CHAPTER XVII. WYATT AND SURREY. GASCOIGNE. SACKVILLE.

The names of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) and of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547), are for ever memorable in English poetry, not so much for what they actually achieved as for what they attempted. They abstained from allegory, still lingering in its unlovely dotage, and from doggerel. They wrote of themselves and their own loves, joys, and sorrows, but though their verse is concerned with their personal emotions, these are treated in a conventional way, borrowed from continental poetry. They turned to the Italian sonneteers, especially to Petrarch, and saw afar the dawning of the "Pléiade," the company of French reformers of poetic style and language, Ronsard, du Bellay, and the rest, or at least of Mellin de Saint-Gelais, their predecessor. But both Wyatt and Surrey died young, Wyatt by an unfortunate chance, Surrey as a victim of the jealous tyranny of Henry VIII. The two young poets thus live together in men's memories like the Bion and Moschus of Greece: theirs is "unfulfilled renown".

Wyatt, of a Yorkshire family, was son of Sir Henry Wyatt, of Allington in Kent, a man who had strange vicissitude of fortune in the reigns of Richard III and Henry VII. Thomas went very early to St. John's College, Cambridge, married at 17, was a glory of the Court of Henry VIII, went on diplomatic missions to Italy (Venice, Ferrara, Bologna, Florence, and Rome), studied Italian literature, was now in favour and now in prison, and made love, with more or less of earnestness, to Anne Boleyn, being fortunate in escaping from the doom of her admirers when Henry VIII took her life. Favoured by Henry's minister, Thomas Cromwell, but detested, and accused of diplomatic misdeeds[Pg 164] by Bishop Bonner, Wyatt defended himself with a success then very rare, retired from Court and wrote satires and poems on the advantages of retirement; paraphrased the Seven Penitential Psalms, and died of a fever caught from fatigue and travel, in October, 1542, lamented in verse by Surrey.

The reader of his sonnets, the earliest in English, is amazed to find that we have travelled through so many centuries of the life of English poetry, and only reached lame lines that can scarcely be scanned. Since Chaucer the art of verse had become very dim, perhaps in consequence of the transitional state of the language, the obsolescence of the sound of the final e, and the Anglicizing of the sounds of borrowed French words by throwing back the accent (as in hōnour for honōūr, virtue for vīrtūe). Wyatt, when he began to write sonnets, put accents in strange places, and counted syllables on his fingers, content if he could reckon ten of them, in a line. To rhyme "aggrieved" to "wearied," is like the tramp's effort to make "workhouse" rhyme with "sorrow". The young student in a novel of Henri Murger's reads only the rhymes in sonnets. If we study in that way Wyatt's sonnet "The Lover Waxeth Wiser," we find that the last words in the first eight lines are

aggrieved
last
past
wearied
buried
fast
haste
stirred.

He usually tried to keep to the Petrarchian arrangement of rhymes in the first eight lines a b b a a b b a, but, contrary to Italian rule, his last two lines were always a rhyming couplet, as in Shakespeare's "Sonnets," in which the Petrarchian model is wholly disregarded. The sonnet thus ends with an emphatic clench, usually moral, while in the Italian sonnet the last six lines resemble the withdrawal of the wave of the first eight lines.

The sonnet, with its concision and its technical difficulties, afforded excellent practice to poets who endeavoured to bring[Pg 165] delicacy and order into the chaos and coarseness of verse as written by Skelton and his contemporaries. But a good sonnet is among the rarest of good things, and the mere technical difficulties once overcome, men's minds may turn out sonnets of no value with the rapidity of machine work. The stock character of this kind of poetry, the Lover, with his strange far-fetched conceit in his almost metaphysical refinements, is apt to become as tedious as the old figures of allegory; however, he was a novelty. Wyatt improved with practice in sonnet-making, though such rhymes as "mountains" "fountains," "plains," "remains," are a stumbling-block to the modern reader. But his "And wilt thou leave me thus?" and "Forget not yet the tried intent," with their brief refrains are immortal lyrics, heralding the music of the age of Elizabeth.

His epigrams are not the stinging wasps of verse commonly called epigrams, but are brief poems in the manner of the epigrams of the Greek Anthology. The satires on the Court, based on Italian poems, and including a form of the "Town and Country Mouse," are not in Skelton's violent way, but the work of a gentle man, and the poems in rhyme royal, seven line stanzas, with six syllables to the line, are charming novelties.

The Earl of Surrey.

The date of Surrey's birth is uncertain: it was four or five years after the battle of Flodden (1513), in which his grandfather—"an auld decrepit carle in a chariot—" was victorious over the fiery James IV. The title Earl of Surrey is a courtesy title, borne by the poet as son of the Duke of Norfolk. He was at least a dozen years younger than his friend Wyatt, and was a lively young courtier, who was made a Knight of the Garter in 1541. He married very early, in 1532, and his famous passion for fair Geraldine may have been merely poetical—the usual story about Geraldine and the magic mirror is derived from a novel of 1554. About 1542 he was imprisoned for a matter of a duel, a challenge at least, and in 1543 went about London at night breaking windows with a stone-bow. He wrote a poem in which he gravely maintains that he was merely punishing the wicked city for her sins. Again released from prison he saw some fighting in France, and,[Pg 166] returning, patronized a poet named Churchyard, who later wept unmelodiously above his early tomb. Early in 1546 Surrey had the worse of a battle with the French near Boulogne, was superseded by the Earl of Hertford, and, in January, 1547, was accused of a sort of heraldic high treason (quartering the arms of Edward the Confessor, who, of course, had never heard of armorial bearings), and executed, shortly before the death of the tyrant, Henry VIII.

Surrey's versification, especially in the sonnet, is much superior to that of Wyatt, but he is less apt to keep to the rules of rhyme, in the first eight lines; indeed he writes in the form of Shakespeare's sonnets. His "Prisoned in Windsor" is a pleasant picture of a young gallant's life, who takes his eye off the ball at Tennis to watch the ladies in the dedans: hunts, tilts, and makes friends. The moral poems in lines of fourteen feet are of no great merit, but Surrey's translation of the Second Book of the ?neid is the first English example of blank verse, borrowed from Italian practice. The lines are stiff and hard; and the main merit is the novelty, the first birth of the measure that was to become, in forty years, "Marlowe's mighty line".

Tottel's Miscellany.

The poems of Wyatt and Surrey were not published till long after the deaths of the authors, when they appeared, with many other pieces, in "Tottel's Miscellany". Other writers represented there are Nicholas Grimald, with his jog-trot metre, the "poulter's" or poulterer's measure of from twelve to fourteen syllables to the dozen—so were eggs sold by a custom of the trade. Surrey's retainer, Thomas Churchyard, a man very busy with sword and pen, was also a writer in the "Miscellany"; and indeed was a literary hack-of-all-work. There came, after the brief gleam of sunshine that fell on Wyatt and Surrey, another generation of wooden versifiers and translators, with whose names, Tusser the bucolic, Phaer, Golding, Googe, and Whetstone, it is hardly necessary to fill the page and burden the memory. They may be studied by the curious, but they wrought no deliverance. To generations which possess superabundance of versifiers and no great poets, these barren years are a kind of consolation. For[Pg 167] reasons not to be discovered there are such periods in the literary life of all nations, as in England between Pope and Cowper.

The versifiers in "Tottel's Miscellany" keep harping unmelodiously on the strings of Surrey and Wyatt, many of their pieces are complimentary addresses to ladies, or laments on the deaths of friends. Poor conceits are twisted and tormented; there is hardly any promise of advance; we scarcely hear any of the bird-like musical notes with which the later part of the reign of Elizabeth sang so wondrously.

Gascoigne.

George Gascoigne (1525 (?)-1577) was an interesting character. He was a Cambridge man, a member of the Society of Gray's Inn, a poet who, like Scott, composed his verses in the saddle: a Member of Parliament who was opposed as "a common rhymer... noted for manslaughter... a notorious Ruffian," and even a spy, certainly he owed debts, and was disinherited by his father. He wrote on woodmanship, but was apt to forget to shoot at the deer that came within range of his cross-bow. As a captain in the Low Countries he and his command were surprised and taken by the Spaniards: he came home, published his Posies (1575) and, he says, got not a penny by the venture: he then wrote "The Steel Glass," a kind of satire, the mirror of the age, in blank verse, and next wrote in common ballad measure the long and amazingly prosaic "Complaint of Philomene".

In 1572 Gascoigne published "A Hundred Sundry Flowers, bound up in one small Posy". The long title sets forth that some of the flowers were culled in the gardens of Euripides, Ovid, Petrarch, and Ariosto, others are from English orchards. The native flowers are the sweeter and more fair. While our poets were turning into stiff measures the sonnets of Italy, Gascoigne could write so naturally and melodiously his own English, as in his "Lullaby of a Lover".

Sing lullaby, as women do,
Wherewith they bring their babes to rest,
And lullaby can I sing too,
As womanly as can the best.

[Pg 168]

Beneath the stiff borrowed phrases and metres there was always this native and tuneful spirit of unsophisticated song.

In 1575 he was a maker of words for the Masques at Leicester's famous reception of Elizabeth at Kenilworth (see the novel of that name, where Scott calmly introduces Shakespeare as already a successful dramatist). He satirized drunkards: we have already seen that he translated a tragedy, "Jocasta," from the Italian; he wrote a love story in rhyme of a personal kind, and his brief "Instructions" is the earliest English work, in no way indebted to Aristotle, on the Art of Poetry. As he also translated, we have seen, a comedy from the Italian, and a prose tale, a kind of work later fashionable, Gascoigne may be regarded as an intrepid explorer in many fields of literature. "He first beat the path to that perfection which our best poets have aspired to since his departure," says Nash (1589). "He brake the ice for our quainter poets that now write," says Tofte (1615). But the path as trodden by this pioneer continued to be rough. Gascoigne was an example of the versatility and literary ambition which many young gentlemen displayed in the age of Elizabeth; mingling poetry and study and serious thought with their gallant adventures in love, diplomacy, war, and travel.

His "Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the making of Verse in English" is a very brief pamphlet. He quotes "my master, Chaucer" against alliterative "thunder in Rym, Ram, Ruff," but mentions no other poet. Be original, he says, if you sing of a lady do not applaud her "crystal eye" or "cherry lip," which Spenser did not disdain, for these things are trite and obvious. The great matter is "to avoid the uncomely customs of common writers," says this "common rhymer". Do not use "obscure and dark phrases in a pleasant sonnet". Do not wander out of your "Poulters measure" metre into lines of thirteen syllables. Give every word its natural emphasis: do not make treasure into treasure. Chaucer is to be followed as a master of prosody. You should write:—

"I understand your meaning by your eye,"

not,

"Your meaning I understand by your eye",

[Pg 169]

"The more monosyllables that you use, the truer Englishman you shall seem".

There follows advice on the caesura, and all this counsel shows that, in the early years of Elizabeth, versification was at a very low ebb.

In practice, Gascoigne did not always shine. There are few passages of interest in the stiff blank verse of his "Steel Glass" (the mirror that does not flatter). The best passage, and it is very good, describes the labourer,

Behold him, priests, and though he stink of sweat,
Disdain him not, for shall I tell you what?
Such climb to heaven before the shaven crowns,

because the labourers

feed with fruits of their great pains
Both king and knight and priests in cloister pent.

It would be cruel to quote "Philomene," no stall-ballad creeps more tardily on a longer road than Gascoigne in his tale of her who sings, in a later poet's words,

Who hath remembered thee, who hath forgotten?
They have all forgotten, oh summer swallow,
But the world shall end when I forget.

Sackville.

The poetry of Thomas Sackville (1536-1608) is not to be found in his dull tragedy, "Gorboduc," but in his contributions to a vast and once popular collection, "The Mirror for Magistrates". This work is intended to admonish men in power by rhymed histories of the falls of English peers and princes. This was the plan of Chaucer's Monk, in "The Monk's Tale," which that sound critic, the Host, could not long endure. The model was Boccaccio's work on "The Falls of Princes," Englished by Lydgate. The enterprise started by Baldwin and others in 1554-1559, suggests a dread lest English verse should return to Lydgate in the den of Giant Despair, and take up with sepulchral solemnity the tale of tragedies from the darkest days of the unfortunate ancient Britons. A mammoth compilation was gradually evolved, for doleful matter[Pg 170] was not far to seek, but Sackville's two contributions, the "Induction," and the "Complaint of Buckingham"—the Buckingham executed under Richard III,—alone concern us.

In the "Induction" the poet describes the gloom of winter, and, in the mediaeval way, dwells long on the constellations. As he muses, he is met by a very deplorable female form—

With doleful shrieks that echoed in the sky.

She proclaims herself to be Sorrow, a goddess, and guides Sackville "to the grisly lake" of Avernus, over which no fowl may fly and live. A number of rueful figures of allegory are encountered, Dread, Revenge, Misery, Care, Old Age, and Sleep, and these are drawn with abundant vigour and variety. The stanza on Sleep gives the measure of the versification, which is rapid, concise, various, sustained, and in its music heralds the arrival of Spenser.

The body's rest, the quiet of the heart,
The travail's care, the still night's frere was he,
And of our life on earth the better part,
Reiver of sight, and yet in whom we see
Things oft that tide, and oft that never be,
Without respect, esteeming equally
King Croesus' pomp and Irus' poverty.

One stanza in the description of the home of the dead seems to have been suggested by famous lines in the Eleventh Book of the "Odyssey".

The "Induction" ends with the appearance of the spirit of Buckingham, who not only tells his own tragedy at great length, and in full historical detail, but introduces several other ancient tragedies, those of Cyrus, Cambyses, Brutus, Cassius, Besseus, Alexander the Great, Clitus, Phalaris, Pher?us, Camillus, and Hannibal. From these fallen princes we drop to

One John Milton, Sheriff of Shropshire then,

who arrested Buckingham, and to

A man of mine, called Humphrey Banastaire,

[Pg 171]

who betrayed his master. Banastaire is then cursed in eleven stanzas. "May Banastaire live to the age of eighty, and then be tried for theft. May his eldest son expire in a pig-sty; his second son be strangled in a puddle, and his daughter be smitten by leprosy."

It cannot be denied that this tragedy, including as it does the murder of the Princes in the Tower, is rather too rich in terrible components, and does not, especially when Banastaire is being dealt with, affect us in the same measure as Dante's pictures of the Inferno. On the whole it is the manner, not the matter, of Sackville that contains more than mere promise: his management of the stanza and of the music of the line is far in advance of anything that had come from an English pen since the death of Chaucer. As for the gloom and horror, these were congenial to a people which, since the burning of the Maid of France (1431), had seen an endless sequence of violence, murder, martyrdoms, and massacres of peers, Princes, Queens, Bishops, and humble folk.