strenuous labour of a great brain illumined by the
steady flame of love for his country and for his lady.
Mr. Courthope has said that he lacked loftiness and
resolution of artistic purpose; without these, we
ask, how could a man, not lavishly dowered with poetry
in his soul, have achieved so much of it? It was
his very fixity and loftiness of purpose, his English
stubbornness and doggedness of resolution that enabled
him to surmount so many obstacles of style and metre,
of subject and thought. His two purposes, of glorifying
his mistress and his friends, and of sounding England’s
glories past and future, while insisting on the dangers
of a present decadence, never flagged or failed.
All his poetry up to 1627 has this object directly
or secondarily; and much after this date. Of
the more abstract and universal aspects of his art
he had not much conception; but he caught eagerly
at the fashionable belief in the eternizing power of
poetry; and had it not been that, where his patriotism
was uppermost, he was deficient in humour and sense
of proportion, he would have succeeded better:
as it is, his more directly patriotic pieces are usually
the dullest or longest of his works. He requires,
like all other poets, the impulse of an absolutely
personal and individual feeling, a moment of more
intimate sympathy, to rouse him to his heights of song.
Thus the Ballad of Agincourt is on the very
theme of all patriotic themes that most attracted
him; Virginian and other Voyages lay very close to
his heart; and in certain sonnets to his lady lies
his only imperishable work. Of sheer melody and
power of song he had little, apart from his themes:
he could not have sat down and written a few lark’s
or nightingale’s notes about nothing as some
of his contemporaries were able to do: he required
the stimulus of a subject, and if he were really moved
thereby he beat the music out. Only in one or
two of the later Odes, and in the volumes of 1627
and 1630, does his music ever seem to flow from him
naturally. Akin to this quality of broad and extensive
workmanship, to this faculty of taking a subject and
when writing, with all thought concentrated on it,
rather than on the method of writing about it, is
his strange lack of what are usually called ‘quotations’.
For this is not only due to the fact that he is little
known; there are, besides, so few detached remarks
or aphorisms that are separately quotable; so few
examples of that curiosa felicitas of diction:
lines like these,
Thy Bowe, halfe broke, is
peec’d with old desire;
Her Bowe is beauty with ten
thousand strings....