ENGLISH POETRY"
PROFESSOR COURTHOPE continues his historical survey of the Muse's development in England with all the loving care and method which distinguished his boginnings. We doubt if poetry is a plant so absolutely subject to known laws of evolution as he seems to hold. Of the gods godlike, she is apt to spring up in unknown places and in unsuspected forms, and to carry the world before her by right divine of genius in other ways than are dreamed of in our philosophy. The Professor is perhaps apt to ignore this fashion of Poetry's—whose "violets and cowslips grow for the earth, without the care of planting "—a little too much, perhaps, in his study of the undoubted influence of mind over mind which signalises progress in this field as much as in any other. Mach as Shakespeare, the sun of our poetic system, may have borrowed from every quarter in the way of plot and story, it has always appeared to us that his debt to others for style and method reduces itself almost to the vanishing point. The magnificent rush of verse, the careless mastery and superabundance of illustration and of simile, the superb intuition into all the motives of conduct, good and evil, and the extraordinary gift of dramatic invention and construction which an inferior generation is affecting to despise, are all so completely his own. The result is visible in the fact that against all the opposition and assertion of modern schools and ideas, and in laughing defiance of all small and obvious detraction, that mighty spirit is still with us in his plays. But recently it has been found possible to produce Macbeth, and the Merchant of Venice, and even Antony and Cleopatra, upon a popular stage, with slender appliances in the way of scenery and effect, and though with the interpre- tation of a young and unknown company, all alike dis- tinguished by effort and by earnestness, in a form that proved sufficient to attract a considerable number of interested listeners. The more we listened, the more we felt convinced that it was in the superb force of the poetry that the living attraction lay. Neither school, nor evolution, nor any theory of descent or influence at all, can account for Shakespeare. On the other hand, his influence over all who followed, small and great, has been absolutely overpowering. The few can discuss Marlowe and Ford and Greene with interest and appreciation ; but to the world at large they are dead. The occasional revival of an Elizabethan play from any hand but Shakespeare's only serves to emphasise the truth; and the efforts of all the blank-verse dramatists since his days have been more or less aimed at awaking some echoes of his style. Not yet has any serious attempt at founding a new school of blank-verse writing been made. There is no Victorian blank-verse drama, for no poet has so far attempted, unless it be John Davidson, to treat co. temporary subjects and cotemporary people as Shakespeare did. There is nothing to be called Victorian in Queen _Mary or in Becket. There is more real originality of idea and treatment in Aurora Leigh than in nearly all the modern blank-verse plays pat together; and if we seem to be giving any undue preference to the blank-verse form it is because it is so grandly and characteristically Saxon. If Shakespeare is impossibly prominent among all other spirits of the poet- world, nec viget guidguam simile aut secundunt, Milton must, we presume, rank distinctly next him, and Milton's greatest achievement is, and must be always, the great blank-verse • A History of English Poetry. By W. S. Conrthope, M.A.. MLitt , Pro. teaser of Poetry in the University of Orford. V.I. II. Tie Renaissance and the Reformation: Influence of the Uourt and the Universitlea. London Macmillan and Co. epic of Paradise Lost. Professor Courthope only just reaches Shakespeare in his present volume, but we are inclined to think from his last chapter, on the "Infancy of the Romantic Drama," that he proposes to give more prominence to the idea of evolution in connection with the dawning of this morning star than we ourselves shall he quite willing to accept. He does not hesitate, however, before the greatness of his work. "It is not the smallest part of Shakespeare's glory," he says, "that he should have saved the popular imagination from itself, and by restoring to tragedy the elements of conscience, religion, and chivalry which Marlowe had expelled from it, should have convinced his countrymen of the purpose of playing ' : namely, ` to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.'" And if the Professor deals with writers of Marlowe's type, it is to argue from it that "the average taste of Elizabethan audiences was not far raised above that of the Spanish populace at a bull-fight," but at the same time to maintain that he and his school prepared the way for a new con- ception of tragic action. In the half-mad character of Flieronimo, in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, Professor Courthope finds the absolute prototype of Shakespeare's Hamlet, stating without reserve that it served as the groundwork for the great drama, and insisting on the fact that it contained the con- trivance of a 'play within a play" as proof of the statement. That is exactly where we should be inclined to join issue with the Professor. Over and over again it has been pointed out that coincidence in these matters does not always imply plagiarism. The source of Hamlet, as of so many of Shakespeare's plays, was found in a story, the most common and the most legitimate of all materials for the purpose. And it seems to us far more probable, if the resemblance be held to be anything more than superficial, that Shakespeare referred to the story to which Kyd had gone before him, and made it his own as completely as his predecessor had failed to do so, than that he made use of Kyd's work in any way whatever. The play within a play would come from the story, even if it were not, as it was, a common dramatic device of the day. It exists in the Mid- summer Night's Dream, and is the whole matter of the Taming of the Shrew. If we have dwelt at some length upon this side of Professor Courthope's subject, it is because it is clearly that which interests him most, as it is the fact that because the world's greatest poet chose our drama for his field, dramatic poetry stands foremost in an Englishman's regard. But we honestly do not believe that any writer or any critic has ever given quite sufficient prominence to the fact that Shakespeare is the English drama. His dramatic poetry is not so much, as Professor Courthope holds, the "product of a long development," as the crown and glory of a single mind.
In dealing with the writers of sonnets—none of whom, by the bye, ever approached Shakespeare in his undramatic hours—our author has, of course, more obvious matter for his speculation. Sonnets and pastorals are the very essence of copy and of imitation, though in this field too Shakespeare appears to us absolutely unindebted to anybody. In fact Shakespeare knew this so well that in his exuberant moments he broke out into burlesque of many poetical fads and fashions of the hour. Orlando was a very specimen of a fashionable poet, and Touchstone's joyous imitation-
" If a hart do lack a hind, Let him seek out Rosalind,"
has the taste of his original with but a touch of travesty. How it rings out, that joyous sound, which is the most difficult of Shakespeare's notes to strike or to recover in the present sadder age. There is a fullness and a largeness of fan about a Falstaff or a Touchstone which strike but falsely or tamely on a modern ear, and make many good people dubious about Shakespeare's humour, only because it was more characteristic of his day, as humours of their essence must be, than are his tragedies and his philosophies. As for them, they are as much with us and as vivid as ever,—and it is that very fact and reality which make us feel more and more, as we look into Professor Courthope's pages, the unreality and the dim distance of Nicholas Breton, of Gascoigne and of Barclay, of Barnfield, of Harvey, and of Lodge. We can almost quarrel with the Professor for unburying such a specimen of Spenser as this :—
"See ye the blindfolded prety God, that feathered archer, Of lovers' miseries which maketh his bloody game ?
Wote ye why ? his Moother with a veil bath covered his face, Trust me, lest he my love happily chance to behold."
It appears that Harvey thought that this was very bad classical verse, and he was right. But when he himself
essayed the elegiac he perpetrated this :—
"Encomium Lauri.
What might I call this tree ? A laurel ? 0 bonny laurel ! Near to thy boughs will I bow this knee and veil my bonetto. Who but thou the renown of Prince and princely Poeta ? Th' one for crown, for garland th' other, thanketh Apollo."
This imaginary christening of the laurel is delightfully simple, and reminds us of nothing so much as of the naturalist who first encountered an unpleasant animal, and said, "What shall this beast be called ? It looks like a skunk, it moves like a skunk, and it smells like a skunk. Let us call it a skunk."
We have not left ourselves space to do more than indicate the interest and pleasure attaching to Professor Courthope's book, and leave it to his readers to follow out many sug- gestive veins of thought which his treatment of his subject opens. We like him particularly about the Euphuists —Touchstone again, much virtue in an "if "—who, to Sir Piercy Shafton downwards, furnish much quaint and pleasant, reading, and give the full flavour of the poetry which hangs- about a Court. We are rather wanting in Court poetry just now, though we are all wondering why the wonderful German Emperor has so far failed to inspire some tribute equal to the vast occasion. But we are struck with nothing so much ourselves as we study the Muse's annals as the marked superiority of the smaller fry of verse, at the present day, over their predecessors as they are brought before us from the past. We shall feel great curiosity to find oat how Professor Courthope deals with that undoubted form of mental evolution.
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