u.c
GREAT ENGLISHMEN OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME.
SCRAMBLES AMONGST THE ALPS. Edward Whymfer. THE GREAT BOER WAR. Arthur Conan Doyle.
COLLECTIONS AND RECOLLECTIONS. G. W.E.Russell. LIFE OF GLADSTONE. Herbert W. Paul.
REMINISCENCES. Sir Henry Hawkins.
LORD RUSSELL OF KILLOWEN. R. Barry O'Brien.
FROM THE CAPE TO CAIRO. E. S. Grogan.
A BOOK ABOUT THE GARDEN. Dean Hole.
CULTURE AND ANARCHY. Matthew Arnold.
COLLECTIONS AND RECOLLECTIONS (Second Series).
G. W. E. Russell.
LIFE OF FRANK BUCKLAND. George C. Bomfas.
WITH KITCHENER TO KHARTUM. G. W. Steevens.
THE UNVEILING OF LHASA. Edmund Candler.
LIFE OF LORD DUFFERIN. Sir Alfred Lyall.
LIFE OF DEAN STANLEY. R. E. Prothero.
ASTRONOMY FOR AMATEURS. Camille Flammarion. ROUND THE WORLD ON A WHEEL. J . Foster Fraser. THE PATH TO ROME. Hilaire Belloc.
LIFE OF CANON AINGER. Edith Sichel.
REMINISCENCES OF LADY DOROTHY NEVILL. LETTERS AND RECOLLECTIONS OF
SIR WALTER SCOTT. Mrs. Hughes of Uffington.
LITERATURE AND DOGMA. Matthew Arnold.
SPURGEON'S SERMONS. Sir W. Robertson Nicoll, LL.D. MY CONFIDENCES. Frederick Locker-Lampson.
SIR FRANK LOCKWOOD. Augustine Birrell.
THE MAKING OF A FRONTIER. Col. Durand.
LIFE OF GENERAL GORDON. D. C. Boulger.
COLLECTED POEMS OF HENRY NEWBOLT. POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN. Mrs. Earle. THE RING AND THE BOOK. Robert Browning.
THE ALPS FROM END TO END. Sir IV. Martin Conway. THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION. Walter Bagehot.
IN INDIA. G. W. Steevens.
THE LIFE OF COBDEN. Lord Morley.
THE LIFE OF PARNELL. R. Barry O'Brien.
HAVELOCK'S MARCH. /. W. Sherer.
UP FROM SLAVERY. Booker Washington.
RECOLLECTIONS OF THE RT. HON. SIR ALGERNON WEST.
Others to folloiv.
Great Englishmen
of the
Sixteenth Century
BY
LEE
Hon. D.Litt., Oxford; Hon. LL.D., Glasgow; Hon. Litt.D.
Victoria University, Manchester; Corresponding Member of the
Massachusetts Historical Society ; Editor of the
' Dictionary of National Biography ; ' Author
of 'A Life of William Shakespeare,' and
' Queen Victoria : A Biography '
THOMAS NELSON & SONS
LONDON, EDINBURGH, DUBLIN AND NEW YORK
7A- JF/7
11*-) ;;-"
608138
PREFACE TO A NEW EDITION
THE call for a new edition of this work has given me the opportunity of correcting a few errors, but I have made no change of importance, and have confined myself to removing inaccuracies of fact or expression. Since these pages were written, I have devoted much time to the study of one of the topics which here finds occasional mention, namely, the revelation of the New World of America to Tudor England, and the relations subsisting between the two territories through the reign of Elizabeth. More minute research in these directions than I had undertaken when I penned this volume, has led me to modify some earlier conceptions of the precise influences, exerted by the first settlement of America, on the development of the English Renaissance. It would disturb the balance of this book were I to amplify its references to the New World. But I venture to refer any reader who cares to know the latest results of my investigation into the bearings of the Discovery of America on the history of English and European thought and action during the sixteenth century to the four articles from my pen, entitled The Call of the West, which have lately appeared in Scribner's Magazine (New York), and are now in process of revision and expansion for publication in an independent volume.
SIDNEY LEE.
October
PREFACE
THE contents of this volume are based on a series of eight lectures which I delivered, by invitation of the Trustee, at the Lowell Institute, Boston, in the spring of last year. I paid a first visit to America for the purpose of fulfilling that engagement. My reception was in all ways of the pleasantest, and I feel especially grateful to my Boston audience for the considerate attention which they extended to me.
In preparing the lectures for the press I have adhered to the main lines which I followed in their delivery. But I have judged it necessary to make sweeping altera tions in form and detail. I have introduced much information which was scarcely fitted for oral treatment. I have endeavoured to present more coherently and more exhaustively the leading achievements of the Renaissance in England than was possible in the time at the disposal of a lecturer. I have tried, however, to keep in view the requirements of those to whom the lectures were originally addressed. Though I have embodied in my revision the fruits of some original research, I have not overloaded my pages with recondite references. My chief aim has been to interest the cultivated reader of general intelligence rather than the expert.
The opening lecture of my course at Boston surveyed in general terms the uses to the public (alike in England and America) of the Dictionary of National Biography.
viii PREFACE.
Of that lecture I have only printed a small section in this volume. I have substituted for it, by way of introduction, a sketch of the intellectual spirit which was peculiar to the sixteenth century. This preparatory essay, which is practically new, gives, I trust, increased unity to the general handling of my theme.
The six men of whom I treat are all obviously, in their several ways, representative of the highest culture of sixteenth-century England. But they by no means exhaust the subject. Many other great Englishmen of the sixteenth century — statesmen like Wolsey and Burghley, theologians like Colet and Hooker, dramatists like Marlowe and Ben Jonson, men of science like William Gilbert, the elec.trician, and Napier of Mer- chiston, the inventor of logarithms — deserve association with them in any complete survey of sixteenth-century culture. In choosing five of the six names, I was moved by the fact that I had already studied, with some minuteness, their careers and work in my capacity of contributor to the Dictionary of National Biography. I wrote there the lives of Sir Thomas More, Sir Philip Sidney, and Shakespeare, and I collaborated with others in the biographies of Sir Walter Ralegh and Edmund Spenser. I have not written at any length on Bacon before; but it is obvious that not the briefest list of great Englishmen of the sixteenth century would be worthy of attention were he excluded from it. I hope that, by presenting Bacon in juxtaposition with Shake speare, I may do something to dispel the hallucination which would confuse the achievements of the one with those of the other.
Any who desire to undertake further study of the men
PREFACE. ix
who form my present subject may possibly derive some guidance from the bibliographies prefixed to each chapter. There I mention the chief editions of the literary works which I describe and criticise, and give references to biographies of value. For full bibliographies and ex haustive summaries of the biographical facts, the reader will do well to consult, in each case, the article in the Dictionary of National Biography. My present scheme only enables me to offer my readers such information as illustrates leading characteristics. I seek to trace the course of a great intellectual movement rather than attempt detailed biographies of those who are identified with its progress.
In the hope of increasing the usefulness of the volume I have supplied a somewhat full preliminary analysis of its contents, as well as a chronological table of leading events in European culture from the introduction of printing into England in 1477 to Bacon's death in 1626. In preparing these sections of the book, I have been largely indebted to the services of Mr. W. B. Owen, B.A., late scholar of St. Catherine's College, Cambridge. I have at the same time to thank my friend Mr. Thomas Seccombe for reading the final proofs.
October i, 1904.
CONTENTS
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE, |
V 11 xxi |
|
I |
||
THE SPIRIT OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY |
||
PAGE |
PAGE |
|
BIBLIOGRAPHY, . . .27 |
The discovery of Greek lit |
|
erature and philosophy, . |
35 |
|
i |
The Italian influence, |
35 |
National Biography and six teenth century England, . 27 Causes of distinctive achieve |
The physical revelation, Maritime exploration, The discovery of the solar |
36 36 |
ment, . . . .28 |
system, . |
36 |
The Renaissance, . . 28 |
The expansion of thought, . |
37 |
Unity of the movement, . 29 |
IV |
|
' Knowledge is power,' . 30 |
The invention of printing, . |
38 |
II |
The Renaissance and the |
|
Width of outlook, . .31 Checks on distribution of |
Church of Rome, . The compromise of Protes |
38 |
tantism, . |
39 |
|
mental energy, . . 32 Versatility of great English |
Literary influence of the Bible |
A T |
men of the epoch, . . 32 |
I1 |
|
V |
||
HI |
The ethical paradox of the |
|
The transitional aspect of |
era, . . . |
41 |
the century, . . -34 |
The alliance of good and evil, |
41 |
Primary causes of the awak |
The major paradox of More, |
|
ening, . . . .34 |
Bacon, and Ralegh,. . |
42 |
The priority of the intellec |
The minor paradox of Sidney, |
|
tual revelation, . . 34 |
Spenser, and Shakespeare, |
42 |
II |
||
SIR THOMAS MORE |
||
BIBLIOGRAPHY, . . 44 |
The invention of printing, . |
46 |
i |
II |
|
More's birth, 7th Feb. 1478, 45 |
More's father, |
47 |
Xll
CONTENTS.
PAGE
At school in London . 47 In the service of Archbishop
Morton, 1491, . • 47
At Oxford, 1492, . . 48
The influence of Oxford, . 48
A student of law, 1494, . 49
Spiritual questionings', . 50
The influence of Erasmus, . 51 Erasmus's friendship for More, .... 52
IV
More's first marriage, 1505, 53
His second marriage, 1511, 54
Settlement at Chelsea, . 55 Under-Sheriff of London,
1510, .... 55
t V
First visit to the Continent,
*51S> •.•. 55 Social recreation at Ant werp, ... .56
VI • First draft of the Utopia,
1516, . . .56
Detachment of the Utopia, 57
VII
' The First Book of the Utopia, 57
The ideal of the New World, 58
The Second Book, . . 59
Utopian philosophy, . . 60
Utopian religion, . . 6l
VIII
Utopia published on the Continent, ... 62
Contrast between Utopian precepts and More's per sonal practice, . . 63
The Utopia a dream of fancy, . » . • . - 63
Dread of the Lutheran revolution, ... 64
Court office, . . -65
More's attitude to politics, 66
His loyalty, ... 67 X
Rapid preferment, 1518- 1523 68
Chancellor, 25th October 1529, .... 69
The King and the Reforma tion, . . '•.. '. 7°
XI
More's view of the King's projected divorce, . . 71
The growth of Protestan tism, .... 71
More's conscientious scruples, . . • 72
His resignation of the Wool sack, . . . . 73
His spiritual ambition, . 73
XII
More's impaired resources, 74
The Chelsea tomb, . . 75
His work as Chancellor, . 75
XIII
More and theological con troversy, ... 77 The Maid of Kent, 1533, . 79 The threat of prosecution, . 80
XIV
Thetriumphof AnneBoleyn, 81 The oath abjuring the Pope, 81 More's detention, 1534, . 82 The oath of the Act of Suc cession, .... 83
XV
In the Tower, 1534, . . 84 His trial, 1st July 1535, . 85
CONTENTS. |
xiii |
||
FACE |
PAGE |
||
XVI |
His love of art, . |
90 |
|
More's execution, 6th July |
His Latin writing, |
90 |
|
1535 |
87 |
His English poetry, . |
91 |
The reception abroad 6f the |
His English prose, . |
91 |
|
news, .... |
89 |
Pico's Life, |
91 |
XVII |
Controversial theology, His devotional treatises, . |
91 92 |
|
More's character, |
89 |
His literary repute, . |
92 |
His mode of life, |
89 |
The paradoxes of his career, |
93 |
III |
|||
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY |
|||
BIBLIOGRAPHY, |
95 |
'Astrophel and Stella,' |
in |
j |
Sidney s sonnets, |
112 |
|
Their influence, |
115 |
||
Sidney's rank, . |
96 |
||
Intellectual ambitions, |
96 |
VI |
|
.. |
Political ambitions, . |
116 |
|
II National strife, . |
97 |
At Heidelberg and Vienna, IS77, |
117 |
Sidney's birth, 3Oth Nov. |
_,o |
* Jl / 9 At Antwerp, |
/ 118 |
IS54, -.> • • . • |
98 |
||
Queen Elizabeth's accession, 1558, .... |
99 |
VII Varied occupations, . . |
119 |
The Earl of Leicester, |
99 |
Friendship with Spenser, . |
1 20 |
The literary club of ' The |
|||
III |
Areopagus,' 1579, . |
121 |
|
At Shrewsbury school, |
IOO |
Intercourse with Bruno, |
|
Fulke Greville, . . '"'. |
IOO |
1584, .... |
122 |
At Oxford, 1568, |
IOI |
||
Lord Burghley's favour, . |
102 |
VIII Sidney and the Drama, |
124 |
IV |
The Apologiefor Poetrie, , |
126 |
|
Foreign travel, . |
104 |
The worth of poetry, |
127 |
The St. Bartholomew Mas |
Confusion between poetry |
||
sacre, 2jrd August 1572, |
105 |
and prose, |
128 |
The meeting with Languet, |
105 |
Enlightened conclusions, . |
129 |
At Vienna, 1573, |
106 |
IX |
|
At Venice, 1573-4. • Protestant zeal, . |
106 107 |
Difficulties at Court, . |
130 |
Diplomatic employment, . End of the foreign tour, |
108 109 |
In retirement, . The Arcadia, Its foreign models, |
131 132 132 |
V |
The verse of the Arcadia, . |
138 |
|
At Kenilworth, 1576, |
109 |
The prose style, |
139 |
Penelope Devereux, . |
no |
Want of coherence, . . |
139 |
XIV
CONTENTS.
Reconciliation with the
Queen, . . . . 139 Official promotion, . .140 His knighthood, 1583, . 140 Joint-Master of the Ord nance, 1585, . . .141 Marriage, 1585, . . 141 The cal I of the New World , 142 Grant to Sidney of land in America, . . .143
The last scene, .
BIBLIOGRAPHY,
144
PAGE
Hostility to Spain, 1585, . 145 Governor of Flushing, 1586, 146 Difficulties of the Dutch
campaign, . . . 146 The attack on Zutphen,
1586, . . . .147 Sidney's death, i;th Oct.
1586, . . . .148
XII
Sidney's career, . . . 149 His literary work, . .150 Influence of the Arcadia, . 151 The impression of his life and work, . . .152
IV SIR WALTER RALEGH
Primary cause of colonial
expansion, Three secondary causes,
II
Great colonising epochs, . Columbus's discovery, 1492, England and the New World, .... America and new ideals, . The spirit of adventure, Imaginary age of Gold, Moral ideals, . • .
Ill Ralegh a type of Elizabethan
versatility,
Sir Francis Drake, . Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Ralegh's birth, 1552, Infancy and Education,
IV
The rivalry with Spain,
153
153 154
155 156
156 157 158 159 160
161 161 161 162 162
Spain and Holland, . .163 Ralegh in France, 1569, . 163 His first conflict with Spain, 163 In Ireland, 1580, . .164
Ralegh and Queen Eliza beth, 1581, . . .166 His relations with Virginia, 168 The potato and tobacco, : 169
Captain John Smith in Vir ginia, . . . .170
Colonial philosophy of the time, . . . .170
The Spanish Armada, 1588, 172 Intellectual pursuits, . .173 Ralegh's poetry, . .174 Meetings at the ' Mermaid,' 175
El Dorado, . . .170 162 j The Expedition to Guiana, 177
CONTENTS. |
XV |
||
PAGE |
PACK |
||
IX |
XI |
||
Ralegh and Court fac |
Hopes of freedom, |
iSg |
|
tions, . . . . |
182 |
The projected return to |
|
The accession of James I., |
Guiana, 1616, . . |
100 |
|
1603, .... |
183 |
Failure of the expedition, . |
191 |
Charges of treason, . |
184 |
Disgrace and death, 2gth |
|
Sentence of death, 1603, . |
185 |
Oct. 1618, |
192 |
XII |
|||
X |
Contemporary estimate of |
||
In the Tower, . |
1 86 |
Ralegh, . . . . |
193 |
Scientific curiosity, . |
1 86 |
His failure and success, |
195 |
The History of the World, . |
1 86 |
The true founder of Ameri |
|
Character of the work, |
1 88 |
can colonisation, . |
195 |
V |
|||
EDMUND SPENSER |
|||
BIBLIOGRAPHY, |
197 |
Its foreign models, . |
211 |
i |
Eulogy of Chaucer, . |
212 |
|
The Elizabethan pursuit of poetry, .... The contrast between Spen |
198 |
The critical apparatus, Place of the poem in Eng lish poetry, . |
213 215 |
ser's career and his poetic |
V |
||
zeal, .... |
199 |
Official promotion, 1580, . |
216 |
II |
Migration to Ireland, |
217 |
|
His humble birth, 1552, . |
200 |
The Irish problem, . |
217 |
At Merchant Taylors' |
Early friends in Ireland, . |
218 |
|
School, .... |
2O2 |
Spenser's poetic exertions, |
219 |
At Cambridge, . |
203 |
||
Gabriel Harvey, |
203 |
VI |
|
Early verse, 1568, |
2O4 |
Removal to the south of |
|
III |
Ireland, 1588, |
22O |
|
Disappointment in love, Settlement in London, 1578, .... The patronage of Leicester, |
2O5 2O6 206 |
Quarrels with neighbours, . Sir Walter Ralegh, . London revisited, 1589, The Faerie Queene, Books |
22O 221 222 WJ |
Sir Philip Sidney, |
208 |
.- ., . |
22 j |
The classical fallacy, . |
2O9 |
VII |
|
Poetic experiments, . |
209 |
The grant of a pension, |
225 |
IV |
The return to Ireland, 1597, |
225 |
|
The Skefheards Calender, |
His despair of his fortunes, |
226 |
|
1579 |
211 |
Complaints, 1590, |
227 |
xvi CONTENTS. PAGE |
PAGE |
|
VIII |
The tomb in Westminster |
|
The poet's marriage, 1594, 228 |
Abbey, . . . . .• |
240 |
His Amoretti, 1595, . . 228 |
X |
|
The Epithalamion, 1595, . 231 |
Spenser's greatness, . |
24ll |
The Faerie Queeite con |
The Faerie Queene, . |
241 1 ' |
tinued, 1596,. . ' . 232 |
The amplitude of scale, |
242 , |
Political difficulties, . . 232 |
The moral aim, |
244K |
The Earl of Essex's patron |
The debt to Plato, . |
244 |
age, .... 232 |
Affinities with chivalric |
|
The prose tract on Ireland, |
romance, |
246 |
1597, • • • -233 |
Want of homogeneity, |
248 |
The allegory, . . |
249 |
|
IX |
Bunyan's superiority, |
249 |
Sheriff of Cork, 1598, . 236 |
Influence of the age, . |
252 |
Ireland in rebellion, . . 237 |
The Spenserian stanza, |
255 |
Last mission to London, |
The vocabulary, |
257 |
1598, . . . .238 |
The debt to Chaucer, |
257 |
His death, l6th January |
Sensitiveness to beauty, |
258 |
1599 238 |
Spenser's influence, . |
260 . |
VI |
||
FRANCIS BACON |
||
BIBLIOGRAPHY, . . 262 |
Essex's death, Feb. 25, 1601, |
273 |
i |
Bacon's perfidy, . '. |
274 |
Bacon's and Shakespeare's |
V |
|
distinct individualities, . 263 |
Bacon and James I., . •' . |
274 |
II |
Advice to the King, . |
275 |
Bacon's parents, . . 264 |
The political situation, |
275 |
Birth, Jan. 22, 1561, . 265 |
VI |
|
Education, . . . 265 |
Literary occupations, |
277 |
III |
Marriage, 1606, . . |
278 |
The profession of law, . 267 |
Bacon's first promotion, |
|
Bacon's idealism, . . 267 His materialism, . . 267 |
1607, . . . ;;^, Attorney-General, 1613, . |
279 280 |
His entrance into politics, . 268 |
VII |
|
His scheme of life, . . 269 |
The political peril, . '• JfJR |
280 |
IV |
Bacon and Buckingham, . |
281 |
Bacon's relations with Essex, 271 |
Lord Keeper, 1617, . |
281 |
The government of Ire |
Lord Verulam, 1618, and |
|
land, .... 272 |
Viscount St. Alban, 1621, |
281 |
Downfall of Essex, 1601, . 273 |
His judicial work, |
282 |
CONTENTS.
xv
VIII The Novum Organuni,
1620, .... The charge of corruption,
1621, .... Bacon's collapse,
His punishment and his re tirement,
His literary and scientific occupation, .
IX
His death, April 9, 1626, . His neglect of morality, His want of savoir fatre, .
x
His true greatness, His literary versatility, His contempt for the Eng lish tongue, . His Essays, His majestic style, His verse,}. . . .
283
284 285
285
287 290 290
294
His philosophic works, . 297
PAGE
His attitude to science, . 298
His opposition to Aristotle, 298
On induction, . . . 298
The doctrine of idols, . 300
XII
The limitless possibilities of man's knowledge, . . 301
The fragmentary character of his work, ... 301
His ignorance of contempo rary advances in science, 302
His own discoveries, . . 303
His place in the history of science, .... 303
XIII
The endowment of research, 304 The New Atlantis, 1614-
1618, .... 304 The epilogue to the English
Renaissance, . . . 304 The imaginary college of
science 306
Bacon's aspiration, . . 308 Prospects of realising
Bacon's ideal, . . 308
VII SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER
BIBLIOGRAPHY, . . . 311
i
The documentary material, 311 Parentage and baptism,
26th April 1564, . .312 Education, . . .312 His- self-training, . . 313
II
Experiences of youth, . 314 The infant drama, . -315 His association with Lon- -don, 1586, . . . 316
III
The period of probation, . 317
Use of law terms, . 317 Shakespeare's conformity
with prevailing habit, . 320
IV
Shakespeare's early plays, 321 The Earl of South
ampton, . 321
At Court, 1594, . 322
Court favour, . . 324
xviii CONTENTS. |
|||
PAGE |
PAGE |
||
V |
VIII |
||
The favour of the crowd, . |
325 |
His last days, April 1616, . |
332 |
Popular fallacy of Shake |
His will, . |
333 |
|
speare's neglect, |
326 |
His monument, . |
334 |
VI |
IX |
||
Progressive quality of his work, . . . « |
327 |
His elegists, Prophecy of immortality, . |
336 338 |
VII |
X |
||
The return to Stratford, |
The certainty of our know |
||
1611, |
329 |
ledge |
340 |
His financial competence, . |
330 |
The loss of his manuscripts, |
340 |
VIII |
|||
FOREIGN INFLUENCES ON SHAKESPEARE |
|||
BlBLIOfJRAPHY, . . |
343 |
Knowledge of French and |
|
Italian, .... |
354 |
||
I |
Lack of scholarship, . |
355 |
|
Shakespeare's universal re |
V |
||
pute In Germany and France, . Shakespeare's patriotism, . |
344 344 345 |
Shakespeare no traveller abroad, .... Imaginative affinity with |
356 |
II |
Italy, .... |
358 |
|
Foreign influence on Eliza bethan literature, . . Elizabethan plagiarism, |
346 347 |
VI Internal evidences of foreign influence, Greek mythology, |
359 360 |
in |
Mythical history of Greece, |
361 |
|
History of Rome, |
36i |
||
Shakespeare's assimilative |
I talian history and literature, |
363 |
|
power, ... |
348 |
The Italian novel, |
364 |
His instantaneous power of |
Othello and Merchant of |
||
perception, . . . |
350 |
Venice, .... |
365 |
Petrarch, .... |
367 |
||
IV |
Italian art, |
367 |
|
Early instruction in Latin, |
351 |
VII |
|
Apparent ignorance of Greek, .... |
35i |
Poetry of France, Rabelais and Montaigne, . |
368 37i |
Alertness in acquiring for eign knowledge,
The geographical aspect of his work,
Geographical blunders,
The foreign spirit in
work,
Historic sensibility, . Fidelity to ' atmosphere,'
CONTENTS. |
xix |
||
PAGE |
PAGE |
||
Width of historic outlook, . |
377 |
||
for- |
X |
||
t of |
371 |
Shakespeare's relation to |
|
VJ2 |
his era |
378 |
|
Ji * |
Elizabethan literature and |
||
372 |
the Renaissance, . |
378 |
|
Shakespeare's foreign con |
|||
temporaries, . |
379 |
||
his |
The diffusion of the spirit |
||
374 |
of the Renaissance, |
380 |
|
375 |
Misapprehensions to be |
||
> |
376 |
guarded against, |
381 |
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
OF LEADING EVENTS IN THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND EUROPEAN CULTURE FROM THE INTRO DUCTION OF PRINTING INTO ENGLAND TO THE DEATH OF FRANCIS BACON
1477. Caxton sets up a printing-
press at Westminster. Birth of Titian.
1478. Birth of Sir Thomas More. 1480. Birth of Bandello, the
Italian novelist.
1483. Birth of Raphael. Birth of Luther. Birth of Rabelais.
1484. Birth of Julius Caesar
Scaliger.
1485. Death of Richard in. Accession of Henry vil.
1486. Birth of Andrea del Sarto.
1491. Copernicus studies optics
and mathematics at Cracow.
1492. Columbus's first voyage to
West Indies.
1493. Columbus's second voyage
to West Indies.
1494. Death of Politian.
1497. John Cabot sights Cape
Breton and Nova Scotia. Vasco da Gama rounds the
Cape of Good Hope. Birth of Holbein.
1498. Columbus discovers South
America.
Erasmus first visits Eng land.
Death of Savonarola.
1499. Cabot follows North Amer ican coast from 60° to 30° N. lat. Leonardo da Vinci's. ' Last
Supper.'
Birth of Charles V. 1502. Columbus sails in the Gulf
of Mexico.
1504. More enters Parliament. More's first marriage. Leonardo da Vinci paints
'Mona Lisa.' Sanazzaro's Arcadia. 1506. Death of Columbus.
1508. Michael Angelo decorates
the roof of the Sistine Chapel.
1509. Death of Henry vn. Accession of Henry vni. Erasmus's Encom turn
Moritz published. Raphael decorates the
Vatican. Birth of Calvin.
1510. More Under - Sheriff of
London.
Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. Titian paints ' Sacred and
profane Love.' Death of Botticelli.
1511. More's second marriage.
1512. Death of Amerigo Vespucci.
XX11
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE.
1513. Leo x. Pope.
Wolsey chief minister in England.
Machiavelli's Prince com posed.
1515. More sent as envoy to
Flanders.
Raphael's ' Sistine Ma donna.'
1516. Erasmus issues revised
Greek text of New Testament.
1516. More's Utopia.
1517. Erasmus finally leaves
England.
Luther nails his challenge to the Pope on Witten berg Church door.
1518. Birth of Tintoretto.
1519. Death of Leonardo da
Vinci. Charles V. elected emperor.
1520. Death of Raphael. Luther burns papal bull
condemning him.
1521. More knighted.
Luther translates Scriptures
into German. Death of Leo X.
1522. Luther attacks Henry vill.
1523. Lord Berners's translation
of Froissart's Chronicles
(ist vol.) published. More Speaker of the House
of Commons. Titian's ' Bacchus and
Ariadne.'
1524. Birth of Ronsard.
1525. Tyndale translates the New
Testament into English. Lord Berners's translation
of Froissart's Chronicles
(2nd vol.) published. More Chancellor of the
Duchy of Lancaster.
1526. Sebastian Cabot visits La
Plata on behalf of Charles v. of Spain.
1527. Holbein visits England. Death of Machiavelli (cet.
58).
1528. Birth of Albert Diirer. Birth of Paul Veronese.
1529. More succeeds Wolsey as
Lord Chancellor.
1 530. Copernicus (De Revolution-
ibus) completes descrip tion of solar system. The Augsburg Confession embodies Luther's final principles.
1532. More resigns office of Lord
Chancellor.
Machiavelli's Prince pub lished.
Rabelais' Pantagrnel and Gargantua.
Birth of Jean Antoine de Baif.
1533. Separation of English
Church from Rome.
Divorce of Queen Cather ine.
Death of Ariosto.
Birth of Montaigne.
1534. Henry vin. made supreme
Head of the Church of England.
The Nun of Kent denoun ces Henry vin.
More sent to the Tower.
1535. Execution of More. Coverdale's translation of
the Bible (first complete Bible printed in Eng lish).
1536. English Bible issued by
Rogers.
Dissolution of lesser mon asteries.
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE.
xxm
1536. Pope Paul in. issues bull of deposition against Henry viu.
Death of Erasmus.
Calvin's Christiana; Ke- ligionis fnstitutio pub lished.
1539. Suppression of greater
abbeys in England.
1540. Order of Jesuits instituted.
1542. Montemayor's Diana. Inquisition established in
Rome.
1543. Death of Copernicus. Death of Holbein.
1 544. Birth of Tasso.
1 546. Michael Angelo designs the
dome of St. Peter's, Rome. Death of Luther. Birth of Tycho Brahe. Birth of Philippe Desportes.
1547. Death of Henry vm. Accession of Edward vi. Birth of Cervantes.
1549. English Book of Common
Prayer issued.
Ronsard's first poem pub lished.
Du Bellay's Defense et illustration de la langue Franfaise.
1550. Monument to Chaucer
erected in Westminster Abbey.
Inauguration of the French Pleiade.
1551. English translation of
More's Utopia.
1552. English Prayer Book re
vised by Cranmer. Birth of Edmund Spenser. Birth of Sir Walter Ralegh.
1553. Death of Edward vi. Coronation of Lady Jane
Grey.
1553. Accession of Mary, who
restores the Catholic re ligion. Death of Rabelais.
1554. Birth of Sir Philip Sidney. Bandello's Novelle pub lished.
1555. Persecution of Protestants
in England.
1556. Death of Cranmer. Death of Ignatius Loyola,
founder of the Jesuits. 1558. England loses Calais.
Death of Queen Mary.
Accession of Queen Eliza beth, who restores Pro testantism in England.
Death of Julius Caesar Scaliger.
1560. The Geneva (Breeches)
Bible. First collective edition of
the works of Ronsard. Death of Du Bellay. Death of Bandello, the
Italian novelist.
1561. Birth of Francis Bacon. Scaliger's Poetics published.
1562. Tasso's epic Rinaldo writ
ten.
1563. The Thirty-nine Articles
imposed on the English Clergy.
1564. Birth of Shakespeare. Birth of Marlowe. Death of Michael Angelo. Death of Calvin.
Birth of Galileo.
1565. Cinthio's Hecatommithi
published.
1568. The 'Bishops' Bible' pub lished.
1571. Bull of deposition issued by Pope Pius v. against Queen Elizabeth.
XXIV
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE.
'1571. Birth of Kepler.
1572. The St. Bartholomew Mas
sacre in Paris.
1573. Sidney in Germany and
Italy.
1574. Death of Cinthio, the Ital
ian novelist.
1576. First public theatre opened
in London.
Death of Titian.
Festivities at Kenilworth in honour of Queen Eliza beth.
Spenser becomes M.A.
1577. Sidney on diplomatic mis
sion in Germany. Birth of Rubens.
1578. Sidney visits William of
Orange at Antwerp.
1579. Gosson's School of Abuse. North's English translation
of Plutarch's Lives.
Spenser's Shepheards Cal ender published.
Sidney and Spenser be come members of the ' Areopagus.'
Birth of John Fletcher.
1580. Lyly's Euphues published. Spenser settles in Ireland
in Government service.
Sir F. Drake returns to England after his cir cumnavigation.
Kepler and Tycho Brahe's Astronomical Tables published.
Montaigne's Essais (L, ii.) published.
1581. Sidney's Arcadia finished,
his Sonnets and Apologie for Poetrie begun. Tasso's Gerusalemme Lib- erata published, and Aminta written.
1582. Shakespeare marries Anne
Hathaway.
Bible translated by English Catholics at Rheims.
1583. Bruno visits England. Sidney knighted : becomes
Joint - Master of Ord nance, and marries Frances Walsingham.
Sir Humphrey Gilbert voy ages to Newfoundland.
Grant to Sidney of land in America.
Galileo discovers the prin ciple of the pendulum.
1584. Bacon enters Parliament. Ralegh's colonisation of
Virginia begins. Birth of Francis Beaumont.
1585. Death of Ronsard (27th
December).
Guarini's Pastor Fido acted.
Cervantes' first work, Gala tea, published.
1586. Shakespeare leaves Strat-
ford-on- Avon for London.
Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity begun.
Bacon becomes a member of Gray's Inn.
English army supports Protestants of Low Countries.
Death of Sir Philip Sidney.
Tobacco and potatoes in troduced into England.
1587. Marlowe's Tamburlaine
produced. Marlowe, Lodge, Greene,
and Peele begin writing
for English stage. Execution of Mary Queen
of Scots.
1588. Defeat of Spanish Armada. Death of Paul Veronese.
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE.
XXV
1588. Montaigne's Essais (iii.)
published.
1589. Bacon's Advertisement
touching Controversies of
the Church.
Drake plunders Corunna. Lope de Vega commences
his great series of dramas. Death of Jean Antoine de
Baif.
1590. Sidney's.<4raKft0published. Spenser revisits London,
and publishes his faerie Queene (i.-iii.). Death of Walsingham.
1591. Bacon enters service of the
Earl of Essex.
Spenser receives a pension from the Queen.
Sidney's Astrophel and Stella.
Spenser's Daphnaida and Complaints.
Shakespeare's Love's La bour's Lost written.
1592. Shakespeare remodels
Henry VI. Death of Montaigne. Galileo supports Coper-
nican theory in lectures
at Padua.
1 593. Death of Marlowe. Shakespeare's Venus and
Adonis published.
1594. Shakespeare's Lucrece pub
lished.
Shakespeare acts at Court. Spenser marries Elizabeth
Boyle. Death of Tintoretto.
1 595. Ralegh sails to Guiana. Spenser's Colin Clout,
Amoretti, and Epilha- lamion published. Death of Tasso.
1595. Sidney's Apologie for
Poetrie published.
1596. Death of Sir Francis Drake. Ralegh's Discovery of
Guiana written (pub lished, 1606).
Spenser's View of the State of Ireland completed, Faerie Queene (iv.— vi.) and Prothalamion pub lished.
1597. First edition of Bacon's
Essays.
Shakespeare writes I Henry IV., and purchases New Place, Stratford - on - Avon.
1598. Globe Theatre built. Death of Lord Burghley. Spenser Sheriff of Cork. Sidney's Arcadia edited in
folio.
Jonson's Every Man in His Humour acted.
1599. Death of Spenser and burial
in Westminster Abbey. Expedition of Earl of Essex in Ireland.
1600. William Gilbert's De
Magnete published.
Death of Hooker.
Birth of Calderon.
Fairfax's translation of Tasso's Jerusalem Deliv ered published.
Giordano Bruno burned at Rome.
Earl of Essex's rebellion and execution.
1 60 1. Death of Tycho Brahe ; he
is succeeded by Kepler as astronomer to the Emperor Rudolph n.
1602. Hamlet produced.
1603. Death of Queen Elizabeth.
XXVI
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE.
1603. Accession of James I. Florio's translation of
Montaigne published. Ralegh condemned for alleged treason, and im prisoned .in the Tower of London.
1604. Hamlet published in quarto. England makes peace with
Spain. Kepler's Optics published.
1605. Bacon's Advancement of
Learning published. Bacon marries Alice Barn-
ham. Cervantes's Don Quixote,
Part i., published. Death of Desportes.
1607. Bacon Solicitor-General.
1608. King Lear published in
quarto. Birth of Milton.
1609. Spenser's Works published
in folio.
Shakespeare's Sonnets, Troihis and Cressida, and Pericles published in quarto.
Kepler publishes first and second laws of astro nomical calculation.
Galileo discovers the satel lites of Jupiter.
1611. Shakespeare's Tempest pro
bably written ; after which the dramatist re tires to Stratford. Authorised Version of Bible issued.
1612. Second Edition of Bacon's
Essays.
Death of Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury.
1613. Bacon Attorney-General. Death of Guarini.
1614. Ralegh's History of the
World published.
1615. Cervantes's Don Quixote,
Part ii., published.
1616. Bacon privy-councillor. Death of Shakespeare. Death of Francis Beau mont.
Death of Cervantes.
1617. Bacon Lord Keeper. Expedition of Ralegh to
the Orinoco.
Galileo submits to the eccle siastical authorities. 1619. Bacon Lord Chancellor, and raised to peerage as Lord Verulam. Ralegh's execution.
1619. Harvey reveals his discov
ery of the Circulation of the Blood.
Kepler publishes third law in his Harmonia Mundi.
1620. Landing of Pilgrim Fathers
in New England. Bacon's Novttm Organum published.
1621. Bacon made Viscount St.
Alban ; charged with corruption, convicted, and degraded.
1622. Bacon's Henry VII. pub
lished.
Othello published in quarto.
1623. Shakespeare's First Folio
published.
Bacon's De Augmentis published.
1624. Bacon writes New Atlantis.
1625. Third and final edition of
Bacon's Essays. Death of James I. Death of John Fletcher.
1626. Death of Bacon (April 9).
I
THE SPIRIT OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
' What a piece of work is man ! How noble in reason ! how infinite in faculty ! in form, in moving how express and admirable ! in action how like an angel ! in apprehen sion how like a god ! the beauty of the world ! the paragon of animals ! '
SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet, n. ii. 323-328.
' Nam ipsa scientia potestas est.'
BACON, Meditationes Sacrae.
[BIBLIOGRAPHY. — The subject of the European Renais sance may be studied at length in Burckhardt's Civilisation of the Period of the Renaissance in Italy (English ed. 1890) ; in J. A. Symonds's Renaissance in Italy (7 vols. ed. 1898) ; and in the Cambridge Modern History, vol. i. , 1902. Important phases of the movement are well illus trated in Walter Pater's collection of Essays called The Renaissance (1877).]
T N the Dictionary of National Biography will be
•*• found the lives of more than two thou- ,T . .
,_,,., National
sand Englishmen and Englishwomen who Biography
flourished in England in the sixteenth cen- and tury. It is the first century in our history sixteenth
which offers the national biographer sub- century
... r r- England,
jects reaching m number to four figures.
The Englishmen who attained, according to the national
28 THE SPIRIT OF THE
biographer's estimate, the level of distinction entitling them to biographic commemoration were in the sixteenth century thrice as numerous as those who reached that level in the fourteenth or fifteenth century.
The number of distinguished men which a country produces depends to some extent, but to some extent Causes of onlv> on ^ts P°Pulation- England of the distinctive sixteenth century was more populous than achieve- England of the fourteenth or fifteenth, but ment. tjje mcrease of population is not as three to
one, which is the rate of increase in the volume of distinctive achievement. Probably the four millions of the fifteenth century became five millions in the sixteenth, a rate of increase of twenty-five per cent., an infinitesimal rate of increase when it is compared with the gigantic increase of three hundred per cent., which characterises the volume of distinctive achieve ment. One must, therefore, look outside statistics of population for the true cause of the fact that for every man who gained any sort of distinction in fifteenth century England, three men gained any sort of distinc tion in the sixteenth century. It is not to the numbers of the people that we need direct our attention; it is to their spirit, to the working of their minds, to their out look on life, to their opportunities of uncommon experi ence that we must turn for a solution of our problem.
Englishmen of the sixteenth century breathed a new atmosphere intellectually and spiritually. They came
under a new stimulus, compounded of many Ine Ke- , , .. , ,.,..*
naissance. elements, each of them new and inspiring.
To that stimulus must be attributed the sud den upward growth of distinctive achievement among them, the increase of the opportunities of famous ex-
SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 29
ploits, and the consequent preservation from oblivion of more names of Englishmen than in any century before. The stimulus under which Englishmen came in the sixteenth century may be summed up in the familar word Renaissance. The main factor of the European Renaissance, of the New Birth of intellect, was a passion for extending the limits of human know ledge, and for employing man's capabilities to new and better advantage than of old. New curiosity was gener ated in regard to the dimensions of the material world. There was a boundless enthusiasm for the newly dis covered art and literature of ancient Greece. Men were fired by a new resolve to make the best and not the worst of life upon earth. They were ambitious to cultivate as the highest good the idea of beauty.
All the nations of Western Europe came under the sway of the mighty movement of the Renaissance, and although national idiosyncrasies moulded Unity and coloured its development in each of the country, there was everywhere close resem- movement. blance in the general effect. The intellectual restless ness and recklessness of sixteenth-century England, with its literary productivity and yearning for novelty and adventure, differed little in broad outline, however much it differed in detail, from the intellectual life of sixteenth-century France, Italy, Spain, or even Ger many. It was the universal spirit of the Renaissance, and no purely national impulse, which produced in sixteenth-century England that extended series of varied exploits on the part of Englishmen and English women, the like of which had not been known before in the history of our race. That series of exploits may be said to begin with the wonderful enlightenment of
30 THE SPIRIT OF THE
Sir Thomas More's Utopia, and to culminate in the achievements of Bacon and Shakespeare ; sharply divided as was the form of Shakespeare's work from that of Bacon's, each was in spirit the complement of the other.
Bacon ranks in eminence only second to Shakespeare among the English sons of the Renaissance, and his 'Know- Latin apophthegm, 'nam ipsa scientia po- ledge is testas est ' — ' for knowledge is power ' — power.' might be described as the watchword of the intellectual history of England, as of all Western Europe, in the sixteenth century. The true sons of the Renaissance imagined that unrestricted study of the operations of nature, life, and thought could place at their command all the forces which moved the world. The Renaissance student's faith was that of Marlowe's Faustus :
' Oh, what a world of profit and delight, Of power, of honour, and omnipotence, Is promised to the studious artisan ! All things that move between the quiet poles Shall be at my command ; emperors and kings Are but obeyed in their several provinces ; But his dominion that exceeds in this, Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man.' *
Knowledge was the ever present quest. Study yielded 'godlike recompense,' which was worthy of any exer tion. Men drank deep of the fountains of knowledge and were still insatiate. Extravagant conceptions were bred of the capabilities of man's intellect which made it easy of belief that omniscience was ultimately attain able.
* Marlowe, I-auslus, Sc. I. 54 sq.
SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 31
Here and there a painful scholar of the Renaissance was content to seek knowledge in one direction only ;
such an one cheerfully forwent the ioys of
iv • *v u f Width of
life in the hope of mastering in all minute- out]00k
ness a single branch of learning, or of science. But the meticulous scholar was not typical of the epoch. The children of the Renaissance scorned narrowness of outlook. They thirsted for universal knowledge ; they pursued with equal eagerness practice and theory. Natural science was not divorced from literature. The study of mathematics was a fit pursuit for the artist. The greatest painter of the age, Leonardo da Vinci, was also poet, mathematician, engineer, expert indeed in all branches of physical science. The poet and the scholar were ambitious to engage in affairs of the world — in war or politics. It was no part of a man, however richly endowed by genius, to avoid the active business of life. Dialecticians of the time credited all goals of human endeavour with inherent unity. They repeatedly argued, for example, that skill with the pen was the proper complement of skill with the sword. Poetry, according to Sir Philip Sidney, an admirable representative of Renaissance aspirations, was the right ful ' companion of camps,' and no soldier could safely neglect the military teachings of Homer. Avowed specialism was foreign to the large temper of the times. Versatility of interest and experience was the accepted token of human excellence.
There are obvious disadvantages in excessive distribu tion of mental energy. The products of diversified endeavour are commonly formless, void, and evan-
32 THE SPIRIT OF THE
escent. But the era of the Renaissance had such abundant stores of intellectual energy that, in spite
Checks on of a11 that was dissipated m tne vain °tuest distribu- of omniscience, there remained enough to tion of vitalise particular provinces of endeavour. with mental enduring and splendid effect. Theme," , energy. Renaissance had reserves of strengtl' '" th^ enabled them to master more or less specialise of work, even while they winged vague and di .u U1 flights through the whole intellectual expanse. . ardo da Vinci was an excellent mathematic; poet, but despite his excellence in these direct: . supreme power was concentrated on painting. 1 c as seemed the expenditure of intellectual effor" -r'ace- was a practical economy in its application, result its ripest fruit was stimulating and lasting, v stimulating and lasting than any which came o more rigid specialism of later epochs.
More and Ralegh, Sidney and Spenser, Bacon and Shakespeare, all pertinently illustrate the versatility of Versatility t^ie a§e> tne ^°^ digressiveness of its intel- of great lectual and imaginative endeavour. To English- varying extents omniscience was the foible men of the of au amj carried with it the inevitable penalties. Each set foot in more numerous and varied tracts of knowledge than any one man could thoroughly explore. They treated of many subjects, of the real significance of which they obtained only the faintest and haziest glimpse. The breadth of their intellectual ambitions at times impoverished their achievement. The splendid gifts of Sidney and Ralegh were indeed largely wasted in too wide and multi farious a range of work. They did a strange variety of
SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 33
things to admiration, but failed to do the one thing of isolated pre-eminence which might have rewarded effi cient concentration of effort. Shakespeare's intellectual capacity seems as catholic in range as Leonardo da Vinci's, and laws that apply to other men hardly apply t^> •• j but there were tracts of knowledge, outside the fo lakespeare's province, on which he trespassed of th&' '• His handling of themes of law, geography, across olarship proves that in his case, as in that of Greek men, there were limits of knowledge beyond till the : was perilous for him to stray. With greater Turks t 2 Bacon wrote of astronomy without putting was dri'r to the trouble of apprehending the solar system Greek ' srnicus, and misinterpreted other branches of had y' ^rom ^ac^ °^ sPecia^ knowledge. But in the Bacon and Shakespeare, such errors are spots 3 sun. As interpreter in drama of human nature t, rspeare has no rival ; nor indeed among prophets .ji science has any other shown Bacon's magnanimity or eloquence. Although nature had amply endowed • hem with the era's universality of intellectual interests, she had also given them the power of demonstrating the full force of their rare genius in a particular field of effort. It was there that each reached the highest pinnacle of glory.
in
In a sense the sixteenth century was an age of tran sition, of transition from the ancient to the modern world, from the age of darkness and superstition to the age of light and scientific knowledge. A mass of newly discovered knowledge lay at its disposal, but so large a mass that succeeding centuries had to be enlisted in
2
34 THE SPIRIT OF THE
the service of digesting it and co-ordinating it. When
the sixteenth century opened, the aspects of human life
had recently undergone revolution. The
The Iran- . , ,
sitional old established theories of man and the aspect world had been refuted, and much time of the was required for the evolution of new
century. theories that should be workable, and fil the vacant places. The new problems were surveyed with eager interest and curiosity, but were left to the (Future for complete solution. The scientific spirit, whfch is the life of the modern world, was conceived p the sixteenth century ; it came to birth later.
The causes of the intellectual awakening which dis tinguished sixteenth-century Europe lie on the surface. Primary ^ts Primarv mainsprings are twofold. Cti the causes one hand a distant past had been suddealy
of the unveiled, and there had come to light an.
awakening. ancient literature and an ancient philosophy which proved the human intellect to possess capacities hitherto unimagined^ On the other hand, the dark curtains which had hitherto restricted man's view of the physical world to a small corner of it were torn asunder, and the strange fact was revealed that that which had hitherto been regarded by men as the whole sphere of physical life and nature was in reality a mere frag ment of a mighty universe of which there had been no previous conception.
Of the two revelations — that of man's true intellectual The prior- capacity and that of the true extent of his ityofthe physical environment — the intellectual reve- intellectual lation came first. The physical revelation revelation. fonowed at no long interval. It was an accidental conjuncture of events. But each powerfully
SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 35
reacted on the other, and increased its fertility of effect.
It was the discovery anew by Western Europe of classical Greek literature and philosophy which was the spring of the intellectual revelation of the T, ,. Renaissance. That discovery was begun in COVery of the fourteenth century, when Greek subjects Greek of the falling Byzantine empire brought literature across the Adriatic manuscript memorials of ^nd plu" Greek intellectual culture. But it was not till the final overthrow of the Byzantine empire by the Turks that all that survived of the literary art of Athens was driven westward in a flood, and the whole range of Greek enlightenment — the highest enlightenment that had yet dawned in the human mind — lay at the dis posal of Western Europe. It was then there came for the first time into the modern world the feeling for form, the frank delight in life and the senses, the un restricted employment of the reason, with every other enlightened aspiration that was enshrined in Attic liter ature and philosophy. Under the growing Greek influ ence, all shapes of literature and speculation, of poetry and philosophy, sprang into new life in Italy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the sixteenth century the torch was handed on by Italy xhe to Spain, France, Germany, and England. Italian In each of those countries the light devel- influence, oped in accord with the national idiosyncrasy, but in none of them did it wholly lose the Italian hue, which it acquired at its first coming into Western Europe. It was mainly through Florence that the newly released stream of Hellenism flowed northwards.
From another quarter than the East came, a little
36 THE SPIRIT OF THE
later, the physical revelation which helped no less to mould the spirit of the era. Until the extreme end The °f tne fifteenth century, man knew nothing
physical of the true shape or extent of the planet revelation. on which his life was cast. Fantastic theories of cosmography had been evolved, to which no genuine test had been applied. It was only in the year 1492 that Western Europe first learned its real place on the world's surface. The maritime explorations which dis tinguished the decade 1490-1500 unveiled new expanses of land and sea which reduced to insignificance the fragments of earth and heaven with which men had hitherto been familiar.
To the west was brought to light for the first time a continent larger than the whole area of terrestrial matter Maritime of which there was previous knowledge. To explora- the south a Portuguese mariner discovered tion. that Africa, which was hitherto deemed to
be merely a narrow strip of earth forming the southern boundary wall of the world, was a gigantic peninsula thrice the size of Europe, which stretched far into a southern ocean, into the same ocean which washed the shores of India.
Such discoveries were far more than contributions to the science of geography. They were levers to lift the Thedis- sPirit of man into unlooked-for altitudes, covery of They gave new conceptions not of earth the solar aione, but of heaven. The skies were sur veyed from points of view which had never yet been approached. A trustworthy study of the sun and stars became possible, and in the early years of the sixteenth century a scientific investigator deduced from the rich array of new knowledge the startling truth that
SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 37
the earth, hitherto believed to be the centre of Jhe uni verse, was only one — and that not the largest — of numer ous planetary bodies rotating about the sun. If Columbus and Vasco da Gama, the discoverers of new lands and seas, deserve homage for having first revealed the true dimensions of the earth, to Copernicus is due the supreme honour of having taught the inhabitants of the earth to know their just place in the economy of the limitless firmament, over which they had hitherto fancied that they ruled. Whatever final purpose sun, planets, and stars served, it was no longer possible to regard them as mere ministers of light and heat to men on earth.
So stupendous was the expansion of the field of man's thought, which was generated by the efforts of Columbus and Copernicus, that only gradually was its The ex- full significance apprehended. All branches pansion of human endeavour and human speculation of thought, were ultimately remodelled in the light of the new physi cal revelation. The change was in the sixteenth century only beginning. But new ideals at once came to birth, and new applications of human energy suggested them selves in every direction.
Dreamers believed that a new universe had been born, and that they were destined to begin a new manner of human life, which should be freed from the defects of the old. The intellectual revelation of a new culture powerfully reinforced the physical revelation of new heavenly and earthly bodies. Assured hopes of human perfectibility permeated human thought. The unveiling of the measureless expanse of physical nature made of man, physically considered, a pigmy, but the spirited enterprises whereby the new knowledge was gained combined with the revelation of the intellectual
38 THE SPIRIT OF THE
achievements of the past to generate the new faith that there lurked in man's mind a power which would ulti mately yield him mastery of all the hidden forces of animate and inanimate nature.
IV
The mechanical invention of the printing press almost synchronised with the twofold revelation of new realms The inven- of thought and nature. The ingenious device tion of came slowly to perfection, but as soon as it printing. was perfected, its employment spread with amazing rapidity under stress of the prevailing stir of discovery. The printing press greatly contributed to the dissemination of the ideas, which the movement of the Renaissance bred. Without the printing-press the spread of the movement would have been slower and its character would have been less homogeneous. The books embodying the new spirit would not have multi plied so quickly nor travelled so far. The printing-press distributed the fruit of the new spirit over the whole area of the civilised world.
In every sphere of human aspiration through Western Europe the spirit of the Renaissance made its presence The Re- ^t- ^ew ideas invaded the whole field of naissance human effort in a tumbling crowd, but many and the traditions of the ancient regime, which the Church of jnvasion threatened to displace, stubbornly held their ground. Some veteran principles opposed the newcomers' progress and checked the growth of the New Birth of mind. The old Papal Church of Rome at the outset absorbed some of its teaching. The Roman Church did not officially dis-
SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 39
courage Greek learning and it encouraged exploration. There were humanists among the Popes of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But the new spirit, in the ful ness of time, demanded concessions of the Church which struck at the root of her being. The Church peremptorily refused to remodel her beliefs on the liberal lines that the new spirit laid down. Ultimately she; declared open war on the enlightened thought of the Renaissance. Some essayed the subtle task of paying simultaneous allegiance to the two opposing forces. Erasmus's unique fertility of mental resource enabled him to come near success in the exploit. But most found the attempt beyond their strength, and, like Sir Thomas More, the greatest of those who tried to recon cile the irreconcilable, sacrificed genius and life in the hopeless cause.
The Papacy had more to fear from the passion for inquiry and criticism which the Renaissance evoked than from the positive ideals and principles j^e com. which is generated. The great Protestant promise of schism is sometimes represented, without Protes- much regard for historic truth, as a calculated tantlsm- return to the primitive ideals of a distant past, as a deliberate revival of a divinely inspired system of religion which had suffered eclipse. Its origin is more com plex. It was mainly the outcome of a compromise with the critical temper, which the intellectual and physical revelations of the Renaissance imposed on men's mind. Protestantism, in the garb in which it won its main triumph, was the contribution of Germany to the spirit ual regeneration of the sixteenth century, and a Teutonic cloudiness of sentiment overhung its foundations. Pro testantism ignored large tracts of the new teaching and
40 THE SPIRIT OF THE
a mass of the new ideas which the Italian Renaissance brought to birth and cherished. But Protestants were eager to mould their belief in some limited agreement with the dictates of reason. They acknowledged, within bounds, the Renaissance faith in the power and right of the human intellect to grapple with the mysteries of nature. The dogmas and ceremonies of the old system which signally flouted reason were denounced and re jected. A narrow interpretation of the Renaissance theory of human perfectibility coloured new speculations as to the efficacy of divine grace. But Protestantism declined to take reason as its sole guide or object of worship. Protestantism was the fruit of a compromise between the old conception of faith and the new con ception of reason. The compromise was widely wel comed by a mass of inquirers who, though moved by the spirit of the age, were swayed in larger degree by religious emotion, and cherished unshakable confidence in the bases of Christianity. But the Protestant en deavour to accommodate old and new ideas was not acceptable in all quarters. A bold minority in Italy, France, and England, either tacitly or openly, spurned a compromise which was out of harmony with the genuine temper of the era. While Roman Catholicism fortified its citadels anew, and Protestantism advanced against them in battle array in growing strength, the free thought and agnosticism, which the unalloyed spirit of the Re naissance generated, gained year by year fresh acces sion of force in every country of Western Europe.
On secular literature the religious reformation, working within its normal limits, produced a far-reaching effect. The qualified desire for increase of knowledge, which .characterised the new religious creeds, widely extended
SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 41
the first-hand study of the Holy Scriptures, which en shrined the title-deeds of Christianity. Translations of the Bible into living tongues were encouraged Literary by all Protestant reformers, and thereby influence Hebraic sublimity and intensity gained ad- of the mission to much Renaissance literature. It Bible, was owing to such turn of events that there met, notably in the great literature of sixteenth-century England, the solemnity of the Hebraism, with the Hellenist love of beauty and form.
The incessant clash of ideas — the ferment of men's thought — strangely affected the moral character of many leaders of the Renaissance in England no xne ethical less than in Europe. Life was lived at too paradox of high a pressure to maintain outward show of l^e era- unity of purpose. A moral chaos often reigned in man's being, and vice was entangled inextricably with virtue.
Probably in no age did the elemental forces of good and evil fight with greater energy than in the sixteenth century for the dominion of man's soul. Or -j^e rather, never did the two forces make closer alliance compact with each other whereby they might of good maintain a joint occupation of the human an<1 evil- heart. Men who were capable of the noblest acts of heroism were also capable of the most contemptible acts of treachery. An active sense of loyalty to a throne seemed no bar to secret conspiracy against a sovereign's life. When Shakespeare described in his sonnets the two spirits — 'the better angel ' and 'the worser spirit,' both of whom claimed his allegiance — he repeated a
42 THE SPIRIT OF THE
conceit which is universal in the poetry of the Renais sance, and represents with singular accuracy the ethical temper of the age.
Among the six men whose life and work are portrayed The ma' or *n tn's vo^ume> tnree — More, Bacon, and paradox Ralegh — forcibly illustrate the mutually in- of More, consistent characteristics with which the spirit Bacon, and of tne Renaissance often endowed one and Ralegh. tne same man- More, who proved himself in the Utopia an enlightened champion of the freedom of the intellect, and of religious toleration, laid down his life as a martyr to superstition and to the principle of authority (in its least rational form) in matters of religion. Ralegh, who preached in his History of the World and in philosophic ^tracts a most elevated altruism and phi losophy of life, neglected the first principles of honesty in a passionate greed of gold. Bacon, who rightly believed himself to be an inspired prophet of science, and a clear-eyed champion of the noblest progress in human thought, stooped to every petty trick in order to make money and a worldly reputation.
Happily the careers of the three remaining subjects — Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare — are paradoxical in The minor a minor degree. But the paradox which is paradox of inherent in the spirit of the time cast its Sidney, glamour to some extent even over them. Spenser, The poets Sidney and Spenser, who preached
s£ea?eha with every aPPearance of conviction the fine doctrine that the poets' crown is alone worthy the poets' winning, strained their nerves until they broke in death, in pursuit of such will-o'-the-wisps as political or military fame. Shakespeare, with narrow .personal experiences of life, and with worldly ambitions
SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 43
of commonplace calibre, mastered the whole scale of human aspiration and announced his message in lan guage which no other mortal has yet approached in insight or harmony. Shakespeare's career stands apart from that of his fellows and defies methods of analysis which are applicable to theirs. But he, no less than they, was steeped in the spirit of the Renaissance. In him that spirit reached its apotheosis. With it, however, there mingled in his nature a mysteriously potent ele ment, which belonged in like measure to none other. The magic of genius has worked miracles in individual minds in many epochs, but it never worked greater miracle than when it fused itself in Shakespeare's being with the ripe temper of Renaissance culture.
II
SIR THOMAS MORE
' Thomae Mori ingenio quid unquam finxit natura vel mollius, vel dulcius, vel felicius?' — [Than the temper of Thomas More did nature ever frame aught gentler, sweeter, or happier ?]
Erasmi Epistolae, Tom. ill., No. xiv.
[BIBLIOGRAPHY. — The foundation for all lives of Sir Thomas More is the charming personal memoir by his son-in-law, William Roper, which was first printed at Paris in 1626, and after passing through numerous editions was recently re-issued in the ' King's Classics.' Cresacre More, Sir Thomas's great-grandson, a pious Catholic layman, published a fuller biography about 1631 ; this was re-issued for the last time in 1828. The Letters of Erasmus, Erasmi Epistolae, Leyden, 1706, which J. A. Froude has charmingly summarised, shed invaluable light on More's character. Mr. Frederic Seebohm's Oxford Reformers (Colet, Erasmus, and More) vividly describes More in rela tion to the religious revolution of his day. The latest complete biography, by the Rev. W. H. Hutton, B.D., appeared in 1895. The classical English translation of More's Utopia, which was first published in 1551, has lately been re-edited by Mr. Churton Collins for the Oxford University Press. More's English works have not been reprinted since they were first collected in 1557. The completest collection of his Latin works was issued in Germany in 1689.]
SIR THOMAS MORE was a Londoner. He was born in the heart of the capital, in Milk Street, Cheapside, not
SIR THOMAS MORE. 45
far from Bread Street, where Milton was born more than a century later. The year of More's birth carries us back to 1478, to the end of the Middle More's Ages, to the year when the Renaissance was birth, ;th looming on England's intellectual horizon, Feb- T478- but was as yet shedding a vague and flickering light. The centre of European culture was in distant Florence, and England's interests at home were still mainly absorbed by civil strife. Though by 1478 the acutest phases of that warfare were passed, it was not effectually stemmed till Henry vn. triumphed at Bosworth Field and More was seven years old. Much else was to change before opportunity for great achievement should be offered More in his maturity.
It was in association with men and movements for the most part slightly younger than himself that More first figured on life's stage. He set forth on life in the van guard of the advancing army of contemporary progress, but destiny decreed that death should find him at the head of the opposing forces of reaction.
Of the leading actors in the drama in which More was to play his great part, two were at the time of his birth unborn, and two were in infancy. Luther, Senior of the practical leader of the religious rev- Luther and olution by which More's career was moulded, Henry vm. did not come into the world until More was five ; nor until he was thirteen was there born Henry VIIL, the monarch to whom he owed his martyrdom. To only two of the men with whom he conspicuously xhe junior worked was he junior. Erasmus, one of the of Erasmus chief emancipators of the reason, from whom and Wolsey. More derived abundant inspiration, was his senior by eleven years; Wolsey, the political priest, who was to
46 SIR THOMAS MORE.
give England ascendency in Europe and to offer More the salient opportunities of his career, was seven years his senior.
One spacious avenue to intellectual progress was indeed in readiness for More and his friends from the The inven- outset One commanding invention, which tion of exerted unbounded influence — the introduc- printing. tion into England by Caxton of the newly invented art of printing — was almost coincident with More's birth. A year earlier Caxton had set up a printing-office in Westminster, and produced for the first time an English printed book there. That event had far-reaching consequences on the England of More's childhood. The invention of printing was to the six teenth century what the invention of steam locomotion was to the nineteenth.
The birth in England of the first of the two great influences which chiefly stimulated men's intellectual development, during More's adolescence, was almost simultaneous with the introduction of printing. Greek learning and literature were first taught in the country at Oxford in the seventh decade of the fifteenth cen tury. It was not till the last decade of that century that European explorers set foot in the New World of America, and, by compelling men to reconsider their notion of the universe and pre-existing theories of the planet to which they were born, completed the inauguration of the new era of which More was the earliest English hero.
SIR THOMAS MORE. 47
ii
More's family belonged to the professional classes, whose welfare depends for the most part on no extran eous advantages of inherited rank or wealth, , but on personal ability and application. His father father was a barrister who afterwards became a judge. Of humble origin, he acquired a modest fortune. His temperament was singularly modest and gentle, but he was blessed with a quiet sense of humour which was one of his son's most notable inheritances. The father had a wide experience of matrimony, having been thrice married, and he is credited with the un- gallant remark that a man taking a wife is like one putting his hand into a bag of snakes with one eel among them ; he may light on the eel, but it is a hun dred chances to one that he shall be stung by a snake.
Of the great English public schools only two — Win chester and Eton — were in existence when More was a boy, and they had not yet acquired a national
TT TUT At school
repute. Up to the age of thirteen More . , , attended a small day school — the best of its kind in London. It was St. Anthony's school in Threadneedle Street, and was attached to St. Anthony's Hospital, a religious and charitable foundation for the residence of twelve poor men. Latin was the sole means and topic of instruction.
Cardinal Morton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was wont to admit to his household boys of good jn tjje family, to wait on him, and to receive in- service of struction from his chaplains. More's father the Arch- knew the Archbishop, and requested him to bish°P- take young Thomas More into his service. The boy's
48 SIR THOMAS MORE.
wit and towardness delighted the Archbishop. 'At Christmastide he would sometimes suddenly step in among the players and masquers who made merriment for the Archbishop, and, never studying for the matter, would extemporise a part of his own presently among them, which made the lookers-on more sport than all the players besides.' The Archbishop, impressed by the lad's alertness of intellect, ' would often say of him to the nobles that divers times dined with him "This child here waiting at the table, whoever shall live to see it, will prove a marvellous man." '
The Archbishop arranged with More's father to send him to the University of Oxford, and, when little more
. „ , , than fourteen, he entered Canterbury Hall, At Oxford. . '
a collegiate establishment which was after wards absorbed in Cardinal Wolsey's noble foundation of Christ Church.
More's allowance while an Oxford student was small. Without money to bestow on amusements, he spent his time in study to the best advantage. At Oxford, More came under the two main influences that dominated his life.
Oxford has often been called by advanced spirits in England the asylum of lost causes, but those who call The her so have studied her history superficially,
influence Oxford is commonly as ready to offer a home of Oxford. to new intellectual movements as faithfully to harbour old causes. Oxford has a singular faculty of cultivating the old and the new side by side with a parallel enthusiasm. The University, when More knew it, was proving its capacity in both the old and the new directions. It was giving the first public welcome in England to the new learning, to the revival of classical,
SIR THOMAS MORE. 49
and notably of Greek, study. It was helping to intro duce the modern English world to Attic literature, the most artistically restrained, the most brilliantly perspicu ous body of literature that has yet been contrived by the human spirit. Greek had been lately taught there for the first time by an Italian visitor, while several Oxford students had just returned from Italy burdened with the results of the new study. More came under the travelled scholars' sway, and his agile mind was filled with zeal to assimilate the stimulating fruits of pagan intellect. He read Greek and Latin authors with avidity, and essayed original compositions in their tongues. His scholarship was never very exact, but the instinct of genius revealed to him almost at a glance the secrets of the classical words. His Latin verse was exceptionally facile and harmonious. French came to him with little trouble, and, in emulation of the fre quenters of the Athenian Academy, he sought recrea tion in music, playing with skill on the viol and the flute.
His conservative father, who knew no Greek, was alarmed by his son's enthusiasm for learning, which did not come within his own cognisance. He feared its influence on the boy's religious of jau orthodoxy, and deemed it safer to transfer him to the study of law. Recalling him from Oxford, he sent him to an Inn of Court in London before he was twenty, to pursue his own legal profession. More, with characteristic complacency, adapted himself to his new environment. Within a year or two he proved himself an expert and a learned lawyer.
But his father had misunderstood Oxford, and had misunderstood his son. At the same time as the youth
50 SIR THOMAS MORE.
imbibed at Oxford a passion for the new learning, he had also imbibed a passion there for the old Spiritual religion. Oxford, with its past traditions of question- unswerving fidelity to the Catholic Church, ings. had made More a religious enthusiast at the
same time as her recent access of intellectual enlighten ment had made him a zealous humanist. While he was a law student in London, the two influences fought for supremacy in his mind. He extended his knowledge of Greek, making the acquaintance of other Oxford students with like interests to his own. Colet, Linacre, Grocyn, and Lily, all of whom had drunk deep of the new culture of the Renaissance, became his closest associates. He engaged with them in friendly rivalry in rendering epigrams from the Greek anthology into Latin, and he read for himself the works of the great Florentine humanist and mystical philosopher, Pico della Mirandola, who had absorbed the idealistic teach ings of Plato. But spiritual questionings at the same time disturbed him. Every day he devoted many hours to spiritual exercises. He fasted, he prayed, he kept vigils, he denied himself sleep, he wore a shirt of hair next his skin, he practised all manner of austerities. He gave lectures on St. Augustine's Christian ideal of a ' City of God ' in a London city church ; he began to think that the priesthood was his vocation.
But before he was twenty-five he had arrived at a different conclusion. He resolved to remain at the bar and in secular life ; he thought he had discovered a via media whereby he could maintain allegiance to his two fold faith in Catholicism and in humanism. The breadth of his intellect permitted him the double enthusiasm, although the liability of conflict between the two was
SIR THOMAS MORE. 51
always great. While moderating his asceticism, he con tinued scrupulously regular in all the religious observ ances expected of a pious Catholic. But he pursued at the same time his study of Lucian and the Greek anthology, of Pico della Mirandola and the philosophic humanists of modern Italy. He made, to his own satis faction, a working reconciliation between the old religion and the new learning, and imagined that he could devote his life to the furtherance of both causes at once. There was in the resolve a fatal miscalculation of the force of his religious convictions. There was incon sistency in the endeavour to serve two masters. But miscalculation and inconsistency were the moving causes of the vicissitudes of Thomas More's career.
in
Probably the main cause of More's resolve to adhere to the paths of humanism, when his religious fervour inclined him to abandon them, was his intro- The influ- duction to the great scholar of the European ence of Renaissance, Erasmus, who came on a first Erasmus, visit to England about the year that More reached his majority. Erasmus, a Dutchman about eleven years More's senior, became a first-rate Greek scholar when a student at Paris, and gained a thorough mastery of all classical learning and literature. Taking priest's orders he was soon a learned student of divinity, and an en lightened teacher alike of profane and sacred letters. His native temperament preserved him from any tincture of pedantry, and implanted in him a perennially vivid interest in every aspect of human endeavour and ex perience. Above all things he was a penetrating critic —
52 SIR THOMAS MORE.
a critic of life as well as of literature, and he was able to express his critical views with an airiness, a charm, a playfulness of style, which secured for his conclusions a far wider acceptance than was possible to a more formal, more serious, and more crabbed presentation. He was an adept in the use of banter and satire, when exposing the abuses and absurdities whether of religious or secular society of his time. But he met with the usual fate of independent and level-headed critics to whom all ex tremes are obnoxious, and whose temperament forbids them to identify themselves with any distinctly organised party or faction. In the religious conflicts of the hour* Erasmus stood aloof from Protestant revolutionaries like Luther, and from orthodox champions at the Paris Sorbonne of the ancient faith of papal Rome. In the struggle over the progress of humanistic learning, he treated with equal disdain those who set their faces against the study of pagan writers, and those who argued that the human intellect should be exclusively nurtured on servile imitation of classical style. As a consequence Erasmus was denounced by all parties, but he was unmoved by clamour, and remained faithful to his idiosyncrasy to the last In the era of the Renaissance he did as much as any man to free humanity from the bonds of superstition, and to enable it to give free play to its reasoning faculties.
Erasmus spent much time in England while More's life was at its prime, and the two men became the Erasmus's closest of friends. Erasmus at once acknow- friendship ledged More's fascination. 'My affection for More. for the man is so great,' he wrote, in the early days of their acquaintance, ' that if he bade me dance a hornpipe, I should do at once what he bid me.' Until
SIR THOMAS MORE. 53
death separated them, their love for one another knew no change. Erasmus's enlightened influence and critical frankness offered the stimulus that More's genius needed to sustain his faith in humanism at the moment that it was threatened by his religious zeal.
Neither More's spiritual nor his intellectual interests detached him from practical affairs. His progress at the bar was rapid, and after the customary At the Bar manner of English barristers, he sought to and in improve his worldly position by going into Parliament, politics and obtaining a seat in Parliament. He was a bold and independent speaker, and quickly made his mark by denouncing King Henry vn.'s heavy taxation of the people. A ready ear was given to his argument by fellow members of the House of Commons, and they negatived, at his suggestion, one of the many royal appeals for money. The King angrily expressed as tonishment that a beardless boy should disappoint his purpose, and he invented a cause of quarrel with More's father by way of revenge.
IV
Meanwhile More married. As a wooer he seems to have been more philosophic than ardent. He made the acquaintance of an Essex gentleman .
named Colte, who had three daughters, and the second daughter, whom he deemed ' the fairest and best favoured,' moved affection in More. But the young philosopher curbed his passion ; he ' considered that it would be both great grief and some shame also to the eldest to see her younger sister preferred before her in
54 SIR THOMAS MORE.
marriage.' Accordingly ' of a certain pity ' he ' framed his fancy towards' the eldest daughter, Jane. He married her in 1505. The union, if the fruit of com passion, was most satisfactory in result. His wife was very young, and quite uneducated, but More was able, according to his friend Erasmus, to shape her character after his own pattern. Teaching her books and music, he made her a true companion. Acquiring a house in the best part of the City of London, in Bucklersbury, More delighted in his new domestic life. He reckoned 'the enjoyment of his family a necessary part of the business of the man who does not wish to be a stranger in his own house,' and such leisure as his professional work allowed him was happily divided between the superintendence of his household and literary study. Unluckily his wife died six years after marriage. She left him with a family of four children. More lost no
, time in supplying her place. His second His second .c .1 . f .... -
wife. w"e was a wldow, who, he would often say
with a laugh, was neither beautiful nor well educated. She lacked one desirable faculty in a wife, the ability to appreciate her husband's jests. But she had the virtues of a good housewife, and ministered to More's creature comforts. He ruled her, according to his friend Erasmus, with caresses and with jokes the point of which she missed. Thus he kept her sharp tongue under better control than sternness and assertion of authority could achieve. With characteristic sense of humour, More made her learn harp, cithern, guitar and (it is said) flute, and practise in his presence every day.
More, after his second marriage, removed from the bustling centre of London to what was then the peace-
SIR THOMAS MORE. 55
ful riverside hamlet of Chelsea. There he lived in simple patriarchal fashion, surrounded by his children. Ostentation was abhorrent to him, but he
quietly gratified his love for art and litera- f ^uT^
at Chelsea.
ture by collecting pictures and books.
More prospered in his profession. The small kgal post of Under-Sheriff, which he obtained from the Corporation of London, brought him into Under- relations with the merchants, who admired Sheriff of his quickness of wit. The Government was London, contemplating a new commercial treaty with Flanders, and required the assistance of a representative of London's commercial interest with a view to improving business relations with the Flemings. More was recom mended for the post by a city magnate to Henry vin.'s great Minister, Cardinal Wolsey, and he received the appointment. Thus, not long after he had fallen under the sway of the greatest intellectual leader of the day, Erasmus, did he first_come under the notice of the great political chieftain.
But for the present Wolsey and More worked out their destinies apart. The duties of the new office required More to leave England. For the pirst visjt first time in his life he was brought face to to the face with Continental culture. He chiefly Continent, spent his time in the cities of Bruges, Brussels, and Antwerp, all of which were northern strongholds of the art and literature of the Italian Renaissance. More's interests were widened and stimulated by the enlight ened society into which he was thrown. But he had his private difficulties. His salary was small for a man with
56 SIR THOMAS MORE.
a growing family, and he humorously expressed regret at the inconsiderateness of his wife and children in failing to fast from food in his absence.
But, however ill More was remunerated at the moment, this first visit to the Continent invigorated, Social re- ^ ^ did not create, a new ideal of life, and creation at impelled him to offer his fellow-men a new Antwerp. counsel of perfection, which, although it had little bearing on the practical course of his own affairs, powerfully affected his reputation with posterity. At Antwerp, More met a thoroughly congenial companion, the great scholar of France and friend of Erasmus, Peter Giles or Egidius. Versatility of interest was a mark of Renaissance scholarship. With Giles, More discussed not merely literary topics but also the con temporary politics and the social conditions of England and the Continent. In the course of the debates the notion of sketching an imaginary commonwealth, which should be freed from the defects of existing society, entered More's brain.
VI
From Antwerp More brought back the first draft of his Utopia. That draft ultimately formed the second First draft book of the completed treatise. But the of the first and shorter book which he penned
Utopia. after his return home merely served the purpose of a literary preface to the full and detailed exposition of the political and social ideals which his foreign tour had conjured up in his active mind.
Increasing practice at the Bar, and the duties of his Judicial office in the City, delayed the completion of the
SIR THOMAS MORE. 57
Utopia, which was not published till the end of 1516, a year after More's return.
The Utopia of Sir Thomas More is the main monu ment of his genius. It is as admirable in literary form as it is original in thought. It displays a
mind revelling in the power of detachment etac " . , . T • merit of
from the sentiment and the prejudices which the
prevailed in his personal environment. To a large extent this power of detachment was bred of his study of Greek literature. Plato, the great philosopher of Athens, had sketched in detail an imaginary republic which was governed solely by regard for the moral and material welfare of the citizens. To Plato's republic is traceable More's central position. Equality in all things is the one and only way to ensure the well-being of a community. All men should enjoy equal posses sions and equal opportunities. On that revolutionary text, which defied the established bases of contemporary society, More preached a new and unconventional dis course which ranks with the supreme manifestations of intellectual fertility.
vn
The prefatory book of the Utopia is a vivid piece of fiction which Defoe could not have excelled. More relates how he accidentally came upon his scholarly friend Peter Giles in the streets of irst
Antwerp, in conversation with an old sailor named Raphael Hythlodaye. The sailor had lately re turned from a voyage to the New World under tne com mand of Amerigo Vespucci, America's eponymous hero. Raphael had been impressed by the beneficent forms of government which prevailed in the New World. He
58 SIR THOMAS MORE.
had also visited England, and had noted social evils there which called for speedy redress. The degradation of the masses was sapping the strength of the country. Capital punishment was the invariable penalty for rob bery, and it was difficult to supply sufficient gibbets whereon to hang the offenders. The prevalence of crime Raphael assigned to want of employment among the poor,, to the idleness and the luxury of the well- to-do, to the recklessness with which the rulers engaged in war, and to the readiness with which merchants were converting arable land into pasture ; villages were laid waste and the opportunity of labour was greatly dimin ished, in order to fill the coffers of capitalists. Dis charged soldiers, troops of dismissed retainers from the households of the nobility and gentry, who, after a life of idleness, were thrown on their own resources, plough men and peasants, whose services were no longer re quired by the sheep-farmers, perilously swelled the ranks of the unemployed and made thieving the only means of livelihood for thousands of the population. A more even distribution of wealth was necessary to the country's salvation. To this end were necessary the enjoyment of the blessings of peace, restrictions on the cupidity of the capitalist, improved education of the humbler classes, and the encouragement of new industries. Crime could be restrained by merciful laws more effectually than by merciless statutes.
This fearless and spirited exposure of the demoralisa tion of English society, which is set in the mouth of the The ideal sailor from the world beyond the Atlantic, of the New potently illustrates the stimulus to thought in World. the social and political sphere which sprang from the recent maritime discoveries. The abuses
SIR THOMAS MORE. 59
which time had fostered in the Old World could alone be dispersed by acceptance of the unsophisticated prin ciples of the New World. The sailor's auditors eagerly recognise the worth of his suggestions, and the sailor promises to report to them the political and social institutions which are in vogue in the land of perfection across the seas. He had lived in such a country. He had made his way to the island of Utopia when, on his last voyage, he had been left behind by his comrades at his own wish on the South American coast near Cape Frio, off Brazil.
The second book of More's Utopia describes the ideal commonwealth of this imaginary island of No-where (Ov TOTTOS), and in it culminate the hopes The Second and aspirations of all Renaissance students Book of the of current politics and society. The con- Utopia, stitution of the country is an elective monarchy, but the prince can be deposed if he falls under suspicion of seeking to enslave the people. War is regarded as inglorious, and no leagues or treaties with foreign powers are permitted. The internal economy is of an excep tionally enlightened kind. The sanitary arrangements in towns are the best imaginable. The streets are broad and well watered. Every house has a garden. Slaughter-houses are placed outside the wall. Hospitals are organised on scientific principles. The isolation of persons suffering from contagious diseases is imperative.
The mind is as wisely cared for as the body. All children, whether girls or boys, are thoroughly and wisely educated. They are apt to learn, and find much attraction in Greek authors, even th'e mind in Lucien's merry conceits and jests. At the same time labour is an universal condition of life.
60 SIR THOMAS MORE.
Every man has to work at a craft, as well as to devote some time each day to husbandry, but no human being is permitted to become a mere beast of burden. The hours of manual labour are strictly limited to six a day. A large portion of the people's leisure is assigned to intellectual pursuits, to studies which liberalise the mind. Offenders against law and order are condemned to bondage. But redemption was assured bondmen when they gave satisfactory promise of mending their ways, and of making fit use of liberty.
Contempt for silver and gold and precious stones is especially characteristic of the Utopians. Diamonds Contempt an<* pearls are treated as children's play- for the things. Criminals are chained with golden precious fetters by way of indicating the disrepute metals. attaching to the metal. Ambassadors arriv ing in Utopia from other countries with golden chains about their necks, and wearing robes ornamented with pearls, are mistaken by the Utopians for degraded bondmen, who among the Utopians are wont to cherish in adult years a childish love for toys.
To find happiness in virtuous and reasonable pleasure is the final aim of the Utopian scheme of life. The
Utopians declare that 'the felicity of man' Utopian . . % .
philosophy. conslsts ln pleasure. But ' they think not,
More adds, ' felicity to consist in all pleasure but only in that pleasure that is good and honest.' They define virtue to be 'life ordered according to nature, and that we be hereunto ordained even of God. And that he doth follow the course of nature, who in desiring and refusing things is ruled by reason.' The .watchword of Utopia declares reason and reason alone
SIR THOMAS MORE. 61
to be the safe guide of life. Even in the religious sphere principles of reason's fashioning are carried to logical conclusions without hesitation or condition.
The official religion of More's imaginary world is that manner of pantheism which assumes the immanence of Divine power in the creation, — a doctrine taught by the Greek Fathers and not re- jected by western theologians. But differ ences on religious questions are permitted in Utopia. The essence of the Utopian faith is 'that there is a certain godly power unknown, far above the capacity and reach of man's wit, dispersed throughout all the world, not in bigness, but in virtue and power. Him they call Father of all. To Him alone they attribute the beginnings, the increasings, the proceedings, the changes, and the ends of all things. Neither give they any divine honours to any other than Him.' The state organises public worship of such first principles about which differences of opinion are barely con ceivable. In other regards divergences of view are encouraged.
Nowhere indeed has the great doctrine of religious toleration been expounded with greater force or fulness than in the Utopia. The bases of morality are duly safeguarded, but otherwise every man in Utopia is per mitted to cherish without hindrance the religious belief that is adapted to his idiosyncrasy. Reason, the sole' test of beneficent rule, justifies no other provision.
VIII
More wrote his romance of Utopia in Latin, and addressed it to the educated classes of Europe. It was
62 SIR THOMAS MORE.
published at the end of 1516, at Louvain, a prominent centre of academic learning. A new edition came four Utopia months later from a famous press of Paris, published and then within a year the scholar printer, on the Froben of Basle, produced a luxurious re- -nt- issue under the auspices of Erasmus and with illustrations by Erasmus's friend and chief exponent of Renaissance art in Germany, Hans Holbein. The brightest influences of the new culture pronounced fervent benedictions on the printed book, and the epithets which the publishers bestowed on its title-page, 'aureus,' 'salutaris/'festivus'-— golden, healthful, joyous — were well adapted to a manifesto from every sentence of which radiated the light and hope of social progress.
None who read the Utopia can deny that its author drank deep of the finest spirit of his age. None can question that he foresaw the main lines along which the political and social ideals of the Renaissance were to develop in the future. There is hardly a scheme of social or political reform that has been enunciated in later epochs of which there is no definite adumbration in More's pages. But he who passes hastily from the speculations of More's Utopia to the record of More's subsequent life and writings will experience a strange shock. Nowhere else is he likely to be faced by so sharp a contrast between precept and practice, between enlightened and vivifying theory in the study and adher ence in the work-a-day world to the unintelligent routine of bigotry and obscurantism. By the precept and theory of his Utopia, More cherished and added power to the new light. By his practical conduct in life he sought to extinguish the illuminating forces to which his writing offered fuel.
SIR THOMAS MORE. 63
The facts of the situation are not open to question. More was long associated in the government of his country on principles which in the Utopia he condemned. He acquiesced in a sys- Between tern of rule which rested on inequalities _of Utopian rank and wealth, and made no endeavour precepts to diminish poverty. In the sphere of and More>s
religion More's personal conduct most con- Pers°Pal . _ . , . , . . . practice,
spicuously conflicted with the aspirations of
his Utopians. So far from regarding Pantheism, or any shape of undogmatic religion, as beneficial, he lost no opportunity of denouncing it as sinful ; he regarded the toleration in practical life of differences on religious questions as sacrilegious. He actively illustrated more than once his faith in physical coercion or punishment as a means of bringing men to a sense of the only religion which seemed to him to be true. Into his idealistic romance he had introduced a saving clause to the effect that he was not at one with his Utopians at all points. He gave no indication that by the con duct of his personal life he ranked himself with their strenuous foes.
The discrepancy is not satisfactorily accounted for by the theory that his political or religious views suf fered change after the Utopia was written, i^ Utopia No man adhered more rigidly through life a dream of to the religious tenets that he had adopted fancy- in youth. From youth to age his dominant hope was to fit himself for the rewards in a future life of honest championship of the Catholic Christian faith. No man was more consistently conservative in his attitude to questions of current politics. He believed in the despotic principle of government and the inevitable-
64 SIR THOMAS MORE.
ness of class distinctions. But the breadth of his intellectual temper admitted him also to regions of speculation which were beyond the range of any estab lished religious or political doctrines. He was capable of a detachment of mind which blinded him to the inconsistencies of his double part. The student of More's biography cannot set the Utopia in its proper place among More's achievements unless he treat it as proof of his mental sensitiveness to the finest issues of the era, as evidence of his gift of literary imagination, as an impressively fine play of fancy, which was woven by the writer far away from his own work-a-day world in a realm which was not bounded by facts or practical affairs, as they were known to him. Whatever the effects of More's imaginings on readers, whatever their practical bearing in others' minds on actual conditions of social life, the Utopia was for its creator merely a vision, which melted into thin air in his brain as he stood face to face with the realities of life. When the dream ended, the brilliant pageant faded from his con sciousness and left not a wrack behind.
IX
Very soon after the Utopia was written, More de scended swiftly from speculative heights. His attention Dread was absorbed by the religious revolution that of the was arising in Germany. He heard with
Lutheran alarm and incredulity of the attempt of revolution. Luttierj the monk of Wittenberg, to reform the Church by dissociating it from Rome. Like his friend Erasmus, More was well alive to the defects in the administration of the Catholic Church. The igno-
SIR THOMAS MORE. 63
ranee ot many priests, their lack of spiritual fervour, their worldly ambition, their misapprehension of the significance of ceremonies, their soulless teaching of divine things, all at times roused his resentment, and he hoped for improvement. But in the constitution of the great Roman hierarchy, under the sway of St. Peter's vicegerent, the Pope, he had unswerving faith. It never occurred to him to question the belief in the Pope. Against any encroachment on the Pope's authority every fibre of his mind and body was prepared to resist to the last. From first to last he exhausted the language of invective in denouncing the self-styled reformers of religion. The enlightened principles of reason and tolerance which he had illustrated with unmatchable point and vivacity in the Utopia were ignored, were buried. As soon as the papal claim to supremacy in matters of religion was disputed, every pretension of the papacy seemed to take, in More's mind, the character of an indisputable law of nature. To challenge it was to sin against the light. No glimmer of justice nor of virtue could his vision dis cover in those who took another view.
Meanwhile More was steadily building up a material fortune and practical repute. His success as a diplo matist at Antwerp reinforced his reputation as a lawyer in London. He showed gifts of office oratory which especially gratified the public ear. The King's great minister, Wolsey, anxious to absorb talent which the public recognised, deemed it politic to offer him further public employment. Un expected favour was shown him. His ability and reputation led to his appointment to a prominent Court office, a Mastership of Requests, or Examiner of Petitions
3
66 SIR THOMAS MORE.
that were presented to the King on his progresses through the country. The duties required More to spend much time at Court, and he was thus brought suddenly and unexpectedly into relation with the greatest person in the State — with the King.
According to Erasmus, More was ' dragged ' into the circle of the Court. ' " Dragged " is the only word,'
wrote his friend, ' for no one ever struggled His attitude , , - , . . ., ,,
to olitics harder to gam admission there than More
struggled to escape.' Secular politics always seemed to More a puny business. He always held a modest view of his own capacities, and despite his literary professions in the Utopia, he never entertained the notion that from the heights of even supreme office could a statesman serve his country to much purpose. By lineage he was closely connected with the people. No ties of kinship bound him to a privileged nobility. He instinctively cherished a limited measure of popular sympathy. He desired all classes of society to enjoy to full extent such welfare as was inherent in the estab lished order of things. Above all, he was by tempera ment a conservative. He had little faith in the efficacy of new legislation to ameliorate social or political con ditions. He had no belief in heroic or revolutionary i statesmanship. At most the politician could prevent increase of evil. He could not appreciably enlarge the volume of the nation's virtue or prosperity. To other activities than those of statesmen, to religious and spiritual energy and endeavour, More alone looked in the work-a-day world for the salvation of man and society. 'It is not possible,' he wrote complacently, 'for all things to be well unless all men are good ; which I think will not be yet these many years.' Study of
SIR THOMAS MORE. 67
precedents, experience, reliance on those religious prin ciples which had hitherto enjoyed the undivided allegi ance of his countrymen, these things alone gave promise of healthful conduct of the world's affairs. It was neither a fruitful nor a logical creed, when applied to politics, but it was one to which More, despite the professions of his imaginary spokesman in his great romance, clung throughout his political career with unrelaxing tenacity.
The established principles of absolute monarchy More accepted intuitively. He respected the authority of the
King with a whole heart. Henry vni.'s T
. , .„ 11- . His loyalty,
private character illustrated the inconsistency
of conduct which prevailed among the children of the Renaissance. He could be 'wise, amaz'd, temperate and furious, loyal and neutral in a moment.' But there was much in Henry vni.'s personality to confirm More's instinctive reverence for the head of the State. The King was well educated, and encouraged pursuit of the New Learning. If he had disappointed the hopes of those who, at his succession, prophesied that his reign would inaugurate peace and goodwill at home and among the nations, he was reckoned to have at heart, provided his autocratic pretensions went unques tioned, the welfare of his people. His geniality attracted all comers, and diverted condemnation of his sensuality and tyranny. For the main dogmas and ceremonial observances of the Church of his fathers he pro fessed reverent loyalty. The King bade More, at the outset of his Court career, look first unto God, and after God unto the King. Such conventional counsel was in complete accord with More's working views of lite.
68 SIR THOMAS MORE.
More's personal fascination at once put him on inti mate terms with his sovereign. His witty conversation, his wide knowledge, delighted Henry, who favour m§ S treated his new counsellor with much famili arity, often summoning him to his private room to talk of science or divinity, or inviting him to supper with the King and Queen in order to enjoy his merry talk. At times Henry would go to More's own house and walk about the garden at Chelsea with him. But More did not exaggerate the significance of these attentions. He had no blind faith in the security of royal favour. Whatever his respect for the kingly office, he formed no exaggerated estimate of the magnanimity of its holder. ' If my head should win him a castle in France,' More once remarked to his son-in-law, ' it should not fail to go.'
More's ascent of the steps of the official ladder was very rapid. He was knighted in the spring of 1521, and each of the ten years that followed saw ferment^ some advance of dignity. From every direc tion came opportunities of preferment. The King manifested the continuance of his confidence by making him sub -Treasurer of the Household. To Cardinal Wolsey's influence he owed one session's experience of the Speakership of the House of Com mons. He was employed on many more diplomatic missions abroad, and in 1525 became chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster.
The smiles of fortune engendered no pride in More. The Cardinal expressed surprise that he did not press
SIR THOMAS MORE. 69
his advantage with greater energy or seek larger pecuniary rewards for his service. Independence was of greater value to him than wealth or titles, and he made the Cardinal often realise that he was a fearless if witty critic whom no bribe could convert into a tool.
Had Wolsey foreseen events, he might 'have had good ground for fearing More's advancement. Wolsey sud denly forfeited the royal favour, and was ^Iore ma(le deprived of his high office of Lord Chan- Lord Chan cellor in the autumn of 1529. Six days cellor, 25th later — on 25th October — greatly to More's Oct< I529- surprise, the King invited him to fill the vacant place. The Lord Chancellor is the head of the legal profession! in England — the chief judge, the adviser of the King in all legal business, who is popularly called keeper of the King's conscience. More's appointment was an excep tional proceeding from every point of view. Lord Chancellors, though their business was with law, had of late invariably been dignitaries of the Church, who in the Middle Ages were the chief lawyers. Doubtless the King's motive in promoting to so high an office a man of comparatively humble rank was in order to wield greater influence over the Chancellor, and to free himself of the bonds that had been forged for him by Wolsey, whose powerful individuality and resolute ambi tion seems to find among modern statesmen the closest reflection in Prince Bismarck.
More's father, Sir John More, was still judge when he first occupied the woolsack, and Sir John More and remained on the bench till his death a year his father later. Sir Thomas's affection for his father as judges, was deep and lasting, and during the first year of his
70 SIR THOMAS MORE.
Chancellorship, while he and his father were both judges at the same time, it was the Chancellor's daily practice to visit his father in the lower court in order to ask a blessing as he passed down Westminster Hall on the way to his superior court of Chancery. With like humility More bore himself to all on reaching the goal of a lawyer's mundane ambition. Nor did his dignities repress his mirthful geniality in intercourse either with equals or inferiors.
The King had need of subservient instruments in his great offices of State. He was contemplating a great The King revolution in his own life and the life of the and the nation. He had determined to divorce his Reforma- wife, Queen Catherine, and to marry another, tion. Anne Boleyn. The purpose was not easy of
fulfilment. The threatened Queen had champions at home and abroad, with whom conflict was perilous. Charles v., the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Henry's most persistent rival in his efforts to dominate Europe, was his wife's nephew. Divorce was a weapon that could only be wielded by the Pope, and it was known that the Pontiff was not inclined to forward Henry's wish. It was this intricate coil of circumstance which encumbered More's great elevation. The clouds deepened in the years that followed, and ultimately cast the shadow of tragedy over the tenor of More's life.
IX
Soon after More became Chancellor, the King lightly consulted him on the projected divorce. More frankly declared himself opposed to the King's design. Henry
SIR THOMAS MORE. 71
for the time was complacent, and told his new Chan cellor he was free to hold his own opinion. But the King recognised the existence of no ob- M , stacle, however formidable it might prove, view of to the fulfilment of his will. No authority, the King's not even that of the Pope, was powerful projected enough to deflect his settled purpose. To divorce- him the conclusion was inevitable that if the Pope would not go with him on an errand to which he was committed, he must go without the Pope. The King's An upheaval of the ecclesiastical and political supreme constitution of the State which should put power, heavy strain on the conscience of a large section of his people was a price that Henry was prepared to pay with equanimity for the accomplishment of his desires. The sanction of the papacy was to be abrogated in his dominions, if it failed to accommodate itself to the royal resolve.
Apart from his obstinate faith in his own personal power, the King knew that he possessed in the sym pathy which the Lutheran movement in xne growth Germany bred among a small class of his sub- of Protes- jects a powerful lever which might easily be tantism. worked to bring about England's separation from Rome. Hitherto he had done what he could to discourage the spread of the Lutheran movement at home, and the mass of the people had proved loyal to the papacy. But controversy respecting the precise grounds of the Pope's claim in England to the supreme authority in matters of religion had already sown seeds of alienation between England and Rome ; were those seeds fostered by royal influence, there would be placed in the royal hand a formidable weapon of offence. The cry of
72 SIR THOMAS MORE.
national independence always quickened the people's spirit, and it could readily be made the watchword of opposition to the papal pretensions. The King's position as champion of his people against foreign domination was difficult of assault.
The constitution of the country was, too, easily adaptable to Henry's purposes. Parliament, which as Hopeless- Ye' knew little of its strength, was usually ness of eager to give effect to a popular King's resistance, wishes. His wishes were indeed hardly dis tinguishable from commands. As soon as the King's mind was made up, it was easy for him to secure Parlia mentary enactments which should disestablish the papacy in England and abolish its sovereignty. At a word from the King, Parliament could be reckoned on to remove all the obstacles that papal obduracy put in the way of the legal accomplishment of his plan of divorce. Officers of State, and indeed the people at large, might disapprove of such parliamentary action, but they could only stand aside or acquiesce. The King, whose liking for More was not easily dispelled, applied no compulsion to him either to accept his master's policy or to declare his convictions. He was at liberty, he was told, to stand aside.
Neutrality for More on matters touching his innermost beliefs was out of the question. For him to remain in More's con- office when the Government was irretrievably scientious committed to heresy was to belie his con- scruples, science. To condemn himself to silence in any relation of life was contrary to his nature. Tacitly to accept the revolution in religion, which was hence forth to identify England with Protestantism, was in his eyes a breach of the laws of morality. As soon,
SIR THOMAS MORE. 73
therefore, as Parliament was invited to set aside papal power in England, More retired from his high office. He had held the Chancellorship, when he His re • resigned it in the spring of 1532, for two nation of and a half years. In spite of all his early the Wool- hopes and ambitions, it was with a pro- sack- found sense of relief that he brought his official career to an end.
Loyalty to the King was still a cherished doctrine of More's practical philosophy, even when loyalty was avowedly in conflict with his principles. The His inconsistent attitude of mind was unchange- spiritual able till death. To preserve his sense of ambition, loyalty from decay now required of him, he perceived, a serious effort. The proper course, to his mind, was to abstain henceforth from affairs of State, and to keep his mind fixed exclusively on spiritual matters. Pitfalls encircled him, but he was sanguine enough to believe that, despite all that had happened in the past or might happen in the future, he might as a private citizen reconcile his duty to his God with his duty to his King.
To Erasmus he wrote on the day of his resignation, ' That which I have from a child unto this day continu ally wished, that being freed from the troublesome businesses of public affairs I might live somewhile only to God and myself, I have now, by the especial grace of Almighty God and the favour of my most indulgent prince, obtained.' He told his friend that he was sick at heart, and that his physical strength was failing. Apprehension of the trend of public affairs shook his nerve, but there was no infirmity in his convictions.
74 SIR THOMAS MORE.
XII
The abandonment of his career meant for More a serious reduction of income, and entailed upon him the
More's need of livin§ with Sreat simPlicity- He
impaired adapted his household expenses to his dimin- resources. ished revenues with alacrity, but showed the utmost consideration for all retainers whom he was com pelled to dismiss.* He called all his children together and reminded them that he had mounted to the highest degree from the lowest, and that he had known all manner of fare from the scantiest to the most abundant — the fare of a poor Oxford student, of a poor law student, of a junior barrister, and finally of a great officer of state. He hardly knew how far his resources would go; he would not at the outset adopt the low est scale of living with which youthful experience had familiarised him ; he would make trial of the fare to which his earnings as barrister had accustomed him ; but he warned his hearers that, if his revenues proved insufficient to maintain that level of expenditure after a year's experiment, he should promptly descend in the scale, with risk of a further descent, should prudence require it. He jested over the necessity which he suffered of selling his plate ; he cheerfully declared that a hundred pounds a year was adequate for any reason able man's requirements.
* When dismissing the gentlemen and yeomen of his house hold, he endeavoured to find situations for them with bishops and noblemen. He seems to have presented his barge to his successor in the Chancellorship, Sir Thomas Audley, with the request that the new Chancellor would retain in his service the eight bargemen who had served his predecessor.
SIR THOMAS MORE. 75
More's chief interests were for the time absorbed in the erection of a tomb for himself in Chelsea Church. For the monument he prepared a long Tne epitaph, in which he announced the fulfil- Chelsea ment of his early resolves to devote his last tomb, years to preparation for the life to come.
From the worldly points of view — public or private — More's premature withdrawal from the office of Lord Chancellor was regrettable. The chief duty His work of a Lord Chancellor is to act as a judge as Chan- in equity, to dispense justice in the loftiest cellor. and widest sense. For the performance of such a function More had first-rate capacity, and the wisdom of his judgments rendered his tenure of the Chancellor ship memorable in the annals of English law. He worked with exceptional rapidity, and, as long as he held office, freed the processes of law from their tradi tional imputation of tardiness. On one occasion he cleared off the business of his court before ten o'clock in the morning. A popular rhyme long ran to the effect : —
' When More some time had Chancellor been
No more suits did remain, The like will never more be seen Till More be there again.'
We are told that 'The poorest suitor obtained ready access to him and speedy trial, while the richest offered presents in vain, and the claims of kindred found no favour.' More's son-in-law and biographer, William Roper, wrote 'That he would for no respect digress from justice well appeared by a plain example of [another] son-in-law Mr. Giles Heron. For when Heron having a matter before his father-in-law in the Chancery,
76 SIR THOMAS MORE.
presuming too much of the Chancellor's favour, would by him in no wise be persuaded to agree to any indiffer ent order, then made the Chancellor in conclusion a flat decree against his son-in-law.'
More took the widest views of his duty, and ignored all restrictive formalities. It was not only in his court His that he was prepared to dispense justice to
accessibility the people whom Tie served. ' This Lord as judge. Chancellor,' wrote his son-in-law, ' used com monly every afternoon to sit in his open hall, to the intent, if any person had any suit unto him, they might the more boldly come to his presence, and there open complaints before him. His manner was also to read every bill or cause of action himself, ere he would award any subpoena, which bearing matter sufficient worthy a subpoena, would he set his hand unto, or else cancel it.' Constantly did he point out to his colleagues that equitable considerations ought to qualify the rigour of the law.
But high as was More's standard of conduct on the judicial bench, he did not escape censure. In the Censure of stirring controversy, to one side of which his judicial he was deeply committed, every manner of conduct. calumnious suspicion was generated. There were vague charges brought against him of taking bribes. But these hardly admit of examination. More serious were the persistent reports that he had used his judicial power in order to torture physically those who held religious opinions differing from his own. There seems little question that at times he endeavoured to repress the spread of what he regarded as heresy or irreligion by cruel punishment of offenders. ' But the evidence against him comes from opponents who were resolved
SIR THOMAS MORE. 77
to put the worst construction on all he did. His alleged acts of tyranny have been misrepresented. He had an old-fashioned belief in the value of corporal punishment. A boy in his service who talked lightly of sacred things to a fellow-servant was whipped by his orders. A mad man who brawled in churches was sentenced by him to be beaten. He honestly thought that in certain cir cumstances physical torture and even burning at the stake was likely to extirpate heretical doctrine. The fervour of his religious faith inclined him to identify with crime obstinate defiance of the ancient dogmas. His native geniality was not proof against the consum ing fire of his religious zeal. But the ultimate humane ness of his nature was not subdued to what it worked in.
XIII
In his retirement, More studied the writings of the Protestant controversialists, and sought to meet their arguments in a long series of tracts in which More he expressed himself with heat and vehe- engages in mence. He abandoned the Latin language, theological in which he had penned his great romance controversy- of Utopia^ and wrote in English in order to gain the ear of a wider public.
The chief object of his denunciation was the Protes tant translator of the Bible into English, and the fore most of the early champions of the English Reformation, William Tyndale. In the on Tyndale. opposite camp Tyndale faced, with a resolu tion equal to More's, poverty, danger and death in the service of what he held to be divine truth. Already in
78 SIR THOMAS MORE.
the height of his prosperity had More opened fire on Tyndale; as early as 1529, the year of his accession to the Chancellorship, he had passionately defended the cause of Rome against the ' pestilent sect of Luther and Tyndale.' Before More's withdrawal from public life, Tyndale replied with much cogency and satiric bitter ness, although he wrongly suspected More of having sold his pen to his royal employer. More, by his retire ment from public life, effectively confuted such suspicion. When in his time of leisure he renewed the attack on the foe, he gave him no quarter. Tyndale's writings were declared to be a 'very treasury and well-spring of wickedness.' The reformer and friends were of all 'heretics that ever sprang in Christ's church the very worst and the most beastly.' More did not object to translations of the Bible into English, provided they were faithful renderings. But Tyndale's version of the New Testament had (he argued) altered 'matters of great weight,' and was only worthy of the fire. Erasmus wisely thought his friend would have been more prudent in leaving theology to the clergy. It was under stress of an irresistible impulse which reason could not mod erate that More fanned with his pen the theological strife.
More's time was fully occupied in his library and chapel, and he sought no recreation abroad. He studi- More seeks ously avoided the Court, where the predomi- to ignore nance of the King's new wife, Anne Boleyn, political intensified his misgivings of the course of affairs. public affairs. But he was discreetly silent when friends invited his opinion on political topics. His mind, however, was always alert, and his rebellious instincts were not always under control. In spite of
SIR THOMAS MORE. 79
himself he was drawn from his retreat into the outer circle of the political whirlpool, and was soon engulfed beyond chance of deliverance.
In J533> England was distracted by a curious im posture. A young woman, Elizabeth Barton, who be came known as the Holy Maid of Kent, was More and believed to possess the gift of prophecy. She the Maid prophesied that the King had ruined his of Kent, soul and would come to a speedy end for having divorced Queen Catherine. She was under the influ ence of priests, who were resentful at the recent turn of affairs, and were sincerely moved by the unjust fate that the divorced Queen Catherine had suffered. The girl's priestly abettors insisted that she was divinely in spired, and report of her sayings was forwarded to More. He showed interest in her revelations, and did not at the outset reject the possibility that they were the out come of divine inspiration. He visited her when she was staying at the monastery of the order of St. Bridget, at Sion, near Isleworth, Middlesex. He talked with her, and was impressed by her spiritual fervour, but he was prudent in the counsel that he offered her. He advised her to devote herself to pious exercises, and not to meddle with political themes. He committed him self to little in his interview with her. It was, however, perilous to come into close quarters with her at all. The nation was greatly roused by her utterances, which were fully reported and circulated by her priestly friends. The new Protestant Minister of the King, Cromwell, deemed it needful to take legal proceedings against her and her allies. She and the priests were arrested. By way of defence they asserted that More, the late Lord Chancellor, was one of the Holy Maid's disciples.
8o SIR THOMAS MORE.
The Minister, Cromwell, sent to More for an explana tion ; More repeated what he knew of the woman, and Cromwell Cromwell treated his relations with her as invites innocent. More soon learned the dishonest
explana- tricks by which the Maid of Kent's influence tions. na(j been spread by the priests, and he at once
admitted that he had been the victim of a foolish im posture. But at the trial of the Holy Maid of Kent, proofs were adduced of the reverence in which More's views were held by disaffected Catholics. The King's suspicions were aroused. He dreaded More's influence, and, in defiance of his personal feeling for him, could not bring himself to neglect the opportunity of checking his credit which the proceedings against the Holy Maid seemed to offer.
More was charged with conniving at treason through his intercourse with the Holy Maid. Summoned before The threat a Committee of the Privy Council, he was of prose- asked an irrelevant question which was embar- cution. rassing. It had no concern with the charges of treason brought against him, yet it went to the root of the situation. Had he declined to acknowledge the wis dom and necessity of the King's abjuration of the Pope's authority in England? More quietly replied that he wished to do everything that was acceptable to the King ; he had explained his views freely to him, and he knew not that he had incurred the royal displeasure. There the matter was for the moment suffered to rest. But very ominous looked the future. The charge of treason was not pressed further. Its punishment might have been death ; it would certainly have been fine and im prisonment. For the time More was safe. The warn ing, however, was unmistakable. More's eyes were
SIR THOMAS MORE. 81
opened to the peril which menaced him. His friend the Duke of Norfolk reminded him that the anger of a King means death. More received the re- More con. mark with equanimity. 'Is that all, my scious of Lord?' he answered, 'then, in good faith, his danger, between your Grace and me is but this, that I shall die to-day, and you to-morrow.'
XIV
Rulers in those days believed that coercion gave ulti mate security to uniformity of opinion. Henry was not willing to tolerate dissent from his policy, The though he bore More no ill-will. On his triumph own terms the King was always ready to wel- of Anne come his ex-Chancellor's return to the royal Boleyn- camp, but he felt embarrassment, which was easily con vertible into resentment, at More's remaining in perma nence outside. Having now divorced Queen Catherine, and married Queen Anne, Henry had caused a bill to be passed through Parliament vesting the succession to the Crown in Anne's children, and imposing as a test of loy alty an oath on all Englishmen, by which they undertook to be faithful subjects of the issue of the new Queen.
Commissioners were nominated to administer this oath, and they interpreted their duties liberally. They added to it words by which the oath-taker The oath abjured any foreign potentate, i.e. the Pope, abjuring More was summoned before the new Com- the p°Pe- missioners, at whose head stood Cromwell the Minister, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cranmer. After hearing Mass, and taking the Holy Communion, he pre-
82 SIR THOMAS MORE.
sented himself to the Archbishop and his fellow Com missioners at the Archbishop's Palace of Lambeth. The ex-Chancellor was requested to subscribe to the new oath in its extended form. The demand roused his spirit ; he was in no temper to sacrifice his principles. He declared himself ready to take the oath of fidelity to the Queen's children, but he declined to go further. He was bidden take an oath that impugned the Pope's authority. He refused peremptorily. He was told that he was setting up his private judgment against the nation's wisdom as expressed in Parliament. More replied that the council of the realm was setting itself against the general council of Christendom. The Com missioners were uncertain what step to take next. They ordered More for the present into the custody of one of themselves, the Abbot of Westminster Abbey, detention ^ne Archbishop was inclined to a compro mise. What harm would come of permitting More to take the oath with the reservations which he had claimed ? The King was consulted ; he also expressed doubt as to the fit course to pursue. The new Queen, Anne Boleyn, had, however, made up her mind that More was a dangerous enemy. At her instance the King and his Minister declared that no exception could be made in favour of More. By their order he was committed to the Tower of London as a traitor, and there he remained a prisoner until his death, some fifteen months later. An old friend, John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, had of late gone through the same experience as More, and he was already in the Tower to welcome the arrival of his companion in the faith.
Lawyers generally doubted whether the oath of fidelity to the new Queen's issue, as defined in the Act of Parlia-
SIR THOMAS MORE. 83
ment, included any repudiation of the Pope ; and Parlia ment was invited to solve this doubt by passing a reso lution stating that the double-barrelled oath, j^e oath of as it had been administered to More and the Act of Fisher, was the very oath intended by the Act Succession, of Succession. More's position was thereby rendered most critical. There was no longer any doubt that he was putting himself in opposition to the law of the land. Legal definition was given to his offence. A bill of indictment was drawn against him ; it declared him to be a sower of sedition, and guilty of ingratitude to his royal benefactor.
Adversity as it deepened had no terrors for More. His passage from palace to prison did not disturb his equanimity. He had already written in verse More's of the vicissitudes of fortune. He had repre- resig- sented the scornful goddess as distributing nation, among men ' brittle gifts,' bestowing them only to amuse herself by suddenly plucking them away —
' This is her sport, thus proveth she her might ; Great boast she mak'th if one be by her power Wealthy and wretched both within an hour.
Wherefore if thou in surety lust to stand, Take poverty's part and let proud fortune go, Receive nothing that cometh from her hand. Love manner and virtue ; they be only tho, Which double Fortune may not take thee fro': Then may'st thou boldly defy her turning chance, She can thee neither hinder nor advance.'
There was no affectation in the lines. More wrote from his heart. It was with a smile on his lips that he re turned Fortune's ugliest scowl.
84 SIR THOMAS MORE.
xv
In the Tower More's gaolers treated him with kind ness. His health was bad, but his spirits were untam able, and when his friends and his wife and children visited him in his cell his gaiety proved infectious. In the first days of his imprisonment he wrote many letters, punctually per formed his religious duties, and penned religious tracts. There was no hope of his giving way. His wife urged him to yield his scruples, ask pardon of the King, and gain his freedom. He replied that prison was as near Heaven as his own house, and he had no intention of quitting his cell. His children petitioned the King for pardon on the ground of his ill-health and their poverty, and they reasserted that his offence was not of malice or obstinacy, but of such a long-continued and deep- rooted scruple as passeth his power to avoid and put away. His relatives were forced to submit to painful indignities. They had to pay for his board and lodging, and their resources were small. More's wife sold her clothes in order to pay the prison fees.
Henry, under the new Queen's influence, was now at length incensed against More. The likelihood of his The King mercy was small. Parliament was entirely and the under his sway. In the late autumn of 1534 supremacy yet a new Act was passed to complete the of the separation of England from Rome. There
was conferred on the King the title of Supreme Head of the Church in place of the Pope, and that title, very slightly modified, all Henry vni.'s successors have borne. The new Act made it high treason mali ciously to deny any of the royal titles. Next spring
SIR THOMAS MORE. 85
Minister Cromwell went to the Tower and asked More his opinion of this new statute ; was it in his view lawful or no ? More sought refuge in the declaration that he was a faithful subject of the King. He declined further answer. Similar scenes passed in the months that fol lowed. But More was warned that the King would compel a precise answer.
More's fellow-prisoner Fisher was subjected to like trials, and they compared their experiences in corre spondence with each other. More also wrote
in terms of pathetic affection to his favourite
r spondence.
daughter, Margaret Roper, and described the recent discussions in his cell. He received replies. In the result his correspondence was declared to consti tute a new offence ; it amounted to conspiracy. The prisoner was unmoved by the baseless insinuation. His treatment became more rigorous. Deprived of writing materials and books, he could only write to his wife, daughter, or friends on scraps of paper with pieces of coal.
More cheerfully abandoned hope of freedom. He caused the shutters of the cell to be closed, and spent his time in contemplation in the dark. His end was, indeed, near. Death had been made the penalty for those who refused to accept the King's supremacy. On the 25th June 1535, Fisher suffered for his refusal on the scaffold. On the ist July 1535, More was brought to Westminster Hall to stand his trial for having infringed the Act of Supremacy, disobedience to which was now high treason. The Crown relied on his answer to his examiners in the prison, and on his correspondence with Fisher. He was ill in health, and was allowed to sit. He denied the truth of most
86 SIR THOMAS MORE.
of the evidence. He had not advised his friend Fisher to disobey the new Act ; he had not described that new Act as a two-edged sword, approval of which ruined the soul, while disapproval of it ruined the body. The outcome was not in doubt. A verdict of guilty was re turned, and More, the faithful son of the old Church and the disciple of the new culture, was sentenced to be hanged at Tyburn. As he left the Court he remarked that no temporal lord could lawfully be head of the Church ; that he had studied the. history of the papacy, and was convinced that it was based on Divine authority. With calm and unruffled temper, More faced the end. As he re-entered the Tower he met his favourite daughter The fare- wno asked his blessing. The touching epi- well to his sode is thus narrated by William Roper, daughter. husband of More's eldest daughter, who wrote the earliest biography of More : — ' When Sir Thomas More came from Westminster to the Tower- Ward again, his daughter, my wife, desirous to see her father, whom she thought she should never see in this world after, and alsoe to have his final blessing, gave attendance about the Tower wharf where she knew he should pass before he could enter into the Tower. There tarrying his comming, as soon as she saw him, after his blessing upon her knees reverentlie received, she hasting towards him, without consideracion or care of her selfe, pressing in amongst the midst of the throng and com pany of the guard, that with halberds and bills went round about him, hastily ran to him, and there openly in sight of them embraced him and took him about the neck and kissed him. Who well liking her most natural' and dear daughterly affecion towards him gave her his fatherly blessing and many godly words of comfort be-
SIR THOMAS MORE. 87
sides. From whom after she was departed, she was not satisfied with the former sight of him, and like one that had forgotten herself being all ravished with the entire love of her father, having respect neither to herself nor to the press of the people and multitude that were there about him, suddenly turned back again, ran to him as before, took him about the neck and divers times kissed him lovingly, and at last with a full and heavy heart was fain to depart from him : the beholding where of was to many that were present so lamentable that it made them for very sorrow thereof to weep and mourn.'
XVI
The King commuted the sentence of hanging to that of beheading, a favour which More grimly expressed the hope that his friends might be spared the ,
need of asking. Early on the morning of the e f.
» execution.
6th July he was carried from the Tower to Tower Hill for execution. His composure knew no diminution. ' I pray thee, see me safely up,' he said to the officer who led him from the Tower, up the steps of the frail scaffold, ' as for my coming down, I can shift for myself.' He encouraged the headsman to do his duty fearlessly : ' Pluck up thy spirits, man ; be not afraid to do thine office ; my neck is very short.' He seemed to speak in jest as he moved his beard from the block, with the remark that it had never committed treason. Then with the calmness of one who was rid of every care he told the bystanders that he died in and for the faith of the Catholic Church, and prayed God to send the King good counsel.
88 SIR THOMAS MORE.
His body was buried in the Tower of London. The tomb that he had erected at Chelsea never held his Preserva- remains. His head was placed, according to tion of his the barbarous custom of that day, on a pole head by on London Bridge, but his favourite daughter, Margaret Margaret Roper, privately purchased it a month later, and preserved it in spices till her death, nine years afterwards. Tennyson commemo rated her devotion in his great poem ' A Dream of Fair Women,' where he describes her as the woman who clasped in her last trance of death her murdered father's head.
' Morn broaden'd on the borders of the dark
Ere I saw her, who clasp'4 in her last trance Her murdered father's head.'
The head is said to have long belonged to her descend ants, and to have been finally placed in the vault belonging to her husband's family in a church at Canter bury.
More's piteous fate startled the world. His meekness at the end, the dignified office which he once enjoyed, the fine temper of his intellect, his domestic virtues seemed to plead like angels trumpet-tongued against the deep damnation of his taking off. To onlookers it appeared as if virtue and wisdom in a champion of orthodoxy had whetted the fury of a schismatic tyrant. To the principle and sentiment of the Catholic peoples a desperate challenge had been offered. 'The horrid deed was blown in every eye, and tears drowned the wind ' of every country of Western Europe. Catholics in Europe freely threatened the King (Henry vm.) with reprisals. The Emperor, Charles v., declared he would
SIR THOMAS MORE. 89
have rather lost his best city than such a counsellor. The Pope prepared a bull and interdict of deposition which was designed to cut King Henry off The recep. from the body of Christ, to empower his sub- tion abroad jects to expel him from the throne and to cast of news of his soul in death into hell for ever. English his deatn- ambassadors abroad were instructed, without much effect, to explain that More had suffered justly the pen alty of the law, and that the legal procedure had been perfectly regular. In all countries poets likened him to the greatest heroes of antiquity, to Socrates, Seneca, Aristides, and Cato. Few questioned the declaration of his friends that angels had carried his soul into ever lasting glory, where an imperishable crown of martyrdom adorned his brow.
XVII
More's devotion to principle, his religious fervour, his invincible courage, are his most obvious personal
characteristics, but with them were com-
. ... ... , Mores
bmed a series of qualities which are rarely character.
to be met with in the martyrs of religion. There was no gloom in his sunny nature. He was a wit, a wag, delighting in amusing repartee, and seeking to engage men in all walks of life in cheery talk. It was complained of him that he hardly ever opened his mouth except to make a joke, and his jests on the scaffold were held by many contemporary critics to be idle impertinences. Yet his mode of life His mode could stand the severest tests ; he lived with of Hfe great simplicity, drinking little wine, avoid ing expensive food, and dressing carelessly. He hated
90 SIR THOMAS MORE.
luxury or any sort of ostentation in his home life. At Chelsea he lived in patriarchal fashion, with his children and their husbands or wives and his grandchildren about him. He rarely missed attendance at the Chelsea Parish Church, and would often sing in the choir, wearing a surplice. He encouraged all his household to study and read, and to practise liberal arts. He was fond of animals, even foxes, weasels, and monkeys. He was a charming host to congenial friends, though he disliked games of chance, and eschewed dice or cards.
At the same time More never ceased to prove him self a child of the Renaissance. All forms of Art
strongly appealed to him. He liked collect- , ing curious furniture and plate. ' His house,'
wrote Erasmus, ' is a magazine of curiosities, which he rejoices in showing.' He delighted in music, and persuaded his uncultivated wife to learn the flute and other instruments with him. Of painting he was an expert critic. The great German artist, Holbein, was his intimate friend, and, often staying with him at Chelsea, acknowledged More's hospitality by painting portraits of him and his family.
As a writer, More's fame mainly depended on his political romance of Utopia, which was penned in
finished Latin. His Latin style, both in His Latin , c , .,., ,
writin prose and verse, is of rare lucidity, and
entitles him to a foremost place among English contributors to the Latin literature of the Renaissance. His Utopia is an admirable specimen of fluent and harmonious Latin prose. With the popular English translation of his romance, which was first published sixteen years after his death, he
SIR THOMAS MORE. 91
had no concern. Much English verse as well as much Latin verse came from More's active pen. Critics have usually ignored or scorned his English
poetry. Its theme is mainly the fickleness His EnSllsh
r r . - . poetry.
of fortune and the voracity of time. But
freshness and sincerity characterise his treatment of these well-worn topics, and, though the rhythm is often harsh, and the modern reader may be repelled by archaic vocabulary and constructions, More at times achieves metrical effects which adumbrate
the art of Edmund Spenser. Of English His English
T, IT 111 • • prose,
prose More made abundant use in treating
both secular and religious themes. There is doubt as to his responsibility for the 'History of Richard in.,' which ordinarily figures among his English prose writ ings. Archbishop Morton has been credited, on grounds that merit attention, with the main responsibility for its composition. It is an admirable example of Tudor prose, clear and simple, free from pedantry and singularly modern in construction. Similar characteristics are only a little less conspicuous in More's authentic biog- . ,,-./• raphy of Pico, the Italian humanist, who, like More himself, yielded to theology abilities that were better adapted to win renown in the pursuit of profane literature.
It is, however, by the voluminous polemical tracts and devotional treatises of his closing career that More's English prose must be finally judged. Contro- In controversy More wrote with a rapidity versial and fluency which put dignity out of the theology, question. Very often the tone is too spasmodic and interjectional to give his work genuine literary value.
92 SIR THOMAS MORE.
In the heat of passion he sinks to scurrility which admits of no literary form. But it is only episodically that his anger gets the better of his literary temper. His native humour was never long repressible, and some homely anecdote or proverbial jest usually rushed into his mind to stem the furious torrents of his abuse. When the gust of his anger passed, he said what he meant with the simple directness that comes of con viction, unconstrained by fear. Vigour and freedom are thus the main characteristics of his controversial English prose.
There is smaller trace of individual style in his books of religious exhortation and devotion, but their pious His placidity does not exclude bursts both of
devotional eloquence and anecdotal reminiscence which treatises. prove his wealth of literary energy and of humoursome originality. To one virtue as a writer in English he can make no claim : pointed brevity was out of his range. In Latin he could achieve epigrams, but all his English works in prose are of massive dimensions, and untamable volubility.
For two centuries after his death More was regarded by Catholic Europe as the chief glory of English litera- More's ture- ^n tne seventeenth century the Latin literary countries deemed Shakespeare and Bacon repute his inferiors. It was his Latin writing that
abroad. was majniy known abroad. But, even in regard to that branch of his literary endeavours, time has long since largely dissipated his early fame. In the lasting literature of the world, More is only remem bered as the author of the Utopia, wherein he lives for all time, not so much as a man of letters, but in that imaginative role, which contrasts so vividly with
SIR THOMAS MORE. 93
other parts in his repertory, of social reformer and advocate of reason. In English literary history his voluminous work in English prose deserves grateful, if smaller, remembrance. Despite the many crudities of his utterance, he first indicated that native English prose might serve the purpose of great literature as effectively as Latin prose, which had hitherto held the field among all men of cultivated intelligence. There is an added paradox in the revelation that one who was the apostle in England at once of the cosmopolitan culture of the classical Renaissance and of the medi aeval dogmatism of the Roman Catholic Church should also be a strenuous champion of the literary usage of his vernacular tongue. But paradox streaks all facets of More's career. »
Few careers are more memorable for their pathos than More's. Fewer still are more paradoxical. In that regard he was a true child of an era The para- of ferment and undisciplined enthusiasm, doxes of which checked orderliness of conduct or his career, aspiration. Sir Thomas More's variety of aim, of ambition, has indeed few parallels even in the epoch of the Renaissance. Looking at him from one side we detect only a religious enthusiast, cheerfully sacri ficing his life for his convictions — a man whose religious creed, in defence of which he faced death, abounded in what seems, in the dry light of reason, to be super stition. Yet surveying More from another side we find ourselves in the presence of one endowed with the finest enlightenment of the Renaissance, a man whose outlook on life was in advance of his generation ; possessed too of such quickness of wit, such imaginative activity, such sureness of intellectual insight, that he
94 SIR THOMAS MORE.
could lay bare with pen all the defects, all the abuses, which worn-out conventions and lifeless traditions had imposed on the free and beneficent development of human endeavour and human society. That the man, who, by an airy effort of the imagination, devised the new and revolutionary ideal of Utopia, should end his days on the scaffold as a martyr to ancient beliefs which shackled man's intellect and denied freedom to man's thought is one of history's perplexing ironies. Sir Thomas More's career propounds a riddle which it is easier to enunciate than to solve.
Ill
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
' A combination and a form indeed, Where every god did seem to set his seal, To give the world assurance of a man. '
SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet, m. iv. 55-57.
[BIBLIOGRAPHY. — The earliest attempt- at a biography of Sir Philip Sidney was made by his intimate friend, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, in the Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney, which was first published in 1652. It is a rambling character sketch, intermingled with much irrel evant discussion of English foreign policy. The fullest modern biography is by Mr. H. R. Fox-Bourne, which was first published in 1862, and afterwards revised for re issue in the ' Heroes of the Nations ' series, 1891. Sidney's Arcadia, together with his chief literary works, appeared in 1598, and the volume was many times reprinted down to 1721. An abridgment of the Arcadia, edited by J. Hain Friswell, appeared in 1867. An attractive re print of Sidney's Astrophel and Stella was edited by Mr. A. W. Pollard in 1888, and that collection of poems is included in Elizabethan Sonnets (1904), edited by the present writer in Messrs. Constable's ' English Garner.' The Apologie for Poetrie has been well edited by Prof. Albert S. Cook, of Yale (1901, Boston, U.S.A.).]
THE course of Sir Philip Sidney's life greatly differed from that of More's. Sidney held by patrimony a place
96 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
in the social hierarchy which was outside More's ex perience. A grandson of a Duke, a nephew of Earls, , he belonged by birth to the English aristoc- hi hTirth racy> to tne governing classes of England. To some measure of distinction he was born. The professions of arms, of diplomacy, of politics, opened to him automatically without his personal effort. The circumstance of his lineage moulded the form and pressure of his career.
From other springs flowed his innermost ambitions. The spirit of the Renaissance imbued his intellectual being more consistently than it imbued Core's. The natural affinities of Sidney's mind were from first to last with great literature and art, not with the turmoil of war, or politics, or creeds. The Muse of poetry, who scorns the hollow pomp of rank, laid chief claim to his allegiance. But he was a curious and persistent in quirer into many fashions of beauty besides the poetic. One part of his energies was devoted to a prose romance, which he designed on a great scale; another part to prose criticism of a reasoned enlightenment that was unprecedented in England. To all manifestations of the new spirit of the age he was sensitive. But there were contrary influences, bred of his inherited environ ment, there were feudal and mediaeval traditions, which disputed the sway over him of the new forces of culture. The development of his poetic and literary endowments was checked by rival political and military preoccupa tions. Even if death had spared him until his faculties were fully ripened, he seemed destined to distribute his activities over too wide a field for any of them to bear the richest fruit. He ranks with the heroes who have
97
promised more than they have performed, with the pathetic sharers ' of unfulfilled renown.'
Nineteen years after More's tragic death, and ten years before the birth of Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney came into the world. His short life of The central thirty-two years covers the central period in period of the history of the English Renaissance, which the Renais- reached its first triumph in More's Utopia sance- and its final glory in Shakespearean drama. Sidney died while Shakespeare was yet unknown to fame, when the dramatist's fortunes were in the balance, before his literary work was begun.
Interests with which literature had little in common distracted the mental energies of the nation between the dates of More's execution and of Sidney's
birth. The religious reformation had been . .r
. i • i • stnie.
carried to a conclusion by coercive enact ments, which outraged the consciences of too many subjects of the king to give immediate assurance of finality. The strong-willed monarch, Henry vin., had died, amid signs that justified doubt of the permanence of the country's new religious polity. Disease soon laid its hands on the feeble constitution of the boy, who, succeeding to Henry's throne as Edward vi., upheld there with youthful eagerness and extravagance the cause of the Reformation. Factions of ambitious noblemen robbed the Court of respect, and jeopardised the Government's power. The air rang with confused threats of rebellion. The succession to the throne
4
98 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
was disputed on the boy-king's premature death. It was no time for the peaceful worship of the Muses. Political and religious strife oppressed the England of Sir Philip Sidney's infancy, and the circumstances of his birth set him in the forefront of the struggle.
Sidney was a native of Kent, born at Penshurst, in an old mansion of great beauty and historic interest,
which, dating from the fifteenth century, still Sidney's stan(js. His father, Sir Henry Sidney, was
a politician who had long been busily en gaged in politics, mainly in the ungrateful task of governing Ireland. His mother was a daughter of the ambitious nobleman, the Duke of Northumberland, who endeavoured to place his daughter-in-law (of a nobler family than his own), Lady Jane Grey, upon the throne of England after the death of the boy-king Edward vi. The plot failed, and Henry vm.'s eldest daughter, Mary, who shared More's enthusiasm for the papacy and his horror of Protestantism, became Queen in accordance with law. The failure of the Duke's ambitious schemes led to his death on the scaffold. Queen Mary's acces sion preceded Sidney's birth by a few months, and the tragedy of his grandfather's execution darkened his entry into life.
The two critical events — the failure of the Duke of Northumberland's scheme of usurpation, and Queen
Mary's revival of a Catholic sovereignty —
were vividly recalled at Philip's baptism, baptism. ' . i
His godmother was his grandmother, the
widowed Duchess of Northumberland. His godfather was the new Catholic Queen's lately married husband, Philip of Spain, the sour fanatic, who shortly afterwards became King Philip n. It was an inauspicious con-
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 99
junction of sponsors. Both were identified with doomed forces of reaction. The ancient regime of Spain, which King Philip represented, was already on its downward grade. The widowed Duchess was the survivor of a lawless and selfish political faction, which had defied political justice and the general welfare. Shadows fell across the child's baptismal font. A cloud of melan choly burdened the minds of those who tended him in infancy, and his childish thoughts soon took a serious hue.
But before his childhood ended, the gloom that hung about his country and his family's prospects was light ened. The superstitious Queen Mary, having Queen restored to her country its old religion, died Elizabeth's prematurely, and her work was quickly un- accession, done by her sister and successor, Queen Elizabeth. Fortune at length smiled again on the English throne, and the new sovereign won by her resolute temper, her self-possession, and her patriotism, her people's regard and love. Slowly but surely the paths of peace were secured. The spirit of the nation was relieved of the griefs of religious and civil conflict. The Muses flour ished in England as never before.
On Sidney's domestic circle, too, a new era of hope dawned. His mother's brother, the ill-fated Duke of Northumberland's younger son, Robert Dud- Sidney's ley, Earl of Leicester, became Queen Eliza- uncle, the beth's favoured courtier, and, by a strange Earl of turn of fortune's wheel, wielded, despite his Leicester- father's disgrace and death, immense political influence. Throughout Sidney's adult life his uncle Leicester, who, although unprincipled and self-indulgent, had affection for his kindred, was the most powerful figure
ioo SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
in English public life. Such advantages as come of a near kinsman's great place in the political world lay at Sidney's disposal in boyhood and early manhood.
in
The boy was at first brought up at Penshurst, but was soon taken further west, to Ludlow Castle. At the
time his father, in the interval of two terms bur "Tool °^ government in Ireland, was President of
the principality of Wales, which was then separately governed by a high officer of state. Ludlow Castle, then a noble palace, now a magnificent ruin, was his official residence. Owing to his father's resi dence in the western side of England, the boy Philip was sent to school at Shrewsbury, which was just coming into fame as a leading public school.
On the same day there entered Shrewsbury school another boy of good family, who also attained great
reputation in literature and politics, Fulke Greville Greville, afterwards Lord Brooke. Greville
was a poet at heart, although involved and mystical in utterance. He was Sidney's life-long friend, and subsequently his biographer. Greville died forty- two years after his friend, but the memory of their association sank so deep in his mind and heart that, despite all the other honours which he won in mature life, he had it inscribed on his tomb that he was ' Friend to Sir Philip Sidney.'
Sidney was a serious and thoughtful boy. Of his youth his companion, Greville, wrote : — ' I will report no other wonder than this, that, though I lived with
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 101
him and knew him from a child, yet I never knew him other than a man, with such staidness of mind, lovely and familiar gravity, as carried grace Sidney's and reverence above greater years ; his talk serious ever of knowledge, and his very play tend- youth, ing to enrich his mind, so that even his teachers found something in him to observe and learn above that which they had usually read or taught. Which eminence by nature and industry made his worthy father style Sir Philip in my hearing, though I unseen, lumen families sua (light of his household).' Gravity of demeanour characterised Sidney at all periods of his life.
From childhood Sidney was a lover of learning. At eleven years old he could write letters in French and
Latin : and his father gave him while a lad , . ......... At Oxford.
advice on the moral conduct of life which
seemed to fit one of far maturer years. The precocious spirit of the Renaissance made men of boys, and youths went to the University in the sixteenth century at a far earlier age than now. At fourteen Philip left Shrews bury school for the University of Oxford — for the great foundation of Christ Church, to which at an earlier epoch More had wended his way. At Oxford, Sidney eagerly absorbed much classical learning, and gathered many new friends. His tutor was fascinated by his studious ardour, and he too, like Sidney's friend Grev- ille, left directions for the fact that Sidney had been his pupil to be recorded on his tombstone. As at school, so during his college vacations Greville — himself a student at Cambridge — was Sidney's constant com panion. The Protestant faith, which Queen Elizabeth had re-established, was now the dominant religion, and Sidney, at school and Oxford, warmly embraced the
102 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
doctrines of the Reformation. But religious observ ances which dated from the older papal regime were still in vogue in England, and from one of them Philip as an undergraduate sought relief. His health was delicate. His influential uncle, the Earl of Leicester, was well alive to his promise, and he obtained a licence of the Archbishop of Canterbury for the boy to eat flesh in Lent, ' because he was subject to sickness.'
The circumstance that Sidney was the Earl of Leicester's nephew placed many other special privileges Lord within his reach. It opened to him the road
Burghley's to the Court, and gained for him personal in- favour. troduction to the great statesmen of the time. Queen Elizabeth's astute Lord Treasurer and Prime Min ister, Sir William Cecil, afterwards Lord Burghley, came through Leicester to know of Sidney in his youth, and while at Oxford, Philip spent a vacation with the states man's family, who then lived near London, at Hampton Court. The experienced minister — like all who met Philip — acknowledged infinite attraction in the youth. ' I do love him,' he said, ' as he were my own,' and he was moved by parental sentiment to suggest means whereby the lad might become 'his own.' He pro posed to Philip's father, after the manner of parents of that time, a marriage between his elder daughter and the boy. Marriages in the higher ranks of society were in those days rarely arranged by the persons chiefly concerned. Parents acted as principals throughout the negotiations. Fathers and mothers were always anxious to marry off daughters as soon as they left the nursery. Sons might wait a little longer. The girl in the present case was only thirteen. Philip was two years older. Money was the pivot on which such matrimonial com-
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 103
pacts turned. But Sir Henry Sidney could not afford to make much pecuniary provision for his son. The Earl of Leicester did what he could to forward the auspicious project. He undertook to provide his nephew, Philip, with an income of near £500 a year on the day of his marriage with the Prime Minister's daughter, and promised something like three times that amount at a subsequent period. The discussion went far between the parents, but the scheme was ultimately wrecked on pecuniary rocks. The girl's father wavered, and, on further consideration, thought it well to seek a suitor who was richer in his own right. Sidney was rejected. The young lady married a wealthier young nobleman, the Earl of Oxford, between whom and Sidney no love was lost thenceforth. The Earl of Oxford was a poet and a lover of poetry, but the new culture left no impress on his manners. Boorish and sullen tempered, Lord Burghley's new son-in-law assimi lated the crude vices of the Renaissance. His nature rejected its urbanities.
Epidemic disease, in days when cleanliness was reckoned a supererogatory virtue, devastated at fre quent intervals England and Europe. An outbreak of the plague at Oxford cut short at Philip's career there. Students were scat tered in all directions. At seventeen Sidney left the University. He did not return to it. His education was pursued thereafter in a wider sphere.
IV
A year later Sidney obtained permission from the Queen to travel abroad, for a further period of two
104 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
years. Thereby he gained a more extended knowledge of life and letters than was accessible at home. The
value of foreign travel as a means of educa- Foreign ^Q^ wag never better understood, in spite of
rudimentary means of locomotion, than by the upper classes of Elizabethan England. All who drank deep of the new culture had seen 'the wonders of the world abroad.' Sidney's keen-witted uncle, Leicester, recognized that his nephew, despite his promise, was as yet 'young and raw.' The French Court was already famed for its courtesy. Thither his uncle sent him with a letter of introduction to the English Ambassador there, Sir Francis Walsingham. Walsingham, a politician of rare acumen, and a man of cultivated taste, had fashioned himself on the model of Machiavelli, the Florentine. Intercourse with him was well qualified to sharpen a pensive youth's intellect. Sidney's foreign tour was only destined to begin in France. It was to extend to both the east and south of , p . Europe. His Parisian experiences, as events
proved, were calculated to widen his views of life and deepen his serious temper more effectually than to polish his manners or to foster in him social graces. Sidney stayed three months at the English Embassy in Paris. He went to the French Court, and was well received by the Protestant leaders, the leaders of the Huguenots, a resolute minority of the French people, who were pledged to convert France at all hazards into a Protestant country. Ronsard was the living master of French poetry, and Sidney readily yielded himself to the fascination of the delicate har monies and classical imagery of the Frenchman's muse. But while Philip was still forming his first impressions
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 105
of the French capital, Paris and the world suffered a great shock. The forces of civilisation seemed in an instant paralysed. The massacre of the Protestants in Paris by the French Government — or the leaders of the Catholic majority — on St. Bartholomew's j^e St. Day (23rd August 1572) is one of those Barthol- crimes of history of which none can read omew without a shudder. For the time it gave Massacre. new life to the worst traditions of barbarism. Sidney was safe at the embassy, and ran no personal risk while the fiendish work was in progress. But his proximity to this Catholic carnival of blood inflamed his hatred of the cause to which it ministered, and intensified his Protestant ardour. Until his death every persecuted Huguenot could reckon in him a devoted friend*.
When the news of the great crime reached England, Sidney's friends were alarmed for his safety. Lord Burghley and Lord Leicester bade Walsing- Depar- ham procure passports for the youth to leave ture for France for Germany. Religious turmoil — Germany, the strife of Protestant and Catholic — infected Germany as well as France, but the scale in Germany seemed turning in the Protestant direction, and there was small likelihood there of danger to a Protestant traveller.
In Germany learning of the severest type was, then as now, sedulously cultivated. Sidney soon reached Frankfort. There he lodged with Andrew The meet- Wechel, a learned printer in Hebrew and ing with Greek, and gathered under his roof the Languet. latest fruit of Renaissance scholarship. Printing — still a comparatively new art — was a learned and a scholarly profession, and German printers had earned a high repute for disinterested encouragement of classical pro-
io6 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
ficiency. A fellow-lodger at this learned printer's house was Hubert Languet, a Huguenot controversialist and scholar. Languet, a quiet, thoughtful student, was fifty-four years old, no less than thirty-five years Sidney's senior. But despite the disparity of age, Sidney's heart went out at once to the exile from France for conscience' sake. The Frenchman on his side was attracted by the sympathetic bearing of the young traveller, and there sprang up between them a lasting and attractive friendship. Languet, Sidney said after wards, taught him all he knew of literature and religion. From Frankfort, Sidney went on to Vienna, the capital of Austria, and the home of the ruler of the
Holy Roman Empire. There the Renais- At Vienna. , . , . l , . , ,. ,.
sance was held in check by mediaeval tradi tion and prejudice, and Sidney's first stay there was short. For the moment Vienna was a mere halting-place in his progress towards what was the land of promise for all enlightened wayfarers. He passed quickly to the true home of the Renaissance — to Italy, where all the artistic, literary, and scientific impulses of contemporary culture were still aglow with the fire of the new spirit. A v . Most of his time was spent in Venice. That
city of the sea seemed to him to owe its existence to the rod of an enchanter, and cast on him the spell of her artistic and intellectual triumphs in their glistening freshness. At Venice, Sidney studied with characteristic versatility the newest developments of astronomy and music. He read much history and current Italian literature. He steeped himself in the affectations of the disciples of the dead Petrarch, and eagerly absorbed the rich verse of the living Tasso. He was entertained magnificently by Venetian mer-
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 107
chants. But above all he came to know the great Italian painters, Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese, in whom Venetian pictorial art, if not the pictorial art of the world, came nearest perfection. In all direc tions Sidney came to close quarters with contemporary culture of the most finished kind.
The sensual levities of Venetian society made no appeal to Sidney, who still took life in a solemn spirit. He avoided the pleasures of youth. His friends thought him almost too serious, Of"°nl too sad and thoughtful, for a young man of twenty or twenty-one. Sidney admitted that he was ' more sober than my age or business requires,' and he endured patiently the sarcasms of those to whom zeal for things of the mind was always a synonym for dul- ness and boredom. Although he was a good horseman, he was never a sportsman, and the story is told by a friend, Sir John Harington, that of the noble and fashionable recreations of hawking and hunting, Sidney was wont to say that, next to hunting, he liked hawk ing worst. The falconers and hunters, Harington pro ceeded, would be even with him, and would say that bookish fellows such as he could judge of no sports but those within the verge of the fair fields of Helicon, Pindus, and Parnassus. It was no brilliant jest, but the anecdote testifies to the exceptional refinement of temper and the independence of social convention that Sidney acquired early and enjoyed in permanence.
Not that' Sidney had keen eyes and ears only for
what was passing about him in spheres of
r. T^ • • I *. ..u . Protestant
literature and art. Every serious interest that al
weighed with intelligent men found some
echo in his being. He was fast gathering political
io8 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
convictions on his foreign tour; he was watching nar rowly the strife of Protestant and Catholic, and his nascent enthusiasm for the future of the Protestant religion in Europe, which he identified with the free development of human thought, mounted high.
As the nephew of the Queen of England's favourite, Leicester, Sidney could count on a respectful hearing, Diplomatic when he enunciated political opinions. Go employ- cult English diplomacy honeycombed conti- ment. nental courts, and those in close touch at
home with the English sovereign were credited with an exaggerated power over her, which it was to the advan tage of foreign potentates to concilitate. Sidney, as his continental tour lengthened, and the attractions of his personality attained wider recognition, was held to reflect something of his uncle's influence and his country's glory. When he returned to Vienna from Venice, there was talk of his offering himself as a candidate for a European throne — the vacant throne of Poland — which was filled by electoral vote. The sug gestion came to nothing, but it illustrated the spreading faith in his fitness for political responsibilities. Finally, in his anxiety to perfect his political experience, he accepted an offer of employment as Secretary at the English Legation in Vienna. Despite his antipathy to sport, he yielded to friendly advice, and learned, in the Austrian capital, horsemanship — all the intricate graces of the equestrian art — of the Emperor's esquire of the stables.
Sidney's friends in England were growing alarmed at his long absence on the Continent of Europe. They had not yet fully understood him. They feared that he might be converted to Catholicism, which in Austria
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
109
had mastered the Protestant revolt, or that he might be corrupted by the fantastic vice of Italy. At his friends' instance, when three years — a goodly part of End Of the his short life — had ended, he made his way foreign home. On the journey he greatly extended tour- his intercourse with scholars who were settled in Ger many. At Heidelberg he met the greatest of scholar- printers, Henri Etienne or Stephens. Stephens, whose name is honoured by all who honour scholarship, after wards dedicated to Sidney an edition — an editio princess — of a late Greek historian, Herodian. Sidney returned home under the sway of the purest influences that dominated the art, literature, and scholarship of the Continental Renaissance. His moral sense had tri umphed over the current temptations to sensual indul gence. His Protestantism was untainted. Only that which was of good repute had lent sustenance to his mind or heart.
Settled in England, Sidney, like all young men of good family, was formally presented to his sovereign. As nephew of the Court favourite, Leicester, he was heartily welcomed by the Queen, and was admitted to the select circle of her attendants. Attached to the Court, he largely occupied his time in
its splendid recreations. He was at Kenil-
, . ^11- i T • At Kenil-
worth in 1576 when his uncle Leicester gave worth
that elaborate and fantastic entertainment in honour of the Queen's visit which fills a glowing page in Elizabethan history. It is reasonable to conjecture that in the crowd of neighbouring peasants who came
no SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
to gaze at the gorgeous spectacles — the decorations, the triumphal arches, the masques, the songs, the fireworks — was John Shakespeare, from Stratford-on-Avon, a dozen miles off, and that John brought with him his eldest son William, — the poet and dramatist whose fame was completely to eclipse that of any of the great lords and ladies in the retinue of their sovereign. Reminiscences of the great fete, with its magnificent pageantry, are trace able in a spirited speech of the dramatist's A Midsummer Nighfs Dream. They are actual incidents in the scenic and musical devices at Kenilworth which Oberon describes in his picture of
' A mermaid on a dolphin's back, [Uttering] such dulcet and harmonious breath, That the rude sea grew civil at her song.'
But if Sidney's uncle sought by his splendid shows in extricably to entangle the Queen's affections, he failed. ' Young Cupid's fiery shaft ' missed its aim ;
' And the imperial votaress passed on In maiden meditation, fancy free. '
From Kenilworth, Sidney went on a visit with his sovereign to another great house, Chartley Castle, the owner of which, the first Earl of Essex, was Devere'ux. Leicester's successor as the Queen's host. The visit exerted important influence on Philip's future. There he first met the Earl's daughter Penelope, who, although then only a girl of twelve, was soon to excite in him a deep, if not passionate, interest. It was, however, her father, the Earl of Essex, who, like so many other eminent men and women, first fell under Sidney's spell. The Earl delighted in the young man's
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. in
sympathetic society, and invited him to accompany him to Ireland, whither he went to fill a high official post. Sidney's father was once again Lord Deputy of Ireland, and Sidney was glad of the opportunity of visiting his family. Together he and his new friend crossed the Irish Channel. But the journey had an unhappy out come. The Earl of Essex was taken ill at Dublin, and died immediately after he had landed. His last words were unqualified love and admiration for Philip. ' I wish him well — so well that, if God move their hearts, I wish that he might match with my daughter. I call him son — he is so wise, virtuous, and godly. If he go on in the course he hath begun, he will be as famous and worthy a gentleman as ever England bred.'
The Earl's dying wish that he should marry his daughter bore wayward fruit ; it was fraught with conse quences for which the Earl had not looked. , •Ai •!• • ^ c ^ 'Astrophel
Philip was now a serious youth of twenty- and gtgjla >
two ; Penelope was only fourteen. Like her brother, the new Earl of Essex, who was to succeed the Earl of Leicester in Queen Elizabeth's favour, and then, after much storm and strife, to sacrifice his life to pique and uncontrollable temper, Penelope Devereux was impetuous and precocious. She was gifted with a coquettish disposition, which was of doubtful augury for the happiness of herself and her admirers. Encour aged by her dead father's hopes, she sought Philip's admiration. He made kindly response. Passion did not enslave him. A gentle attachment sprang up between them, and Sidney turned it to literary account. In accordance with the fashion of the day he began addressing to Penelope a series of sonnets, in which he called himself ' Astrophel ' and the young girl ' Stella.'
ii2 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
Nothing came of this courtship except the sonnets. Penelope soon married another. Sidney, a few years later, also married another. But ' Astrophel,' with full approval of his sister and subsequently of his wife, never ceased to cultivate a platonic and literary friend ship with the daughter of his dead friend, the Earl of Essex, both while she was a maid and after she became another's wife. He continued to address poetry to 1 Stella ' till near his death.
The sonnet-sequence called 'Astrophel and Stella,'
which owed its being to Sidney's faculty for friendship,
was probably Sidney's earliest sustained
>i neys attempt at literature. The collection illus- sonnets. r . .
trates with exceptional clearness the influence
that the Renaissance literature of France and Italy had exerted on him during his recent travels. By these sonnets, too, he signally developed a tract of literature, which had hitherto yielded in England a barren harvest. Though Dante was an admirable sonnetteer, it was his successor, Petrarch, in the fourteenth century, whose History example gave the sonnet its lasting vogue in of the Europe. The far-famed collection of sonnets
Sonnet. which Petrarch addressed to his lady-love Laura generated, not only in his own country but also in France and Spain, a spirit of imitation and adaptation which was exceptionally active while Sidney was on his travels. Early in the sixteenth century two of Henry vni. 's courtiers, Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey, had made some effort to familiarise the English people with Petrarch's work, by rendering portions of it into the English tongue. But the effort ceased with their death. Subsequently, in Sidney's youth, the vogue of the Petrarchan sonnet spread to France. The con-
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 113
temporary poets, Ronsard, Du Bellay, and their associ ates, wrote thousands of sonnets on the Italian model. It was in France that Sidney practically discovered the sonnet for England anew. He, like two other poets of his own generation, Thomas Watson and Edmund Spenser, who essayed sonnetteering about the same time, gained his first knowledge of the sonnet from the recent French development of it, with which his visit to Paris familiarised him, rather than from the original Italian source, of which he drank later. Not that Sidney did not quickly pass from the examples of France to the parent efforts of Italy, but it was France, as the undertone of his sonnets proves, that gave the first spur to Sidney's sonnetteering energy. The influence of Ronsard is at least as conspicuous as that of Petrarch, and of Petrarch's sixteenth-century disciples in Italy. But, in whatever proportions the inspiration is to be precisely distributed between France and Italy, nearly all of it came from the Continent of Europe. Sidney's endeavour quickly acquired in England an extended vogue, and thereby Sidney helped to draw Elizabethan poetry into the broad currents of continental culture.
The sonnet of sixteenth-century Europe was steeped in the Platonic idealism which Petrarch had first con spicuously enlisted in the service of poetry. Earthly beauty was the reflection of an eternal celestial type, and the personal ex periences of the sonnetteer were 'subordinated to the final aim of celebrating the praises of the immortal pattern or idea of incorporeal beauty. The path of the sonnetteer as defined by the Petrarchists — disciples of Petrarch in Italy and France — was bounded by a series of conventional conceits, which gave little scope to the
H4 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
writer's original invention. Genuine affairs of the heart, the uncontrollable fever of passion, could have only remote and shadowy concern with the misty idealism and hyperbolical fancies of which the sonnet had to be woven. Sidney's addresses to 'Stella' follow with fidelity Petrarch's archetypal celebration of his love for Laura. Petrarchan idealism permeates his imagination. The far-fetched course, which the exposition of his amorous experience pursues, is defined by his reading in the poetry of Petrarch, and of Petrarch's French and Italian pupils. His hopes and fears, his apostrophes to the river Thames, to sleep, to the nightingale, to the moon, and to his lady-love's eyes, sound many a sweet and sympathetic note, but most of them echo the foreign voices. At times Sidney's lines are endowed with a finer music than English ears can detect in the original harmonies, but he nearly always moves in the circle of sentiment and idea which foreign effort had consecrated to the sonnet. To the end he was loyal to his masters, and he closes his addresses to ' Stella ' in Petrarch's most characteristic key. In his concluding sonnet he adapts with rare felicity the Italian poet's solemn and impressive renunciation of love's empire : —
' Leave me, O love, which readiest but to dust, And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things.'
Perfect sincerity and sympathy distinguish Sidney's final act of homage to the greatest of his poetic masters.
None of Sidney's poetic fellow-countrymen assimilated The metre more thoroughly the manner or matter of their of the poetic tutors. In metrical respects especially,
sonnets. Sidney showed as a sonnetteer far greater loyalty to foreign models than any of the Elizabethan
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 115
sonnetteers who succeeded him. Almost all his suc cessors, while they endeavoured to reproduce the foreign imagery and ideas, ignored foreign rules of prosody. Sidney sought to reproduce the foreign metres as well as the foreign imagery and ideas. In gradually unfolding the single idea which the true sonnet develops, he knew the value of quatrains and tercets linked together by interlaced rhymes. He saw the danger of incoherence or abruptness in the accepted English habit of terminating the poem by a couplet, in which the rhymes were unconnected with those pre ceding it. Five rhymes, variously distributed (not seven rhymes, after the later English rule), sufficed for the foreign sonnet, and Sidney proved that a close student of foreign literature could work out an English sonnet under like restriction without loss of energy.
Sidney's sonnets were in his lifetime circulated only in manuscript. They were first published five years after his death. Whether in manuscript or influence in print they met with an extraordinarily of his enthusiastic reception, and stimulated son- sonnets, netteering activity in Elizabethan England to an extent which has had no parallel at later epochs. 'Stella,' Sidney's poetic heroine, received in England for a generation homage resembling that which was accorded in Italy to Laura, Petrarch's poetic heroine, whose linea ments she reflected. Apart from considerations of poetic merit, Sidney's sonnets form an imposing land mark in the annals of English literature, by virtue of the popularity they conferred on the practise of penning long series or sequences of sonnets of love. Their progeny is legion. In all ranks of the literary hierarchy their issue abounded. Sidney's efforts were the moving
n6 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
cause of Spenser's collection of ' Amoretti,' and it is more important to record that to their example stands conspicuously indebted the great sonnetteering achieve ment of Shakespeare himself.
VI
The composition of Sidney's sonnets was pursued amid the practical work of life. It was never his No pro- ambition nor his intention to become a fessional professional poet and man of letters. His poet. devotion to literature shed its glow over all
his interests. But his most active energies were ab sorbed by other than literary endeavours. 'The truth is,' wrote his friend Greville, ' his end was not writing, even while he wrote, nor his knowledge moulded for tables and schools — but both his wit and understanding bent upon his heart, to make himself and others, not in words or opinion, but in life and action, good and great.'
Like all young men of his rank and prospects, Sidney proposed to devote the main part of his career to the public service. An early opportunity ambitions. °^ gratifymg his wish seemed to offer. Early in 1577, while he was no more than twenty- three, an active political career appeared to await his will. He was entrusted with a diplomatic mission, which, although it was of an elementary type, put no small strain on his youthful faculties. He was. bidden carry messages of congratulation from Queen Elizabeth to two foreign sovereigns, both of whom had just suc ceeded to their thrones, the Elector Palatine at Heidel berg, and the new Emperor Rudolph n. at Prague.
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 117
Sidney threw himself into his work with vigour and enthusiasm — with more vigour indeed than was habitual to the hardened politician. He would do more than the mere bloodless work which diplomacy required of him. He would break a lance for his personal principles as well as carry out his sovereign's commands. He endeavoured to influence the policy and aspirations of the rulers of the countries that he visited. It was in discretion on the part of an ambassador which was likely to breed trouble.
In Heidelberg, the capital city of the Elector Palatine's Protestant state, the people were divided between Lutherans and Calvinists, and the At Heidel- two parties were at deadly enmity with one berg and another. Sidney urged on both sides the Vienna, need of reconciliation, but neither approved with any warmth the interference of a foreigner. Throughout Germany he urged on rulers the formation of a great Protestant league to stem the spread of Catholic doctrine. At the Catholic Court of Vienna, where he had already accepted frequent hospitalities and was held in high esteem, he slightly changed his tone. While he sought to consolidate and unify the Protestant views of Europe, he desired to sow dissension among the Catholic powers. He lectured the newly crowned Emperor on the iniquities of Spain and Rome, and urged on him the duty of forming another league, a great league of nations to resist Spanish and Romish tyranny. He was listened to civilly, if not with serious attention.
A more grateful experience befel him before he re turned home. On his way back to England he was ordered by the Queen's Government to visit Antwerp,
u8 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
that city which had been the parent of More's Utopia,
in order to congratulate the Protestant prince and
general, William the Silent, Prince of Orange,
At on the birth of a son. It was not only his
Antwerp. J
own cultured fellow-countrymen nor the
poets and artists of foreign lands who felt the spell of Sidney's character. The great Dutch leader, the taciturn master of the supreme arts of strategy in peace and war, was captivated by the young Englishman's fervour and intelligence. Sidney exerted on him all the fascination which Lord Burghley and the Earl of Essex had acknow ledged. The Prince of Orange, who was reputed never to speak a needless word, declared that the Queen of England had in Sidney one of the greatest and ripest counsellors that could be found in Europe.
Despite some characteristic display of youthful im petuosity which escaped Prince William's notice, the
tour greatly added to Sidney's reputation. His success*
The Queen's Secretary, Walsingham, wrote
to Sidney's father in Ireland on the young man's return : ' There hath not been any gentleman, I am sure, these many years, that hath gone through so honourable a charge with as good commendations as he.' Sidney's energy and activity were now untamable. ' Life and action ' were now all in all to him. He put His no limits to the possibilities of his achieve-
views on ment. He believed himself capable of Ireland. solving the most perplexing of political problems. His father, who was a liberal and tolerant statesman, was distracted by the difficulties inseparable from Irish rule. With the self-confidence that came of the laudations of the great, Sidney thought to aid him by writing in detail on the perennial problem. He had
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 119
faith in the justice of his father's methods of government, which were called in question by selfish time-servers in high places. Philip pointed to the dangers of the arrogant pretensions of the Anglo-Irish nobility, immi grants from England, who dominated the native popu lation. He recommended equality of taxation. He showed a reasonable interest in the native Irish which few other Elizabethans admitted, and avowed small sympathy with the Irish landlord, deference to whose selfish claims habitually guided the home policy. But Sidney was preaching to deaf ears, and was merely jeopardising his chances of advancement.
VII
No regular work in the service of the state was offered Sidney. Without official occupation at Court, he had no opportunity there of bending his wit and Varied understanding to the exploits of 'life and occupa- action ' for which he was yearning. He was tions- impelled to seek compensation in those intellectual interests which his temperament, despite his professions to the contrary, would never allow him to forgo entirely. For the entertainment of the Queen, when she was paying another visit to his uncle Leicester, he wrote a crude masque of conventional adulation, called 'The Lady of the May.' The slender effort abounds in classical conceits, and seeks to satirise classical pedantry. It gives no promise of dramatic faculty. The little piece has, however, historic value, because Shakespeare read it, and partly assimilated it in his Lovers Labour's Lost, In other directions Sidney gave fuller scope to
120 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
his cultured intelligence. He sought friends amongst poets, painters, musicians, and engineers (or mechan icians), and he showed stimulating sympathy with their work and ambition. It was with men of letters that he found himself most at home, and with the greatest Elizabethan poet of all who were the fore-runners of Shakespeare he formed, by a fortunate chance, at a midmost point of his adult life, a memorable friendship, which increases the dignity and interest of his career.
Sidney was often at his uncle Leicester's house in London, and there Edmund Spenser, the poet and Friendship moralist of the Faerie Queene, was employed with for a time in a secretarial capacity. The two
Spenser. men met} and a warm affection at once sprang up between them. Spenser was Sidney's senior by two years ; when they became acquainted with one another in 1578, Sidney was twenty-four, Spenser was twenty-six. It was the younger man whom the elder at first hailed as master : Spenser was anxious to rank as Sidney's admiring disciple. But the means he took to announce this relationship put each man in his rightful place. Spenser's first published work — that book which heralded the great Elizabethan era of literature — the Shepheards Calender^ is distinguished by a dedication to Sidney, 'the president,' Spenser calls him, 'of nobleness and chivalry.' The patron recognised that he thereby received more honour than he could confer. Of all reputations the one that Sidney most vauled was that of association with the noblest figure in the literature of his day.
Other men of letters, prominent among whom was the courtier poet, Sir Edward Dyer, joined Sidney and Spenser in social intercourse at Leicester House. The
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 121
nights were passed in eager literary debate. The company formed itself into a literary club, all mem bers of which were fired with literary zeal -j^e liter- — with zeal for creating an English literature ary club that should compete with the best that of ' The the Continent had yet produced. A like Areopagus.' ambition had fired a band of Frenchmen of the previous generation, when returning from travel in Italy. A like ambition had led to the formation in France of that little regiment of cultured lyric poets which christened itself 'La Pleiade.' As in France so in England, the poetic pioneers lay under the spell of the great classical literature, knowledge of which had lately reached them from Italy. The future of literature depended, they erroneously believed, on the closeness with which it fashioned itself on classical models. Classical style, classical expression, was the philosopher's stone which could convert the dross of the vernacular into literary gold. At the club, vhich met at Leicester House, and bore the classical title of ' The Areopagus,' the members were dazzled for the time by this perilous theory. They committed themselves to the heretical belief that rhyme and accent, the natural concomitants of English verse, were vulgar and unrefined. It was incumbent on the new poets, if they would attain lasting glory, to accli matise in English poetry the Latin metre of quantity, which the genius of Virgil and Horace had ennobled.
The principle which underlay this endeavour was mis conceived, and only required to be practically applied
to be convicted of impotence. Modern
.. . , „ . ., . , . , Classical
literature might well assimilate classical metres>
ideas, but classical prosody or syntax had no
juster place in a modern language than a Greek chiton
122 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
or a Roman toga in a modern wardrobe. Sidney, like fellow-members of the Club, experimented in English sapphics and hexameters and elegiacs, but the uncouth results brought home to genuine lovers of poetry that the movement was marching in a wrong direction. When, after a year's trial, Sidney's literary club was dissolved, English poetry was proving beyond risk of doubt that accent and rhyme were its only instruments of work, and that the classical fashions of prosody or syntax were barbarisms outside the ancient languages of Rome or Greece. Versatility of interest was character istic of Sidney and his friends. It had suddenly led them into error, but it led them out again with almost equal celerity.
Hereditary rank combined with his individual tastes and character to facilitate Sidney's assumption of a Intercourse leader's place in the intellectual society of with London. At the same time Sidney steadily
Bruno. maintained his interest in the literary efforts of continental Europe. Insularity was foreign to the literary spirit of the Elizabethan age. Especially did Sidney and his associates cherish that fraternal feeling which binds together literary workers of all races and countries. His breadth of intellectual sympathy comes into peculiar prominence in the reports of the reception which he and his friends accorded to the Italian phi losopher, Giordano Bruno, on his visit to London in 1584. At the house of his friend Fulke Greville, Sidney and Bruno often met. Together they discussed moral, metaphysical, mathematical, and scientific specu lations. The Italian poured into Sidney's eager ears Galileo's new proofs of the Copernican doctrine that the earth moves round the sun. No teacher could have
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 123
found a more receptive pupil. Bruno proved his regard for Sidney's sympathetic attention by dedicating to him two of his best known speculative works, and thus linked his name with the most advanced thought of the Renaissance. Not that Sidney meekly accepted Bruno's opinions. Sidney's faith in Christianity was not easily shaken. With Christianity Bruno had small con cern. His philosophy was the philosophy of doubt. Like the Utopians of Sir Thomas More, Bruno was a vague Pantheist, to whom the truths of orthodox Christianity did not appeal. A fearless thinker, he was ultimately burnt with revolting brutality as a heretic at Rome in 1600. Religious toleration came naturally to Sidney's active and inquisitive mind. He gave Bruno's religious opinions courteous consideration. They deeply interested him. But he did not adopt them. He zealously cultivated independence of mind, and, as if to prove his equable temper, at the same time he was debating the bases 6f religion with Bruno he was translating a perfectly orthodox treatise on the Christian religion by a distinguished French Protestant friend, De Mornay. When De Mornay visited London, Sidney was no less profuse in hospitality to him than to Bruno. Every man of intellectual tastes attracted him, but he was steadfast to his own conviction, and was not hastily led away by novel speculation, even if he were fascinated by the charm of exposition which hovered on its in ventor's lips.
VIII
To another form of literary endeavour Sidney's attention was diverted somewhat against his will.
124 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
English Drama was still in its infancy. Comedy
had not yet emerged from the shell of horseplay and
burlesque and rusticity ; genuine humour
Sidney and genuine romance was to develop later, the Drama.
Tragedy was still a bombastic presentment of
blood and battle, of barbarous and sordid crime. But the embryonic Drama was encouraged by men of en lightenment, and by none so warmly as by the cultured leaders of the aristocracy. To the leisured classes any new form of recreation is welcome, and the drama could adapt itself to all gradations of literary taste among its patrons. The acting profession in England was first organised under the protection of the nobility. Like other great noblemen, Sidney's uncle Leicester took under his patronage a band of men who went about the country engaged in rudimentary dramatic performances. The company of actors called itself the Earl of Leicester's men or his servants. It ultimately developed into that best of all organised bands of Elizabethan actors which was glorified by Shakespeare's membership. Sidney interested himself in the company of players which was under the patronage of his uncle. He stood godfather to the son of one of its leaders, a very famous comic actor, Richard Tarleton — one of the earliest English actors whose name has escaped oblivion. But there was nothing individual in Sidney's attitude to actors. His attitude was the conventional one of his class. Despite the favour of the great, the prospects of the Drama in England in those days of infancy were critical
and uncertain. It was a new development Puritan .
attacks. m Englan<3> and had little but its novelty to
recommend it. Its artistic future was unfore seen. Its earliest manifestation, too, excited the fears
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 125
and animosity of the growing Puritan sentiment of the country. To the delight in Art which the Renaissance encouraged, the Puritan feeling, when once roused, was mortally opposed. Puritanism was in fact a reactionary movement against the delights in things of the sense which the study of ancient literature fostered. Puritan ism was impatient of the current culture. It viewed all recreation with distrust, and detected in most forms of amusement signs of sin. Especially did the Drama, the most recent outcome of the Renaissance of paganism, rouse ugly suspicions in the Puritan minds. Its lawful ness in a Christian commonwealth was doubted. Con troversy arose as to whether or no the Drama was an emanation of the devil : whether or no the theatre was to be tolerated by members of Christ's Church.
The Puritan attack was bitter and persistent. The Puritan champions sought recruits from all ranks of society, and were anxious to divert from the Stephen new-born theatre the favour of the nobility. Gosson Their fanaticism lent them strength. Their seeks methods were none too scrupulous. Sidney Sidney's was known to be of serious temper ; he was suPPor • held in esteem in fashionable society. His countenance was worth the winning for any cause. Accordingly one of the most outspoken of the Puritan controversialists — one of the warmest foes of the budding Drama — en deavoured, by a device that had nothing but boldness to excuse it, to press Sidney's influence into his service. Without asking Sidney's leave, Stephen Gosson, who had once been himself a writer of plays and now wrote with the fury of an apostate, dedicated to Sidney a viru lent invective, or libel, on plays, players, and dramatists, which he called The School of Abuse. He affected to
126 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
take for granted Sidney's sympathy. To him he dedi cated his diatribe, and paraded his name in the preface of the book as an illiberal foe of dramatic literature.
The misrepresentation of Sidney's sentiment was un blushing. Sidney's soul rebelled against the obscurantist Sidney's views to which the pamphleteer committed resent- him. One might have as justly dedicated to ment. Sir Thomas More a Lutheran tract, and
credited him with enthusiasm for the doctrines of Luther. No truce was possible between Sidney and one who failed to see in the Drama which Greeks and Romans had especially dignified an honoured branch of literature. Sidney retaliated with spirit. Turning the tables on the offending author, he set to work on an enlightened defence of the Drama. The essay, which he called An Apologie for Poetrie, embodied his firmest convictions on the value to life of literature and works of imagination.
Sidney's retort to Gosson went far beyond its imme diate purpose. He did much more than expound the The worth of the Drama. The Drama was for
Apologie him one of many manifestations of poetry. for Poetne. ft was ^o the defence of the whole poetic art that he bent his energies. In an opening paragraph he calls himself a 'piece of a logician,' and it is a logical mode of argument that he pursues. Nowhere is the fine quality of Sidney's intellect seen to better advantage. Nowhere else does he illustrate with equal liberality the breadth of his literary sympathies or his instinct for scholarship. He had studied not only the critical phi losophy of Aristotle, together with Plato's general dis cussions of the merits and defects of poetry, but had steeped himself in the elaborate criticism of the Renais-
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 127
sance scholars, Minturno and Julius Caesar Scaliger, who had in their treatises, named respectively 'De Poeta ' and ' Poetice,' attempted, in the middle of the sixteenth century, to codify anew the principles and practices of poetry.
Despite the extent and variety of his sources of learn ing, Sidney retained full mastery of his authorities, and welds them together with convincing effect. The catho licity of his literary taste preserved him from Freedom pedantry. A popular ballad sung with from heartiness roused him as with a trumpet, pedantry, while the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar could do no more. Sidney wrote with lucidity. His style is coloured by his enthusiasm for all that elevates the mind of man. Nearly two centuries and a half later, Shelley, in emula tion of Sidney, wrote another Defence of Poetry, where the poet's creed was again defined in language of singu lar beauty. No higher testimony to Sidney's suggestive force or influence can be offered than the fact that his tract should have engendered in Shelley's brain offspring of so rare a charm.
Sidney's central proposition, to which all sections of the treatise converge, is that poetry is the noblest of all
the works of man. Philosophy and history
e i_ u j -j r The worth
are for the most part mere handmaidens of of poetn,
poetry, which is the supreme teacher, and ranks as a creative agent beside Nature herself. To the ordinary matter-of-fact intellect of every age such a claim on behalf of poetry is barely intelligible. That poetry is a ' deep thing, a teaching thing, the most surely and wisely elevating of human things,' is an assertion that sounds whimsical in the ears of the multitude of all epochs. It represents a faith whose adherents in every
128 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
era have been few. Sidney gave reasons For it with exceptional sincerity and logical force. In Elizabethan England the tendency to accept the belief was perhaps more widely disseminated than at any other period of English history. Certainly Sidney's words seem to have fallen on willing ears, and widened the ranks of the faithful.
In details Sidney's Apologie for Poetrie lies open to criticism. He underrated the value of poetic expression Confusion an^ poetic form. Poetry embraced for him between every exercise of the imagination. Matter poetry and was for him more valuable than manner, prose. 'Verse,' he wrote, 'is but an ornament, and
no cause to poetry;' prose might consequently be as effective a vehicle of poetry as metrical composition. Though his main contention that poetry is the supreme teacher is not materially affected by the misconception, Sidney here falls a victim to a confusion of terms. The place of expression in poetry is over-estimated when it is argued that it counts alone. But expression is the main factor. The functions of poetry and prose lie, too, for the most part, aloof from one another. Neither theory nor practice justifies a statement of their identity, even though on occasion they may traverse the same ground. Things of the mind are the fittest topic of prose which seeks to supply knowledge. Things of the emotions are the fittest topic of poetry which seeks to stimulate feel ing. Prose is under no obligation to appeal to aught beside the intellect ; poetry is under a primary obliga tion to appeal to the emotions and to the sense of sound.
In one other respect Sidney disappoints us. After he has enumerated and defined with real insight the vari-
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 129
ous known classes of poetic effort, he offers an esti mate of the past, present, and future position of English poetry. His commendations of Chaucer, Misunder- Surrey, and his friend Spenser satisfy a standings reasonable standard of criticism. But his in- about sight fails him in his comments on the literary English prospects of the English Drama. Rever- P°etry- ence for Aristotle's laws, as they were developed by the; classicists of the Renaissance, shackles his judgment, i He ridicules the failure to observe the primeval unity of action or the later classical unities of place and time. He warmly denounces endeavours to echo in a single play the voices of comedy and tragedy. Tragi-comedy he anathematises. An obstinate conservatism mingled with his liberal sympathies and led him at times to confuse progress with anarchy. Sidney wrote before Elizabethan effort had proved the capacity of forms of dramatic art of which classical writers had not dreamed.
But if Sidney's views of the Drama were halting and reactionary, he regained his clearness of vision in the concluding pages of his great Apologie. His
final condemnation of strained conceits in n Jf .em
conclusions.
lyrical poetry — although a fault from which his own verse is not always free — is wise and enlight ened. He perceived that the English tongue was, if efficiently handled, comparable with Greek, and was far more pliant than Latin, in the power of giving harmoni ous life to poetic ideas. If he underrated the poetic promise of his age, his eloquent appeal to his fellow- countrymen at the end of his Apologie, to disown the ' earth-creeping mind ' that ' cannot lift itself up to look into the sky of poetry,' proved for many a stirring call
5
i3o SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
to arms. He took leave of his readers like a herald summoning to the poetic lists all the mighty combatants with whom the Elizabethan era was yet to be identified.
IX
But Sidney was soon summoned from these altitudes.
Controversies in public and Court life were competing
with literary debates for Sidney's attention.
Difficulties The Queen>s favour was always difficult to
at Court. . . J . .
keep. Her favourite, Leicester, Sidney s uncle, forfeited it for a time when the news reached her of his secret marriage with that Countess of Essex who was mother of Sidney's Penelope, his poetic idol, 'Stella.' The Queen's wrath, when roused, always ex pended itself over a wide area, and it now involved all Leicester's family, including his nephew.
There was much in Court life to alienate Sidney's genuine sympathies. Many of his fellow-courtiers were Quarrels difficult companions. The ill - mannered with Earl of Oxford always regarded Sidney with
courtiers. dislike and ridiculed his aspirations. The Earl's wife was that daughter of the Prime Minister Burghley whose hand in girlhood had been at first offered by her father to Sidney himself. Childish quarrels be tween Sidney and the Earl were frequent. Once, at the Queen's palace at Whitehall, while Sidney was playing tennis, the Earl insolently insisted on joining uninvited in the game. Sidney raised objections. The Earl bade all the players leave the court. Sidney protested. The Earl called him 'a puppy.' Sidney retorted, truthfully if not very felicitously, 'Puppies are got by dogs, and
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 131
children by men,' and then with greater point challenged the unmannerly nobleman to a duel. The dispute reached the Queen's ears. She forbade the encounter, and with great injustice ordered Sidney to apologise for an insult which he had directed at a man of higher rank than himself. Sidney declined, and the Queen's wrath against him increased. He was in no yielding mood, and sought no reconciliation.
In the Queen's personal and political conduct there was at that moment much to offend Sidney's innermost convictions. He was resolved to forfeit altogether his position at Court rather than acquiesce in silence. The Queen was contemplating marriage with the King of France's brother. On grounds of patriotism and of Protestantism he begged her to throw over a Frenchman and a Catholic. There was no lack of plainness or of boldness in this address to his prince. The result was inevitable. He was promptly excluded from the royal presence.
Sidney's intellectual friends had long regretted the waste of his abilities which idle lounging about the Court entailed, and they viewed his taste of the royal anger without dejection. He, too, retirement left the Court with a sense of relief. Prefer ment that should be commensurate with his character and abilities had long seemed a hopeless quest ; vanity now appeared the only goal of a courtier's life. He could escape from it, with the knowledge that solace for his disappointments awaited him in the society of a beloved comrade, his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, whose tastes were singularly like his own. At her husband's country-house in Wiltshire he was always a welcome guest, and there could cut himself off with a
i32 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
light heart from the mean and paltry pursuit of the royal countenance. In this period of enforced retirement he engaged with the Countess in literary recreation of an exacting kind. For her and his own amusement he wrote a romance. He called it the Countess of Pem broke's Arcadia. It was the latest and most ambitious of all his literary endeavours, and gave him a world wide repute.
Sidney affected to set no value on the work, which exile from the central scene of the country's activities
had given him the opportunity of essaying.
He undertook it, he said, merely to fill up
Arcadia. ' . . J •
an idle hour and to amuse his sister. ' Now, it is done only for you, only to you :' he modestly told her, ' if you keep it to yourself, or to such friends, who will weigh errors in the balance of goodwill, I hope, for the father's sake, it will be pardoned, perchance made much of, though in itself it have deformities. For indeed, for severer eyes it is not, being but a trifle, and that triflingly handled.'
The work is far more serious than the deprecatory preface suggests. Sidney's pen must have travelled with lightning speed. Whatever views may be entertained of the literary merits of his book, it amazes one by its varied learning, its wealth of episode and its exceptional length. It was eulogised in its own day by Sidney's friend, Gabriel Harvey, as a 'gallant legendary, full of pleasurable accidents and profitable discourses; for three things especially very notable — for amorous courting (he was young in years), for sage counselling (he was ripe in judgment), and for valorous fighting (his sovereign pro fession was arms) — and delightful pastime by way of
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 133
pastoral exercises may pass for the fourth.'* The com mendation is pitched in too amiable a key. The Arcadia is a jumble of discordant elements ; but, despite its manifold defects, -it proves its author to have caught a distant glimpse of the true art of fiction.
The romance was acknowledged on its production to be a laborious act of homage to a long series of foreign literary influences. In his description of character and often in his style of narration he was thought to have assimilated the tone of the Latin historians Livy, Tacitus, and the rest, and the modern chroniclers, Philippe de Comines and Guicciardini. The Arcadia is a compound of an endless number of simples, all of which are of foreign importation. Sidney proves in it more than in his sonnets or his critical tract his loyalty to foreign models and the catholicity of taste which he brought to the study of them.
The corner stone of the edifice must be sought in a pastoral romance of Italy. A Neapolitan, Sanazzaro, seems to have been the first in modern Europe to apply the geographical Greek name of Arcadia to an imaginary realm of pastoral simplicity, where love alone held sway. Sanazzaro, who wrote very early in the i6th century, was only in part a creator. He was an enthusiastic disciple of Virgil, and he had read Theocritus. His leading aim was to develop in Italian prose the pastoral temper of these classical poets. But he brought to his work the new humanism of the Renaissance and broad ened the interests and outlook of pastoral literature. His Italian Arcadia set an example which was eagerly followed by all sons of the Renaissance of whatever nationality. In Spain one George de Montemayor de- * Pierces Supererogation, etc.
134 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
veloped forty years later Sanazzaro's pastoral idealism in his fiction of Diana Inamorada, and the Spanish story gained a vogue only second to its Italian original. Sidney was proud to reckon himself a disciple of Mon- temayor the Spaniard, as well as of Sanazzaro the Nea politan.
But it was not exclusively on the foundations laid by Italian or Spaniard that Sidney's ample romantic fiction The Greek was based. Two other currents merged in novel of its main stream. Sidney knew much of late Heliodorus. Greek literary effort which produced, in the third century of the Christian era, the earliest specimen of prose fiction. It was the Graeco-Syrian Heliodorus, in his ' Aethiopian Tales,' who first wrote a prose novel of amorous intrigue. Heliodorus's novels became popu lar in translation in every western country, and Sidney familiarised himself with them. But his literary horizon was not bounded either by the ancient literature of Greece or by the contemporary adaptations of classical literary energy. Feudalism had its literary exponents. Mediaeval France and Spain were rich in tales of chiv alry and feudal adventure. The tedious narrative, for example, of Amadis of Gaul, which was mainly respon sible for the mental perversion of Don Quixote, fired the Middle Ages with a genuine enthusiasm. That enthusiasm communicated itself to Sidney.
To each of these sources — the pastoral romances of the Renaissance of Italy and Spain, the Greek novel, and the mediaeval tales of chivalry — Sidney's Arcadia is almost equally indebted. But his idiosyncrasy was not wholly submerged. Possibly Sidney originally thought to depict with philosophic calm in his retire ment from the Court the life of shepherds and shep-
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 135
herdesses, and thereby illustrate the contrast between the simplicity of nature and the complex ambitions of princes and princesses. But the theme rang „, hollow to one who had studied closely life mingling and literature, who sought, above all things, of pastoral to be sincere. To credit rusticity which he with chiv- knew to be coarse, ignorant, and sensual, with .?. a unalloyed innocence was little short of fraud. To confine himself solely to pastoral incident, however realistically treated, was to court tameness. On his pastoral ground-plan, therefore, he grafted chivalric war fare of a mediaeval pattern, and intrigue in the late Greek spirit
Chivalric adventure is treated by Sidney for the most part with directness and intelligibility. At the outset of his Arcadia, two princely friends, Musidorus of Macedon and Pyrocles of Thessaly, who enjoy equal renown for military prowess, are separated in a shipwreck, and find asylum in different lands. Each is entertained by the king of the country which harbours him, and is set at the head of an army. The two forces meet in battle. Neither commander recognises in the other his old friend, until they meet to decide the final issues of the strife in a hand-to-hand combat. Peace follows the generals' recognition of one another. The two friends are free to embark together on a fantastic quest of love in Arcadia. Each seeks the hand of an Arcadian prin cess, and they willingly involve themselves in the domestic and dynastic struggles which distract the Arcadian court and country.
Sidney developed the design with bold incoherence. The exigences of love compel his heroes to disguise themselves. Musidorus, the lover of the Arcadian
136 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
Princess Pamela, assumes the part of a shepherd, calling himself Dorus ; while Pyrocles, the lover of the Arcadian The Princess Philoclea, with greater boldness,
complex metamorphoses himself into a woman; he intrigue. arrays himself as an Amazon, and takes the feminine name of Zelmane. Out of this strange dis guise is evolved a thread of story which winds itself intricately through nearly the whole of the romance. The Amazonian hero spreads unexpected havoc in the Arcadian court by attracting the affections of both the Princess's parents— of Basilius, the old king of Arcady, who believes him to be a woman ; and of Synesia, the lascivious old queen, who perceives his true sex.
The involutions and digressions of the plot are too numerous to permit full description. The extravagances grow more perplexing as the story develops. Arcadian realms exhibit in Sidney's pages few traditional features. The call of realism was in Sidney's ears the call of honesty, and his peasants divested themselves of ideal features for the ugly contours of fact. His shepherds and shepherdesses have long passed the age of innocent tranquillity. Their land is a prey to dragons and wild beasts, and their hearts are gnawed by human passions. Sidney had, too, a sense of the need of variety in fiction. New characters are constantly entering to distort and postpone the natural denouement of events. The work is merged in a succession of detached episodes and ceases to be an organic tale. Parts are much more valuable than the whole. Arguments of coarseness and refinement enjoy a bewildering contiguity. At one moment Platonic idealism sways the scene, and the spiritual significance of love and beauty overshadows their physical and material aspects. At the next
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 137
moment we plunge into a turbid flood of abnormal passion. The exalted thought and aspiration of the Renaissance season Sidney's pages, but they do not exclude the grosser features of the movement. There are chapters which almost justify Milton's sour censure of the whole book as ' a vain and amatorious poem.' *
* The text of the Arcadia suffers from the author's casual methods of composition. Much of it survives in an unrevised shape. He seems to have himself prepared for press the first two books, and the opening section of the third — about a half of the whole. This portion of the romance was printed in 1590, and ended abruptly in the middle of a sentence. Subsequently there was discovered a very rough draft of portions of a long continua tion, forming the conclusion of th? third book, with the succeeding fourth and fifth books. This supplement survived in ' several loose sheets (being never after reviewed or so much as seen altogether by himself) without any certain disposition or perfect order.' With a second edition of the authentic text these unrevised sheets were printed in 1593. Sidney's sister, the Countess of Pembroke, sup plied the recovered books with ' the best coherences that could be gathered out of those scattered papers,' but no attempt was made to fill an obvious hiatus in the middle of the third book at the point where the original edition ended and the rough draft opened. Nor did the editor or publisher venture to bring the unfinished romance to any conclusion. What close was designed for the story by the author was ' only known to his own spirit.' The editors of later editions, bolder than their predecessors, sought to remedy such defects. The gap in the third book was in 1621 filled by a ' little essay ' from the pen of a well-known Scottish poet, Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling. Finally, in 1628, a more adventurous spirit, Richard BeMng, or Bellings, a young barrister of Lincoln's Inn, endeavoured to terminate the story in a wholly original sixth book. It is with these additions that subsequent re-issues of the Arcadia were invariably embellished. Other efforts were made to supplement Sidney's unfinished romance. One by Gervase Markham, an industrious literary hack, came out
138 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
The Arcadia is a prose tale and Milton only applied to it the title of poem figuratively. But one important characteristic of the Arcadia is its frequent introduction of interludes of verse which, although they appeal more directly to the historian of literature than to its aesthetic critic, must be closely examined by students of Sidney's work. Shepherds come upon the stage and sing songs for the delectation of the Arcadian King, and actors in the story at times express their emotions lyrically. Occasionally Sidney's verse in the Arcadia seeks to adapt to the English language classical metres, after the rules that the club of 'Areopagus' sought to impose on his pen. The sap- phics and hexameters of the Arcadia are no less strained and grotesque than are earlier efforts in the like direc tion. They afford convincing proof of the hopeless pedantry of the literary principles to which Sidney for a time did homage, but which he afterwards recanted. Sidney's metrical dexterity is seen to advantage, how ever, in his endeavours to acclimatise contemporary forms of foreign verse. In his imitation of the sestina and terza rima of contemporary Italy he shows felicity and freedom of expression. He escapes from that servile adherence to rules of prosody which is ruinous to poetic invention. Sidney's affinity with the spirit of Italian poetry is seen to be greater than his affinity with the spirit of classical poetry.
No quite unqualified commendation can be bestowed on the prose style of his romance. It lacks the direct- as early as 1607. Another, by 'a young gentlewoman,' Mrs. A. Weames, was published in 1651. The neglect of these frag mentary contributions by publishers of the full work calls for no regret.
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 139
ness which distinguishes the Apologie for Poetrie. It fails to give much support to Drayton's contention that Sidney rid the English tongue of con ceits and affectations. His metaphors are stv^pr often far-fetched, and he overloads his page with weak and conventional epithets. The vice of diffuseness infects both matter and manner. But de lightful oases of perspicuous narrative and description of persons and places are to be found, although the search may involve some labour.
The unchecked luxuriance of Sidney's pen, and absence of well-wrought plan did injustice to the genuine
insight into life and the descriptive power
, .&, , , , . 0. ; Want of
which belonged to him. Signs, however, are coherence
discernible amid all thp tangle that, with the
exercise of due restraint, he might have attained mastery
of fiction alike in style and subject-matter.
It was difficult for Sidney, whatever the attractions that the life of contemplation and literary labour had to offer him, complacently to surrender Court Reconcilia- favour, and with it political office, altogether, tion with He knew the meaning of money difficulties ; the Queen, tailors and bootmakers often pressed him for payment. They were not easy to appease. The notion of seeking a livelihood from his pen was foreign to all his concep tions of life. From the Queen and her Ministers he could alone hope for remunerative employment. He therefore deemed it prudent to seek a reconciliation. Quarrels with Queen Elizabeth were rarely incurable.
140 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
A solemn undertaking to abstain from further political
argument which involved the Queen, opened to Sidney
an easy road to peace.
His uncle Leicester interested himself anew in his
fortunes, and transferred to him a small administrative office which he himself had held, that of Steward to the Bishop of Winchester. He
promotion. . « . •
succeeded his father, too, as Member of Parliament for Kent. In Parliament he joined with eagerness in the deliberations of a Committee which recommended strenuous measures against Catholics and slanderers of the Queen. But in the House of Com mons he made little mark. The slow methods of the assembly's procedure, and its absorption in details which lacked large significance, oppressed Sidney's spirit. He was ill-adapted to an arena where success came more readily to tactful reticence and apathy than to exuberant eloquence and enthusiasm.
In 1583 he was knighted, and assumed his world- famous designation of Sir Philip Sidney. But it is one
of history's little ironies that it was not for hood any Personal merit that he received the title
of honour. English people like titles, al though it be the exception, and not the rule, for them to reward notable personal merit. In Sir Philip's case it happened that a friend whom he had met abroad, Prince John Casimir, brother of the Elector Palatine, had been nominated by Queen Elizabeth to the dignity of a Knight of the Garter. Unable to attend the in vestiture himself the prince had requested his friend Sidney to act as his proxy. Such a position could only be filled by one who was himself of the standing of a knight-bachelor, the lowest of all the orders of knight-
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 141
hood. Consequently, in compliment to the foreign prince, the Queen conferred knighthood on the prince's representative. It was a happy accident by which Sidney was enrolled among English knights. It was not designed as a recognition of his worth ; it conferred no special honour on him ; but it renewed the dignity of an ancient order of chivalry, and it lends a pic turesque colour to the closing scene of his career.
For a year Sidney's course of life ran somewhat more smoothly. Once again he sought scope for political ambitions. He obtained more remunerative j0int- official employment. He was offered a post Master in the military administration of the country, of the He was appointed Joint-Master of the Ord- Ordnance, nance with another uncle, the Earl of Warwick, Leices ter's elder brother.
The need of a regular income was the more pressing because Sidney was about to enter the married state. His old friend, the Queen's Secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham, who, when English ambassador, was his host at Paris in the year of the St. Bartholomew Massacre, chose him for his son-in-law, for the husband of his daughter Frances, a girl of only fourteen. Sidney was twenty-nine years old, more than twice her age, and there seems good reason to regard the union as a marriage de convenance. The astute Secretary of State, who had always cherished an affec tionate interest in Sidney, thought that the young man might yet fill with credit high political office, and his kinship with Leicester gave him hope of a rich inherit ance. The arrangement was not, however, concluded without difficulty. Sidney's father declared that 'his present biting necessity' rendered monetary aid from
I42 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
him out of the question. Leicester was not immediately helpful, and other obstacles to the early solemnisation of the nuptial ceremony presented themselves. The Queen was never ready to assent quickly to her courtiers' marriages. For two months she withheld her assent. Then she suddenly yielded, and showed no trace of resentment. The marriage took place in the autumn of 1583. It was the first scene of the last act in Sidney's life. He had barely three years to live.
Sidney took up his residence with his wife's parents near London, at Barn Elms. His course of life under- Relations went l^6 other change. His literary rela- with Lady tions with his old friend Penelope Devereux, Rich. who two years before had become the wife
of Lord Rich, were not interrupted. He continued to write sonnets to her, and their loyal friendship remained the admiration of fashionable society. None the less Sidney stirred in his girl-wife a genuine affection, and nothing in his association with Lady Rich seems to have prejudiced her happiness.
Sidney's married life, after its first transports were over, increased rather than diminished his dissatisfaction The call of witn his prospects at home. A complete the New change of scene and of effort crossed his World. mind. He thought of trying his fortune in a new field of energy. The passion for exploration, for founding English colonies in the newly discovered Con tinent of America, which had mastered the minds of so many contemporaries, suddenly absorbed him. His active intellect was drawn within the whirlpool of that new enthusiasm. At first he merely took a few shares in an expedition in search of the North- West Passage, but his hopes ran high as he scanned the details of the
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 143
project. He believed that gold, and all that gold might bring, was to be found in abundance in the hazy con tinent of the north. But to take a vicarious part in adventure ill sorted with his nature. He resolved to join in person Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who was about to set forth on that eventful expedition to Newfoundland from which he never returned. Sidney was finally induced to stay behind. He was thus preserved from the fate of Gilbert, who was wrecked on the voyage home.
But Sidney's imagination dwelt on the possibilities which control of a new and untrodden world implied. Designs of dazzling scope vaguely shaped Grant to themselves in his brain : he would gain Sidney of control of the greater part of the new con- American tinent and make of it a purified Arcadia lands- such as fiction could hardly comprehend. Accordingly, he sought and obtained letters-patent to hold for him self and colonise at will the unknown world. No less than three million acres of undiscovered land in America were soon set at his disposal. The document announc ing the grant is well fitted to be enrolled in the courts of Faerie. Sir Philip was ' licensed and authorised to discover, search, find out, view, and inhabit certain parts of America not yet discovered, and out of those countries, by him, his heirs, factors, or assigns to have and enjoy, to him his heirs and assigns for ever, such and so much quantity of ground as should amount to the number of thirty hundred thousand acres of ground and wood, with all commodities, jurisdiction, and royalties, both by sea and land, with full power and authority that it should and might be lawful for the said Sir Philip Sidney, his heirs and assigns, at all times
144 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
thereafter to have, take, and lead in the said voyage, to travel thitherwards or to inhabit there with him or them, and every or any of them, such and so many of her Majesty's subjects as should willingly accompany him or them, or any or every of them, with sufficient shipping and munition for their transportations.'
History seemed obeying the laws that govern fiction. Sidney was building, on a basis of legal technicalities, a castle in the air. The scheme suffered the fate of all speculations in unverified conditions. Little followed the generous grant But Sidney steadily fixed his eyes for the time on the Atlantic horizon. He was greatly moved by Sir Walter Ralegh's plans for the exploration of the land that Ralegh named 'Virginia.' Sidney sat on a committee of the House of Commons which was appointed to adjust the shadowy boundaries of the first projected settlement of Englishmen in that country. The committee's deliberations had no practical effect Sidney was destined to come to no closer quarters with the fanciful property, of which the law, working for once in strange agreement with the vagaries of the imagina tion, had made him master.
XI
The short remainder of Sidney's life was passed in new surroundings. It was on the field of battle that
he closed his brief pilgrimage on earth, scene Hostility to Catholic Spain had combined
with his imaginative energy greatly to stim ulate his interest in the American schemes. Advancing life and closer study of current politics strengthened the conviction that Spain, unless her career were checked,
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 145
was England's fated conqueror in every sphere. The cause alike of Protestantism, of enlightenment, and of trade was menaced by Spanish predomi nance. A general attack on the Empire of ^ • Spain was essential to England's security. With characteristic impetuosity he turned from his American speculations and surveyed the Spanish peril. He was tiring of the contemplative life. He was bent on trying his fortune in an enterprise of action. An opportunity for active conflict with Spain seemed to be forced on England's conscience which could hardly suffer neglect. Spain was making a determined effort to drive Protestantism from the stronghold that it had acquired in the Low Countries. Sidney's old admirer, William of Orange, had,' in 1584, been murdered there at Spanish instigation, a martyr to the cause of Protestant freedom. It was England's duty, Sidney now argued, vigorously to avenge that outrage. The more direct the onslaught on Spain the better. Spain should be attacked in all her citadels ; the Low Countries should be over-run ; raids should be made on Spanish ports ; her rich trade with South America should be persistently intercepted and ultimately crushed.
Such a design, as soon as his mind had formulated it, absorbed all Sidney's being. But it met with faint encouragement in the quarter whence au- The atti- thority to carry it into execution could alone tude of come. The Queen was averse to a direct the Queen, challenge of Spain. She was not fond of spending money. She deprecated the cost of open war. But Sidney and his friends were resolute. They would not let the question sleep. The nation ranged itself on their side. At length, yielding to popular clamour, the
146 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
Queen agreed, under conditions which indemnified her for loss of money, to send strictly limited help to the Protestant States of the Low Country. She would assist them in a qualified way to repel the assadlt of Spain. She would lend them money and would send an army, the cost of which they were to defray. With a policy so meagre in conception and so poor in spirit Sidney had small sympathy. But it was all that it was possible to hope for, and with it he had to rest content. At any rate, wherever and however the blow was to be struck against Spain, he was resolved to lend a hand. That resolve cost him his life.
The command of the English force for the Low
Countries was bestowed on Sidney's uncle Leicester;
and the Queen reluctantly yielded to per-
of°Flushin suasi°n> and conferred on Sidney a subordi-
"' nate post in the expedition. He was
appointed Governor of Flushing, one of the cities which
the Queen occupied by way of security for the expense
which she was incurring. In the middle of November,
1585, Sidney left Gravesend to take up his command.
It was to be his first and last experience of battle.
The campaign was from the outset a doubtful success. The Queen refused to provide adequate supplies. Difficulties Leicester proved an indolent commander, of the Harmonious co-operation with their Dutch
campaign, allies was not easy for the English. Sidney soon perceived how desperate the situation was. He wrote hastily to his father-in-law Walsingham, who shared in a guarded way his political enthusiasm, urging him to impress the Queen with the need of a larger equipment. He had not the tact to improve the situa tion by any counsel or action of his own on the spot.
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 147
He persuaded his uncle to make him Colonel of a native Dutch regiment of horse, an appointment which deeply offended a rival native Dutch candidate. The Queen, to Sidney's chagrin, judged the rival's grievance to be just. Sidney showed infinite daring when oppor tunity offered, but good judgment was wanting. There was wisdom in his uncle's warning against his facing risks in active service. Direction was given him to keep to his post in Flushing.
At length Leicester, yielding to the entreaties of his colleagues and his nephew, decided to abandon Fabian tactics and to come to close quarters with xhe the enemy. The great fortress of Zutphen, attack on which was in Spanish hands, was to be Zutphen. attacked. As soon as the news reached Sidney, he joined Leicester's army of assault as a knight-errant ; his own regiment was far away at Deventer. He presented himself in Leicester's camp upon his own initiative.
On the 2ist September 1586, the English army learned that a troop of Spaniards, convoying provisions to Zutphen, was to reach the town at day break next morning. Five hundred horsemen woun*j ' of the English army were ordered to inter cept the approaching force. Without waiting for orders, Sidney determined to join in the encounter. He left his tent very early in the morning of the 22nd, and meeting a friend who had omitted to put on leg-armour, he rashly disdained the advantage of better equipment, and quixotically lightened his own protective garb. Fog hung about the country. The little English force soon found itself by mistake under the walls of the town, and threatened alike in front and at the rear. A force of
I48 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
three thousand Spanish horsemen almost encircled them. They were between two fires— between the Spanish army within the town and the Spanish army which was seeking to enter it. The Englishmen twice charged the reinforcements approaching Zutphen, but were forced to retreat under the town walls. At the second charge Sidney's horse was killed under him. Remounting another, he foolhardily thrust his way _ through the enemy's ranks. Then, perceiving his isolation, he turned back to rejoin his friends, and was struck as he retreated by a bullet on the left thigh a little above the knee. He managed to keep his saddle until he reached the camp, a mile and a half distant. What followed is one of the classical anecdotes of history, and was thus put on record by Sidney's friend Greville :— ' Being thirsty with excess of bleeding, he called for drink, which was presently brought him ; but as he was putting the bottle to his mouth, he saw a poor soldier carried along, who had eaten his last at the same feast, ghastly casting up his eyes at the bottle, which Sir Philip perceiving, took it from his head before he drank, and delivered it to the poor man, with these words, " Thy necessity is greater than mine." And when he had pledged this poor soldier he was presently carried (by barge) to Arnheim.' Sidney's wife hurried from England to his bedside at ' Arnheim, and after twenty-six days' suffering he died. In his last hours he asked that the Arcadia, which had hitherto only circulated in manu script, might be burnt, but found in literary study and composition solace in his final sufferings. The States-General— the Dutch Government— begged the honour of according the hero burial within their own dominions, but the request was refused, and some
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 149
months later he was buried in great state in that old St. Paul's Cathedral — the church of the nation — which was burnt down in the great fire of 1666.
Rarely has a man been more sympathetically mourned. Months afterwards Londoners refused to wear gay apparel. The Queen, though she shrewdly
complained that Sidney invited death by
' ' mourning.
his rashness, was overwhelmed with grief. Students of both Oxford and Cambridge Universities published ample collections of elegies in honour of one who served with equal zeal Mars and Apollo. Fully two hundred poems were written in his memory at the time. Of these by far the finest is Spenser's pathetic lament ' Astrophel, a Pastoral Elegy,' where the personal fascination of his character receives especially touching recognition : —
' He grew up fast in goodness and in grace, And doubly fair wox both in mind and face, Which daily more and more he did augment, With gentle usage and demeanour mild : That all mens hearts with secret ravishment He stole away, and weetingly beguiled. Ne spite itself, that all good things doth spill, Found aught in him, that she could say was ill.'
'Astrophel,' I. 17.
XII
Sidney's career was, to employ his own words, ' meetly furnished of beautiful parts.' It displayed ' many things tasting of a noble birth, and worthy of a noble mind.' Yet his achievements, whether ^ s
in life or literature, barely justify the passion ate eulogy which they won from contemporaries. In
15o SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
none of his endeavours did he win a supreme triumph. His friend, Gabriel Harvey, after eulogising his ripe judgment in many callings, somewhat conventionally declared that 'his sovereign profession was arms.' There is small ground for the statement. Sidney's fame owes more to the fascination of his chivalric personality and quick intelligence, and to the pathos of his early death, than to his greatness in any profession, whether in war or politics or poetry.
In practical life his purpose was transparently honest. He showed a boy-like impatience of the temporising habit of contemporary statesmanship, but there was a lack of balance in his constitution which gave small assurance of ability to control men or to mould the course of events. The catastrophe at Zutphen tempts
one to exclaim :
' 'Twas not a life, 'Twas but a piece of childhood thrown away.'
To literature he exhibited an eager and an ardent devotion. The true spirit of poetry touched his being, His but he rarely abandoned himself to its
literary finest frenzies. It was on experiments in work. forms of literary art, which foreign masters
had taught him, that he expended most of his energy. Only in detached lyrics, which may be attributed to his latest years, did he free himself from the restraints of study and authority. Only once and again as in his great dirge beginning :
4 Ring out your bells ! Let mourning shows be spread, For love is dead,'
did he wing his flight fearlessly in the purest air of the poetic firmament. Elsewhere his learning tends to
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. i5l
obscure his innate faculty. Despite his poetic en thusiasm and passionate idealism, there is scarcely a sonnet in the famous sequence inscribed by Astrophel to Stella which does not illustrate an 'alacrity in sinking.'
But no demerits were recognised in Sidney by his contemporaries. He was, in the obsolete terminology of his admiring friend, Gabriel Harvey, 'the secretary of eloquence, the breath of the Muses, the honey bee of the daintiest flowers of wit and art, the pith of moral and intellectual virtues, the arm of Bellona in the field, the tongue of Suada in the chamber, the spirit of practice in esse, and the paragon of excellency in print.'* His literary work, no less than his life, magnetised the age His example fired scores of Elizabethans to pen long sequences of sonnets in that idealistic tone of his, which itself reflected the temper of Petrarch and influence Ronsard. His massive romance of Arcadia of the appealed to contemporary taste despite its Arcadia, confusions, and was quickly parent of a long line of efforts in fiction which exaggerated its defects. Eliza bethan dramatists attempted to adapt episodes of Sidney's fiction to the stage. Shakespeare himself based on Sidney's tale of 'an unkind king' the incident of Gloucester and his sons in King Lear. It was not only at home that his writings won the honour of imitation. The fame of the Arcadia spread to foreign countries.' Seventeenth-century France welcomed it in translations as warmly as the original was welcomed in England.
It was indeed by very slow degrees that the Arcadia was dethroned either at home or abroad. In the eighteenth century it had its votaries still. Richardson * Pierces Supererogation, etc.
152 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
borrowed the name of Pamela from one of Sidney's princesses. Cowper hailed with delight ' those Arcadian scenes' sung by 'a warbler of poetic prose.' But the revolt against the predominance of Sidney's romance could not then be long delayed. English fiction of ordered insight was coming into being. The Arcadia, which defied so much of the reality of life, could not breathe the true atmosphere, and it was relegated to obscurity. Historically it remains a monument of deep interest to literary students, but its chief attraction is now that of a curious effigy ; the breath of life has fled from it.
Yet, despite the ephemeral character of the major part of Sidney's labours, the final impression that* his The final brief career left on the imagination of his impression countrymen was lasting. He still lives in the of his life national memory as the Marcellus — the earli- and work. est Marcellus of English literature. After two centuries the poet Shelley gave voice to a faith, almost universal among Englishmen, that his varied deeds, his gentle nature, and his early death had robed him in 'dazzling immortality.' In Shelley's ethereal fancy —
' Sidney, as he fought
And as he fell, and as he lived and loved,
Sublimely mild, a spirit without spot,'
was among the first of the inheritors of unfulfilled re nown to welcome to their thrones in the empyrean the youngest of the princes of poetry, John Keats.
IV
SIR WALTER RALEGH
' O what a noble mind is here o'erthrown ! The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword, The expectancy and rose of the fair state . . . The observed of all observers, quite, quite down ! '
SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet, in. i. 159-162.
[BIBLIOGRAPHY.— By fat the best biography of Relegh is Sir Walter Ralegh ; a biography, by Mr. William Stebbing, Oxford, 1891. His letters may be studied in the second of the two volumes of the ' Life,' by Edward Edwards, 1868. The chief collection of his works in prose and verse was published at Oxford in eight volumes in 1829. The best edition of his poetry is ' The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh and other courtly poets, collected and authenticated, by John Hannah, D.C.L. (Aldine Edition), London, 1885.' The most characteristic of his shorter prose writings, his Discovery of Guiana, is published in Cassells' National Library (No. 67).]
THE primary cause of colonial expansion lies in the natural ambition of the healthy human intellect to ex tend its range of vision and knowledge. primary Curiosity, the inquisitive desire to come to cause of close quarters with what is out of sight, colonial primarily accounts for the passion for travel expansion, and for exploration whence colonial movements spring.
154 SIR WALTER RALEGH.
Intellectual activity is the primary cause of the colonis ing instinct.
But the colonising, the exploring spirit, when once it has come into being, is invariably stimulated and kept Three anve by at ^east three secondary causes, secondary which are sometimes mistaken for the pri- causes. mary. In them good and bad are much tangled. ' The web of our life,' says Shakespeare, ' is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.' Of a very mingled yarn is the web of which colonial effort is woven.
The intellectual desire to know more about the world than is possible to one who is content to pass his life in his native district or land is commonly stim ulated, in the first place, by the hope of gam. '. r T • • ,
improving one s material condition, by the
expectation of making more money than were likely otherwise. Evil lurks in this expectation; it easily degenerates into greed of gain, into the passion for gold.
The desire for foreign exploration, too, is invigorated by impatience of that restraint which law or custom
imposes on an old country, by the hope of Passion for ,., , : , , f
liberty greater liberty and personal independence.
This hope may tempt to moral ruin ; it may issue in the practice of licentious lawlessness.
Then there emerges a third motive — the love of mas tery, the love of exercising authority over peoples of inferior civilisation or physical development mastery ^e l°ve of mastery is capable alike of bene fiting and of injuring humanity. If it be exercised prudently, it may serve to bring races, which would otherwise be excluded, within the pale of a higher
SIR WALTER RALEGH. 155
civilisation ; but if it be exercised imprudently, it sinks to tyranny and cruelty.
The passion for mastery, the passion for gold, and the passion for freedom, have all stimulated colonising energy with mingled results. When the three passions are restrained by the moral sense, colonising energy works for the world's advantage ; the good prepon derates. Wherever the moral sense proves too weak to control the three perilous passions, colonising energy connotes much moral and physical evil.
Great colonising effort, which has its primary source in intellectual curiosity, is an invariable characteristic of eras like the era of the Renaissance, when Great man's intellect is working, whether for good colonising or ill, with exceptional energy. The Greeks epochs, and Romans were great colonisers at the most enlight ened epochs of their history. In modern Europe voyages of discovery were made by sailors of the Italian Republics, of the Spanish peninsula, and of France, when the spirit of the Renaissance was winging amongst them its highest flight.
At first the maritime explorers of Southern Europe confined their efforts to the coast of Africa, especially to the west coast. Then they passed to -phe the East — to India, at first by way of the Western Red Sea, and afterwards round the Cape of Hemi- Good Hope, and through the Indian Ocean. sPhere- Nothing yet was known of the Western Hemisphere. It was a sanguine hope of reaching India by a new and
156 SIR WALTER RALEGH.
direct route through western seas that led to the great discovery of the Continent of America.
Columbus, its discoverer, was a native of the Italian Republic of Genoa, a city distinguished by the feverish Columbus's energy with which its inhabitants welcomed discovery, new ideas that were likely to increase men's 1492. material prosperity. It was in August 1492
— when sailing under the patronage of the greatest sovereigns that filled the throne of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, on what he believed would prove a new route to the Indies — that Columbus struck land in what he called, and in what we still call, the West Indies. He made two voyages to the West Indies before he passed further west and touched the mainland, which turned out to be South America.
England, under the intellectual stimulus of the Renais sance, somewhat lagged behind Spain in the exploration England °^ tne Western Seas. Yet colonial expan- and the sion loomed on England's horizon when the New English Renaissance was coming to birth at
World- the end of the fifteenth century. Like Spain, England owed its first glimpse of the New World to the courage of an Italian sailor.
At the time that Columbus set forth to discover the West Indies, John Cabot, also a native of energetic Genoa, was settled at Bristol in England, and was a pilot of that port. Just before Columbus sighted the main land of South America, Cabot sighted the mainland of North America. Columbus and Cabot flourished at the end of the fifteenth century — in Sir Thomas More's youth. The work which they inaugurated was steadily carried forward throughout the sixteenth century, and its progress was watched with a restless ecstasy.
SIR WALTER RALEGH. 157
The division of labour in exploring the new conti nent, which was faintly indicated by the two directions which Cabot and Columbus took respectively North and to North and South, was broadly adopted in South the century that followed by sailors starting America, respectively from English and Spanish harbours. Span iards continued to push forward their explorations in South America, or in the extreme south of the northern continent. Englishmen by no means left South America undisturbed, but they laid the foundations of their greatest victories for the future in the northern division of the new continent. Spain and England came to be strenuous rivals as colonisers of the Western Hemi sphere. In the end, South America became for the most part a Spanish settlement ; North America became for the most part an English settlement.
The knowledge that a New World was opening to the Old, hardly proved so sharp a spur to the average imagination in England as in other countries America of Western Europe. Yet it contributed to and new the formation among the more enlightened ideals. Englishmen of a new ideal of life ; it gave birth in their minds to the notion that humanity had in its power to begin at will existence afresh, could free itself in due season from the imperfections of the Old World. Within very few years of the discovery of America, Sir Thomas More described, as we have seen, that ideal state which he located in the new hemisphere, that ideal state upon which he bestowed the new name of 'Utopia.' Sir Thomas More's romance of Utopia is not merely a literary masterpiece ; it is also a convincing testimony to the stirring effects on English genius of the discovery of an unknown, an untrodden world.
I58 SIR WALTER RALEGH.
But the discovery of America brought of necessity in its train to England, no less than to other countries, the Material- less elevated sentiments which always dog istic the advances of exploration. The spirit of
influences. English exploration was not for long un- coloured by greed of gain. Licence and oppression darkened its development. But the vague immensity of the opportunities opened by the sudden expansion of the earthly planet filled Englishmen with a ' wild surmise ' which, if it could not kill, could check the growth of active evil. England's colonial aspirations of the sixteenth century never wholly lost their first savour of idealism.
In Elizabethan England a touch of philosophy tinged the spirit of adventure through all ranks of the nation. The Men were ambitious, Shakespeare tells us,
spirit of to see the wonders of the world abroad in adventure, order to enlarge their mental horizons. They lavished their fortunes and their energies in discovering islands far away, in the interests of truth. The intel lectual stir which moved his being impelled Sir Philip Sidney, the finest type of the many-sided culture of the day, to organise colonial exploration, although he died too young to engage in it actively. The unrest which drove men to cross the ocean and seek settlement in territory that no European foot had trodden was identi fied with resplendent virtue. Such was the burden of Drayton's ode ' To the Virginian Voyage ' : —
1 You brave heroic minds, Worthy your country's name, That honour still pursue, Whilst loitering hinds Lurk here at home with shame, Go, and subdue.
SIR WALTER RALEGH. 159
Britons, you stay too long ; Quickly aboard bestow you, And with a merry gale Swell your stretched sail, With vows as strong As the winds that blow you.
Englishmen of mettle were expected to seek at all hazards earth's paradise in America. Not only was the New World credited with unprecedented fertility, but the laws of nature were believed to keep alive there a golden age in perpetuity.
These fine aspirations were never wholly extinguished, although there lurked behind them the hope that an age of gold in a more material and literal sense imaginary than philosophers conceived might ultimately age of reward the adventurers. The Elizabethans gold, were worldly-minded enough to judge idealism alone an unsafe foundation on which to rear a colonial empire. 1 For I am not so simple,' said an elderly advocate of colonial enterprise who fully recognised in idealism a practical safeguard against its degradation, ' I am not so simple to think that any other motive than wealth will ever erect in the New World a commonwealth, or draw a company from their ease and humour at home to settle [in colonial plantations].'
The popular play called Eastward Ho! published early in the seventeenth century, reviewed at the close of the epoch of the English Renaissance all the prevailing incitements to colonial expansion. The language is curiously reminiscent of a passage in Sir Thomas More's Utopia, and illustrates the per manence of the hold that idealism in the sphere of colonial experiment maintained in the face of all
160 SIR WALTER RALEGH.
challenges over the mind of sixteenth-century English men.
In the play an ironical estimate was given of the wealth that was expected to lie at the disposal of all comers to the New World. Infinite treasure was stated to lie at the feet of any one who cared to come and pick it up. Gold was alleged by the dramatist to be more plentiful in America than copper in Europe ; the natives used household utensils of pure gold ; the chains which hung on the posts in the streets were of massive gold ; prisoners were fettered in gold ; and ' for rubies and diamonds,' declares the satiric playwright, ' the Ameri cans go forth on holidays and gather them by the sea shore, to hang on their children's coats, and stick in their caps, as commonly as our children in England wear saffron gilt brooches and groats with holes in them.'
At the same time the dramatist recognised that the
passion for moral perfection remained an efficient factor
in colonising enterprise. He claimed for the
new country that public morality had reached
there a pitch never known in England. No
office was procurable except through merit ; corruption
in high places was unheard of. The New World offered
infinite scope for the realisation of perfection in human
affairs.
in
The mingled motive of sixteenth-century colonial enterprise is best capable of realisation in the career of a typical Elizabethan — Sir Walter Ralegh. The char acter and achievements of Ralegh, alike in their defects
SIR WALTER RALEGH. 161
and merits, sound more forcibly than those of any other the whole gamut of Renaissance feeling and aspiration in Elizabethan England. His Raiegha versatile exploits in action and in con- type of templation — in life and literature — are a Elizabethan microcosm of the virtues and the vices versatllity- which the Renaissance bred in the Elizabethan mind and heart.
Ralegh as a boy was an . enthusiast for the sea. He was a native of Devonshire, whence many sailors have come. Sir Francis Drake, the greatest of Elizabethan maritime explorers, was also a j-. , Devonshire man. It was he who first reached the Isthmus of Panama, and, first of English men to look on the Pacific Sea beyond, besought Al mighty God of His kindness to give him life and leave to sail an English ship once in that sea. That hope he realised six years later when he crossed the Pacific, touched at Java, and came home by way of the Cape of Good Hope. Drake's circumnavigation of the globe was the mightiest exploit of any English explorer of the Elizabethan era.
Only second to Drake as a maritime explorer was Sir Humphrey Gilbert, also a Devonshire man, who in 1583 in the name of Queen Elizabeth took posses- R . , , sion of Newfoundland, the oldest British j^f. colony. This Sir Humphrey Gilbert was brother, Ralegh's elder half-brother, for they were Sir sons of the same mother, who married twice. Humphrey Her first husband, Sir Humphrey's father, was Otho Gilbert, who lived near Dartmouth. Her second husband, who was Ralegh's father, was a country gentleman living near Budleigh Salterton, where Ralegh
6
162 SIR WALTER RALEGH.
was born about 1552, some two years before Sir Philip Sidney.
Gilbert was Ralegh's senior by thirteen years, and like him Ralegh obtained his first knowledge of the sea on the Infancy beach of his native place. The broad Devon- and shire accent, in which he always spoke, he
education, probably learnt from Devonshire sailors. His intellect was from youth exceptionally alert. Vigorous as was always his love of outdoor life, it never absorbed him. With it there went a passion for books, an ad mirable combination, the worth of which was never better illustrated than in the life and letters of the Renaissance.
After spending a little time at Oxford, and also study ing law in London — study that did not serve him in life very profitably — Ralegh followed the fashion among young Elizabethans and went abroad to enjoy experi ence of military service.
IV
Englishmen were then of a more aggressive temper than they think themselves to be now. The new Prot estant religion, which rejected the ancient with'spain domination °f tne Papacy, had created a militant spiritual energy in the country. That spiritual energy, combining with the new physical and intellectual activity bred of the general awakening of the Renaissance, made it almost a point of conscience for a young Elizabethan Protestant in vigorous health to measure swords with the rival Catholic power of Spain. As Sir Philip Sidney realised, Spain and England had divided interests at every point. Spain had been first in the field in the exploration of the New World, and
SIR WALTER RALEGH. 163
was resolved to spend its energy in maintaining exclu sive mastery of its new dominion. Spain was the fore most champion of the religious ideals of Rome. Pacific persuasion and argument were not among the prosely tising weapons in her religious armoury. She was bent on crushing Protestantism by force of arms. She lent her aid to the French Government to destroy the Protestant movement in France which the
Huguenots had organised there. She em- J5^!11 *,n
... Holland,
barked on a long and costly struggle in her
own territory of the Low Countries in Holland to suppress the Dutch champions of the Reformed religion, whose zeal for active resistance was scarcely ever equalled by a Protestant people.
Naturally Ralegh at an early age sought an oppor tunity of engaging in the fray. He found his earliest mili tary experiences in fighting in the ranks of the Huguenots in France. Then he crossed F ** the French territory on the North to offer his sword to the Dutch Protestants, who were struggling to free themselves from Spanish tyranny and Spanish superstition in the Low Countries.
But it was in the New World that Spain was making the most imposing advance. Spanish pretensions in Europe could only be effectually checked if His first the tide of Spanish colonisation of the New conflict World were promptly stemmed. Ralegh with Spain, was filled to overflowing with the national jealousy of Spain, and with contempt for what he deemed her religious obscurantism. His curiosity was stirred by rumours of the wonders across the seas, where Spain claimed sole dominion. Consequently his eager gaze was soon fixed on the New Continent.
164 SIR WALTER RALEGH.
At twenty-six, after gaining experience of both peace and war in Europe, he joined his half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, in a first expedition at sea, on a voyage of discovery. He went as far as the West Indies. With the Spaniards who had already settled there inevitable blows were exchanged. But Ralegh's first conflict with the arch enemy was a drawn battle. He was merely prospecting the ground, and the venture bore no immediate fruit.
During a succeeding season he exhausted some of his superabundant energy in a conflict nearer home. In
Ireland, England was engaged in her unend- In Ireland. . , . , , P ! , . _
ing struggle with the native population. On
Ralegh's return from the West Indies he enlisted, with a view to filling an idle hour, in the Irish wars. The situation was not hopeful, and his mind was too busy with larger projects to lead him to grapple with it seri ously. Ireland appeared to him to be 'a lost land,' 'a common woe, rather than a commonwealth.' But its regeneration seemed no work for his own hand. He gained, however, a great material advantage from his casual intervention in the affairs of the country. There was granted to him a great tract of confiscated land in the South of Ireland, some forty thousand acres in what are now the counties Waterford and Cork. The princely estate stretched for many miles inland from the coast at Youghal along the picturesque banks on both sides of the river Blackwater in Munster.
The soil was for the most part wild land overgrown with long grass and brambles, but Ralegh acquired with the demesne a famous house and garden near Youghal which was known as Myrtle Grove, and he afterwards built a larger mansion at Lismore. There he spent
SIR WALTER RALEGH. 165
much leisure later, and both houses are of high biographic interest. It was not, however, the puzzling problems of Irish politics which occupied Ralegh's attention, while he dwelt on Irish soil. He formed no opinions of his own on Irish questions. He accepted the conventional English view. For the native population he cherished the English planters' customary scorn. He did not hesi tate to recommend their removal by means of ' practices,' which were indistinguishable from plots of assassination. But politics were not the interests which he cultivated in the distracted country. He devoted his energies there to the pacific pursuits of poetry and of gardening, and to social intercourse with congenial visitors.
The passion for colonisation, for colonisation of terri tory further afield than Munster, was the dominant in fluence on Ralegh's mind. It was his half-brother Gilbert's discovery of Newfoundland, and the grant to Gilbert of permission to take, in the Queen's name, possession of an almost infinite area of unknown land on the North American Continent, that led to the epi sode which gave Ralegh his chief claim to renown in
the history of the English Colonies. Gilbert's , . i j u j Gilbert's
ship was wrecked ; he was drowned on return- death jrg,
ing from Newfoundland, and the Queen was thereupon induced to transfer to Ralegh most of the privileges she had granted to his half-brother. The opportunity was one of dazzling promise. Ralegh at once fitted out an expedition to undertake the explora tion which Gilbert's death had interrupted.
166 SIR WALTER RALEGH.
But Ralegh had meanwhile become a favourite of the Queen.* He had exerted on her all his charm of man- Ralegh ner and °f speech. He had practised to the and Queen full those arts familiar to all the courts of the Elizabeth. Renaissance which gave a courtier's adulation of his prince the tone of amorous passion. In the ab sence of ' his Love's Queen ' or of ' the Goddess of his life' Ralegh declared himself, with every figurative ex travagance, to live in purgatory or in hell ; in her presence alone was he in paradise. Elizabeth rejoiced in the lover-like attentions that Ralegh paid her. She affected to take him at his word. His flatteries were interpreted more literally than he could have wished. She refused to permit her self-styled lover to leave her side. He was ordered to fix his residence at the court. Reluctantly Ralegh yielded to the command of his exacting mistress. The expedition that he fitted out to North America left without him.
Ralegh's agents, after a six weeks' sail, landed on what is now North Carolina, probably on the island of Roa- noke. The reports of the mariners were highly favour-
* The well-known story that Ralegh first won the Queen's favour by placing his cloak over a muddy pool in her path is not traceable to any earlier writer than Fuller, who in his Worthies, first published in 1662, wrote : ' Captain Raleigh coming out of Ireland to the English court in good habit (his clothes being then a considerable part of his estate) found the queen walking, till meet ing with a plashy place, she seemed to scruple going thereon. Presently Raleigh cast and spread his new plush cloak on the ground ; whereon the queen trod gently, rewarding him afterwards with many suits, for his so free and seasonable tender of so fair a foot cloth. Thus an advantageous admission into the first notice of a prince is more than half a degree to preferment.' The inci dent was carefully elaborated by Sir Walter Scott in his novel Kenil-worth, chap. xv.
SIR WALTER RALEGH. 167
able. A settlement, they declared, might readily be made. At length Englishmen might inhabit the New
World. The notion presented itself to _. ,,,.,.., ~ . Virginia.
Ralegh s mind to invite the Queen s permis sion to bestow on this newly discovered territory, which was to be the corner-stone of a British colonial empire, a name that should commemorate his fealty to the virgin Queen, the name of ' Virginia.' It was a compliment that the Queen well appreciated at her favourite's hand. It gave her a lease of fame which the soil of England alone could not secure for her. For many years after wards all the seaboard from Florida to Newfoundland was to bear that designation of Virginia. It was a desig nation which linked the first clear promise of the coloni sation by Englishmen of the North American Continent with the name of the greatest of English queens.
Ralegh's project of planting a great English colony in North America had arisen in many other minds before it took root in his. He had heard, while fighting with the Huguenots in France, of their hopes of founding in North America a new France, where they should be free from the persecution of the Roman Catholic Govern ment. He had studied the ambitious designs of Coligny, the leader of the French Huguenots, and the tragic fail ure which marked the first attempt of Frenchmen to colonise North America. It was probably this know ledge that fired Ralegh's ambition to make of Virginia a New England. In that hope he did not himself suc ceed, but his failure was due to no lack of zeal. Two
years after he had received the report of his
~ .... ,,..,,. Grenville s
first expedition, he sent out his cousin, Sir exped;tjon
Richard Grenville, with a band of colonists
whom he intended to settle permanently in his country of
168 SIR WALTER RALEGH.
Virginia. But difficulties arose which baffled his agent's powers. There were desperate quarrels between the settlers and natives. Food was scanty. The forces of nature conquered the settlers. Most of them were rescued from peril of death and carried home a year later by Sir Francis Drake. Ralegh was not daunted by such disasters. He refused to abandon his aim. Further batches of colonists were sent out by him in later years at his expense. The results of these expedi tions did not, however, bring him appreciably nearer success. Mystery overhangs the fate of some of these earliest English settlers in America, Ralegh's pioneers of the British empire. They were either slain or ab solved past recognition by the native peoples. In 1587, one band of Ralegh's emigrants, consisting of eighty-nine men, seventeen women, and two children, were left in Virginia, while their leaders came home for supplies, but when these emissaries arrived again in the new con tinent, the settlers had all disappeared. What became of them has never been known.
Ralegh was never in his life in Virginia. He was never near its coast-line. His project, the fruit of Ralegh's idealism, was not pursued with much regard relations for practical realisation. The difficulty of with settling a new country with Europeans he
Virginia. hardly appreciated. He is reckoned to have spent forty thousand pounds in money of his own day — about a quarter of a million pounds of our own currency — in his efforts to colonise Virginia. So long as he was a free man his enthusiasm for his scheme never waned, and he faced his pecuniary losses with cheerfulness. Despite his failures and disappointments, his costly and persistent efforts to colonise Virginia are the starting-
SIR WALTER RALEGH. 169
point of the history of English colonisation. To him more than to any other man belongs the credit of in dicating the road to the formation of a greater England beyond the seas.
Two subsidiary results of those early expeditions to Virginia which Ralegh organised, illustrate the minor modifications of an old country's material The potato economy that may spring from colonial enter- and prise. His sailors brought back two new tobacco, products which were highly beneficial to Great Britain and Ireland, especially to Ireland. Englishmen and Irishmen owe to Ralegh's exertions their practical ac quaintance with the potato and with tobacco. The potato he planted on his estates in Ireland, and it has proved of no mean service alike to that country and to England. Tobacco he learnt to smoke, and taught the art to others.
Tobacco-smoking, which revolutionised the habits, at any rate, of the masculine portion of European society, is one of the striking results of the first ex- Spread of periments in colonial expansion. The magi- tobacco- cal rapidity with which the habit of smoking smoking, spread, especially in Elizabethan England, was a singular instance of the adaptability of Elizabethan society to new fashions. The practice of tobacco-smoking became at a bound a well-nigh universal habit. Camden, the his torian of the epoch, wrote a very few years after the return of Ralegh's agents from Virginia that since their home-coming 'that Indian plant called Tobacco, or Nicotiana, is grown so frequent in use, and of such price, that many, nay, the most part, with an unsatiable desire do take of it, drawing into their mouth the smoke thereof, which is of a strong scent, through a pipe made
170 SIR WALTER RALEGH.
of earth, and venting of it again through their nose; some for wantonness, or rather fashion sake, or other for health sake. Insomuch that Tobacco shops are set up in greater number than either Alehouses or Taverns.' *
VI
In more imposing ways Ralegh's early endeavours bore fruit while he lived. Early in the seventeenth Captain century Captain John Smith, a born traveller, John considered somewhat more fully and more
Smith in cautiously than Ralegh the colonising prob- Virginia. jem> an(j reached a workable solution. In 1606 Smith took out to Virginia 105 emigrants, to the banks of the James river in Virginia. His colonists met, like Ralegh's colonists, with perilous vicissitudes, but the experiment had permanent results. Before Ralegh's death he had the satisfaction of learning that another leader's colonising energy had triumphed over the obstacles that dismayed himself, and the seed that he had planted had fructified.
Smith was a harder-headed man of the world than Ralegh. Idealism was not absent from his tempera- Colonial ment, but it was of coarser texture, and was philosophy capable of answering to a heavier strain. It of Ralegh's was stoutly backed by a rough practical sense, disciples. jje ^QQ^ ^ woric of colonising to be a pro fession or handicraft worthy of any amount of energy. He preached the useful lesson that settlers in a new country must work laboriously with their hands. His views echo those of his far-seeing contemporary, Bacon,
* Camden, Annales, 1625, Bk. 3, p. 107.
SIR WALTER RALEGH. 171
who compressed into his Essay on Plantations the finest practical wisdom about colonisation that is likely to be met with. There must be no drones among colonists is the view of Bacon and Captain John Smith ; the scum of the people should never be permitted to engage in colonial enterprise ; there should not be too much moil ing underground in search of mines ; there should be no endeavour to win profit hastily and inconsiderately ; the native races should be treated justly and graciously. ' Do not entertain savages, 'Bacon wrote, 'with trifles and gingles, but show them grace and justice, taking reasonable precautions against their attacks, but not seeking the favour of any one tribe amongst them by inciting it to attack another tribe.' Above all, it was the duty of a mother-country to promote the permanence and prosperity of every colonial settlement which had been formed with her approval. ' It is the sinfullest thing in the world to for sake or destitute a plantation once in forwardness. For, beside the dishonour, it is the guiltiness of blood of many commiserable persons.'
It was colonisation conceived on these great lines that Captain John Smith, Ralegh's disciple, carried out in practice with a fair measure of success. His Captain idealism was not of the tender kind which John enfeebled his working methods, but it flashed Smith's forth with brilliant force in the prophetic views- energy with which he preached the value of a colonial outlet to the surplus population of an old country. 'What so truly suits with honour and honesty as the discovering of things unknown, erecting towns, peo pling countries, informing the ignorant, reforming things unjust, teaching virtue, and to gain our native mother-
172 SIR WALTER RALEGH.
country a kingdom to attend her, to find employment for those that are idle because they know not what to do?'
VII
The rivalry between Spain and England which was largely the result of the simultaneous endeavour to The colonise the newly - discovered countries
Spanish reached its climax in 1588, when Spain made Armada. a mighty effort to crush English colonial enterprise at its fountain-head by equipping a great fleet to conquer and annex the island of Britain itself. Ralegh naturally took part in resisting the great expedi tion of the Spanish Armada, and contributed to the defeat of that magnificently insolent effort. He does not seem to have taken a very prominent part in active hostilities, but he did useful work ; he helped to organise the victory. When the danger was past he was anxious to pursue the offensive with the utmost vigour and to forward attacks on Spain in all parts of the world. Her dominion of the Western oceans must be broken if Eng land was to secure a colonial empire. Others for the moment took more active part than Ralegh in giving effect to the policy of aggression. But in 1592 an ex pedition under his control captured a great Spanish vessel homeward bound from the East Indies with a cargo of the estimated value of upwards of half a million sterling.
Ralegh had ventured his own money on the expedi tion, and was awarded a share of the plunder, but it was something less than that to which he thought himself entitled, and he did not dissemble his annoyance.
SIR WALTER RALEGH. 173
Ralegh was masterful and assertive in intercourse with professional colleagues of his own rank. His colonis ing idealism was not proof against the strain Ralegh's of idly watching others reap from active par- hopes of ticipation in the great struggle with Spain a Sain- larger personal reward than himself. Desire for wealth grew upon him as the passions of youth cooled, and the hope that some of the profits which Spain had acquired from her settlements in. the New World might fill his own coffers besieged his brain. Anxiety to make out of an energetic pursuit of colonisation a mighty fortune, was coming into conflict with the elevated aspirations of early days. The vehement struggle of vice and virtue for mastery over men's souls, which characterised the Elizabethan age in a greater degree than any other age, was seeking a battle-ground in Ralegh's spirit.
Ralegh shared that versatility of interest and capacity which infected the enlightenment of the era. Like his great contemporaries, his energy never al- intellectual lowed him to confine his aims to any one pursuits branch of effort. Interest in literature and and philosophy was intertwined with his interest sympathies, in the practical affairs of life, and he had at command many avenues of escape from life's sordid temptations. The range of his speculative instinct was not limited by the material world. It was not enough for him to dis cover new countries or new wealth. He was ambitious to discover new truths of religion, of philosophy, of poetry. No man cherished a more enthusiastic or more disinterested affection for those who excelled in intel lectual pursuits. No man was more generous in praise of contemporary poets, or better proved in word and deed his sympathy with the noblest aspirations of con-
i74 SIR WALTER RALEGH.
temporary literature. From the early days of his career in Ireland he was the intimate associate of Spenser, who held civil office there, and lived in his neighbourhood. Spenser, the great poet and moralist, who in his age was second in genius only to the master poet, Shakespeare, was proud of the friendship. With characteristic ambi tion to master all branches of intellectual energy, Ralegh emulated his friend and neighbour in writing poetry. His success was para doxically great. His poetry breathes a lyric fervour which is not out of harmony with his disposition, but its frequent tone of placid meditation seems far removed from the stormy temper of his life. The most irrepress ible of talkers, when speech was injurious to his own interests, he preached in verse more than once the virtues of silence :
' Passions are likened best to flood and streams ;
The shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb ; So when affections yield discourse, it seems
The bottom is but shallow whence they come. They that are rich in words, in words discover That they are poor in that which makes a lover,'
Amid the rush and turmoil of politics and of warfare which absorbed the major part of his activity, Ralegh never for long abandoned
' Those clear wells Where sweetness dwells,'
— the sweetness of philosophy, poetry, history, and all the pacific arts that can engage the mind of man. Poetry was only one of many interests in the literary sphere. He loved to gather round him the boldest intellects of
SIR WALTER RALEGH. 175
his day, and, regardless of consequences, frankly to discuss with them the mysteries of existence. Marlowe, the founder of English tragedy, the tutor of Shakespeare, was his frequent companion. They debated together the evidences of Christianity, and reached the perilous conclusion that they were founded on sand. He was a member, too, of one of the earliest societies or clubs of Antiquaries in England, and surveyed the progress of civilisation in England from very early times. He caught light and heat from intercourse with all classes of men to whom things of the mind appealed. To him, tradition assigns the first invention of those famous meetings of men of letters which long digni- Meetings fied the ' Mermaid ' Tavern in Bread Street at the in the City of London. Credible tradition 'Mermaid.' asserts that those meetings were attended by Shake speare, Ben Jonson, and all the literary masters of the time; that there stimulating wit was freer than air. Genius encountered genius, each in its gayest humour. The spoken words were
' So nimble, and so full of subtle flame, As if that every one from whence they came Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, And had resolved to live a fool the rest Of his dull life.'
No part of Ralegh's life could be dull. All parts of it were full of ' subtle flame.' But that flame was destined to burn itself out far away from the haunts of his com rades of the pen.
176 SIR WALTER RALEGH.
VIII
Ralegh's versatility, the free unfettered play of his fertile thought, distinguishes him even among Eliza bethan Englishmen, and lends his biography the strangest mingling of light and shadow. His tireless speculative ambition manifested itself in the most im posing practical way when he was about forty years old. Self-contradiction was inherent in his acts. Despite his reverence for the triumph of the intellect, the affairs of the world were ever under his eager observation. Ripen ing experience deepened the conviction that gold was the pivot on which human affairs mainly revolved, and that he who commanded untold sources of wealth could gratify all human desires. The opportunity of making such a conquest suddenly seemed to present itself to Ralegh. His poetic imagination made him credulous. He resolved on a pilgrimage to a fabulous city, where endless treasure awaited the victorious invader.
Reports had been spread in Spain of the existence of a city of fabulous wealth in South America to which had El D d Deen given the Spanish name of ' El Dorado.' Its location was vaguely defined. It was stated to be in the troublous country that we now know as Venezuela, which is itself part of the wider territory called by geographers Guiana. The rumour fired Ralegh's brain. The ambition to investigate its truth proved irresistible. Hurriedly he sent out an agent to inquire into the story on what was thought to be the spot, but the messenger brought him no informa tion of importance. Vicarious inquiry proved of no avail. At length in 1595 Ralegh went out himself. He infected his friends with his own sanguine expecta-
SIR WALTER RALEGH. 177
tion. He succeeded in enlisting the sympathy or ma terial support of the chief ministers of state. He obtained a commission from the Queen permitting him to wage war if necessary upon the Spaniard and the native American in South America. No risk was too great to be run in such a quest. The exploit which was to provide endless peril and excitement was the turning- point of Ralegh's career.
Without delay Ralegh reached Trinidad, a Spanish settlement. From the first active hostilities had to be faced. Little resistance was offered, how- The ever, at Trinidad, and Ralegh took prisoner expedition the Spanish governor, who proved a most to Guiana, amiable gentleman. The governor freely told Ralegh all he knew of this reputed city or mine of gold on the mainland. A Spanish explorer a few years ago had, it appeared, lived among the natives of Guiana for seven months, and on his death-bed bore witness to a limitless promise of gold near the banks of the great river Orinoco and its tributaries which watered the territory of Guiana.
In April 1595 Ralegh, with a little flotilla of ten boats bearing one hundred men, and provisions for a month, started on his voyage up the river. The equip ment was far from adequate for the stirring enterprise. ' Our vessels,' Ralegh wrote, ' were no other than wherries, one little barge, a small cockboat, and a bad galliota, which we framed in haste for that purpose at Trinidad, and those little boats had nine or ten men apiece with victuals and arms.' They had to row against the stream, which flowed with extraordinary fury; the banks were often covered with thick wood, and floating timber was an ever present danger. De barkation for prospecting purposes was attended with
178 SIR WALTER RALEGH.
the gravest risks. The swiftness of the current often rendered swimming or wading impossible.
The hardships which Ralegh and his companions faced hardly admit of exaggeration. Almost every day they were 'melted with heat in rowing and marching, and suddenly wet again with great showers. They ate of all sorts of corrupt fruit and made meals of fresh fish without season.' They lodged in the open air every night. Not in the filthiest prison in England , could be found men in a more ' unsavory
5 lps' and loathsome ' condition than were Ralegh and his friends while they ran their race for the golden prize. But their spirits never drooped. Their hopes ran high to the end. Ralegh was able in his most desperate straits to note in detail the aspects of nature and the varied scenery that met his gaze. Despite the inhospitable river banks, nature smiled on much of the country beyond. After climbing one notable hill, ' there appeared,' Ralegh wrote with attractive vivacity,
' some ten or twelve waterfalls in sight, every The natural , . , , . , . , . ,
scene one as S above the other as a church
tower, which fell with that fury, that the rebound of waters made it seem as if had been all covered over with a great shower of rain ; and in some places we took it at the first for a smoke that had risen over some great town. For mine own part, I was well persuaded from thence to have returned, being a very ill footman; but the rest were all so desirous to go near the said strange thunder of waters, as they drew me on by little and little, till we came into the next valley, where we might better discern the same. I never saw a more beautiful country, nor more lively prospects, hills so raised here and there over the
SIR WALTER RALEGH. 179
valleys, the river winding into divers branches, the plains adjoining without bush or stubble, all fair green grass, the ground of hard sand, easy to march on either for horse or foot, the deer crossing in every path, the birds towards the evening singing on every tree with a thousand several tunes, cranes and herons of white, crimson, and carnation, perching on the river's side, the air fresh, with a gentle easterly wind; and every stone that we stopped to take up promised either gold or silver by his complexion.'
But Ralegh and his friends had mistaken their route, and were bent on what proved a fool's errand. The golden fleece was unattainable. The promise of the stones on the shores was imperfectly fulfilled. After proceeding four hundred and forty miles up the difficult river, further progress was found impossible. Then Ralegh and his companions went down with the current back to the sea. The ' white spar ' on the river bank, in which appeared to be signs of gold, was all that the travellers brought home. Metallurgists to whom he submitted them, on revisiting London, declared the appearance true.*
* Scoffers freely asserted that the ' white spar,' many tons of which Ralegh brought home with him, was nothing else than ' marcasite ' or iron-pyrites. In the letter to the reader with which he prefaced his Discovery of Guiana Ralegh categorically denied the allegation. He wrote hopefully, ' In London it was first assayed by Master Westwood, a refiner dwelling in Wood Street, and it held after the rate of 12,000 or 13,000 pounds a ton. Another sort was afterwards tried by Master Bulmar and Master Dimoke, assay-master, and it held after the rate of 23,000 pounds a ton. There was some of it again tried by Master Palmer, comptroller of the mint, and Master Dimoke in Goldsmith's hall, and it was held after at the rate of 26,900 pounds a ton. There
i8o SIR WALTER RALEGH.
There is no doubt that Ralegh came near making a great discovery. Little question exists that a great Within g°ld mine lay in Venezuela, not far from reach of the furthest point of his voyage up the river gold. Orinoco. Many years later, during the nine
teenth century, a gold mine was discovered within the range of Ralegh's exploration, and has since been worked to great profit. But the El Dorado which Ralegh thought to grasp had eluded him. It remained for him a dream. Not that he ever wavered in his confident belief that the city of gold existed and was yet to be won. He retired for the time with the resolve to make new advances hereafter. He left behind, with a tribe of friendly natives, 'one Francis Sparrow (a servant of Captain Gifford), who was desirous to tarry, and could describe a country with his pen, and a boy of mine, Hugh Goodwin, to learn the language.'
Affairs at home prevented Ralegh's early return to South America. A new Spanish settlement soon blocked the entrance to the river Orinoco, and the region he had entered was put beyond his reach. A last desperate attempt to force a second passage up the Orinoco brought, as events turned out, Ralegh to the scaffold. He had soared to heights at which he could not sustain his flight.
One result of Ralegh's first experience of the banks of the Orinoco demands a recognition, which requires
was also at the same time, and by the same persons, a trial made of the dust of the said mine, which held eight pounds six ounces weight of gold in the hundred ; there was likewise at the same time a trial made of an image of copper made in Guiana which held a third part gold, besides divers trials made in the country, and by others in London.'
SIR WALTER RALEGH. 181
no apology. His narrative of the expedition — The Discovery of Guiana — ranks with the most vivid pictures of travel. No reader, be he naturalist or geographer or ethnologist, or mere lover of stirring adventure, will turn to the fascinating pages without delight. Literary faculty in a traveller is always re freshing. Few books of travel are more exhilarating or invigorating than this story by Ralegh of his hazard ous voyage.
When Ralegh came back to England from the Orinoco he flung himself with undaunted energy into further conflict with Spain. There were rumours Further of a new Spanish invasion of England, which conflict it was deemed essential to divert by attack- Wlth Spam, ing Spain in her own citadels. Two great expeditions were devised, and in both Ralegh took an active part. He was with the fleet which attacked Cadiz in 1596. Again next year he joined in a strenuous effort to intercept Spanish treasure ships off the Azores. Ralegh worked ill under discipline, and, chiefly owing to his quarrels with his fellow-commanders, the atttempt on the islands of the Atlantic failed. Fortune had never been liberal in the bestowal of her favours on him. At best she had extended to him a cold neutrality. Little of the glory or the gain that came of the last two challenges to Spain fell to Ralegh. Thence forth the fickle goddess assumed an attitude of menace, which could not be mistaken. She became his active and persistent foe.
182 SIR WALTER RALEGH.
IX
Ralegh's later years were dogged' by disaster. With the death of Queen Elizabeth begins the story of his ruin. She had proved no constant mistress, and had at times driven him from her presence. His marriage in 1592 had excited more than the usual measure of royal resentment. But Queen Elizabeth was not ob durate in her wrath. Her favour was never forfeited irrevocably. Ralegh long held the court office of captain of the guard. In her latest years there was renewal of his sovereign's old show of regard for him. She liked to converse with him in private; and the envious declared that she 'took him for a kind of oracle.' To the last he addressed her in those adula tory strains which she loved. During all her reign, adversity had mingled in his lot with prosperity, but prosperity delusively seemed at the close to sway the scales.
A bitter spirit of faction divided Queen Elizabeth's advisers against themselves. Ralegh's hot temper and Ralegh impatience of subordination made him an and Court easy mark for the hatred and uncharitable- factions. ness which the factious atmosphere fostered. The outspoken language which was habitual to him was violently resented by rival claimants to the Queen's favour. With one of these, the Earl of Essex, who was even more self-confident and impetuous than him self, he maintained an implacable feud until the Earl's death on the scaffold. Ralegh had come into conflict with Lord Howard of Effingham, the great admiral of the Armada, and an influential member of the Howard family. The admiral's numerous kindred re-
SIR WALTER RALEGH. 183
garded him with aversion. Sir Robert Cecil, the prin cipal Secretary of State in Queen Elizabeth's last years, who held in his hand all the threads of England's policy, although more outwardly complacent, cherished suspicion of Ralegh. It was only royal favour that had hitherto rendered innocuous the shafts of his foes. Now that that favour was withdrawn Ralegh was to find that he had sown the wind and was to reap the whirlwind. Fortune, wrote a contemporary, 'picked him out of purpose ... to use as her tennis ball;' having tossed him up from nothingness to a point within hail of greatness she then unconcernedly tossed him down again.
Between Ralegh and his new sovereign, James i., little sympathy subsisted. They knew little of one another. To Ralegh's personal enemies at xhe acces- Court James owed the easy road which led sion of to the English throne. Ralegh on purely James i. personal grounds, which court schisms fully account for, abstained from showing enthusiasm for James's accession. He fully recognised the justice of the Scottish monarch's title to the English crown. But he had not pledged himself, like his private foes, in a preliminary correspondence to support the new King actively. By that preliminary correspondence the King set great store. He was not prepossessed in favour of any of Elizabeth's courtiers who had failed before Eliza beth's death to avow in writing profoundest sympathy with his cause.
As soon as James became King of England, Ralegh's position at Court was seen to be insecure. His enemies were favourably placed for avenging any imagined in dignity which his influence with the late sovereign had
184 SIR WALTER RALEGH.
enabled him to inflict on them. He lay at the mercy of factions which were markedly hostile to himself and held the ear of the new sovereign. There was no likelihood that the new wearer of the crown would exert himself to protect him from assault.
At first a comparatively petty disgrace was put on him. He was unceremoniously superseded in his Fabricated court office of captain of the guard, a post charges of which had brought him into much personal treason. contact with the late sovereign. He natu rally resented the affront and showed irritation among his friends. The king's allies found ready means of increasing their own importance and improving their prospects of advancement by drawing to light of day and exaggerating any hasty expression of doubt respect ing James's legal title to the English crown of which they could find evidence. Dishonest agents easily dis torted an inconsiderate word of dissatisfaction with the political situation into deliberate treason. An intricate charge of this character was rapidly devised against Ralegh by his factious foes, and almost without warning he was brought within peril of his life. He was accused on vague hearsay of having joined in a plot to surprise the king's person with a view to his abduction or assassination. It was alleged that he was conspiring to set up another on the throne, to wit, the king's distant cousin, Arabella Stuart. Ralegh was put under arrest. Thoroughly exasperated by the victory which his enemies had won over him, he for the first time in his life lost nerve. He made an abortive attempt at suicide. This rash act was held by his persecutors to attest his guilt. When he was brought to trial at Winchester — the plague in London had compelled the
SIR WALTER RALEGH. 185
Court's migration — all legal forms were pressed against him. In the result he was condemned to a traitor's death (iyth Nov. 1603). His estates were
forfeited, and such offices as he still re- f j '
of death.
tamed were taken from him.
For three weeks Ralegh lay in Winchester Castle in almost daily expectation of the executioner's dread
summons. He sought consolation in litera- „,
, . , . The respite,
tiire, and in letters and in poems addressed
to his wife he sought to reconcile himself to his fate. He made no complaint of his perverse lot. He had drunk deep of life, and was not averse in his passion for new experience to taste death. But James faltered at the last, and hesitated to sign the death-warrant. A month after the trial Ralegh was informed that he was reprieved of the capital punishment. He was to be kept a prisoner in the Tower of London. He was not pardoned, nor was his sentence commuted to any fixed term of confinement. As long as he was alive, it was tacitly assumed by those in high places that liberty would be denied him. It was difficult for one of Ralegh's energy to reconcile himself to the situation. Bondage was for him barely thinkable. Long years of waiting could not vanquish the assured hope that freedom would again be his, and he would carry further the projects that were as yet only half begun.
Ralegh's intellectual activity was invincible, and there he found the main preservative against the numbing despair with which the prison's galling tedium menaced
i86 SIR WALTER RALEGH.
him. He was allowed some special privileges. At first, his lot was alleviated by the companionship of his
wife and sons. Within the precincts of the J1 e Tower and its garden he was apparently
free to move about at will. But he con centrated all his mental strength while in confinement on study — study of exceptionally varied kinds. Litera ture and science divided his allegiance. In a laboratory or still-house which he was allowed to occupy in the
garden of the Tower he carried on a long Scientific e i • i • -\T e
curiosit series of chemical experiments. Many of
his scientific investigations proved successful ; he condensed fresh water from salt, an art which has only been practised generally during the past century. He compounded new drugs against various disorders ; these became popular and were credited with great efficacy. Chemistry, medicine, philosophy, all appealed to his catholic curiosity. Nevertheless his main in tellectual energy was absorbed by literature. The grandeur of human life and aspiration impressed him in his enforced retirement from the world more deeply than when he was himself a free actor on the stage.
He designed a noble contribution to English the World Prose literature, his History of the World.
He set himself the heavy task of surveying minutely and exactly human endeavours in the early days of human experience. He sought to write a history of the five great empires of the East — of Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, and Macedonia. Only a fragment of the work was completed; it broke off abruptly one hundred and thirty years before the Christian era, with the conquest of Macedon by Rome. But Ralegh's achievement is a lasting memo-
SIR WALTER RALEGH. 187
rial of his genius and of the elevated aspect of his career.
Ralegh did not approach a study of history in a strictly critical spirit, and his massive accumulations of facts, which he collected from six or seven hundred volumes in many tongues, have long been superannu ated. But he showed enlightenment in many an unex pected direction. He betrayed a lively appreciation of the need of studying geography together with history, and he knew the value of chronological accuracy. His active imagination made him a master of historic por traiture, and historical personages like Artaxerxes, Queen Jezebel, Demetrius, Pyrrhus, or Epaminondas, are drawn with a master's pencil.
Ralegh's methods were discursive. He often digressed from the ancient to the modern world. The insight which illumined his account of the heroes of a remote past was suffered now and again to „ play quite irrelevantly about the personalities of recent rulers of his own land. He was content to speak the truth as far as it was known, without fear of consequences. Of Henry vm. he writes uncompromis ingly, thus : ' If all the pictures and patterns of a merci less prince were lost in the world, they might all again be painted to the life out of the story of this king. For how many servants did he advance in haste (but for what virtue no man could suspect), and with the change of his fancy ruined again, no man knowing for what offence ! . . . What laws and wills did he devise, to establish this kingdom in his own issues? using his sharpest weapons to cut off and cut down those branches which sprang from the same root that himself did. And in the end (notwithstanding these his so many irreligious
i88 SIR WALTER RALEGH.
provisions) it pleased God to take away all his own without increase ; though, for themselves in their several kinds, all princes of eminent virtue.' The father of his late royal mistress could hardly have been more caustically limned.
It was Ralegh's intense love of the present which frequently turned his narrative by devious paths far Criticism fr°m his rightful topics of the past. He of current cannot resist the temptation of commenting events. freely on matters within his personal cog nisance as they rose to his mind in the silence of his prison cell. Despite the consequent irregularity of plan, his strange irrelevances endow the History in the sight of posterity with most of its freshness and originality. The mass of his material may be condemned as dry-as- dust, but the breath of living experience preserves sub stantial fragments of it from decay. A perennial interest attaches to Ralegh's suggestive treatment of philosophic questions, such as the origin of law. Remarks on the tactics of the Spaniards in the Armada, on the capture of Fayal in the Azores, on the courage of Elizabethan Englishmen, on the tenacity of Spaniards, on England's relations with Ireland, may be inappropriate to their Babylonian or Persian surroundings, but they reflect the first-hand knowledge of an observer of infinite mental resource, who never failed to express his own opinions with sincerity and dignity. His style, although often involved, is free from conceits, and keeps pace as a rule with the majesty of his design.
The general design and style of Ralegh's History of the World are indeed more noteworthy than any details of its scheme or execution. The design is instinct with magnanimous insight into the springs of human action.
SIR WALTER RALEGH. 189
Throughout it breathes a serious moral purpose. It illustrates the sureness with which ruin overtakes 'great conquerors and other troublers of the world ' The morai who neglect law whether human or divine, purpose It is homage paid to the corner-stone of of the civilised society by one who knew at once enterPnse- how to keep and how to break laws of both God and man. There is an inevitable touch of irony in Ralegh's large-hearted sermon. After showing how limitless is man's ambition and how rotten is its fruit unless it be restrained by respect for justice, Ralegh turns aside in his concluding pages to salute human greatness, however it may be achieved, as an empty dream. He closes his book with a sublime apostrophe to Death the destroyer, who is, after all, the sole arbiter of mortal man's destiny.
XI
But despite all his characteristic alertness of mind, Ralegh, while a prisoner in the Tower, was always look ing forward hopefully to the day of his release. His mind often reverted to that , °^es land of gold, the exploration of which he had just missed completing eight or nine years before. The ambition to repeat the experiment grew on him. James i.'s Queen, and her son and heir, Henry, Prince of Wales, had always regarded Ralegh as the victim of injustice, and sympathised with his aspirations for liberty. They listened encouragingly to his pleas for a new expe dition to America. Ralegh was not ready to neglect the opportunity their favour offered him. From them he turned to petition the Privy Council and the King him-
igo SIR WALTER RALEGH.
self. He would refuse no condition, if his prayer was granted. He offered to risk his head if he went once Thg more to the Orinoco and failed in his search,
projected At length, after five years of pertinacious return to petitioning, the King yielded, perhaps at the Guiana. instigation of his new favourite, George Villiers, afterwards Duke of Buckingham, who antici pated profit from his complacence. Ralegh was released from the Tower after thirteen years' imprisonment ( i Qth March 1616), on the condition that he should make a new voyage to Guiana and secure the country's gold mines. At first Ralegh was ordered to live at his own house in the custody of a keeper, but this restriction was removed next year, and he was at liberty to make his preparations as he would.
Ralegh was sixty-five years old, and although his spirit mounted high his health was breaking. Out of prison, he was a desolate old man without means or friends. There was no possibility of his planning to a successful issue a new quest of El Dorado. The project had to reckon, too, with powerful foes and critics. When the news of his expedition reached the ears of the Spanish Ambassador in London, he pro- protests tested that all Guiana was his master's property, and that Ralegh had no right to approach it. It was objected that Ralegh's design was a vulgar act of piracy. Ralegh was unmoved by the argument. He acknowledged no obligation to respect the scruples of onlookers at home or abroad. The assurances given by the Government that he would peacefully respect all rights of Spanish settlers in Guiana floated about him like the idle wind.
All that Ralegh said or did when preparing to leave
SIR WALTER RALEGH. 191
England increased the odds against him. His reputa tion sank lower and lower. Dangers and difficulties only rendered his mood more desperate. He was, like Banquo's murderer,
' So weary with disasters, tugged with fortune, That he would set his life on any chance To mend it or be rid on't.'
Few men of repute would bear him company. He cared not who went with him provided he went at all. It was an ill-omened crew that he collected. He filled his ship (he afterwards admitted) with the world's scum, with drunkards and blasphemers, and others whose friends were only too glad to pay money to get them out of the country.
At length he started. But fortune frowned on him more fiercely than before. The weather was unpropi- tious. He had to put in off Cork. At length he weighed anchor for South America, but on the voyage fell ill of a fever. Arrived off the river Orinoco, he was successful in an attack on the new Spanish settlement at its mouth which bore the name of St. Thornd Care less of the promises solemnly made on his behalf by his Government, he rudely despoiled it and set fire to it ; but the doubtful triumph cost him the death of a com panion whom he could ill spare, his elder son Walter. Thenceforward absolute failure dogged his steps. His attempt to ascend the river was quickly defeated by the activity of the new Spanish settlers. Nothing Failure remained for him but to return home. He of the had failed in what he had pledged his head expedition, to perform ; contrary to conditions he had molested the Spanish settlement. He reached Plymouth in despair.
192 SIR WALTER RALEGH.
An attempt at flight to France failed, and he was sent again to the Tower.
One fate alone awaited him. He was already under
sentence of death. By embroiling his country anew
with Spain, he was held to have revived his
Di^aC?u old offence. The English judges declared, and death. , J. ~
harshly and with doubtful justice, that the
old sentence must be carried out. The circumstance that ' he never had his pardon for his former treason ' was treated as argument which there was no controvert ing. Accordingly, on Wednesday, 2 8th October 1618, the ruined man was brought from the Tower to the bar of the King's Bench. He was asked by the Lord Chief Justice why he should not suffer ' execution of death,' according to the judgment of death ' for his treason in the first year of the king.' He offered protest, but his answer was deemed by the court to be insufficient. He was taken back to the prison, and the next day was appointed for the execution of the old sentence. ' He broke his fast early in the morning,' according to a con temporary annalist, and, to the scandal of many, smoked a pipe at the solemn moment ' in order to settle his spirits.' At eight o'clock he was conducted to a scaffold erected in Palace Yard, Westminster, outside the Houses of Parliament.
Ralegh faced death boldly and without complaining. He talked cheerfully with those around him, and in a speech to the spectators thanked God that he was allowed 'to die in the light.' Speaking from written notes he traversed the various imputations that had been laid upon him, and concluded with the words, ' I have a long journey to take and must bid the company farewell.' As his fingers felt the edge of the axe, he
SIR WALTER RALEGH. 193
smilingly said to the sheriffs : ' This is a sharp medicine, but it is a sure cure for all diseases.' Then he bade the reluctant executioner strike, and at two blows his head fell from his body.
- 'After life's fitful fever he sleeps well.' The night before he ascended the scaffold he had penned the simple lines :
' Even such is time, that takes in trust Our youth, our joys, our all we have, And pays us but with earth and dust ; . Who, in the dark and silent grave
When we have wandered all our ways, ; . Shuts up the story of our days.
But from this earth, this grave, this dust, My God shall raise me up I trust.'
He gave death welcome, when it arrived to claim him, in the same philosophic spirit that he had apos trophised it, a few years earlier, on putting the finishing stroke to his History of tJie World: — *O eloquent, just, and mighty Death ! . . . thou hast drawn together all the far stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words — Hicjacet!'
XII
Ralegh's final labour is the least admirable episode of his career:. It was a buccaneering raid, and admits of no eulogy,- even after we make allowance for The con. the strange circumstances in which it was temporary undertaken and suffer pity to temper con- estimate of demnation. It was a desperate bid for his Rale§h- personal freedom. But his failure was punished with
7
194 SIR WALTER RALEGH.
tragic injustice. His fate excited widespread lamenta tion. The facts seemed to the casual observer to be capable of more than one interpretation. His memory was long venerated as that of a man who sacrificed his life in an honest, public-spirited, magnanimous endeav our to injure his country's foes.
Ralegh's character is an inextricable tangle of good and evil. ' What matter how the head lie ! ' he had said The good when placing his neck on the block. ' What and evil matter how the head lie so the heart be in his right ? ' Many of his countrymen deemed
character, those words his fitting epitaph. But neither Ralegh's heart nor head was often quite in a righteous posture. He was physically as courageous, intellectu ally as resourceful and versatile, as any man known to history. He was a daring politician, soldier, sailor, traveller, and coloniser. He was a poet of exuberant fancy, a historian of solid industry and insight, and a political philosopher of depth. He ranks with the great writers of English prose. Things of the mind appealed to him equally with things of the senses or the sinews. Many serious-minded men treated his History of the World with hardly less respect and veneration than the Bible itself, and it was sedulously pressed in the seven teenth century on the attention of young men, whose minds lacked power of application, as mental ballast of the finest quality.* Yet it was mental ballast which
* Cromwell the Protector, when he found his eldest son Richard wasting his time and energy in athletic pastime, bade him recreate himself with Sir Walter Ralegh's history. There was advantage, Cromwell deemed, in the work's massive proportions. ' It's a body of history,' Cromwell told his heir, 'and will add much more to your understanding than fragments of story.' Carlyle's Letters and Speeches of Cromwell, ii. 255.
SIR WALTER RALEGH. 195
Ralegh's own character chiefly lacked. His manifold activity declined restraint. He rebelled against law. His actions were heedless of morality. He was proud, covetous, and unscrupulous.
Yet the influence of his inevitable failures was greater than that of most men's successes. The main failure of his life was more fruitful than any ordinary
triumph. His passion for colonial expansion,
- , , r - . ' and success.
for the settlement of America by Englishmen,
lost in course of time almost every trace of the idealism in which it took rise. Exaggerated hopes of gain, a swollen spirit of aggressiveness, ultimately robbed his endeavours of true titles to respect. His final effort led to little apparent result beyond the loss of his own head ; his fellow-countrymen never gained the mastery of South America; they never obtained exclusive possession of its mines, the desperate cause in which Ralegh flung away his life. None the less the spur that his appar ently barren and ill-conceived exploits gave to English colonising cannot be over-estimated. All xhe true over the world Englishmen subsequently founder of worked in his spirit. But it is his primary Virginia, attempt to create a New England in the Northern Con tinent of America which gives him his genuine creden tials to fame. It was an attempt on which he lavished his fortune in the spirit of a dreamer, and at the time it seemed, like so much that Ralegh sought to do, to be made in vain. Yet it was mainly due to his influence, if not to the work of his hands, that the great English settlements of Virginia and New England came into being, and gave religious and political liberty, spiritual and intellectual energy, a new home, a new scope, wherein to develop to the advantage of the human race.
196 SIR WALTER RALEGH.
However sternly the moralist may condemn Ralegh's conduct in the great crises of his career, he must in justice admit that the good that Ralegh did lives after him, while the evil was for the most part buried with his bones. Dark shadows envelop much of his life and death, but there are patches of light which are inextinguishable.
V
EDMUND SPENSER
' A sweeter swan than ever sang in Po, A shriller nightingale than ever blessed The prouder groves of self-admiring Rome ! Blithe was each valley, and each shepherd proud, While he did chant his rural minstrelsy ; Attentive was full many a dainty ear ; Nay, hearers hung upon his melting tongue, While sweetly of his Faerie Queene he sung, While to the waters' fall he tun'd her fame.'
The Return from Parnassus, II. i. 2.
[BIBLIOGRAPHY. — The memoir by Dean Church in the ' Men of Letters ' series is a useful critical biography in brief compass. The ' Globe ' edition of the port's work, with an introductory memoir by Prof. J. W. Hales, supplies a good text. Of the ten volumes of Dr. Grosart's privately printed edition of the works (1880-2), the first volume is devoted to biography by the general editor, and to critical essays from many competent pens. Of earlier critical editions of Spenser the chief is that by Henry John Todd, which was issued in eight volumes in 1805. A good criticism of Spenser appears in James Russell Lowell's Essays on the English Poets.~\
LITERATURE was a recreation of all men of spirit in the Elizabethan age. It mattered little whether or no they were heirs of great genius. Literature was almost uni-
198 EDMUND SPENSER.
versally the occupation of such leisure as could be snatched from the practical affairs of the world. States- The Eliza- men an(^ soldiers, in their hours of ease, bethan courted the Muses with assiduity. These pursuit of damsels might discourage their advances, poetry. but fae suitors were persistent. Poetry was the politest of recreations ; verses were delightful ' toys to busy idle brains.' Queen Elizabeth and her suc cessor James I. are of the number of English authors in both poetry and prose. ' To evaporate their thoughts in a sonnet ' was ' the common way ' of almost all nobles and courtiers, who concentrated their main energies on sport, politics, and war. At the same time the professional pursuit of letters — the writing of books for money, the reliance on the pen for a livelihood — was held to be degrading. Literature was not reckoned to be in any sense a profession fit for a man of high birth to follow. It was the gorgeous ornament or plaything of life, and no approved source of its sus tenance. '
Not that literary work failed on occasion to prove re munerative. From one branch of Elizabethan literature
— from the drama — there were dazzling Profits of ,. , , . . . ,.
literature Pronts to be drawn. An inevitable measure
of social prestige attached in the Elizabethan, no less than in other eras, to substantial property ; yet to property that was derived from the exercise of the pen social prestige could only attach in Elizabethan society after the owner had ceased to write for a living. Shakespeare bore convincing testimony to the strength of the prevailing mistrust of any professional pursuit of letters by retiring, at a comparatively early age, from active work, in order to enjoy, unhampered by the con-
EDMUND SPENSER. 199
ventional prejudice, the material fruits of his past energy.
A poet by nature, of intensely aesthetic instinct, Spenser lacked inherited sources of livelihood ; but the social sentiment of the era compelled him to seek a career elsewhere than in literature. In a far larger and higher sense than his friends Sir Philip Sidney or Sir Walter Ralegh he was a favoured servant of the Muses. But he, no more than they, reckoned poetry to be his practical concern in life. Political service, endeavour to gain remunerative political office, coloured his career as it coloured theirs. He knew the vanity of political ambitions. But oppor tunities of quiet contemplation apart from the haunts of politicians, opportunities for cultivating in seclusion his great literary genius, were not what he asked of those who had it in their power to fashion his line of life. Unlike his great successor Tennyson, with whom his affinities are many, he deliberately engaged in business which lay outside Parnassian fields. He sought with zeal and persistency political employment and official promotion.
As an officer of state, Spenser achieved small repute or reward. The record of his worldly struggles is sordid and insignificant. Often, amid the entangle- ^he con- ments and disappointments of political strife, trast with did he give voice to that cry of the Psalmist, his poetic which his contemporary, Francis Bacon, zeal> pathetically echoed, that his life was passed in a strange land. It was only as a poet that he won happiness or renown. It is only as a supreme poet of the English Renaissance that he lives. Imbued from boyhood with the spirit of the new learning, he was in rarest sympathy
200 EDMUND SPENSER.
with the classics, and with the literature of contemporary Italy and France. An innate delight in the harmonies of language grew with his years. A passion for beauty dominated his thought. Although he was brought up in the new religion of Protestantism and accepted it without demur, doctrinal religion laid her hand lightly on his intellect. It was in an ideal world that he found the objects of his worship. None the less, in order to realise the manner of man Spenser was, and the sturdy links which bound him to his age, his vain political endeavours must find on the biographer's canvas hardly a smaller place than his splendid poetic triumphs.
ii
Spenser, who ranks second to Shakespeare among Elizabethan poets, was a native of London. Like Sir His Thomas More, he was a native of the capital
humble city of the kingdom, but he came of a sub- birth, stantial family whose home was elsewhere, in Lancashire. He was a distant relative of the noble house of Spencer, many members of which have played an important part in English political history. But however good Spenser's descent, his father was a London tradesman, a journeyman cloth-maker, who was at one time in the service of a wool-dealer.
The poet was born, probably in 1552 — the year of Ralegh's birth— in East Smithfield. About his birth place there glowed in his infancy the fires place ^ °^ reugi°us intolerance — intolerance of that blind and inconsequent type which first won Sir Thomas More's allegiance, and then, shifting the quarter from which it blew, drove him to the scaffold.
EDMUND SPENSER. 201
But when Spenser was six years of age, the sway of unreason was brought to a stand. The fanatic Catholic, Queen Mary, died, and with the accession of Queen Queen Elizabeth to the throne the spirit of Elizabeth's the nation found a practicable equilibrium, accession. Protestantism with a promise of peace was in the ascendant; Catholicism, although by no means ex orcised, was not in a position to pursue open hostilities. Another six years passed, and while the nation was enjoying its first taste of security, Shakespeare was born. But the interval which separated Shakespeare from Spenser was wider than that difference of twelve years in their dates of birth suggests. Shakespeare belonged exclusively to Elizabethan England, which saw the final development of Renaissance culture. Spenser's memory reached further back and absorbed many an ideal and thought which were nearly obsolete when Shakespeare began to write. The mass of Shakespeare's work belongs to the epoch which followed Spenser's death. Spenser's elder genius flowered and passed away before Shakespeare's younger genius was of full age.
But the two men's outward careers ran at the first on much the same lines. There was a strong resemblance between the circumstances of Spenser's boy- hood and of Shakespeare's, which it behoves sceptics of the admitted facts of Shakespeare's biography to study closely. In spite of the claim of Spenser's father to high descent, his walk in life was similar to that of Shakespeare's father. Better educa tional opportunities were open to a tradesman's son in London than to a tradesman's son in a small village, but their superiority is easily capable of exaggeration. The
202 EDMUND SPENSER.
trade or guild of merchant tailors, with which the elder Spenser was distantly connected, had lately founded a new school in London — the Merchant Taylors' School for sons of tailors. To that school, which still flourishes, Edmund Spenser was sent as a boy, under very like con ditions to those which brought Shakespeare to the grammar school of Stratford-on-Avon.
Spenser's headmaster was an enlightened teacher, Richard Mulcaster, who believed in physical as well At as intellectual training; who thought girls
Merchant deserved as good an education as boys ; Taylors' who urged the importance of instruction in School. music and singing ; and who turned a deaf ear to the prayers of cockering mothers and indulgent fathers when appeal was made to him to mitigate the punishment of pupils. Spenser's headmaster had im bibed the spirit of pedagogy as Plato first taught it, and More and Ascham had developed it in the light of the Renaissance. But the elder Spenser was not well off, and no special attention was paid his son. The boy's school-days threatened to be short. Happily a merchant had lately left large sums of money to be bestowed on poor London scholars — poor scholars of the schools about London — and under this benefaction Edmund received much-needed assistance. Such charities as that by which Spenser benefited were numerous in Elizabethan England, and charitable funds were largely applied to the noble purpose of assisting poor lads to complete their education. What American merchants are doing now for education in their country more conspicuously than elsewhere, Elizabethan mer chants were doing for education in Elizabethan Eng land. It was owing to this enlightened application of
EDMUND SPENSER. 203
wealth that Spenser was enabled to finish his school career.
Promising boys of Elizabethan England, whether rich or poor, were encouraged to pursue their studies at the Universities on leaving school, even if their parents could not supply them with brid *m~ means of subsistence. The college endow ments would carry a poor student through the greater part of an academic career, and might at need be supplemented by private munificence. Spenser went to Cambridge — to Pembroke Hall (or College) — trusting for pecuniary support to the college endowments. He was compelled to enter the College in the lowest rank, the rank of a sizar. Sizars were indigent students who, in consideration of their poverty and in exchange for menial service, were given food, drink, and lodging.
At Pembroke, Spenser found congenial society. The college had not yet acquired its literary traditions. It was long afterwards that it became the home of the poet Crashaw, and later still of the poet Gray. Spenser himself was the first poet, alike in point of time and of eminence, to associate his name with the foundation. But to contemporary members of the college he owed much. A young Fellow of the College, Gabriel Harvey, an ardent but pedantic student of literature, took deep interest in him and greatly influenced his literary tastes. Harvey re inforced in his pupil a passion for classical learning, which the boy had acquired at school, and encouraged him to pursue a study of French and Italian literature, to which on his own initiative he had already devoted his leisure. A young fellow-sizar, Edward Kirke, also became a warm admirer and stimulating friend.
204 EDMUND SPENSER
From a lad Spenser was a close student and a wide reader, and gave early promise of poetic eminence. He
was attracted not merely by the classics, the ^1rsseearliest orthodox subject of study at school and
college, but by French and Italian literature. Almost as a schoolboy he began to translate into English the poetry of France. Before he went to Cambridge he prepared for a London publisher metrical translations of poems by Du Bellay, a scholarly spirit of the Renaissance in France, and he also rendered into seven English sonnets an ode of Petrarch, the great Italian master of the sonnet, from the version of the early French poet Clement Marot. It was through his knowledge of French that the gate to the vast and varied literature of Italy opened to him. Both Petrarch's and Du Bellay's verses described the uncertainties of human life and the fickleness of human fortune. Spenser's renderings were merely inserted by an in dulgent publisher as letterpress to be attached to old woodcuts in his possession. Letterpress is a humiliat ing position for literature to fill, but the youth was con tent to get his first poetic endeavours into type on any conditions. Spenser's ambition at the time was satisfied when a tedious Dutch treatise of morality appeared in English with his earliest poems irrelevantly introduced as explanations of the pictorial illustrations that adorned the opening pages. The musical temper of Spenser's boyish verse argued well for the future, but no critic at the time discerned its potentiality.
While an undergraduate Spenser suffered alike from poverty and ill-health. Small sums of money were granted to him as a poor scholar from the old bequest which had benefited him at school, and he was often
EDMUND SPENSER. 205
disabled by sickness. He remained however at Cam bridge for the exceptionally long period of seven years. He took the degree of Master of Arts in 1576, and then left the University. He always speaks of Cambridge — of 'my mother Cambridge' — with respect. He wrote in a well- known passage of the Faerie Queene how the River Ouse which runs near Cambridge
' doth by Huntingdon and Cambridge flit, My mother Cambridge, whom as with a crown He [i.e. the river] doth adorn and is adorn'd of it With many a gentle muse and many a learned wit.' *
Spenser was himself in due time to adorn his Alma Mater ' as with a crown ' by virtue of his c gentle muse ' and ' learned wit.'
in
When Spenser's Cambridge life closed, he was no less than twenty-four years old. That was a mature age in those days for a man to be entering on a Disappoint- career, and even then, owing to his feeble ment in constitution, he seems to have been in no love- haste to seek a settlement. The omens were none too favourable. In poor health, without money or pros pects, he apparently idled away another year with his kinsfolk, his cousins, in Lancashire. There, having nothing better to do, he fell in love. The object of his affections was, we are told, a gentlewoman, of no mean house, ' endowed with no vulgar or common gifts of nature or manners.' But the lady disdained the poet's
* Faerie Queene, Bk. iv., canto xi., stanza xxxiv.
206 EDMUND SPENSER.
suit, and he sought consolation in verse. Antiquaries have tried to discover the precise name of the lady, but beyond the fact that she was the daughter of a Lanca shire yeoman, nothing more needs saying of her.
Spenser's failure in his amorous adventure was, despite the passing grief it caused him, beneficial. It
stirred him to fresh exertions alike in poetry Settlement and th affajrg Qf the worfi Re resolved to in .London.
seek in London greater happiness than
Lancashire offered him, and the means of earning an honourable livelihood. Gabriel Harvey, his Cambridge friend, strongly urged on him the prudence of seeking employment in the capital. Harvey prided himself on his influence in high circles. His activity at Cambridge made him known to all visitors of distinction to the University. He knew the Queen's favourite, the Earl of Leicester, the uncle of Sir Philip Sidney, who had it in his power to advance any aspirant to fortune. To Leicester, Harvey gave Spenser an introduction. That introduction proved the true starting-point of Spenser's adult career.
Like all Queen Elizabeth's courtiers Leicester had literary tastes. He was favourably impressed by the The patron- young poet and offered him secretarial em- age of ployment. Spenser's duties required him to Leicester. i{ve at Leicester House, the Earl's great London mansion. Literary sympathies overcame, in Elizabethan England, class distinctions, and Spenser — the impecunious tailor's son — was suddenly thrown into close relations with fashionable London society. Many poor young men of ability and character owed all their opportunities in life to wealthy noblemen of the day. The friendly -union between patron and poet often bred
EDMUND SPENSER. 207
strong mutual affection, and was held to confer honour on both. Spenser's relations with Leicester were of the typical kind. They were easy and amiable. The poet felt pride in the help and favour that the Earl bestowed on him, although he was not backward in pressing his claims to preferment. Spenser describes with ungrudg ing admiration Leicester's influential place in the State as
' A mighty prince, of most renowned race, Whom England high in count of honour held, And greatest ones did sue to gain his grace ; Of greatest ones he greatest in his place, Sate in the bosom of his sovereign, And " Right and Loyal " did his word maintain.' *
Referring to his own relations with his patron, he ex claimed :
' And who so else did goodness by him gain ? And who so else his bounteous mind did try ? ' *
Leicester stands to Spenser in precisely the same relation as the Earl of Southampton stands to Shake speare.
Spenser had at Leicester House much leisure for study. He wrote poems for his patron. He read
largely for himself, presenting books to his
r. /TT ,-. • Secretarial
friend Harvey, who sent him others in return. work
But his office was no sinecure. He was sent abroad in behalf of his patron, usually as the bearer of despatches. In Leicester's service he paid a first visit to Ireland, and went on official errands to France, Spain, and Italy, notably to Rome, and even further afield. Foreign travel nurtured his imagination, and widened
* Jiuirus of Time, 11. 184-189. t Ibid., 11. 232-233.
208 EDMUND SPENSER.
his knowledge of the literary efforts of French and Italian contemporaries.
Spenser's connection with Leicester brought him the acquaintance of a more attractive personality — Leicester's
fascinating nephew, Sir Philip Sidney. The Sidn 11P acquaintance rapidly ripened into a deep
and tender friendship, and exerted an excel lent influence, morally and intellectually, on both young men.
Thus, in 1579, when Spenser was about twenty-seven years old, Fortune seemed to smile on him. He
mixed freely with courtiers and politicians,
and was in close touch with all that was advice.
most enlightened in London society. Amid such environment his poetic genius acquired new energy and confidence. He was ambitious to excel in all forms of literary composition, and he was in doubt which to essay first. He confided his perplexities to his friend and tutor Harvey. Harvey was a pedantic and short sighted counsellor. He was no wise adviser of one endowed with great original genius which was best left to seek an independent course. Harvey's passion for the classics, and his absorption in the study of them, distorted his judgment. English poetry was in his mind a branch of classical scholarship. Hitherto the art of poetry had, in his opinion, been practised to best advantage by Latin writers. Consequently, English poetry, were it to attain perfection, ought to imitate Latin verse, alike in metre and ideas. Harvey's theory was based on a very obvious misconception. Poetry can only flourish if it be free to adapt itself to the idiosyncrasy of the poet's mother-tongue. Accent, not quantity, is alone adaptable to poetry in the English
EDMUND SPENSER. 209
language. English verse which ignores such considera tions cannot reach the poetic level.
Yet for a time Harvey's views prevailed with Spenser. He defied a great law of nature and of art, and did violence to his bent, in order to essay the hopeless task of naturalising in English verse metrical rules which the English language rejects. In the meetings of the literary club of the ' Areopagus ' which Leicester's friends and dependents formed at Leicester House, Spenser, Sidney, and others debated, at Harvey's instance, the application to English poetry of the classical rules of metrical quantity. Spenser joined the company in making many experi ments in Latinised English verse, a few of which survive. The result was an uncouth sort of verbiage, lumbering or wallowing in harsh obscurity. Happily Spenser quickly perceived that no human power could fit the English language to classical metres ; he saw the weak ness of the pedantic arguments. It was well that he escaped the classicists' toils. It was needful that he should deliberately reject false notions of English verse before his genius could gain an open road.
The first serious poetic efforts that Spenser designed in his adult years are lost, if they were ever completed.
Soon after he had settled at Leicester House, o i j i_ • e • j t. • • Poetic ex-
Spenser told his friends he was penning nine periments
comedies, to be called after the nine Muses, in the manner of the books of Herodotus's History, An account of his patron's family history and chief ancestors was also occupying his pen ; fragments of this design, perhaps, survive in the elegy on his patron which he subsequently incorporated in his Ruines of Time. He seems to have sketched a lost prose work called The
210 EDMUND SPENSER.
English Poet> an essay on literary criticism, which, like Sidney's Apologie for Poe/rie, was intended to prove poetry (so a friend of Spenser reported) to be ' a divine gift and heavenly instinct not to be gotten by labour and learning, but adorned with both, and poured into the wit by a certain enthousiasmos and celestial inspira tion.'* Spenser, having cut himself adrift of pedantic classicism, adopted a view no less exalted than that of Shelley of the constituent elements of genuine poetry. Even more important is it to note that Spenser had found the form of poetic endeavour, at this early epoch, which best suited his ethical and artistic temper. His ambitious allegorical epic or moral romance, which he called the Faerie Queene^ dates from the outset of his literary career. He sent some portion to Harvey as early as the autumn of 1579, at the moment when he was recanting his tutor's classical heresy. Harvey was naturally not impressed by a project which he had not advised, and which ignored or defied his pedantic prin ciples of poetic art. The design was in Harvey's eyes an unwarranted innovation, a deflection from tried and well-trodden paths. Spenser was not encouraged by Harvey to hurry on. The discouragement had some effect. Ten years elapsed before any portion of the poem was sent to press. Spenser was shy and sensi tive by nature. He could not ignore critical censure. But happily other friends, of better judgment than Harvey, urged him to persevere.
* Cf. Argument before Tht Shepheards Calender, Eclogue x.
EDMUND SPENSER. 211
IV
Spenser's ascent of Parnassus was not greatly preju diced by Harvey's misleading counsel. Temporarily abandoning the Faerie Queene, he turned The Shep- to work for which precedent was more heards abundant. He completed and caused to Calender. be printed, before the close of 1579 — a year very event ful in his career — a poem which left enlightened critics in no doubt of his powers.
Spenser's first extant poem of length, which he called The Shepheards Calender, consisted of twelve dialogues or eclogues spoken in dialogue by shepherds, one for every month of the year. The design of the volume followed foreign models of acknowledged repute. Greek pastoral poetry of Theoc ritus and Bion was its foundation, modified by study of Virgil's Eclogues and of many French and Italian examples of more recent date. Mantuanus and Sanaz- zaro among Italian poets, and Clement Marot among Frenchmen, commanded Spenser's full allegiance. The title was borrowed from an English translation in current use of a popular French Almanac known as Kalendrier des Bergers, and the debt to Marot's French eclogues is especially large. The names of the speakers Thenot and Colin are of Marot's invention, and in two of the eclogues Spenser confines himself to adaptation of Marot's verse. Everywhere he gives proof of reading and respect for authority. His friends freely acknow ledged that he piously 'followed the footing' of the excellent poets of Greece, Rome, France, and Italy.
It was not only abroad that Spenser's genius sought sustenance. Although he was fascinated by the varied
212 EDMUND SPENSER.
charms of foreign literary effort, he was not oblivious of the literary achievement of his own country. English poetry had not of late progressed at the same rate as the poetry of Italy or France, But a poetic tradition had come into being in fourteenth-century England. Spenser was attracted by it, and he believed himself capable of continuing it. He was eager to enrol him self under the banner of the greatest of his English predecessors, of Chaucer. By way of proving u ogy o ^e sjncerjty of hjs patriotic allegiance, he took toll openly of the English poet, even exaggerating the extent of his indebtedness.* His direct eulogy of Chaucer under the name of Tityrus is a splendid declaration of homage on the younger poet's part to the old master of English poetry.
' The God of Shepherds, Tityrus, is dead, Who taught me homely, as I can, to make ; He, whilst he lived, was the sovereign head Of shepherds all that bene with love ytake ; Well couth he wail his woes, and lightly slake The flames which love within his heart had bred, And tell us merry tales to keep us wake, The while our sheep about us safely fed.
?*ow dead is he, and lieth wrapt in lead,
(O ! why should death on him such outrage show !)
And all his passing skill with him is fled
The fame whereof doth daily greater grow.
But if on me some little drops would flow
Of that the spring was in his learned head,
I soon would learn these woods to wail my woe,
And teach the trees their trickling tears to shed.'f
* In Eclogue II. (February) Spenser pretends to quote from Chaucer the fable of the oak and the briar. The alleged quotation seems to be entirely of Spenser's invention.
t The Shephcards Calender, June, lines 81-96.
EDMUND SPENSER. 213
No poftm of supreme worth ever crept into the world more modestly or made larger avowal of obligation to poetry of the past than The Shepheards
Calender. Spenser, who merely claimed to e cntlcal
, • , , . , . } . apparatus,
be trying his ' tender wings ' in strict accord
with precedent, hesitated to announce himself as the author. The book was inscribed anonymously on its title-page to his friend Sir Philip Sidney, and in a little prefatory poem which he characteristically signed 'Im- merito,' he fitly entitles his patron 'the president of noblesse and chivalry.' A college friend, Edward Kirke, emphasised the work's dependence on the ancient ways in a dedicatory epistle to the scholar Gabriel Harvey ; and the same hand liberally scattered through the volume notes and glosses, which empha sised the poet's loans from the accepted masters of his craft. Owing to Spenser's anxiety to link himself to the latest period — remote as it was — when English poetry had conspicuously flourished, the vocabulary was deliberately archaic. Foreign examples justified such procedure. Kirke explained that, after the manner of the Greek pastoral poets who affected the rustic Doric dialect, Spenser 'laboured to restore as to their rightful heritage such good and natural English words as had been long time out of use and clean disin herited.'
Kirke's sincere enthusiasm for his author neutralises the prejudice which lovers of poetry commonly cherish against officious editorial comment. He justifies his intervention between reader and author on the some what equivocal ground that although Spenser was an imitator, his imitations were often so devised that only ' such as were (like his editor) well scented '
214 EDMUND SPENSER.
in the hunt after foreign originals could 'trace them out.'
But the range of topics of The Shepheards Calender
suggests to the least observant reader that there is exag-
. geration in the editor's repeated denial of
the poet's ability to walk alone or to strike out new paths for himself. Spenser naturally pursues the old pastoral roads in discoursing of the pangs of despised love of which he had had his own experience, of the woes of age and of the joys of youth ; but there is individuality in his treatment of the well-worn themes, and he does not confine himself to them. In his con trasts between the virtues of Protestantism and the vices of Popery he handles problems of theology which his poetic predecessors had not essayed. The interlocutors are the poet himself and his friends and patron under disguised names, and he does not repress his private sentiments or idiosyncrasies. Of his personal beliefs he makes impressive confession in his tenth eclogue, in which he ' complaineth of the contempt of poetry and the causes thereof.' Theocritus and Mantuanus had already condemned monarchs and statesmen for failure to respect the votaries of 'peerless poesy.' Spenser followed in their wake, but the ardour with which he pleads the poet's cause is his own, and the argument had never before been couched in finer harmonies.
Despite its large dependence on earlier literary effort, the value of The Shepheards Calender lies ultimately not
(as its editor would have us believe) in the value. dexterity of its adaptations, but in the proof
it offers of the original calibre of Spenser's poetic genius. Historically important as it is for the student and critic to note and to define what a poet
EDMUND SPENSER. 215
takes from others, of greater importance is it for them to note and to define what a poet makes of his borrow ings. In the first place, The Shepheards Calender shows a faculty for musical modulation of words, of which only the greatest practisers of the poetic art are capable. It is a peculiar quality of Spenser's power to manipulate the metre so that it moves as the sense dictates, now slowly and solemnly, now quickly and joyfully. In the second place, the thought is clothed in a picturesque simplicity, which is the fruit of the poet's personality. The life and truthfulness of the pictures are the outcome of the poet's individual affinities with the poetic aspects of nature and humanity.
Since the death of Chaucer no poet of a distinction similar to that of Spenser had come to light in England. The Shepheards Calender was not without jts place signs of immaturity ; the melodies of the in English verse were interrupted by awkward disso- poetry, nances and by feeble or discordant phrases. But its merits far out-distanced its defects and it worthily inaugurated a new era of English poetry. It proved beyond risk of denial that there had arisen a poet of genius fit to rank above all preceding English poets save only Chaucer, who died nearly two centuries before. It is to the credit of the age that this great fact, despite editorial endeavours to disguise it, was straightway recognised. ' He may well wear the garland and step before the best of all English poets that I have seen or heard,' wrote one early reader of The Shepheards Calender. Drayton, the reputed friend of Shakespeare, declared that 'Master Edmund Spenser had done enough for the immortality of his name had he only given us his The S/iepheards Calender, a masterpiece if any.'
216 EDMUND SPENSER.
Masterpieces had been scarce in English literature since Chaucer produced his Canterbury Tales.
Elizabethan poetry brought its makers honourable recognition, but it did not bring them pecuniary re- The poet's war^- Spenser had entered Leicester's complaint service in order to obtain an office which of his should produce a regular revenue. But as
patron. ^g months went on, Spenser suffered dis appointment at his patron's hands. Leicester was not as zealous in the poet's interest as the poet hoped. The services which he rendered his patron seemed to him to be inadequately recognised. He expected more from his master than board and lodging. His dissatis faction found vent in a rendering of the poem called 'Virgil's Gnat'
' Wronged, yet not daring to express my pain,'
the poet dedicated the apologue to his 'excellent' lord 'the causer of my care.' He likened himself to the gnat, which, in the poem, rouses a sleeping shepherd to repel a serpent's attack by stinging his eyelid, and then is thoughtlessly brushed aside and slain by him whom the insect delivers from peril.
Spenser probably wrote in a moment of temporary annoyance, and exaggerated the injury done him by the Offi ' 1 ^ar^' Happily a change of fortune was at promotion, ^and> and his irritation with Leicester passed away. Although there is no reason for re garding the sequence of events as other than accidental,
EDMUND SPENSER. 217
it was within six months of the publication of The Shepheards Calender, that the poet was offered a remunerative and responsible post. He accepted the office of secretary to a newly-appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland, and the course of his life was completely changed.
In the summer of 1580 Spenser left England prac tically for good. Though he thrice revisited his native land, Ireland was his home for his remaining nineteen years of life. At the outset he 1|ra, ^ accepted the post in the faith that it would prove a stepping-stone to high political office in Eng land. Permanent exile he never contemplated with complacency. London was his native place and the seat of government, and it was his ambition to enjoy there profitable and dignified employment. But this was not to be, and as the prospect of preferment grew dim, his spirit engendered an irremovable melancholy and discontent. He bewailed his unhappy fate with the long-drawn bitterness of Ovid among the Scyth ians. He declared himself to be a 'forlorn wight' who was banished to a 'waste,' and there was 'quite forgot.'
Sixteenth-century Ireland had few attractions for an English poet. The country was torn asunder by inter necine strife. The native Irish were in per-
..„.., , The Irish
petual revolt against their English rulers. probiem
The Spaniards, anxious to injure England at every point, were ready to fan Irish disaffection, and were always threatening to send ships and men to encourage active rebellion. The air was infected by barbarous cruelty, by suffering and poverty. To Spenser's gentle and beauty-loving nature, violence and
2i8 EDMUND SPENSER.
pain were abhorrent, but he had no chance of escape from the hateful environment, and familiarity with the sordid scenes had the natural effect of dulling, even in his sensitive brain, the active sense of repulsion to its worst evils. Though he never reconciled himself to the conditions of Irish life or government, and vaguely hoped for mitigation of their horrors, he assimilated the views of the governing class to which he belonged, and became an advocate of the coercion of the natives to whose wrongs he gave no attentive ear.
Self-interest, too, insensibly moulded his political views. Having entered the official circle in Ireland, he Early eagerly sought opportunities of improving
friends in his material fortunes. He yearned for the Ireland. rewards of political life in England, but he came to realise that if those prizes were beyond his reach, he must accommodate himself to the more limited scope of advancement in Ireland. There he met with moderate success. He was quickly the recip ient of many profitable posts in Dublin, which he held together with his secretaryship to the Lord Deputy. He was also granted much land, in accordance with the English policy, which encouraged English settlers in Ireland. Happily, there was some worthier mitigation of his lot His official colleagues included some con genial companions whose sympathy with his literary ambitions went some way to counteract the griefs of his Irish experience. In Lord Grey, his Chief, the governor of the country, Spenser found one who in spired him with affection and respect. To Lord Grey's nobility of nature the poet paid splendid tribute in his description of Sir Artegal, the knight of justice in the Faerie Queene (Book iv. canto ii.). A humbler
EDMUND SPENSER. 219
colleague, Lodowick Bryskett, was a zealous lover of literature; he occupied a little cottage near Dublin, and often invited Spenser and others to engage there in literary debate. There the poet talked with engag ing frankness and modesty of his literary ambitions and plans.
Spenser's temperament was prone to seek the guid ance and countenance of others. It was fortunate that Ireland did not withhold from him the encouragement which was needful to stimulate poetic exertion. It was not likely that the poetic impulse would be conquered by his migration, but in the absence of sympathetic companions its activity would doubtless have slackened, and he would have wanted the confidence to give to the world its fruits. As things turned out, his enthusiasm for his art increased rather than diminished in his retire ment. Literary composition provided congenial relief from the routine work of his office. At the entreaty of
his friends, he took up again his great work •< T- • s^ -it -^ i • j • His poetic
the Faene Queene, with its scene laid in an exertions
imaginary fairyland, to which the poetic humour could carry him from any point of the earth's surface. At the same time he made many slighter excursions in verse, of which the most beautiful was his lament for the premature death of his friend and patron, Sir Philip Sidney. No sweeter imagery ever adorned an elegy than that to be met with in Spen ser's 'Astrophel, a pastorall Elegie upon the death of the most noble and valorous knight Sir Philip Sidney.' His brain could summon at will ethereal visions which the sordid environment of his Irish career could neither erase nor blur. He was no careless pleasure- seeking official; he did his official work thoroughly,
220 EDMUND SPENSER.
although not brilliantly. There was strange contrast between the poet's official duties and the intellectual and spiritual aspirations which filled his brain while he laboured at the official oar.
VI
After eight years, Spenser left London to take up a new and more dignified post in the South of Ireland. Removal to He was made clerk of the Council of the south Munster, the southern province, a prosaic of Ireland, office for which poetic genius was small qualification. He took active part in the work of plant ing or colonising with Englishmen untenanted land, or land from which native holders were evicted. Spenser thought it perfectly just to evict the natives ; it is doubt ful if he saw any crime in exterminating them. New tracts of land were given him by way of encouragement in the neighbourhood of Cork. He took up his resi dence in the old castle of Kilcolman, three miles from Doneraile, in County Cork. It was surrounded by woodland scenery, and the prospect was as soothing to the human brain as any that a 'poet could wish. The house is now an ivy-covered ruin, while the surrounding scenery has gained in fulness and in richness of aspect.
But the beauty of nature brought to Spenser in Ireland little content or happiness. It was on his Quarrels management of 'the world of living men,' with not on a placid survey of ' wood and stream
neighbours. an(j fieid an(j hm* and ocean ' that his material welfare depended. He had not the tact and social diplomacy needful for the maintenance of har mony with his rude, semi-civilised neighbours. With
EDMUND SPENSER. 221
the landlords of estates contiguous to his «wn he was constantly engaged in litigation, and was often under dread of physical conflict.
Nevertheless, one source of relief from the anxieties and annoyances of official life was present in County Cork as in County Dublin. Fortune again gave him a companion who could offer him welcome encouragement in the practice of his poetic art.
When Spenser pitched his tent in the south of Ireland, there was there another English settler who was
notably imbued with literary tastes in some
i • L- o- I*? 1*. -n i u Sir Walter
way akin to his own. Sir Walter Ralegh
was living at his house on the Blackwater in temporary retirement from political storms across the Irish Channel. He quickly made his way to Kilcolman Castle. Spenser was cheered in his desolation by a visitor whose literary enthusiasm was proof against every vicissitude of fortune. With Ralegh's inspiring voice ringing in his ear, Spenser's Faerie Queene pro gressed apace. Spenser recognised, too, Ralegh's own poetic power, and he stirred his neighbour to address himself also to the Muse in friendly rivalry. Of his meetings with Ralegh in the fastnesses of Southern Ireland, and of their poetic contests, Spenser wrote with simple beauty thus : —
A strange shepherd chanced to find me out, Whether allured with my pipes delight, Whose pleasing sound yshrilled far about, Or thither led by chance, I know not right ; Whom, when I asked from what place he came, And how he hight, himself he did ycleepe The Shepherd of the Ocean by name, And said he came far from the main-sea deep.
222 EDMUND SPENSER.
He, sitting me beside in that same shade,
Provoked me to play some pleasant fit ;
And when he heard the music which I made,
He found himself full greatly pleased at it :
Yet aemuling * my pipe, he took in hond
My pipe, before that aemuled f of many,
And played thereon ; (for well that skill he cond) ;
Himself as skilful in that art as any.
He pip'd, I sung ; and, when he sung, I piped ;
By change of turns, each making other merry ;
Neither envying other, nor envied,
So piped we until we both were weary. '£
It was at Ralegh's persuasion that Spenser, having completed three books of his Faerie Queene, took the resolve to visit London once more. At revisited Ralegh's persuasion he sought to arrange for the publication of his ambitious venture. His fame as author of The Shepheards Calender still ran high, and a leader of the publishing fraternity, William Ponsonby, was eager to undertake the volume. The negotiation rapidly issued in the appearance of the first three books of Spenser's epic allegory under Ponsonby's auspices early in 1590.
Ralegh, to whom the author addressed a prefatory letter 'expounding his whole intention in the course of Its dedica- tn^s worV had filled the poet with hope that tion to the highest power in the land, the Queen Queen herself, ' whose grace was great and bounty
Elizabeth. mOst rewardful,' would interest herself in so noble an undertaking. With the loyalty characteristic of the time, the poet had made his virgin sovereign a chief heroine of his poem. To her accordingly he dedicated
* Rivalling. t Rivalled.
J Colin Clouts (ome homt again*- 11. 60-79.
EDMUND SPENSER. 223
the work in words of dignified brevity. The dedication ran : — ' To the most high, mighty, and magnificent Empress, renowned for piety, virtue, and all gracious government. . . . Her most humble servant, Edmund Spenser, doth in all humility dedicate, present, and consecrate these his labours, to live with the eternity of her fame.' But it was not the Queen alone among great personages who could, if well disposed, benefit his material fortunes and restore him in permanence to his native English soil. The poet was urged by friendly advisers to enlist the interest of all leading men and women in his undertaking. In seventeen prefatory sonnets he saluted as a suppliant for their favour as many high officers or ladies of the Court.
The reception accorded to the first published instal ment of the Faerie Queene gave Spenser no ground for regret. Among lovers of poetry the book Recept;on attained instant success. The first three Ofthe books of the Faerie Queene dispelled all Faerie surviving doubt that Spenser was, in point of QM££ne> time, the greatest poet (after Chaucer) in the English language ; and there were many who judged the later poet to be in merit the equal if not the superior of the earlier.
In the Faerie Queene Spenser broke new ground. It was not of the category to which Spenser's earlier effort The Shepheards Calender belonged. its advance Since the earlier volume appeared more on The than ten years had passed, and Spenser's Shepheards hand had grown in confidence and cunning. Calen(ier> His thought had matured, his intellectual interests had grown, till they embraced well-nigh the whole expanse of human endeavour. His genius, his poetic capacity,
224 EDMUND SPENSER.
had now ripened At length a long-sustained effort of exalted aim lay well within his scope. As in the case of The Shepheards Calender, Spenser deprecated origin ality of design. With native modesty he announced on the threshold his discipleship to Homer and Virgil, to Ariosto and Tasso. It was an honest and just an nouncement. Many an episode and much of his diction came from the epic poems of Achilles and ^Eneas, or of Orlando and Rinaldo. But all his borrow ings were fused with his own invention by the fire of his brain, and the final scheme was the original fruit of individual genius. Spenser's main purpose was to teach virtue, to instruct men in the conduct of life, to ex pound allegorically a system of moral philosophy. But with a lavish hand he shed over his ethical teaching the splendour of great poetry, and it is by virtue of that allurement that his endeavour won its triumph.
VII
Spenser was ill content with mere verbal recognition of the eminence of his poetic achievement. His
presence in London was not only planned A suitor j , ,. . . j- • /-.
for office m or"er to publish the Faerie Queene, and
to enjoy the applause of critics near at hand. It was also designed to win official preferment, to gain a more congenial means of livelihood than was open to him in Ireland, a home ' unmeet for man in whom was aught regardful.' To secure this end he spared no effort He cared little for his self-respect provided he could strengthen his chances of victory. He submitted to all the tedious and degrading routine which was in-
EDMUND SPENSER. 225
cumbent on suitors for court office ; he patiently suffered rebuffs and disappointments, delays and the indecision of patrons. Some measure of success rewarded his persistency. Ralegh, who enjoyed for the time Queen Elizabeth's favour, worked hard in his friend's behalf. The Queen was not indifferent to the compliments Spenser had paid her in his great poem. Great ladies were gratified by the poetic eulogies he offered them in occasional verse. In the exalted ranks of society his reputation 'as an unapproached master of his art grew steadily.
A general willingness manifested itself to respond favourably to the plaintive petitions of a poet so richly endowed. A pension was suggested. The The Queen herself, the rumour went, accepted grant of the suggestion with alacrity, and calling the a pension, attention of her Lord Treasurer, Lord Burghley, to it, bade him be generous. She named a sum which was deemed by her adviser excessive. Finally Spenser was allotted a State-paid income of fifty pounds a year. The amount was large at a time when the purchasing power of money was eight times what it is now, and the bestowal of it promised him such prestige as recog nition by the crown invariably confers on a poet, although it did not give Spenser the formal title of poet-laureate.
But Spenser was unsatisfied ; he resented and never forgave the attitude of Lord Burghley, who, like most
practical statesmen, looked with suspicion on ,
.... , The return
poets when they sought political posts : he to Ire]and-
had no enthusiasm for amateurs in political
office, nor did he approve of the appropriation of public
money to the encouragement of literary genius. The
226 EDMUND SPENSER.
net result left Spenser's position unchanged The pension was not large enough to justify him in abandon ing work in Ireland. England offered him no asylum. He recrossed the Irish Channel to resume his office as Clerk of the Council of Munster.
His despair At home in Ireland, Spenser reviewed his of his fortunes in despair. With feeling he wrote
fortunes. in his poem called Mother Hubberds Tale : —
* Full little knowest thou, that hast not tried, What hell it is, in suing long to bide : To lose good days, that might be better spent ; To waste long nights in pensive discontent ; To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow ; To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow ; To have thy Prince's grace, yet want her Peers ; To have thy asking, yet wait many years ; To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares ; To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs ; To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run, To spend, to give, to want, to be undone. Unhappy wight, born to disastrous end, That doth his life in so long tendance spend ! ' *
On a second poem of the same date and on the same theme he bestowed the ironical title Colin Clouts come home againe (Colin Clout was a nickname 'which it amused him to give himself). Colin Clout is as charm ing and simple an essay in autobiography as fell from any poet's pen. He recalls the details of his recent experience in London with charming naivet^ and dwells with generous enthusiasm on the favours and 'sundry good turns,' which he owed to his neighbour Sir Walter Ralegh. He sent the manuscript of
* Spenser's Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubberds Tale, 11. 896-909. .
EDMUND SPENSER. 227
Colin Clout to Ralegh, and, although it was not printed till 1595, it soon passed from hand to hand. Elsewhere in another occasional poem, The Ruines of Time, which mainly lamented the death of his first patron Leicester and of that patron's brother the Earl of Warwick, he avenged himself in a more strident note on Lord Burghley's cynical indifference to his need.
All the leisure that his official duties left him he now devoted to poetry. He committed to verse all his thought. He was no longer reticent, and sent copies of his poems in all directions. z f!j a Quickly he came before the public as author of another volume of verse possessing high auto biographical attraction. This was a characteristic ven ture of the publisher Ponsonby, and with its actual preparation for the press the poet was not directly con cerned. Scattered poems by Spenser were circulating in manuscript from hand to hand. These the publisher, Ponsonby, brought together under the title of Com plaints, without distinct authority from the author. The book seems to have contained compositions of various dates; some belonged to early years, but the majority were very recent To the recent work belongs one of Spenser's most characteristic and most mature poetic efforts, the poem of ' Muiopotmos.' That poem is the airiest of fancies treated with marvellous delicacy and vivacity. It tells the trivial story of a butterfly swept by a gust of wind into a spider's web. But the picturesque portrayal of the butterfly's careless passage through the air, and of his revellings in all the delights of nature, breathes the purest spirit of simple and sensu ous poetry.
228 EDMUND SPENSER.
' Over the fields, in his frank lustiness, And all the champain o'er, he soared light, And all the country wide he did possess, Feeding upon their pleasures bounteously, That none gainsaid and none did him envy.'
It is difficult to refuse assent to the interpretation of the poem which detects in the butterfly's joyous career on 'his air-cutting wings,' and his final and fatal entangle ment in the grisly tyrant's den, a figurative reflection of the poet's own experiences.
VIII
A change was imminent in Spenser's private life. Once more he contemplated marriage. He paid his
addresses to the daughter of a neighbouring The poet's } dl d H fathe james Boyle was the marriage. ' J '
kinsman of a great magnate of the south of
Ireland, Richard Boyle, who was to be created at a later period Earl of Cork.
It was in accord with the fashion of the time, that Spenser, under the new sway of the winged god, should
interrupt the poetic labours on which he had Amoretti alrea(ty entered, to pen, in honour of his
wished-for bride, a long sequence of sonnets. Spenser's sonnets, which he entitled Amoretti^ do not rank very high among his poetic compositions. Like those of most of his contemporaries, they reflect his wide reading in the similar work of French and Italian contemporaries to a larger extent than his own in dividuality. Although a personal experience impelled him to the enterprise, it is only with serious qualifications that Spenser's sequence of sonnets can be regarded as
EDMUND SPENSER. 229
autobiographic confessions.* In his hands, as in the hands of Sidney and Daniel, the sonnet was a poetic instrument whereon he sought to repeat in his mother- tongue, with very vague reference to his personal cir cumstances, the notes of amorous feeling and diction which earlier poets of Italy and France had already made their own. The sonnet, which was a wholly foreign form of poetry, and came direct to Elizabethan England from the Continent of Europe, had an inherent attrac tion for Spenser throughout his career. His earliest literary efforts were two small collections of sonnets, renderings respectively of French sonnets by Du Bellay and Marot's French translation of an ode of Petrarch. His Amoretti prove that in his maturer years he had fully maintained his early affection for French and Italian sonnetteers. He had indeed greatly extended his ac quaintance among them. The influence of Petrarch and Du Bellay was now rivalled by the influence of Tasso and Desportes.t At times Spenser is content
* Spenser makes only three distinctly autobiographical statements in his sonnets. Sonnet xxxiii. is addressed by name to his friend Lodowick Bryskett, and is an apology for the poet's delay in com pleting his Faerie Queene. In Sonnet Ix. Spenser states that he is forty-one years old, and that one year has passed since he -came under the influence of the winged god. Sonnet Ixxiv. apostrophises the ' happy letters ' which comprise the name Elizabeth, which he states was borne alike by his mother, his sovereign, and his wife, Elizabeth Boyle.
' Ye three Elizabeths ! for ever live,,
That three such graces did unto me give.'
Here Spenser seems to be following a hint offered him by Tasso, who addressed a sonnet to three benefactresses (' Tre gran donne ') all named Leonora.— (Tasso, Rime, Venice, 1583, vol. i. p. 39.)
t See Elizabethan Sonnets, vol. i. pp. xcii.-xcix. (introd.), edited by the present writer. The following is a good example of
230 EDMUND SPENSER.
with literal translation of these two foreign masters; very occasionally does he altogether escape from their toils. Where he avoids literal dependence, he com monly adopts foreign words and ideas too closely to give his individuality complete freedom. Only three or four times does he break loose from the foreign chains and reveal in his sonnet sequence the full force of his great genius. For the most part the Amoretti repro duces the hollow prettiness and cloying sweetness of French and Italian conceits with little of the English poet's distinctive charm.
Spenser's dependence on Tasso. Nine lines of Tasso's sonnet are literally translated by Spenser : —
' Fair is my love, when her fair golden hairs With the loose wind ye waving chance to mark ; Fair, when the rose in her red cheeks appears, Or in her eyes the fire of love doth spark. . . . But fairest she, when so she doth display The gate with pearls and rubies richly dight ; Through which her words so wise do make their way, To bear the message of her gentle spright.'
(Spenser, Amoretti, Ixxxi.)
' Bella e la donna mia, se dal bel crine,
L'oro al vento ondeggiare avien, che miri ; Bella se volger gli occhi in dolci giri O le rose fiorir tra la sue brine. . . .
Ma quella, ch'apre un dolce labro, e serra Porta di bei rubin si dolcemente, E belta sovra ogn' altra altera, ed alma.
Porta gentil de la pregion de 1'alma,
Onde i messi d'amor escon sovente.'
(Tasso, Rime, Venice, 1585, vol. iii. p. 17^.)
Spenser's fidelity as a translator does not permit him to overlook even Tasso's pleonastic ' che miri ' (line 2), which he renders quite literally by 'ye chance to mark.'
EDMUND SPENSER. 231.
But if sincerity and originality are slenderly repre sented in the sonnets, neither of these qualities is want ing to the great ode which was published with them. There Spenser with an engaging , Q, . frankness betrayed the elation of spirit which came of his courtship and marriage. In this Epi- thalamion, with which he celebrated his wedding, his lyrical powers found full scope, and the ode takes rank with the greatest of English lyrics. The refined tone does not ignore any essential facts, but every touch subserves the purposes of purity and brings into prom inence the spiritual beauty of the nuptial tie. Of the fascination of his bride he writes in lines like these : —
' But if ye saw that which no eyes can see, The inward beauty of her lively spright, Garnished with heavenly gifts of high degree, Much more then would you wonder at that sight, And stand astonished like to those which red Medusa's mazeful head.
There dwells sweet love, and constant chastity, Unspotted faith, and comely womanhood, Regard of honour, and mild modesty ; There virtue reigns as queen in royal throng And giveth laws alone, The which the base affections do obey, And yield their services unto her will ; Ne thought of thing uncomely ever may Thereto approach to tempt her mind to ill. Had ye once seen these her celestial treasures, And unrevealed pleasures, Then would ye wonder, and her praises sing, That all the woods should answer, and your echo ring.' *
Spenser deferred marriage to so mature an age as * Epithalamion, 11. 185-203.
232 EDMUND SPENSER.
forty-two. His great achievements in poetry were then completed. Before his marriage he had finished the The Faerie ^ast three completed books of his Faerie Queene Queene ; a fragment of a seventh book sur- continued. vives of uncertain date, but it probably belongs to the poet's pre-nuptial career. After his marriage, his first practical business was to revisit London and super intend the printing of the three last completed books of his great allegory.
Five years had passed since his last sojourn in Eng land, and his welcome was not all that he could wish.
In diplomatic circles he found himself an Political , . r • • T ,, , . f
difficulties. obJect of susPlclon- James vi., the king of
Scotland, himself a poet and a reader of poetry, had lately detected in Duessa, the deceitful witch of Spenser's great poem, an ill-disguised portrait of his own mother, Mary Queen of Scots. Official complaint had been made to the English Government, and a request preferred for the punishment of the offending poet. The controversy went no further and Spenser was unharmed, but the older politicians complained privately of his indiscretion, and Burghley's cynical scorn seemed justified.
The fashionable nobility, however, only recognised his glorious poetic gifts and their enthusiasm was un- The Earl diminished. Spenser followed the Court of Essex's with persistence. He was a visitor at the patronage. Queen's palace at Greenwich, where Shake speare had acted in the royal presence two seasons before. Especially promising was the reception accorded him by the Queen's latest favourite, the Earl of Essex, a sincere lover of the arts and of artists, but of too impetuous a temperament to exert genuine influence at
EDMUND SPENSER. 233
Court in behalf of his protege. Spenser was the Earl's guest at Essex House in the Strand. The mansion was already familiar to the poet, for it had been in earlier years the residence of the Earl of Leicester, the poet's first patron, and Essex's predecessor in the regard of his sovereign. Spenser rejoiced in the renewed hospitality the familiar roof offered him. Of his presence in Essex House, he left a memorial of high literary interest. It was in honour of two noble ladies, daughters of the Earl of Worcester, who were married from Essex House in November 1596. that Spenser penned the latest of his poems and one that embodied the quintessence of his lyric gift His ' Prothalamioti or a spousal verse, in honour of the double marriage of two honourable and virtuous ladies,' was hardly a whit inferior to his recent Epithalamion. Its far-famed refrain :
' Sweet Thames ! run softly, till I end my song,'
sounds indeed a sweeter note than the refrain of answer ing woods and ringing echoes in the earlier ode. It leaves an ineffaceable impression of musical grace and simplicity. It was Spenser's fit farewell to his Muse.
It was not poetry that occupied Spenser's main atten tion during this visit to London. Again his chief concern was the search for more lucrative His prose employment than Ireland was offering him, tract on and in this quest he met with smaller en- Ireland, couragement than before. With a view to proving his political sagacity and his fitness for political work, he now indeed abandoned with his Prothalamion poetry altogether. Much of his time in London he devoted to describing and criticising the existing condition of the country of Ireland where his life was unwillingly
234 EDMUND SPENSER.
passed. He wrote dialogue-wise a prose treatise which he called ' A view of the present state of Ireland.' It was first circulated in manuscript, and was not published in Spenser's lifetime. Despite many picturesque pas sages, and an attractive flow of colloquy, it is not the work that one would expect from a great poet at the zenith of his powers. For the most part Spenser's 'View' is a political pamphlet, showing a narrow poli tical temper and lack of magnanimity. The argument is a mere echo of the hopeless and helpless prejudices which infected the English governing class. Despair of Ireland's political and social future is the dominant note. 'Marry, see there have been divers good plots devised and wise counsels cast already about reforma tion of that realm ; but they say it is the fatal destiny of that land, that no purposes, whatsoever are meant for her good, will prosper or take good effect, which whether it proceed from the very Genius of the soil, or influence of the stars, or that Almighty God hath not yet appointed the time of her reformation, or that he reserveth her in this unquiet state still for some secret scourge, which shall by her come unto England, it is hard to be known, but yet much to be feared.'
The poet failed to recognise any justice in the claims of Irish nationality ; English law was to' be forced on Hispre- Irishmen; Irish nationality was to be sup- judice pressed (if need be) at the point of the
against sword. Spenser's avowed want of charity the Irish. long caused in the native population ab horrence of his name. But while condemning Irish character and customs, Spenser was enlightened enough to perceive defects in English methods of governing Ireland. He deplored the ignorance and degradation
EDMUND SPENSER. 235
of the Protestant clergy there, and the unreadiness of the new settlers to take advantage, by right scientific methods of cultivation, of the natural wealth of the soil. Despite his invincible prejudices, Spenser ac knowledged, too, some good qualities in the native Irish. They were skilled and alert horsemen. ' I have heard some great warriors say, that, in all the services which they had seen abroad in foreign countries, they never saw a more comely horseman than the Irish man, nor that cometh on more bravely in his charge : neither is his manner of mounting unseemly, though he wants stirrups, but more ready then with stirrups, for in his getting up his horse is still going, whereby he gaineth way.'
Spenser allows, too, a qualified virtue in the native poetry. Of Irish compositions Spenser asserts that 'they savoured of sweet wit and good invention, but skilled not of the goodly ornaments of Poetry : yet were they sprinkled with some pretty flowers of their own natural device, which gave good grace and come liness unto them.' Spenser also took an antiquarian interest in the remains of Irish art and civilisation, and contemplated a work on Irish antiquities, of which no trace has been found.
Only the natural beauty of the country excited in him any genuine enthusiasm. 'And sure it is yet a most beautiful and sweet country as any is The natu- under heaven, seamed throughout with many ral beauty goodly rivers, replenished with all sorts of of Ireland, fish; most abundantly sprinkled with many sweet islands and goodly lakes like little inland seas that will carry even ships upon their waters ; adorned with goodly woods fit for building of houses and ships, so
236 EDMUND SPENSER.
commodiously, as that if some princes in the world had them, they would soon hope to be lords of all the seas, and ere long of all the world ; also full of good ports and havens opening upon England and Scotland, as inviting us to come to them, to see what excellent commodities that country can afford ; besides the soil itself most fertile, fit to yield all kinds of fruit that shall be committed thereunto. And lastly, the heavens most mild and temperate.'
His ' View of the present state of Ireland ' is Spenser's only work in prose, and is his [final contribution to literature.
IX
Early in 1597 Spenser returned to Ireland for the last time, and at the moment empty-handed. He was
more than usually depressed in spirit. His Sheriff of .. •_ u j u c vi
Cork iwS v Court, he wrote, had been fruitless.
Sullen care overwhelmed him. Idle hopes flew away like empty shadows. None the less a change was wrought next year in his position in Ireland. He received the appointment of Sheriff of Cork in the autumn of 1598. The preferment was of no enviable kind. It was an anxious and a thankless office to which Spenser was called. The difficulties of Irish government were at the moment reaching a crisis which was likely to involve Sheriffs of the South in personal peril. A great effort was in preparation on the part of the native Irish to throw off the tyrannous yoke of England, and a stout nerve and resolute action were required in all officers of state if the attack were to be successfully repulsed.
EDMUND SPENSER. 237
The first sign of the storm came in August 1598 — a week before Spenser's formal instalment as Sheriff. In that month the great leader of the native Irish, the Earl of Tyrone, gathered an army together and met English troops at the Yellow Ford, on the Blackwater River, in County Tyrone, inflicting on them a complete defeat. That is the only occasion in English history on which Irish men, meeting Englishmen in open battle, have proved themselves the conquerors. The old spirit of discon tent, thus stimulated, rapidly spread to Spenser's neigh bourhood. Tyrone sent some of his Irish soldiers into Munster, the whole province was roused, and County Cork was at their mercy. Panic seized the little English garrisons scattered over the County. Spenser was taken unawares ; the castle of Kilcolman was burnt over his head, and he, his wife, and four children fled with great difficulty to Cork. An in accurate report spread at the time in London that one of his children perished in the flames. Spenser's position resembled that of many an English civilian at the outbreak in India of the Indian Mutiny, but he did not display the heroism or firm courage of those */ who were to follow him as guardians of the outposts /S of the British Empire. At Cork all that Spenser did was to send a brief note of the situation to the Queen, entreating her to show those caitiffs the terror of her wrath, and send over a force of ten thousand men, with sufficient cavalry, to extirpate them.
In December the President of Munster, Sir Thomas Norreys, an old friend of the poet, sent him over to London to deliver despatches to the Government. It was his last journey. His health was fatally ruined
238 EDMUND SPENSER.
by the shock of the rebellion, and he reached London only to die. He found shelter in an inn or lodging His last m King Street, Westminster, and there he mission to died on Saturday, i6th January, 1599. He London. was in the prime of life — hardly more than forty-seven years old — but his choice spirit could not withstand the bufferings of so desperate a crisis.
Rumour ran that Spenser died in Westminster, 'for lack of bread,' in a state of complete destitution. It is said that the Earl of Essex, his host in London of three years back, learned of his distressful condition too late, and that, just before the poet breathed his last, the Earl sent him twenty pieces of silver, which Spenser refused with the grim remark that he had no time to spend them. The story is probably exaggerated. Spenser came to London as a Queen's messenger; he was in the enjoyment of a pension, and though his life was a long struggle with poverty, mainly through unbusinesslike habits, it is unlikely that he was without necessaries on his death bed. It is more probable that he died of nervous prostration than of starvation.*
At any rate Spenser had friends in London, and they, when he was dead, accorded him a fitting burial.
* Nevertheless the belief that he had been harshly used long survived. John Weever, in an epigram published in the year of Spenser's death, declared : —
' Spenser is ruined, of our latest time
The fairest ruin, Faeries foulest want.'
The author of the Return from Parnassus asserts that in his last hours ' maintenance ' was denied him by an ungrateful country. A later disciple, Phineas Fletcher, in his Purple Island, wrote of Spenser : —
' Poorly, poor man, he lived ; poorly, poor man, he died.'
EDMUND SPENSER. 239
Westminster Abbey, the National Church, where the sovereigns of the country were wont to find their last
earthly home, became Spenser's final resting- .
» m. , • r His burial,
place. I he choice of such a sepulchre
was notable testimony to his poetical repute. The Abbey had not yet acquired its 'Poets' Corner' in its southern transept. It was Spenser's interment which practically inaugurated that noble chamber of death. Only one great man of letters had been buried there already. Chaucer had been laid in the southern transept two hundred years before, not apparently in his capacity of poet, but as officer of the King's royal household, all members of which had some vague title to burial near their royal masters. It was not until the middle of the sixteenth century, when Chaucer's title to be reckoned the father of great English poetry was first acknowledged, that an admirer sought and obtained permission to raise a monument to his memory near his grave. The episode stirred the imagination of the Elizabethans, and when death claimed Spenser, who called Chaucer master, and who was reckoned the true successor to Chaucer's throne of English poetry, a sentiment spread abroad that he who was so nearly akin to Chaucer by force of poetic genius ought of right to sleep near his tomb. Accord ingly in fitting pomp Spenser's remains were interred beneath the shadow of the elder poet's monument*
* The propriety of the honour thus accorded to Spenser is crudely but emphatically acknowledged by the author of the Pilgrimage to Parnassus, 1600, where the critic of contemporary literature, Ingenioso, after lamenting the sad circumstances of Spenser's death, adds : —
' But softly may our honour's \var. led. Homer's] ashes rest, That lie by merry Chaucer's noble chest.'
240 EDMUND SPENSER.
The Earl of Essex, the favourite of the Queen, who honoured Spenser with unqualified enthusiasm, and, despite his waywardness in politics, never erred in his devotion to 'the Muses, defrayed the expenses of the ceremony. Those who attended the obsequies were well chosen. In the procession of mourners walked, we are told, the poets of the day, and when the coffin was lowered these loving admirers of their great col league's work threw into his tomb ' poems and mournful elegies with the pens that wrote them.' Little imagina tion is needed to conjure up among those who paid homage to Spenser's spirit the glorious figure of Shake speare, by whom alone of contemporaries Spenser was outshone.
It was welcome to the Queen herself that Spenser, the greatest of her poetic panegyrists, should receive The tomb ^ue honour in death. There is reason to in West- believe that she claimed the duty of erecting minster a monument above his grave. But the pecuniary misfortunes which had dogged Spenser in life seemed to hover about him after death. The royal intention of honouring his memory was defeated by the dishonesty of a royal servant. The money which was allotted to the purpose by the Queen was nefariously misapplied. Ultimately, twenty- one years after Spenser's death, a monument was erected at the cost of a noble patroness of poets, Ann Clifford, Countess of Dorset. The inscription ran : — ' Here lyes expecting the second comminge of our Saviour Christ Jesus, the body of Edmond Spencer, the Prince of Poets in his tyme, whose divine spirit needs noe other witnesse than the workes which he left behind him.' Spenser was rightfully named prince of the realm of
EDMUND SPENSER. 241
which Shakespeare was king. Although Shakespeare was not buried at Westminster, Spenser's tomb was soon encircled by the graves of other literary heroes of his epoch, and in course of time a memorial statue of Shakespeare overlooked it. Three of Spenser's contemporaries, Francis Beaumont, Michael Drayton, and Ben Jonson, were within a few years interred near him in the Abbey.
Time dealt unkindly with the fabric of Spenser's monument, and in the eighteenth century it needed renovating 'in durable marble.' But it was Spenser's funeral rites that permanently ensured for literary eminence the loftiest dignity of sepulture that the Eng lish nation has to bestow. Great literature was thence forth held to rank with the greatest achievements wrought in the national service. During the last two centuries few English poets of supreme merit have been denied in death admission to the national sanc tuary in the neighbourhood of Spenser's tomb. Several of those who had been buried elsewhere have been, like Shakespeare, commemorated in Westminster Abbey by sculptured monuments.
In practical affairs Spenser's life was a failure. It ended in a somewhat sordid tragedy, which added nothing to his political reputation. His ,
literary work stands on a very different e^atness footing. Its steady progress in varied ex cellences was a ceaseless triumph for art. It won him immortal fame. Spenser's chief work, the Faerie
242 EDMUND SPENSER.
Queene, was the greatest poem that had been written in England since Chaucer died, and remains, when it is brought into comparison with all that English poets have written since, one of the brightest jewels in the crown of English poetry. It is worthy of closest study. Minute inquiry into its form and spirit is essen tial to every estimate of Spenser's eminence.
In all senses the work is great. The scale on which Spenser planned his epic allegory has indeed no The ampli- parallel in ancient or modern literature. All tude of that has reached us is but a quarter of the scale. contemplated whole. Yet the Faerie Queene
is, in its extant shape, as long as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey combined with Virgil's ^Eneid. Even epics of more recent date, whose example Spenser confesses to have emulated, fell far behind his work in its liberality of scale. In the unfinished form that it has come down to us, Spenser's epic is more than twice as long as Dante's La Divina Commedia^ or Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata. Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, with which Spenser was thoroughly familiar, was brought to completion in somewhat fewer lines. Nor did Spenser's great successors compete with him in length. Milton's Paradise Lost, the greatest of all English epics, fills, when joined to its sequel Paradise Regained^ less than a third of Spenser's space. Had the Faerie Queene reached a twenty-fourth book, as the poet at the outset thought possible, not all the great epics penned in ancient or modern Europe would, when piled one upon the other, have reached the gigantic dimensions of the Elizabethan poem.
The serious temper and erudition of which the enter prise was the fruit powerfully impress the inquirer at
EDMUND SPENSER. 243
the outset. It is doubtful if Milton and Gray, who are usually reckoned the most learned of English poets, excelled Spenser in the range of their read ing, or in the extent to which their poetry Assunila-
tive power, assimilated the fruits of their study. Homer
and Theocritus, Virgil and Cicero, Petrarch and Du Bellay, mediseval writers of chivalric romance, Tasso and Ariosto, supply ideas, episodes, and phrases to the Faerie Queene. Early in life Spenser came under the spell of Tasso, the monarch of contemporary Italian poetry, and gathered much suggestion from his ample store. But the Faerie Queene owes most to the epic of Orlando Furioso by Tasso's predecessor, Ariosto. The chivalric adventures which Spenser's heroes undergo are often directly imitated from the Italian of 'that most famous Tuscan pen.' Many an incident, together with the moralising which its details suggest, follows Ariosto in phraseology too closely to admit any doubt of its source. Spenser is never a plagiarist. He in vests his borrowings with his own individuality. But very numerous are the passages which owed their birth to Ariosto's preceding invention. The Italian poet is rich in imagery. He drank deep of the Pierian spring. He is indeed superior to Spenser in the conciseness and directness of his narrative power. But Ariosto has little of the warmth of human sympathy or moral elevation which dignifies Spenser's effort. Spenser's tone is far more serious than that of the Italian master, whose main aim was the telling of an exciting tale. Ariosto is far inferior to Spenser in the sustained energy • alike of his moral and of his poetic impulse.
The Faerie Queene was not designed, like Ariosto's achievement, as a mere piece of art It was before
244 EDMUND SPENSER.
all else a moral treatise. Although it was fashioned
on the epic lines with which constant reading of the
work of Homer and Virgil among the
ancients, and more especially of Ariosto morai aim. , , , , ,
and Tasso among the moderns, had made
Spenser familiar, Spenser was not content merely to tell a story. According to the poet's own account, he sought 'to represent all the moral virtues, Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, and the like, assigning to every virtue a knight to be the pattern and defender of the same ; in whose actions and feats of arms and chivalry the operations of that virtue, whereof he is the pro tector, are to be expressed, and the vices and unruly appetites that oppose themselves against the same to be beaten down and overcome.' Twelve books, one for each moral virtue, were needed for such an exposi tion of ethical philosophy. But this was only the first step in the poet's contemplated journey. The author looked forward to supplementing this ethical effort by an exposition of political philosophy, in another twelve books which would expound the twelve political virtues that were essential to a perfect ruler of men. Of the twenty-four projected books there is a tradition that Spenser wrote twelve, nearly half of which were de stroyed in manuscript by the rebels in Ireland. It is certain that only the first six books, with a small portion of the seventh, have reached us.
Spenser's ethical views are not systematically de veloped, but, considered in their main aspect, they owe
an immense debt to the Greek philosopher The debt ,-,. . „, . . . , . , . , . , to Plato "lato. Plato s ethical teaching glows in page
after page of the Faerie Queene and of Spen ser's shorter poems. The English poet loyally accepts
EDMUND SPENSER. 245
Plato's doctrines that true beauty is only of the mind, that reason is the sole arbiter of man's destiny, that war must be waged on the passions and the bodily senses, that peace and happiness are the fruit of the intellect when it is enfranchised of corporeal infirmity. 'All happy peace and goodly government ' are only ' settled in sure establishment'
' In a body which doth freely yield His parts to reason's rule obedient, And letteth her that ought the sceptre wield.' *
But it is not merely in his general ethical tone that Spenser acknowledges his discipleship to Plato. Many de tails of the Faerie Queene embody Platonic terminology and Platonic conceptions. In Book in. he borrows from Plato the conception of ' the garden of Adonis,' — Nature's nursery — and under that image he presents Plato's theory of the infinite mutability of matter, despite its indestructibility. Infinite shapes of creatures are bred, Spenser points out, ' in that same garden ' where with the world is replenished,
' Yet is the stock not lessened, nor spent, But still remains in everlasting store, As it at first created was of yore. ' t
In Book ii. Spenser describes the threefold elements which go to the making of man's soul : right reason (Medina), the passion of wrath (Elissa), and the passion of sensual desire (Perissa). Although the poet here recalls the doctrine of Plato's great disciple, Aristotle, to the effect that virtue is the golden mean between
* Bk. ii., canto xi., stanza ii.
t Bk. in., canto vi., stanza xxxvi.
246 EDMUND SPENSER.
excess and defect, he actually accepts the older Platonic principle that virtue is the mean between two equally active and powerful evil passions. Occasionally Spenser ranges himself with later Greek philosophers, who de veloped and exaggerated Plato's doctrine of the eternal spirit's supremacy over mutable matter. But Plato is always his foremost teacher, not only in the Faerie Queene but in his sonnets, in his rapturous hymns of beauty, and in much else of his occasional poetry.
In fulfilment of his ethical purpose the poet imagined twelve knights, each the champion of one of ' the private Spenser's moral virtues' of Greek philosophy, who Knights of should undertake perilous combats with vice the Virtues. jn various shapes. The first and second champions, — respectively, the knight of the Red Cross, or of Holiness, and Sir Guyon, the knight of Temper ance, — embody with singular precision Platonic doctrine. The third champion, a more original conception, was a woman, Britomart, the lady-knight of Chastity ; the fourth was Cambell, who, joined with Triamond, illus trates the worth pf Friendship ; the fifth was Artegal, the knight of Justice ; the sixth, Sir Calidore, the knight of Courtesy. Spenser intended that his seventh knight should be champion of Constancy, but of that story only a fragment survives. Sir Calidore is the last completed hero in the poet's gallery.
The allegorised adventures in which Spenser's knights engage are cast for the most part in the true epic mould. Affinities Episode after episode reads like chapters of with chivalric romance of adventure. Rescues of
chivalric innocent ladies by the knights from the per-
mance. secutions of giant villains constantly recur. Fiercely - fought encounters with monsters of hateful
EDMUND SPENSER. 247
mien abound. Spenser indeed employs this machinery of chivalric conflict with a frequency that leaves the impression of monotony. The charge of tediousness which has often been brought against the Faerie Queene is not easy to repel when it is levelled against Spenser's descriptions of his valiant heroes' physical perils.*
But there is much else in the poem to occupy the reader's mind. Spenser's design would have failed to satisfy the primary laws of epic had he xhe Queen allowed it to hinge alone on isolated adven- and Prince tures of virtuous knights, of knights who Arthur, pursued their career independently of one another. From the epic point of view there was urgent need of welding together the separate episodes. Great as is the place they fill in the story, the chivalric types of the moral virtues are, consequently, not its only protagonists. With a view to investing the whole theme with homo geneity and unity the poet introduced two supreme beings, a heroine and a hero, to whom the other char acters are always subsidiary. Each knight is the subject of a female monarch, the Faerie Queene, in whose person
* Macaulay's denunciation of the monotony of the poem is well known. In his essay on Bunyan he writes : — ' Of the persons who read the first canto, not one in ten reaches the end of the first book, and not one in a hundred perseveres to the end of the poem. Very few and very weary are those who are in at the end, at the death of the Blatant Beast.' This criticism only seems just with qualifications, and it is impaired by the inaccuracy of its final words. The Blatant Beast, which typifies the spirit of malice, does not die in the sixth and last completed book in which it plays its stirring part. The knight of Courtesy, Sir Calidore, makes captive of the monster, but it ultimately escapes its chains, and in the con cluding stanzas is described as ranging (through the world again without restraint.
248 EDMUND SPENSER.
flourish all human excellences. She is the worthy object of every manner of chivalric adoration, and in her name all chivalric deeds are wrought. In this royal quintes sence of virtue Spenser, with courtier-like complacency, idealised his own sovereign, Queen Elizabeth. But the queen of the poem is . not quite isolated in her pre eminence. The knights owe allegiance to another great prince — to Prince Arthur, in whom the twelve private moral virtues are all combined. Prince Arthur presents Aristotle's philosophical idea of magnanimity, the human realisation of moral perfectibility. This perfect type of mankind was, according to Spenser's design, to inter vene actively in the development of the plot. He was to meet with each of the twelve knights when they were hard pressed by their vicious foes, and by his superior powers to rescue each in turn from destruction. Nor were these labours to exhaust the prince's function in the machinery of the poem. He was not merely to act as the providence of the knights. He was allotted a romance of his own. He was in quest of a fated bride, and she was no other than the Faerie Queene.
The ground-plan of the great poem proved somewhat unwieldy. The singleness of scheme at which Spenser Want of aimed in subordinating his virtuous knights homo- to two higher powers, the Faerie Queene and
geneity. Prince Arthur, was hardly attained. The links which were invented to bind the books together proved hardly strong enough to bear the strain. The poet's ' endeavours after variety ' conquer his efforts at unity. Each of the extant books might, despite all the author's efforts, be easily mistaken for an independent poem. The whole work may fairly be described as a series of epic poems very loosely bound one to another.
EDMUND SPENSER. 249
It is scarcely an organic whole. The amplitude of scale on which the work was planned, the munificence of detail which burdens each component part, destroys in the reader the sense of epic unity.
It was hardly possible to obey strictly all the principles of epic art while serving an allegorical purpose, and from that allegorical purpose Spenser never -j^e consciously departs. He announced in his allegorical opening invocation to Clio his intention to intention, 'moralise' his song, and he frequently reminds his reader of his resolve. His heroes and heroines are not, as in the writings of Spenser's epic tutors, mere creatures of flesh and blood, in whose material or spiritual fortune the reader's interest is to be excited. In the poet's mind they are always moving abstractions which illus trate the moral laws that sway human affairs. Truth, Falsehood, Hypocrisy, Mammon, Pride, Wantonness, are the actors and actresses on Spenser's stage. The scenery is not inanimate nature, nor dwellings of brick and stone. The curtain rises now on the Bower of Bliss ; now on the Cave of Despair ; now on the House of Temperance. The poet seeks to present a gigantic panorama of the moral dangers and difficulties that beset human existence.
To manipulate a long-drawn allegory so as to concen trate the reader's attention on its significance, and to keep his interest at all seasons thoroughly Spenser alive is a difficult task. The restraints which and are imposed by the sustained and prolonged Bunyan pursuit of analogies between the moral and compared, material worlds are especially oppressive to the spirit of a poet who is gifted with powers of imagination of infinite activity. In his capacity of worker in allegory
250 EDMUND SPENSER.
Spenser falls as far short of perfection as in his capacity of worker in epic. Only one Englishman contrived a wholly successful allegory. Spenser was not he. John Bunyan, in the Pilgrim 's Progress, alone among English men possessed just that definite measure of imagination which enabled him to convert with absolute sureness personifications of virtues and vices into speaking like nesses of men and women and places. Bunyan's great exercise in the allegorical art is rarely disfigured by in consistencies or incoherences. His scenes and persons — Christian and Faithful, The House Beautiful and Vanity Fair — while they are perfectly true to analogy, — are endowed with intelligible and life-like features. The moral significance is never doubtful, while the whole picture leaves the impression of a masterpiece of literary fiction.
Spenser's force of imagination was far wider than Bunyan's. His culture and his power over language were infinitely greater. But Spenser failed where Bun yan succeeded through the defect of his qualities, through excess of capacity, through the diversity of his interests, through the discursiveness of his imagination. He had little of Bunyan's sipgleness of purpose, simplicity of thought and faith, or faculty of self-suppression. His poetic and intellectual ebullience could not confine itself to the comparatively narrow and direct path, pursuit of which was essential to perfection in allegory and won for Bunyan his unique triumph.
Spenser's interests in current life and his aesthetic
temperament were, in fact, too alert to allow Influence , . ,. , . _
of his age. m ° confine "1S efforts to the search
after moral analogies. Strong as was his moral sense, he was also thrall to his passion for beauty.
EDMUND SPENSER. 251
Few manifestations of beauty either in nature or in art, which fell within his cognisance, could he pass by in silence. He had drunk deep, too, of the ideals peculiar to his own epoch. He was a close observer of the leading events and personages of Elizabethan history, and in defiance of the laws of allegory he wove into the web of his poetry many personal impressions of con temporary personages and movements, which had no just home in a moral or philosophical design of pro fessedly universal application. Duessa, the hateful witch of Falsehood, who endeavours to mislead the Red Cross Knight of Holiness (Bk. i.), and seeks another victim in another knight, Sir Scudamore (Bk. iv.), is no universal pattern of vice ; she is Spenser's interpretation of the character of Mary Queen of Scots. Sir Artegal, the Knight of Justice, is obviously a portrait of Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton, Lord Deputy of Ireland, whom Spenser served as secretary. Elsewhere there are un disguised references to the poet's painful personal relation with Lord Treasurer Burghley : —
' The rugged forehead, that with grave foresight, Welds kingdom's causes and affair of state.' *
Spenser laments that he had incurred this 'mighty peer's displeasure ' by applying himself too exclusively to tales of love (Bk. vi., canto xii., stanza xli.). Queen Elizabeth herself constantly appears on the scene, and no halo of allegory is suffered to encircle her. Spenser addresses her in the key of adulation which is a conven tional note of the panegyric of princes, but is altogether out of harmony with a broad philosophic tone. The
* Bk. iv., introd., stanza i.
252 EDMUND SPENSER.
Queen is apostrophised as the main source of the poet's inspiration :
' And thou, O fairest Princess under sky ! In this fair mirror mayest behold thy face, And thine own realms in land of Fairy, And in this antique image thy great ancestry. ' *
In another passage of the second book Prince Arthur and the Knight of Temperance, Sir Guyon, peruse together two old books called respectively The Briton Moniments and The Antiquity of Fairy from which the poet pretends to draw a chronicle of the old British kings. He justifies the digression by a rapturous panegyric of ' my own sovereign queen, thy realm and race,' who is descended
' From mighty kings and conquerors in war, Thy fathers and great grandfathers of old, Whose noble deeds above the Northern Star Immortal fame for everthath enrolled.' t
Nowhere does the fervid loyalty of the Elizabethan find more literal utterance than in Spenser's poem.
However zealous a worshipper at the shrine of ' divine philosophy,' Spenser was deeply moved by the peculiar aspirations which fired the age, and the prejudices which distorted its judgment. His resolve to preach morality that should be of universal application was not proof against such influences. The old blind woman in the first book, counting her beads and mumbling her nine hundred 'pater nosters' and nine hundred 'ave marias,' is a caricature of papistry. It is the fruit of the con-
* Bk. n., introd., stanza iv. t Bk. II., canto x., stanza iv.
EDMUND SPENSER. 253
temporary Protestant zeal which infected Spenser and his circle of friends. The current passion for exploring the New World moves the poet to note how every day —
' Through hardy enterprise Many great Regions are discovered, Which to late age were never mentioned. Who ever heard of th' Indian Peru ? Or who in venturous vessel measured The Amazon huge river, now found true ? Or fruitfullest Virginia who did ever view ? ' *
Identifying himself with a popular sentiment of the day, the poet lays stress on the enlightened argument that no limits can be set to the area over which man's energy and enterprise may yet gain sway : —
' Yet all these were, when no man did them know, Yet have from wisest ages hidden been ; And later times things more unknown shall show. Why then should witless man so much misween, That nothing is but that which he hath seen ? ' f
Such digressions and interpolations add greatly to the poem's charm and variety, but they interrupt the flow of the allegorical narrative and frankly ignore the allegor ical design.
But it is not as a chivalric story nor as an allegory, it is not as an epic narrative nor as an ethical tractate, nor indeed is it as an exposition of Eliza bethan ideals and sentiments, that Spenser's Styjeep0€ poem is to be finally judged. It is by its poetic style and spirit that it must be appraised. It is the fertility of the poet's imagination, the luxuriance of
* Bk. II., introd., stanza ii. t Bk. II., introd., stanza iii.
254 EDMUND SPENSER.
his pictorial imagery, his exceptional command of the music of words, which give the Faerie Queene its highest title to honour. Despite all his ethical professions and his patriotic zeal, it was to the muse of poetry alone that Spenser swore unswerving fealty. The spirit of his work may best be gauged by the opening stanza of his sixth and last completed book : —
' The ways through which my weary steps I guide In this delightful land of Fairy, Are so exceeding spacious and wide, And sprinkled with such sweet variety Of all that pleasant is to ear or eye, That I, nigh ravished with rare thought's delight, My tedious travel do forget thereby ; And, when I gin to feel decay of might, It strength to me supplies and cheers my dulled sprite.
Such secret comfort and such heavenly pleasures,
Ye sacred imps, that on Parnassus dwell,
And there the keeping have of learning's treasures
Which do all earthly riches far excel,
Into the minds of mortal men do well,
And goodly fury into them infuse ;
Guide ye my footing, and conduct me well,
In these strange ways, where never foot did use,
Ne none can find but who was taught them by the Muse.'
His quarry is ' all that pleasant is to ear or eye.' He dwells in ' that delightful land ' where the ' sacred imps ' of Parnassus infuse 'goodly fury' into the minds of mortal men. His conception of happiness is to be ' nigh ravished with rare thought's delight.' It is not study of religion or philosophy or politics that can cheer and strengthen his ' dulled sprite.' It is in the ' exceeding spacious and wide' realms of beauty, which are only
EDMUND SPENSER. 255
accessible to the poet's imagination, that he finds 'heavenly pleasures.' Spenser abandoned himself reck lessly to the pure spirit of poetry. Despite the diffuse- ness of utterance and lack of artistic restraint which were inevitable in so fervid a votary of the Muses, Spenser, in his Faerie Queene, gave being to as noble a gallery of sublime conceptions, as imposing a procession of poetic images, as ever came from the brain of man.
The form of Spenser's verse was admirably adapted to its purpose. It was his own invention, and is in itself striking testimony to the originality of his The genius. The Spenserian stanza was ingeni- Spenserian ously formed by adding an Alexandrine, a stanza, line in twelve syllables, to the eight ten-syllabled lines of the stanza which had been employed by Chaucer in his 'Monk's Tale,' a stanza long popular in France under the name of 'rhyme royal,' and in Italy under that of ' ottava rima.' Undoubtedly there is in Spenser's metrical device a tendency to monotony and tedious- ness. Languor would seem to be inevitable. Dr. Johnson complained that the stanza was ' tiresome ' by its uniformity and length. But Spenser's rare poetic instinct enabled him to hold such defect in check by variety in the pauses. In his hands the stanza is for the most part an instrument of sustained spirit, even though the closing Alexandrine imposes a gentle and
leisurely pace on the progress of the verse.
,. , . .,, , , The flow of
One stanza glides into the next with graceful, the verge
natural flow, and at times with rapidity. The movement has been compared, not perhaps quite appositely, to that of the magic gondola which Spenser describes in his account of the Lady of the Idle Lake ; the vessel slides
256 EDMUND SPENSER.
' More swift than swallow shears the liquid sky ; It cut away upon the yielding wave, Ne cared she her course for to apply ; For it was taught the way which she would have, And both from rocks and flats itself could wisely save.' *
Spenser does not altogether avoid 'rocks and flats. Horace Walpole called attention to a certain want of judgment in devising a nine-line stanza in a language so barren of rhymes as the English tongue, with only three different rhymes; of these one is twice repeated, the second three times, and the third four times. This rhyming difficulty was not capable of complete mastery, and Spenser's rhyming failures are not inconspicuous. There are in every canto some stanzas in which an awkward strain is put, by the exigencies of rhyme, on the laws of syntax, prosody, and even good sense. But the great passages of the poem are singularly free from irregularities of metre, and fascinate us by the dexterity of the rhymes. In view of the massive proportions of the work, Spenser's metrical success moves almost boundless admiration. In the Spenserian stanza, as Spenser handled it, are, if anywhere, 'the elegancy, facility, and golden cadence of poetry.' t
* Bk. II., canto vi., stanza v.
t Every canto offers examples of carelessness. Turning to Bk. IV., canto ii. , we find Spenser in a single stanza (xxxiii. ) rhyming ' waste ' with ' defaced ' (which is spelt ' defaste ' in order to cover up the irregularity) ; ' writs ' for purposes of rhyme are used for ' writings,' and the closing Alexandrine sinks to such awkward tautology as this : —
' Sith works of heavenly wits Are quite devoured, and brought to naught by little bits'
(Stanza xxxiii.) In stanza lii. the Alexandrine again offends : —
EDMUND SPENSER. 257
Spenser in the Faerie Queene, as in his earliest poetic effort, The Shepheards Calender, deliberately used a vocabularly that was archaic for its own day.
Many contemporary critics were doubtful of
, . J . , vocabulary.
his wisdom. The poet Daniel, who fully
recognised Spenser's genius, deemed his meaning need lessly obscured by 'aged accents and untimely (i.e. obsolete) words.' But a tendency to preciosity, a pre dilection for the unfamiliar, a passion for what was out of date, were characteristic of Spenser's faculty. Archaic language lent, in his view, the beauty of mellowness to his work and removed it from the rawness or ' weari some turmoil ' of current speech.
It was his filial devotion to Chaucer which mainly kept alive Spenser's love for archaisms of speech. Chaucer's verse had from earliest to
days lingered in his memory, and he occa
sionally quotes lines of his predecessor word for word.*
' That both their lives may likewise be annext
Unto the third, that his may so be trebly wext." The last stanza of the canto ends lamely and with burlesque effect, thus : —
' The which, for length, I will not here pursew, But rather will reserve it for a Canto new.'
(Stanza liv.) * With Spenser's
' Ne may Love be compelled by mastery : For soon as mastery comes, sweet Love anon Taketh his nimble wings, and soon away is gone,'
(Bk. in., canto i., stanza xxv.) compare Chaucer's
' Love wolle not be constreyn'd by maistery ; When maistery cometh, the God of Love anone Betith his winges, and farewell he is gone.'
(Franklin's Tale, lines 2310-2.)
9
258 EDMUND SPENSER.
In Book iv. canto ii., he completes the Squire's Tale, which in Chaucer's text was left unfinished. Spenser fulfils Chaucer's promise to tell of the chivalric contests in which suitors for the hand of the fair Canace engaged. This episode was preluded in the Faerie Queene by a splendid invocation to his master, to revive whose 'English undefiled' was one of his primary ambitions.
' Dan Chaucer, well of English undefiled, On fame's eternal beadroll worthy to be filed.
Then pardon, O most sacred happy spirit !
That I thy labours lost may thus revive,
And'steal from thee the meed of thy due merit,
That none durst ever whilst thou wast alive,
And being dead in vain yet many strive :
Ne dare I like ; but, through infusion sweet
Of thine own spirit which doth in me survive,
I follow here the footing of thy feet,
That with thy meaning sojl may the rather meet. ' *
Spenser's artistic nature was many-sided. Plato's ideal ism, equally with Chaucer's homely gaiety and insight, His sensi- moulded his mind. But his varied know- tiveness to ledge of literature and philosophy went hand beauty. jn hand with a different type of endowment — a sensuous sensitiveness to external aspects of nature.
' Every sight
And sound from the vast earth and ambient air Sent to his heart its choicest impulses.'
Especially perfect is the art with which he depicts foun tains and rivers and oceans. The magical canto in which he describes the marriage of the river Thames with the river Medway is rich alike in classical allusion
* Bk. iv., canto ii., stanzas xxxii. and xxxiv.
EDMUND SPENSER. 259
and intimate knowledge of British topography. But the varied learning is fused together by an exuberance of pictorial fancy and sympathy with natural scenery, which give individuality to almost every stream that may have come within the poet's cognisance either in litera ture or in life. Spenser's power as the poet of nature owes its finest quality to his rare genius for echoing in verse the varied sounds which natural phenomena pro duce in the observer's ear. When he represents a gentle flowing river, the metre glides with a corresponding placidity. When he describes a tempestuous wind, the words rush onwards with an unmistakable roar. In the familiar stanzas which follow we hear in living harmonies the voices of the birds : —
' Eftsoones they heard a most melodious sound, Of all that mote delight a dainty ear, Such as at once might not on living ground, Save in the Paradise, be heard elsewhere : Right hard it was for wight which did it hear, To read what manner music that mote be, For all that pleasing is to living ear Was there consorted in one harmony ; Birds, voices, instruments, winds, waters, all agree.
The joyous birds, shrouded in cheerful shade Their notes unto the voice attempred sweet ; Th' Angelical soft trembling voices made To th' instruments divine respondence meet ; The silver sounding instruments did meet With the base murmurs of the waters fall ; The waters fall with'difference discreet, Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call ; The gentle warbling wind low answered to all.' *
Spenser did not depict physical beauty in men or * Bk. II., canto xii., stanzas Ixx.-lxxi.
260 EDMUND SPENSER.
women with quite the same abandonment that he brought to the sights and sounds of earth or air. But although Spenser studied as thoroughly as any poet the aspects of physical beauty — 'the goodly hue of white and red with which the cheeks are sprinkled' — his philosophic idealism would seldom allow him to content himself with the outward appearance. To him as to Plato the fair body was merely the external expression of an inner spiritual or ideal beauty, which it was the duty of reasoning man to worship : —
' So every spirit, as it is most pure And hath in it the more of heavenly light, So it the fairer body doth procure To habit in, and is more fairly dight With cheerful grace and amiable sight, For of the soul the body form doth take, For soul is form, and-doth the body make.' *
Spenser's influence on the poetic endeavours of his own age was very great. Imitations of his allegorical
method abounded, and one at least of his influence disciples, Phineas Fletcher, produced in his
Purple Island an elaborate allegorical descrip tion of the human body, a poem which, despite its defects and dependence on the Faerie Queene, does no dishon our to its source. Charles Lamb justly called Spenser ' the poet's poet.' Probably no poem is qualified equally with the Faerie Queene to endow the seeds of poetic genius in youthful minds with active life. Cowley's con fession is capable of much pertinent illustration in the biography of other poets. ' I believe,' wrote Cowley, 'I can tell the particular little chance that filled my head first with such chimes of verse as have never since
* An Hymne in Honour of Beautie, 11. 127-133.
EDMUND SPENSER. 261
left ringing there ; for I remember, when I began to read and take some pleasure in it, there was wont to lie in my mother's parlour (I know not by what accident, for she herself never in her life read any book but of devotion) ; but there was wont to lie Spenser's Works ; this I happened to fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with the stories of the knights and giants, and monsters, and brave horses which I found everywhere there (though my understanding had little to do with all this) ; and by degrees with the tinkling of the rhyme and dance of the numbers, so that I had read him all before I was twelve years old, and was thus made a poet.'
The variety of Spenser's excellences caused his work to appeal in different ways to different men. The boy Cowley was fascinated by his chivalric tales The variety of wonder and the ringing harmony of his of his excel- verse. Milton was chiefly impressed by the knees, profundity of his ideal philosophy ; Bunyan by his moral earnestness. Dryden did homage to him as his master in poetic speech, although he deemed his learning his crowning merit. In the eighteenth century the impulse to poetic effort which was inherent in his writings showed no sign of decay. James Thomson and Robert Burns, Shelley and Keats, Byron and Campbell, worked with varying skill in the Spenserian stanza, and, by the uses to which they put their master's metrical instrument, added to the masterpieces of English poetry. The poems penned in the stanza of the Faerie Queene include the Cottar's Saturday Night by Burns, the Eve of St. Agnes by Keats, and Childe Harold by Byron, and all reflect glory on the stanza's inventor. But Spenser's work is an inexhaustible fountain of poetic inspiration, and none can define the limits of its influence.
VI FRANCIS BACON
1 The mind is the man. ... A man is but what he knoweth.' — BACON, Praise of Knowledge, 1592.
[BIBLIOGRAPHY. — Bacon's life and work may be studied in full in the Life and Letters, by James Spedding, 7 vols., 1861-74, an^ in the Works, edited by J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath, 7 vols., 1857-9. The best sum mary of his life and work is Francis Bacon, an Account of his Life and Works, by the Rev. E. A. Abbott, D.D., 1885. The text of his chief English writings was published in a convenient volume, at a small price, by George Newnes, Limited, in 1902. Of modern annotated reprints of the Essays, those edited respectively by Dr. Abbott (1879), and by Samuel Harvey Reynolds (Clarendon Press, 1890), are most worthy of study. A valuable Harmony of the Essays — the text of the four chief editions in parallel columns — was prepared by Professor Edward Arber in 1869. The Advancement of Learning was edited by Dr. Aldis Wright for the Clarendon Press in the same year. ]
WE now approach the highest but one of the peaks of intellectual greatness which were scaled in England by An ascend- sons of the Renaissance. Spenser was a great ing scale of poet and moralist, one who sought to teach greatness. men morality by means of poetry, one who could weave words into harmonious sequence, one
FRANCIS BACON. 263
who could draw music from ordinary speech, with a sureness of touch that only two or three men in the world's history — Virgil, perhaps, alone among the classi cal poets, and Milton most conspicuously among the modern poets — have excelled. But if we deduct Spen ser's aesthetic power and moral enthusiasm from the sum of his achievement, if we turn to measure the calibre of Spenser's intellect or the width of his mental horizon, if we estimate the extent by which he advanced human thought beyond the limits that human thought had already commanded, we cannot fail to admit (difficult as any precise comparison may be) that Bacon, with whom I now deal, is Spenser's intellectual superior.
Not that Bacon himself is the highest peak in the range of sixteenth-century English enlightenment. Giant as Bacon was in the realm of mind, in the empire of human intellect, Shakespeare, his contemporary, mani fested an intellectual capacity that places Bacon himself in the second place.
From every point of view the interval that separates Bacon from Shakespeare is a wide one. An illogical
tendency has of late years developed in un- ...,.,.., , -A j Bacons
disciplined minds to detect m Bacon and and
Shakespeare a single personality. One shake- has heard of brains which, when subjected speare's to certain excitements, cause their possessors to see double, to see two objects when only one is in view ; but it is equal proof of un stable, unsteady intellectual balance which leads a man or woman to see single, to see one individuality when they are in the presence of two individualities, each definite and distinct. The intellect of both Shakespeare and Bacon may well be termed miraculous. The facts
264 FRANCIS BACON.
of biography may be unable to account for the emer gence of the one or the other, but they can prove con vincingly that no two great minds of a single era pursued literary paths more widely dissevered. To assume, without an iota of sound evidence, that both Shake speare's and Bacon's intellect were housed in a single brain is unreal mockery. It is an irresponsibly fantastic dream which lies outside the limits of reason.
The accessible details of Bacon's biography are more numerous and more complicated than in the case of The study Shakespeare, or any other writer of the age. of Bacon's His life, intellectually and materially, is fuller life and of known incident ; his writings are more work. voluminous; his extant letters and private
memoranda are more accessible. His work is noble; his life is ignoble. ' But in order to understand his intri cate character, in order fully to appreciate his psycho logical interest, in order fully to appreciate his place in the history of literature and science, both his biography and his work demand almost equally close study.
Bacon came of no mean stock. His father, Sir Nicholas Bacon, was Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, , the chief Law Officer of England, who exer- parents cised the authority of Lord High Chancellor. Sir Nicholas was thus a successor of Sir Thomas More. He was of a merry, easy-going disposi tion, with a pronounced love of literature and a gift of eloquent speech. He freely and without compunction engaged in the political intrigue which infected the
FRANCIS BACON. 265
queen's court, and made no greater pretence than his contemporaries to superfine political virtue. Bacon's mother, his father's second wife, was a woman of para doxical character. Her great learning and scholarship were of the true Renaissance type ; she was at home in most of the classical and post-classical authors of Greece and Rome. But her main characteristic was a fiery religious zeal. She belonged to the narrowest and least amiable sect of the Calvinists, and her self-righteous temper led her to rule her household and her children with a crabbed rigour that did not diminish with age. In feature Bacon closely resembled his stern-complex- ioned mother, and although her sour pietism did not descend to him, her love of literature, as well as the resolute self-esteem which her creed harboured in her, was woven into the web of his character. Lady Bacon was highly connected : her sister married Lord Burgh- ley, Queen Elizabeth's powerful Treasurer and Prime Minister. The Prime Minister of the day therefore stood to Bacon in the relation of uncle.
Bacon thus began life with great advantages. He was son of the Lord Chancellor and nephew of the Prime Minister. It is difficult in England to be more His advan- influentially related. His family was not tage of rich, but it was reasonably provided for. As birth- far as social position went, he could not have been better placed.
Francis Bacon was born in 1561 at his father's official residence in London, York House in the Strand, of
which the water-gate alone survives. Queen _-.,.,, , , , Birth and
Elizabeth had come to the throne three years educat;on>
before. Shakespeare was born three years
after. When he was a child, before he was thirteen,
266 FRANCIS BACON.
Bacon was sent, as the custom then was, to a university — to Trinity College, Cambridge, a recently founded institution which was even then acquiring great edu cational traditions. He was there for two years, and at the age of fifteen returned to London to study law.
Bacon was an extraordinarily thoughtful boy, full of
great ambitions, all lying within a well-defined compass.
He wished to be a great man, to do work by
which he might be remembered, to do work precocity. °
that should be beneficial to the human race.
With that self-confidence which he owed to his mother, he judged himself to be, almost from childhood, capable of improving man's reasoning faculties ; of extending the range of man's knowledge, especially his knowledge of natural science and the causes of natural phenomena. When his father first brought him to court as a boy, the queen was impressed by his thoughtful demeanour, and laughingly dubbed him, in allusion to his father's office, her 'young Lord Keeper.' It is difficult to match in history — even in the fertile epoch of the Renaissance — either Bacon's youthful precocity, or the closeness and fidelity with which he kept before his mind through life the ambitions which he formed in youth.
in
Three impressionable years of Bacon's youth — from his fifteenth to his eighteenth year — were spent at the English Embassy in Paris in the capacity of a very junior secretary. The experience widened his outlook on life and gave him a first taste of diplomacy. But
FRANCIS BACON. 267
his father had destined Francis for his own profession of law, and the lad returned to England to follow his father's wishes. He worked at his profession
with industry. But it excited in him no • e pl ? CS * . sion or law.
enthusiasm. He regarded it as a means to an end. His father died when Francis was eighteen. His example endowed the lad with the belief that intrigue was the key to worldly prosperity. A very narrow income was his only tangible bequest. But a com petence, an ample supply of money, was needful if Bacon were to achieve those advances in science, if he were to carry to a successful issue those high resolves to extend the limit of human knowledge which he held to be his mission in life. ' He knew him- self,' he repeatedly declared, ' to be fitter to idealism hold a book than to play a part on the active stage of affairs.' For affairs he said he was not ' fit by Nature and more unfit by the preoccupation of his mind.' Yet he did not hesitate to seek early admission to ' the active stage of affairs.' His nature was so framed that he felt it his duty to devote himself to work in the world in which he felt no genuine interest, in order to acquire that worldly fortune, that worldly materialism. position and worldly influence without which he regarded it to be impossible to carry into effect his intellectual ambition, his intellectual mission. Never were materialism and idealism woven so firmly together into the texture of a man's being. ' I cannot realise the great ideal,' he said in effect, 'which I came into the world and am qualified to reach, unless I am well off and influential in the merely material way.' The inevit able sequel was the confession that much of his life was misspent ' in things for which he was least fit, so, as I
268 FRANCIS BACON.
may truly say, my soul hath been a stranger in the course of my pilgrimage.'
The profession of the law had prizes which he hoped that the influence of his uncle, the Prime Minister, His en- might open to him. But Lord Burghley, trance into unlike English officers of state of later periods, politics. Was not always eager to aid his relatives, and Bacon's early hopes of legal preferment were not ful filled. However, when Bacon was twenty-three, his uncle did so much service for him as to secure for him a seat in Parliament. He entered the House of Com mons in 1584, and he remained a member of the House for more than thirty years. A lawyer in England often finds it extremely advantageous to himself in the material sense to identify himself with politics at the same time as he practises at the bar. This plan Bacon readily adopted. He at once flung himself into the discussion of the great political questions of the day in the same spirit as that in which he approached the pro fession of the law. At all hazards he must advance himself, he must build up a material fortune. If the intellectual work to which he was called were to be done at all, no opportunity of securing the material where withal was he justified in rejecting. That is the principle which inspired Bacon's attitude to politics as well as to law ; that is the principle which inspired every action of his life outside the walls of his study.
Naturally as a politician he became an opportunist. His intellectual abilities enabled him to form enlightened
views of political questions, views in advance His attitude r ,. -r, , • • , , • •• •
r ,. -r, , • • , , •
to politics aSe' ^ut ms icieal was not m
His scheme of life compelled him to adapt his private views in politics to suit the views of those in
FRANCIS BACON. 269
authority, so as to gain advancement from them. In his early days in the House of Commons he sought to steer a middle course — his aim being so to express his genuine political opinions or convictions, which were wise in themselves, as to give them a chance of acceptance from those in authority. He urged on the Government the wisdom of toleration in matters of religion. Aggressive persecution of minorities appeared to him in his heart to be unstatesmanlike as well as inhuman. But he care fully watched the impression his views created. He was not prepared to sacrifice any chance of material advance ment to his principles. If his own political views proved unacceptable to those who could help him on, he must substitute others with which the men of influence were in fuller sympathy.
Very methodical by nature, Bacon systematised as a young man practical rules of conduct on which he re lied for the advancement of his material in- His work- terests, and for the consequent acquisition of ing scheme the opportunity of working out his philoso- of life, phical aims in the interests of mankind. He drew up a series of maxims, a series of precepts for getting on, for bettering one's position — for the architecture, as he called it, of one's fortune. Of these precepts, which form a cynical comment on Bacon's character and on his conception of social intercourse, this much may be said in their favour, — that they get behind the screen of conventional hypocrisies. They are not wholly original. In spirit, at any rate, they resemble the unblushing counsel which Machiavelli, the Florentine statesman and historian of the sixteenth century, offered to politicians. The utility of Machiavellian doctrines Bacon's father had acknowledged. Machiavelli and his kind were
270 FRANCIS BACON.
among Bacon's heroes : ' We are much beholden to Machiavelli and others,' he remarked in the Advance ment of Learning, ' that wrote what men do, not what they ought to do.' But Bacon's compendium of pro verbial philosophy, whatever its debt to others, reveals his individuality as clearly as anything to which he set his pen.
Bacon laid it down that the best way to enforce one's views upon those in authority was by appearing to agree with them, and by avoiding any declared dis agreement with them. 'Avoid repulse.' he precepts. ° . r '
said; 'never row against the stream. Prac tise deceit, dissimulation, whenever it can be made to pay, but at the same time secure the reputation of being honest and outspoken. ' Have openness in fame and repute, secrecy in habit ; dissimulation in seasonable use, and a power to feign if there be no remedy ; mix ture of falsehood is like alloy in coin of gold and silver which may make the metal work better.' Always show off your abilities to the best advantage ; always try to do better than your neighbours. But on none of his rules of conduct does Bacon lay greater stress, than on the suggestion that the best and most rapid way of getting The uses °n ^s to accommodate oneself to the ways of of great great men, to bind oneself hand and foot men. to great men. This rule Bacon sought with
varying success to put into practice many times during his life.
IV
In 1591, when Bacon was thirty, a first opportunity of coming advancement through intimate association
FRANCIS BACON. 271
with a man of position seemed to present itself. He obtained an introduction to a young nobleman of great ambition and no little influence, the Earl of Bacon's Essex. He was Bacon's junior by six years, relations He was as passionate and impulsive a young with Essex, gentleman as could be found among Elizabethans, but he was not altogether without consciousness of his own defects. He was not blind to the worth of sobriety and foresight in others. The cool and wary good sense of Bacon attracted him ; Bacon's abilities impressed him. Bacon deliberately planned his relationship with Essex to secure his own preferment. He attached himself to Essex, he said, ' in a manner which happeneth rarely among men.' He would do the best he could with him in all ways. Essex might prove a fit instrument to do good to the State as well as to himself. He would per suade Essex to carry through certain political reforms which required great personal influence to bring them to the serious notice of the authorities. At the same time Essex was either to secure for his mentor dignified and remunerative office, or to be swept out of his path. The first episode of the partnership was not promis ing. The high legal office of Attorney-General fell vacant. Bacon's enthusiastic patron, Essex, An un- was readily induced to apply for the post in promising Bacon's behalf. But Essex met with a serious opening, rebuff. A deaf ear was turned by the queen and the Prime Minister to the proposal. Essex was as dis appointed as Bacon himself. He quixotically judged himself in honour bound to compensate Bacon for the loss. He gave him a piece of land at Twickenham, which Bacon afterwards sold for ^1800. For a moment this failure daunted Bacon. After so discouraging an
272 FRANCIS BACON.
experience he seriously considered with himself whether it were not wiser for him altogether to forsake the law, the prizes in which seemed beyond his reach, and devote himself entirely to the scientific study which was his true end in life. It would have been better for his fame had he yielded to the promptings of the inner voice. But he was in need of money. With conscious mis givings he resolved to keep to the difficult path on which he had embarked.
The outlook did not immediately grow brighter. Closer acquaintance with Essex convinced Bacon that Essex dis- he was not the man either to carry through appoints any far-reaching political reforms or to aid Bacon. njs own advancement. He was proving him self captious and jealous-tempered. He was not main taining his hold upon the queen's favour. Bacon energetically urged on him petty tricks of conduct whereby he might win and retain the queen's favour. He drew up a series of obsequious speeches which would fit a courtier's lips and might convince a sovereign that the man who spoke them to her deserved her confidence.
Finally Bacon sought a bold means of release from a doubtful situation. He thoroughly appreciated the The difficult problem which the government of
government Ireland offered Elizabethan statesmen, and of Ireland, he plainly told Essex that Ireland was his destiny ; Ireland was ' one of the aptest particulars for your Lordship to purchase honour on.' Bacon steadily pressed his patron to seek the embarrassing post of Governor or Lord Deputy of the distracted country. The counsel took effect. The arduous office was con ferred on Essex. His patron's case, as it presented
FRANCIS BACON. 273
itself to Bacon's tortuous mind, was one of kill or cure. Glory was to be gained by pacifying Ireland, by bringing her under peaceful rule. Infamy, enforced withdrawal from public life, was the reward of failure. The task was admittedly hard, and called for greater prudence than any of which Essex had yet given signs. But Bacon, from his point of view, thought it desirable that Essex should have the opportunity of achieving some definite triumph in life which would render his future influence supreme. Or if he were incapable of conspicuous success in life, then the more patent his inefficiency became, and the quicker he was set on one side, the better for his protege's future.
Essex completely failed in Ireland, and he was ordered to answer for his conduct in the arbitrary Court of the Star Chamber. Thereupon Bacon set to work with Machiavellian skill to turn an ap- r ^ parently unpromising situation to his own advantage. He sought and obtained permission to appear at the inquiry into Essex's conduct as one of the Counsel for the Crown. He protested to the end that he was really working diplomatically in Essex's 'behalf, but he revealed the secret of his conduct when he also plainly told Essex that the queen's favour was after all more valuable to him than the earl's. His further guarded comment that he loved few persons better than his patron struck a hardly less cynical note.
Essex was ultimately released from imprisonment on parole ; but he then embarked on very violent courses. He sought to stir up a rebellion against the queen and her advisers in London. He death placed himself in a position which exposed «• • him to the penalties of high treason. Bacon again
274 FRANCIS BACON.
sought advantage from his patron's errors. He again appeared for the Crown at Essex's formal trial on the capital charge of treason. His advocacy did much to bring Essex's guilt home to the judges. With inhuman coolness Bacon addressed himself to the prisoner, and explained to him the heaviness of his offence. Finally Essex was condemned to death, and was executed on 25th February 1601.
Bacon sacrificed all ordinary considerations of honour in his treatment of Essex. But his principles of active , life deprived friendship of meaning for him. erfi'd S ^e material benefit to be derived by one man from association with another alone en tered into his scheme of self-advancement, and self- advancement was the only principle which he understood to govern ' the active stage of affairs.'
The death of Elizabeth opened new prospects to Bacon, but the story of his life followed its old drift.
He naturally sought the favour of the new Bacon and , . T ^ „ , , ,
Tames i king, James i. Naturally he would accom modate his own political opinions to those of a new king. The royal influence must, if it were possible, be drawn his way, be drawn towards him, be pressed into his individual service. Bacon probably at the outset had hopes of inducing the king to accept and act upon the good counsel that he should offer him, just as at the opening of their relations he thought it possible that he might lead Essex to take his enlightened advice. It was reported that the king was not devoid of large
FRANCIS BACON. 275
ideas. Bacon, who was never a good judge of men, may have credited the report. He may not have seen at first that James was without earnest purpose in life ; that the king's intellect was cast in a narrow mould; that an extravagant sense of his own importance mainly dominated its working. Yet there was this excuse for Bacon's misapprehension : James was inquisitively minded. He was at times willing to listen to the ex position of good principles, however great his disinclina tion to put them into practice.
By way of experiment, Bacon at the outset proffered King James i. some wise counsel. He repeated his old arguments for toleration in matters of religion.
Bacon set forth these views as mere ballons ., v?c.e
the king.
a essai, as straws to show him which way the wind blew. As soon as Bacon saw that the wind in the royal quarter was not blowing in the direction of. tolera tion, he tacked about to win the breeze of royal approval some other way. He supported persecution. Happily another proposal of his was grateful to the new king. Bacon recommended a political union, a political amal gamation of the two kingdoms of England and Scotland, of both of which James was now king. It was a wise plan in the circumstances, and one entirely congenial to the new Scottish monarch of England. James was not slow to mark his approval of Bacon's advice on the point, and Bacon's material prospects brightened.
James's reign was a critical period in English history. Bacon's depth of intellectual vision enabled him to fore see, perhaps more clearly than any other man The of his age, the growing danger of a breach political between the king and the people's representa- situation, tives in the House of Commons. The English people
276 FRANCIS BACON.
was learning its political strength; the English people was learning the value of personal liberty, although the mass of them only hazily recognised the importance of self-government. Sir Walter Ralegh had enunciated the principle that ' in every just state some part of the government is or ought to be imparted to the people.' There was a growing conviction that government for the good of the many, rather than for the good of any one man, was essential to the full enjoyment of life. Govern ment for the good of a sovereign who failed to move in the people any personal enthusiasm was certain to prove sooner or later an intolerable burden. Bacon acknow ledged it to be the duty of a true statesman to seek to reconcile the two conflicting forces, the power of the king and the reasonable claims of the people. He had no faith in democracy ; he believed in the one-man rule probably as sincerely as he believed in any political principle. The future peace of the country depended, in Bacon's view, on the king — on his power and will to dispense equal justice among his subjects, and to con form to his subjects' just wishes on matters affecting their personal liberties. The king should be persuaded to exert his power and will to this end. But the prob lem of how best to reconcile king and people was not one that could be solved by mere assumption of the king's benevolent intentions. Unless a man championed great principles, and applied them to the problem with out fear of forfeiting royal favour, he wasted breath and ink. Bacon had no intention of imperilling his relations with the king, or sacrificing his personal chances of pre ferment. However clearly he may have diagnosed the situation, he had not moral fibre enough materially to shape its course of development.
FRANCIS BACON. 277
VI
Bacon was eager to derive personal profit from any turn of the political wheel. Yet with the singular versa tility that characterised him, he, amid all the Literary bustle of the political world in which he had occupa- immersed himself, found time to pursue his tions. true vocation. Before Queen Elizabeth died he had produced the first edition of his Essays^ those terse ob servations on life which placed him in. the first rank of Elizabethan men of letters.* They were penetrating reflections on human nature and conduct which seemed to come from a sober observer of affairs, from one of infinitely varied experience, from a thinker not unduly biassed by his material interests. Revision and enlarge ment of his Essays constantly occupied Bacon's scanty leisure till his death.
In 1605, two years after James's accession, there ap peared a far more convincing proof of disinterested devotion to things of the mind. Bacon then published
* The first edition of the Essays appeared in 1597, and con sisted only of ten essays together with two pieces called respectively ' Sacred Meditations,' and ' Colours of Good and Evil.' This volume was reprinted without alteration in 1598 and 1606. A re vised version which came out in 1612 brought the number of essays up to thirty-eight. Other editions followed, including a Latin translation by the author and translations by English friends into both Italian and French. The final edition, the publication of which Bacon superintended, is dated 1625 (the year before his death), and supplied as many as fifty-eight essays. An addition to the collection, a fragment of an essay of ' Fame,' appeared posthumously. This was included by Dr. William Rawley, Bacon's chaplain, into whose hands his master's manuscripts passed at his death, in the miscellaneous volume which Rawley edited in 1657 under the title of Resuscitatio.
278 FRANCIS BACON.
his greatest contribution in English to philosophical literature, his Advancement of Learning. It was a popular work, treating eloquently of the excellence of knowledge and noting in detail the sufficiency and insufficiency of its present state. Bacon surveyed fairly and sagaciously all existing departments of knowledge, and indicated where progress was most essential The noble volume was intended to prepare the minds of readers for the greater venture which absorbed Bacon's thoughts, the exposition of a new philosophy, a new instrument of thought, the Novum Organum. This new instrument was designed first to enable man to interpret nature and thereby realise of what the forces of nature were capable, and then to give him the power of adapting those forces to his own purposes. In the completion of that great design lay Bacon's genuine ambition ; from birth to death, political office, the rewards of the legal profession, money profits, anxious as he was to win them, were means to serve his attainment of that great end. All material successes in life were, in his view, crude earth works which protected from assault and preserved intact the citadel of his being.
Slowly but surely the material recognition, the emolu ments for which he hungered, came Bacon's way. In M . 1606, at the age of forty-five, he married.
His wife was the daughter of an alderman in the city of London, and brought him a good dowry. Little is known of Bacon's domestic life, and some mystery overhangs its close. He had no children, but according to his earliest biographer he was a considerate and generous husband.* In the last year of his life,
* Dr. William Rawley, Bacon's chaplain, in his Life, ed. 1670, p. 6, writes with some obvious economy of truth : — ' Neither did
FRANCIS BACON. 279
however, he believed he had serious ground of com plaint against his wife, and the munificent provision which he made for her in the text of his will he in a concluding paragraph, ' for just and grave causes, utterly revoked and made void, leaving her to her right only.' He acquired a love of magnificence in his domestic life, which he indulged to an extent that caused him pecu niary embarrassments. It was soon after he entered the estate of matrimony that he put in order, at vast expense, the property at Gorhambury, near St. Albans, which his father had acquired, and he built upon the land there a new country residence of great dimensions, Verulam House. In the decoration and furnishing of the mansion he spent far more than he could afford. There he main tained a retinue of servants the number of whom, it was said, was hardly exceeded in the palace of the king.
Bacon's material resources rapidly grew after his marriage. A year later he received his first official pro motion. In 1607 he was made Solicitor- General, a high legal office, and one well remunerated. He had waited long for such conspicuous advancement. He was now forty-six years old, and the triumph did not cause him undue elation. He suffered, he writes, much depression during the months that followed. But his ambition was far from
the want of children detract from his good usage of his consort • during the intermarriage ; whom he prosecuted, with much con jugal love and respect : with many rich gifts, and endowments ; besides a robe of honour, which he invested her withal : which she wore until her dying day, being twenty years and more, after his death.' According to Aubrey, after Bacon's death she married her gentleman-usher, Sir Thomas Underbill, and survived the execution of Charles I. in 1649.
28o FRANCIS BACON.
satiated. A repetition of the experience happily brought him greater content. Six years
n<7~ later, at fifty-two, he was promoted to the General. * '
more responsible and more highly remun erated office of Attorney-General.
VII
The breach between the king and his people was meanwhile widening. The Commons were reluctant to
grant the king's demand for money without caJ6 eril' ^ exactmg guarantees of honest government —
guarantees for the expenditure of the people's money in a way that should benefit them. Such de mands and criticism the king warmly resented. He was bent on ruling autocratically. He would draw taxes from his people at his unfettered will. The hopeless ness of expecting genuine benefit to the nation from James's exercise of authority was now apparent Had Bacon been a high-minded, disinterested politician, with drawal from the king's service would have been the only course open to him ; but he had an instinctive respect for authority, his private expenses were mounting high, and he was at length reaping pecuniary rewards in the legal and political spheres. Bacon deliberately chose the worser way. He abandoned in practice the last shreds of his political principles ; he gave up all hope of bringing about an accommodation on lines of right and justice between the king and the people. He made up his mind to remain a servant of the crown, with the single and unpraiseworthy end of benefiting his own pocket.
FRANCIS BACON. 281
Tricks and subterfuges, dissimulation, evasion, were thenceforth Bacon's political resources. He soon sought assiduously the favour of the king's new and Bacon and worthless favourite, the Duke of Bucking- Bucking ham. For a fleeting moment he seems to ham- have tried to deceive himself, as he had tried to deceive himself in the case of Essex and of the king, into the notion that this selfish, unprincipled courtier might im press a statesmanlike ideal on the king's government. Bacon offered Buckingham some advice under this mis conception. But Bacon quickly recognised his error. The good counsel was not repeated. He finally aban doned himself exclusively to the language of unblushing adulation in his intercourse with the favourite in order to benefit by the favourite's influence.
Bacon's policy gained him all the success that he could have looked for. A greater promotion than any he had enjoyed soon befell him. The Lord Keepership of the Great Seal, the highest Keeper legal office, to which belonged the functions of the Lord Chancellor, became vacant. It was the post which Bacon's father had filled, and the son proposed himself to Buckingham as a candidate. Bacon secured the lofty dignity on the ground that the favourite thought he might prove a useful, subservient tool. But a rough justice governed thepolitical world evenin James i.'s reign. Bacon's elevation to the high office proved his ruin.
Bacon was now not only the foremost judge in the land, but was also chief member of the King's Lord Veru- Council. He had become, however, the mere lam and creature of the crown, and all his political Viscount intelligence he suffered to run to waste. The St> Alban- favourite, Buckingham, was supreme with the king, and
282 FRANCIS BACON.
Bacon played a very subordinate part in discussions of high policy. He obsequiously assented to measures which he knew to be disastrous, and even submitted meekly to the personal humiliations which subservience to Buckingham — an exacting master — entailed. For a time his pusillanimity continued to bring rewards. In 1618 he was raised to the peerage, as Baron Verulam ; in 1619 he exchanged without alteration of functions the title of Lord Keeper of the Great Seal for the more dignified style of Lord High Chancellor of England. Two years later he was advanced to a higher rank of nobility as Viscount St. Alban. His paternal estate, on which he had built his sumptuous pleasure-house, lay near the city of St. Albans, and adjoined the neighbour ing site of the Roman city of Verulamium. He felt a scholar's pride in associating his name with a relic of ancient Rome.
It may be admitted that Bacon's quick intelligence rendered him a very efficient and rapid judge in his . court, the Court of Chancery. He rapidly
cialwork cleared off arrears of business, and seems to have done as a rule substantial justice to suitors. But he was not, even in his own court, his own master. The favourite, Buckingham, inundated him with letters requesting him to show favour to friends of his who were interested in causes in Bacon's court. Bacon's moral sense was too weak to permit resistance to the favourite's insolent demands.
Bacon's moral perception was indeed blurred past The ap- recovery. Servility to the king and his preaching favourite had obvious dangers, of which he danger. failed to take note. Resentment was rising in the country against the royal power, and that rebellious
FRANCIS BACON. 283
sentiment was certain sooner or later to threaten with disaster those who for worldly gain bartered their souls to the king and his minion. The wheel was coming full circle.
VIII
Yet so full of contradiction is Bacon's career, that it was when he stood beneath the shadow of the ruin which was to destroy his worldly fortune and The Novum repute that he crowned the edifice of his Organum, philosophical ambition, which was to bring l620- him imperishable glory. In 1620 he published his elaborate Latin treatise, Novum Organum. It is only a fragment — an unfinished second instalment — of that projected encyclopaedia in which he designed to unfold the innermost secrets of nature. But such as it is, the Novum Organum is the final statement of his philo sophic and scientific position. It expounds 'the new instrument,' the logical method of induction whereby nature was thenceforth to be rightly questioned, and her replies to be rightly interpreted. The book is the citadel of Bacon's philosophic system. To this exposi tion of his ultimate aim in life Bacon justly attached the highest importance. Twelve times amid the bustle of public business had he rewritten the ample treatise before he ventured on its publication. For twelve years, amid all the preoccupation of his public career, a draft of the volume had never been far from his hand.
The Novum Organum was obsequiously dedicated to the king. A very few months later, the irony of fate was finally to bring home to Bacon the error of dividing
284 FRANCIS BACON.
his allegiance between intellectual ideals and worldly honours and riches. For eight years James had sus- The wrath pended the sittings of Parliament. But money of Parlia- difficulties were growing desperate. At length ment. the king resolved on the perilous device of
making a fresh appeal to Parliament to extricate him from his embarrassments. Bacon was well aware of the exasperated state of public feeling, but with a curiously mistaken faith in himself and^in his reputa tion, he deemed his own position perfectly secure. When Parliament met he discovered his error. At first he sought to close his eyes to the true character of the crisis, but they were soon rudely opened. His enemies were numerous in the House of Commons, and were in no gentle mood.
Heated censure was passed on Bacon and on others of the king's associates as soon as the session opened. The charge Quickly a specific charge was brought against ofcormp- him. Two petitions were presented to the tion. House of Commons by suitors in Bacon's
court charging him with taking bribes in his court, with corrupting justice. The charge was undisguised. There was no chance of misapprehending its gravity, but with characteristic insensibility, Bacon affected to regard the attack as some puerile outcome of spite. He asserted that it was unworthy of consideration. The House of Commons, however, referred the com plaints to the House of Lords, and the Lords took the matter too seriously to leave Bacon longer in doubt of his danger.
As soon as the scales dropped from his eyes, the shock unmanned him. He fell ill, and was unable to leave his house. Fresh charges of corrupting justice
FRANCIS BACON. 285
were brought against him, and he was called upon for an answer. Seeking and obtaining an interview with the king, he confessed to his sovereign that he had ,
taken presents from suitors, but he solemnly ,, asseverated that he had received none before the cause was practically decided. He denied that gifts had ever led him to pervert justice. Unluckily, evidence was forthcoming that at any rate he took a bribe while one cause was pending.
As soon as he studied the details of the indictment, Bacon perceived that defence was impossible, and his failing nerve allowed him to do no more than His con- throw himself on the mercy of his peers. His fession of accusers pressed for a definite answer to the Sullt- accusation, but he gave none. He declined to enter into details. He declared in writing that he was heartily sorry and truly penitent for the corruption and neglect of which he confessed himself guilty.
The story is a pitiful one. Bacon, reduced to the last stage of nervous prostration, figures in a most ignoble
light throughout the proceedings. He turned
. r . f f His punish-
his back to the smiter in a paroxysm of fear. men£
On the ist of May 1621 he was dismissed from his office of Lord Chancellor, and two days later, in his absence through illness, sentence was pro nounced upon him by the House of Lords. He was ordered to pay a fine of ^40,000 and to be imprisoned for life, and was declared incapable of holding any office in the State.
Thus ended in deep disgrace Bacon's active career. The king humanely relieved him of his punishment, and he was set free with the heavy fine unpaid. He retired from London to his house at St. Albans. Driven from
286 FRANCIS BACON.
public life, he naturally devoted himself to literature and science — to those .spheres of labour which he believed himself brought into the world to pursue. Although his health was broken, his intellect was unimpaired by his ruin, and he engaged with renewed energy in literary composition, in philosophical speculation, and in scientific experiment. His literary The first fruit of his enforced withdrawal and scienti- from official business was a . rapidly written fie occupa- monograph on Henry vn. He essayed his- tion. tory, he boldly said, because, being deprived
of the opportunity of doing his country 'service,' 'it remained to him to do it honour.' His Reign of King Henry VIL is a vivid historical picture, independent in tone and of substantial accuracy. More germane to his previous labours was a first instalment of a large collec tion of scientific facts and observations, which he pub lished in Latin in the same year as his account of Henry vn. (1622), under the title Historia Naturalis et Experimentalis ad Condendam Philosophiam (Natural and Experimental History for the Foundation of Phi losophy). Next year there followed De Augmentis Scientiarum, an enlarged version in Latin of his Ad vancement of Learning.
To the last Bacon, with characteristic perversity, declined to realise the significance of his humiliation. His vain Of tne sentence passed upon him, he re- hope of marked before he died, ' It was the justest rehabilita- censure in Parliament that was these two hundred years.' But he prefaced this opinion with the qualification, ' I was the justest judge that was in England these fifty years.' As his life was closing, he cherished wild hopes of regaining the king's favour,
FRANCIS BACON. 287
even of returning to the domain of politics out of which he had passed so ignominiously. He offered to draw up a Digest of the Law, to codify the Law. He still addressed his patron of the past, King James, with the same adulation as of old. But fortunately for himself these ill-conceived efforts failed. When Charles I. came to the throne on the death of his father James i., Bacon imagined that a new opportunity was opened to him, and he petitioned for that full pardon which would have enabled him to take his seat in Parliament. But his advances were then for a last time brusquely repulsed.
IX
Although Bacon's health was shattered and he could not yield himself in patience to exclusion from the
public stage of affairs, his scientific enthu-
• u- u on. • j- ,. His death,
siasm still ran high. 1 he immediate cause
of his death was an adventure inspired by scientific curiosity. At the end of March 1626, being near Highgate, on a snowy day, he left his coach to collect snow with which he meant to stuff a hen in order to observe the effect of cold on the preservation of its flesh.* He was thus a pioneer of the art of refrigera-
* This circumstance rests on the testimony of the philosopher Hobbes, who was thirty-eight years old at the time of Bacon's death, and was in constant personal intercourse with him during the previous ten years. Hobbes's story, which Aubrey took down from his lips and incorporated in his life of Bacon (cf. Aubrey's Lives, vol. ii. part. ii. p. 602), runs as follows : — ' The cause of his Lordship's death was trying an experiment. As he was taking an aire in a coach with Dr. Witherborne 'a Scotchman, Physician to the King) towards Highgate, snow lay on the ground, and it
288 FRANCIS BACON.
tion, of preserving food by means of cold storage. In performing the experiment he caught a chill and took refuge in the house of a neighbouring friend, the art- connoisseur, Lord Arundel, who happened to be from home. Bacon was sixty-five years old, and his constitu tion could bear no new strain. At Lord Arundel's house he died on the gth of April of the disease now known as bronchitis. He was buried at St. Michael's Church, St. Albans, where his tomb may still be visited. The monument represents him elaborately attired and seated in a contemplative attitude. It was set up by a loving disciple, Sir Thomas Meautys. A Latin inscrip-
came into my Lord's thoughts, why flesh might not be preserved in snow as in salt. They were resolved they would try the experi ment presently. They alighted out of the coach, and went into a poore woman's house at the bottome of Highgate Hill, and bought a hen, and made the woman exenterate it, and then stuffed the bodie with snow, and my Lord did help to doe it himselfe. The snow so chilled him, that he immediately fell so extremely ill, that he could not returne to his lodgings (at Graye's Inne) but went to the Earl of Arundell's house at Highgate, where they putt him into a good bed warmed with a panne, but it was a damp bed that had not been layn in about a yeare before, which gave him such a cold that in 2 or 3 dayes he dyed of suffocation.' Bacon carried the frozen hen with him to Lord Arundel's house and lived long enough to assure himself that his experiment was successful. Lord Arundel happened to be absent from home on Bacon's arrival, and Bacon managed, before he understood the fatal char acter of his illness, to dictate a letter — the last words which he is known to have uttered — to his host explaining the situation. ' I was likely to have had the fortune,' the letter, began, 'of Caius Plinius the elder, who lost his life by trying an experiment about the burning of the mountain Vesuvius. For I was also desirous to try an experiment or two, touching the conservation and indura tion of bodies. As for the experiment itself, it succeeded excellently well.' ('A Collection of Letters made by Sr. Tobie Mathews, Kt., 1660,' p. 57.)
FRANCIS BACON. 289
tion, which was penned by another admirer, Sir" Henry Wotton, may be rendered in English thus : — •
' Thus was wont to sit FRANCIS BACON, LORD VERULAM, VISCOUNT ST. ALBANS, (or to call him by his more illustrious titles) the light of the sciences, the standard of eloquence, who, after he had discovered all the secrets of natural and moral philosophy, fulfilled nature's law of dissolution, A.D. 1626, aged 66. — To the memory of so eminent a man THOMAS MEAUTYS, a disciple in life, an admirer in death, set up this monu ment.'
' For my name and memory,' Bacon wrote in his will, •' I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.' These legatees have not proved themselves negligent of the trust that Bacon reposed in them ; yet, when his personal career is surveyed, it is impossible for man's charitable speeches or foreign nations or the next ages to apply to it the language of eulogy. An unparalleled faith in himself, a blind self-confidence, is the most striking feature of his personal character. It justified in his mind acts on his part which defied every law of morality. That characteristic may have been partly due to his early training. The self-righteous creed which his narrowly Puritan mother implanted in him was responsible for much. The Calvinistic doctrine of predestination and election gave him, unconsciously, at the outset, confidence in his eternal salvation, what ever his personal conduct in life. But, if this were the result of his mother's teaching, his father, who was immersed in the politics of the day, made him familiar as a boy with all the Machiavellian devices, the crooked tricks of policy and intrigue which infected 10
290 FRANCIS BACON.
the political society of Queen Elizabeth's court. While these two influences — his mother's superstition and his father's crafty worldliness — were playing on his recep tive mind, a third came from his own individuality. He grew convinced of the possession of exceptional intellectual power which, if properly applied, would revolutionise man's relations with nature and reveal to him her hidden secrets. As years advanced, he realised that material wealth and position were needful to him if he were to attain the goal of his intellectual His neglect ambition. With a moral sense weakened by of moral his early associations with Calvinism on the sanctions. one hand and with utilitarianism on the other, he was unable to recognise any justice in moral obstacles intervening between him and that material prosperity which was essential, in his belief, to the ful filment of his intellectual designs. The higher he advanced in the material world, the more independent he became of the conventional distinctions between right and wrong. His mighty fall teaches the useful lesson that intellectual genius, however commanding, never justifies breaches of those eternal moral laws which are binding on men of great mental endowments equally with men of moderate or small intellectual capacities.
Nor in the practical affairs of life did Bacon have at command that ordinary faculty, that savot'r fairs, which His want ^ often to be met with in men of smaller ofsavoir capacity, and can alone ensure success or faire. prosperity. In money matters his careless
ness was abnormal, even among men of genius. Whether his resources were small or great, his expendi ture was always in excess of them. He was through
FRANCIS BACON. 291
life in bondage to money-lenders, yet he never hesitated to increase his outlay and his indebtedness. He saw his servants robbing him, but never raised a word in protest. By a will which he drew up in the year before he died, he was munificent in gifts, not merely to friends, retainers, and the poor, but to public institu tions, which he hoped to render more efficient in public service. Yet when all his assets were realised, the amount was only sufficient to defray two-thirds of his debts, and none of his magnanimous bequests took effect. With his thoughts concentrated on his intel lectual ambitions, he neglected, too, the study of the men with whom he worked. Although human nature had revealed to him many of its secrets, and he could disclose them in literature with rare incisiveness, he failed to read character in the individual men with whom chance brought him into everyday association. He misunderstood Essex ; he misunderstood James i. ; he misunderstood Buckingam ; his wife and his servants deceived him.
In the conduct of his affairs, as in the management of men, Bacon stands forth as a pitiable failure. It is only in his scientific and his literary achieve- ments that he is great, but there few have 'atness been greater.
Bacon's mind was a typical product of the European Renaissance. His intellectual interests em- braced every topic ; his writings touched al- most every subject of intellectual study. To each he brought the same eager curiosity and efficient
292 FRANCIS BACON.
insight. He is the despair of the modern specialist He is historian, essayist, logician, legal writer, philo sophical speculator, writer on science in every branch.
At heart Bacon was a scholar scorning the applause which the popular writer covets. It is curious to note His rever- tnat ne set a higher value on his skill as a ence for writer of Latin than on his skill as a writer of the Latin English. Latin he regarded as the language tongue. of ^g iearne(j of every nationality, and con sequently books written in Latin were addressed to his only fit audience, the learned society of the whole civilised globe. English writings, on the other hand, could alone appeal to the (in his day) comparatively few persons of intelligence who understood that tongue. Latin was for him the universal language. English books could never, he said, be citizens of the world.
So convinced was he of the insularity of his own tongue, that at the end of his life he deplored that he His con- had wasted time in writing books in English, tempt for * He hoped all his works might be translated English. mto Latin, so that they might live for pos terity. Miscalculation of his powers governed a large part of Bacon's life, and find signal illustration in this regret that he should have written in English rather than in Latin. For it is not to his Latin works, nor to the Latin translations of his English works, that he owes the mail part of his immortality. He lives as a spec ulator in philosophy, as one who sought a great intel lectual goal ; but he lives equally as a great master of the English tongue which he despised.
For terseness and pithiness of expression there is nothing in English to match Bacon's style in the Essays. His reflections on human life which he embodied
FRANCIS BACON. 293
there, his comments on human nature, especially on human infirmities, owe most of their force to the stimu lating vigour which he breathed into Eng- The style lish words. No man has proved himself a of his greater master of the pregnant apophthegm in Essays. any language, not even in the French language, which far more readily lends itself to aphorism.
Weighty wisdom, phrased with that point and brevity which only a master of style could command, is scattered through all the essays, and many sentences phrases have become proverbial. It is the essay ' Of from the Marriage and Single Life ' that begins : c He Essays. that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune ; for they are impediments to great enterprises either of virtue or mischief.' That ' Of Parents and Children ' has ' Children sweeten labours, but they make misfortunes more bitter ; they increase the cares of life, but they mitigate the remembrance of death.' Of ' Building ' he made the prudent and witty remark : ' Houses are built to live in and not to look on ; there fore let use be preferred before uniformity, except where both may be had. Leave goodly fabrics of houses for beauty only to the enchanted palaces of the poets who build them with small cost.' Equally notable are such sentences as these: — 'A crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal where there is no love.' On the scriptural proverb about riches making themselves wings, Bacon grafted the practical wisdom : ' Riches have wings and sometimes they fly away of themselves, sometimes they must be set flying to bring in more.' Equally penetrat ing are these aphoristic deliverances : — ' Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few
294 FRANCIS BACON.
to be chewed and digested' (Essay i., of 'Studies'). ' A little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth man's mind about to religion' (Essay xvi., of 'Atheism'). Sometimes he uses very homely language with singular effect. ' Money is like muck — not good except it be spread ' (Essay xv., of ' Seditions and Troubles '). Thus he summarised a warning which he elsewhere elaborately phrased, that it is an evil hour for a State when its treasure and money are gathered into a few hands.
But Bacon's style is varied. The pithy terseness of his essays is not present in all his works. In addition to his terse mode of English expression, he kad at command a rich exuberance and floridity abounding in rhetorical ornament 'and illustration. He professed indifference to mere questions of form in composition. But whatever his theoretical view of style, he was a singularly careful writer, and his philosophical English writings — his Advancement of Learning especially — are as notable for the largeness of their vocabulary, the richness of their illustration, and the rhythmical flow of their sentences as for their philosophic suggestiveness.
All that Bacon wrote bore witness to his weighty and robust intellect, but his style was coloured not merely by intellectual strength, but by imaginative insight. So much imaginative power, indeed, underlay his majestic phraseology and his illuminating metaphors, that Shelley in his eloquent Defence of Poetry figuratively called him a poet.* It is only figuratively that Bacon could be
* Shelley fancifully endeavours to identify poets and philosophers. 'The distinctions,' he writes, 'between philosophers and poets have been anticipated. Plato was essentially a poet. . . . Lord
FRANCIS BACON. 295
called a poet. He is only a poet in the sense that every great thinker and observer of nature has a certain faculty of imagination. But his faculty of imagination is the thinker's faculty, which is mainly the fruit of intellect. The great poet's faculty of imagination, which is mainly the fruit of emotion, was denied Bacon. Poetry in its strict sense, the modulated harmony of verse, the emotional sympathy which seeks expression in lyric or drama, was out of his range.
The writing of verse was probably the only branch of intellectual endeavour which was beyond Bacon's
grasp. He was ambitious to try his hand at
r . . . J His verse,
every literary exercise. At times he tried to
turn a stanza. The results are unworthy of notice. Bacon's acknowledged attempts at formal poetry are uncouth and lumbering ; they attest congenital unfitness for that mode of expression. Strange arguments have indeed been adduced to credit Bacon with those supreme embodiments of all poetic excellence — Shake speare's plays. The number of works that Bacon claimed to have penned, when combined with the occupations of his professional career, so filled every nook and cranny of his adult time, that on no showing was leisure available for the conquest of vast fields of poetry and drama. But whoever harbours the delusion that Bacon was responsible for anything that came from Shakespeare's pen, should examine Bacon's versified paraphrase of Certaine Psalmes which he published in a
Bacon was a poet. His language has a sweet and majestic rhythm, which satisfies the sense no less than the almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect. . . . Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton ... are philosophers of the very loftiest power.'— Defence of Poetry, ed. A. S. Cook, pp. 9-10.
296 FRANCIS BACON.
volume the year before he died. He dedicated the book to the poet George Herbert, in terms which attest, despite some conventional self-depreciation, the store he set by this poor experiment. The work represents the whole of the extant metrical efforts which came, without possibility of dispute, from Bacon's pen. If the reader of that volume be not promptly disabused of the heresy that any Shakespearean touch is discernible , in the clumsy and crude doggerel, he deserves to be con demned to pass the rest of his days with no other literary company to minister to his literary cravings than this ' Translation of Certaine Psalmes into English Verse, by the Right Honourable Francis, Lo. Verulam, Viscount St. Alban.'*
* Despite his incapacity for verse Bacon, like many smaller men, seems to have assiduously courted the muse in private. Writing to a poetic friend, Sir John Davies, in 1603, he numbers himself among ' concealed poets,' and the gossiping biographer, Aubrey, applies to him the same designation. Apart from his verse render ing of the psalms, he has only been credited on any sane grounds with two pieces of verse, and to one of these he has certainly no title. The moralising jingle, beginning ' The man of life upright,' figures in many seventeenth-century manuscript miscellanies of verse as 'Verses made by Mr. Francis Bacon,' but its true author was Thomas Campion (cf. Poems, ed. A. II. Bullen, p. 20). The other poetic performance assigned to Bacon is variously called ' The World,' ' The Bubble,' and ' On Man's Mortality.' It opens with the lines,
' The world's a bubble, and the life of man Less than a span,'
and was first printed after Bacon's death in 1629 in Thomas Farnaby's Florilegium Epigrammaticum Grtecorum, a Latin trans lation of selections from the Greek Anthology. The poem in question is the only English verse in Farnaby's book, and is ascribed by him on hazy grounds to ' Lord Verulam.' It is a
FRANCIS BACON. 297
XI
It is Bacon's scientific or philosophic labour which forms the apex of his history. Although he wrote many scattered treatises which dealt in detail with His scientific phenomena, Bacon's scientific and philosophic philosophic aims can best be deduced from works, his two great works, the Advancement of Learning, which was written in English, and the Novum Organum, which was written in Latin. The first, which was greatly amplified in a Latin paraphrase (at least one- third being new matter) called De Augmentis Scientiarum, is a summary survey in English of all knowledge. The second work, the Latin Novum Organum, is a fragment of Bacon's full exposition of his scientific system ; it is the only part of it that he completed, and mainly describes his inductive method of scientific investigation.
Bacon's attitude to science rests on the convictions that man's true function in life is to act as the interpreter
rendering of the epigram in the Palatine Anthology, x. 359, which is sometimes assigned to Posidippus and sometimes to Crates (cf. Mackail's Greek Anthology, sect. xii. No. xxxix. p. 278). The English lines, the authorship of which remains uncertain, paraphrase the Greek freely and effectively, but whoever may be their author, they cannot be ranked among original compositions. A copy was found among Sir Henry Wotton's papers, and printed in the Reliquia Wottoniana (1651) above the signature 'Ignoto.' They were also put to the credit, in early manuscript copies, of Donne, of ' Henry Harrington,' and of ' R. W.' The Greek epigram, it is interesting to note, was a favourite with Elizabethan versifiers. English renderings are extant by Nicolas Grimald (in Tottel's Songes and Sonnettes, ed. Arber, p. 109), by Puttenham (in Arte of English Poesic, ed. Arber, p. 214), by Sir John Beaumont, and others.
298 FRANCIS BACON.
of nature ; that truth cannot be derived from authority, but from man's experience and experiments ; that know- His atti- ledge is the fruit of experience and experi- tude to raent. Bacon's philosophic writings have science. for their main object the establishment of a trustworthy system whereby nature may be interpreted by man, and brought into his service, whereby the study of natural science may be set on a firm and fruitful foundation.
The first aim was to overthrow the deductive methods of Aristotle and mediaeval schoolmen, by virtue of which Hi9 oppo- it nad bgeri customary before Bacon's time to sition to seek to prove preconceived theories without Aristotle. reference to actual fact or experience. The formal logic of the syllogism was in Bacon's eyes barren verbiage. By such means elaborate conclusions were reached, which were never tested by observation and experiment, although if they were so tested, they would be summarily confuted. The deductive conclusion that bodies fall to the ground at a velocity proportioned to their weight is one of the simple fallacies which were universally accepted before observation and experiment were summoned to test its truth and brought the law of gravitation into being.
Bacon ranks as the English champion of the method
of inductive reasoning. It was well known to earlier
logicians that an enumeration of phenomena
i diction offered material for generalisation, but Bacon's
predecessors were content with a simple and
uncritical enumeration of such facts as happened to
come under their notice, and their mode of generalising
was valueless and futile, because the foundations were
unsound as often as they were sound. Bacon argued
that reports of isolated facts were to be accumulatedj
FRANCIS BACON. 299
and were then to be systematically tested by means of observation and experiment. Phenomena were to be carefully selected and arranged. There were to be eliminations and rejections of evidence. From the assemblage and codification of tested facts alone were conclusions to be drawn.
On man's inability, without careful training to dis tinguish between fact and fiction, Bacon laid especial stress. Man's powers were rarely in a con- Man's dition to report on phenomena profitably or mental faithfully. Congenital prejudice was first to prejudices, be allowed for and counteracted. Man was liable to misapprehensions of what came within the range of his observation, owing to inadequate control of the senses and emotions.
To an analysis of the main defects in the operation of the human intellect in its search after truth Bacon devoted much attention. The mind of man, Bacon pointed out, was haunted by phantoms, and exorcism of these phantoms was needful before reason was secure in her dominion of the mind. Bacon called the phantoms of th^ mind idols — idola, from the Greek word e'SwAa, phantoms or images. Idols or idola were, in Bacon's terminology, the antitheses of ideas, the sound fruit of thought. Bacon finally reduced the idols or phantoms which infested man's mind to four classes— idols of the tribe, the cave, the market-place, and the theatre.*
* Sections xxxviii.-lxviii. of the Novum Organum expound Bacon's ' doctrine of the idols ' in its final shape. A first imper fect draft of the doctrine appears in the Advancement of Learning (Bk. ii.), and is expanded in the De Augmentis and in the Latin tracts Valerius Terminus and Partis Secunda Delineatio, but the Novum Organum is the locus classicus for the exposition of the doctrine.
300 FRANCIS BACON.
Idols of the tribe are inherent habits of mind common to all the human tribe, such as the tendency to put The more faith in one affirmative instance of
doctrine success than in any number of negative of idols. instances of failure. An extraordinary cure is effected by means of some drug, and few people stop to inquire how often the drug has failed, or whether the cure was due to some cause other than the administra tion of this particular drug. Idols of the cave (a con ception which is borrowed from Plato's Republic) are the prejudices of the individual person when he is im prisoned in the cave of his own idiosyncrasy. One man's natural habit inclines to exaggeration of statement, while another man's habit inclines to under-estimation of the importance of what he sees or hears. The third idol — of the market-place — is the disposition to become the slave of phrases and words which are constantly heard in ordinary traffic, the market-place of life. Mere words or phrases, when echoed in the market-place of life, apart from the circumstances that give them their full significance, breed irrational misconception. Words like Free-trade or Protection, to take a modern example, fall within the scope of Bacon's doctrine; they easily become verbal fetishes, and the things of which they are mere market-place token- are left out of account Idols of the theatre mean those tendencies on the part of masses of men and women to put faith in everything that is said very dogmatically, as actors are wont to speak from the stage of the theatre. Philosophies or religions, which rest on specious dogmas, have the character, in Bacon's judgment, of stage-plays which delude an ignorant audience into accepting the artificial, unreal scene for nature, by virtue of over-emphasised speech and action.
FRANCIS BACON. 301
Man's vision must be purged from prejudices, whether they are inherited or spring from environment, before he can fully grasp the truth. The dry light of The dry reason is the only illuminant which permits light of man to see clearly phenomena as they are ; reason, only when idols are dispersed does the dry light burn with effectual fire.
XII
Bacon claimed that all knowledge lay within the scope of man's enfranchised mind. The inductive system was to arrive ultimately at the cause, not only of The limjt_ scientific facts and conditions, but of moral, iess possi- political, and spiritual facts and conditions, bilities of He refused to belr'sve that any limits were man's set beyond which numan intellect when clari- now ge- fied and purified could not penetrate. He argued that, however far we may think we have advanced in know ledge or science, there is always more beyond, and that the tracts lying beyond our present gaze will in due course of time come within the range of a purified in tellectual vision. There were no bounds to what human thought might accomplish. To other children of the Renaissance the same sanguine faith had come, but none gave such emphatic voice to it as Bacon.
But Bacon did not go far along the road that he had marked out for himself. His great system of knowledge was never completed. He was always look- The frag. ing forward to the time when, having ex- mentary hausted his study of physics, he should character proceed to the study of metaphysics — the ofhls work' things above physics, spiritual things — but metaphysics
302 FRANCIS BACON.
never came within his view, nor did he, to speak truth, do much more than touch the fringe of physical investi gation. He failed to keep himself abreast of the „. . physical knowledge of his day, and some of
ranee of his guesses at scientific truth strike the contem- modern reader as childish. He knew noth- porary ing of Harvey's discovery of the circulation advances Qf fae blood, which that great physician enunciated in his lectures to his students fully ten years before Bacon died. He knew nothing of Napier's invention of logarithms, nor of Kepler's mathematical calculations, which set the science of astronomy on a just footing. He ignored the researches of his own fellow-countryman, William Gilbert, in the new science of the magnet. Nor, apparently, was he acquainted with the Vast series of scientific discoveries, including the thermometer and the telescope, which were due to the genius of the greatest of his scientific contemporaries, Galileo.
It is doubtful whether Bacon, despite his intuitive grasp of scientific principle, had any genuine aptitude for the practical work of scientific research. News of Galileo's discovery of Jupiter's satellites reached him, but he did not apprehend its significance. Galileo's final confirmation of the Copernican system of as tronomy, which proved that the earth went round the tsun, never obtained Bacon's recognition. He adhered to the geocentric theory of Ptolemy, which was long accepted universally, that the earth was the fixed centre of the universe, round which sun and planets revolved. He even disrespectfully referred to those who insisted on the earth's movement round the sun as ' these mad carmen which drive the earth about,'
FRANCIS BACON. 303
Vet Bacon's spacious intuition enabled him to strike out a few shrewd scientific observations that anticipated researches of the future. He described heat His as £ mode of motion, and light as requiring own dis- time for its transmission. Of the atomic coveries. theory of matter he had, too, a shadowy glimpse. He even vaguely suggested somevaluable mechanical devices which are now in vogue. In a description of instru ments for the transference of sound, he foreshadowed the invention of speaking-tubes and telephones ; and he died, as we have seen, in an endeavour to test a per fectly accurate theory of refrigeration.
His greatness in the history of science does not, how ever, consist in the details of his scientific study, nor in his applications of science to practical life, j^is piace nor in his personal aptitude for scientific in the research, but rather in the impetus which history of his advocacy of inductive and experimental science- methods gave to future scientific investigation. As he himself said, he rang the bell which called the other wits together. He first indicated the practical efficiency of scientific induction, and although succeeding experi menters in science may have been barely conscious of their indebtedness to him, yet their work owes its value to the logical method which he brought into vogue.
XIII
Although he failed to appreciate the value of the scientific investigations of his contemporaries, Bacon preached with enthusiasm the crying need of practical
304 FRANCIS BACON.
research if his prophecy of the future of science were to be realised. His mind frequently contemplated :he The endow- organisation, the endowment and equipment ment of of research in every branch of science, theo- research. retical or practical. A great palace of inven tion, a great temple of science, was one of his dreams. In later life he amused himself by describing, in fanciful language, what form such a palace might take in imagin ary conditions. The sketch is one of the most charm ing of his writings. He called it The New Atlantis. It was never finished, and the fragment was not published in his lifetime.
Bacon intended the work to fulfil two objects. First he sought to describe an imaginary college, which should
be instituted for the purpose of interpreting The New , c -, • j
Atlantis nature, ar>d °f producing great and marvel lous works for the benefit of men. In the second place, he proposed to frame an ideal body of laws for a commonwealth. The second part was not begun. The only portion of the treatise that exists deals, after the manner of a work of fiction, with an ideal endowment of scientific research. It shows Bacon to advantage as a writer of orderly and dignified English, and embodies, in a short compass, as many of Bacon's personal convictions and ideals as any of his composi tions.
In the history of the English Renaissance, the Neiv The Atlantis fills at the same time an important
epilogue to place. It is in a sense the epilogue of the the Renais- drama. It is the latest pronouncement in the sance in endeavour of the Renaissance to realise per- ng an ' fection in human affairs. The cry for the re generation of the race found voice — for the first time in
FRANCIS BACON. 305
England under the spell of the Renaissance — in More's Utopia. More pleaded for the recognition of equal social rights for all reasoning men. Bacon's New At lantis was a sequel to More's Utopia, but it sharply contrasted with it in conception. Since More wrote the Utopia, time had taught thinkers of the Renaissance to believe that man's ultimate regeneration and per fectibility depended primarily not on reform of laws of property or on social revolution, but on the progress of science and the regulation of human life by the scientfic spirit. Bacon's New Atlantis proclaimed with almost romantic enthusiasm that scientific method alone was the ladder by which man was to ascend to perfect living.
The opening page of Bacon's scientific romance intro duces us abruptly to a boatload of mariners on their voyage from Peru by the South Pacific Sea ^he story to China and Japan. Storms delay them, Of the New and their food-supplies fail, but happily they Atlantis reach land, the existence of which they had Ut°Pia- not suspected. The inhabitants, after careful inquiry, permit the castaways to disembark. The land proves to be the island of Ben Salem, to which the Christian religion had been divinely revealed at a -very early period. The islanders practise all civic virtues, especially the virtue of hospitality. The visitors are royally enter tained. It is curious to note that Bacon, zealous for efficiency of organisation in small things as in great, points out how the servants refused with amused con tempt the offer of gifts of money from the strange travellers on whom they were directed to wait; the servants deemed it (such. was their disinterested and virtuous faith in logic) dishonour to be twice paid for
306 FRANCIS BACON.
their labours — by their employers and by their employers' guests.
The customs of the people of this unknown island are charmingly described, and ultimately the travellers are The im- introduced to the chief and predominating aginary feature of the island, a great college of college of science, founded by an ancient ruler, and science. called Salomon's house — ' the noblest founda tion that ever was upon the earth, and the lantern of this kingdom.'
The rest of the work describes the constitution of this great foundation for ' the finding out the true nature of The work aU things.' The end of this college of science of the is to reach 'the knowledge of causes, and
college. secret motions of things, and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire to the effecting of all things possible.' That is the motto of the great temple. There is much that is fantastic in the sequel, but it illustrates Bacon's dearest aspirations, and his anticipa tions of what science might, if effort were fittingly organised, ultimately accomplish. There are caves sunk six hundred fathoms deep, in which ' refrigerations and conservations of bodies ' are effected, and new metals artificially contrived.' There are turrets half a mile high — in one case erected on a mountain three miles high—' for purposes of meteorological observation. There is a chamber of health, where the atmosphere is modulated artificially with a view to adapting it to cure various diseases. In the gardens, new flowers and fruits are brought into being by dint of grafting and inoculation. Vivisection is practised on beasts and birds, so that opportunities may be at hand to test the effects of poison and new operations in surgery, and to widen the know*
FRANCIS BACON. 307
ledge of physiology; while breeding experiments pro duce new and useful species of animals. Optics in all its branches is studied practically in the laboratories, called perspective houses. Finally, there is an establish ment where tricks that deceive the senses, like feats of juggling, or spiritualistic manifestations, or ghostly apparitions, are practised to the highest perfection, and then explained to serious students who go out into the world, and by their instruction prevent the simple- minded from being deceived by quacks and impostors.
The leading men of the island, the aristocracy, con sist of a great hierarchy of fellows, or endowed students, of the House of Science, Each rank exer- The Fellows cises different functions, Some, called ' the of the merchants of light,' travel to collect informa- college, tion. Others at home compile knowledge from books. Others codify the experiments of their colleagues. Some of the students devote themselves to applying the discoveries of theoretical science to mechanical inven tions. Others extract, through the general work of the college, philosophic generalisations. Religion sheds its light on the foundation ; and the father, or chief ruler, of the house is represented as abounding in pious fervour. All the students are, indeed, described as philanthropists seeking inspiration from God. Respect for great discoverers of new truths or of new applications of science was one of the principles of Bacon's great scheme of a Temple of Science. For every invention of value a statue to the inventor was at once erected in the House, and a liberal and honourable reward was given him.
The scheme of this great imaginary institution is Bacon's final message to mankind. His college of
308 FRANCIS BACON.
science was a design, he said, fit for a mighty prince to execute. He felt that if such a design had been executed , in his day, he himself would have had the a(JratiS opportunity which he lacked of separating himself from sordid and sophisticated society, from evil temptations which he had not the moral cour age to resist, of realising his youthful ambition. History would then have known him exclusively as a benefactor of the human race, a priest of science, who consecrated every moment of his life to searching into the secrets of nature for the benefit of his fellow-men.
Bacon's idea has not yet been realised. Whether a temple of science, on the scale that Bacon imagined it, Prospects w^ ever come mto existence remains to be of realising seen.* At present the portents, I fear, are Bacon's not favourable for its emergence in this ideal. country. It seems more likely to come to
birth in Germany or in America first. For both in Ger many and in America things of the mind such as Bacon worshipped receive a public consideration which is denied them here. Nothing here is comparable with the widespread eagerness in the United States among young men and women to enjoy the benefit of academic scientific training. Rich and poor alike share the passion for enlightenment. The sacrifices, the penuri ous living which poor students cheerfully face in order to complete their University course, form heroic chapters in the nation's life. And most important in the present connection is it to note the munificent readiness with which the legislatures of many States of America, and
* The passage which follows was interpolated in a repetition of this lecture at the Working Men's College in London at the opening of the Session on 3rd October 1003.
FRANCIS BACON. 309
more especially rich individual citizens of America, respond, like the founder of Bacon's New Atlantis, to demands made on their resources to supply the people with fit endowment and equipment of research. Nothing in the current experience of our country enables us to realise, even dimly, the scale on which wealth in America is appropriated to Bacon's great cause — the advance ment of learning.
This is a melancholy reflection. It suggests a descent from the high level of aspiration and endeavour which England maintained in the era of the Renaissance and after. England nurtured not merely Bacon, who stimu lated scientific research through all the world ; she has produced a long succession of scientific investigators — ' merchants of light ' one might call them in Bacon's fine phrase — who, working in Bacon's spirit, enjoy the honours of universal recognition. She has moreover produced in the past a long line of benefactors who paid willing tribute to learning, who, in the cause of research, fostered educational institutions, libraries, and laboratories. England's prestige owes very much to the scientific triumphs won by men who were Bacon's dis ciples in methods of research, and who were indebted to ancient educational benefactions.
Bacon was well alive to the means whereby a nation's intellectual prestige could best be sustained. In this illuminating tractate of his, The New Atlantis, he argued in effect that it was incumbent on a nation to apply a substantial part of its material resources to the equip ment of scientific work and exploration — a substantial part of its resources which should grow greater and greater with the progress of time and of population, with the increasing complexity of knowledge. Such applica-
3io FRANCIS BACON.
tion of material resources, in Bacon's view, was the surest guarantee of national glory and prosperity. This is perhaps at the moment the most serious lesson that Bacon's writings teach us, and patriotic pride in his achievement ought to forbid our neglect of his counsel, ought to forbid our watching supinely the superior, the better sustained efforts of foreign nations to reach his ideal. •
VII SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER
"... Princes sit like stars about his throne, And he the sun for them to reverence. None that beheld him, but like lesser lights Did vail their crowns to his supremacy.'
Pericles, II. iii. 39-42.
[BIBLIOGRAPHY.— The main facts are recorded in the present writer's Life of Shakespeare, which was published in 1898. The documentary information respecting Shake speare's career is collected in Halliwell Phillipps's Out lines of the Life of Shakespeare, 2 vols., tenth Edition, 1898. The two volumes published by the New Shakspere Society : Shakspere^ s Centurie of Prayse ; being materials for a history of opinion on Shaksfere and his works, A,D, 1591-1693 (edited by C. M. Ingleby, and Lucy Toulmin Smith, 1879), and Some 300 Fresh Allusions to Shakspere from 1594 to 1694 A.D. (edited by F. J. Furnivall, 1886), bear useful testimony to the persistence of the accepted tradition.]
THE obscurity with which Shakespeare's biography has been long credited is greatly exaggerated. The mere biographical information accessible is far The docu- more definite and more abundant than that mentary concerning any other dramatist of the day. material. In the case of no contemporary dramatist are the precise biographical dates and details — dates of baptism and
312 SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER.
burial, circumstances of marriage, circumstances of children, the private pecuniary transactions of his career, the means of determining the years in which his various literary works were planned and produced — equally numerous or based on equally firm documentary foun dation.
Shakespeare's father, John Shakespeare, was a dealer in agricultural produce at Stratford-on-Avon, a prosper ous country town in the heart of England. anTbirtff Jonn Shakespeare was himself son of a small farmer residing in the neighbouring Warwick shire village of Snitterfield. The family was of yeoman stock. Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, was also daughter of a local farmer, who enjoyed somewhat greater wealth and social standing than the poet's father and his kindred. William Shakespeare, the eldest child that survived infancy, was baptized in the parish church of Stratford-on-Avon on 26th April 1564, and the entry may still be read there in the parish registers.
The more closely one studies Shakespeare's career, the plainer it becomes that his experiences and fortunes
were very similar to those of many who came Education. . ,, ... • i_- j u-
m adult years to follow in his day his own
profession. Sprung from yeoman stock, of a family moderately supplied with the world's needs, he had the normal opportunities of education which the Grammar School of the town of his birth could supply. Eliza bethan Grammar Schools gave boys of humble birth a sound literary education. Latin was the chief subject of their study. The boys talked Latin with their master in simple dialogue ; they translated it into English ; they wrote compositions in it. A boy with a native bent for literature was certain to have his interest stimulated if
SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER.
313
he went to an Elizabethan Grammar School, and mas tered the Latin curriculum. Few of Shakespeare's schoolfellows at Stratford, whatever their adult fortunes, lost in later life familiarity with the Latin which they had acquired at school. Friends and neighbours of Shake speare at Stratford, who were educated with him at the Grammar School and passed their days as grocers or butchers in the town, were in the habit of corresponding with one another in copious and fluent Latin.
Of Shakespeare's great literary contemporaries few began life in a higher social position or with better opportunities of education than he. Mar- The trajn_ lowe, who was the first writer of literary blank ing Of verse in England, and was Shakespeare's literary tutor in artistic tragedy, was son of a shoe- contem- maker, and was educated at the King's por Grammar School of Canterbury. Spenser, the poet of the Faerie Queene, was son of an impecunious London tailor, and began writing poetry after passing through the Merchant Taylors' School. These schools were of the same type as the school of Stratford-on-Avon ; they provided an identical course of study.
While Shakespeare was a schoolboy, his father was a prosperous tradesman, holding the highest civic office in the little town of Stratford. Unfortunately, when the eldest son William was little more trainjngi than fourteen, the father fell into pecuniary embarrassment, and the boy was withdrawn from school before his course of study was complete. He was deprived of the opportunity of continuing his education at a university; his further studies he had to pursue unaided. Nothing peculiar to his experience is to be detected in the fact that his pursuit of knowledge went
314 SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER.
steadily forward after he left school. Many men of the day, whose education suffered similar abbreviation, be came not merely men of wide reading, but men of immense learning. Ben Jonson, whose erudition in the Latin and Greek classics has for range and insight very rarely been equalled in England, was, according to his own account, taken from school and put as a lad to the trade of bricklaying — the least literary of all trades. Sir Walter Ralegh had a very irregular training in youth ; he left Oxford soon after joining the university, without submitting to regular discipline there ; yet, after a career of great activity in all departments of human effort, he wrote his History of the World, a formidable compen dium of learned and recondite research. Other great writers of the day owed little or nothing to academic teaching ; their wide reading was the fruit of a natural taste ; it was under no teacher's control ; it was carried forward at the same time as they engaged in other employment. Shakespeare, owing to his interrupted education, was never a trained scholar ; he had defects of knowledge which were impossible in a trained scholar, but he was clearly an omnivorous reader from youth till the end of his days ; he was a wider reader than most of those who owed deeper debts to schools or colleges.
ii
Shakespeare's father intended that he should assist Experi- him in his own multifarious business of ences of glover, butcher, and the rest. But this occu- youth. pation was uncongenial to the young man, and
he successfully escaped from it. He developed early.
SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER. 315
At eighteen he married hastily, to the not unnatural annoyance of his parents. Very soon afterwards his genius taught him that he required a larger scope for its development than the narrow associations of a domestic hearth in a little country town could afford him. At twenty-two, like hundreds of other young Englishmen of ability, of ambition, and of high spirits, he set his face towards the capital city of the country, towards London, where he found his goal.
The drama was in its infancy. The first theatre built in England was not a dozen years old when Shakespeare arrived in the metropolis. The theatre was
a new institution in the social life of Shake- The mfant
, . _ ,. , drama,
speares youth. English drama was an
innovation ; it was one of the latest fruits of the Re naissance in England, of the commingling of the new study of classical drama with the new expansion of in tellectual power and outlook. A love of mimicry is inherent in men, and the Middle Ages gratified it by their Miracle Plays, which developed into Moralities, and Interludes. In the middle of the sixteenth century Latin and Greek plays were crudely imitated in English. But of poetic, literary, romantic, intellectual drama, England knew practically nothing until Shakespeare was of age. The land was just discovered, and its ex ploration was awaiting a leader of men, a master mind. There is nothing difficult or inexplicable in Shake speare's association with the theatre. It should always be borne in mind that his conscious aims His associ- and ambitions were those of other men of ation with literary aspirations in this stirring epoch. the theatre. The difference between the results of his endeavours and those of his fellows was due to the magic and in-
3i6 SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER.
voluntary working of genius, which, since the birth of time, has exercised as large a charter as the wind, to blow on whom it pleases. Speculation or debate as to why genius bestowed its fullest inspiration on Shake speare, this youth of Stratford-on-Avon, is as futile a speculation as debate about why he was born into the world with a head on his shoulders at all instead of, say, a block of stone. It is enough for prudent men and women to acknowledge the obvious fact that genius in an era of infinite intellectual energy endowed Shake speare, the Stratford-on-Avon boy, with its richest gifts. A very . small acquaintance with the literary history of the world, and the manner in which genius habitually plays its part there, will show the folly of cherishing astonishment that Shakespeare, of Stratford-on-Avon, rather than one more nobly born, or more academically trained, should, in an age so rich in intellectual and poetic impulse, have been chosen for the glorious dignity.
In London, Shakespeare's work was mainly done. There his reputation and fortune were achieved. But Hisassoci- his London career opened under many dis- ation with advantages. A young man of twenty-two, London. burdened with a wife and three children, he had left his home in his little native town about 1586 to seek his fortune in the great city. Without friends, and without money, he had, like many another stage- struck youth, set his heart on a two-fold quest. He would become an actor in the metropolis, and would write the plays in which he should act. Fortune did not at first conspicuously favour him; he sought and won the menial office of call-boy in a London play house, and was only after some delay promoted to
SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER. 317
humble duties on the stage itself. But no sooner had his foot touched the lowest rung of the theatrical ladder, than he felt intuitively that the topmost rung was within his reach. He tried his hand on the revision of an old play in the theatrical repertory, a play which was about to be revived. The manager was not slow to recognise the gift for dramatic writing.
lit
Shakespeare's period of probation was not short. He did not leap at a bound to fame and fortune. Neither came in sight until he had worked for seven The period or eight years in obscurity and hardship, ofproba- During these years he accumulated know- tion- ledge in very varied fields of study and experience. Rapid power of intuition characterised many another great writer of the day, but none possessed it in the same degree as himself. Shakespeare's biographers have sometimes failed to make adequate allowance for his power of acquiring information with almost the rapidity of a lightning flash, and they have ignored al together the circumstance that to some extent his literary contemporaries shared this power with him. The habit of viewing Shakespeare in isolation has given birth to many misconceptions.
The assumption of Shakespeare's personal association in early days with the profession of the law is a good
illustration of the sort of misunderstanding
. . , r ou i Use of law
which has corrupted accounts of Shake- terms>
speare's career. None can question the fact
of Shakespeare's frequent use of law terms. But the
318 SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER.
theory that during his early life in London he practised law in one or other professional capacity becomes per fectly superfluous as soon as his knowledge of law is compared with that of other Elizabethan poets, and its intuitive, rather than professional, character appre ciated,
It is true that Shakespeare employs a long series of law terms with accuracy and is in the habit of using legal metaphors. But the careful inquirer will also per ceive that instances of ' bad law ' or unsound interpreta tion of legal principles are almost as numerous in Shakespeare's work as instances of ' good law ' or right interpretation of legal principles. On that aspect of the problem writers are as a rule tantalisingly silent.
If we are content to keep Shakespeare apart from his contemporaries, or to judge him exclusively by the prac tice of imaginative writers of recent times, the circum stance that he often borrows metaphors or terminology from the law may well appear to justify the notion that personal experience of the profession is the best explana tion of his practice. But the problem assumes a The habit very different aspect when it is perceived of contern- that Shakespeare's fellow-writers, Ben Jonson poraries. an<j Spenser, Massinger and Webster, em ployed law terms with no less frequency and facility than he. It can be stated with the utmost confidence that none of these men engaged in the legal profession. Spenser's Faerie Queene seems the least likely place wherein to study Elizabethan law. But Spenser in his Spenser's romantic epic is even more generous than use of law Shakespeare in his playsin technical references terms. to iegai procedure. Take such passages as
the following. The first forms a technical commentary
SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER. 319
on the somewhat obscure law of 'alluvion,' with which Shakespeare shows no sign of acquaintance : —
' For that a waif, the which by fortune came Upon your seas, he claim'd as property : And yet nor his, nor his in equity, But yours the waif by high prerogative. Therefore I humbly crave your Majesty It to replevie, and my son reprieve, So shall you by one gift save all us three alive.' *
In the second passage a definite form of legal practice is fully and accurately described : —
' Fair Mirabella was her name, whereby Of all those crimes she there indicted was : All which when Cupid heard, he by and by, In great displeasure willed a Capias Should issue forth t'attach that scornful lass. The warrant straight was made, and there withal A Bailiff-errant forth in post did pass, Whom they by name there Portamore did call ; He which doth summon lovers to love's judgment hall. The damsel was attached, and shortly brought Unto the bar whereas she was arraigned ; But she thereto nould plead, nor answer aught Even for stubborn pride which her restrained. So judgment passed, as is by law ordained In cases like.'t
It will be noticed by readers of these quotations that Spenser makes free with strangely recondite Spenser's technical terms. The verb ' replevie/ in the recondite first quotation means 'to enter on disputed law property, after giving security to test at law Phrases- the question of rightful ownership;' the technicality
* Faerie Qtteene, Bk. IV., canto xii., stanza xxxi.
t Faerit Queens^ Bk. vi., canto vii., stanzas xxxv, and xxxvi.
320 SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER.
is to modern ears altogether out of harmony with the language of the Muses, and is rarely to be matched in Shakespeare.
Such examples could be multiplied almost indefinitely
from Spenser, Ben Jonson, and scores of
speare's *heir contemporaries. The questions 'Was
conformity Spenser a lawyer ? ' or ' Was Ben Jonson a
with pre- lawyer ? ' have as far as my biographical
vailmg studies go, not yet been raised. Were they
raised, they could be summarily answered in
the negative.
No peculiar biographical significance can attach there fore, apart from positive evidence no tittle of : which exists, to Shakespeare's legal phraseology. Social inter course between men of letters and lawyers was excep tionally active in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In view of the sensitiveness to environment, in view of the mental receptivity of all great writers of the day, it becomes unnecessary to assign to any more special causes the prevailing predilection for legal language in contemporary literature. The frequency with which law terms are employed by Shakespeare's contempo raries, who may justly be denied all practical experience of the profession of law, confutes the conclusion that Shakespeare, becauses he uses law terms, was at the out set of'his career in London a practising lawyer or lawyer's clerk. The only just conclusion to be drawn by Shake speare's biographer from his employment of law terms is that the great dramatist in this feature, as in numerous other features, of his work was merely proving the readi ness with which he identified himself with the popular literary habits of his day. All Shakespeare's mental energy, it may safely be premised, was absorbed through-
SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER. 321
out his London career by his dramatic ambition. He had no time to make acquaintance at first hand with the technical procedure of another profession.
IV
It was not probably till 1591, when he was twenty- seven, that Shakespeare's earliest original play, Love's Labour's Lost, was performed. It showed shake- the hand J of a beginner ; it abounded in speare's trivial witticisms. But above all there shone early Plays- out clearly and unmistakably the dramatic and poetic fire, the humorous outlook on life, the insight into human feeling, which were to inspire Titanic achieve ments in the future. Soon after, he scaled the tragic heights of Borneo and Juliet, and he was rightly hailed as the prophet of a new world of art. Thenceforth he marched onward in triumph.
Fashionable London society befriended the new birth of the theatre. Cultivated noblemen offered their patron age to promising actors or writers for the The Earl stage, and Shakespeare sooned gained the of South- ear of the young Earl of Southampton, one ampton. of the most accomplished and handsome of the Queen's noble courtiers. The earl was said to spend nearly all his leisure at the playhouse every day.
It is not always borne in mind that Shakespeare gained soon after the earliest of his theatrical successes notable recognition from the highest in the land, from Queen Elizabeth, and her Court ; It was probably at the suggestion of his enthusiastic patron, Lord South ampton, that, in the week preceding the Christmas of II
322 SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER.
1594, when Shakespeare was thirty, and he had just turned the corner of his career, the Lord Chamberlain, who controlled the entertainment of the Court, sent a stirring message to the theatre in Shoreditch, where Shakespeare was at work as playwright and actor. The young dramatist was ordered to present himself at Court for two days following Christmas, and to give his sover eign on each of the two evenings a taste of his quality.
The invitation was of singular interest. It cannot have been Shakespeare's promise as an actor that led to the Shake- royal summons. His histrionic fame did not speare at progress at the same rate as his literary re- Court, pute. He was never to win the laurels of a great actor. His most conspicuous triumph on the stage was achieved in middle life as the Ghost in his own Hamlet, and he ordinarily confined his efforts to old men of secondary rank. Ample compensation for his personal deficiencies as an actor was provided by the merits of his companions on his first visit to Court ; he was to come supported by actors of the highest eminence in their generation. Directions were given that the greatest of the tragic actors of the day, [Richard Bur- bage, and the greatest of the comic actors, William Kemp, were to bear the young actor-dramatist company. With neither of these was Shakespeare's histrionic posi tion then, or at any time, comparable. For years they were the leaders of the acting profession. Shakespeare's relations with Burbage and Kemp were close, both privately and professionally. Almost all Shakespeare's great tragic characters were created on the stage by Burbage, who had lately roused London to enthu siasm by his stirring representation of Shakespeare's Richard III. for the first time. As long as Kemp lived
SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER. 323
he conferred a like service on many of Shakespeare's comic characters, and he had recently proved his worth as a Shakespearean comedian by his original rendering of the part of Peter, the Nurse's graceless serving-man, in Romeo and Juliet, Thus powerfully supported, Shakespeare appeared for the first time in the royal presence-chamber in Greenwich Palace on the evening of St. Stephen's Day (the Boxing-day of subsequent generations) in 1594.
Extant documentary evidence of this visit of Shake speare to Court may be seen in the manuscript account of the ' Treasurer of the [royal] chamber ' A perform- now in the Public Record Office in London. ance at The document attests that Shakespeare and Court in his two associates performed one 'Comedy *594- or Interlude' on that night of Boxing-day in 1594, and gave another ' Comedy or Interlude ' on the next night but one (on Innocents'-day) ; that the Lord Chamber lain paid the three men for their services the sum of ^13, 6s. 8d., and that the Queen added to the honor arium, as a personal proof of her satisfaction, the further sum of ;£6, 133. 4d. The remuneration was thus ^20 in all. These were substantial sums in those days, when the purchasing power of money was eight times as much as it is to-day, and the three actors' reward would now be equivalent to ;£i6o. Unhappily, the record does not go beyond the payment of the money. What words of commendation or encouragement Shake speare received from his royal auditor are not handed down to us, nor do we know for certain what plays were performed on the great occasion. It is reasonable to infer that all the scenes came from Shakespeare's reper tory. Probably they were drawn from Love's Labour's
324 SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER.
Lost, which was always popular in later years at Eliza beth's Court, and from the The Comedy of Errors, in which the farcical confusions and horse-play were cal culated to gratify the Queen's robust taste. But nothing can be stated with absolute certainty except that on December 29, 1594, Shakespeare travelled up the River Thames from Greenwich to London with a heavier purse and a lighter heart than on his setting out. That the visit had in all ways been crowned with success there is ample indirect evidence. He and his work had fasci nated his sovereign, and many a time was she to seek delight again in the renderings of his plays, by himself and his fellow actors, at her palaces on the banks of the Thames during her remaining nine years of life.
When, a few months later, Shakespeare was penning his new play of A Midsummer Nighfs Dream, he could Shake- n°t forbear to make a passing obeisance of speare's gallantry (in that vein for which the old gallantry. spinster queen was always thirsting) to 'a fair vestal throned by the West,' who passed her life ' in maiden meditation, fancy free.'
The interest that Shakespeare's work excited at the Court was continuous throughout his life, and helped to Continu- render his position unassailable. When ance of James I. ascended the throne, no author was Court more frequently honoured by 'command'
favour. performances of his plays in the presence of the sovereign. Then, as now, the playgoer's apprecia tion was quickened by his knowledge that the play he was witnessing had been produced before the Court at Greenwich or Whitehall a few days earlier. Shake speare's publishers were not above advertising facts like these, as the title-pages of quarto editions published in
SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER. 325
his lifetime sufficiently prove. 'The pleasant conceited comedy called Love's Labour's Lost* was advertised with the appended words, ' as it was presented publishers' before her highness this last Christmas.' advertise- ' A most pleasant and excellent conceited ments of comedy of Sir John Falstaff and the Merry the fact- Wives of Windsor* was stated to have been 'divers times acted both before her Majesty and elsewhere.' The ineffably great play of King Lear was advertised with something like tradesmanlike effrontery 'as it was played before the King's Majesty at Whitehall on St. Stephen's Night in the Christmas Holidays.'
But the Court never stood alone in its admiration of Shakespeare's work. Court and crowd never differed in their estimation of his dramatic power. There The favour is no doubt that Shakespeare conspicuously of the caught the ear of the Elizabethan playgoers crowd, of all classes at a very early date in his career, and held it firmly for life. ' These plays,' wrote two of his pro fessional associates of the reception of the whole series in the playhouse during his lifetime, ' these plays have had their trial already, and stood out all appeals.' Equally significant is Ben Jonson's apostrophe of Shake speare as
' The applause, delight, and wonder of our stage.'
A charge has sometimes been brought against the Elizabethan playgoer of failing to recognise Shake-
326 SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER.
speare's sovereign genius. That accusation should be reckoned among popular fallacies. It was not merely P ular *ne recognition of the fashionable, the crit- fallacy of ical, the highly-educated, that Shakespeare Shake- personally received. It was by the voice of the speare's half-educated populace, whose heart and intel- neg ect. jgct wgre £Qr once jn ^g rjght, that he was
acclaimed the greatest interpreter of human nature that literature had known, and, as subsequent experience has proved, was likely to know. There is evidence that throughout his lifetime and for a generation afterwards his plays drew crowds to pit, boxes, and gallery alike. It is true that he was one of a number of popular dramatists, many of whom had rare gifts, and all of whom glowed with a spark of the genuine literary fire. But Shakespeare was the sun in the firmament ; when his light shone the fires of all contemporaries paled in the contemporary playgoer's eye. Very forcible and very humorous was the portrayal of human frailty and eccentricity in the plays of Shakespeare's contemporary, Ben Jonson. Ben Jonson, too, was a fine classical scholar, which Shakespeare, despite his general know ledge of Latin, was not. But when Shakespeare and Ben Jonson both tried their hands at dramatising episodes in Roman history, the Elizabethan public of all degrees of intelligence welcomed Shakespeare's efforts with an enthusiasm which they rigidly withheld from Ben Jonson's. This is how an ordinary playgoer contrasted in crude verse the reception of Jonson's Roman play of Catiline's Conspiracy with that of Shakespeare's Roman play of Julius Ccesar : —
' So have I seen when Caesar would appear, And on the stage at half-sword parley were
SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER. 327
Brutus and Cassius — oh ! how the audience Were ravished, with what wonder they went thence ; When some new day they would not brook a line Of tedious though well-laboured Catiline.'
Jonson's 'tedious though well-laboured Catiline' was unendurable when compared with the ravishing interest of Julius Ccesar.
Shakespeare was the popular favourite. It is rare that the artist who is a hero with the multi- Snake. tude is also a hero with the cultivated few. speare's But Shakespeare's universality of appeal was univer- such as to include among his worshippers sallty of from first to last the trained and the untrained aPPeal> playgoer of his time.
VI
Shakespeare's work was exceptionally progressive in quality ; few authors advanced in their art more steadily. His hand grew firmer, his thought grew progress. richer, as his years increased, and apart from ive quality external evidence as to the date of production of his or publication of his plays, the discerning work- critic can determine from the versification, and from the general handling of his theme, to what period in his life each composition belongs. All the differences dis cernible in Shakespeare's plays c'carly prove the gradual but steady development of dramatic power and temper ; they separate with definiteness early from late work. The comedies of Shakespeare's younger days often trench upon the domains of farce ; those of his middle and later life approach the domain of tragedy. Tragedy in his hands markedly grew, as his years advanced, in
328 SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER.
subtlety and intensity. His tragic themes became more and more complex, and betrayed deeper and deeper knowledge of the workings of human passion. Finally the storm and stress of tragedy yielded to the placid pathos of romance. All the evidence shows that, when his years of probation ended, he mastered in steady though rapid succession every degree and phase of excellence in the sphere of drama, from the phantasy of A Midsummer Nighfs Dream to the unmatchable humour of Falstaff, from the passionate tragedies of King Lear and Othello to the romantic pathos of Cym- beline and The Tempest.
VII
Another side of Shakespeare's character and biog raphy deserves attention. He was not merely a great His prac- Poet anc^ dramatist, endowed with imagina- tical hand- tion without rival or parallel in human ling of history ; he was a practical man of the world, affairs. jjjg wor]{ proves that his unique intuition
was not merely that of a man of imaginative genius, but that of a man who was deeply interested and well versed in the affairs of everyday life. With that practical sense, which commonly characterises the man of the world, Shakespeare economised his powers and spared his inventive energy, despite its abundance, wherever his purpose could be served by levying loans on the writings of others. He rarely put himself to the pains of inventing a plot for his dramas; he borrowed his fables from popular current literature, such as Holin- shed's Chronicles, North's translation of Plutarch's Lives, widely read romances, or even plays that had already
SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER. 329
met with more or less success on the stage. It was not merely ' airy nothings ' and ' forms of things unknown ' — the creatures of his imagination — that found in his dramas ' a local habitation and a name ; ' he depended very often on the solid fruit of serious reading. By such a method he harboured his strength, at the same time as he deliberately increased his hold on popular taste. He diminished the risk of failure to satisfy the standard of public culture. Naturally he altered his borrowed plots as his sense of artistic fitness dictated, or refashioned them altogether. From rough ore he usually extracted pure gold, but there was business aptitude in his mode of gathering the treasure. In like manner the amount of work he accomplished in the twenty years of his active professional career amply proves his steady power of application, and the regu larity with which he pursued his literary vocation.
Appreciation of his practical mode of literary work should leave no room for surprise at the discovery that he engaged with success in the practical The return affairs of life which lay outside the sphere of to Strat- his art. As soon as the popularity of his ford- work for the theatre was assured, and he had acquired by way of reward a valuable and profitable share in the profits of the company to which he was attached, Shake speare returned to his native place, filled with the am bition of establishing his family there on a sure footing. His father's debts had grown in his absence, and his wife had had to borrow money for her support. But his return in prosperous circumstances finally relieved his kindred of pecuniary anxiety. He purchased the largest house in the town, New Place, and, like other actors of the day, faced a long series of obstacles in an
330 SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER.
effort to obtain for his family a coat of arms. He in vested money in real estate at Stratford ; he acquired arable land as well as pasture. His Stratford neigh bours, who had known him as a poor lad, now appealed to him for loans or gifts of money in their need, and for the exercise of his influence in their behalf in London. He proved himself a rigorous man in all business matters with his neighbours, asserting his legal rights in all financial relations in the local courts, where he often appeared as plaintiff, and usually came off victorious. His average income in later life was reputed by his neighbours to exceed a thousand pounds a year.
No mystery attaches to Shakespeare's financial com petency. It is easily traceable to his professional His finan- earnings — as author, actor, and theatrical cial com- shareholder — and to his shrewd handling of petence. his revenues. Shakespeare's ultimate finan cial position differs little from that which his fellow theatrical managers and actors made for themselves. The profession of the theatre flourished conspicuously in his day, and brought fortunes to most of those who shared in theatrical management. Shakespeare's pro fessional friends and colleagues — leading actors and managers of the playhouses — were in late life men of substance. Like him, they had residences in both town and country; they owned houses and lands; and laid questionable claim to coat armour.* Edward Alleyn,
* A manuscript tract, entitled ' A brief discourse of the causes of the discord amongst the officers of Arms and of the great abuses and absurdities committed to the prejudice and hindrance of the office,' was recently lent me by its owner. It is in the handwriting of one of the smaller officials of the College of Arms, William Smith, rouge dragon pursuivant, and throws curious light on the
SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER. 331
an actor and playhouse manager, began life in much the same way as Shakespeare, and was only two years his junior; at the munificent expense of ten thousand pounds he endowed out of his theatrical earnings, after making due provision for his family, the great College of God's Gift, with almshouses attached, at Dulwich, within four miles of the theatrical quarter of Southwark. The explanation of such wealth is not far to seek. The fascination of novelty still hung about the theatre even when Shakespeare retired from work. The Eliza- passion for heraldry which infested Shakespeare's actor-colleagues. Rouge-dragon specially mentions in illustration of his theme two of Shakespeare's professional colleagues, namely Augustine Phillipps and Thomas Pope, both of whose names are enshrined in that leaf of the great First Folio which enumerates the principal actors of Shakespeare's plays during his lifetime. Augustine Phillipps was an especiaily close friend, and left Shakespeare by his will a thirty shilling piece in gold. Both these men, Pope and Phillipps, ac cording to the manuscript, spared no effort to obtain and display that hall-mark of gentility — a coat of arms. Both made unjusti fiable claim to be connected with persons of high rank. When applying for coat-armour to the College of Arms, ' Pope the player,' we are told, would have no other arms than those of Sir Thomas Pope, a courtier and privy councillor, who died early in Elizabeth's reign, and perpetuated his name by founding a college at Oxford, Trinity College. The only genuine tie between him and the player was identity of a not uncommon surname. Phillipps the player claimed similar relations with a remoter hero, one Sir Wil liam Phillipps, a warrior who won renown at Agincourt, and who was allowed to bear his father-in-law's title of Lord Bardolph — a title very familiar to readers of Shakespeare in a different connec tion. The actor Phillipps, to the disgust of the heraldic critic, caused the arms of this spurious ancestor, Sir William Phillipps, Lord Bardolph, to be engraved with due quarterings on a gold ring. The critic tells how he went with a colleague to a small graver's shop in Foster Lane, in the City, and saw the ring that had been engraved for the player.
332 SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER.
bethans, and the men and women in Jacobean England, were — excepting those of an ultra-pious disposition — enthusiastic playgoers and seekers after amusement, and the stirring recreation which the playhouse provided was generously and even extravagantly remunerated. There is nothing exceptional either in the amount of the profits which Shakespeare derived from connection with theatri cal enterprise or in the manner in which he spent them.
VIII
Finally, about 1611, Shakespeare made Stratford his
permanent home. He retired from the active exercise
of his profession, in order to enjoy those
honours and privileges which, according to
the prevailing social code, wealth only
brought in full measure to a playwright after he ceased
actively to follow his career. Shakespeare practically
admitted that his final aim was what at the outset of his
days he had defined as ' the aim of all ' :
' The aim of all is but to nurse this life Unto honour, wealth, and ease in waning age.'
Shakespeare probably paid occasional visits to London in the five years that intervened between his retirement from active life and his death. In 1613 he purchased a house in Blackfriars, apparently merely by way of investment. He then seems, too, to have disposed of his theatrical shares. For the work of his life was over, and he devoted the evening of his days to rest in his native place, and to the undisturbed tenure of the respect of his neighbours. He was on good terms with
SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER. 333
the leading citizens of Stratford, and occasionally invited literary friends from London to be his guests. In local politics he took a very modest part. There he figured on the side of the wealthy, and showed little regard for popular rights, especially when they menaced property. At length, early in 1616, when his fifty-second year was closing, his health began to fail, and he died in his great house at Stratford on Tuesday, April 23, 1616, probably on his fifty-second birthday.
Shakespeare carefully attended in the last months of his life to the disposition of his property, which con sisted, apart from houses and lands, of ^350 . in money (nearly ^3000 in modern cur rency), and much valuable plate and other personalty. His wife and two daughters survived him. He left the bulk of his possessions to his elder daughter, Susanna, who was married to a medical practitioner at Stratford, John Hall. He bequeathed nothing to his wife except his second best bedstead, probably because she had smaller business capacity to deal with property than her daughter Susanna, to whose affectionate care she was entrusted. Shakespeare's younger daughter, Judith, was adequately provided for ; and to his granddaughter, his elder daughter's daughter, Elizabeth, who was ultimately his last direct survivor, he left most of his plate. The legatees included three of the dramatist's fellow-actors, to each of whom he left a sum of 265. 8d., wherewith to buy memorial rings. Such a bequest well confirms the reputation that he enjoyed among his profes sional colleagues for geniality and gentle sympathy. Other bequests show that he reckoned to the last his chief neighbours at Stratford among his intimate friends.
334 SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER.
Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of the church
of his native town, Stratford-on-Avon. On His burial. , , , .. , .
the slab of stone covering the grave on the
chancel floor were inscribed the lines :
' Good frend for Jesus sake forbeare, To digg the dust encloased heare : Bleste be ye man yt spares thes stones, And curst be he yt moves my bones.'
A justification of this doggerel inscription is (if needed) not far to seek. According to one William Hall, who described a visit to Stratford in 1694, these crude verses were penned by Shakespeare to suit the capacity of ' clerks and sextons, for the most part a very ignorant set of people.' Had this curse not threatened them, Hall proceeds, the sexton would not have hesi tated in course of time to remove Shakespeare's dust to ' the bone-house,' to which desecration Shakespeare had a rooted antipathy. As it was, the grave was made seventeen feet deep, and was never opened, even to receive his wife, although she expressed a desire to be buried in the same grave with her husband.
But more important is it to remember that a monu ment was soon placed on the chancel wall near his
grave. The inscription upon Shake- Ehsmonu- are,g tomb jn Stratford-on-Avon Church menu
attests that Shakespeare, the native of Strat ford-on-Avon, who went to London a poor youth and returned in middle life a man of substance, was known in his native place as the greatest man of letters of his epoch. In these days, when we hear doubts expressed of the fact that the writer of the great plays identified with Shakespeare's name was actually associated with
SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER. 335
Stratford-on-Avon at all, this epitaph should, in the interests of truth and good sense, be learned by heart in youth by every English-speaking persoa The epitaph opens with a Latin distich, in which Shakespeare is likened, not perhaps very appositely, to three great heroes of classical antiquity — in judgment to Nestor, in genius to Socrates (certainly an inapt comparison), and in art or literary power to Virgil, the greatest of Latin poets. Earth is said to cover him, the people to mourn him, and Olympus to hold him. Then follows this English verse, not brilliant verse, but verse that leaves no reader in doubt as to its significance :
' Stay, passenger, why goest thou by so fast ? Read, it thou canst, whom envious death hath plast Within this monument ; — Shakespeare, with whom Quicke nature died : * whose name doth deck this tombe Far more than cost : sith all that he hath writ Leaves living art but page to serve his wit.'
There follows the statement in Latin that he died on 23rd April 1616.
' All that he hath writ Leaves living art but page to serve his wit.'
These words mean only one thing : at Stratford-on-Avon,
* It is curious to note that Cardinal Pietro Bembo, one of the most cultivated writers of the Italian Renaissance, was author of the epitaph on the painter Raphael, which seems to adumbrate (doubtless accidentally) the words in Shakespeare's epitaph, ' with whom Quicke Nature died.' Bembo's lines run :
1 Hie ille est Raphael, metuit quo sospite vinci Rerum magna parens, et moriente, mori.'
(' Here lies the famous Raphael, in whose lifetime great mother Nature feared to be outdone, and at whose death feared to die.')
336 SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER.
his native place, Shakespeare was held to enjoy a univer sal reputation. Literature by all other living pens was at the date of his death only fit, in the eyes of his fellov- townsmen, to serve ' all that he had writ ' as pageboy or menial. There he was the acknowledged master, and all other writers were his servants. The epitaph can be explained in no other sense. Until the tongue that Shakespeare spoke is dead, so long as the English lan guage exists and is understood, it is futile to express doubt of the traditionally accepted facts of Shakespeare's career.
IX
The church at Stratford-on-Avon, which holds Shake speare's bones, must always excite the liveliest sense „. of veneration among the English-speaking
peoples. It is there that is enshrined the final testimony to his ascent by force of genius from obscurity to glory. But great as is the importance of the inscription on his tomb to those who would under stand the drift of Shakespeare's personal history, it was not the only testimony to the plain current of his life that found imperishable record in the epoch of his death. Biographers did not lie in wait for men of eminence on their deathbeds in Shakespeare's age, but the place of the modern memoir-writer was filled in those days by friendly poets, who were usually alert to pay fit homage in elegiac verse to a dead hero's achievements. In that regard Shakespeare's poetic friends showed at his death exceptional energy. During his lifetime men of letters had bestowed on his ' reigning wit,' on his kingly suprem acy of genius, most generous stores of eulogy. When
SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER. 337
Shakespeare lay dead, in the spring of 1616, when, as one of his admirers technically phrased it, he had with drawn from the stage of the world to the ' tiring-house ' or dressing-room of the grave, the flood of panegyrical lamentation poured forth in a new flood. One of the earliest of the elegies was a sonnet by William Basse, who not only gave picturesque expression to the con viction that Shakespeare would enjoy for all time a unique reverence on the part of his countrymen, but brought into strong relief the fact that national obsequies were held by his contemporaries to be his due, and that the withholding of them was contrary to a widely dis seminated wish. In the opening lines of his poem Basse apostrophised Chaucer, Spenser, and the drama tist, Francis Beaumont, the only three poets who had hitherto received the recognition of burial in Westminster Abbey. Beaumont, the youngest of the trio, had been buried in the Abbey only five weeks before Shakespeare died. To this honoured trio Basse made appeal to ' lie a thought more nigh' one to another so as to make room for the newly dead Shakespeare within their 'sacred sepulchre.' Then, in the second half of his sonnet, the poet justified the fact that Shakespeare was buried elsewhere by the reflection that he in right of his pre-eminence merited a tomb apart from all his fellows. With a glance at Shakespeare's distant grave in the chancel of Stratford-on-Avon church, the writer ex claimed :
' Under this carved marble of thine own Sleep, brave tragedian, Shakespeare, sleep alone."1
This fine sentiment found many a splendid echo. It resounded in Ben Jonson's noble lines prefixed to the
338 SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER.
First Folio of 1623. 'To the memory of my beloved, the author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us.'
' My Shakespeare, rise ! I will not lodge thee by Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie A little further to make thee a room. Thou art a monument without a tomb, And art alive still, while thy book doth live And we have wits to read and praise to give.'
Milton qualified the conceit a few years later, in 1630, when he declared that Shakespeare ' sepulchred ' in ' the monument ' of his writings,
' in such pomp doth lie, That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.'
Never was a glorious immortality foretold for any man with more impressive confidence than it was fore- Prophecy told for Shakespeare at his death by his circle ofimmor- of adorers. When Time, one elegist said, tolity' should dissolve his 'Stratford monument,'
the laurel about Shakespeare's brow would wear its greenest hue. Shakespeare's critical friend, Ben Jonson, was but one of a numerous band who imagined the 'sweet swan of Avon,' 'the star of poets,' shining for ever as a constellation in the firmament. Ben Jonson did not stand alone in anticipating that his fame would always shed a golden light on his native place of Strat ford and the river Avon which ran beside it. Such was the invariable temper in which literary men gave vent to their grief on learning the death of the 'beloved author,' 'the famous scenicke poet,' 'the admirable dramaticke poet,' ' that famous writer and actor,' ' worthy master William Shakespeare ' of Stratford-on-Avon.
SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER. 339
When Shakespeare died, on the 23rd April 1616, many men and women were alive who had come into personal association with him, and
there were many more who had heard of . j.°. , . ,. ., t_ i j , -i,. tradition,
mm from those who had spoken with him.
Apart from his numerous kinsfolk, his widow, sister, brother, daughters, nephews, and neighbours at Stratford- on-Avon, there were in London a large society of fellow-authors and fellow-actors with whom he lived in close communion. In London, where Shakespeare's work was mainly done, and his fortune and reputation achieved, he lived with none in more intimate social relations than with the leading members of his own prosperous company of actors, which, under the patron age of the king, produced his greatest plays. It is to be borne in mind that to the disinterested admiration for his genius of two fellow-members of Shakespeare's company we chiefly owe the preservation and publication of the greater part of his literary work in the First Folio, that volume which first offered the world a full record of his achievement, and is the greatest of England's literary treasures. Those actor-editors of his dramas, Heming and Condell, acknowledged plainly and sin cerely the personal fascination that c so worthy a friend and fellow as was our Shakespeare' had exerted on them. All his fellow-workers cherished an affectionate pride in the intimacy. It was they who were the parents of the greater part of the surviving oral tradition con cerning Shakespeare — a tradition which combines with the extant documentary evidence to make Shakespeare's
340 SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER.
biography as unassailable as any narrative known to history.
Some links in the chain of Shakespeare's career are still missing, and we must wait for the future to disclose The them. But though the clues at present are
certainty in some places faint, the trail never altogether of our eludes the patient investigator. The ascer-
knowledge. tajne(j facts are already numerous enough to define beyond risk of intelligent doubt the direction that Shakespeare's career followed. Its general outline is fully established by a continuous and unimpeachable chain of oral tradition, which survives from the seven teenth century, and by documentary evidence — far more documentary evidence — than exists in the case of Shakespeare's great literary contemporaries. How many- distinguished Elizabethan and Jacobean authors have shared the fate of John Webster, next to Shakespeare the most eminent tragic dramatist of the era, of whom no positive biographic fact survives ?
It may be justifiable to cherish regret for the loss of Shakespeare's autograph papers, and of his familiar The correspondence. Only five signatures of
absence of Shakespeare survive, and no other fragments his manu- of his handwriting have been discovered, scripts. Other reputed autographs of Shakespeare have been found in books of his time, but none has quite established its authenticity. Yet the absence of autograph material can excite scepticism of the received tradition only in those who are ignorant of Elizabethan literary history — who are ignorant of the fate that in variably befell the original manuscripts and correspond ence of Elizabethan and Jacobean poets and dramatists. Save for a few fragments of small literary moment, no
SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER. 341
play of the era in its writer's autograph escaped early destruction by fire or dustbin. No machinery then ensured, no custom then encouraged, the due preserva tion of the autographs of men distinguished for poetic genius. The amateur's passion for autograph collecting is of far later date. Provision was made in the public record offices, or in private muniment-rooms of great country mansions, for the protection of the official papers and correspondence of men in public life, and of manu script memorials affecting the property and domestic history of great county families. But even in the case of men, in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, in official life who, as often happened, devoted their leisure to literature, autographs of their literary compositions have for the most part perished, and there usually only remain in the official depositories remnants of their writing about matters of official routine. Some docu ments signed by Edmund Spenser, while he was Secretary to the Lord Deputy of Ireland, or holding official positions in the Government of Ireland, survive, but where is the manuscript of Spenser'* poems — of his Shepheards Calender, or his great epic of the Faerie Queene ? Official papers signed by Sir Walter Ralegh, who filled a large place in English public life of the period, survive, but where is any fragment of the manu^ script of his voluminous History of the World ?
Not all the depositories of official and family papers in England, it is to be admitted, have yet been fully explored, and in some of them a more thorough search than has yet been undertaken may possibly throw new light on Shakespeare's biography or work. Meanwhile, instead of mourning helplessly over the lack of material for a knowledge of Shakespeare's life, it becomes us to
^342 SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER.
estimate aright what we have at our command, to study it closely in the light of the literary history of the epoch, and, while neglecting no opportunity of bettering our information, to recognise frankly the activity of the destroying agencies that have been at work from the outset. Then we shall wonder, not why we know so little, but why we know so much.
VIII
FOREIGN INFLUENCES ON SHAKESPEARE
' . . . All the learnings that his time Could make him the receiver of, ... he took, As we do air, fast as 'twas minister'd, And in 's spring became a harvest.'
Cymbeline, I. i. 43-46.
' His learning savours not the school-like gloss That most consists in echoing words and terms . . . Nor any long or far-fetched circumstance — Wrapt in the curious generalties of arts — But a direct and analytic sum Of all the worth and first effects of art. And for his poesy, 'tis so rammed with life That it shall gather strength of life with being, And live hereafter more admired than now. '
BEN JONSON, Poetaster, v. i.
[BIBLIOGRAPHY — Study of foreign influences on Shake speare's work has not been treated exhaustively. M. Paul Stepper's Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity, 1880, covers satisfactorily a portion of the ground, and much that is use ful may be found in Shakespeare's Library, edited by J. P. Collier and W. C. Hazlitt, 1875, and Shakespeare's Plutarch, edited by Prof. Skeat, 1875. Mr. Churton Collins's Shake spearean Studies, 1904, and Mr. J. M. Robertson's Mon taigne and Shakespeare, 1897, throw light on portions of the topic, although all the conclusions reached cannot be fully accepted. Of the indebtedness of Elizabethan writers
344 FOREIGN INFLUENCES
to Italian and French poets, much has been collected by the present writer in his introduction to Elizabethan Sonnets (Messrs. Constable's 'An English Garner,' 2 vols., 1904).]
ART and letters of the supreme kind, we are warned by Goethe, know nothing of the petty restrictions of nation- Shake- ality. Shakespeare, the greatest poet of the speare's world, is claimed to be the property of the universal world. Some German writers have carried repute. tnjs argurnent further. They have treated Shakespeare as one of themselves, and the only com plaint that Germans have been known of late years to make of Shakespeare is that he had the inferior taste to be born an Englishman.
The interval between English and French literary sentiment is far wider than that between English and
German literary sentiment. It is therefore In France. ...-•*»
significant to note that France, too, regards
Shakespeare as an embodiment of that highest kind of power of the human intellect which gives a claim of kinship with him to every thinking man, no matter what his race or country. Victor Hugo recognised only three men as really memorable in the world's history ; Moses and Homer were two of them, Shakespeare was the third. The elder Dumas, the prince of romancers, gave even more pointed expression to his faith in Shake speare's pre-eminence in the' Pantheon, not of any single nation or era, but of the everlasting universe. Dumas set the English dramatist next to God in the cosmic system : ' After God, Shakespeare has created most.'
ON SHAKESPEARE. 345
In presence of so exalted an estimate there is some thing bathetic, something hardly magnanimous, in insist ing on the comparatively minor matter of fact shake- that Shakespeare was an Englishman, a kins- speare's man of the English-speaking peoples, born in patriotism, the sixteenth century in the heart of England, and enjoying experiences which were common to all con temporary Englishmen of the same station in life. Yet Shakespeare's identity with England — with the English- speaking race — is a circumstance that accurate scholar ship compels us to keep well before our minds. It is a circumstance which Shakespeare himself presses on our notice in his works. Shakespeare was not superior to the ordinary, natural, healthy, instinct of patriotism. English history he studied in a patriotic light, even if it be admitted that his patriotism was a well-regulated sentiment which sought the truth. In his English History plays he made contributions to a national epic. His Histories are detached books of an English Iliad. They are no blind heroic glorifications of the nation; Shakespeare's kings are more remarkable for their fail ings than their virtues. But Shakespeare pays repeated homage to his own country, to the proud independence which its geographical position emphasised, to the duty laid by nature on its inhabitants of mastering the seas that encompass it :
' England bound in with the triumphant sea, Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege Of wat'ry Neptune.'
The significance of the sea for Englishmen was recog nised by Shakespeare as fully as by any English writer. His lines glow with exceptional thrill when he writes of
346 FOREIGN INFLUENCES
' The natural bravery of the isle, which stands As Neptune's park, ribbed and belted in With rocks unscaleable, and roaring waters.'
None but an Englishman could have apostrophised England as —
' This precious stone, set in a silver sea, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England. '
Shakespeare's great contemporary, Bacon, bequeathed by will his name and memory to men's charitable
speeches, and to foreign nations, and the His next- c,, i j
of-kin n ages- Shakespeare made no testamen
tary dispositions of his name and memory, and by default his name and memory become the herit age of the English-speaking peoples, his next-of-kin.
But the depth of Shakespeare's interest in his country and her fortunes, his instinctive identification of himself Foreign w^ England and Englishmen, is a fact of influence secondary importance in any fruitful diagnosis on Eliza- of his genius or work. Neither Elizabethan bethan literature nor his spacious contribution to it lre' came to birth in insular isolation ; they form part of the European literature of the Renaissance.
Full of suggestiveness are the facts that Shakespeare was born in the year of Michael Angelo's death and of Galileo's birth, and that he died in the same year as Cervantes. He was sharer of the enlightenment of the great era which saw the new birth of the human intellect in all countries of Western Europe.
ON SHAKESPEARE. 347
No student will dispute the proposition that Eliza bethan England was steeped in foreign influences. Elizabethan literature abounded in translations from Greek, Latin, Italian, French, and Spanish, in adapta tions of every manner of foreign literary effort. The spirit and substance of foreign literature were among the elements of which Elizabethan literature was com pounded. Literary forms which were imported from abroad, like the sonnet and blank verse, became in digenous to Elizabethan England. The Elizabethan drama, the greatest literary product of the Elizabethan epoch, was built largely upon classical foundations, and its plots were framed on stories invented by the novelists of the Italian Renaissance. Shakespeare described an Elizabethan gallant or man of fashion as buying 'his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany, and his behaviour everywhere.' The remark might easily be applied figuratively to the habili ments — to the characteristics — of Elizabethan literature. The dress and fashion of Elizabethan literature were more often than not Continental importations.
The freedom with which the Elizabethans adapted contemporary poetry of France and Italy at times seems inconsistent with the dictates of literary Eliza- honesty. Many a poem, which was issued bethan in Elizabethan England as an original com- plagiarism, position, proves on investigation to be an ingenious translation from another tongue. The practice of un acknowledged borrowing went far beyond the limits which a high standard of literary morality justifies. Such action was tolerated to an extent to which no other great literary epoch seems to offer a parallel. The greatest of the Elizabethans did not disdain on occasion
348 FOREIGN INFLUENCES
to transfer secretly to their pages phrases and ideas drawn directly from foreign books. But it is unhistorical to exaggerate the significance of these foreign loans, whether secret or acknowledged. The national spirit was strong enough in Elizabethan England to maintain the individuality of its literature in the broad current. Despite the eager welcome which was extended to foreign literary forms and topics, despite the easy toler ance of plagiarism, the foreign influences, so far from suppressing native characteristics, ultimately invigorated, fertilised, and chastened them.
in
Shakespeare's power of imagination was as fertile as that of any man known to history, but he had another Shake- power which is rarely absent from great speare's poets, the power of absorbing or assimilating assimila- the fruits of reading. Spenser, Milton, Burns, tive power. KeatSj an(j Tennyson had the like power, but probably none had it in quite the same degree as Shakespeare. In his case, as in the case of the other poets, this power of assimilation strengthened, rendered more robust, the productive power of his imagination. This assimilating power is as well worth minute study and careful definition as any other of Shakespeare's characteristics.
The investigation requires in the investigator a wide literary knowledge and a finely balanced judgment. Short-sighted critics, misapprehending the significance of his career, have sometimes credited Shakespeare with exceptional ignorance, even illiteracy. They have
ON SHAKESPEARE. 349
oracularly declared him to be a natural genius, owing nothing to the learning and literature that came before him, or were contemporary with him. That view is con tradicted point-blank by the external facts of his edu cation, and the internal facts of his work. A more modern type of critic has gone to the opposite extreme, and has credited Shakespeare with all the learning of an ideal professor of literature. This notion is as illusory as the other, and probably it has worked more mischief. This notion has led to the foolish belief that the facts of Shakespeare's career are inconsistent with the facts of his achievement. It is a point of view that has been accepted without serious testing by those half-informed persons who argue that the plays of Shakespeare must have come from the pen of one far more highly educated than we know Shakespeare to have been.
The two views of Shakespeare's equipment of learning were put very epigram matically by critics writing a century and a half ago. One then said ' the man who doubts the learning of Shakespeare has none of his own ; ' the other critic asserted that ' he who allows Shakespeare had learning ought to be looked upon as a detractor from the glory of Great Britain.'
Each of these apophthegms contains a sparse grain of truth. The whole truth lies between the two. Shake speare was obviously no scholar, but he was widely read in the literature that was at the disposal of cultivated men of his day. All that he read passed quickly into his mind, but did not long retain there the precise original form. It was at once assimilated, digested, transmuted by his always dominant imagination, and, when it came forth again in a recognisable shape, it bore, except in the rarest instances, the stamp of
350 FOREIGN INFLUENCES
his great individuality, rather than the stamp of its source.
Shakespeare's mind may best be likened to a highly sensitised photographic plate, which need only be ex- The instan- Posed for the hundredth part of a second to taneous anything in life or literature, in order to power of receive upon its surface the firm outline of a perception. picture which could be developed and repro duced at will. If Shakespeare's mind for the hundredth part of a second came in contact in an alehouse with a burly good-humoured toper, the conception of a FalstafT found instantaneous admission to his brain. The char acter had revealed itself to him in most of its involu tions, as quickly as his eye caught sight of its external form, and his ear caught the sound of the voice. Books offered Shakespeare the same opportunity of realising human life and experience. A hurried perusal of an Italian story of a Jew in Venice conveyed to him the mental picture of Shylock, with all his racial tempera ment in energetic action, and all the background of Venetian scenery and society accurately defined. A few hours spent over Plutarch's Lives brought into being in Shakespeare's brain the true aspects of Roman character and Roman aspiration. Whencesoever the external im pressions came, whether from the world of books or the world of living men, the same mental process was at work, the same visualising instinct which made the thing, which he saw or read of, a living and a lasting reality.
IV
In any estimate of the extent of foreign influence on Shakespeare's work, it is well at the outset to realise the
ON SHAKESPEARE. 351
opportunities of acquaintance with foreign literatures that were opened to him in early life. A great man's education or mental training is not a process that stops with his school or his college days; it is in progress throughout his life. But youthful education usually suggests the lines along which future intellectual de velopment may proceed.
At the grammar school at Stratford-on-Avon, where Shakespeare may be reasonably presumed to have spent seven years of boyhood, a sound training in Early in- the elements of classical learning was at the struction disposal of all comers. The general instruc- in Latin, tion was mainly confined to the Latin language and literature. From the Latin accidence, boys of the period, at schools of the type of that at Stratford, were led, through Latin conversation books, — books of Latin phrases to be used in conversation, like the Sententiae Pueriles and Lily's Grammar, — to the perusal of such authors as Seneca, Terence, Cicero, Virgil, Plautus, Ovid, and Horace. Nor was modern Latin literature altogether overlooked. The Latin eclogues of a popular Renaissance poet of Italy, Baptista Mantuanus — 'the good old Mantuan ' Shakespeare familiarly calls him — were often preferred to Virgil's for youthful students. Latin was the warp and woof of every Elizabethan grammar school curriculum.
The rudiments of Greek were occasionally taught in Elizabethan grammar schools to very promising pupils ; but it is doubtful if Greek were accessible to Apparent Stratford schoolboys. It is unlikely that ignorance Shakespeare knew anything of Greek at first of Greek hand. Curious verbal coincidences have Ian8uage- been detected between sentences in the great Greek
352 FOREIGN INFLUENCES
plays and in Shakespearean drama. Striking these often are. In the Electro, of Sophocles, which is akin in its leading motive to Hamlet^ the chorus consoles Electra for the supposed death of Orestes with the same expres sions of sympathy as those with which Hamlet's mother and uncle seek to console him on the loss of his father : —
' Remember Electra, your father whence you sprang is mortal, wherefore grieve not much, for by all of us has this debt of suffer ing to be paid.'
In Hamlet are the familiar sentences —
' Thou know'st 'tis common ; all that live must die ; But, you must know, your father lost a father ; That father lost, lost his ... but to persever In obstinate condolement is a course Of impious stubbornness.'
Shakespeare's ' prophetic soul,' which is found both in Hamlet and in the Sonnets^ is matched by the Tr/jo/Aavris dv/jios of Euripides's Andromache (1075). Hamlet's ' sea of troubles ' exactly translates the KCXKWV ireAayos of Accidental ^Eschylus's Persae (442). Such parallels coinci- could be easily extended. But none com- dences. pe]s us to admit textual knowledge of ^Eschylus or Sophocles or Euripides on Shakespeare's part. They barely do more than suggest the community of sentiment that binds all great thinkers together.
Something of the Greek spirit lived in Latin, French, Italian, and English translations and adaptations of the masterpieces of Greek literature. Shakespeare gained some conception of the main features of Greek .;'; literature through those conduits. At least one epi- \
ON SHAKESPEARE. 353
gram of the Greek anthology he turned through a Latin version into a sonnet. But there was no likeli hood that he sought at first hand in Greek poetry for gnomic reflections on the commonest vicissitudes of human life. Poets, who write quite independently of one another, often clothe such reflections in almost identical phrase. When we find a universal sentiment common to Shakespeare and a foreign author, it is illogical to infer that the sentiment has come to : Shake speare from that foreign author, unless we can establish two most important propositions. First, external fact must render such a transference probable or possible. There must be reasonable ground for the belief that the alleged borrower had direct access to the work from which he is supposed to borrow. Secondly, either the verbal similarity or the peculiar distinctness of the sentiment must be such as to render it easier to .believe that the utterance has been directly borrowed than that it has arisen independently in two separate minds. ^
In.the case of the Greek parallels of phrase it is easier to believe that the expressions reached Shakespeare in dependently—by virtue of the independent working of the intuitive faculty-than that he directly borrowed them of their Greek prototypes. Most of the paral lelisms of thought and phrase between Shakespearean and the Attic drama are probably fortuitous, are acci dental proofs of consanguinity of spirit rather than evidences of Shakespeare's study of Greek.
But although the Greek language is to be placed out side Shakespeare's scope at school and in later life, we may safely defy the opinion of Dr. Farmer, the < bridge scholar of the eighteenth century, who enun ciated in his famous Essay on Shakespeare's Learning 12
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the theory that Shakespeare knew no tongue but his own, and owed whatever knowledge he displayed of the Knowledge classics and of Italian and French literature of French to English translations. English translations and of foreign literature undoubtedly abounded
Italian. jn Elizabethan literature. But Shakespeare was not wholly dependent on them. Several of the books in French or Italian, whence Shakespeare derived the plots of his dramas, were not in Elizabethan days rendered into English. Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques is the source of Hamlet's history. In Ser Giovanni's Italian collection of stories, called // Pecorone, alone may be found the full story of the Merchant of Venice. Cinthio's Hecatommithi alone supplies the tale of Othello. None of these foreign books were accessible in English translations when Shakespeare wrote. On more general grounds the theory of his ignorance is adequately con futed. A boy with Shakespeare's exceptional alertness of intellect, during whose school days a training in Latin classics lay within reach, would scarcely lack in future years the means of access to the literature of France and Italy which were written in cognate languages.
With Latin and French and with the Latin poets of the school curriculum, Shakespeare in his early writings Latin and openly and unmistakably acknowledged his French acquaintance. In Henry V. the dialogue in quotations, many scenes is carried on in French which is grammatically accurate if not idiomatic. In the mouth of his schoolmasters, Holofernes in Lovers Labour's Lost and Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare placed Latin phrases drawn directly from Lily's popular school grammar, and from the Sententiae Pueriles, the conversation book used by boys at school.
ON SHAKESPEARE. 355
The influence of a popular school author, the voluminous Latin poet Ovid, was especially apparent throughout his earliest literary work, both poetic and dramatic. Ovid's Metamorphoses was peculiarly familiar to him. Hints drawn directly from it are discernible in all his early poems and plays as well as in The Tempest, his latest play (v. i. 33 sef.). Ovid's Latin, which was ac cessible to Shakespeare since his school days, never faded altogether from his memory.
We have, however, to emphasise at every turn the obvious fact that Shakespeare was no finished scholar and no expert in any language but his own. L^ Of He makes, in classical subjects, those mis- scholar- takes which are impossible in a scholar. sh>P- Homer's 'YTre/otW, a name of the sun, which Ovid ex actly reproduces as Hyperion, figures in Shakespeare's pages (and indeed in those of many of his more learned contemporaries) as Hyperion — ' Hyperion to a satyr ' — with every one of the four syllables wrongly measured. The wholesale error in quantity is patent to any classical scholar, and Keats's submissive repetition of it is clear evidence that, despite his intuitive grasp of the classical spirit, he had no linguistic knowledge of Greek. Again, Shakespeare's closest adaptations of Ovid's Meta morphoses, despite his knowledge of Latin, reflect the tautological phraseology of the popular English version by Arthur Golding, of which seven editions were issued in Shakespeare's lifetime. From Plautus, Shakespeare drew the plot of The Comedy of Errors, but there is reason to believe that Shakespeare consulted an English version as well as the original text. Like many later students of Latin, he did not disdain the use of trans lations when they weie ready to his hand. Shakespeare's
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lack of exact scholarship explains the ' small Latin and less Greek ' with which he was credited by his scholarly friend Ben Jonson. But the report of his early biog rapher, Aubrey, 'that Shakespeare understood Latin pretty well,' need not be contested. His knowledge of French in early life may be estimated to have equalled his knowledge of Latin, while he probably had quite sufficient acquaintance with Italian to enable him to discern the drift of any Italian poem or novel that reached his hand.
There is no evidence that Shakespeare was a widely travelled man. It is improbable that he completed his Shake- earty education in a foreign tour, and that speare no he came under foreign literary influences at traveller their fountain-heads, in the places of their abroad. origin. Young Elizabethans of rank com monly made a foreign tour before completing their edu cation, but Shakespeare was not a young man of rank. It was indeed no uncommon experience for men of the humbler classes to work off some of the exuberance of youth by 'trailing a pike' in foreign lands, serving as volunteers with foreign armies. From the neighbour hood of Stratford itself when Shakespeare was just of age many youths of his own years crossed to the Low Countries. « They went to Holland to fight the Spaniards under the command of the great Lord of Warwickshire, the owner of Kenilworth, the Queen's favourite, the Earl of Leicester. A book was once written to show that one of these adventurous volunteers, who bore the name of Will Shakespeare, was Shakespeare himself, but
ON SHAKESPEARE. 357
the identification is a mistake. William Shakespeare, the Earl of Leicester's soldier, came from a village in the neighbourhood of Stratford where the name was com mon. He was not the dramatist.
Some have argued that in his professional capacity of actor Shakespeare went abroad. English actors in Shakespeare's day occasionally combined to make pro fessional tours through foreign lands where court society invariably gave them a hospitable reception. In Den mark, Germany, Austria, Holland, and France, many dramatic performances were given before royal audiences by English actors throughout Shakespeare's active career. But it is improbable that Shakespeare joined any of these expeditions. Actors of small account at home mainly took part in them, and Shakespeare quickly filled a leading place in the theatrical profession. Lists of those Englishmen who paid professional visits abroad are ex tant, and Shakespeare's name occurs in none of them.
It seems unlikely that Shakespeare ever set foot on the Continent of Europe in either a private views of or professional capacity. He doubtless would foreign have set foot there if he could have done so, travel, but the opportunity did not offer. He knew the dangers of insular prejudice : —
' Hath Britain all the sun that shines ? Day, night, Are they not but in Britain ? . . . prithee, think There's livers out of Britain.'
He acknowledged the educational value of foreign travel when rightly indulged in. He points out in one of his earliest plays how wise fathers
' Put forth their sons, to seek preferment out, Some to the wars to try their fortune there ;
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Some to discover islands far away ;
Some to the studious universities [on the Continent] ; '
how the man who spent all his time at home was at a disadvantage
' In having known no travaile in his youth.'
' A perfect man ' was one who was ' tried and tutored in the world ' outside his native country.
' Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits.'
Some touch of a counsel of perfection may be latent in these passages. Elsewhere Shakespeare betrayed the stay-at-home's impatience of immoderate enthusiasm for foreign sights and customs. He denounced with severity the uncontrolled passion for travel. He scorned the travelled Englishman's affectations, his laudation of foreign manners, his exaggerated admiration of foreign products as compared with home-products : —
' Farewell, monsieur traveller,' says Rosalind to the melancholy Jaques. ' Look you lisp and wear strange suits and disable all the benefits of your own country, and be out of love with your nativity, and almost chide God for making you that countenance you are, or I will scarce think you have swam in a gondola.'
But many who reject theories of Shakespeare's visits to France or Germany or Flanders are unwilling to forgo Imagina- the conjecture that Shakespeare had been tive affinity in Italy. To Italy — especially to cities of with Italy. Northern Italy, like Venice, Padua, Verona, Mantua, and Milan — Shakespeare makes frequent and familiar reference, and he supplies many a realistic por trayal of Italian life and sentiment. But the fact that
ON SHAKESPEARE. 359
he represents Valentine in The Two Gentlemen (i. i. 71) as travelling from Verona to Milan (both inland cities) by sea, and the fact that Prospero in The Tempest em barks in a ship at the gates of Milan (i. ii. 129-144) renders it almost impossible that he could have gathered his knowledge of Northern Italy from personal observa tion. Shakespeare doubtless owed all his knowledge of Italy to the verbal reports of travelled friends and to Italian books, the contents of which he had a rare power of assimilating and vitalising. The glowing light which his quick imagination shed on Italian scenes lacked the literal precision and detailed accuracy with which first hand exploration must have endowed it.
VI
The only safe source of information about Shake speare's actual knowledge in his adult years either of the world of literature or of the world of men internai is his extant written work. It is a more evidences satisfying source than any conjectures of his of foreign personal experiences. What are the general influence. tracts of foreign knowledge, what are the spheres of foreign influence with which Shakespeare's work — his plays and poems — prove him to have been familiar? It is quite permissible to reply to such questions with out further detailed consideration of the precise avenues through which those tracts of knowledge were in Shake speare's day approachable. With how many of the topics or conceptions of great foreign literature does the internal evidence of his work show him to have been acquainted ?
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Firstly, it is obvious that the tales and personages of classical mythology — the subject-matter of classical References Poetry — were among his household words, to the words. When the second servant in The
Greek Taming of the Shrew asks the drunken Kit
mythology, sly :— ' Dost thou love pictures?' Shake speare conjures up stories of classical folk-lore with such fluent ease as to imply complete familiarity with most of the conventional themes of classical poetry. ' Dost thou love pictures ? ' says the servant. He answers his own question thus : —
' Then we will fetch thee straight Adonis painted by a running brook, And Cytherea all in sedges hid,
Lord. We'll show thee lo as she was a maid,
yd Serv. Or Daphne roaming through a thorny wood,
Scratching her legs that one shall swear she bleeds, And at that sight shall sad Apollo weep.'
All that it was of value for Shakespeare to know of Adonis, Cytherea, lo, Daphne, Apollo, flowed in the current of his thought. Without knowledge of Greek he assimilated the pellucid fancy and imagery that played "about Greek verse. The Greek language was unknown to him. But he comprehended the artistic significance of Greek mythology, of which Greek poetry was woven, as effectively as the learned poets of the Italian and French Renaissance.
So, too, with the general trend and leading episodes of Greek history. Greek tradition, both in mythical and in historic times, was as open a book to him as Greek poetic mythology. He had not studied Greek
ON SHAKESPEARE. 361
history in the spirit of an historical scholar. Troilus and Cressida indicates no critical study of the authorities for the Trojan War, but the play leaves no doubt Mythical of Shakespeare's intuitive grasp of the lead- history of ing features and details of the whole story of Greece. Troy as it was known to his contemporaries. In Athens — the capital city of Greece, the main home of Greek culture — he places the scene of more than one of his plays. The names of Greek heroes from Agamemnon, Ulysses, Nestor, and Theseus, to Alcibiades and Pericles, figure in his dramatis persona. The names are often so employed as to suggest little or nothing of the true historic significance attaching to them, but their presence links Shakespeare with the interest in Greek achieve ment which was a corner-stone of the Renaissance. The use to which he put Greek nomenclature is an involuntary act of homage to 'the glory that was Greece.'
' The grandeur that was Rome ' made, however, more abundant appeal to Shakespeare. The history of Rome in its great outlines and its great episodes clearly fascinated him as deeply as it fasci- nated any of the leaders of the Renaissance. The subject in one shape or another was always inviting his thought and pen. His chief narrative poem Lucrece — one of his first efforts in literature — treats with exuberant eagerness of a legend of an early period in Roman history — of regal Rome. When Shakespeare's dramatic powers were at their maturity he sought with concentrated strength and insight dramatic material in the history of Rome at her zenith, as it was revealed in the pages of the Greek biographer Plutarch. No lover of Shakespeare would complain if the final judgment to
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be pronounced on his work were based on his three Roman tragedies : the austere Coriolanus, with its single but unflaggingly sustained dramatic interest, the scene of which is laid in the early days of the Roman Republic; the tragedy oi Julius Ccesar, a penetrating political study of the latest phase of the Roman Republic, and the tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra, a magical presentment and interpretation of an episode in the early history of the Roman Empire. To Shakespeare's mind, any survey of human endeavour, from which was excluded the experience of Rome with her 'conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils,' would have ' shrunk to little measure.' Of Shakespeare's acquaintance with the literature of Rome as represented by Ovid, the proofs are too numer ous and familiar to need rehearsal. But there are more recondite signs that he had come under the spell of the greatest of Latin poems, the sEneid of that poet Virgil, to whom he was likened in his epitaph. 'One speech in it I chiefly loved,' said Hamlet : ' 'twas Eneas' tale to Dido ; and thereabout of it especially, where he speaks of Priam's slaughter.' Shakespeare recalls the same Virgilian story in his beautiful and tender lines : —
' In such a night
Stood Dido with a willow in her hand Upon the wild sea banks, and waft her love To come again to Carthage. '
Not Roman poetry only, but also Roman drama, fell within the scope of Shakespeare's observation. The humours of Plautus are reproduced with much fidelity in The Comedy of Errors.
If we leave classical history and literature for the foreign literatures that were more nearly contemporary
ON SHAKESPEARE. 363
with Shakespeare, evidence of devotion to one of the greatest and most prolonged series of foreign literary efforts crowds upon us. With Italy— the Italy Italian his- of the Renaissance — his writings show him tory and to have been in full sympathy through the literature, whole range of his career. The name of every city of modern Italy which had contributed anything to the enlightenment of modern Europe finds repeated mention in his plays. Florence and Padua, Milan and Mantua, Venice and Verona are the most familiar scenes of Shakespearean drama. To many Italian cities or dis tricts definite characteristics that are perfectly accurate are allotted. Padua, with its famous university, is called the nursery of the arts ; Pisa is renowned for the gravity of its citizens ; Lombardy is the pleasant garden of great Italy. The mystery of Venetian waterways ex cited Shakespeare's curiosity. The Italian word 'tra- ghetto/ which is reserved in Venice for the anchorage of gondolas, Shakespeare transferred to his pages under the slightly disguised and unique form of ' traject.'
In the early period of his career Shakespeare's disciple- ship to Italian influences was perhaps most conspicuous. In his first great experiment in tragedy, his Romeo and Juliet, he handled a story wholly of Italian origin and identified himself with the theme with a completeness that admits no doubt of his affinity with Italian feeling. That was the earliest of his plays in which he proved himself the possessor of a poetic and dramatic instinct of unprecedented quality. But Italian influences and signs of sympathy with the spirit of Italy mark every stage of his work. They dominate the main plot of the maturest of his comedies, Mi4ch Ado about Nothing;
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they colour one of his latest works, his serious romantic play of Cymbelinc.
The Italian novel is one of the most characteristic forms of Italian literature, and the Italian novel con stituted the main field whence Shakespeare
e I a 1 derived his plots. Apart from Love's Laboitr's Lost and A Midsummer Nighfs Dream, the plots of which, while compounded of many borrowed simples, are largely of Shakespeare's own invention, apart, too, from The Comedy of Errors, which was adapted from Plautus, there is no comedy by Shake speare of which the fable does not owe something to an Italian novel. The story of All's Well that End's Well, and the Imogen story of Cymbeline, are of the invention of Boccaccio — of Boccaccio the master-genius of the Italian novelists. Much Ado about Nothing and Tivelfth Night come from Bandello, the chief of Boccaccio's disciples, and Measure for Measure is from Cinthio, a later disciple of Boccaccio, almost Shakespeare's con temporary. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, although based on a Spanish pastoral romance, derives hints from the Italian of both Bandello and Cinthio.
How far Shakespeare had direct recourse to Boccaccio, Bandello, and Cinthio is an open question. The chief Means of Italian novels were diffused in translations access to and adaptations throughout Europe. The the Italian WOrk of Bandello, who enjoyed, of all Italian novel. novelists, the highest popularity in the six
teenth century, was constantly reappearing in Italian, French, and English shapes, which rendered easy the study of his tales in the absence of access to the original version. Shakespeare readily identified himself with the most popular literary currents of his epoch, and
ON SHAKESPEARE. 365
worked with zest on Bandello's most widely disseminated stories. Before he wrote Much Ado about Nothing, the story by Bandello, which it embodies, had experienced at least four adaptations; it had been translated into French ; it had been retold in Italian by Ariosto in his epic of Orlando Furioso ; it had been dramatised in English by one student of Ariosto, and had been trans lated into English out of the great Italian poet by another (Sir John Harington). Similarly, Bandello's tale, which gave Shakespeare his cue for Twelfth Night, had first been rendered into French ; it was then trans lated from French into English; it was afterwards adapted anew in English prose from the Italian ; it was dramatised in Italian by three dramatists independently, and two of these Italian dramas had been translated into French. Shakespeare's play of Twelfth Night was at least the ninth version which Bandello's fable had under gone.
There are two plays of Shakespeare which compel us in the present state of our knowledge to the conclusion that Shakespeare had recourse to the Italian ot&el/o&nd itself. The story of Othello as far as we Merchant know was solely accessible to him in the °f Venice. Italian novel of Cinthio. Many of Cinthio's stories had been translated into English; many more had been translated into French, but there is no rendering into either French or English of Othello's tragical history. Again in the Merchant of Venice we trace the direct influence of // Pecorone, a fourteenth-century collection of Italian novels by Ser Giovanni Fiorentino ; that col lection remained unpublished till 1558, and was in Shakespeare's day alone to be found in the Italian original. The bare story of the Jew and the pound of
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flesh was very generally accessible. But it is only in Shakespeare's play and in // Pecoronc that the defaulting Christian debtor, whose pound of flesh is demanded by his Jewish creditor, is rescued through the advocacy of ' The Lady of Belmont,' wife of the Christian debtor's friend. The management of the plot in the Italian novel is indeed more closely followed by Shakespeare than was his ordinary habit.
The Italian fable, it is to be admitted, merely formed as a rule the basis of his structure. Having surveyed all Shake- ^ts possibilities, he altered and transmuted the speare's story with the utmost freedom as his artistic radical spirit moved him. His changes bear weighty methods of testimony to the greatness of his conceptions alteration. Qf both Ufe and literature In Measure for
Measure, by diverting the course of an Italian novel at a critical point he not merely showed his artistic ingenuity but gave dramatic dignity and unusual elevation to a degraded and repellent theme. Again, in Othello^ the tragic purpose is planned by him anew. The scales never fall from Othello's eyes in the Italian novel. He dies in the belief that his wife is guilty. Shakespeare's catastrophe is invested with new and fearful intensity by making lago's cruel treachery known to Othello at the last, after lago's perfidy has compelled the noble-hearted Moor in his groundless jealousy to murder his gentle and innocent wife Desdemona. Too late Othello sees in Shakespeare's tragedy that he is the dupe of lago and that his wife is guiltless. But, despite the magni ficent freedom with which Shakespeare often handled the Italian novel, it is to the suggestion of that form of Italian literary art that his dramatic achievements owe a profound and extended debt.
ON SHAKESPEARE. 367
Not that in the field of Italian literature, Shakespeare's debt was wholly confined to the novel. Italian lyric poetry left its impress on the most inspiring of Shakespeare's lyric flights. Every son- netteer of Western Europe acknowledged Petrarch (of the fourteenth century) to be his master, and from. Petrarchan inspiration came the form and much of the spirit of Shakespeare's sonnets. Petrarch's ambition to exalt in the sonnet the ideal type of beauty, and to glorify ethereal sentiment, is the final cause of Shake speare's contributions to sonnet-literature. At first hand Shakespeare may have known little or even noth ing of the Italian's poetry which he once described with a touch of scorn as ' the numbers that Petrarch flowed in.' But English and French contemporary adaptations of Petrarch's ideas and phrases were abundant enough to relieve Shakespeare of the necessity of personal recourse to the original text while the Petrarchan in fluence was ensnaring him. The cultured air of Eliza bethan England was charged with Petrarchan conceits and imagery. Critics may differ as to the precise texture or dimensions of the bonds which unite the two poets, but they cannot question their existence.
Nor was Shakespeare wholly ignorant of another mode in which Italian imaginative power manifested itself. He was not wholly ignorant of Italian Italian art. In The Winter's Tale he speaks of a contemporary Italian artist, Giulio Romano, with singular enthusiasm. He describes the supposed statue of Hermione as ' performed by that rare Italian master, Giulio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly is he her ape.' No loftier praise
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could be bestowed on a worker in the plastic arts. Giulio Romano is better known as a painter than a sculptor, but sculpture occupied him as well as painting in early life, and although Michael Angelo's name might perhaps have been more appropriate and obvious, Shake speare was guilty of no inaccuracy in associating with Romano's name the surpassing qualities of Italian Renaissance sculpture.
VII
Of the great foreign authors who, outside Italy, were more or less contemporary with the Elizabethans, those
of France loom large in the Shakespearean France ° arena. No Elizabethan disdained the close
study of sixteenth-century literature of France. Elizabethan poetry finally ripened in the light of the lyric effort of Ronsard and his fellow-masters of the Ple'iade School. Ronsard and his friends, Du Bellay and De Bai'f, had shortly before Shakespeare's birth deliberately set themselves the task of refining their country's poetry by imitating in French the classical form aad spirit Their design met with rare success. They brought into being a mass of French verse which is comparable by virtue of its delicate imagery and simple harmonies with the best specimens of the Greek anthology. It was under the banner of the Pleiade chieftains and as translators of poems by one or other of their retainers, that Spenser and Daniel, Lodge and Chapman, set forth on their literary careers. Shake speare could not escape altogether from the toils of this active influence. It was Ronsard 's example which introduced into Elizabethan poetry the classical conceit,
ON SHAKESPEARE. 369
which Shakespeare turned to magnificent advantage in his sonnets, that the poet's verses are immortal and can alone give immortality to those whom he commemorates. Insistence on the futility of loveless beauty which lives for itself alone, adulation of a patron in terms of affec tion which are borrowed from the vocabulary of love, expressions of fear that a patron's favour may be alien ated by rival interests, were characteristic motives of the odes and sonnets of the Pleiade, and, though they came to France from Italy, they seem to have first caught Shakespeare's ear in their French guise.
When Shakespeare in his Sonnets (No. xliv.) reflects with vivid precision on the nimbleness of thought which
' can jump both sea and land As soon as think the place where he would be,'
he seems to repeat a note that the French sonnetteers constantly sounded without much individual variation. It is difficult to believe that Shakespeare's description of Thought's triumphs over space, and its power of leaping ' large lengths of miles,' did not directly echo Du Bellay's apostrophe to Tenser volage,' or the address of Du Bellay's disciple Amadis Jamyn to
' Penser, qui peux en un moment grand erre Courir leger tout 1'espace des cieux, Toute la terre, et les flots spacieux, Qui peux aussi penetrer sous la terre.' *
** Sonnets to Thought are especially abundant in the poetry of sixteenth-century France, though they are met with in Italy. The reader may be interested in comparing in detail Shakespeare's Sonnet xliv. with the two French sonnets to which reference is made in the text. The first sonnet runs :
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But Shakespeare's interest in French literature was not confined to the pleasant and placid art or the light ethereal philosophy of Ronsard's school. The burly
1 Penser volage, et leger comme vent,
Qui or' au ciel, or' en mer, or' en terre En un moment cours et recours grand' erre, Voire au seiour des ombres bien souvent.
En quelque part que voises t'eslevant Ou rabaissant, celle qui me fait guerre, Celle beaute tousiours deuant toy erre, Et tu la vas d'un leger pied suyvant.
Pourquoy suis tu (6 penser trop peu sage) Ce qui te nuit ? pourquoy vas-tu sans guide, Par ce chemin plain d'erreur variable ?
Si de parler au moins eusses 1'usage, Tu me rendrois de tant de peine vuide, Toy en repos et elle pitoyable. '
(Du BELLAY, Olive xliii.) The second sonnet runs :
' Penser, qui peux en vn moment grand erre Courir leger tout 1'espace des cieux, Toute la terre, et les floU spacieux, Qui peux aussi penetrer sous la terre :
Par toy souvent celle-la qui m'enferre De mille traits cuisans et furieux, Se represente au devant de mes yeux, Me menafant d'vne bien longue guerre
Que tu es vain, puis-que ie ne S9aurois T'accompagnant aller ou ie voudrois, Et discourir mes douleurs a ma Dame !
Las ! que n'as tu Ie parler comme moy, Pour lui center Ie feu de mon esmoy, Et lui ietter dessous Ie sein ma flame ? '
(AMADIS JAMYN, Sonnet xxi.)
Tasso's" sonnet (Venice 1583, ,i. p. 33) beginning : ' Come s'human pensier di giunger tenta Al luogo,' and Ronsard's sonnet {Amours, I. clxviii. ) beginning : ' Ce fol penser, pour s'envoler trop haut,' should also be studied in this connection.
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humorist Rabelais, who was older than Ronsard by a generation, and proved the strongest personality in the whole era of the French Renaissance, clearly Rabelais came within the limits of Shakespeare's cog- and nisance. The younger French writer, Mon- Montaigne, taigne, who was living during Shakespeare's first thirty- eight years of life, was no less familiar to the English dramatist as author of the least embarrassed and most suggestive reflections on human life which any auto biographical essayist has produced. From Montaigne, the typical child of the mature Renaissance in France, Shakespeare borrowed almost verbatim Gonzalo's de scription in The Tempest of an ideal socialistic common wealth.
VIII
This brief survey justifies the conclusion that an almost limitless tract of foreign literature lent light and heat to Shakespeare's intellect and imagina- Alertness in tion. He may not have come to close acquiring quarters with much of it. Little of it did he foreign investigate minutely. But he perceived and knowledge- absorbed its form and pressure at the lightning pace which his intuitive faculty alone could master. We may apply to him his own words in his description of the training of his hero Posthumus, in Cymbeline. He had at command —
' . . . All the learnings that his time Could make him the receiver of; which he took, As we do air, fast as 'twas ministered, And in's spring became a harvest.'
The world was Shakespeare's oyster which he with
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pen could open. The mere geographical aspect of his dramas proves his width of outlook beyond English The geo- boundaries. In no less than twenty-six plays graphical of the whole thirty-seven are we transported point of for a space to foreign towns. In A Mid- view> summer Night's Dream, in Timon of Athens,
Athens is our home, and so occasionally in Antony and Cleopatra. Ephesus was the scene of The Comedy of Errors and part of the play of Pericles. Messina, in Sicily, is presented in Much Ado about Nothing, as well as in Antony and Cleopatra, which also takes us to Alexandria, to a plain in Syria, and to Actium. Pericles introduces us to Antioch, Tarsus, Pentapolis, Mytilene, together with Ephesus ; Troilus and Cress ida to Troy ; and Othello to Cyprus. In no less than five plays the action passes in Rome. Not only is the ancient capital of the world the scene of the Roman plays Titus An- dronicus, Coriolanus, Julius Casar, and Antony and Cleopatra, but in Cymbeline much that is important te the plot is developed in the same surroundings. Of all the historic towns of Northern Italy can the like story be told. Hardly any European country is entirely omitted from Shakespeare's map of the world. The Winter's Tale takes us to Sicily and Bohemia ; Twelfth Night to an unnamed city in Illyria ; Hamlet to Elsinore in Denmark ; Measure for Measure to Vienna, and Love's Labour's Lost to Navarre.
Shakespeare's plays teach much of the geography of Europe. But none must place unchecked reliance on Geo- the geographical details which Shakespeare
graphical supplies. The want of exact scholarship blunders. which is characteristic of Shakespeare's atti tude to literary study is especially noticeable in his
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geographical assertions. He places a scene in The Winters Tale in Bohemia ' in a desert country near the sea.' Unluckily Bohemia has no seaboard. Shake speare's looseness of statement is common to him and at least one contemporary. In this description of his Bohemian scene, Shakespeare followed the English novelist, Robert Greene, from whom he borrowed the plot of A Winters Tale. A fantastic endeavour has been made to justify the error by showing that Apulia, a province on the sea-coast of Italy, was sometimes called Bohemia. The only just deduction to be drawn from Shakespeare's bestowal of a sea-coast on Bohemia is that he declined with unscholarly indifference to submit himself to bonds of mere literal fact.
Shakespeare's dramatic purpose was equally well served, whether his geographical information was correct or incorrect, and it was rarely that he attempted inde pendent verification. In his Roman plays he literally depended on North's popular translation of Plutarch's Lives. He was content to take North as his final authority, and wherever North erred Shakespeare erred with him. In matters of classical geography and topog raphy he consequently stumbled with great frequency, and quite impenitently. In Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare includes Lydia among the Queen of Egypt's provinces or possessions. Lydia is a district in Asia Minor with which Cleopatra never had relation. Plu tarch wrote quite correctly that the district of Lybia in North Africa was for a time under the Queen of Egypt's sway. Shakespeare fell blindly into the error, caused by a misprint or misreading, of which no scholar ac quainted with classical geography was likely to be guilty.
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Again, in Julius Ccesar, there are many errors of like kind due to like causes — to casual acts of carelessness on the part of the English translator, which Shakespeare adopted without scruple. Mark Antony in Shakespeare describes the gardens which Caesar bequeathed to the people of Rome as on this side of the Tiber — on the same side as the Forum — where the crowded streets and population left no room for gardens. Plutarch had correctly described the Tiber gardens as lying across the Tiber, on the opposite side to that where the Forum lay. A very simple mistake had been committed by North or his printers : ' on that side of the Tiber ' had been misread 'on this side.' But Shakespeare was oblivious of a confusion, which would be readily per ceived by one personally acquainted with Rome, or one who had studied Roman topography.
IX
But more interesting than the mere enumeration of details of Shakespeare's scenes or of the literature that he absorbed is it to consider in broad out- -j^e line how his knowledge of foreign literature foreign worked on his imagination, howfar itaffected spirit in his outlook on life. How far did Shakespeare Shakespeare, catch the distinctive characteristics of the inhabitants of foreign lands and cities who fill his stage? How much genuine foreign spirit did he breathe into the foreign names? Various answers have been given to this inquiry. There are schools of critics which deny to Shakespeare's foreign creations — to the Roman char acters of Julius Ccesar^ or to the Italian characters of
ON SHAKESPEARE. 375
Romeo and Juliet and Othello — any national or individual traits. All, we are told by some, are to the backbone Elizabethan Englishmen and Englishwomen. Others insist that they are universal types of human nature in which national idiosyncrasies have no definite place.
Neither verdict is satisfactory. No one disputes that Shakespeare handled the universal features of humanity, the traits common to all mankind. On the surface the highest manifestations of the great passions — ambition, jealousy, unrequited love — are the same throughout the world and have no peculiarly national colour. But to the seeing eye, men and women, when yielding to emo tions that are universal, take something from the bent of their education, and from the tone of the climate and scenery that environs them. The temperament of the untutored savage differs from that of the civilised man ; the predominating mood of northern peoples differs from that of southern peoples. Shakespeare was far too enlightened a student of human nature, whether he met men or women in life or literature, to ignore such facts as these. His study of foreign literature especially brought them home to him, and gave him opportunities of realising the distinctions in human character that are due to race or climate. Of this knowledge he took full advantage. Love-making is universal, but Shake speare recognised the diversities of amorous emotion and expression which race and climate engender. What contrast can be greater than the boisterous bluntness in which the English king, Henry v., gives expression to his love, and the pathetic ardour in which the young Italians Romeo and Ferdinand urge seM£yj|ty their suits ? Intu itively, perhaps involuntarily, Shakespeare with his unrivalled sureness of insight
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impregnated his characters with such salient features of their national idiosyncrasies as made them true to the environment that was appointed for them in the work of fiction or history on which he founded his drama. As the poet read old novels and old chronicles, his dramatic genius stirred in him a rare force of historic imagination and sensibility. Study developed in Shake speare an historic sense of a surer quality than that with which any professed historian has yet been gifted. Caesar and Brutus, of whom Shakespeare learned all he knew in the pages of Plutarch, are more alive in the drama of Julius Casar than in the pages of the historian Mommsen. Cleopatra is the historic queen of Egypt, and no living portrait of her is known outside Shake speare. No errors in detail destroy the historic vrai- semblance of Shakespeare's dramatic pictures.
The word ' atmosphere ' is hackneyed in the critical jargon of the day. Yet the term has graphic value. Fidelity Shakespeare apprehended the true environ-* to ' atmos- ment of the heroes and heroines to whom his phere.' reading of history or romance introduced him, because no writer had a keener, quicker sense of atmosphere than he. The comedies and tragedies, of which the scene is laid in Southern Europe, in Italy or Greece or Egypt, are all instinct with the hot passion, the gaiety, the quick jest, the crafty intrigue, which breathe the warm air, the brilliant sunshine, the deep shadows, the long days of Southern skies.
The great series of the English history plays, with the bourgeois supplement of The Merry Wives, is, like the dramas of British legend, Macbeth and King Lear and Cymbeline^ mainly confined to English or British scenery. Apart from them, only one Shakespearean play carries
ON SHAKESPEARE. 377
the reader to a northern clime, or touches northern his tory. The rest take him to the south and introduce him to southern lands. The one northern play is Hamlet, The introspective melancholy that infects not the hero only, but his uncle, and to a smaller extent his friend Horatio and his mother, is almost peculiar to them in the range of Shakespearean humanity ; it bears slender relation to Jaques's cynical weariness of the world, or to Richard ii.'s self-recriminatory sadness; it belongs to the type of mind which is reared in a land of mists and long nights, of leaden skies and cloud-darkened days. Such are the distinguishing features of the northern Danish climate. Shakespeare's historic sense would never have allowed him to give Hamlet a local habita tion in Naples or Messina, any more than it would have suffered him to represent Juliet or Othello as natives of Copenhagen or London.
Another point is worth remarking. Shakespeare took a very wide view of human history, and few of the condi tions that moulded human character escaped width of his notice. His historic insight taught him historic that civilisation progressed in various parts of outlook, the world at various rates. He could interpret human feeling and aspirations at any stage of development in the scale of civilisation. Under the spur of speculation, which was offered by the discovery of America, barbar ism interested him hardly less than civilisation. Caliban is one of his greatest conceptions. In Caliban he paints an imaginary portrait conceived with the utmost vigour and vividness of the aboriginal savage of the new world, of which he had heard from travellers or read in books of travel. Caliban hovers on the lowest limits of civilisa tion. His portrait is an attempt to depict human nature
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when just on the verge of the evolution of moral senti ment and intellectual culture.
Shakespeare was no less attracted by the opposite extreme in the scale of civilisation. He loved to observe civilisation that was over-ripe, that had overleaped itself, and was descending on the other side to effeteness and ruin. This type Shakespeare slightly sketched at the outset in his portrait of the Spanish Armado in Love's Labour's Lost, but the painting of it only engaged his full strength, when he turned in later life to Egypt Queen Cleopatra, the ' serpent of old Nile,' who by her time- honoured magic brings ' experience, manhood, honour ' to dotage, is Shakespeare's supreme contribution to the study of civilised humanity's decline and fall.
But it was the thought and emotion that animated the living stage of his own epoch which mainly engaged Shake- Shakespeare's pencil. He cared not whether speare's his themes and scenes belonged to England relation to Or to foreign countries. The sentiments and his era. aspirations which filled the air of his era were part of his being, and to them he gave the crowning expression.
Elizabethan literature, which was the noblest manifes- Elizabethan ^ticn in England of the Renaissance, reached literature its apotheosis in Shakespeare. It had ab- and the sorbed all the sustenance of the new move- Renais- ment — the enthusiasm for theGreek andLatin classics, the passion for extending the limits of human knowledge, the resolve to make the best and
ON SHAKESPEARE. 379
not the worst of life upon earth, the ambition to cultivate the idea of beauty, the conviction that man's reason was given him by God to use without restraint. All these new sentiments went to the formation of Shakespeare's work, and found there perfect definition. The watch word of the mighty movement was sounded in his familiar lines :
' Sure, He that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not The capability and god-like reason, To fust in us unused.1
Upon the new faith of the Renaissance in the perfec tibility of man, intellectually, morally, and physically, Shakespeare pronounced the final word in his deathless phrases : ' What a piece of work is man ! How noble in reason ! how infinite in faculties ! in form and moving, how express and admirable ! in action, how like an angel ! In apprehension, how like a god ! ' Renais sance authors of France, Italy, and Spain expressed themselves to like intent. But probably in these words of Shakespeare is enshrined with best effect the true significance of the new enlightenment.
Shakespeare's lot was cast, by the silent forces of the universe, in the full current of this movement of the Renaissance which was in his lifetime still shake- active in every country of Western Europe, speare's He was the contemporary of Tasso, Ariosto's foreign successor on the throne of Italian Renais- contem- sance poetry and its last occupant. Ronsard and the poets of the French Renaissance flourished in his youth. Montaigne, the glory of the French Renais sance, whose thought on man's potentialities ran very
380 FOREIGN INFLUENCES
parallel with Shakespeare's, was very little his senior. Cervantes, the most illustrious figure in literature of the Spanish Renaissance, was his senior by only seventeen years, and died only ten days before him. All these men and their countless coadjutors and disciples were subject to many of the same influences as Shakespeare was. The results of their efforts often bear one to another not merely a general resemblance, but a specific likeness, which amazes the investigator. How many poets and dramatists of sixteenth-century Italy, France, and Spain, applied their energies to developing the identical plots, and the identical traditions of history as Shakespeare ? Almost all countries of Western Europe were producing at the same period, under the same incitement of the revival of learning, and the renewal of intellectual energy, tragedies of Julius Caesar, of Antony and Cleopatra, of Romeo and Juliet, and of Timon of Athens. All countries of Western Europe were produc ing sonnets and lyrics of identical pattern with unpre cedented fertility; all were producing prose histories and prose essays of the like type ; all were surveying the same problems of science and philosophy, and offering much the same solutions.
The direct interchange, the direct borrowings are not the salient features of the situation. Less material in- The diffu- fluences than translation or plagiarism were sion of the at work ; allowance must be made for the spirit of the community of feeling among all literary arti- Renais- ficers of the day, for the looking backwards to classical literature, for the great common stock of philosophical sentiments and ideas to which at that epoch authors of all countries under the sway of the movement of the Renaissance had access independently.
ON SHAKESPEARE. 381
National and individual idiosyncrasies deeply coloured the varied literatures in which the spirit of the Renais sance was embodied. But that unique spirit is visible amid all the manifestations of national and individual genius and temperament.
When we endeavour to define the foreign influences at work on Shakespeare's achievement, we should beware of assigning to the specific influence of any Misappre- individual foreign writers those characteristics hensions to which were really the property of the whole be guarded epoch, which belonged to the stores of aSainst- thought independently at the disposal of every rational being who was capable at the period of assimilating them. Much has been made of the parallelisms of sentiment between Shakespeare and his French contem porary Montaigne, the most enlightened representative of the spirit of the Renaissance in France. Such parallelisms stand apart from that literal borrowing by Shakespeare of part of a speech in The Tempest from Montaigne's essay on 'cannibals.' The main resem blances in sentiment concern the two men's attitude to far-reaching questions of philosophy. But there is little justice in representing the one as a borrower from the other. Both gave voice in the same key to that demand of the humanists of the Renaissance for the freest pos sible employment of man's reasoning faculty. Shake speare and Montaigne were only two of many who were each, for the most part independently, interpreting in the light of his individual genius, and under the sway of the temperament of his nation, the highest principles of enlightenment and progress, of which the spirit of the time was parent.
Direct foreign influences are obvious in Shakespeare ;
382 INFLUENCES ON SHAKESPEARE.
they are abundant and varied j they compel investiga tion. But no study of them can throw true and trust worthy light on any corner of Shakespeare's work, unless we associate with ou : study a full recognition, not merely of the personal pre ninence of Shakespeare's genius and intuition, but al of the diffusion through Western Europe of the spirit .. the Renaissance. That was the broad basis on which the foundations of Shakespeare's mighty and unique achievement were laid.
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