ENGLAND'S HELICON

England's Helicon. Printed for Frederick Etchells and Hugh

IT will never be known to what accident in their birth, their climate, or their characters the English owe their supremacy inverse. Their foreign critics equally deplore the national lack of spiritual imagination and their possession of practical shrewd-. ness. They call them shopkeepers, and attempt (in vain) to boy- cott their shop. They regard them as the essential bourgeoisie, but (as is the hypocritical English custom) clothed and ashamed. In short, they endow them with all the qualities which should render poetry impossible, and then, finding that the English continue imperturbably to produce the best poets, escape from the dilemma by explaining that this is not poetry, because it is written in English. Nor does history—the name that we give tonur historians' mistakes— help us. The nation of antiquity which most resembles the English, at least sup-erne-jolly: the Winans, were noticeably inferior in this respect to the Greeks, who in every conceivable particular are unlike us. In short it is a miracle, which is as it should be.

So it will be as well to leave wondering, and accept the further proof Of the English 'claim afforded by the anthology called England's Helicon, " reprinted from the Edition of 1600 with additional Poems from the Edition of 1614." The perusal of this quite startling collection will throw no light on why the English write verse, but it does illustrate how and with what continuous abundance.

Let us begin by considering names. The anthologist of 1600 was able to dispose of two lyric poets—Spenser and Marlowe—of quite the first order. Ranking very close to these, if not actually at their side, he had Philip Sidney, Michael Drayton, John Wotton, George Peele, the -Earl of Surrie and Thomas Lodge. As to W. Shakespeare, we had better say nothing, because there is nothing that can be said, except to obserVe that the compiler clearly preferred nearly all the others to William if one may judge by the comparative number of pieces ,quoted.

Here, then, is the first distinctive mark of English poetry in the great periods. It has a fertility not to be matched in any other country, and there is this further . peculiarity

to be noted, that the greatest poets in our literature are never, like Virgil or Goethe, isolated and towering figures, but primi inter pares.

In the next place, the Helicon states all over again the debt that English poets, like English citizens, owe to their native freedom. Some of the poems here quoted were

written, if not contemporaneously with, very shortly after Ronsard, du Bellay and Desportes and not long before Racine. Comparing the English with the French poets, one is almost confronted with a comparison of two histories. Here on the English side is almost unfettered liberty of form, language and thought (though, in these poems, generally clothed in a pastoral convention), liberty that justifies itself by its wise moderation, while on the French there are all the restrictions of metre and form, which, in essence an attempt to confine a too romantic tendency, is curiously called classical. Most instructive- is a comparison, for example, of the first

verse of Thomas- Lodge's " Rosalinde's Madrigall " and the first quatrain of Ronsard's " Sonnet pour Marie " " Love in my bosome like a Bee,

doth suck his sweete, now with his winges he plays with me, now with his feete.

Within mine eyes he makes his nest, His bed's amidst my tender brest, My kisses are his daily feast, And yet he robs me of my rest.

Ah wanton will ye ? "

And " Commo on voit sur la branche au mois de mai la rose

En as belle jeunesse, en sa premiere fleur, Rendre le ciel jaloux de sa vive couleur, Quand l'aube de ses fleurs au point du jour l'arrose."

Thomas Lodge invents his measure, stuffs his verse as thick with conceits as a cake with comfits ; and sings, as it were, at the top of his voice. Ronsard, on the other hand, is bound by iron necessities. There is already the double rhyme, " la rose " and " l'arrose," to encompass, there is the carefully- regulated thought, and there is, in spite of these obstacles, an air of determined mastery triumphantly achieved. I do not propose to pursue the comparison, or to attempt to decide (though I have no doubts) which of the two is the true gate to Parnassus. That would involve me in all the barren controversy between the classical and romantic schools. But, at least, I may perhaps conclude that though great poetry can be and undoubtedly is written by the French method, the English method is rewarded by greater fertility. It is not, of course, that there are no ruleS in English. Poetry, like life, is impossible without them, but she tends to make her own as she goes along, setting her case-law against the Code Napoleon.

Here, then, are two distinguishing marks, fertility and freedom. For a third I would choose the abundant use of the English tongue, that inextinguishable -source of beauty, surprise and wealth, that tongue of which, like Turgenev of the Russian, one can say : " In days of doubt, in days of dreary musings on my country's fate, thou alone art my stay and support, mighty, true, free English speech." And these poets had the great advantage over later generations of having the magical words almost with the dew on them. So E. B. can write of " The Silvanes in their shagged haire.". So Spenser :-

" The pretty Paunee and the Cheuisaunce shall match with the faire flower7Delice."

So Ignoto of

" Vermilion roses that with new dayes rise," or of violets

" your gracious odours, which you couched boars -within your palie faces." - •

So rich, so fresh and varied as the-languag,6,- that-if mre.-dicl_aot. find poets to use it for their art, it would almost certainly write itself in poetry. But the poets are not wanting, and they

match the riches of the And with an abundance of

imagination as rich. And one striking quality of English verse (which it sluires with the German) is here 'shown in the capacity to make poetry out of the commonplaces of life.

Through the stilted pastoral convention gleam out again first-hand observation and love of daily things, as when Sidney writes :—

" Your faire Mother is abed, Candles out, and curtaines speed, . She thinks you doo letters write."

This is a vein that has never been worked -out, and never will, and is one of ; the peculiar and sovereign merits of English

verse, which, returning for ever to her mother the earth, is for ever renewed.

In fine Mr. Macdonald has every right to claim in the intro- duction that " Of all the collections of lyrical poetry published between Toners Miscellany in 1557 and the Golden Treasury in 1861 England's Helicon is by far the most important."

HUMBERT WOLFE.