BOOKS.

FORGOTTEN POETS.* Otra modern literary pantheon is large enough to include every variety of divinity; and the series of reprints which Professor Saintsbury is now editing shows that the minor deities no less than the Olympians come in for their share of incense. It may, indeed, be questioned whether Professor Saintsbury has not pushed the cult for the fugitive and the obscure a little too far. He has let down his drag-net into the ocean of Caroline poetry, and has fished out a handful of small fry which would have slipped through the meshes of any ordinary criticism. It is only, however, in one sense that the fry are small. The four poets whose works are reprinted in the present volume take up between them over eight hundred large octavo pages, most of which are double- columned. Surely the resuscitation of such a vast quantity of matter was a serious responsibility ; and is it possible altogether to admit that the act was justifiable, when -we remember that there is not a single line in the whole mass of the collection which rises above the second-rate P

But such doubts—though we cannot but feel them—are perhaps a little ungracious, for the volume possesses so many points of interest that it is easy to forget the portentous mediocrity which is really its dominant feature. Professor Saintsbury in his introductory notices has laid special stress

upon the light which his poets throw upon the development of English versification ; and it is true that this important,

though somewhat technical, subject can be amply illustrated by their works. But why does Professor Saintsbury stop there P The truth is that it is not only the versification of the period, but the whole tendency of Elizabethan poetry, which is epitomised in this volume. The poems are poor poems ; they belong to the fag-end of a great tradition ; they exaggerate its weaknesses and minimise its strength. But their very faults help us to understand more clearly the true nature of the great age which was theirs. The splendours of triumphant art are often so dazzling as to blind us to the

actual detail of its qualities; and it is only when we have coolly examined a bad imitation that we come to comprehend the hidden values of the original.

The poems of Patrick Hannay afford an excellent example of the orthodox Elizabethan tradition. Their fancy, their naiveté, their easy grace, make them constantly delightful ; they are composed of a series of pretty details set in a back-

ground of delicate, if conventional, romance. The poet, walking 'din the shade which top-entwining trees had made,"

listens to the music of the birds in the branches :— "Ravished with liking of their songs, I thought I understood The several language to each 'longs, That lodges in that wood.

Most Philomel

Did me compel To listen to her song, In sugar'd strains, While she complains

Of Tyrant Tereus' wrong."

The rest of the poem consists of the story of Philomel, which the bird proceeds to give utterance to for the next hundred stanzas. Hannay's description of the nightingale's song may aptly be applied to his own poetry : it is " sugar'd." That is at once its merit and its fault; for Hannay's sweetness is unrelieved by any other quality. His

form is always careless and his thought is always common- place. His narratives meander through a wilderness of unruly ornament and tangled verse : and only stop to remind us at irregular intervals that honesty is the best policy, that in this world nothing is permanent, and that

good children obey their parents. Nor does Hannay in his most sugary moments ever produce a really first-rate piece

of confectionery. His sweetness is of the kind which easily • Minor Poets of tha Caroline Period. Edited by George Saintsbury, Vol I. Oxford : at the Clarendon Press. [10s. 6d. usta cloya, and it would be u difficult to read through Sheretine and Mariana at a single sitting as to eat the whole of the icing on a wedding-cake.

The Pharonnida of William Chamberlayne presents precisely similar characteristics, but in an exaggerated degree. If Hannay's verse resembles a shrubbery thick with brambles which delay the traveller at every step, Pharonnida is a tropical forest where the luxuriance of festoons and undergrowth must be hewn through by sheer force. That

extraordinary poem, with its vast intrigue in the recesses of which the author, no less than the reader, loses his way, is in reality no more than the framework for an endless succession of descriptive details. In these details lies the whole value of the poem, and at their best they give Chamberlayne a place only just below the great and unmistakable poets of our language. Such lines as "Heart-cheering chrysolytes, With rubies set, which to adorn them twist Embraces with the temperate amethyst,"

show a command of language not unworthy of a spiritual ancestor of Keats. But Chamberlayne falls below mediocrity more often than he rises above it, and his incredible prolixity still further emphasises the flatness of the common level of his verse. Quotation from him is rendered peculiarly difficult by this very fact, for it is only possible to obtain the full impression of his easy, diffuse, and infinitely decorated style by reading through several pages. The following passage, however, though necessarily abridged, will give some idea

of the run of an ordinary sentence—or, rather, clause—in Pharonnida :— " . . . A purling stream; whose spring did live,

When from the hill's cool womb broke forth, within A grotto ; whence before it did begin To take its weeping farewell, into all The various forms restrictive Art could call Her elemental instruments into Obedience by, it courts the admiring view Of pleased spectators—here, exalted by Clear aqueducts, in showers it from those high

Supporters falls ; now turned into a thin

Vapour, in that heaven's painted bow is seen; Now it supplies the place of air, and to A choir of birds gives breath, which all seemed flew From thence for fear, when the same element, With such a voice as seas imprisoned rent Including rocks, doth roar so, Proteus-like, Returned from what did fear or wonder strike, The liquid nymph, resuming her own shape Within a marble square, a clear escape, Till from her winding stream the river takes Still fresh supplies, from that fair fountain makes."

These lines, published as late as 1659, yet belong clearly enough to the main school of Elizabethan poetry,—the school of Spenser. The absence of concision, the lack of distinguished thought, the intricacy of detail, BO obvious in Chamberlayne

are no less patent in the Faerie Queen. But we shall search in vain in the later poet for the unending glamour and the compelling charm of his great predecessor. Chamberlayne seems to possess in double measure all the unessential qualities of Spenser, and to lack the only essential one,—his

inspiration. He is a Spenser run to seed. He resembles in his winding elaboration the "purling stream" of his own poem, which, though the water is the same, has wandered

very far indeed from the fountain-head.

The other two poets in Professor Saintsbury's collection— Edward Benlowes and Katherine Philips—are representatives of a precisely contrai7 tradition, that which had its origin in the amazing genius of Donne. This is, indeed, their only point of resemblance, for they differ from one another no less than they differ from Chamberlayne or Hannay. Like their master, the great Dean of St. Paul's, they have entered into revolt against the Spenserian method ; and in their reaction from the orthodox style, with its diffuseness, its conventional insipidity, and its easy sweetness, they have flown into the

opposite extreme. They are so compact as to run the risk of obscurity ; their imagery is drawn, not from a fancied world of fable and romance, but from the everyday occurrences of

real life ; and their hatred of the commonplace makes them load their poetry with an accumulation of complicated, extra.. ordinary, and often grotesque thoughts. These peculiarities are to be found in every page of Theophila, Benlowes's

enormous poem on the soul. He seems determined never to say the expected thing. He is willing to be rugged, obscure,

ridiculous, so long as he is always original. At the creation

of the world Nature was a callow bird whose sprouting feathers were effects springing from the universal cause. The carbuncles on drunkards' noses are link-boys lighting them through the night. Warning his readers to repent before they are overtaken by old age, be says :—

"Eve in thy pocket thou thine eyes dost wear; Ere thy bones serve for calender ;

Ere in thy hand's thy leg, or silver in thy hair ; Preventing physic use."

This is Benlowes's way of talking of a walking-stick and a pair of spectacles.

The poems of Katherine Philips—" the matchless Orinda," as she was called in her own day—are somewhat tame in com- parison with the extravagances of Theophila. While Benlowes found his inspiration in Donne's religious poems, Mrs. Philips found hers in his secular verse, and her lyrics resemble those of Cowley, though they lack the intellectual adroitness and the depth of feeling of the author of "The Mistress" and the elegy on Harvey. They are nevertheless nearly alw ays graceful and never ordinary; so that, if one can forget how far they have been surpassed in their own manner, they make pleasant reading. For instance, her comparison between two friends and a pair of compasses, which "are, and yet they are not, two," is ingeniously worked out :—

"Each follows where the other leans, And what each does this other means. And as when one foot does stand fast, And t'other circles seeks to cast, The steady part does regulate

And make the wanderer's motion straight; So friends are only two in this, T' reclaim each other when they miss."

It is only when they have been compared with Donne's well- known verses on the same subject that these lines seem to lose their point. Mrs. Philips, like the other poets of Pro- fessor Saintsbury's volume, represented a moribund tradi-

tion. The style of Donne was already giving place to the style of Dryden, just as the genius of Milton was beginning

to triumph in the domain over which Spenser's spirit had ruled so long and gloriously. The rois fainéants of the old dynasty were destined to fall before these vigorous usurpers.

Professor Saintsbury's volume contains the last echo of

Elizabethan poetry, before it was silenced for ever by the classicism of the eighteenth century ; and across the gulf

which separates them from us the songs of Chamberlayne and of Benlowes, of Hannay and of Katherine Philips, sound

strangely and dimly in our ears :— "Only a sense

Remains of them, like the omnipotence Of music, when the inspired voice and lute Languish, ere yet the responses are mute."