Surrey, upon the whole, strikes us as more light-hearted and ebullient; less deeply penetrated by the earnestness of passion. None of Wyat's songs open with the ringing strength and joyous brightness of Surrey's "praise of his love, wherein he reproveth them that compare their ladies with his : "Give place, ye lovers, here before That spent your boasts and brags in vain : The best of yours, I dare well sain, And thereto hath a truth as just, I could rehearse, if that I would, The like to whom she could not paint: Compliments that flow with such a current, and sparkle with such bubbles, do not come from the depths. Again, Wyat is too intensely in earnest to love on without hope of success: he seeks after a definite sign, and when the signs seem unfavourable, bitterly takes refuge in self-sufficing pride. Surrey, on the other hand, with light-hearted generosity, is content only to be hers "although his chance be nought;" and with a hopefulness that shows how slender a hold the passion has upon him, finds consolation in thinking of the long toils and ultimate triumph of the Greeks before Troy. Once more, when Wyat suspects his 1 The sonnet by Fiorenzuola, from which this is imitated, was a favourite with the translators and imitators of the sixteenth century. There are other two versions of it in Tottel's Miscellany, one of them attributed to Heywood, which opens with the following rather pretty staves : "Give place you ladies, and begone! For here at hand approacheth one The virtue of her lovely looks I wish to have none other books In each of her two crystal eyes It would you all in heart suffice lady of playing false, he mocks his own stupidity, and gravely resolves to be wiser in future; beneath his assumed indifference of tone, we see that the lesson has been bitter. In a similar situation, Surrey prides himself upon his acuteness in seeing through the practices of faithless women :— "Too dearly had I bought my green and youthful years, Yet can I judge in colours dim as deep as can the best." In another poem he is represented by the editor of 'Tottel' as "a careless man, scorning and describing the subtle usage of women toward their lovers." Still, all these signs may be deceptive, and one would not care to dogmatise on the difference between the two lovers. None of Wyat's poems are dramatic: he speaks for himself ; he does not put himself in the place of others and express their emotions for them. Two or three of Surrey's poems, on the other hand, have this dramatic turn. He sets himself to express, in two different metres, the complaint of a lady whose lover is absent upon the sea-an early Mariana. The following are three staves of the first complaint : "When other lovers in arms across, Drowned in tears to mourn my loss, In my window where I may see, And in green waves when the salt flood A thousand fancies in that mood Alas! now drencheth my sweet foe, And when the seas wax calm again, My doubtful hope doth cause me plain, Thus is my wealth mingled with wo, And of each thought a doubt doth grow, Now he comes! will he come? alas! no, no. The forms of sonnet used by Wyat and Surrey are various ; they were experimenting, and neither of them seems to have been fascinated by any one form. They several times attempted con structing the fourteen lines throughout upon two rhymes, as in Surrey's " Alas! so all things now do hold their peace" (p. 126); a form of no particular beauty, and attractive to verse-writers chiefly as an exercise of skill in rhyming. The two most important types are seen in their rival versions of the same sonnet, quoted at p. 118. Wyat follows the arrangement observed by Petrarch, and thus loosely spoken of as the Italian form; Surrey, the arrangement adopted by Shakespeare, and thus loosely spoken of as the English form. The fourteen lines of Wyat's version are divided into two parts: first a stanza of eight lines, consisting of two quatrains banded together by common rhymes; then a stanza of six lines, consisting of two tercettes, also banded together by common rhymes. In this type of sonnet, a certain variety was permitted in the disposition of the rhymes within these limits: in the banded quatrains, they might either be alternate, or successive as in Wyat's sonnet; and in the tercettes there might be two rhymes or three connected in any order that the sonneteer could devise. The form of Surrey's version, the English form, is an easier arrangement, which came into use in Italy in the beginning of the sixteenth century. In it the division into two stanzas is broken up, and the fourteen lines arranged in three independent quatrains closed in by a couplet. As we shall see, the form was adopted and regularly used by Daniel for his "Sonnets to Delia "; and from him was adopted by Shakespeare. Before the "Sonnets to Delia," the Italian form was rather the favourite with English sonneteers: it was employed constantly by Sidney. Surrey's poem composed during his imprisonment in Windsor, is claimed by Dr Nott, who edits Surrey with more than a biographer's enthusiasm, as the first specimen of our elegiac stave— four heroic lines rhyming alternately. This poem contains twelve such staves. Curiously enough, however, the whole is shut in with a final couplet, so that the poem is really a sonnet with twelve quatrains instead of three. It is a confirmation of Mr Guest's intrinsically probable conjecture that the elegiac stave arose from the breaking up of the sonnet into easier forms. Mr Guest, however, is wrong in saying that the final stage of dropping the couplet did not come on till after Milton. Elegiacs without any such appendage are found in the poems of Robert Greene. The chief feather in Surrey's plume as a verse-writer is his introduction of blank verse. He employed it in his translation of the Second and Fourth Books of the Æneid, which is memorable also as an indication of the growing study of the ancient classics in England. Although Gawain Douglas is a prior claimant to the honour of producing the first English translation of an ancient classic (if Douglas's language is entitled to be called English), Surrey has sufficient honour in his choice of the unrhymed form. About the same time the Italians were beginning to experiment in dispensing with rhyme; and Surrey had the good fortune, or the good sense, to apply to the translation of the great Roman epic the form that has since been established as English heroic verse. His blank verse is described by Conington as a good beginning, but "not entitled to any very high positive praise," being "languid and monotonous, and sometimes unmetrical and inharmonious." Surrey's direct knowledge of the classics preserved him as it preserved Wyat and others of the time from the gross mediaval blunders yet it is significant of his being only among the pioneers that in his praise of Wyat he speaks of "Dan Homer's rhymes," "who feigned gests of heathen princes sung." We should not omit to notice, among other evidences of Surrey's searching versatility and eager activity seeking vent in many forms, that he made an attempt also at pastoral poetry. His Complaint of a dying Lover refused upon his Lady's unjust mistaking of his writing," is put into the mouth of a shepherd. In this he followed the example of the Italian imitators of Virgil. His metre seems to be a modification of the old ballad form of long rhyming couplets: he shortens the first line of the couplet by an accent, or two syllables, thus— "In Winter's just return, when Boreas gan his reign, And every tree unclothed fast as Nature taught them plain; In misty morning dark, as sheep are then in hold, I hied me fast, it set me on, my sheep for to unfold. And as it is a thing that lovers have by fits, Under a palm I heard one cry as he had lost his wits." III.-Writers of Mysteries, Moralities, " Moral Interludes": JOHN BALE. The writers that fall under this section lay wholly out of the current of Italian influences. The common stage did not feel these influences till later. The primitive English drama was as little affected by the causes that furthered the poetry of Wyat and Surrey as it had been a century and a half before, by the movement of which the main English outcome was Chaucer. With its firm hold of popular sympathies, through its ministration to simple inartificial wants, it continued to flourish when the spirit of Chaucer decayed, and maintained a certain struggle for existence even after the full maturity of the Elizabethan drama, of which it had, as we shall see, some claim to be considered the parent. Throughout its lease of life it was a direct response to a popular demand: it knew its audience, and gave them what they desired. In one view, indeed, this rude religious drama cannot be held to have remained unaffected by surrounding influences. The Moralplays, in which the characters were personified virtues and vices -Reason, Repentance, Avarice, Sensuality, Folly, &c.—may be regarded as a modification produced, not by a development from within, but by the action of neighbouring forces. As the materials of one section of Chaucer's poetry were the offspring of a union between Abstraction and Sense, so the moral plays may be looked upon as a cross between Abstraction and the Miracle-plays. It really is immaterial to this view what conclusion we adopt as to the precise transition from miracle-play to moral-play, whether we suppose the transition to have taken place by the gradual introduction of abstract personifications among Scriptural and legendary individuals, or suppose it to have taken place at a leap by the use of moral tales of personifications instead of Scripture and legend as subjects for dramatic representation. In either view, we are at liberty to regard the transition as an encroachment made by the abstracting tendency of the Middle Ages upon a simple popular entertainment. Moral-plays, in whatever way they were suggested, were common throughout the fifteenth century, and had not quite died out at the end of the sixteenth. They, as well as Mysteries, were largely used by the advocates and the opponents of the Reformation to promote their respective views. To give some idea of their nature, we may look at "The World and the Child," Mundus et Infans, which is called "a proper new interlude," showing the estate of childhood and manhood. It has no regard for the unity of time it conducts a child from the cradle to the grave without change of scene. It has no plot: it is really a descriptive or panoramic dialogue, in which the Prince of this World holds conversations with a human creature at various stages of its existence, giving his commands to it, and receiving at the end of every seven years an account of its proceedings. The outline is something like this. Mundus enters boasting of his palace, his stalled horses, his riches, his command of mirth and game. is prince of power and of plenty; and he smites with poverty all that come not when he calls. Infans next tells us that he is a child like other children, "gotten in game and in great sin," and complains of his nakedness and poverty. He beseeches Mundus to clothe him and feed him "Sir, of some comfort I you crave He 1 Mr Collier gives a particular account of "Nature," a morality by Henry Medwall, chaplain to Cardinal Morton.-Hist. of Dram. Poet. ii. 298. See Mr Collier's work for a complete account of our primitive drama. |