A History of the French Novel. Volume 1. From the Beginning to 1800

 
"Come ye heavy states of night,
Do my father's spirit right;
Soundings baleful let me borrow,
Burthening my song with sorrow:
Come sorrow, come! Her eyes that sings
By thee, are turnèd into springs.
"Come you Virgins of the night
That in dirges sad delight,
Quire my anthems; I do borrow
Gold nor pearl, but sounds of sorrow.
Come sorrow, come! Her eyes that sings
By thee, are turnèd into springs."
 

It does not matter who wrote that – the point is its occurrence in an ordinary collection of songs to music neither better nor worse than many others. When we read such verses as this, or as the still more charming Address to Love given on page 122, there is evident at once the non so che which distinguishes this period. There is a famous story of a good-natured conversation between Scott and Moore in the latter days of Sir Walter, in which the two poets agreed that verse which would have made a fortune in their young days appeared constantly in magazines without being much regarded in their age. No sensible person will mistake the meaning of the apparent praise. It meant that thirty years of remarkable original production and of much study of models had made possible and common a standard of formal merit which was very rare at an earlier time. Now this standard of formal merit undoubtedly did not generally exist in the days of Elizabeth. But what did generally exist was the "wind blowing where it listeth," the presence and the influence of which are least likely to be mistaken or denied by those who are most strenuous in insisting on the importance and the necessity of formal excellence itself. I once undertook for several years the criticism of minor poetry for a literary journal, which gave more room than most to such things, and during the time I think I must have read through or looked over probably not much less than a thousand, certainly not less than five or six hundred volumes. I am speaking with seriousness when I say that nothing like the note of the merely casual pieces quoted or referred to above was to be detected in more than at the outside two or three of these volumes, and that where it seemed to sound faintly some second volume of the same author's almost always came to smother it soon after. There was plenty of quite respectable poetic learning: next to nothing of the poetic spirit. Now in the period dealt with in this volume that spirit is everywhere, and so are its sisters, the spirits of drama and of prose. They may appear in full concentration and lustre, as in Hamlet or The Faërie Queene; or in fitful and intermittent flashes, as in scores and hundreds of sonneteers, pamphleteers, playwrights, madrigalists, preachers. But they are always not far off. In reading other literatures a man may lose little by obeying the advice of those who tell him only to read the best things: in reading Elizabethan literature by obeying he can only disobey that advice, for the best things are everywhere.^*