MR. GILBERT PARKER’S SONNETS.[2]
A SEQUENCE of songs, of which this collection of Mr. Parker’s sonnets is an example, is more recondite and remote than most of its readers probably imagine. It would be as difficult to trace its origins as to trace springs, which, flowing from many subterranean sources, unite somewhere in one current, and force their way onward and upward until they appear at last, and are hailed as the well-heads of famous rivers. Who will may trace its beginnings to the lays of the troubadours, which were nothing if they were not amorous: I am content to find them on Italian soil in the sonnets of Petrarch, and on English soil in the sonnets of Wyatt and Surrey. What the literatures of Greece and Rome were to men of letters the world over, once they were freed from the seclusion of the manuscripts which sheltered them so long, the literature of Italy was to Englishmen of letters from the days of Chaucer down. They read Italian more than they read Latin and Greek: they wrote Italian, not more clumsily, let us hope, than they wrote English: and they sojourned in Italy, if they could get there, not greatly to their spiritual welfare, if the satirists of their time are to be believed. One need not be deeply read in English literature of the sixteenth century to perceive its obligations to Italian literature, to detect the influences of Boccaccio, and Bandello, and other Italian story-tellers in its drama, and the influence of Italian poets in its poetry, particularly the influence of Petrarch, the sweetness, the grace, the ingenuity of whose amorous effusions captivated the facile nature of so many English singers. He was the master of Wyatt and Surrey, who, tracking their way through the snow of his footprints, introduced the sonnet form into English verse, and, so far as they might, the sonnet spirit, as they understood it. They allowed themselves, however, licenses of variation in the construction of their octaves and sextets, which, judging from his avoidance of them, would have displeased Petrarch,—a proceeding which was followed by their immediate successors, who seldomobserved the strict laws of the Petrarchian sonnet. Whether the sonnets of Wyatt and Surrey were expressions of genuine emotion, or were merely poetic exercises, is not evident in the sonnets themselves, which are formal and frigid productions. They were handed round in manuscript copies, and greatly admired in the courtly circles in which their authors moved, and ten years after the death of Surrey were collected by Master Richard Tottell, to whom belongs the honor of publishing the first miscellany of English verse. That this miscellany, the original title of which was “Songs and Sonnets written by the ryght honorable Lorde Henry Howard, late Earle of Surrey and other,” was very popular is certain from the number of editions through which it passed, and from the number of similar publications by which it was followed. It was an epoch-making book, like the “Reliques” of good Bishop Percy two centuries afterwards, and like that rare miscellany was fruitful of results in the direction of what chiefly predominated there,—the current of personal expression in amatory sonnets. The first notable scholar of Wyatt and Surrey, a scholar who surpassed his masters in every poetical quality, wasSir Philip Sidney, whose sequence of sonnets was given to the world five years after his death as “Astrophel and Stella.” This was in 1591. Samuel Daniel appeared the next year with a sequence entitled “Delia,” Michael Drayton a year later with a sequence entitled “Idea,” and two years after that came Edmund Spenser with a sequence entitled “Amoretti.” The frequency of the sonnet form in English verse was determined at this time by this cluster of poets, to which the names of Constable, Griffin, and others might be added, and determined for all time by their great contemporary, whose proficiency as a sonneteer, outside of his comedies, was chiefly confined to the knowledge of “Mr. W. H.” and his friends until 1609. To what extent this treasury of sonnets is read now I have no means of knowing; but it cannot, I think, be a large one, the fashion of verse has changed so much since they were written. They should be read for what they are rather than what we might wish them to be; in other words, from the Elizabethan and not the Victorian point of view. So read they seem to me “choicely good,” as Walton said of their like, though I cannot say that they are much better than thestrong lines that are now in fashion in this critical age. Only two of these sonnet sequences are known to have been inspired by real persons, Sidney’s “Astrophel and Stella,” which celebrates his enamourment of Lady Rich, and consists of one hundred and eight sonnets and eleven songs, and Spenser’s “Amoretti,” which celebrates his admiration for the unknown beauty whom he married during his residence in Ireland, and which consists of eighty-eight sonnets, and an epithalamium. Of the two sequences, the Sidneyan is the more poetical, and making allowance for the artificial manner in which it is written, the more impassioned, certain of the sonnets authenticating their right to be considered genuine by virtue of their qualities as portraiture, their self-betrayal of the character of Sidney, and the vividness of their picturesque descriptions or suggestions. Such I conceive to be the twenty-seventh (“Because I oft, in dark, abstracted guise”), the thirty-first (“With how sad steps, O moon, thou climb’st the skies”), the forty-first (“Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance”), the fifty-fourth (“Because I breathe not love to every one”), the eighty-fourth (“Highway, since you my chief Parnassus be”),and the one hundred and third (“O happy Thames, that didst my Stella bear”). If Sidney had followed the advice of his Muse in the first of these sonnets,
“Fool, said my Muse to me, look in thy heart and write,”
that noble heart would surely have taught him to write in a simpler and more sincere fashion than he permitted himself to do in “Astrophel and Stella,” which is more important for what it promised than for what it achieved.
The ease of a more practised poet than Sidney lived to be is manifest in Spenser’s “Amoretti,”—as manifest there, I think, as in “The Faerie Queene,” the musical cadences of whose stanzas and, to a certain extent, its rhythmical construction are translated into sonnetry; but, taken as a whole, they are as hard reading as most easy writing. They are fluent and diffuse, but devoid of felicities of expression, and the note of distinction which Sidney sometimes attains. Daniel and Drayton were reckoned excellent poets by their contemporaries, and measured by their standards, and within their limitations, they were; but their excellence did not embrace the emotion which the writing of amatory sonnets demands,nor the art of simulating it successfully, for the “Delia” of the one was as surely an ideal mistress as the “Idea” of the other. The substance of Drayton’s sonnets is more prosaic than that of Daniel’s and his touch is less felicitous, is so infelicitous, in fact, that only one of the sixty-three of which the sequence is composed lingers in the memory as the expression of what may have been genuine feeling. The sonnets of Daniel are distinguished for sweetness of versification, for graces of expression, and for a vein of tender and pensive thought which was native to him. One of them (there are fifty-seven in all) which begins, “Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable night,” recalls a similar invocation to sleep in “Astrophel and Stella,” and others, especially the nineteenth, which begins, “Restore thy tresses to the golden ore,” remind us of some of the sonnets of Shakespeare, whose first master in sonnetry was as certainly Samuel Daniel, as in dramatic writing Christopher Marlowe.
Of the sonnets of Shakespeare, I shall say nothing here, for though they form a sequence, the sequence is not of the kind which the sonnets of Sidney and Daniel and Drayton and Spenser illustrate, and ofwhich the purpose is to celebrate the love of a man for a woman, but of a kind which the genius of Shakespeare originated, and which deals with the friendship of a man and for a man, and of which the most noteworthy example is Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.” I pass, therefore, from Spenser to Drummond of Hawthornden, who, in the year of Shakespeare’s death, published in his second collection of verse a series of sonnets, songs, sextains, and madrigals, the majority of which are of an amatory nature. Modelled after the manner of his Italian and English predecessors, and consequently academical rather than individual, they are characterized by tenderness of sentiment and a vein of melancholy reflection, by studied graces of scholarly phrasing which are not free from Scotticisms, and by a chastened remembrance of his sorrow for the loss of Mary Cunningham, the daughter of a laird, who was carried off by a fever before the arrival of their nuptial day. The line of amatory sonneteers ended with Drummond; but not the line of amatory poets, the best of whom (apart from mere lyrists like Lovelace and Suckling) was William Habington, who in 1634-1635 celebrated his affection for Lucia, daughter of William,Lord Powis, and the worst of whom was Abraham Cowley, who, at a later period, celebrated nobody in “The Mistress, or Several Copies of Love-Verses.” There are exquisite things in “Castara,” the title of which is fully justified by the spiritual purity of the love of which it is a memorial, and there are execrable things in “The Mistress,” where the fancy of Cowley exhausted itself in a profusion of ingenious conceits, the brilliant absurdity of which is absolutely bewildering. Love there is none, nor any serious pretence of it, Cowley’s motive in writing being that poets are scarce thought free-men of their Company, without paying some duties, and obliging themselves to be true to Love.
To follow the succession of English amatory poets later than their founders, the writers of sonnet sequences and their lyrical children, lies outside the purpose of this paper, which is simply to trace the position of Mr. Parker; so I shall say nothing of two illustrious and comparatively recent members of the guild, one being Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who in “The House of Life” has preserved and Italianated the romantic traditions of Sidney and Daniel, and the other, Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning,whose “Sonnets from the Portuguese” are the most impassioned utterances of love in any language, linking her name forever with the burning name of Sappho. I find in “A Lover’s Diary” a quality which is not common in the verse of to-day, and which I find nowhere in its fulness except in the poetry of the age of Elizabeth. To describe what evades description, I should call it suggestion,—a vague hinting at rather than a distinct exposition of feeling and thought,—the prescience of things which never beheld are always expected, the remembrance of things which are only known through the shadows they leave behind them, the perception of uncommon capacities for pain, the anticipation of endless energies for pleasure, the instinctive discovery and enjoyment of the secret inspirations of love. The method which Mr. Parker preserves is that of the early masters, whose sole business when they wrote sonnets was to write sonnets, not caring what they proved, or whether they proved anything, not disdaining logic, though not solicitous to obey its laws, not avid for nor averse from the use of imagery; content, in the best words they had, to free their minds of what was in them. They wrote well orill, according to their themes and moods, but nobly, gloriously, when at their best; and to be reminded of them by a sonneteer of to-day, as I am by Mr. Parker, is a poetic enjoyment which is not often vouchsafed to me.
FOOTNOTE:[2]“A Lover’s Diary. Songs in Sequence.” By Gilbert Parker. Cambridge and Chicago: Stone & Kimball. MDCCCXCIV. London: Methuen & Co.
[2]“A Lover’s Diary. Songs in Sequence.” By Gilbert Parker. Cambridge and Chicago: Stone & Kimball. MDCCCXCIV. London: Methuen & Co.
[2]“A Lover’s Diary. Songs in Sequence.” By Gilbert Parker. Cambridge and Chicago: Stone & Kimball. MDCCCXCIV. London: Methuen & Co.