By-ways in Book-land: Short Essays on Literary Subjects. Adams William Henry Davenport

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СКАЧАТЬ some bears the signature of rare Ben Jonson. It came in, in full force, with the mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease – with Suckling, whose ‘Prithee, why so pale, fond lover?’ is in exactly the right tone; and with Dorset, whose ‘To all you ladies now on land’ is another typical specimen. By-and-by Dryden showed how well he could write in the familiar style, when he composed the song about fair Iris:

      ‘She’s fickle and false, and there we agree,

      For I am as false and as fickle as she;

      We neither believe what either can say,

      And neither believing, we neither betray.’

      Then came the reign of Pope, and Swift, and Prior, and Peterborough – Pope, with his truly playful ‘What is Prudery?’ Swift, with his charming lines to Stella; Prior, with his ‘Dear Chloe, how blubber’d is that pretty face!’ and Peterborough, with that masterpiece of the familiar genre:

      ‘I said to my heart, between sleeping and waking,

      Thou wild thing, that always art leaping and aching,

      What black, brown, or fair, in what clime, in what nation,

      By turns has not taught thee this pit-a-pat-ation?’

      Then there were the Lady Wortley Montagu, with her lines to Congreve; and Chesterfield, with his ‘Advice to a Lady in Autumn’; Fielding, with his inimitable epistles to Walpole; and Goldsmith, with his incomparable ‘Retaliation.’ Later, again, came Cowper, with his ‘Nose and Eyes’ and ‘Names of Little Note’; Byron, with his verses ‘To Tom Moore’; Moore himself, with his ‘Time I’ve Lost in Wooing’; Barham, with his ‘Lines left at Hook’s’; Peacock, Canning, James Smith, Praed, and Mahony; and, still later, Hood, with his ‘Clapham Academy’; Brough, with his ‘Neighbour Nelly’; Mortimer Collins, with his tribute to his ‘Old Coat’; and a hundred others, all of whom could play delightfully on the familiar string.

      And, happily, the manufacture of familiar verse still goes on swimmingly. The Laureate has engaged in it, and even Mr. Browning has condescended to it. It has never, in the whole course of its career, been written better than by Mr. Holmes and Mr. Lowell, and, among ourselves, by Mr. Frederick Locker and Mr. Austin Dobson. No age, indeed, was ever more favourable than our own for the composition of verse which should, above all things, never be betrayed into exaggeration – which may have, if it please, a soupçon of wit and humour, and even of sentiment, but which should, in particular, be tolerant and urbane.

      SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLAND

      It was with true instinct that one of our most vigorous orators, desiring the other day to emphasize by quotation an appeal to the patriotic sentiments of his audience, went to a play of Shakespeare’s for the passage. For the bard of Avon is par excellence the poet of England. Keen as, in later years, has been the love of country displayed by such men as Thomson, Wordsworth, Lord Tennyson, and Mr. Swinburne, it is in the pages of Shakespeare that we find the most magnificent outbursts of national feeling. Let it be granted that the poet has not hesitated to throw a few satiric pebbles at his countrymen. Everybody will recall the amusing colloquy in ‘Hamlet,’ in which the Gravedigger humorously reflects upon the sanity of the English people, declaring that, if Hamlet be mad, it will not be noted in England, for there the men are as mad as he is. And then there is that other diverting colloquy in ‘Othello,’ wherein Iago stigmatizes Englishmen as ‘most potent in potting,’ asserting that they ‘drink with facility your Dane dead drunk,’ so expert is your Englishman in his drinking.

      But these be the gibes of Danes and Italians – not of the man Shakespeare or of Englishmen speaking with his voice. True it is that if Shakespeare was strongly patriotic, he was so only in common with the Englishmen of his day. He lived in an age when the English people were consumed with a spirit of burning affection for the isle which they inhabited – when the great religious upheaval which we call the Reformation had set the blood coursing through their veins, and infused new life into their heart and brain – and when the fear of Spanish domination had joined all classes in an indissoluble bond of love and loyalty. Probably the English nation never was more thoroughly united, more profoundedly in earnest, more closely attached to its traditions and its soil, than in those spacious times of great Elizabeth. And if Shakespeare produced play after play dealing with the history of his country, and presenting on the boards many of the most famous Englishmen of the past, he was led to do so, no doubt, not only because the topic had attractions for him, but because the Englishmen of his day revelled in such reminders of the stirring years gone by – of the great soldiers, statesmen, clerics, and the like, who had shed lustre on the national name. There must have been a decided and continuous demand for these elaborate chronicle-dramas, and it may be argued that the poet, in supplying them, did but comply with the call made upon him by his public patrons.

      The fact, however, that Shakespeare found historical plays a paying product will not wholly account for the powerfully patriotic strain in which they were composed. It is not only that the long series stretching from ‘King John’ to ‘Henry VIII.’ pulses from beginning to end with love of, and pride in, country; it is not only that the poet makes great Englishmen speak greatly – that, placing them in positions in which declarations of patriotism are natural and necessary, he makes those declarations eloquent and thrilling; – it is that he charges all his passages about England and the English with a passion of enthusiasm which can be explained only on the hypothesis that he was throwing his whole heart into the work, and sympathized deeply with the utterances of his creations. There is, for instance, something more than mere appropriateness to the character and the occasion in that marvellous piece of eulogy of which, in ‘Richard II.,’ John of Gaunt is made the spokesman. The poet seems unable to hold his admiration within bounds:

      ‘This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,

      This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

      This other Eden – demi-paradise – …

      This happy breed of men, this little world,

      This precious stone set in a silver sea…

      This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,

      This nurse, this teeming womb of Royal Kings…

      This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,

      Dear for her reputation through the world’ —

      on what other country has such magnificent praise been poured out by her poets? One can see, too, how sincere Shakespeare was in his feelings as an Englishman by the phrases and the epithets he everywhere bestows upon his fatherland. There is Chorus’s famous description of it in ‘Henry V.’ as ‘Little body with a mighty heart;’ there is the Queen’s allusion, in ‘Henry VI.,’ to its ‘blessed shore.’ Now it is called ‘fair,’ now ‘fertile,’ and now ‘happy.’ ‘Dear mother England,’ cries the Bastard in ‘King John.’ Bolingbroke rejoices that, though banished, he yet can boast that he is ‘a true-born Englishman;’ and elsewhere we read of ‘our lusty English,’ our ‘noble English,’ our ‘hearts of England’s breed’ – Rambures, the Frenchman, admitting that ‘that island of England breeds very valiant creatures.’

      And mark how Shakespeare causes one and all of his patriots to congratulate themselves that Britain is an island. Tennyson has called upon his countrymen to

      ‘Thank Him who isled us here, and roughly set

      His Briton in blown seas and storming showers;’

      and elsewhere has made a ‘Tory member’s elder son’ say —

      ‘God bless the narrow sea…

      Which keeps our Britain whole within herself.’

      Thomson, too, tells how ‘the rushing flood’ turned ‘this favoured isle’ ‘flashing СКАЧАТЬ