Fend.MAYEUR

NOTES.

LEIGH HUNT (Book of the Sonnet) says, that Spenser with all his Italian proclivities was the first who deliberately abandoned the archetypal pattern of the sonnet, which Sir Thomas Wyat and the Earl of Surrey are believed to have brought back with them from Italy when (fresh from the schools of Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto) they set themselves to the work of reforming English metre and style. It is hard to understand this statement, for Surrey, who died five years before the year of Spenser's birth, wrote in the structure adopted in the great body of Spenser's sonnets. A slight divergence of structure is indeed seen in Spenser's method of linking together the several parts of his sonnet by the repetitions of rhymes (the fifth line rhyming with the fourth, and the ninth with the eighth), but so far from indicating a deliberate abandonment of the archetypal model, this variation rather signalises a desire to return to it with a view to that rounded unity which is imperfectly felt where the three quatrains stand apart in scheme of rhyme.

Edmund Spenser. Pages 1-4.

Sidney.

The last line of this sonnet is a little obscured by a transposition. Sir Philip He means, Do they call ungratefulness there a virtue?'—Charles Lamb.

The series of sonnets, Astrophel and Stella, from which the above is quoted, appear to record Sidney's love for Penelope Devereux, sister to the second Earl of Essex and wife of Lord Rich. Southey, however, in a letter to Sir Egerton Brydges, says Sidney's Stella cannot have been Lady Rich, because the poems plainly relate to a successful passion, and because the name was by contemporaries applied to the widow of Sidney.

Page 5.

Page 7.

Samuel
Daniel.

Page 9.

It may be

the vaine

not to be

This sonnet appears in the Arcadia immediately after a fine passage on the condition of the soul after death, and when the two friends, Musidorus and Pyrocles, are in peril of being put to death. presumed that Milton's warning in his Eikonoklastes against amatoreous Poem of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia,' which was read at any time without good caution,' scarcely applied to this sonnet, which is indeed so full of a pious resignation as to be worthy even in time of trouble and affliction to be a Christian's prayer-book.' Of course Milton's strictures on the 'worth and witt' of the book in question were primarily provoked by King Charles's inopportune enjoyment of them.

'His Sonnet to Sleep became a kind of model to younger writers, and imitations of it are to be found in the sonneteers of the time, sometimes with the opening epithet literally borrowed.'-G. SAINTSBURY, The English Poets, vol. i.

It would be extremely difficult to prove that the opening epithet of this sonnet originated with Daniel, though Bartholomew Griffin's employment of it in his Fidessa is an obvious appropriation from him. It does not appear to have been observed in this connection that certain lines of Griffin's derived sonnet (published about 1596) are clearly the germ of the great passage on sleep in Macbeth, probably written about 1606. It need hardly be said that in this case, as in other cases of Shakspeare's apparent borrowings, the coincidences are merely verbal, and that the spirit of what is said by Griffin undergoes complete transfiguration, such as raises it to a level proper to the greater poet. Daniel appears to have been regarded with some amount of favour by his contemporaries, but subsequent critics judged him prosaic, and he was in danger of falling entirely out of sight when Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey, in the days of the first Lyrical Ballads, discovered in him excellent specimens of that neutral style which they were then asserting was common to good prose and natural verse; and henceforward these poets lost no opportunity of commending a writer who seemed to them often to write in language as easy and natural as it was pure. Another set of excellences, a richness and an occasional exuberance of epithet,

attached Leigh Hunt and the London school to this chaste, amiable, and serious poet, and again the 'well-languaged Daniel' took poetic rank, to which his Musophilus and Hymen's Triumph (abounding as they nevertheless do with passages of exceptional beauty) seem scarcely to have entitled him. One later champion (in addition to his modern editor, Dr. Grosart) Daniel has indeed secured in the gifted and right-hearted William Davies, author of Songs of a Wayfarer. In a paper on the Sonnet published in the Quarterly Review, January 1873, Mr. Davies says that for mellifluous tenderness and pensive grace of expression, the above might rank amongst the first sonnets in the language.

There are many English sonnets treating of love-parting, and certain of the most notable of them are by Elizabethan and Victorian poets of great name, but by a general agreement of catholic opinion this is amongst all similar sonnets quite incomparable. As a piece of selfportrayal it is matchless. Those who long for something simply thought and simply said will find it charming in the full first sense of that injured word, whilst those who demand psychical insight will realise in it a profundity as deep as the whole depth of the spirit of love in humanity. Observe specially the contrast of the mock outbraving tone in the opening passages, and the strong yearning of confessed passion in the unmasked close, now first so separated that the contrast may be the better felt. The marvel is that this sonnet stands almost alone in excellence in the works of a poet who wrote a cycle of sixty-three sonnets in all, mostly disfigured by conceits and plays upon words. Under a pseudonym Drayton completely veiled the identity of his Faire Idea, Soule-shrin'd Saint,' but from the sonnets themselves and from a passage in Polyolbion, it is supposed that she was Anne Goodeere, daughter of his patron, Sir Henry Goodeere, of Powlesworth Abbey. The lovers were finally separated, probably by difference of social position. It is curious that a recent critic speaks of Drayton as one who promised to confer an immortality upon his lady which his verse has not realised.

The trumpet-tone of all these lines is wondrously inspiriting; they
That Shakspeare, who led

express a perfect and splendid confidence.

Michael

Drayton.

Page 12.

William Shakspeare. Page 16.

Page 19.

Page 20.

an inconspicuous life, and took no heed for the preservation of any of his writings later than the Venus and Adonis and the Lucrece, should yet have known with such entire certainty that they would outlive the perishing body of men and things, till the Resurrection of the Dead-this is the most moving fact in his extant history; the one which informs with grandeur of being, and reconciles into a potent unity, the residual elements of his career, sparse and disparate at best, sometimes insignificant and incongruous-looking.'-W. M. ROSSETTI, Lives of Famous Poets.

It is proposed (the late Mr. Staunton, Athenæum, January 31, 1874) to read crime for time at the end of the sixth line. The alteration would rob the succeeding four lines of half their significance and all their relevancy. The sweetest buds, unstained prime, and ambush of young days are phrases clearly designed to emphasise the previous tribute to the purity of the author's subject; namely, that being good, slander but proves his worth the greater, because it so directs men's eyes as to compel them to see that though still of that time of life when evil woos its utmost (and when he might with least of guilt fall into vice) he is yet either not assailed by it or victor over it. Yet this praise (negative and enforced as it is) cannot tie up envy, which indeed grows the more as praise is wrung out of slander. In short, if suspicion of some ill did not attach to the subject, then he alone of all men whatever would own the universal goodwill.

One of the least irrational and certainly one of the least harmful of the many theories which have been started by those who repudiate the simple and natural significance of Shakspeare's sonnets, is that of the late Richard Simpson, who argues that, together with the principal Elizabethan sonnet-systems, they were written in conformity with the lovephilosophy of the schools, and that therefore they are not to be understood as in any sense accidental,' but as being written altogether passionlessly, in a scala amoris which demanded that all the joys and all the sorrows of love should find systematical expression. This theory is akin to that which goes to prove that the early Italian poets often used love as a metaphor where politics and scepticism were covertly involved,—and it is open

to the same objection, that of robbing the poetry in question of the beauty that attaches to it from its appearance of sincerity. The known facts, however, of the amours of certain of the Elizabethan poets, seem to give colour to the rumour current amongst subsequent critics, that the agonies of unrequited affection often existed only in verse. In the case of Shakspeare's sonnets, on the other hand, the internal evidence of reality is not merely more forcible than elsewhere among the sonnets of his contemporaries, but the external evidence appears conclusive as to their having some personal application.

The Editor has preserved the halting and puzzling punctuation of the first line observed in the original source, because the accepted reading seems to require it. The when in that line appears to him to present the baffling difficulty, breaking as it does the flow of the passage and the unity of thought. He suggests as a feasible emendation both of words and pointing:

Then hate me, an' thou wilt, if ever, now.'

Precedent in abundance for such literary form will be readily remembered from Shakspeare.

Surely it robs this sonnet of half its beauty and direct sincerity to dig Page 24. beneath the surface for symbolical allusions such as appears to prove (see F. G. Fleay, Macmillan's Magazine, March 1875) that the absence, journey, and travel here dwelt upon do not refer to an actual journey at all, but to the separation between Southampton and Shakspeare caused by the unfaithfulness of the latter in producing not poems dedicated to his friend, but only dramas destined for the multitude. When we think how much of the above sonnet may be so strained as to seem to bear a metaphorical significance, we must needs shrink from a foreshadowing sense of how painfully that charm of simple, unaffected truthfulness which (with all the mystery of personal reference) pervades Shakspeare's sonnets must vanish beneath a touch that compels them to labour in a pregnancy of which they can never in this world be delivered.