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lay it down as a general rule that-given the concurrent quality of high poetic expression-the most truly interesting effects in love poetry are where the shadow of two living and credible personalities—those of the lover and of his beloved,- -are recognisably thrown across the verse; such is the case, for instance, with Shakespeare and his dark lady; but for the most part, in the amatory song-writing and sonnet-making of the Elizabethan age, there seems absolutely no personality at all either in the singer or the sung; it is an abstraction addressing an abstraction, a shade apostrophising a shade. The poet seems to have a female lay-figure before him, and from all one can gather, he might never have seen a real woman in his life. He carries hyperbole—a vice which only great style can redeem- to intolerable lengths, and demonstrates in every page how thin are the partitions between extravagance and insipidity. If he ever really is in love, he is marvellously successful in keeping his secret-even, one would suppose, from the lady. His goddess is a mere inventory of feminine graces, and she might be constructed from a stock recipe of saccharine ingredients. She is usually, also, in the attitude of obstinate resistance to a chronic siege, which adds another element of monotony; and truly, when we perceive what a fantastic and absurd figure the beleaguering party often makes, we scarcely wonder at the fortress being so slow to capitulate. In an age, too, when that swan-song of chivalry, Spenser's Faerie Queene, was but newly resonant upon the air, it is disconcerting to find ever and anon a tone, a spirit, which to our modern apprehension seems emphatically unchivalrous,-witness the frequent phenomenon of a foiled inamorato crying sour grapes when the hopelessness of his suit has at last

become manifest. He turns upon the adamantine fair, roundly tells her that henceforth he shall repay scorn with scorn, and altogether behaves with a degree of incivility which the occasion does not seem to require. Quite possibly it is a situation having more of an air of reality than usually accompanies the literary love-making of those spacious times; but none the less there is a painful want of knightliness about it. To my thinking even the fine and justly admired sonnet of Drayton's,

Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part,

is not undisfigured in that way; the line,

Nay, I have done, you get no more of me,

being as coarse in feeling as it is rude in expression. Taken as a whole, however, the poem in which it occurs is so real, so convincingly alive, as to be worth a hundred of the pranked and bedizened inanities of that period.

Whilst touching upon these matters one may note the frequency with which an otherwise harmless exercise in amatory verse is marred, for us moderns, by physiological flowers of rhetoric which the mere caprices of time have made archaic and grotesque. In Shakespeare himself the mention of the liver as the seat and residence of amorous desire is far from being uncommon; and when Francis Beaumont writes,

Did all the shafts in thy fair quiver
Stick fast in my ambitious liver,
Yet thy power would I adore, etc.,

we are apt to forget that our own employment of cardiac symbolism is equally arbitrary, and may perhaps disqualify some of the most admired love poetry of the present day for inclusion in an English anthology published in the year 2092.

In short, those enthusiasts to whom anything whatsoever bearing the name of Campion or Lodge or Barnefield is sacred, and who seem to have difficulty in grasping the idea that bad poetry could be written even in the reigns of Elizabeth and James, must forgive me for having acted, if not invariably, at least very nearly so, upon the principle of disregarding the mere adventitious distinction of antiquity. Verse that is not intrinsically of high value may often, of course, have a relative or contingent importance, and a bearing upon the development and evolution of poetry as a whole, which rightly render it noteworthy in the student's eyes; but in a book like this, the absolute merits, not the historic or extrinsic significance, of a thing are surely the only aspects of it proper to be kept in view. Not seldom, in regard to old authors, Pope's observation is just, that

It is the rust we value, not the gold;

and, with respect to our indigenous literature, this tendency seems to me much more marked in our own time than in Pope's, when the stricture could only have applied to the pedantries of classical scholars. Against such a tendency I have deemed it best to guard; and, although this volume might very easily have been trebled in bulk by the simple expedient of going to the Elizabethan Castaly with a draw-net, I have taken the more troublesome course, often casting my line, patiently, again and again,

From morn to dewy eve, a summer's day,

to be rewarded at last with nothing more than a single little golden-gleaming captive, or with none. I have some hope that the result has justified my procedure, for

I think there is in this book nothing that is not good poetry, and little that is not very fine poetry indeed.

Passing onward to the succeeding period, from the age which, with some latitude as to chronology, we broadly characterise as Elizabethan, I cannot but confess that to me there is something in the accent and air of the royalist or cavalier school of poets (and, saving Milton, Marvell, and Wither, all Parnassus was with the king) which, at its best, exceeds in sheer delectableness anything to be found elsewhere. Being neither in the decorative-pastoral spirit and florid Renaissance manner of the age that had closed, nor in the wholly mundane mood of the age that was to come, it caught something of the one by reminiscence, something of the other by foretaste, the result being an exquisite blend that will probably never be repeated. Whatever we may think

of the lost cause in which Charles suffered, the sentiment of romantic personal loyalty which it evoked was certainly auspicious for the Muse. This picturesque and lofty figure, ennobled with the sombre grace of august calamity, aroused an emotion of service, and kindled a passion of allegiance, such as a pure Mary Stuart or a beautiful Elizabeth Tudor, hallowed with like misfortune, might have inspired; and the effect upon the poetry of the time may be felt in a certain high Quixotic fantasy, and a kind of fine unreasonableness, which have yet a propriety and decorum of their own. With the passing of these poets the note of chivalric love ceased to sound, and during the whole of the long interval between Dryden's accession to the throne of literature and the romantic revival at the close of the last century, what is there in English love poetry to record? There is, of course, Pope's elaborate study of a somewhat perilous

theme, and a wonderful piece of art it is, but too remote from the sphere of ordinary sympathies; and there are verses of Swift,-whom, of all writers, we associate least with ideas of tenderness-verses addressed to Stella, which are true poetry, and more than half belie their writer's disclaimer of any feeling warmer than friendship and esteem. The glow and nameless light are, however, lacking to them, and the same may be said of his really graceful verses "To Love"

In all I wish, how happy should I be,

Thou grand Deluder, were it not for thee!
So weak thou art, that fools thy power despise,
And yet so strong, thou triumph'st o'er the wise.
Thy traps are laid with such peculiar art,
They catch the cautious, let the rash depart.
Most nets are filled by want of thought and care,
But too much thinking brings us to thy snare;
Where, held by thee, in slavery we stay,

And throw the pleasing part of life

away.

These are not despisable verses, but much of what is professedly dramatic writing is more really lyrical.

With regard to modern love poetry there is little that needs to be said here. On the whole, one must admit that "the freshness of the early world" has departed from it; but, on the other hand, the fantastic insincerities of our elder literature have departed too. The artificial woe of the ancient amorist, whose days were a perpetual honeyed despair and his nights one long lachrymose vigil, is an extinct literary tradition; but a new, a different, and, alas! a more real sadness has taken its place the modern world - sadness, the Weltschmerz, which infects all we do and are, not excepting our love-making

Ev'n in the very temple of Delight

Veiled Melancholy hath her sovran shrine.

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