The Art of Letters | Page 8

finer ecstasy. The compliment is certainly of the noblest in the lyric which sets out--
When thou must home to shades of underground, And, there arriv'd, a new admired guest, The beauteous spirits do ingirt thee round, White lope, blithe Helen, and the rest, To hear the stories of thy finisht love From that smooth tongue whose music hell can move;
but it fades by way of beauty into the triviality of convention in the second verse:
Then wilt thou speak of banqueting delights, Of masks and revels which sweet youth did make, Of tourneys and great challenges of knights, And all these triumphs for thy beauty's sake: When thou hast told these honours done to thee, Then tell, O tell, how thou didst murther me.
There is more of jest than of sorrow in the last line. It is an act of courtesy. Through all these songs, however, there is a continuous expense of beauty, of a very fortune of admiration, that entitles Campion to a place above any of the other contemporaries of Shakespeare as a writer of songs. His dates (1567-1620) almost coincide with those of Shakespeare. Living in an age of music, he wrote music that Shakespeare alone could equal and even Shakespeare could hardly surpass. Campion's words are themselves airs. They give us at once singer and song and stringed instrument.
It is only in music, however, that Campion is in any way comparable to Shakespeare. Shakespeare is the nonpareil among song-writers, not merely because of his music, but because of the imaginative riches that he pours out in his songs. In contrast with his abundance, Campion's fortune seems lean, like his person. Campion could not see the world for lovely ladies. Shakespeare in his lightest songs was always aware of the abundant background of the visible world. Campion seems scarcely to know of the existence of the world apart from the needs of a masque-writer. Among his songs there is nothing comparable to "When daisies pied and violets blue," or "Where the bee sucks," or "You spotted snakes with double tongue," or "When daffodils begin to peer," or "Full fathom five," or "Fear no more the heat o' the sun." He had neither Shakespeare's eye nor Shakespeare's experiencing soul. He puts no girdle round the world in his verse. He knows but one mood and its sub-moods. Though he can write
There is a garden in her face, Where roses and white lilies grow,
he brings into his songs none of the dye and fragrance of flowers.
Perhaps it was because he suspected a certain levity and thinness in his genius that Campion was so contemptuous of his English verse. His songs he dismissed as "superfluous blossoms of his deeper studies." It is as though he thought, like Bacon, that anything written for immortality should be written in Latin. Bacon, it may be remembered, translated his essays into Latin for fear they might perish in so modern and barbarous a tongue as English. Campion was equally inclined to despise his own language in comparison with that of the Greeks and Romans. His main quarrel with it arose, however, from the obstinacy with which English poets clung to "the childish titillation of rhyming." "Bring before me now," he wrote, "any the most self-loved rhymer, and let me see if without blushing he be able to read his lame, halting rhymes." There are few more startling paradoxes in literature than that it should have been this hater of rhymes who did more than any other writer to bring the art of rhyme to perfection in the English language. The bent of his intellect was classical, as we see in his astonishing Observations on the Art of English Poesy, in which he sets out to demonstrate "the unaptness of rhyme in poesy." The bent of his genius, on the other hand, was romantic, as was shown when, desiring to provide certain airs with words, he turned out--that seems, in the circumstances, to be the proper word--"after the fashion of the time, ear-pleasing rhymes without art." His songs can hardly be called "pot-boilers," but they were equally the children of chance. They were accidents, not fulfilments of desire. Luckily, Campion, writing them with music in his head, made his words themselves creatures of music. "In these English airs," he wrote in one of his prefaces, "I have chiefly aimed to couple my words and notes lovingly together." It would be impossible to improve on this as a description of his achievement in rhyme. Only one of his good poems, "Rosecheek'd Laura," is to be found among those which he wrote according to his pseudo-classical theory. All the rest are among those in which he coupled his words and notes lovingly together, not as a duty, but as a diversion.
Irish critics have sometimes hoped that certain qualities