Sir Walter Ralegh Part 5

To kingdoms strange, to lands far-off addressed,

and of the irresistible power of 'her memory' in 1592

To call me back, to leave great honour's thought, To leave my friends, my fortune, my attempt; To leave the purpose I so long had sought, And hold both cares and comforts in contempt.

[Sidenote: _Belphoebe._]

Concurrent testimony in favour of a date for the book later than 1589, though much prior to 1603, is afforded by the use in it of the name Belphoebe:

A queen she was to me--no more Belphoebe; A lion then--no more a milk-white dove; A prisoner in her breast I could not be; She did untie the gentle chains of love.

Belphoebe was a word coined apparently by Spenser. To the poem of _Cynthia_ Spenser had said he owed the idea of the name, implying that it was of his coinage. It was fas.h.i.+oned, he stated, 'according to Ralegh's excellent conceit of Cynthia, Cynthia and Phoebe being both names of Diana.' Ralegh, by the introduction of the name into his _Cynthia_, at once has dated the canto in which it occurs as not earlier than 1591, or, perhaps, than 1595, and indicated his desire to link his own verses to the eventful meeting

among the coolly shade Of the green alders, by the Mulla's sh.o.r.e.

[Sidenote: _Ralegh's Sonnet._]

Spenser referred again to the poem of _Cynthia_, and to Ralegh's poetic greatness, in the most beautiful of the sonnets offered to his several patrons at the end of his surpa.s.sing romance and allegory:

To thee, that art the Summer's Nightingale, Thy Sovereign G.o.ddess's most dear delight, Why do I send this rustic Madrigal, That may thy tuneful ear unseason quite?

Thou only fit this argument to write, In whose high thoughts Pleasure hath built her bower, And dainty Love learned sweetly to indite.

My rhymes I know unsavoury and sour, To taste the streams that, like a golden shower, Flow from the fruitful head of thy Love's praise; Fitter perhaps to thunder martial stowre, Whenso thee list thy lofty Muse to raise; Yet, till that thou thy Poem wilt make known, Let thy fair Cynthia's praises be thus rudely shown.

It was his return for tribute in kind. By the side of Ralegh's sonnet its flattery hardly seems extravagant:--

Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay, Within that temple where the vestal flame Was wont to burn; and pa.s.sing by that way, To see that buried dust of living fame, Whose tomb fair Love and fairer Virtue kept, All suddenly I saw the Fairy Queen, At whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept; And from thenceforth those graces were not seen, For they this Queen attended; in whose stead Oblivion laid him down on Laura's hea.r.s.e.

Hereat the hardest stones were seen to bleed, And groans of buried ghosts the heavens did pierce: Where Homer's spright did tremble all for grief, And cursed the access of that celestial thief.

[Sidenote: _Poetic Gifts._]

Before this, or Spenser's eulogy on him, was printed, Ralegh had acquired the reputation at Court of a poet. Puttenham, a critic of high repute, had, in _The Art of English Poesy_, printed in 1589, p.r.o.nounced 'for ditty and amorous ode, Sir Walter Ralegh's vein most lofty, insolent, and pa.s.sionate.' By 'insolent,' not 'condolent,' as Anthony Wood quotes, Puttenham meant original. His first public appearance as a poet was in 1576, when in grave and sounding lines he maintained Gascoigne's merits against envious detractors, as if with a presentiment of his own fate--

For whoso reaps renown above the rest, With heaps of hate shall surely be oppressed.

His flow of inspiration never dried up till his head rolled in the dust.

But the years between 1583 and 1593 seem, so far as dates, always in Ralegh's career distracting, can be fixed, to have been the period of his most copious poetic fruitfulness.

[Sidenote: _Their Limitations._]

Throughout his life he won the belief of men of letters and refinement in his poetic power. Their admiration has never failed him in the centuries which have followed. He has not been as fortunate in gaining and keeping the ear of the reading public. For that a poet has not only to be born, but to be made. Ralegh had a poet's gifts. He had music in his soul. He chose to think for himself. He possessed the art of the grand style. The twenty-first book of the _Cynthia_ errs in being overcharged with thought. It abounds in n.o.ble imagery. There is pathos as well as dignity. Its author, had he lived in the nineteenth century, in default of new worlds to explore, or Armadas to fight, might have written an _In Memoriam_. In previous English poetry no such dirge is to be found as his Epitaph on Sir Philip Sidney. A couple of stanzas will indicate its solemn music:--

There didst thou vanquish shame and tedious age, Grief, sorrow, sickness, and base fortune's might; Thy rising day saw never woeful night, But pa.s.sed with praise from off this worldly stage.

What hath he lost that such great grace hath won?

Young years for endless years, and hope unsure Of fortune's gifts for wealth that still shall dure: O happy race, with so great praises run!

He had as light a touch. He understood how to play with a conceit till it glances and dances and dazzles, as in his, for probably it is his, _Grace of Wit, of Tongue, of Face_, and in _Fain would I, but I dare not_. Praed was not happier in elaborate trifling than he in his _Cards and Dice_. Prior might have envied him _The Silent Lover_. His _Nymph's Reply to the Pa.s.sionate Shepherd_, if it be his, as Izaak Walton without suspicion a.s.sumes, and, if it did not compel comparison with Marlowe's more exquisite melody, would a.s.sure his place among the poets of the age. He was able to barb a fierce sarcasm with courtly grace. How his fancy could swoop down and strike, and pierce as it flashed, may be felt in each ringing stanza of _The Lie_--

Say to the Court, it glows And s.h.i.+nes like rotten wood; Say to the Church, it shows What's good, and doth no good: If Church and Court reply, Then give them both the lie.

His fancy could inspire in his _Pilgrimage_ one of the loftiest appeals in all literature to Heaven from the pedantry of human justice or injustice. He could match Cowley in metaphysical verse, as in _A Poesy to prove Affection is not Love_. But the Court spoilt him for a national poet, as it spoilt Cowley; as it might, if it had been more generous, have spoilt Dryden. He desired to be read between the lines by a cla.s.s which loved to think its own separate thoughts, and express its own separate feelings in its own diction, sometimes in its own jargon. He hunted for epigrams, and too often sparkled rather than burned. He was afraid not to be witty, to wrangle, as he himself has said,

In tickle points of niceness.

[Sidenote: _Disputed Authors.h.i.+p._]

Often he refined instead of soaring. In place of sympathising he was ever striving to concentrate men's regards on himself. Egotism is not inconsistent with the heat of inspiration, when it is unconscious, when the poet sings because he must, and bares his own heart. Ralegh rarely loses command of himself. He is perpetually seen registering the effects his flights produce. Apparently he had no ambition for popular renown as a poet. He did not print his verses. He cannot be said to have claimed any of them but the _Farewell to the Court_. His authors.h.i.+p of some, now admitted to be by him, has been confidently questioned. A critic so judicious as Hallam, for reasons which he does not hint, and a student as laborious as Isaac D'Israeli, have doubted his t.i.tle to _The Lie_, otherwise described as _The Soul's Errand_, which seems to demonstrate his authors.h.i.+p by its scornful and cynical haughtiness embodied in a wave of magnificent rhythm. Verses, instinct with his peculiar wit, like _The Silent Lover_, have been given away to Lord Pembroke, Sir Robert Ayton, and others. Its famous stanza--

Silence in love bewrays more woe Than words, though ne'er so witty; A beggar that is dumb, you know, Deserveth double pity!

was in the middle of last century boldly a.s.signed to Lord Chesterfield.

His compositions circulated from hand to hand at Court. They were read in polished coteries. So little did they ever become a national possession that, complete or incomplete, the most considerable of them has vanished, all but a fragment. Small as is the whole body of verse attributed to him, not all is clearly his. Dr. Hannah, and other ardent admirers of his muse, have been unable to satisfy themselves whether he really wrote _False Love and True Love_, with its s.h.i.+fting rhythm, and its bewitching scattered phrases; the Shepherd's fantastically witty _Description of Love_, or _Anatomy of Love_--

It is a yea, it is a nay;

or the perfect conceit, which Waller could not have bettered in wit or equalled in vivacity, with the refrain--

What care I how fair she be!

Twenty-seven other poems, among them, the bright sneering _Invective against Women_, have been put down to him on no other ground than that they cannot be traced to a different source. He might have been the author of the graceful _Praise of his Sacred Diana_. He might have sighed for a land devoid of envy,

Unless among The birds, for prize of their sweet song.

From him might have come the airy melody of the charming eclogue _Phyllida's Love-call to her Corydon_, which invites the genius of a Mendelssohn to frame it in music. He might have penned in his prison cell the knell for the tragedy of human life, _De Morte_. He might have been the shepherd minstrel of the flowers--

You pretty daughters of the earth and sun.

But, unfortunately, the sole pretext for affirming his t.i.tle, as the editors of the 1829 collection of his works affirmed it, is that the poems are found in the _Reliquiae Wottonianae_, in Davison's _Poetical Rhapsody_, or in _England's Helicon_, and are there marked 'Ignoto.'

[Sidenote: _Carelessness of Literary Renown._]

The a.s.signment, often, as Mr. Bullen shows in his editions of _England's Helicon_, and _A Poetical Rhapsody_, without the slightest authority or foundation, of poetic foundlings of rare charm and distinction to Ralegh is a token of the prevalent belief in the unfathomed range of his powers. At the same time it implies that he had never been adopted, and identified, by the contemporary public specifically as a poet. He would not be discontented with the degree and kind of the poetic fame conceded to him. Had he coveted more he would have been at more pains to stamp his verses. His poetic gift he valued merely as a weapon in his armoury, like many others. It held its own and a more important place in his career. Imagination, which might have made a poet, elevated and illuminated the captain's and the courtier's ambition and acts. If it put him at a disadvantage in a race for power with a Robert Cecil, it carried him to Guiana, and gave him the palm in the glorious struggle at the mouth of Cadiz harbour; it inspired him in the more tremendous strife with judicial obliquity; it supported him on the scaffold in Palace Yard.

CHAPTER IX.

THE REVENGE. (September, 1591).

[Sidenote: _Sir Richard Grenville._]

Long after Ralegh began to be recognized in his new circle as a poet, he first showed himself a master of prose diction. The occasion came from his loss of an opportunity for personal distinction of a kind he preferred to literary laurels. The hope and the disappointment alike testify that, whatever had been the Queen's demeanour in 1589, she frowned no longer in 1591. Ess.e.x's temporary disgrace, on account of his marriage with Lady Sidney in 1590, had improved Ralegh's prospects. So much in favour was he that, in the spring of 1591, he had been commissioned as Vice-Admiral of a fleet of six Queen's s.h.i.+ps, attended by volunteer vessels and provision boats. Lord Thomas Howard, second son of the Duke of Norfolk beheaded in 1572, commanded in chief. The object of the expedition was to intercept the Spanish plate fleet at the Azores. Ralegh's cousin and friend, the stern and wayward but gallant Sir Richard Grenville, finally was subst.i.tuted for him. There is no evidence that the change was meant for a censure. Much more probably it was a token of the Queen's personal regard. He sent with the squadron his s.h.i.+p, the Ark Ralegh, under the command of Captain Thynne, another of his innumerable connexions in the West. The English had to wait for the plate galleons so long at the Azores that news was brought to Spain.

A fleet of fifty-three Spanish sail was despatched as convoy. Ralegh was engaged officially in Devons.h.i.+re. The Council directed him in May to send off a pinnace to tell Howard that this great Spanish force had been descried off Scilly.

[Sidenote: _The Fight._]

The warning arrived too late. The Spaniards surprised the fleet on September 10, when many of its men were ash.o.r.e. Grenville in the Revenge covered the embarkation. Thus he lost the wind. He mustered on board his flags.h.i.+p scarce a hundred sound men. Soon he was hemmed in. The Foresight stayed near him for two hours, and battled bravely, but finally had to retire. For fifteen hours he fought the squadron of Seville, five great galleons, with ten more to back them. Crippled by many wounds, he kept the upper deck. Nothing was to be seen but the naked hull of a s.h.i.+p, and that almost a skeleton. She had received 800 shot of great artillery, some under water. The deck was covered with the limbs and carcases of forty valiant men. The rest were all wounded and painted with their own blood. Her masts had been shot overboard. All her tackle was cut asunder. Her upper works were razed and level with the water. She was incapable of receiving any direction or motion, except that given her by the billows. Three Spanish galleons had been burnt.