Donald Grant Mitchell

“ If not a poet, she led poets into gracious ways of speech. Her culture, her clear perceptions, her love of pageants even, her intolerance of all forms of dulness or slowness, her very vanities—were all of them stimulants to those who could put glowing thought into musical language. Her high ruff, her jewelled corsage, her flashing eye, her swift impulses, her perils, her triumphs, her [312] audacities, her maidenhood—all drew flatteries that heaped themselves in songs and sonnets. So live a woman and so live a Queen magnetized dulness into speech. ”

“ When thou, God knows, full far art gone.”
Surrey is to be held in honor as the first poet who wrote English blank verse; he having translated two books of the Æneid in that form. But this delicate singer, this gallant soldier cannot altogether please the capricious monarch; perhaps he is too fine a soldier; perhaps too free a liver; perhaps he is dangerously befriended by some ladies of the court: Quite certain it is that the King frowns on him; and the frowns bring what they have brought to so many others—first, imprisonment in the Tower, and then the headsman’s axe. ”

“ All this is the criticism of a matter-of-fact man, who perhaps has no right of utterance—as if one without knowledge of music should criticise its cumulated triumphs. Many a man can enjoy a burst of balladry—of little vagrant songs—who is crushed and bored by the pretty tangles and symphonies of an opera. Spenser was poets’ poet—not people’s poet; hardly can be till people are steeped in that refinement, that poetic sensibility, which only poets are supposed to possess. ”

“ In the mid scenes, vast ranks of men sweep under your vision, and crash against opposing ranks, and break, and dissolve away in the hot swirl of battle. And by way of artistic contrast to all this, comes at last, in the closing pages, that piquant, homely, strange coquettish love-scene, which—historically true in its main details—joined the fortunes of England and of France in the persons of King Henry and Katharine of Valois. ”

“ Yet—it must be said—there is no grand horizon at the back of his pictures: pleasant May-mornings and green meadows a plenty; pathetic episodes, most beguiling tracery of incidents and of character, but never strong, passionate outbursts showing profound capacity for measurement of deepest emotion. We cannot think of him as telling with any adequate force the story of King Lear, in his delirium of wrath: Macbeth’s stride and hushed madness and bated breath could not come into the charming, mellifluous rhythm of Chaucer’s most tragic story without making a dissonance that would be screaming. ”

“ But we have already brought our literary mention up to a point far beyond this in the Queen’s life; up to a point where Shakespeare, instead of tearing over hedge-rows and meadows to see the Tritons and the harlequins of Kenilworth, has put his own Tritons to swimming in limpid verse, and has put his bloated, dying Falstaff to “babbling o’ green fields.” The Queen, too, who has listened—besides these revels—to the tender music of Spenser and outlived him; who has heard the gracious courtliness of Sidney, and outlived him ”

“ It is an exclamation that a good many lesser men than Spenser have tempted—in class-rooms, in lecture-rooms, and in pulpits. And I am wicked enough to think that if a third had been shorn away by the poet from that over-full [225] and over-epitheted poem of the Faery Queen, it would have reached farther, and come nearer to more minds and hearts. But who—save the master—shall ever put the shears into that dainty broidery where gorgeous flowers lie enmeshed in page-long tangles, and where wanton tendrils of words enlace and tie together whole platoons of verse? ”

“ King William swept the monasteries clean of those ignorant priests who had dozed there, from the time of Alfred, and put in Norman Monks with nicely clipped hair, who could construe Latin after latest [27] Norman rules. He new parcelled the lands, and gave estates to those who could hold and manage them. It was as if a new, sharp eager man of business had on a sudden come to the handling of some old sleepily conducted counting-room; he cuts off the useless heads; he squares the books; he stops waste; pity or tenderness have no hearing in his shop. ”

“ Yet Spenser is never ribald, never vulgar, rarely indelicate, even measured by modern standards: He always has a welcoming word for honesty, and for bravery, and, I think, the welcomest word of [227] all for Love, which he counts, as so many young people do, the chiefest duty of man.
Once upon a time, there comes to see Spenser in his Kilcolman home—that daring adventurer, that roving knight, Sir Walter Raleigh—who is so well taught, so elegant, so brave that he can make the bright eyes even of Queen Bess twinkle again, with the courtliness of his adulation ”

“ Roger Bacon.
Starting now from about the same point in time where we left off, our opening scene will take us to the old University town of Oxford. It is a rare city for a young American to visit; its beautiful High Street, its quaint Colleges, its Christ Church Hall, its libraries, its Magdalen walks and tower, its charming gardens of St. John’s and Trinity, its near Park of Blenheim, its fragrant memories—all, make it a place where one would wish to go and long to linger. ”

“ CHAPTER VII. As we open our budget to-day, we are still under kingship of the great Queen Bess, in whose presence we saw the portentous Lord Burleigh, whose nod has passed into history; we saw, too, in our swift way, the wise, the judicious, the simple-minded, the mismarried Richard Hooker. We called Spenser before us, and had a taste of those ever-sweet poems of his—ever sweet, though ever so long. ”

“ He can tear words in tatters, and he can string them rhythmically in all shapes; he makes his own law in language, as he grows heated in his work; twists old phrases out of shape; makes new ones; binds them together; tosses them as he will to the changing level of his thought: so that whereas one may go to Chaucer, in points of language, as to an authority—one goes to Spenser as to a mine of graceful and euphonious phrases: but the authority is wanting—or, at least, is not so safe. ”

“ The literalists will never like him, of course; he drops words that worry him—whole lines indeed with which he does not choose to grapple; he adds words, too—whole lines, scenes almost; there is vulgarity sometimes, and coarseness; he calls things by their old homely names; there is no fine talk about the chest or the abdomen, but the Greek lances drive straight through the ribs or to the navel, and if a cut be clean and large—we are not told of crimson tides—but the blood gurgles out in great gouts as in a slaughter-house; there may be over-plainness, and over-heat, and over-stress ”

“ Paradise Lost stretched six times over would not equal his pile of print; and all the verse that Goldsmith ever wrote, compared with Drayton’s portentous mass would seem like an iridescent bit of cockle-shell upon a sea of ink. This protracting writer was a Warwickshire man—not a far-off countryman of [292] Shakespeare, and a year only his senior; a respectable personage, not joining in tavern bouts, caring for himself and living a long life. His great poem of Poly-olbion many know by name, and very few, I think, of this generation ever read through. ”

“ If you would know more of things Celtic, I would commend to your attention a few lectures read at Oxford in 1864-65 by Matthew Arnold in which he has brought a curious zeal, and his wonted acumen [9] to an investigation of the influences upon English literature of that old Celtic current. It was a wild, turbulent current; it had fret and roar in it; it had passion and splendor in it; and there are those who think that whatever ardor of imagination, or love for brilliant color or music may belong to our English race is due to old interfusion of British blood. ”

“ We start to-day with an England that has its office-holding and governing people speaking one language—its moody land-holders and cultivators speaking another—and its irascible Britons in Wales and Cumbria and Cornwall speaking yet another. Conquered people are never in much mood for song-singing or for history-making. So there is little or nothing from English sources for a century or more. Even the old Saxon Chronicle kept by monks (at Peterboro in this time) , does not grow into a stately record, and in the twelfth century on the year of the death of King Stephen, dies out altogether. ”

“ A far better notion of her presence and [147] power than Shakespeare gave is brought to mind by that recent French painting of Bastien-Lepage—so well known by engraving—which aims to set forth the vision and the voices that came to her amid the forest silence and shadows. Amid those shadows she stands—startled: a strong, sweet figure of a peasant maiden; stoutly clad and simply; capable of harvest-work with the strongest of her sisterhood; yet not coarse; redeemed through every fibre of body and soul by a light that shines in her eye, looking dreamily upward; seeing things others see not ”

“ Indeed it is to be feared that theologic discussion does not greatly provoke gentleness of speech, in any time; it is a very grindstone to put men’s wits to sharpened edges. But More was a most honest man withal;—fearless in advocacy of his own opinions; eloquent, self-sacrificing—a tender father and husband—master of a rich English speech (his Utopia was written in Latin, but translated many times into English, and most languages of Continental Europe) , learned in the classics—a man to be remembered as one of the greatest of Henry VIII.’s time ”

“ He affixed to them complimentary mention of himself—whimseys by the poets, even by so great a man as Ben Jonson—a budget of queer, half-flattering, half-ironical rigmarole, which (having plenty of money) he had procured to be written in his favor; and so ushered his book into the world as something worth large notice. He would have made a capital showman. He had some training at Oxford, and won his way by an inflexible persistence into familiarity with men of rank, who made a butt of him. ”

“ Yet there are abounding evidences of wit—of more learning than in Shakespeare, and a great deal drearier; aptnesses of expression, too, which show a keen knowledge of word-meanings and of etymologies; real and deep acquirement manifest, but [298] worn like stiff brocade, or jingling at his pace, like bells upon the heels of a savage. You wonder to find such occasional sense of music with such heavy step—such delicate poise of such gross corporosity.
He helped some hack-writer to put Bacon’s essays into Latin—not that Bacon did not know his Latin ”

“ Most of these old writing people must needs begin at the beginning—drawling over the ancient fables about the Creation and Siege of Troy, keeping by the conventional untruths, and so—very barren and good for nothing, until they get upon their own days, when they grow rich and meaty and juicy, in spite of themselves, and by reason of their voluble minuteness, and their mention of homely, every-day unimportant things. They cannot tell lies, without fear of detection, on their own ground: and so they get that darlingest quality of all history—the simple truth. ”

“ But they have not brought the Norse speech of [26] the old home land with them: they have taken to a Frankish language—we will call it Norman French—which is thenceforth to blend with the Saxonism of Alfred, until two centuries or more later, our own mother English—the English of Chaucer and of Shakespeare—is evolved out of the union. Not only a new tongue, do these conquerors bring with them, but madrigals and ballads and rhyming histories; they have great contempt for the stolid, lazy-going Latin records of the Saxon Chroniclers; they love a song better. ”

“ He is oppressed by the pall of ignorance that overlays the lordly reach of his kingdom: “Scarce a priest have I found,” says he, “south of the Thames who can render Latin into English.” He is not an apt scholar himself, but he toils at learning; his abbots help him; he revises old chronicles, and makes people to know of Beda; he has boys taught to write in English; gives himself with love to the rendering of Boëthius’ “Consolation of Philosophy.” ”

“ It is certain, moreover, that in the immediate service of either Prince or King, he went to the wars—as every young man of high spirit in England yearned to do, when war was so great a part of the business of life, and when the Black Prince was galloping in armor and in victory over the fields of Guienne. But it was a bad excursion the poet hit upon; he went when disaster attended the English forces; he was taken prisoner, and though ransomed shortly thereafter—as the record shows—it is uncertain when he returned; uncertain if he did not linger for years among the vineyards of France ”

“ When the last shattering blow comes to our poor humanity, the better nature in us does somehow lean kindly out, in glance and in purpose. Yet Philip Sidney was certainly a man of great kindness and full of amiabilities and courtesies.
Why, pray, should he not have been? Consider that in all his young life he was wrapped in purple. It is no bad thing in any day to be born eldest son of an old and wealthy and titled family of England ”

“ In such mood he wrote those essays, of some of which I have spoken—wonderfully compact of thought, and as wonderfully compact of language—which one should read and read again. No private library of a hundred English books is complete without a copy of Bacon’s Essays. The keen sagacity and perdurable sense of his observations always engage one. ”

“ Sir Thomas smacked the humor of the thing, in giving the name Utopia, which is Greek for Nowhere. If, indeed, men were all honest, and women all virtuous and children all rosy and helpful, we might all live in a Utopia of our own. All the Fourierites—the Socialists—the Knights of Labor might find the germs of their best arguments in this reservoir of the ideal maxims of statecraft. ”

“ They could boast that their institutions were established—like our railways—for the good of the people, and in the interests of humanity; but while rendering service, waxing into such lustiness of strength and such habits of corruption and rapacity, that at last, when fully bloated, they were broken open and their riches drifted away under the whirlwind of the wrath of King Henry VIII. Great schemes of greed are very apt to carry an avenging Henry VIII. somewhere in their trail. ”