STRICTLY AN ELIZABETHAN LYRIST

England has little primitive poetry, because the Reformers not only broke graven images but destroyed libraries, and gave some centuries of minor literature to the flames. We have much ado in raking together a few stones of their hacking and scattering, but fire has saved their posterity the trouble of trying to restore an annihilated national poetry. Our writers, then (with the obvious exceptions), begin soon after the invention of movable type, and so modern are they that the sixteenth century must serve us for comparative antiquity. The language was mobile between Elizabeth and James, tuned by the hands of the masters whose lives lasted from one developing time into another, and who were themselves England, having history in common with their country.

But Robert Greene was absolutely an Elizabethan—man and boy. He was born in the year of the Queen’s accession, and died while she was dancing, an old man of thirty-four, dropsical and horrible, full of repentance, as were then all of his manner of life when they had an illness sufficiently long to give them time. Greene died from too much banqueting, apparently upon the crudest luxuries, but his sorry death-bed gave him room for ample self-reproach, and doubtless Christopher Marlowe 13also would have left a record of his repentance had the manner of his departure, at even an earlier age than his friend’s, been less violent. In later years Carew asked pardon, with many cries, for the greater number of his verses; and, indeed, during these two bright centuries you may hear, if you turn your ear that way, the loud lamentation of poet after dying poet, a single outcry at intervals; not a death-bed without the clamour that closed the song. It is a parting cry, so poignant and sudden that the air rings with it even while the succeeding singer is heard to be preluding, undaunted for the present. Greene had not a little to repent of in his actions, but nothing to retract in his songs; therefore, the reader who has not beheld his life—his wife was left at ‘six and seven’, as he phrases it, and certainly very forlorn—has little to do with the grief, pain, and fear of the closing scene, and may well be content with the sweetness of the songs. They were sweet and single, like tunes unharmonized. Without following the fashion of using the terms of one art to describe another, we may permit ourselves this mere imagery: the single note of music to represent the sixteenth-century lyric, harmonics for the seventeenth, counterpoint for the nineteenth. Greene’s famous ‘Sephestia’s Song to Her Child’ (by far his best) is the only lyric in which so much as two notes are to be heard; and the double string makes the sound more human.

It is not human to be single as the songs of 14Greene are single; the fading of pleasure, the cruelty of beauty, the inconstancy of love, the happy lot of the shepherd, and the cares of kings—each thing, one at a time, is so unaccompanied that you wonder how a primitive poet should have had time to reject all checking, mingling, and qualifying thoughts together. For it is hardly youth, hardly inexperience that this simplicity suggests, but rather a mind made up, a mind bent on creating other conditions than those which govern an actual world of which the poet has somewhat grown tired.

‘Sephestia’s Song’, however, has the thrill of sweetly jarring notes in the lines that tell the parting of father and mother over their laughing child—lines that seem to have haunted the ear, if not the mind, of Blake in his own song of birth. Blake’s verse has a tempestuous and threatening spiritual wildness of which Greene did not know the language; and it is only in the leaping metre, the clamour of the rhymes that seem striving to be heard above a deafening childish noise, that the two songs have so much likeness.

The wanton smiled, father wept,

Mother cried, baby leapt;

More he crowed, more we cried.

There is a vociferation, a distraction, and a dandling of the child, and you hear also the crying that the mother is seeking to still with her recital of that late scene of sorrow—‘Weep not, my wanton’.

15Next in beauty to ‘Sephestia’s Song’ comes, perhaps, ‘The Praise of Faunia’:

Ah, were she pitiful as she is fair,

Or but as mild as she is seeming so,

is a beginning that sounds like a less grave, less strong, and less masculine Shakespeare sonnet. There is sweet line after line in this poem, and many such a phrase as ‘the morning-singer’s swelling throat’ and ‘When she sings, all singers else be still!’ But the poem is famous chiefly, it may be guessed, for the sake of the final couplet, which has a far more modern kind of ample and intelligible beauty:

O glorious sun, imagine me the west!

Shine in my arms, and set thou in my breast!

Next comes that pretty song ‘Radagon in Dianam’, which is to be praised not as a whole, but for some stanzas in which the cypresses keep a golden sun away from a ‘valley gaudy green’, and from nymphs in white. There never was any scene at once warmer and more fresh. The fountain is cool in a shade that the sun never shot an arrow through, but the sense of outer sunshine is intense and clear, and the dark trees seem to flame blackly, as they do on such a sky. ‘Outer darkness’, by the way, is a familiar phrase, but ‘outer sunshine’ is a presence hardly removed in the southern summer.

This vivid impression from Greene’s poem is caused by the most careless of verses. As a lyrist, 16he never leant hard upon anything; he has the lightest foot, and seems rather to whistle than to sing his tunes upon the way. So lightly is the verse given to the wind that you are apt to read it as carelessly, and so to lose something. This Song of the Fountain, for instance, should be read with more leisure than at a glance it seems to merit.

Greene is dull to any reader who does not take the pains to cancel all the conventions of the times that followed his Elizabethan day. The pure fountains, the nymphs, and the other valleys, gaudy green, must be simply forgotten; and the task is not difficult. Greene has all the good luck by his Elizabethanism—inalienable good luck, which was neither to be repeated by others, nor to be taken from his own head upon whom it alighted first. We, who have been wearied by succeeding nymphs, need not be wearied by those nymphs that were his—and this not because his were best, but because his were first.

See now how he made the mere Cupid childish, wild, and dear:

Cupid abroad was lated in the night,

His wings were wet with ranging in the rain.

But it is hardly possible not to find him somewhat dull, especially when he is not at his best, because he has so little to say. There never was a poet who said less. These poems of his, after all, were, in his own estimation, not important enough to be written for their own sake; they were but snatches of songs 17in his prose writings—novels and what not; and poems so set flying at any other time and in any other English could not have kept their motion and their spirit so long. They never cost him a thought; and the only sign of attention is in the versification. This is by no means always good, but in ‘Radagon in Dianam’ it is very good indeed; the foot is elastic and moves with a rebound.

But as to thoughts, he is at small expense. Take his charming description of ‘A Shepherd and His Wife’. As though in the idleness of an empty mind, he lets his eyes note what is really hardly matter for verse—the way, for example, in which the flaps of the shepherd’s coat were turned over. It is grotesque to produce a rhyme for such a detail as that. But in the same poem are some lively verses about the wife which seem not only to set her up for admiration and delight, but to dance about her in a round when that is done.

Nor is there more in ‘The Shepherd Wife’s Song’, in which the happiest shepherdess in Thessaly compares her love and state with those of queens, and makes her boast sweetly and with a pretty and apt refrain. But ‘Fair Samela’—oftener quoted—has a weakness and listlessness that spoil its grace; and, after this, what is left? Robert Greene was a small poet among the minor poets; but his hour struck in the cool of the morning, and, whatever kind of simplicity was in his mind, the authentic simplicity was in his English.

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