The Art of Letters | Page 7

When one reads it, one ceases to wonder that there exists even a
Catholic version of The Pilgrim's Progress, in which Giant Pope is
discreetly omitted, but the heroism of Christian remains. Bunyan
disliked being called by the name of any sect. His imagination was
certainly as little sectarian as that of a seventeenth-century preacher
could well be. His hero is primarily not a Baptist, but a man. He bears,
perhaps, almost too close a resemblance to Everyman, but his journey,

his adventures and his speech save him from sinking into a pulpit
generalization.

III.--THOMAS CAMPION
Thomas Campion is among English poets the perfect minstrel. He takes
love as a theme rather than is burned by it. His most charming, if not
his most beautiful poem begins: "Hark, all you ladies." He sings of
love-making rather than of love. His poetry, like Moore's--though it is
infinitely better poetry than Moore's--is the poetry of flirtation. Little is
known about his life, but one may infer from his work that his range of
amorous experience was rather wide than deep. There is no lady "with
two pitch balls stuck in her face for eyes" troubling his pages with a
constant presence. The Mellea and Caspia--the one too easy of capture,
the other too difficult--to whom so many of the Latin epigrams are
addressed, are said to have been his chief schoolmistresses in love. But
he has buried most of his erotic woes, such as they were, in a dead
language. His English poems do not portray him as a man likely to die
of love, or even to forget a meal on account of it. His world is a happy
land of song, in which ladies all golden in the sunlight succeed one
another as in a pageant of beauties. Lesbia, Laura, and Corinna with her
lute equally inhabit it. They are all characters in a masque of love,
forms and figures in a revel. Their maker is an Epicurean and an enemy
to "the sager sort":
My sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love, And, though the sager sort our
deeps reprove, Let us not weigh them. Heav'n's great lamps do dive
Into their west, and straight again revive. But, soon as once is set our
little light, Then must we sleep our ever-during night.
Ladies in so bright and insecure a day must not be permitted to "let
their lovers moan." If they do, they will incur the just vengeance of the
Fairy Queen Proserpina, who will send her attendant fairies to pinch
their white hands and pitiless arms. Campion is the Fairy Queen's court
poet. He claims all men--perhaps, one ought rather to say all
women--as her subjects:

In myrtle arbours on the downs The Fairy Queen Proserpina, This night
by moonshine leading merry rounds, Holds a watch with sweet love,
Down the dale, up the hill; No plaints or groans may move Their holy
vigil.
All you that will hold watch with love, The Fairy Queen Proserpina
Will make you fairer than Dione's dove; Roses red, lilies white And the
clear damask hue, Shall on your cheeks alight: Love will adorn you.
All you that love, or lov'd before, The Fairy Queen Proserpina Bids you
increase that loving humour more: They that have not fed On delight
amorous, She vows that they shall lead Apes in Avernus.
It would be folly to call the poem that contains these three verses one of
the great English love-songs. It gets no nearer love than a ballet does.
There are few lyrics of "delight amorous" in English, however, that can
compare with it in exquisite fancy and still more exquisite music.
Campion, at the same time, if he was the poet of the higher flirtation,
was no mere amorous jester, as Moore was. His affairs of the heart
were also affairs of the imagination. Love may not have transformed
the earth for him, as it did Shakespeare and Donne and Browning, but
at least it transformed his accents. He sang neither the "De Profundis"
of love nor the triumphal ode of love that increases from anniversary to
anniversary; but he knew the flying sun and shadow of romantic love,
and staged them in music of a delicious sadness, of a fantastic and
playful gravity. His poems, regarded as statements of fact, are a little
insincere. They are the compliments, not the confessions, of a lover. He
exaggerates the burden of his sigh, the incurableness of his wounded
heart. But beneath these conventional excesses there is a flow of
sincere and beautiful feeling. He may not have been a worshipper, but
his admirations were golden. In one or two of his poems, such as:
Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet; Haste you, sad notes, fall
at her flying feet,
admiration treads on