Part 3

smiles furtively upon her suitor, whose clearsightedness avails him nothing, and who plays the game merrily to the end:--

“She deceiving, I believing, What need lovers wish for more?”

We who read are very far from wishing for anything more. With the Ettrick Shepherd, we are fain to remember that old tunes, and old songs, and well-worn fancies are best fitted for so simple and so ancient a theme:--

“A’ the world has been in love at ae time or ither o’ its life, and kens best hoo to express its ain passion. What see you ever in love-sangs that’s at a’ new? Never ae single word. It’s just the same thing over again, like a vernal shower patterin’ amang the buddin’ words. But let the lines come sweetly, and saftly, and a wee wildly too, frae the lips of Genius, and they shall delight a’ mankind, and womankind too, without ever wearyin’ them, whether they be said or sung. But try to be original, to keep aff a’ that ever has been said afore, for fear o’ plagiarism, or in ambition o’ originality, and your poem ’ill be like a bit o’ ice that you hae taken into your mouth unawares for a lump o’ white sugar.”

Burns’s unrivaled songs come the nearest, perhaps, to realizing this charming bit of description; and the Shepherd, anticipating Schopenhauer’s philosophy of love, is quite as prompt as Burns to declare its promise sweeter than its fulfillment:--

“Love is a soft, bright, balmy, tender, triumphant, and glorious lie, in place of which nature offers us in mockery, during a’ the rest o’ our lives, the puir, paltry, pitiful, fusionless, faded, cauldrified, and chittering substitute, Truth!”

This is not precisely the way in which we suffer ourselves nowadays to talk about truth, but a few generations back, people still cherished a healthy predilection for the comfortable delusions of life. Mingling with the music of the sweet old love-songs, lurking amid their passionate protestations, there is always a subtle sense of insecurity, a good-humored desire to enjoy the present, and not peer too closely into the perilous uncertainties of the future. Their very exaggerations, the quaint and extravagant conceits which offend our more exacting taste, are part of this general determination to be wisely blind to the ill-bred obtrusiveness of facts. Accordingly there is no staying the hand of an Elizabethan poet, or of his successor under the Restoration, when either undertakes to sing his lady’s praises. Sun, moon, and skies bend down to do her homage, and to acknowledge their own comparative dimness.

“Stars, indeed, fair creatures be,”

admits Wither indulgently, and pearls and rubies are not without their merits; but when the beauty of Arete dawns upon him, all things else seem dull and vapid by her side. Nay, his poetry, even, is born of her complaisance, his talents are fostered by her smiles, he gains distinction only as her favor may permit.

“I no skill in numbers had, More than every shepherd’s lad, Till she taught me strains that were Pleasing to her gentle ear. Her fair splendour and her worth From obscureness drew me forth. And, because I had no muse, She herself deigned to infuse All the skill by which I climb To these praises in my rhyme.”

Donne, the most ardent of lovers and the most crabbed of poets, who united a great devotion to his fond and faithful wife with a remarkably poor opinion of her sex in general, pushed his adulations to the extreme verge of absurdity. We find him writing to a lady sick of a fever that she cannot die because all creation would perish with her,--

“The whole world vapours in thy breath.”

After which ebullition, it is hardly a matter of surprise to know that he considered females in the light of creatures whom it had pleased Providence to make fools.

“Hope not for mind in women!”

is his warning cry; at their best, a little sweetness and a little wit form all their earthly portion. Yet the note of true passion struck by Donne in those glowing addresses, those dejected farewells to his wife, echoes like a cry of rapture and of pain out of the stillness of the past. Her sorrow at the parting rends his heart; if she but sighs, she sighs his soul away.

“When thou weep’st, unkindly kind, My life’s blood doth decay. It cannot be That thou lov’st me, as thou say’st, If in thine my life thou waste; Thou art the life of me.”

Again, in that strange poem “A Valediction of Weeping,” he finds her tears more than he can endure; and, with the fond exaggeration of a lover, he entreats forbearance in her grief:--

“O more than moon, Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere; Weep me not dead in thine arms, but forbear To teach the sea what it may do too soon. Let not the wind example find To do me more harm than it purposeth; Since thou and I sigh one another’s breath, Whoe’er sighs most is cruellest, and hastes the other’s death.”

There is a lingering sweetness in these lines, for all their manifest unwisdom, that is surpassed only by a pathetic sonnet of Drayton’s, where the pain of parting, bravely borne at first, grows suddenly too sharp for sufferance, and the lover’s pride breaks and melts into the passion of a last appeal:--

“Since there’s no helpe,--come, let us kisse and parte. Nay, I have done,--you get no more of me; And I am glad,--yea, glad with all my hearte, That thus so cleanly I myself can free. Shake hands forever!--cancel all our vows; And when we meet at any time againe, Be it not seene in either of our brows, That we one jot of former love retaine.

“Now--at the last gaspe of Love’s latest breath-- When, his pulse failing, passion speechless lies; When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death, And Innocence is closing up his eyes, Now! if thou would’st--when all have given him over-- From death to life thou might’st him yet recover.”

Here, at least, we have grace of sentiment and beauty of form combined to make a perfect whole. It seems strange indeed that Mr. Saintsbury, who gives such generous praise to Drayton’s patriotic poems, his legends, his epistles, even his prose prefaces, should have no single word to spare for this most tender and musical of leave-takings.

As for the capricious humors and overwrought imagery which disfigure so many of the early love-songs, they have received their full allotment of censure, and have provoked the scornful mirth of critics too staid or too sensitive to be tolerant. We hear more of them, sometimes, than of the merits which should win them forgiveness. Lodge, dazzled by Rosalynde’s beauty, is ill disposed to pass lightly over the catalogue of her charms. Her lips are compared to budded roses, her teeth to ranks of lilies; her eyes are

“sapphires set in snow, Refining heaven by every wink,”

her cheeks are blushing clouds, and her neck is a stately tower where the god of love lies captive. All things in nature contribute to her excellence:--

“With Orient pearl, with ruby red, With marble white, with sapphire blue, Her body every way is fed, Yet soft to touch, and sweet in view.”

But when this fair representative of all flowers and gems, “smiling to herself to think of her new entertained passion,” lifts up the music of her voice in that enchanting madrigal,--

“Love in my bosom, like a bee, Doth suck his sweet; Now with his wings he plays with me, Now with his feet,”--

we know her at once for the kinswoman and precursor of another and dearer Rosalind, who, with boyish swagger and tell-tale grace,

“like a ripe sister,”

gathers from the trees of Arden the first fruits of Orlando’s love. It was Lodge who pointed the way to that enchanted forest, where exiles and rustics waste the jocund hours, where toil and care are alike forgotten, where amorous verse-making represents the serious occupation of life, and where the thrice fortunate Jaques can afford to dally with melancholy for lack of any cankering sorrow at his heart.

William Habbington, who sings to us with such monotonous sweetness of Castara’s innocent joys, surpasses Lodge alike in the charm of his descriptions and in the extravagance of his follies. In reading him we are sharply reminded of Klopstock’s warning, that “a man should speak of his wife as seldom and with as much modesty as of himself;” for Habbington, who glories in the fairness and the chastity of his spouse, becomes unduly boastful now and then in vaunting these perfections to the world. He, at least, being safely married to Castara, feels none of that haunting insecurity which disturbs his fellow-poets.

“All her vows religious be, And her love she vows to me,”

he says complacently, and then stops to assure us in plain prose that she is “so unvitiated by conversation with the world that the subtle-minded of her sex would deem it ignorance.” Even to her husband-lover she is “thrifty of a kiss,” and in the marble coldness and purity of her breast his glowing roses find a chilly sepulchre. Cupid, perishing, it would seem, from a mere description of her merits, or, as Habbington singularly expresses it,--

“But if you, when this you hear, Fall down murdered through your ear,”

is, by way of compensation, decently interred in the dimpled cheek which has so often been his lurking-place. Lilies and roses and violets exhale their odors around him, a beauteous sheet of lawn is drawn up over his cold little body, and all who see the “perfumed hearse”--presumably the dimple--envy the dead god, blest in his repose. This is as bad in its way as Lovelace’s famous lines on “Ellinda’s Glove,” where that modest article of dress is compelled to represent in turn a snow-white farm with five tenements, whose fair mistress has deserted them, an ermine cabinet too small and delicate for any occupant but its own, and a fiddle-case without its fine-tuned instrument. Dr. Thomas Campion, who, after rhyming delightfully all his life, was pleased to write a treatise against that “vulgar and artificial custom,” compares his lady’s face, in one musical little song, to a fertile garden, and her lips to ripe cherries, which none may buy or steal because her eyes, like twin angels, have them in keeping, and her brows, like bended bows, defend such treasures from the crowd.

“Those cherries fairly do enclose Of Orient pearl a double row, Which, when her lovely laughter shows, They look like rose-buds filled with snow; Yet them nor peer nor prince can buy, Till ‘Cherry ripe’ themselves do cry.”

This dazzling array of mixed metaphors with which the early poets love to bewilder us, and the whimsical conceits which must have cost them many laborious hours, have at least one redeeming merit: they are for the most part illustrative of the lady’s graces, and not of the writer’s lacerated heart. They tell us, seldom indeed with Herrick’s intimate realism, but with many quaint and suspicious exaggerations, whether the fair one was false or fond, light or dark, serious or flippant, gentle or high-spirited; what fashion of clothes she wore, what jewels and flowers were her adornment: and these are the things we take pleasure in knowing. It is Mr. Gosse’s especial grievance against Waller that he does not enlighten us on such points. “We can form,” he complains, “but a very vague idea of Lady Dorothy Sidney from the Sacharissa poems; she is everywhere overshadowed by the poet himself. We are told that she can sleep when she pleases, and this inspires a copy of verses; but later on we are told that she can do anything but sleep when she pleases, and this leads to another copy of verses, which leave us exactly where we were when we started.” Indeed, those who express surprise at Sacharissa’s coldness have perhaps failed to notice the graceful chill of her lover’s poems. “Cupid might have clapped him on the shoulder, but we could warrant him heart-whole.” For seven years he carried on his languid and courtly suit without once warming to the passion point; and when Lady Dorothy at last made up her mind to marry somebody else, he expressed his cordial acquiescence in her views in a most charming and playful letter to her young sister, Lady Lucy Sidney,--a letter containing just enough well-bred regret to temper its wit and gayety. He had fulfilled his part in singing the praises of his mistress, in preaching to her sweetly through the soft petals of a rose, and in sighing with gentle complacency over the happy girdle which bound her slender waist.

“A narrow compass, and yet there Dwelt all that’s good, and all that’s fair; Give me but this ribbon bound Take all the rest the sun goes round.”

Here we have the prototype of that other and more familiar cincture which clasped the Miller’s Daughter; and it must be admitted that Lord Tennyson’s maiden, with her curls, and her jeweled ear-rings, and the necklace rising and falling all day long upon her “balmy bosom,” is more suggestive of a court beauty, like the fair Sacharissa, than of a buxom village girl.

The most impersonal, however, of all the poet-lovers is Sir Philip Sidney, who, in the hundred and eight sonnets dedicated to Stella, has managed to tell us absolutely nothing about her. The atmosphere of haunting individuality which gives these sonnets their half-bitter flavor, and which made them a living power in the stormy days of Elizabethan poetry, reveals to us, not Stella, but Astrophel; not Penelope Devereux, but Sidney himself, bruised by regrets and resentful of his fate. They are not by any means passionate love-songs; they are not even sanguine enough to be persuasive; they are steeped throughout in a pungent melancholy, too restless for resignation, too gentle for anger, too manly for vain self-indulgence. In their delicacy and their languor we read the story of that lingering suit which lacked the elation of success and the heart-break of failure. Indeed, Sidney seems never to have been a very ardent lover until the lady was taken away from him and married to Lord Rich, when he bewailed her musically for a couple of years, and then consoled himself with Frances Walsingham, who must have found the sonnets to her rival pleasant reading for her leisure hours. This is the bald history of that poetic passion which made the names of Stella and Astrophel famous in English song, and which stirred the disgust of Horace Walpole, whose appreciation of such tender themes was of a painfully restricted nature. In their thoughtful, introspective, and self-revealing character, Sidney’s love-poems bear a closer likeness to the genius of the nineteenth than to that of the sixteenth century. If we want to see the same spirit at work, we have but to take up the fifty sonnets by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, called “The House of Life,” wherein the writer’s soul is clearly reflected, but no glimpse is vouchsafed us of the woman who has disturbed its depth. Their vague, sweet pathos, their brooding melancholy, their reluctant acceptance of a joyless mood, are all familiar features in the earlier poet. Such verses as those beginning,--

“Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been; I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell,”

are of the self-same mintage as Sidney’s golden coins, only more modern, and perhaps more perfect in form, and a trifle more shadowy in substance. If Sidney shows us but little of Stella, and if that little is, judged by the light of her subsequent career, not very accurately represented, Rossetti far surpasses him in unconscious reticence. He is not unwilling to analyze,--few recent poets are,--but his analysis lays bare only the tumult of his own heart, the lights and shades of his own delicate and sensitive nature.

It was Sidney, however, who first pointed out to women, with clear insistence, the advantage of having poets for lovers, and the promise of immortality thus conferred on them. He entreats them to listen kindly to those who can sing their praises to the world. “For so doing you shall be most fair, most wise, most rich, most everything! You shall feed upon superlatives.” Carew, adopting the same tone, and less gallant than Wither, who refers even his own fame to Arete’s kindling glances, tells the flaunting Celia very plainly that she owes her dazzling prominence to him alone.

“Know, Celia! since thou art so proud, ’Twas I that gave thee thy renown; Thou hadst in the forgotten crowd Of common beauties lived unknown, Had not my verse exhaled thy name, And with it impt the wings of fame.”

What wonder that, under such conditions and with such reminders, a passion for being be-rhymed seized upon all women, from the highest to the lowest, from the marchioness at court to the orange-girl smiling in the theatre!--a passion which ended its fluttering existence in our great-grandmothers’ albums. Yet nothing is clearer, when we study these poetic suits, than their very discouraging results. The pleasure that a woman takes in being courted publicly in verse is a very distinct sensation from the pleasure that she expects to take when being courted privately in prose. She is quick to revere, genius, but in her secret soul she seldom loves it. Genius, as Hazlitt scornfully remarks, “says such things,” and the average woman distrusts “such things,” and wonders why the poet will not learn to talk and behave like ordinary people. It hardly needed the crusty shrewdness of Christopher North to point out to us the arrant ill-success with which the Muse has always gone a-wooing. “Making love and making love-verses,” he explains, “are two of the most different things in the world, and I doubt if both accomplishments were ever found highly united in the same gifted individual. Inspiration is of little avail either to gods or men in the most interesting affairs of life, those of the earth. The pretty maid who seems to listen kindly

‘Kisses the cup, and passes it to the rest,’

and next morning, perhaps, is off before breakfast in a chaise-and-four to Gretna Green, with an aid-de-camp of Wellington, as destitute of imagination as his master.” It is the cheerful equanimity with which the older poets anticipated and endured some such finale as this which gives them their precise advantage over their more exacting and self-centred successors.

For what is the distinctive characteristic of the early love-songs, and to what do they owe their profound and penetrating charm? It is that quality of youth which Heine so subtly recognized in Rossini’s music, and which, to his world-worn ears, made it sweeter than more reflective and heavily burdened strains. Love was young when Herrick and Carew and Suckling went a-wooing; he has grown now to man’s estate, and the burdens of manhood have kept pace with his growing powers. It is no longer, as at the feast of Apollo, a contest for the deftest kiss, but a life-and-death struggle in that grim arena where passion and pain and sorrow contend for mastery.

“Ah! how sweet it is to love! Ah! how gay is young desire!”

sang Dryden, who, in truth, was neither sweet nor gay in his amorous outpourings, but who merely echoed the familiar sentiments of his youth. That sweetness and gayety of the past still linger, indeed, in some half-forgotten and wholly neglected verses which we have grown too careless or too cultivated to recall. We harden our hearts against such delicious trifling as

“The young May moon is beaming, love, The glow-worm’s lamp is gleaming, love.”

We will have none of its pleasant moral,--

“’Tis never too late for delight, my dear,”

and we will not even listen when Mr. Saintsbury tells us with sharp impatience that, in turning our backs so coldly upon the poet who enraptured our grandfathers, we are losing a great deal that we can ill afford to spare. The quality of youth is still more distinctly discernible in some of Thomas Beddoes’s dazzling little songs, stolen straight from the heart of the sixteenth century, and lustrous with that golden light which set so long ago. It is not in spirit only, nor in sentiment, that this resemblance exists; the words, the imagery, the swaying music, the teeming fancies of the younger poet, mark him as one strayed from another age, and wandering companionless under alien skies. Some two hundred years before Beddoes’s birth, Drummond of Hawthornden, he who sang so tenderly the praises of his sweet mistress, dead on her wedding-day, wrote these quaint and pretty lines entreating for her favor:--

“I die, dear life, unless to me be given As many kisses as the Spring hath flowers, Or there be silver drops in Iris’ showers, Or stars there be in all-embracing heaven. And if displeased, you of the match remain, You shall have leave to take them back again.”

In Beddoes’s unfinished drama of “Torresmond,” we find Veronica’s maidens singing her to sleep with just such bright conceits and soft caressing words, and their song rings like an echo from some dim old room where Lesbia, or Althea, or Celia lies a-dreaming:--

“How many times do I love thee, dear? Tell me how many thoughts there be In the atmosphere Of a new-fall’n year, Whose white and sable hours appear The latest flake of Eternity: So many times do I love thee, dear.

“How many times do I love again? Tell me how many beads there are In a silver chain Of evening rain, Unraveled from the tumbling main, And threading the eye of a yellow star: So many times do I love again.”

It is not in this fairy fashion that the truly modern poet declares his passion; it is not thus that Wordsworth sings to us of Lucy, the most alluring and shadowy figure in English poetry,--Lucy, richly dowered with a few short verses of unapproachable beauty. To the lover of Wordsworth her death is a lasting hurt. We cannot endure to think of her as he thinks of her,--

“Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course With rocks, and stones, and trees.”

We cannot endure that anything so fine and rare should slip forever from the sunshine, and that the secret stars should look down upon her maidenhood no more. Browning, too, who has been termed the poet of love, who has revealed to us every changeful mood, every stifled secret, every light and shade of human emotion,--how has he dealt with his engrossing theme? Beneath his unsparing touch, at once burning and subtle, the soul lies bare, and its passions rend it like hounds. All that is noble, generous, suffering, shameful, finds in him its ablest exponent. Those strange, fantastic sentences in which Mr. Pater has analyzed the inscrutable sorcery of Mona Lisa, beneath whose weary eyelids “the thoughts and experiences of the world lie shadowed,” might also fitly portray the image of Love, as Browning has unveiled him to our sight. He too is older than the rocks, and the secrets of the grave and of the deep seas are in his keeping. He too expresses all that man has come to desire in the ways of a thousand years, and his is the beauty “into which the soul with its maladies has passed.” The slumbering centuries lie coiled beneath his feet, their hidden meaning is his to grasp, their huge and restless impulses have nourished him, their best results are his inheritance. But he is not glad, for the maladies of the soul have stilled his laughter, and the brightness of youth has fled.

BOOKS THAT HAVE HINDERED ME.