Part 35 (1/2)

When we had climb'd the cliff, and were ash.o.r.e.

instead of

When we had come ash.o.r.e, and climb'd the cliff.

The _hipallage_ he calls _the changeling_, when changing the place of words changes the sense; as in the phrase ”come dine with me, and stay not,” turned into ”come stay with me, and dine not.” This change of sense into nonsense he called ”the changeling,” in allusion to the nursery legend when fairies steal the fairest child, and subst.i.tute an ill-favoured one. This at least is a most fanciful account of nonsense!

I will give the technical terms of satire; they display a refinement of conception which we hardly expected from the native effusions of the wits of that day. _Ironia_, he calls the _dry-mock_; _sarcasmus_, the _bitter taunt_; the Greek term _asteismus_ he calls _the merry scoff_--it is the jest which offends not the hearer. When we mock scornfully comes the _micterismus_, the _fleering frumpe_, as he who said to one to whom he gave no credit, ”_No doubt, sir, of that!_” The _antiphrasis_, or the _broad flout_, when we deride by flat contradiction, ant.i.thetically calling a dwarf a giant; or addressing a black woman, ”In sooth ye are a fair one!” The _charientismus_ is _the privy nippe_, when you mock a man in a _sotto voce_; and the _hyperbole_, as the Greeks term the figure, and the Latins _dementiens_, our vernacular critic, for its immoderate excess, describes as ”the over-reacher, or the loud liar.” The rhetorical figures of our critic exceed a hundred in number, if Octavius Gilchrist has counted rightly, all which are ingeniously ill.u.s.trated by fragments of our own literature, and often by poetical and historical anecdotes by no means common and stale. We must appreciate this treasure of our own antiquity, though we may smile when we learn that while we speak or write, however naturally, we are in fact violating, or ill.u.s.trating, this heap of rhetorical figures, without whose aid unconsciously our _fleering frumpes_, our _merry scoffs_, and our _privy nippes_, have been intelligible all our days.

In the more elevated spirit of this work, the writer opens by defining the poet, after the Greek, to be ”a maker” or creator, drawing the verse and the matter from his native invention,--unlike the _translator_, who therefore may be said to be a versifier, and not a poet. This canon of criticism might have been secure from the malignity of hypercriticism.

It happened, however, that in the year following that in which ”The Art of Poetry” was published, Sir John Harrington put forth his translation of Ariosto, and, presuming that none but a poet could translate a poet, he caught fire at the solemn exclusion. The vindictive ”versifier”

invented a merciless annihilation both of the critic and his ”Art,” by very unfair means; for he proved that the critic himself was a most detestable poet, and consequently the very existence of ”The Art” itself was a nullity! ”All the receipts of poetry prescribed,” proceeds the enraged translator of Ariosto, ”I learn out of this very book, never breed excellent poets. For though the poor gentleman laboureth to make poetry an art, he proveth nothing more plainly than that it is a _gift_ and not an _art_, because making himself and many others so cunning in the art, yet he sheweth himself so slender a gift in it.”

Was this critic qualified by nature and art to arbitrate on the destinies of the Muses? Were his taste and sensibility commensurate with that learning which dictated with authority, and that ingenuity which reared into a system the diversified materials of his critical fabric?

We hesitate to allow the claims of a critic whose trivial taste values ”the courtly trifles,” which he calls ”pretty devices,” among the inventions of poesy; we are startled by his elaborate exhibition of ”geometrical figures in verse,” his delight in egg or oval poems, tapering at the ends and round in the middle, and his columnar verse, whose pillars, shaft, and capital, can be equally read upwards and downwards. This critic, too, has betrayed his utter penury of invention in ”parcels of his own poetry,” obscure conceits in barbarous rhymes; by his intolerable ”triumphals,” poetical speeches for recitation; and a series of what he calls ”partheniades, or new year's gifts,”--bloated eruptions of those hyperbolical adulations which the maiden queen could endure, but which bear the traces of the poetaster holding some appointment at court.

When the verse flowed beyond the mechanism of his rule of scanning, and the true touch of nature beyond the sympathy of his own emotions, the rhetorician showed the ear of Midas. He condemns the following lines as ”going like a minstrel's music in a metre of eleven, very harshly in my ear, whether it be for lack of good rime or of good reason, or of both, I wot not.” And he exemplifies this lack of ”good rime and good reason, or both,” by this exquisitely tender apostrophe of a mother to her infant:

Now suck, child, and sleep, child, thy mother's own joy, Her only sweet comfort to drown all annoy; For beauty, surpa.s.sing the azured sky, I love thee, my darling, as ball of mine eye.

Such a stanza indeed may disappoint the reader when he finds that we are left without any more.

In the history of this ambiguous book, and its anonymous author, I discover so many discrepancies and singularities, such elaborate poetical erudition, combined with such inept.i.tude of poetic taste, that I am inclined to think that the more excellent parts could never have been composed by the courtly trifler. It is remarkable that this curious Art of English Poetry was ascribed to SIDNEY; and Wanley, in his catalogue of the Harley Library, a.s.signs this volume to Spenser.[4] I lay no stress on the singular expression of Sir John Harrington, applied to the present writer, as ”the unknown _G.o.dfather_,” which seems to indicate that the presumed writer had named an offspring without being the parent. Nor will I venture to suggest that this work may at all have been connected with that treatise of ”the English poets,” which Spenser, we know, had lost and never recovered. The poet lived ten years after the present publication, and it does not appear that he ever claimed this work. Ma.n.u.scripts, however, we may observe, strangely wandered about the world in that day, and such literary foundlings often fell into the hands of the charitable. In that day of modest publication, some were not always solicitous to claim their own; and there are even instances of the original author, residing at a distance from the metropolis, who did not always discover that his own work had long pa.s.sed through the press; so narrow then was the sphere of publication, and so partial was all literary communication.

One more mystery is involved in the authors.h.i.+p of this remarkable work: first printed in 1589, we gather from the book itself that it was in hand at least as early as in 1553. This glorious retention of a work during nearly forty years, would be a literary virtue with which we cannot honour the trifler who complacently alludes to so many of his own writings which no one else has noticed, and unluckily for himself has furnished for us so many ”parcels of his poetry,” to exemplify ”the art.”

If we resolve the enigma, by acknowledging that this learned and curious writer has not been the only critic who has proved himself to be the most woful of poetasters, this decision will not account for the mysterious silence of the writer in allowing an elaborate volume, the work of a great portion of a life, to be cast out into the world unnamed and unowned.

I find it less difficult to imagine that some stray ma.n.u.script, possibly from the relics of SIDNEY, or perhaps the lost one of SPENSER, might have fallen into the hands of some courtly critic, or ”the Gentleman Pensioner,” who inlaid it with many of his own trivialities: the discrepancy in the ingenuity of the writing with the genius of the writer in this combination of learning and inept.i.tude would thus be accounted for; at present it may well provoke our scepticism.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] ”The Arte of English Poesie, contrived in three bookes--the first of Poets and Poesie, the second of Proportion, the third of Ornament,” 1589, 4to.

[2] Ames appears first to have called him _Webster_ Puttenham.

Possibly Ames might have noted down the name from Carew, as Master Puttenham, which by an error of the pen, or the printer, was transformed into the remarkable Christian name of _Webster_. I cannot otherwise account for this misnomer. Steevens, in an indistinct reference to a ma.n.u.script, revealed it to be _George_; and probably was led to that opinion by the knowledge of a ma.n.u.script work in the Harleian Collection by a George Puttenham. It is a defence of Elizabeth in the matter of the Scottish Queen. Ellis, our poetic antiquary, has distinguished our author as ”Webster, _alias_ George.”

All this taken for granted, the last editor, probably in the course of his professional pursuits, falls on a nuncupative will, dated 1590, of a _George_ Puttenham; already persuaded that such a name appertained to the author of the ”Art of English Poetry,” he ventured to corroborate what yet remained to be ascertained. All that he could draw from the nuncupative will of this _George_ Puttenham is, that he ”left all his goods, movable and immovable, moneys, and bonds,” to Mary Symes, a favourite female servant; but he infers that ”he probably was our author.” Yet, at the same time, there turned up another will of one _Richard_ Puttenham, ”a prisoner in her Majesty's Bench.” _Richard_, therefore, may have as valid pretensions to ”The Arte of English Poesie,” as _George_, and neither may be the author.

This matter is trivial, and hardly worth an inquiry.

Haslewood, laborious but unfortunately uneducated, is the editor of an elegant reprint of this ”Arte of English Poesie.” A modern reader may therefore find an easy access to a valuable volume which had been long locked up in the antiquary's closet.

[3] See page 157 of ”The Arte of English Poesie.”

[4] The following letter is an evidence of the uncertain accounts respecting this author among the most knowing literary historians.

Here, too, we find that Webster, or George, or Richard, is changed into Jo!--

”What authority Mr. Wood has for Jo. Puttenham's being the author of the 'Art of English Poetry' I do not know. Mr. Wanley, in his 'Catalogue of the Harley Library,' says that _he had been told that Edmund Spenser was the author of that book, which came out anonymous_. But Sir John Harrington, in his preface to 'Orlando Furioso,' gives so hard a censure of that book, that Spenser could not possibly be the author.”--”Letter from THOMAS BAKER to the Hon.

James West,” printed in the ”European Magazine,” April, 1788.