Stood painted, every fyall,1 fane2 and stage,3

Upon the plain ground by their own umbrage.

In these last lines we seem to see a landscape as such, truly grasped, and brought clearly out by the light and shade of Nature.

As a contrast, take a passage from T. Warton's prose version of a winter scene

The kite, perched on an old tree, fast by my chamber, cried lamentably, a sign of the dawning day. I rose, and half-opening my window, perceived the morning, livid, wan, and hoary; the air overwhelmed with vapour and cloud; the ground stiff, gray, and rough; the branches rattling; the sides of the hills looking black and hard with the driving blasts; the dew-drops congealed on the stubble and rind of trees; the sharp hailstones, deadlycold, hopping on the thatch and the neighbouring causeway.

The landscapes through which we have here been moving are laid out much on the same model; children, fair and gay, of one family. They make no attempt to "moralise the "song"; they are frames for bright pictures of courteous Love: the gentilezza of early Italian songs and sonnets is in them. Yet we now clearly recognise a pleasure in describing the scenes, mostly found in the palaces and convents of the time, in which the poets personally delighted.

In this series, the rendering of Nature by Douglas marks a very distinct advance: the naïf beauty of mediaeval times which had become conventional through repetition is exchanged for a markedly broader and stronger treatment. And this, unconsciously no doubt, coincides with our arrival at one of the great crises of our literature. Already the preparations have been made for the Elizabethan poetry—the light of the Renaissance influence has risen above the horizon.

1 Dome.

2 I conjecture, vane.

3 Story.

K

CHAPTER XI

LANDSCAPE IN ELIZABETHAN POETRY

THAT Wyatt (1503-1542) and Surrey (c. 1515-1547) are the direct ancestors of our modern poetry has been a truism from the Elizabethan time onwards. This high place they owe less to simple force and inspiration than to the style and matter of the Italian Renaissance, with some measure of its charm, which they were the first to naturalise in England: for Chaucer's brave attempt in that direction proved premature. They are Makers, to give them once more the old rightful name, by virtue of manner in a wide sense; by parting from mediaevalism, to speak generally, in metres, in choice of subject, and by a style less purely national. They are also modern in choice of words; no change in the language even approximately like those great changes during the four hundred years before their date the death of Saxon, the growth of the mixed English-having developed itself during the same period since the sixteenth began.

Wyatt, however, really adds nothing to our own subject. His was not a mind attuned to Nature, her sweet sights and roundelays. Surrey's soul, more gentle and more musical, has left us a charming sonnet, full of true if obvious natural fact: the title is, Description of Spring, wherein everything renews, save only the Lover—

The soote1 season, that bud and bloom forth brings,
With green hath clad the hill, and eke the vale.

1 Sweet.

The nightingale with feathers new she sings;
The turtle to her make1 hath told her tale.

Summer is come, for every spray now springs,
The hart hath hung his old head 2 on the pale;
The buck in brake his winter coat he flings;
The fishes flete 3 with new repairéd scale;

The adder all her slough away she slings;
The swift swallow pursueth the flies smale ; 4
The busy bee her honey now she mings ; 5
Winter is worn that was the flowers' bale.6

And thus I see among these pleasant things

Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs !

These lines, in their simple elegance, probably record Surrey's study of Petrarch. But he also justly claims a lyric in which the poetical advance, whereof he was our chief leader and protagonist, clearly and beautifully reveals itself. The sweet, spontaneous melody, the natural images not only varied but grouped as wholes, the life we are made to feel in the creatures of Nature, and how it is parallel while opposed to humanityall these are new, and all are distinct advances. And the landscape is unconsciously classical also. It shows Nature, not in the allusive, allegorical style of the Middle Ages, but looked at and painted as she is; and in that sense truly follows the Italian poets of what might be termed the middle Renaissance, Lorenzo or Poliziano. This piece is named A Description of the restless State of the Lover when absent from the Mistress of his Heart: I quote the opening lines

1 Mate. 4 Small.

The Sun, when he hath spread his rays,
And show'd his face ten thousand ways;

2 Shed his horns.
5 Mingles.

3 Float.
6 Sorrow.

7 It was printed by Tottel in the same rare book which, in 1557, first gave England the avowed poems by Wyatt and Surrey, but as by an Uncertain Author. After long hesitation, however, on comparison with the lyrics of that time, I cordially agree with those critics who ascribe it to Lord Surrey. Yet even without the name of Howard it would "smell as

sweet."

Ten thousand things do then begin
To show the life that they are in.
The heaven shows lively art and hue,
Of sundry shapes and colours new,
And laughs upon the earth; anon,
The earth, as cold as any stone,
Wet in the tears of her own kind,
'Gins then to take a joyful mind.
For well she feels that out and out
The sun doth warm her round about,
And dries her children tenderly;
And shows them forth full orderly.

The mountains high, and how they stand,
The valleys, and the great main land!
The trees, the herbs, the towers strong,
The castles, and the rivers long!

Earth also sends forth her children, compared by Surrey to young choristers—

Then everything doth pleasure find
In that, that comforts all their kind.
No dreams do drench them of the night
Of foes, that would them slay, or bite,
As hounds, to hunt them at the tail;
Or men force them through hill and dale.
The sheep then dreams not of the wolf:
The shipman forces not the gulf;

1 Surrey here follows the rational Italian practice, using as rhymes words identical in spelling but diverse in sense-a practice which Mr. Swinburne has justly revived for our benefit. 2 Where.

The lamb thinks not the butcher's knife

Should then bereave him of his life.

For when the sun doth once run in,

Then all their gladness doth begin;

And then their skips, and then their play:

So falls their sadness then away.

After this we pass to a picture of Love in Absence, rarely equalled in our poetry for its exquisitely simple phrases, for the delicate homely depth and purity of its passion

It gives a very echo to the seat

Where Love is throned.

But this lies beyond my narrower province.

Great poet as Spenser was, yet his landscape disappoints us. It seems to form an exception-we might perhaps call it a reaction—from the general quality of the English Naturepoetry we have been surveying. Spenser's distinctive note, good critics have observed, is "his remoteness from every day "life"; the "marvellous independence and true imaginative "absence of all particular space or time" in the Faërie Queene.1 Hence his landscape approaches rather to that sweet, but less varied and expressive conventional semi-classic style, frequent in the later Italian poetry.

Taking first, with honour due, his great poem, we may first note that Spenser's similes from nature are rare and slight; they seem to lack conviction. It is buildings, indeed, which he describes much more at length than landscape, e.g. Castle Joyous, or that of Alma, or Busyrane's; or the Palace of Love, where Be bold was written over the door. In these descriptions Spenser's chief object apparently has been to bring in a gallery of endless tapestried pictures devoted to antique amorous legend.

But if natural description as such be rare in the wilderness of his allegory, short vignettes-yet picturesque I should call them, rather than pictures—are frequent; brilliant in colour, and all set off by that unceasing music of words which seems to run, like Pactolus of old, over golden sands. Such 1 S. T. Coleridge.