The Art of Letters | Page 8

the heels of worship.

All that I sung still to her praise did tend; Still she was first, still she my
song did end--
in these lines we find a note of triumphant fidelity rare in Campion's
work. Compared with this, that other song beginning:
Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow, Though thou be black as night,
And she made all of light, Yet follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow--
seems but the ultimate perfection among valentines. Others of the
songs hesitate between compliment and the 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