excellence. The following pages will be found far less grave than those of many such collections; and I have no apology to offer for the fact. Inasmuch as the lyric demands a grasp of the subtler forms of human passion and emotion, combined with a consummate mastery of form and of the music of speech, it is but natural that all literatures should display the lyric amongst the latest of literary growths. Despite what must be admitted as to an impersonal lyrical quality inhering in much early popular poetry, an age in which the gift of lyric expression is widely diffused, must be alike removed from the simplicity and immaturity which is content to note in its literature the direct effects of the phenomena of the outside world and no more, and from that complexity of conditions and that tendency to intellectualize emotion which characterize a time like our own. In an age lyrically gifted, we may look for innumerable points of contact between the spirit of the time and its literature, for the most beautiful and fervent thoughts couched in the most beautiful and fervent language; in such an age we may expect the nicest adjustment and equilibrium of the real and the ideal, each performing its legitimate function and contributing in due proportion to the perfect realization of truth in its choicest form, beauty. Such an age was that of the Elizabethan Lyric, which bloomed with a flower-like diversity of form, color, and fragrance from the boyhood of Shakespeare to the accession of Charles I. The Elizabethan lyric had its origin in culture, not among the people; and the culture of the England of the sixteenth century was the culture of Italy. No one who pretended to gentility could afford to be ignorant of the Italian language, and no one who claimed politeness could ignore her literature or her art. A familiar passage of Roger Ascham dilates 2 upon "the enchantments of Circe, brought out of Italy, to mar men's manners in England, much by example of ill life, but more by precepts of fond books of late translated out of Italian into English, sold in every shop in London"; and laments that the young "have in more reverence the triumphs of Petrarch than the Genesis of Moses." 1 Indeed even the classical mania of the day came clothed in Italian garb, and the classics most imitated and admired in England were those most esteemed in Italy. But however widely diffused this superficial Italianism, literary culture was in the earlier decades of the century confined to the society surrounding princes, and Puttenham's term for the early English poets, "courtly makers," is thus peculiarly fitting. We may thus disregard all earlier attempts and state that the history of the English lyric begins with the life of the first English court which felt the rays of the arisen sun of the Renaissance. That court was the court of Henry VIII, and Tottel's Miscellany, not printed until 1557, is the treasury into which was garnered the earliest lyrical harvest of England. The Earl of Surrey, Thomas Lord Vaux, Sir Thomas Wyatt, George Boleyn Lord Rochford, brother to the unfortunate Queen Anne, even Henry himself who wrote, somewhat inconsistently, on constancy in love—all were notable lyrical poets in their day; and it is worthy of remembrance that few, if any, of the lyrists of Tottel's Miscellany were not courtiers themselves, or not under the immediate patronage of the court. As time went on, however, two other influences made --- 1 The Scholemaster, ed. Arber, pp. 78, 92. 2 "And in her Majesty's time that now is are sprong up another crew of courtly makers, noblemen and gentlemen of her Majesty's own servants, who have written excellently well," etc. Puttenham, The Art of English Poetry ed. Arber, p. 75. 3 See Flügel's Liedersammlungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts, besonders aus der Zeit Heinrich's VIII, Anglia XII, 225 f., and Chappell, Old English Popular Music, I, 42f. ture. themselves felt in the lyric equally with other forms of literaIf culture was derived through the social life of the court, the learning of the time, in which the courtiers shared in no mean part, was based upon a study of the ancients. No less were the scholars and courtiers Englishmen, and hence before long we find the foreign lyrical graft, strengthened by a real love and study of the classics, and rendered hardy by the infusion of a genuine vernacular spirit. The combination of these elements, that of Italian, and, to a lesser degree, French and Spanish culture, classic, especially Roman learning, assimilated to English feeling and manner of thought, give us the literary spirit of the age of Elizabeth. In Tottel's Miscellany and The Paradise of Dainty Devices, with the possible addition of Clement Robinson's A Handful of Pleasant Delights, will be found the bulk of the better lyrics written before the accession of Queen Elizabeth. These collections are representative because they are the product of contemporary educated taste, selecting and choosing from a considerable mass of material already popular with a limited but cultivated audience of readers. A wide diffusion of the gift of lyrical composition is always accompanied by a far wider diffusion of appreciation for lyric art. The work of these earlier miscellanies was prentice work, much of it; but prentice work on good models and not infrequently intrinsically of no mean standard. Many of the older poets, such as Hunnis, Edwards, and the Earl of Oxford, all contributors to The Paradise, and others, such as Turberville, Googe, and Gascoigne, lived well into Elizabeth's reign, and did their part towards preparing the way for the glorious outburst of song which followed the publication of The Shepherds' Calendar in 1579. Few sovereigns have witnessed such social and literary changes as Queen Elizabeth; indeed, the advance of half a century in many other ages have scarcely equalled the strides of a single decade in this singularly quickened time. This was more striking in literature than in almost any other field of activity. Elizabeth had gone to school to excellent Roger Ascham in childhood and laughed at the rude cleverness of Heywood the epigrammatist; she had sonneted in limping Poulter's measure in young womanhood; and lived to receive the literary homage of men like Sidney, Spenser, and Raleigh and to know the glories of the Shakespearean drama in the height of its splendor. There is reason for placing the beginning of the Elizabethan outburst of lyrical poetry at 1575. In that year George Gascoigne, the most important literary figure between Surrey and Spenser, was still at the height of a popularity which seems to have been considerable, and which was based very largely upon a happy lyrical vein and a ready metrical facility. Gascoigne died two years later, and few of his poetical contemporaries long survived him, if we except Whetstone and Churchyard, who are both distinctly unlyrical, if not unpoetical. To this we may add the fact that, in 1576, The Paradise of Dainty Devices gathered up what was then regarded as the choicest lyrical poetry of the period just concluded. On the other hand, in 1575, Spenser, Greville, Lodge, Greene, and Harvey, the classical mentor of Spenser, were already at Cambridge, whilst Lyly, Peele, and Watson remained at Oxford, which Sidney had just quitted to be introduced at court and to proceed upon his foreign travels. The influences that made these men poets were thus at work while they were students at the Universities; for, setting aside the case of Spenser's contributions to The Theatre of Voluptuous Worldlings, in 1569, which not even Dr. Grosart's zeal has rendered wholly unapocryphal,' we know from the letters between the two that Harvey and Spenser were much 1 See his ed. of Spenser, I, 15-23. interested in poetry at Cambridge well before the eighties;1 and it is likely that Lodge at least, if not Greene and Watson, began to write before their departure for London. Within the ten years that followed, each of the authors mentioned had made a name for himself in literature. The decade, 1580-1590, may be regarded as the period of the supremacy of the pastoral. During this period The Shepherds' Calendar and Sidney's Arcadia (although the latter was not printed until 1590) were the most pervasive literary influences. Euphues could alone question the supremacy of these works, and Euphues, though not a pastoral, fell in with the prevailing fashion in not a few particulars. At court, too, Lyly and Peele were cultivating a species of the drama, which, if largely classical in subject, was often pastoral in form, in imagery, and the use of allegory. (E.g., Peele's The Arraignment of Paris or Lyly's Gallathea.) The Arcadia is full of lyrical verse; but Sidney is scarcely here at his best, and there was in him a finer lyrical chord which thrilled in the rich music of Astrophel and Stella. Though surprisingly successful, especially in longer and statelier pastoral lyrics (cf. the Canzon Pastoral in honor of Elizabeth, and the Dirge for the Shepherdess Dido, in April and November respectively, of the Shepherds' Calendar), Spenser too was so much more, that to him the pastoral lyric became little beyond a passing mood. Notwithstanding then that to these two great poets the prevalence of the mode is due, we must look to others for the more limited and distinctive development of the pastoral lyric: whether displayed in the dainty songs interspersed through the dramas of Lyly and Peele, in the equally beautiful amorous verse of the romances of Lodge and Greene, or in the charming little idyls of Breton's poetical booklets. 1 These letters were published by Harvey in 1580. See Dr. Grosart's ed. of Harvey. |