BOOKS.
THE AGE OF SPENSER.* M. JUSBERAND compares the Elizabethan age to one of those forests in the old romances of chivalry, "where errants met, and parted, and met again, losing their way amid marvels and monsters, without ever knowing how to direct their steps in the pathless immensity." The simile might be applied with equal justice to his own book. The spirit of that spacious and luxuriating epoch has so completely seized upon M. Jusserand that one often finds it a little difficult, among his overflowing pages, to see the wood for the trees. The volume is never dull and never superficial; but it is very long and very diffuse; it deals with an enormous variety of subjects; and at last, after five hundred and fifty pages, it stops short without having reached the confines of mature Elizabethan literature, and without having touched upon Elizabethan drama at all. Presumably these subjects will be discussed in a succeeding volume; but the arrangement seems to be an unfortunate one, by which so much that is relevant is ruled out of consideration, and so much that is merely accessory is dwelt upon at length. Cranmer's character is undoubtedly full of interest ; the three or four pages which M. Jusserand devotes to it are among his most brilliant; and when he observes that Cranmer was "Henry the Eighth's Arch- bishop of all-work" one can only be delighted. But, after all, what light claes Cranmer's character throw on Elizabethan literature ? If M. Jusserand had set his face against digres- sions of this sort, and had devoted himself simply to the exposition of his main subject, his book, though perhaps it would have been somewhat less entertaining, would certainly have been a great deal more instructive.
To be entertaining, however, has clearly been M. Jusserand's first object ; and he has taken the very best means for securing his end. He has plunged into the vortex of Elizabethan life, and he has carried his reader with him. His great erudition and his sympathetic and coloured style have enabled him to present a vivid picture of that world of infinite variety and inexhaustible vitality which sprang so suddenly into existence in England during the latter half of the sixteenth century. His point of view is not that of the modern critic ; it is that of a contemporary of Burleigh, of Sidney, and of Drake. He sees things from the inside; and be sees them without vagueness or distortion. But it is obvious that this method of 'teat- ment, while it has all the advantages of picturesqueness, necessarily involves some loss of balance, and some inaccuracy of perspective. The poetry of Dorms, for instance, is noticed in his pages side by side with that of Gascoigne, Hall, and Marston, as if there were no very clear distinction, in style audio power, between the great Dean of St. Paul's and his satirical contemporaries. Doubtless the average Elizabethan reader would have made the same mistake; like M. Jusserand, he would simply have ranked Donne as one of the excellent poets of the day, and said no more about him. To have seen in Donne the beginning of the reaction against the main current of Renaissance poetry, and the father of the "Metaphysical" school of poets, would have been, for a contemporary, an impossible feat of prophetic vision. But, after all, M. Jusserand is in a different position; for he might have prophesied safely and easily enough—after the event.
Extreme and varied productiveness was certainly the most striking characteristic of the age which M. Jusserand has set himself to describe; but it possessed another quality in an almost equal degree,—a quality upon which he lays insufficient stress, and one which supplies the real clue to the tangled labyrinth of the time. It was an age, in letters no less than in action, of adventure. The happy writers of those days found themselves embarked upon an ocean of literature as vast as the Atlantic and as rich in amazing possibilities. Somewhere, they all believed, an America lay waiting to be discovered; but by what compass, by what stars, was it to be reached ? The official navigators chose the most obvious and the least perilous course; they clung to the coast. The great litera- tures of France, Italy, and Spain, which had come into flower with the Renaissance, seemed to them to afford the tree guide
• A Literary Batory of the English People front the Renaissance to the Cisil War. By J. J. June:rand. VoL L London: T. Floater Unwin. [12s. ed. net.1
to the direction which English literature itself should take. Thus the great mass of early Elizabethan work, both in verse and prose, is frankly imitative. The elaborate antithetical sentences of Euphues are echoes of the Spanish sentences of Guevara; and the amorous sonneteers of the same period pillaged right and left from their French and Italian pre- decessors. It is not surprising that these borrowings—to use no harsher word—should have scandalised modern critics, some of whom have been unwilling to allow the credit either of art or of feeling to writings which cannot claim to be original. Against this point of view, however, M. jusserand protests with great force. As lie suggests, the whole con- ception of art has changed since the days when the observance of conventional rules was the first duty of the artist. Then, a poet who did not promise his immortality through his verse was hardly a poet ; and it was as necessary that his lady's hair should be fair act that his sonnet should have fourteen lines. The primary object of the Elizabethan sonneteer was not so much to strike a note of individual passion as to treat beautifully some familiar theme,—to touch once again the old strings which had been so often touched before. And to do so successfully required, no leas than the more personal achievements of later poetry, a high command of art. To deny that such productions could have been inspired by genuine emotion is to jump to the rashest of conclusions. The secret springs of art cannot be sounded with a foot- rule. Some of the most splendid of Shakespeare's sonnets are little more than repetitions of the old refrain of exegi manumentum ; and who shall put bounds upon the feelings which were able to invest that hackneyed thought with such grandeur and such glory ? As M. jusserand says, "because a passage is copied or even translated, it does not follow that the poet thought of no one in particular and felt nothing : it may or may not be ; it is a question of individual cases, to be elucidated separately, according to circumstances Most of these singers," he shrewdly concludes, "mingled truth and life with fiction and imitations; and it seems, indeed, in the nature of things that they should have done so; for why suppose that, contrary to most men, so many poets should have had no experience whatever of love ? And if they had any, why suppose that they would make no use of such obvious, easy, and inspiring material P'
Besides the imitators of foreign models, it is easy to discern, amid the jostling crowd of literary experimentalista, two other classes of writers,—those who, like Gabriel Harvey and Philip Sidney, believed that the salvation of English letters was to be found in the methods of classical antiquity, and those who, like Thomas Nash, relied solely on the powers of a coarse and vigorous vernacular. These two classes formed the extreme poles of literary opinion, and the famous controversy between Neat; and Harvey, though it was in the main a personal one, yet illustrates clearly enough the extraordinary interest which literary questions were capable of arousing. To the cultured and scholarly Harvey, Nash was a vulgar barbarian whose presence in the temple of the Muses was a profanation ; and to honest Nash, Harvey was a foolish pedant, bent upon destroying the ancient liberties of the English language. But even more suggestive of the fermentation of the time are the numerous disserta- tions which appeared during the first half of the reign of Elizabeth upon the theory and the practice of English verse. These tracts, with all their variety of outlook, from the eloquent Defence of Sidney to Gascoigne's elaborately technical Note of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse or Rhyme in English, seem every one to have been inspired by the same prepossession,—that the great age of English poetry was about to commence. There is an air about them which is almost prophetio. "That there be as sharp and quick wits in England," wrote William Webb in his Discourse of English Poesy, "as ever were among the peerless Grecians or renowned Romans, it were a note of no wit in me to deny. And is our speech so coarse, or our phrase so harsh, that Poetry cannot therein find a vein whereby it may appear like itself ?" Let but the sharp and quick wits of England obey the directions of William Webb, and "so would Poetry without question aspire to wonderful perfection, and appear far more gorgeous and delectable among us." The sentiment was not confined to William Webb; every scribbler had his infallible prescription; the future was big with possibilities. What would it bring forth ?
When the great poem of the age did come, it was, buriotmly enough, a retrospective one. The Riede Queen does not look forward; it looks back. It is steeped in the spirit of the Renaissance; but this Renaissance spirit is the old con- ventional one of France and Italy; and, in addition, Spenser has deliberately mingled with it a flavour of antique reminis- cence, an affectation of ancient beauty, and thoughts and phrases out of date. The Paerie Queen, though it must ever be counted among the highest glories of English literature, yet left that literature where it found it,—under the thrall of the Continent; a splendid satellite, but a satellite still. It bore within it no fiery seed of new and unexpected life; for, there is little that lives in it though there is much that dreams. A less bracing poem was never written. In it softness, its charm, its languor, its long elaboration of luxurious ease, it resembles nothing so much as an enormous feather-bed.
The true Columbus of the Elizabethan age was Christopher Marlowe. His main work—his drama—lies outside the range of M. Jusserand's present volume, so that what references to him there are necessarily fall far short of adequacy. Yet it is to be regretted that M. Juaserand has not brought out more clearly the potent influence wielded by Marlowe over English heroic verse. That amazing genius not only created English tragedy, and at the same time made blank verse a living reality; he also, in his Hero and Leander, gave to the heroic: couplet a beauty and a power which it had never possessed before. In his manipulation of the couplet he is the ancestor alike of the classical school of Dryden and of the romantic school of Keats. And who, of all his progeny, has sur- passed him ?
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