Minor Poems of Michael Drayton Part 1

Minor Poems of Michael Drayton.

by Michael Drayton.

INTRODUCTION

Michael Drayton was born in 1563, at Harts.h.i.+ll, near Atherstone, in Warwicks.h.i.+re, where a cottage, said to have been his, is still shown. He early became a page to Sir Henry Goodere, at Polesworth Hall: his own words give the best picture of his early years here.[1] His education would seem to have been good, but ordinary; and it is very doubtful if he ever went to a university.[2] Besides the authors mentioned in the Epistle to Henry Reynolds, he was certainly familiar with Ovid and Horace, and possibly with Catullus: while there seems no reason to doubt that he read Greek, though it is quite true that his references to Greek authors do not prove any first-hand acquaintance. He understood French, and read Rabelais and the French sonneteers, and he seems to have been acquainted with Italian.[3] His knowledge of English literature was wide, and his judgement good: but his chief bent lay towards the history, legendary and otherwise, of his native country, and his vast stores of learning on this subject bore fruit in the _Polyolbion_.

While still at Polesworth, Drayton fell in love with his patron's younger daughter, Anne;[4] and, though she married, in 1596, Sir Henry Rainsford of Clifford, Drayton continued his devotion to her for many years, and also became an intimate friend of her husband's, writing a sincere elegy on his death.[5] About February, 1591, Drayton paid a visit to London, and published his first work, the _Harmony of the Church_, a series of paraphrases from the Old Testament, in fourteen-syllabled verse of no particular vigour or grace. This book was immediately suppressed by order of Archbishop Whitgift, possibly because it was supposed to savour of Puritanism.[6] The author, however, published another edition in 1610; indeed, he seems to have had a fondness for this style of work; for in 1604 he published a dull poem, _Moyses in a Map of his Miracles_, re-issued in 1630 as _Moses his Birth and Miracles_. Accompanying this piece, in 1630, were two other 'Divine poems': _Noah's Floud_, and _David and Goliath_. _Noah's Floud_ is, in part, one of Drayton's happiest attempts at the catalogue style of bestiary; and Mr. Elton finds in it some foreshadowing of the manner of _Paradise Lost_. But, as a whole, Drayton's attempts in this direction deserve the oblivion into which they, in common with the similar productions of other authors, have fallen. In the dedication and preface to the _Harmony of the Church_ are some of the few traces of Euphuism shown in Drayton's work; pa.s.sages in the _Heroical Epistles_ also occur to the mind.[7] He was always averse to affectation, literary or otherwise, and in Elegy viij deliberately condemns Lyly's fantastic style.

Probably before Drayton went up to London, Sir Henry Goodere saw that he would stand in need of a patron more powerful than the master of Polesworth, and introduced him to the Earl and Countess of Bedford.

Those who believe[8] Drayton to have been a Pope in petty spite, identify the 'Idea' of his earlier poems with Lucy, Countess of Bedford; though they are forced to acknowledge as self-evident that the 'Idea' of his later work is Anne, Lady Rainsford. They then proceed to say that Drayton, after consistently honouring the Countess in his verse for twelve years, abruptly transferred his allegiance, not forgetting to heap foul abuse on his former patroness, out of pique at some temporary withdrawal of favour. Not only is this directly contrary to all we know and can infer of Drayton's character, but Mr. Elton has decisively disproved it by a summary of bibliographical and other evidence. Into the question it is here unnecessary to enter, and it has been mentioned only because it alone, of the many Drayton-controversies, has cast any slur on the poet's reputation.

In 1593, Drayton published _Idea, the Shepherds Garland_, in nine Eclogues; in 1606 he added a tenth, the best of all, to the new edition, and rearranged the order, so that the new eclogue became the ninth. In these Pastorals, while following the _Shepherds Calendar_ in many ways, he already displays something of the st.u.r.dy independence which characterized him through life. He abandons Spenser's quasi-rustic dialect, and, while keeping to most of the pastoral conventions, such as the singing-match and threnody, he contrives to introduce something of a more natural and homely strain. He keeps the political allusions, notably in the Eclogue containing the song in praise of _Beta_, who is, of course, Queen Elizabeth. But an over-bold remark in the last line of that song was struck out in 1606; and the new eclogue has no political reference. He is not ashamed to allude directly to Spenser; and indeed his direct debts are limited to a few scattered phrases, as in the _Ballad_ of _Dowsabel_. Almost to the end of his literary career, Drayton mentions Spenser with reverence and praise.[9]

It is in the songs interspersed in the Eclogues that Drayton's best work at this time is to be found: already his metrical versatility is discernible; for though he doubtless remembered the many varieties of metre employed by Spenser in the _Calendar_, his verses already bear a stamp of their own. The long but impetuous lines, such as 'Trim up her golden tresses with Apollo's sacred tree', afford a striking contrast to the archaic romance-metre, derived from _Sir Thopas_ and its fellows, which appears in _Dowsabel_, and it again to the melancholy, murmuring cadences of the lament for Elphin. It must, however, be confessed that certain of the songs in the 1593 edition were full of recondite conceits and laboured ant.i.theses, and were rightly struck out, to be replaced by lovelier poems, in the edition of 1606. The song to Beta was printed in _Englands Helicon_, 1600; here, for the first time, appeared the song of _Dead Love_, and for the only time, _Rowlands Madrigal_. In these songs, Drayton offends least in grammar, always a weak point with him; in the body of the Eclogues, in the earlier Sonnets, in the Odes, occur the most extraordinary and perplexing inversions. Quite the most striking feature of the Eclogues, especially in their later form, is their bold attempt at greater realism, at a breaking-away from the conventional images and scenery.

Having paid his tribute to one poetic fas.h.i.+on, Drayton in 1594 fell in with the prevailing craze for sonneteering, and published _Ideas Mirrour_, a series of fifty-one 'amours' or sonnets, with two prefatory poems, one by Drayton and one by an unknown, signing himself _Gorbo il fidele_. The t.i.tle of these poems Drayton possibly borrowed from the French sonneteer, de Pontoux: in their style much recollection of Sidney, Constable, and Daniel is traceable. They are ostensibly addressed to his mistress, and some of them are genuine in feeling; but many are merely imitative exercises in conceit; some, apparently, trials in metre. These amours were again printed, with the t.i.tle of 'sonnets', in _1599_[10], 1600, _1602_, 1603, _1605_, 1608, 1610, 1613, _1619_, and 1631, during the poet's lifetime. It is needless here to discuss whether Drayton were the 'rival poet' to Shakespeare, whether these sonnets were really addressed to a man, or merely to the ideal Platonic beauty; for those who are interested in these points, I subjoin references to the sonnets which touch upon them.[11] From the prentice-work evident in many of the _Amours_, it would seem that certain of them are among Drayton's earliest poems; but others show a craftsman not meanly advanced in his art. Nevertheless, with few exceptions, this first 'bundle of sonnets' consists rather of trials of skill, bubbles of the mind; most of his sonnets which strike the reader as touched or penetrated with genuine pa.s.sion belong to the editions from 1599 onwards; implying that his love for Anne Goodere, if at all represented in these poems, grew with his years, for the 'love-parting' is first found in the edition of 1619. But for us the question should not be, are these sonnets genuine representations of the personal feeling of the poet? but rather, how far do they arouse or echo in us as individuals the universal pa.s.sion? There are at least some of Drayton's sonnets which possess a direct, instant, and universal appeal, by reason of their simple force and straightforward ring; and not in virtue of any subtle charm of sound and rhythm, or overmastering splendour of diction or thought. Ornament vanishes, and soberness and simplicity increase, as we proceed in the editions of the sonnets. Drayton's chief attempt in the jewelled or ornamental style appeared in 1595, with the t.i.tle of _Endimion and Phoebe_, and was, in a sense, an imitation of Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_. _Hero and Leander_ is, as Swinburne says, a shrine of Parian marble, illumined from within by a clear flame of pa.s.sion; while _Endimion and Phoebe_ is rather a curiously wrought tapestry, such as that in Mortimer's Tower, woven in splendid and harmonious colours, wherein, however, the figures attain no clearness or subtlety of outline, and move in semi-conventional scenery. It is, none the less, graceful and impressive, and of a like musical fluency with other poems of its cla.s.s, such as _Venus and Adonis_, or _Salmacis and Hermaphrodius_. Parts of it were re-set and spoilt in a 1606 publication of Drayton's, called _The Man in the Moone_.

In 1593 and 1594 Drayton also published his earliest pieces on the mediaeval theme of the 'Falls of the Ill.u.s.trious'; they were _Peirs Gavesson_ and _Matilda the faire and chaste daughter of the Lord Robert Fitzwater_. Here Drayton followed in the track of Boccaccio, Lydgate, and the _Mirrour for Magistrates_, walking in the way which Chaucer had derided in his _Monkes Tale_: and with only too great fidelity does Drayton adapt himself to the dullnesses of his model: fine rhetoric is not altogether wanting, and there is, of course, the consciousness that these subjects deal with the history of his beloved country, but neither these, nor _Robert, Duke of Normandy_ (1596), nor _Great Cromwell, Earl of Ess.e.x_ (1607 and 1609), nor the _Miseries of Margaret_ (1627) can escape the charge of tediousness.[12] _England's Heroical Epistles_ were first published in 1597, and other editions, of 1598, 1599, and 1602, contain new epistles. These are Drayton's first attempt to strike out a new and original vein of English poetry: they are a series of letters, modelled on Ovid's _Heroides_,[13] addressed by various pairs of lovers, famous in English history, to each other, and arranged in chronological order, from Henry II and Rosamond to Lady Jane Grey and Lord Guilford Dudley. They are, in a sense, the most important of Drayton's writings, and they have certainly been the most popular, up to the early nineteenth century. In these poems Drayton foreshadowed, and probably inspired, the smooth style of Fairfax, Waller, and Dryden. The metre, the grammar, and the thought, are all perfectly easy to follow, even though he employs many of the Ovidian 'turns' and 'clenches'. A certain attempt at realization of the different characters is observable, but the poems are fine rhetorical exercises rather than realizations of the dramatic and pa.s.sionate possibilities of their themes. In 1596, Drayton, as we have seen, published the _Mortimeriados_, a kind of epic, with Mortimer as its hero, of the wars between King Edward II and the Barons.[14] It was written in the seven-line stanza of Chaucer's _Troilus and Cressida_ and Spenser's _Hymns_. On its republication in 1603, with the t.i.tle of the _Barons' Wars_, the metre was changed to _ottava rima_, and Drayton showed, in an excellent preface, that he fully appreciated the principles and the subtleties of the metrical art.

While possessing many fine pa.s.sages, the _Barons' Wars_ is somewhat dull, lacking much of the poetry of the older version; and does not escape from Drayton's own criticism of Daniel's Chronicle Poems: 'too much historian in verse, ... His rhymes were smooth, his metres well did close, But yet his manner better fitted prose'.[15] The description of Mortimer's Tower in the sixth book recalls the ornate style of _Endimion and Phoebe_, while the fifth book, describing the miseries of King Edward, is the most moving and dramatic. But there is a general lifelessness and lack of movement for which these purple pa.s.sages barely atone. The cause of the production of so many chronicle poems about this time has been supposed[16] to be the desire of showing the horrors of civil war, at a time when the queen was growing old, and no successor had, as it seemed, been accepted. Also they were a kind of parallel to the Chronicle Play; and Drayton, in any case even if we grant him to have been influenced by the example of Daniel, never needed much incentive to treat a national theme.

About this time, we find Drayton writing for the stage. It seems unnecessary here to discuss whether the writing of plays is evidence of Drayton's poverty, or his versatility;[17] but the fact remains that he had a hand in the production of about twenty. Of these, the only one which certainly survives is _The first part of the true and honorable historie, of the life of Sir John Oldcastle, the good Lord Cobham,_ &c.

It is practically impossible to distinguish Drayton's share in this curious play, and it does not, therefore, materially a.s.sist the elucidation of the question whether he had any dramatic feeling or skill. It can be safely affirmed that the dramatic instinct was nor uppermost in his mind; he was a Seneca rather than a Euripides: but to deny him all dramatic idea, as does Dr. Whitaker, is too severe. There is decided, if slender, dramatic skill and feeling in certain of the _Nymphals_. Drayton's persons are usually, it must be said, rather figures in a tableau, or series of tableaux; but in the second and seventh _Nymphals_, and occasionally in the tenth, there is real dramatic movement. Closely connected with this question is the consideration of humour, which is wrongly denied to Drayton. Humour is observable first, perhaps, in the _Owle_ (1604); then in the _Ode to his Rival_ (1619); and later in the _Nymphidia_, _Shepheards Sirena_, and _Muses Elyzium_. The second _Nymphal_ shows us the quiet laughter, the humorous twinkle, with which Drayton writes at times. The subject is an [Greek: agon] or contest between two shepherds for the affections of a nymph called Lirope: Lalus is a vale-bred swain, of refined and elegant manners, skilled, nevertheless, in all manly sports and exercises; Cleon, no less a master in physical prowess, was nurtured by a hind in the mountains; the contrast between their manners is admirably sustained: Cleon is rough, inclined to be rude and scoffing, totally without tact, even where his mistress is concerned. Lalus remembers her upbringing and her tastes; he makes no unnecessary or ostentatious display of wealth; his gifts are simple and charming, while Cleon's are so grotesquely unsuited to a swain, that it is tempting to suppose that Drayton was quietly satirizing Marlowe's _Pa.s.sionate Shepherd_. Lirope listens gravely to the swains in turn, and makes demure but provoking answers, raising each to the height of hope, and then casting them both down into the depths of despair; finally she refuses both, yet without altogether killing hope. Her first answer is a good specimen of her banter and of Drayton's humour.[18]

On the accession of James I, Drayton hastened to greet the King with a somewhat laboured song _To the Maiestie of King James_; but this poem was apparently considered to be premature: he cried _Vivat Rex_, without having said, _Mortua est eheu Regina_, and accordingly he suffered the penalty of his 'forward pen',[19] and was severely neglected by King and Court. Throughout James's reign a darker and more satirical mood possesses Drayton, intruding at times even into his strenuous recreation-ground, the _Polyolbion_, and manifesting itself more directly in his satires, the _Owle_ (1604), the _Moon-Calfe_ (1627), the _Man in the Moone_ (1606), and his verse-letters and elegies; while his disappointment with the times, the country, and the King, flashes out occasionally even in the Odes, and is heard in his last publication, the _Muses Elizium_ (1630). To counterbalance the disappointment in his hopes from the King, Drayton found a new and life-long friend in Walter Aston, of Tixall, in Staffords.h.i.+re; this gentleman was created Knight of the Bath by James, and made Drayton one of his esquires. By Aston's 'continual bounty' the poet was able to devote himself almost entirely to more congenial literary work; for, while Meres speaks of the _Polyolbion_ in 1598,[20] and we may easily see that Drayton had the idea of that work at least as early as 1594,[21] yet he cannot have been able to give much time to it till now. Nevertheless, the 'declining and corrupt times' worked on Drayton's mind and grieved and darkened his soul, for we must remember that he was perfectly prosperous then and was not therefore incited to satire by bodily want or distress.

In 1604 he published the _Owle_, a mild satire, under the form of a moral fable of government, reminding the reader a little of the _Parlement of Foules_. _The Man in the Moone_ (1606) is partly a recension of _Endimion and Phoebe_, but is a heterogeneous ma.s.s of weakly satire, of no particular merit. The _Moon-Calfe_ (1627) is Drayton's most savage and misanthropic excursion into the region of Satire; in which, though occasionally n.o.bly ironic, he is more usually coa.r.s.e and bl.u.s.tering, in the style of Marston.[22] In 1605 Drayton brought out his first 'collected poems', from which the _Eclogues_ and the _Owle_ are omitted; and in 1606 he published his _Poemes Lyrick and Pastorall_, _Odes_, _Eglogs_, _The Man in the Moone_. Of these the _Eglogs_ are a recension of the _Shepherd's Garland_ of 1593: we have already spoken of _The Man in the Moone_. The _Odes_ are by far the most important and striking feature of the book. In the preface, Drayton professes to be following Pindar, Anacreon, and Horace, though, as he modestly implies, at a great distance. Under the t.i.tle of _Odes_ he includes a variety of subjects, and a variety of metres; ranging from an _Ode to his Harp_ or _to his Criticks_, to a _Ballad of Agincourt_, or a poem on the Rose compared with his Mistress. In the edition of 1619 appeared several more Odes, including some of the best; while many of the others underwent careful revision, notably the _Ballad_. 'Sing wee the Rose,' perhaps because of its unintelligibility, and the Ode to his friend John Savage, perhaps because too closely imitated from Horace, were omitted. Drayton was not the first to use the term _Ode_ for a lyrical poem, in English: Soothern in 1584, and Daniel in 1592 had preceded him; but he was the first to give the name popularity in England, and to lift the kind as Ronsard had lifted it in France; and till the time of Cowper no other English poet showed mastery of the short, staccato measure of the Anacreontic as distinct from the Pindaric Ode. In the _Odes_ Drayton shows to the fullest extent his metrical versatility: he touches the Skeltonic metre, the long ten-syllabled line of the _Sacrifice to Apollo_; and ascends from the smooth and melodious rhythms of the _New Year_ through the inspiring harp-tones of the _Virginian Voyage_ to the clangour and swing of the _Ballad of Agincourt_. His grammar is possibly more distorted here than anywhere, but, as Mr. Elton says, 'these are the obstacles of any poet who uses measures of four or six syllables.' His tone throughout is rather that of the harp, as played, perhaps, in Polesworth Hall, than that of any other instrument; but in 1619 Drayton has taken to him the lute of Carew and his compeers. In 1619 the style is lighter, the fancy gayer, more exquisite, more recondite. Most of his few metaphysical conceits are to be found in these later Odes, as in the _Heart_, the _Valentine_, and the _Crier_. In the comparison of the two editions the n.o.bler, if more strained, tone of the earlier is obvious; it is still Elizabethan, in its n.o.bility of ideal and purpose, in its enthusiasm, in its belief and confidence in England and her men; and this even though we catch a glimpse of the Jacobean woe in the _Ode to John Savage_: the 1619 Odes are of a different world; their spirit is lighter, more insouciant in appearance, though perhaps studiedly so; the rhythms are more fantastic, with less of strength and firmness, though with more of grace and superficial beauty; even the very textual alterations, while usually increasing the grace and the music of the lines, remind the reader that something of the old spontaneity and freshness is gone.

In 1607 and 1609, Drayton published two editions of the last and weakest of his mediaeval poems--the _Legend of Great Cromwell_; and for the next few years he produced nothing new, only attending to the publication of certain reprints and new editions. During this time, however, he was working steadily at the _Polyolbion_, helped by the patronage of Aston and of Prince Henry. In 1612-13, Drayton burst upon an indifferent world with the first part of the great poem, containing eighteen songs; the t.i.tle-page will give the best idea of the contents and plan of the book: 'Poly-Olbion or a Chorographicall Description of the Tracts, Riuers, Mountaines, Forests, and other Parts of this renowned Isle of Great Britaine, With intermixture of the most Remarquable Stories, Antiquities, Wonders, Rarityes, Pleasures, and Commodities of the same: Digested in a Poem by Michael Drayton, Esq. With a Table added, for direction to those occurrences of Story and Antiquities, whereunto the Course of the Volume easily leades not.' &c. On this work Drayton had been engaged for nearly the whole of his poetical career. The learning and research displayed in the poem are extraordinary, almost equalling the erudition of Selden in his Annotations to each Song. The first part was, for various reasons, a drug in the market, and Drayton found great difficulty in securing a publisher for the second part. But during the years from 1613 to 1622, he became acquainted with Drummond of Hawthornden through a common friend, Sir William Alexander of Menstry, afterwards Earl of Stirling. In 1618, Drayton starts a correspondence; and towards the end of the year mentions that he is corresponding also with Andro Hart, bookseller, of Edinburgh. The subject of his letter was probably the publication of the Second Part; which Drayton alludes to in a letter of 1619 thus: 'I have done twelve books more, that is from the eighteenth book, which was Kent, if you note it; all the East part and North to the river Tweed; but it lies by me; for the booksellers and I are in terms; they are a company of base knaves, whom I both scorn and kick at.' Finally, in 1622, Drayton got Marriott, Grismand, and Dewe, of London, to take the work, and it was published with a dedication to Prince Charles, who, after his brother's death, had given Drayton patronage. Drayton's preface to the Second Part is well worth quoting:

'_To any that will read it._ When I first undertook this Poem, or, as some very skilful in this kind have pleased to term it, this Herculean labour, I was by some virtuous friends persuaded, that I should receive much comfort and encouragement therein; and for these reasons; First, that it was a new, clear, way, never before gone by any; then, that it contained all the Delicacies, Delights, and Rarities of this renowned Isle, interwoven with the Histories of the Britons, Saxons, Normans, and the later English: And further that there is scarcely any of the n.o.bility or Gentry of this land, but that he is in some way or other by his Blood interested therein. But it hath fallen out otherwise; for instead of that comfort, which my n.o.ble friends (from the freedom of their spirits) proposed as my due, I have met with barbarous ignorance, and base detraction; such a cloud hath the Devil drawn over the world's judgment, whose opinion is in few years fallen so far below all ballatry, that the lethargy is incurable: nay, some of the Stationers, that had the selling of the First Part of this Poem, because it went not so fast away in the sale, as some of their beastly and abominable trash, (a shame both to our language and nation) have either despitefully left out, or at least carelessly neglected the Epistles to the Readers, and so have cozened the buyers with unperfected books; which these that have undertaken the Second Part, have been forced to amend in the First, for the small number that are yet remaining in their hands. And some of our outlandish, unnatural, English, (I know not how otherwise to express them) stick not to say that there is nothing in this Island worth studying for, and take a great pride to be ignorant in any thing thereof; for these, since they delight in their folly, I wish it may be hereditary from them to their posterity, that their children may be begg'd for fools to the fifth generation, until it may be beyond the memory of man to know that there was ever other of their families: neither can this deter me from going on with Scotland, if means and time do not hinder me, to perform as much as I have promised in my First Song:

Till through the sleepy main, to _Thuly_ I have gone, And seen the Frozen Isles, the cold _Deucalidon_, Amongst whose iron Rocks, grim _Saturn_ yet remains Bound in those gloomy caves with adamantine chains.

And as for those cattle whereof I spake before, _Odi profanum vulgus, et arceo_, of which I account them, be they never so great, and so I leave them. To my friends, and the lovers of my labours, I wish all happiness.

_Michael Drayton._'

The _Polyolbion_ as a whole is easy and pleasant to read; and though in some parts it savours too much of a mere catalogue, yet it has many things truly poetical. The best books are perhaps the xiij, xiv, and xv, where he is on his own ground, and therefore naturally at his best. It is interesting to notice how much attention and s.p.a.ce he devotes to Wales. He describes not only the 'wonders' but also the fauna and flora of each district; and of the two it would seem that the flowers interested him more. Though he was a keen observer of country sights and sounds (a fact sufficiently attested by the _Nymphidia_ and the _Nymphals_), it is evident that his interest in most things except flowers was rather momentary or conventional than continuous and heart-felt; but of the flowers he loves to talk, whether he weaves us a garland for the Thame's wedding, or gives us the contents of a maund of simples; and his love, if somewhat homely and unimaginative, is apparent enough. But the main inspiration, as it is the main theme, of the _Polyolbion_ is the glory and might and wealth, past, present, and future, of England, her possessions and her folk. Through all this glory, however, we catch the tone of Elizabethan sorrow over the 'Ruines of Time'; grief that all these mighty men and their works will perish and be forgotten, unless the poet makes them live for ever on the lips of men. Drayton's own voluminousness has defeated his purpose, and sunk his poem by its own bulk. Though it is difficult to go so far as Mr.

Bullen, and say that the only thing better than a stroll in the _Polyolbion_ is one in a Suss.e.x lane, it is still harder to agree with Canon Beeching, that 'there are few beauties on the road', the beauties are many, though of a quietly rural type, and the road, if long and winding, is of good surface, while its cranks const.i.tute much of its charm. It is doubtless, from the outside, an appalling poem in these days of epitomes and monographs, but it certainly deserves to be rescued from oblivion and read.

In 1618 Drayton contributed two _Elegies_ to Henry FitzGeoffrey's _Satyrs and Epigrames_. These were on the Lady Penelope Clifton, and on 'the death of the three sonnes of the Lord Sheffield, drowned neere where Trent falleth into Humber'. Neither is remarkable save for far-fetched conceits; they were reprinted in 1610, and again, with many others, in the volume of 1627. In 1619 Drayton issued a folio collected edition of his works, and reprinted it in 1620. In 1627 followed a folio of wholly fresh matter, including the _Battaile of Agincourt_; _the Miseries of Queene Margarite_, _Nimphidia_, _Quest of Cinthia_, _Shepheards Sirena_, _Moone-Calfe_, and _Elegies upon sundry occasions_.

The _Battaile of Agincourt_ is a somewhat otiose expansion, with purple patches, of the _Ballad_; it is, nevertheless, Drayton's best lengthy piece on a historical theme. Of the _Miseries of Queene Margarite_ and of the _Moone-Calfe_ we have already spoken. The most notable piece in the book is the _Nimphidia_. This poem of the Court of Fairy has 'invention, grace, and humour', as Canon Beeching has said. It would be interesting to know exactly when it was composed and committed to paper, for it is thought that the three fairy poems in Herrick's _Hesperides_ were written about 1626. In any case, Drayton's poem touches very little, and chiefly in the beginning, on the subject of any one of Herrick's three pieces. The style, execution, and impression left on the reader are quite different; even as they are totally unlike those of the _Midsummer Night's Dream_. Herrick's pieces are extraordinary combinations of the idea of 'King of Shadows', with a reality fantastically sober: the poems are steeped in moonlight. In Drayton all is clear day, or the most unromantic of nights; though everything is charming, there is no attempt at idealization, little of the higher faculty of imagination; but great realism, and much play of fancy.

Herrick's verses were written by Cobweb and Moth together, Drayton's by Puck. Granting, however, the initial deficiency in subtlety of charm, the whole poem is inimitably graceful and piquant. The gay humour, the demure horror of the witchcraft, the terrible seriousness of the battle, wonderfully realize the mock-heroic gigantesque; and while there is not the minute accuracy of Gulliver in Lilliput, Drayton did not write for a sceptical or too-prying audience; quite half his readers believed more or less in fairies. In the metre of the poem Drayton again echoes that of the older romances, as he did in _Dowsabel_. In the _Quest of Cinthia_, while ostensibly we come to the real world of mortals, we are really in a non-existent land of pastoral convention, in the most pseudo-Arcadian atmosphere in which Drayton ever worked. The metre and the language are, however, charmingly managed. _The Shepheards Sirena_ is a poem, apparently, 'where more is meant than meets the ear,' as so often in pastoral poetry[23]; it is difficult to see exactly what is meant; but the Jacobean strain of doubt and fear is there, and the poem would seem to have been written some time earlier than 1627. The _Elegies_ comprise a great variety of styles and themes; some are really threnodies, some verse-letters, some laments over the evil times, and one a summary of Drayton's literary opinions. He employs the couplet in his _Elegies_ with a masterly hand, often with a deliberately rugged effect, as in his broader Marstonic satire addressed to William Browne; while the line of greater smoothness but equal strength is to be seen in the letters to Sandys and Jeffreys. He is fantastic and conceited in most of the threnodies; but, as is natural, that on his old friend, Sir Henry Rainsford, is least artificial and fullest of true feeling. The epistle to _Henery Reynolds. Of Poets and Poesie_ shows Drayton as a sane and sagacious critic, ready to see the good, but keen to discern the weakness also; perhaps the clearest evidence of his critical skill is the way in which nearly all of his judgements on his contemporaries coincide with the received modern opinions.

In his later years Drayton enjoyed the patronage of the third Earl and Countess of Dorset; and in _1630_ he published his last volume, the _Muses Elizium_, of which he dedicated the pastoral part to the Earl, and the three divine poems at the end to the Countess. The _Muses Elizium_ proper consists of Ten Pastorals or Nymphals, prefaced by a _Description of Elizium_. The three divine poems have been mentioned before, and were _Noah's Floud_, _Moses his Birth and Miracles_, and _David and Goliah_. The _Nymphals_ are the crown and summary of much of the best in Drayton's work. Here he departed from the conventional type of pastoral, even more than in the _Shepherd's Garland_; but to say that he sang of English rustic life would hardly be true: the sixth _Nymphal_, allowing for a few pardonable exaggerations by the compet.i.tors, is almost all English, if we except the names; so is the tenth with the same exception; the first and fourth might take place anywhere, but are not likely in any country; the second is more conventional; the fifth is almost, but not quite, English; the third, seventh, and ninth are avowedly cla.s.sical in theme; while the eighth is a more delicate and subtle fairy poem than the _Nymphidia_. The fourth and tenth _Nymphals_ are also touched with the sadder, almost satiric vein; the former inveighing against the English imitation of foreigners and love of extravagance in dress; while the tenth complains of the improvident and wasteful felling of trees in the English forests. This last _Nymphal_, though designedly an epilogue, is probably rather a warning than a despairing lament, even though we conceive the old satyr to be Drayton himself. As a whole the _Nymphals_ show Drayton at his happiest and lightest in style and metre; at his moments of greatest serenity and even gaiety; an atmosphere of suns.h.i.+ne seems to envelope them all, though the sun sink behind a cloud in the last. His music now is that of a rippling stream, whereas in his earlier days he spoke weightier and more sonorous words, with a mouth of gold.[24]

To estimate the poetical faculty of Drayton is a somewhat perplexing task; for, while rarely subtle, or rising to empyrean heights, he wrote in such varied styles, on such various themes, that the task, at first, seems that of criticizing many poets, not one. But through all his work runs the same eminently English spirit, the same honesty and clearness of idea, the same stolidity of purpose, and not infrequently of execution also; the same enthusiasm characterizes all his earlier, and much of his later work; the enthusiasm especially characteristic of Elizabethan England, and shown by Drayton in his pa.s.sion for England and the English, in his triumphant joy in their splendid past, and his certainty of their future glory. As a poet, he lacked imagination and fine fury; he supplied their place by the airiest and clearest of fancies, by the strenuous labour of a great brain illumined by the steady flame of love for his country and for his lady. Mr. Courthope has said that he lacked loftiness and resolution of artistic purpose; without these, we ask, how could a man, not lavishly dowered with poetry in his soul, have achieved so much of it? It was his very fixity and loftiness of purpose, his English stubbornness and doggedness of resolution that enabled him to surmount so many obstacles of style and metre, of subject and thought. His two purposes, of glorifying his mistress and his friends, and of sounding England's glories past and future, while insisting on the dangers of a present decadence, never flagged or failed. All his poetry up to 1627 has this object directly or secondarily; and much after this date. Of the more abstract and universal aspects of his art he had not much conception; but he caught eagerly at the fas.h.i.+onable belief in the eternizing power of poetry; and had it not been that, where his patriotism was uppermost, he was deficient in humour and sense of proportion, he would have succeeded better: as it is, his more directly patriotic pieces are usually the dullest or longest of his works. He requires, like all other poets, the impulse of an absolutely personal and individual feeling, a moment of more intimate sympathy, to rouse him to his heights of song. Thus the _Ballad of Agincourt_ is on the very theme of all patriotic themes that most attracted him; Virginian and other Voyages lay very close to his heart; and in certain sonnets to his lady lies his only imperishable work. Of sheer melody and power of song he had little, apart from his themes: he could not have sat down and written a few lark's or nightingale's notes about nothing as some of his contemporaries were able to do: he required the stimulus of a subject, and if he were really moved thereby he beat the music out. Only in one or two of the later Odes, and in the volumes of 1627 and 1630, does his music ever seem to flow from him naturally. Akin to this quality of broad and extensive workmans.h.i.+p, to this faculty of taking a subject and when writing, with all thought concentrated on it, rather than on the method of writing about it, is his strange lack of what are usually called 'quotations'.

For this is not only due to the fact that he is little known; there are, besides, so few detached remarks or aphorisms that are separately quotable; so few examples of that _curiosa felicitas_ of diction: lines like these,

Thy Bowe, halfe broke, is peec'd with old desire; Her Bowe is beauty with ten thousand strings....

are rare enough. Drayton, in fact, comes as near controverting the statement _Poeta nascitur, non fit_, as any one in English literature: by diligent toil and earnest desire he won a place for himself in the second rank of English poets: through love he once set foot in the circle of the mightiest. Sincere he was always, simple often, sensuous rarely. His great industry, his careful study, and his great receptivity are shown in the unusual spectacle of a man who has sung well in the language of his youth, suddenly learning, in his age, the tongue spoken by the younger generation, and reproducing it with individuality and sureness of touch. It is in rhetoric, splendid or rugged, in argument, in plain statement or description, in the outline sketch of a picture, that Drayton excels; magic of atmosphere and colouring are rarely present. Stolidity is, perhaps, his besetting sin; yet it is the sign of a slow, not a dull, intellect; an intellect, like his heart, which never let slip what it had once taken to itself.

As a man Drayton would seem to have been an excellent type of the st.u.r.dy, clear-headed, but yet romantic and enthusiastic Englishman; gifted with much natural ability, sedulously increased by study; quietly humorous, self-restrained; and if temporarily soured by disappointment and the disjointed times, yet emerging at last into a greater serenity, a more unadulterated gaiety than had ever before characterized him. It is possible, but from his clear and sane balance of mind improbable, that many of his light later poems are due to deliberate self-blinding and self-deception, a walking in enchanted lands of the mind.

Of Drayton's three known portraits the earliest shows him at the age of thirty-six, and is now in the National Portrait Gallery. A look of quiet, speculative melancholy seems to pervade it; there is, as yet, no moroseness, no evidence of severe conflict with the world, no shadow of stress or of doubt. The second and best-known portrait shows us Drayton at the age of fifty, and was engraved by Hole, as a frontispiece to the poems of 1619. Here a notable change has come over the face; the mouth is hardened, and depressed at the corners through disappointment and disillusionment; the eyes are full of a pathos increased by the puzzled and perturbed uplift of the brows. Yet a stubbornness and tenacity of purpose invests the features and reminds us that Drayton is of the old and sound Elizabethan stock, 'on evil days though fallen.' Let it be remembered, that he was in 1613, when the portrait was taken, in more or less prosperous circ.u.mstances; it was the sad degeneracy, the meanness and feebleness of the generation around him, that chiefly depressed and embittered him. The final portrait, now in the Dulwich Gallery, represents the poet as a man of sixty-five; and is quite in keeping with the sunnier and calmer tone of his later poetry. It is the face of one who has not emerged unscathed from the world's conflict, but has attained to a certain calm, a measure of tranquillity, a portion of content, who has learnt the lesson that there is a soul of goodness in things evil. The Hole portrait shows him with long hair, small 'goatee'

beard, and aquiline nose drawn up at the nostrils: while the National portrait shows a type of nose and beard intermediate between the Hole and the Dulwich pictures: the general contour of the face, though the forehead is broad enough, is long and oval. Drayton seems to have been tall and thin, and to have been very susceptible of cold, and therefore to have hated Winter and the North.[25] He is said to have shared in the supper which caused Shakespeare's death; but his own verses[26] breathe the spirit of Milton's sonnet to Cyriack Skinner, rather than that of a devotee of Bacchus.

He died in 1631, possibly on December 23, and was buried under the North wall of Westminster Abbey. Meres's[27] opinion of his character during his early life is as follows: 'As Aulus Persius Flaccus is reported among al writers to be of an honest life and vpright conuersation: so Michael Drayton, _quem totics honoris et amoris causa nomino_, among schollers, souldiours, Poets, and all sorts of people is helde for a man of uertuous disposition, honest conversation, and well gouerned cariage; which is almost miraculous among good wits in these declining and corrupt times, when there is nothing but rogery in villanous man, and when cheating and craftines is counted the cleanest wit, and soundest wisedome.'[28] Fuller also, in a similar strain, says, 'He was a pious poet, his conscience having the command of his fancy, very temperate in his life, slow of speech, and inoffensive in company.'

In conclusion I have to thank Mr. H.M. Sanders, of Pembroke College, Oxford, for help and advice, and Professor Raleigh and Mr. R.W. Chapman for help and criticism while the volume was in the press. Above all, I am at every turn indebted to Professor Elton's invaluable _Michael Drayton_,[29] without which the work of any student of Drayton would be rendered, if not impossible, at least infinitely harder.

CYRIL BRETT.

ALTON, STAFFORDs.h.i.+RE.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Elegy viij, _To Henery Reynolds, Esquire_, p. 108.]

[Footnote 2: Sir Aston c.o.kayne, in 1658, says that he went to Oxford, while Fleay a.s.serts, without authority, that his university was probably Cambridge.]

[Footnote 3: Cf. the motto of _Ideas Mirrour_, the allusions to _Ariosto_ in the _Nymphidia_, p. 129; and above all, the _Heroical Epistles_; Dedic. of _Ep._ of _D._ of _Suffolk to Q. Margaret_: 'Sweet is the _French_ Tongue, more sweet the _Italian_, but most sweet are they both, if spoken by your admired self.' Cf. _Surrey to Geraldine_, ll. 5 sqq., with Drayton's note.]

[Footnote 4: Cf. Sonnet xij (ed. 1602), p. 42, ''Tis nine years now since first I lost my wit.' (This sonnet may, of course, occur in the supposed 1600 ed., which would fix an earlier date for Drayton's beginning of love.)]

[Footnote 5: Elegy ix, p. 113.]

[Footnote 6: Cf. Morley's ed. of _Barons' Wars_, &c. (1887), p. 6.]

[Footnote 7: Cf. _E.H. Ep._ 'Mat. to K.J.,' 100 sqq., &c.]

[Footnote 8: Professor Courthope and others. There was some excuse for blunders before the publication of Professor Elton's book; and they have been made easier by an unfortunate misprint. Professor Courthope twice misprints the first line of the Love-Parting Sonnet, as 'Since there's no help, come let us _rise_ and part', and, so printed, the line supports better the theory that the poem refers to a patroness and not to a mistress. Cf. Courthope, _Hist. Eng. Poetry_, iii. pp. 40 and 43.]

[Footnote 9: Cf. _E. and Phoebe_, sub fin.; _Shep. Sir._ 145-8; _Ep. Hy.

Reyn._ 79 sqq.]

[Footnote 10: Those reprints which were really new _editions_ are in italics.]

[Footnote 11: 1594 ed., Pref. Son. and nos. 12, 18, 28; 1599 ed., nos.

3, 31, 46; 1602 ed., 12, 27, 31; and 1603 ed., 47.]

[Footnote 12: Meres thought otherwise. Cf. _Palladis Tamia_ (1598), 'As Accius, M. Atilius, and Milithus were called _Tragediographi_, because they writ tragedies: so may wee truly terme Michael Drayton _Tragaediographus_ for his pa.s.sionate penning the downfals of valiant Robert of Normandy, chast Matilda, and great Gaueston.' Cf. Barnefield, _Poems: in diuers humors_ (ed. Arber, p. 119), 'And Drayton, whose wel-written Tragedies, And Sweete Epistles, soare thy fame to skies. Thy learned name is equall with the rest; Whose stately Numbers are so well addrest.']

[Footnote 13: Cf. Meres, _Palladis Tamia_ (1598), 'Michael Drayton doth imitate Ouid in his _England's Heroical Epistles_.']

[Footnote 14: Cf. id., _ibid._, 'As Lucan hath mournefully depainted the ciuil wars of Pompey and Caesar: so hath Daniel the ciuill wars of Yorke and Lancaster, and Drayton the civill wars of Edward the second and the Barons.']

[Footnote 15: Cf. Elegy viij. 126-8.]