BOOKS.
MR. SAINTSBURY'S ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE.* IN a volume of about 450 pages, Mr. Saintsbury has en- deavoured to give a complete view of the actual literary performance of the period from 1560 to 1660, "excluding or only lightly touching on those authors in its later part who may be said to have anticipated or prepared the post- Restoration changes, but including those who even long after 1660 produced great work in the ante-Restoration styles." His range, it will be seen, therefore, is a wide one, and con- sidering that the century he has chosen is the greatest in our literary history, and contains names that rank with the fore- most in the literature of the world, the task is as difficult as it is comprehensive.
We may say at the outset that, in our judgment, the author has been as successful as it is possible to be within the limits imposed upon him. He writes with a full mind, and if he did not say so in the preface, the style of the criticisms would con- vince us that his knowledge of Elizabethan literature is not gained at second-hand. A prominent characteristic of the volume is its freedom from the pedantry of criticism that exhausts itself upon trifles. The endeavour to fix the order of Shakespeare's plays by counting syllables and attempting to classify the cadence of lines, is, he considers, an obvious failure; and with regard to the Sonnets, he observes that he is "unable to find the slightest interest or the most rudimentary import- ance in the questions whether the Mr. W. H.' of the dedica- tion was the Earl of Pembroke, and if so, whether he was also the object of the majority of the Sonnets ; whether the dark lady,' the woman coloured ill,' was Miss Mary Fitton ; whether the rival poet was Chapman." Justly, too, in our opinion, he characterises the inquiries into Milton's indebtedness to earlier writers as among the idlest inquiries of the kind. "Italians, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Englishmen even, had doubtless treated the Creation and the Fall, Adam and Satan, before him. Perhaps he read them; perhaps he borrowed from them. What then Does any one believe that Andreini or Vondel, Sylvester or Du Bartas, could have written, or did in any measurable degree contribute to the writing of Paradise Lost ? If he does, he must be left to his opinion."
Sound sense is a prominent characteristic of Mr. Saints- bury's judgment ; but combined with it there is also the enthusiasm without which it is impossible to criticise noble literature. This will be seen in his generous appreciation of Spenser, a poet who, if he once lays hold of a man, never loses his power. But this transcendent poet does not, it is to be feared, secure a large audience in our day. He demands leisure in order to exercise his witchery, and this is what the modern reader shrinks from giving. Spenser will not submit to extracts. He should be read altogether or not at all, and then, perhaps, Mr. Saintsbury's assertion that the Faerie Queene is the only long poem that a lover of poetry can sincerely wish longer, will not appear extravagant. He is disposed to think that it is our greatest English poem, and in the chapter on Milton, after putting forth the somewhat startling opinion that Comas is a finer poem than Paradise Lost, he adds,—" Of his poetical powers I trust that I shall not be considered a niggard admirer, because both in the character of its subject (if we are to consider subjects at all) and in its employment of rhyme, that greatest mechanical aid of the poet, the Faerie Queene seems to me greater, or because Milton's own earlier work seems to me to rank higher, than Paradise Lost." This, as Mr. Saintsbury says elsewhere, is a matter of taste; and yet a word or two may be said on an opinion so heterodox before passing on. The writer objects to critics who say that "all depends on the subject ;" and observes that, according to this dictum, there is no difference between poetry and prose, between an epic and a blue-book. The answer to this is, that if all does not depend on the subject, very much depends upon it. Of this the greatest poets of the world have been conscious. They have all chosen great subjects, but—and this makes the difference • A History of Elizabethan Literature. By George Seintabnry. London : Nnomillan end Co. 1887, between an epic and a blue-book—subjects which could be treated poetically. It seems to us that Milton is not only superior to Spenser in the choice of a grand action in his two great epics, but that in the treatment of it he rises to a height above the mark of Spenser. Beyond question Milton is the greatest master of harmony in the language ; and after listening to his majestic music, it is necessary to wait until the last notes have died away before even the delicious song of Spenser can be listened to with pleasure. It is, of course, per- fectly true that poems conceived on a large scale, like Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, must be unequal, and that they cannot show throughout the perfection of beauty which is to be found in the thousand lines of Comas. But why com- pare poems that differ so greatly? As well might you com- pare a small and lovely mountain lake with a majestic river.
While making objections to Mr. Saintsbury's criticism, we must protest against the judgment, pronounced, we believe, for the first time, that the exquisite sonnet, "perhaps one of the ten or twelve best sonnets in the world"—" Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part "—" is Shakespeare all over," and could not have been written by Drayton. There is abso- lutely no ground for the opinion beyond the beauty of the poem ; but a true poet, moved by some strong emotion, will sometimes far surpass his general level, and Drayton, who by the critic's admission has written a battle-piece "quite at the head of its own class of verse in England," and "altogether beyond praise," might also, in an equally happy moment, have written what, in our opinion, is the finest love-sonnet in the language. Why not ? And now we have to make a more serious stricture. In his notice of Carew, Mr. Saints- bury praises the poet's "Rapture," which for poetical felici- ties deserves his praise. But the poem, from the first line to the last, is a passionate incentive to immorality, in whiclohis mistress is urged to disregard honour, to yield to "unrestrained appetite," and to fly with him to Love's Elysium, where— "The hated name Of husband, wife, lust, modest, chaste, or shame Are vain and empty words."
Yet Mr. Saintsbury asks "any grave and precise person," having read this poem, to turn to the archangel's colloquy with Adam, in Paradise Lost, and to say on which side, according to his honour and conscience, the coarseness lies. "I have myself," he adds, "no hesitation in saying that it lies with the husband of Mary Powell." We can but gather from this opinion that the author is unable to distinguish between a grave representation of vice, and the glowing eulogy of free- love by an amatory poet.
Carew, who belongs to the Caroline age, like his con- temporary Herrick, knew how to sing. Song, indeed, is as conspicuous in the century illustrated by Mr. Saintsbury, as it is notable for its absence in the period between Pope and Burns. The snatches of song in Shakespeare and in some contemporary poets are not to be surpassed, and the collections of verse published in that age show that men of small account, when compared with the giants of the period, could "sing a song at least." From the supremely lovely "Epithalamion" of Spenser to the "Fair Daffodils "of Herrick, there is a succession of singing poets, and lyric verse is as plentiful as the didactic and descriptive verse of a later period. It grows rarer as we approach the last half of the seventeenth century, when the sweetness of song is for the most part lost in its conceits. Waller, who lived through the greater part of that century, and, as Mr. Saintsbury observes, "founded the school of good sense," has, we think, received far more attention than he deserves. Assuredly he was not the first to achieve that reform in versification for which Dryden praises him ; but it is quite possible that his influence may have been greater in this way than that of poets before him who wrote the couplet smoothly. As a singer, he belongs more to the poetical decline of his age than to its ripest period; but even Waller has composed a song or two, and his "Go, Lovely Rose," ihre3 ii 01 selections. To the minor poets of the period, Mr. Sainfebury generally does full justice. Something more, perhaps, he might have said in favour of Browne, if not for his merits, which are not in- considerable, yet for the influence hp has had on greater poets ; and Vaughan, too, deserves more praise than he receives. Vaughan has fewer conceits than Herbert or Crashaw, his two great rivals as deyotional poets. Herbert is weightier in matter, Craahaw iii his finest moods ?Am
imaginative, and if the author's praise of him is a little extravagant, the lovers of this most unequal poet are not likely to grudge it. "Probably," he writes, "for a full half of his short life, Crashaw burnt only with religions fire. But no Englishman has expressed that fire as he has, and none in his expression of any sentiment, sacred or profane, has dropped such notes of ethereal music. At his beat he is far above singing, at his worst he is below a very childish prattle. But even then he is never coarse, never offensive, not very often actually dull ; and everywhere he makes amends by flowers of the divinest poetry."
A considerable portion of this brief history is naturally given to the drama, with which, despite the extent of the subject, Mr. Saintsbury is thoroughly familiar. With a. good deal of discretion, he says leas of Shakespeare than of his brother dramatists, observing that, in a book like the present, the whole space of which might very well be occupied in dealing with Shakespeare alone, it is impossible to criticise single plays, passages and characters. The author observes that this is the less of a loss, "as the wisest commentators have always begun and ended by acknowledging Shakespeare is your only commentator on Shakespeare." All that Mr. Saintsbury does say with regard to the greatest of poets is, we think, admirable; but perhaps he scarcely does full justice to what may be called the purity of Shakespeare's atmosphere when compared with that in which contemporary dramatists move and have their being. The reader has but to remember Shakespeare's women, and contrast them with the women of Middleton, and Beaumont and Fletcher, to see the difference.
The prose of the period demands less attention from Mr. Saintsbury than the poetry. It was a poetical age, and prose writers of high mark were comparatively few in number. They include, however, three or four who still rank with the greatest masters of English speech,—Jeremy Taylor, whose books are not only "a perpetual feast of nectared sweets," but a storehouse of divine thought, receives his due from the critic ; so does Milton as a prose writer; so does Lamb's and Southey's favourite, Sir Thomas Browne ; so does Clarendon, "certainly the best English writer in the great, difficult, and now almost lost art of character-drawing ;" so, from the literary point of view, does Bacon; while of Hooker, our earliest great prose writer, we know not where to find a brief estimate so exact and so appreciative. Three pages are also devoted to "what is probably the greatest prose work in any language,—the Authorised Version of the Bible in English." From this noble eulogy of a work that has done more than any other not only to form the national character, but to direct the current of English literature, a passage shall be quoted, and with this we must close a volume weighty with matter for criticism, and also for instruction :—
" Now that there is, at any rate, some fear of this masterpiece ceasing to be what it has been for three centuries—the school and training-ground of every man and woman of English speech in the noblest uses of the English tongue—every one who values his mother-tongue is more especially bound to put on record his own allegiance to it. The work of the Company appears to have been loyally performed in common ; and it is curious that such an un- matched result should have been the result of labours thus com- bined, and not, as far as is known, controlled by any one guiding spirit."
And after pointing out certain advantages the translators possessed, partly due to the age, the writer adds :—
"Men without literary faculty might, no doubt, have gone wrong; but these were men of great literary faculty whose chief liabilities to error were guarded against precisely by the very conditions in which they found their work. The hour had come exactly, and so for once had the men Fortunately, such a national possession as the original Authorised Version, when once multiplied and dispersed by the press, is out of reach of vandalism. The unproved version, constructed on very much the same principle as Davenant's or Ravenscroft's improvements on Shakespeare, may be ordered to be read in churches and substituted for purposes of taking oaths. But the original (as it may be called in no burlesque sense such as that of a famous story) will always be the text resorted to by
scholars and men of letters for purposes of reading, and will remain the authentic lexicon, the recognised source of English words and constructions of the best period. The days of creation ; the narratives of Joseph and his brethren, of Ruth, of the final defeat of Ahab, of the discomfiture of the Assyrian host of Senna- cherib ; the moral discourses of Ecclesiastes and Ecclesiasticus and the Book of Wisdom; the poems of the Psalms and the prophets, the visions of the Revelation,—a hundred other passages which it is unnecessary to catalogue, will always be the ne plus ultra of English composition in their several kinds, and the storehouse from which generation after generation of writers, sometimes
actually hostile to religion, and often indifferent to it, will draw the materials, and not unfrequently the actual form, of their most impassioned and elaborate passages The plays of Shake- speare and the English Bible are, and will ever be, the twin monu- ments not merely of their own period, but of the perfection of English, the complete expressions of the literary capacities of the language at the time when it had lost none of its pristine vigour and had put on enough, but not too much, of the adornments and the limitations of what may be called literary civilisation."
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