New Poems by James I/The King's Verse and Criticism

by James I

IV

THE KING'S VERSE AND CRITICISM

"For such a poet, while thy days were green, Thou wert, as chief of them are said t' have been."

JONSON.

The discussion of the King's theory and practice of poetry is made appropriate at this point by the fact that most of his verse, as he remarks in the preface to the Exercises at vacant houres, was written in his "verie young and tender yeares : wherein nature, (except shee were a monster) can admit no perfection." All of his poems, save three or four sonnets and the revisions of his early paraphrases of the psalms, belong to the period of his reign in Scotland ; and the greater portion of them were composed either before the publication of the first volume of his poems in his nine- teenth year, or in the time of romantic enthusiasm excited by his marriage.

With this early verse should be connected the translations and sonnets of Montgomerie, Fowler, and the Hudsons, the whole representing an attempt, feeble indeed and abortive, to introduce new fashions of poetry into Scotland. In the little group which surrounded the King, there were frequent discussions of literary themes. Translations and para- phrases were planned and carried out. There were sym- posiums in which the excellence of the classical writers was considered, and the desirability of making it known to the "facound" wits of Scotland.^[1]

The manifesto of this minor Areopagus was the Reulis and cautelis to be observit and eschewit in Scottis Poesie,^[2] and its sources and contents require first attention in a review of their work. "Sindrie hes written of it [the art of poetry] in English," says James vaguely, in the preface; but his indebtedness to Gascoigne's excellent Notes of Instruction (1575) is obvious on every page. The King and his guide in the art simply appropriated from the English treatise, after the fashion of border reivers, making adroit and somewhat disingenuous changes in order and phrasing, and adding or omitting as their tastes and the peculiarities of Scottish prosody suggested. On the other hand, the debt to French criticism is surprisingly slight, and confined to observations which are among the commonplaces of criticism early and late. Thus in his discussion of invention, and of art vs. nature (Preface and Chapter VII) James is closer to Horace^[3] than to Ronsard; and in this and other matters he may owe something to the Uranie of Du Bartas, his translation of which is in the same volume with the Reulis. As a matter of fact, the Defense of Du Bellay and the Abrege de l'Art poetique of Ronsard give scant attention to elementary matters of metrical technique, and it is with these that James is chiefly concerned.

When James warns poets to avoid matters of the commonweal, which "are to grave materis for a Poet to mell in," he is doubtless speaking from his experiences with the verse satirists of the Kirk party in Scotland. In other divergences from Gascoigne, the influence of Montgomerie is generally conspicuous. While Gascoigne would not have a poet "hunt the letter to death," James would use alliteration freely, and quotes in illustration a line from Montgomerie's highly alliterative Flyting. His recognition of proverbs, also, as one of the three special ornaments of verse, is doubtless suggested by their frequent occurrence in the writings of the "master poet." James is, I think, the only Elizabethan critic who explicitly condemns "rhymes-in-terms" (e.g. prove . . . disprove), and it is notable that the fault occurs but once in Montgomerie's poems and twice in his own (sonnets XXXIV and XXXVI). In all of these respects the practice of James conspicuously resembles that of the older poet. Of the quotations in the Reulis, three are from the author's own works, three unidentified, and seven from Montgomerie.

An examination of the treatise^[4] shows that the King, as an apprentice in the divine art, is interested not so much in the high purposes of poetry as in details of verse-making and diction. While it is not enough, it is still his chief concern that a poem shall "flow well, with many pretie wordes." In matters of technique he prefers the definite and positive rule. The cesura must fall in the middle and must follow an accented syllable; there must be a pause at the end of every line; weak endings, faulty rhymes, misplaced accents are to be avoided. On all these points he is a stickler for metrical propriety. In his practice, though he cannot strictly obey his precepts, he is reasonably correct. But one of his sonnets contains more than five rhymes, albeit the difficulty of the scheme often contorts his syntax and renders his phrasing grotesque. While it is true that the Reulis and cautelis was the work of his boyhood, and was written at a time when the confusion of poetic standards made dogmatism desirable, while the scantiness of contemporary poetry made the establishment of final principles impossible, it is nevertheless quite likely that the King retained in later years his early precisian views. He had at least this trait of the pedant that he was fond of formulating principles and sticking to them regardless of facts or consequences, as may easily be seen by noting the conformity of many of the doctrines in the Basilikon Doron to the actual conduct of his government. Furthermore, Scottish versemen, from the northern Chaucerians to Drummond and even later, were more conscientious and often more successful metricians than their English contemporaries, and Montgomerie, the King's mentor, was especially adept. In the case of James, one may see the trend of his taste not only by his practice, but by his Sonnet on Sir William Alexander's Harshe Verses after the Ingliche Fasone (XLVI) and by his liking for Forth Feasting, the most correct of Drummond's polished verse. Whatever his direct influence, the King's tastes were on the side of formal accuracy.^[5]

In turning to the King's actual accomplishment in verse, the early date of most of it should be borne in mind, and the fact that it was written when the influence of the old native poetry was nearly dead in Scotland, and when the new lyric impulse from abroad was just beginning to make itself felt. James corresponds in Scotland to the Elizabethan tentatives of the sixties, seventies, and eighties; and his amatory lyrics are not on a much lower level than the "fragrant flowers," "pleasant delites," and "daynty devises" which represent the average of the miscellanies from Tottel's to the Phœnix Nest of 1583. It is a mistake to think of James as a Jacobean and not as a belated Elizabethan, or to judge his work by more severe standards than those applied to the lyrics of Gascoigne and Googe or the translations of Golding and Phaer.

Like the work of the last-mentioned writers, James's translations from Du Bartas are in fourteeners, and whatever poetical beauty they may have had for contemporary ears^[6] is greatly diminished for modern readers by the lilt and flop of this almost fatal measure. The translations are further weakened by the crabbed literalness with which they follow the original. Even in the King's own invention in the same metre, The Lepanto, Dr. Irving searches vainly for "felicity of expression or elevation of thought."^[7] Graces such as he implies are truly lacking, but James, as in his prose and conversation, had a gift of picturesque and racy phrase. His style in the description of the battle between the Christian and the Turkish navies is concrete and lively, and at times achieves an almost ballad-like simplicity, as in the account of the gathering of the Christian forces, ll. 268-279:—

"There came eight thousand Spaniards brave,
From hotte and barren Spaine,
Good order kepars, cold in fight,
With proud disdainfull braine.
From pleasant fertill Italie,
There came twelve thousand als,
With subtill spreites bent to revenge,
By craftie meanes and fals.
Three thousande Almans also came,
From Countries colde and wide,
These monney men with awfull cheare
The chok will dourelie bide."

The Dreame on his Mistris (XVII) is perhaps a better example of the author's ability to handle "eights and sixes" with some approach to dignity. This and the Complaint of his Mistressis Absence from Court (XVI) were written some years later than the other pieces of the Amatoria, and show the progress he was making toward a sounder conception of poetry. They are not, like most of the early poems, a mere jumble of fantastic conceits. They are chiefly commendable, however, the first poem for the ingenious comparison of the alteration at court to changed weather at sea, and the second for the skill with which the poet interprets the tokens left by his mistress. Like the Phœnix, an allegorical elegy on the death of d'Aubigny (Essayes of a Prentise), the Satire against Woemen (XVIII), and the Admonition (LI), the two pieces display a cleverness of invention which somewhat atones for the absence of more poetical qualities.

In his short poems, the King's favorite form is the sonnet, a form suited, according to the Reulis and cautelis, not only for love matters, but for the "compendious praysing of any bukes, or the authoris thairof, or any argumentis of uther historeis"; and the rhyme-scheme he adopts is of especial interest in connection with the practice of contemporary writers. Hoffmann^[8] has already pointed out that the arrangement of the rhymes in Spenser's Amoretti, abab, bcbc, cdcd, ee, was employed also by Montgomerie in thirty-seven of his seventy-two sonnets, and that one of these was published in The Essayes of a Prentise in 1584, the first appearance of the form in print.^[9] But it is notable that the King and the other sonneteers in the Essayes adopt the same scheme, and that James adheres to it strictly in all save four of his published sonnets. Little significance need be attached to the actual date of publication, and Spenser must have written sonnets — other than the unrhymed translations from Petrarch and Du Bellay — earlier than 1586;^[10] but he is not known to have published any before the dedicatory verses at the opening of The Faerie Queene in I59O,^[11] and by this time he would have been familiar with the King's reputation as a patron, and doubtless also with his verse. It is not in any case a matter to be settled by the relative merits of the writers concerned. Either James or Montgomerie, with their fondness for intricate and frequent rhyming, might have invented the scheme by following Gascoigne's statement that "the first twelve [lines] do ryme in staves of four lines by crosse meetre, and the last two ryming togither do conclude the whole."^[12]

Daniel is the only English poet who adopts the rhyming of Spenser in any of his sonnets;^[13] but it is found more frequently among Scottish writers, and is in such cases a sign of the influence of James and Montgomerie. The Hudsons and Fowler employ it exclusively in the scanty collections of their verse which have survived; there are five or six examples scattered among the poems of Sir William Alexander^[14] and Sir David Murray;^[15] Mure of Rowallan^[16] uses it in twenty-five or thirty sonnets' In Scotland it is frequently the form adopted by occasional and amateur practitioners, ^[17] often with a view apparently of pleasing the King.

The latter's persistent use of it in spite of its difficulty may indicate that he took some credit to himself for its inception; it at least shows his attention to matters of form. Of the five sonnets with inclosed instead of alternate rhymes, one, the fifth of the Amatoria, is written with a pretense of anonymity, and the rest are of much later date.^[18] An examination of all the sonnets shows that more than half make the 'turn' at the end of the eighth instead of the twelfth line, though several are arranged as a series of quatrains with a final couplet.

It would be easy to illustrate from the poems the sins of the school of conceits, as for instance in the sonnet on the Armada (App. II, II), where the storm which aided in the defeat of the Spanish navy is attributed to the boisterous laughter of God, or the passage of the Uranie, quoted on page xxxv, in which the Bible is likened, among other things, to a bottomless ocean, a spring of eloquence, and a cornucopia. Here the author is following Du Bartas, whose influence on his British followers, whatever his original merits, must be considered wholly pernicious. As a final instance may be cited the sonnet on Archbishop Adamson's paraphrase of Job, which is spun entirely out of the supposed resemblance between the prelate's "gifts of sprite" and Job's "gifts of geare."

James is most nearly inspired on the subject of the divine right of kings; the sonnet to Henry at the beginning of the Basilikon Doron (App. II, V) opens with the finely Tamburlanian line,—

"God gives not Kings the stile of Gods in vaine."

and maintains something of this high and stately dignity throughout. Three other sonnets, written towards the close of the King's reign in Scotland, are easily distinguished from the rest as the summit of his achievement in poetry. One of these is the Ænigme of Sleepe (XXXVI) , more pleasing in thought than in style, yet not unworthy of comparison with better-known essays on this familiar theme. The other two are the pair of sonnets on page 39, the first beginning,

"Not orientall Indus cristall streames,"

and the second,

"Faire famous Isle, where Agathocles rang."

In sustained music, conformity to the technique of the sonnet, and prettiness of fancy, if not elevation, these might find a place in even a limited anthology of the sonnets of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

A minor poet is fortunate if he has thus surpassed himself in two or three poems. Yet in the case of James, while it is hardly necessary to apply Sir James Melville's remark regarding Mary Stuart's lute playing, that she did "reasonably for a queen," it is still true that his verse derives its interest chiefly from his high political station and the consequent value attached to an intimate revelation of his personal character. In this respect, his poems do not reflect the vices and extreme feebleness of which he is often accused. They show, however, that though of an emotional temperament — quick to tears or laughter — James was blessed with little imagination or insight. Such gifts as he had were more distinctly intellectual — an orderly and inventive habit of mind, agility in debate, and a fondness for logical finesse which had been cultivated from his school days under Buchanan, who was himself both controversialist and poet.

The formula of his verse would include as important elements the extravagant style of Renaissance love poetry, imitated chiefly from Montgomerie; the limitations of theme and treatment due to his exalted position and his acceptance of the narrow views of Calvinism; and the tendency toward intellectual activity uncontrolled by good sense which was not uncommon in current discussions of politics and religion. The first and last of these influences are conspicuous in Jacobean poetry; and it might even be said that, though his work belongs to an earlier period, his training and tastes were fairly in accord with those which prevailed during his reign in England.

1. Cf. the quotation from Hudson, p. xxxv. Doubtless these dinner-table conversations were a development from the devotional reading which had accompanied his repasts from the time of his childhood. In an account of The Present State of Scotland, 1586 (Roy. Hist. Soc., Vol. II, p. 262), it is recorded that there was a "chapter of the bible read with some exposition after each meal."
2. The best edition is in Elizabethan Critical Essays, Vol. I, pp. 208-225. Professor Smith's notes indicate with sufficient fullness the debt to English and French criticism.
3. Cf. De Arte Poetica: "Præstantissima est in omni arte, natura, et poetam non tarn fieri, quam nasci sermone eruditorum dicitur."
4. 1 The most interesting portion of the Reulis is Chap. VIII, "tuiching the kyndis of versis." His application there of the term verse heroicall to a stanza of nine lines, aab, aab, bab, may explain Ludovick Briskett's statement, before 1589, that The Faerie Queene was written in heroicall verse (Spenser, Globe ed., p. xxxiv). His condemnation of the iambic pentameter, or heroic couplet, as "ryme quhilk servis onely for lang historeis, and yit are nocht verse," may perhaps be traced to Montgomerie's avoidance of the metre, or to Ronsard's remark that he preferred the Alexandrine, though he wrote La Franqiade in pentameter at the desire of the King (Preface to La Françiade. (Œuvres, ed. Marty-Lavaux, Vol. III, p. 516; and cf. Abrege, Vol. VI, p. 455).
5. A less elementary discussion of style in verse and prose occurs in the Basilikon Doron, where it has attracted less attention, though parts of it are quoted in Mr. Rail's introduction to the volume entitled A Royal Rhetorician, London, 1900. The chief points in James's remarks are that prose should be plain and short, but stately ; that one's work should be passed to others for criticism; that a poem should be "so rich in quicke inventions, and poeticke flowers, and in faire and pertinent comparisons, as it shall retaine the lustre of a poem, although in prose"; and that "since there is nothing left to be saide in Greeke and Latine alreadie, and ynew of poore schollers would match you in these languages, . . . it best becometh a King to purify and make famous his own tongue, wherein he may go before all his subjects."
6. Gascoigne says Phaer 's Virgil is "in a brave long verse, stately and flowing. . . ."—Eliz. Critical Essays, Vol. I, p. 362.
7. History of Scotish Poetry, p. 502.
8. Englische Studien, Vol. XX, p. 24.
9. It is not true, as has sometimes been stated, that the final couplet is unknown in French sonnets. To be specific, five of Ronsard's, three of Du Bellay's, one of Jodelle's, two of Dorat's, and eight of Thyard's have the couplet; and two of Ronsard's have alternate rhymes in the octave as well as the sestet.
10. A sonnet to Harvey (Globe ed., p. 607) is dated July 18, of this year.
11. It has often been noticed that the Spenserian stanza is precisely the first nine lines of the Spenserian sonnet, with an additional foot at the end. One might easily, therefore, have been developed from the other. If, however, the stanza is to be traced to others of similar length, it should be compared, not with ottava rima, which Spenser employs nowhere save in Muiopotmos, but with the French octave, abab, bcbc, which he uses frequently. This was even more popular in Scottish poetry than in English, and was one of the favorite staves of Scott, Maitland, Montgomerie, and other contemporaries of James.
12. Elizabethan Critical Essays, Vol. I, p. 55.
13. In eight sonnets, Works, ed. Grosart, Vol. I, pp. 17, 35, 49, 59, 60, 223, 277.
14. Works, ed. 1870-1872, Vol. I, pp. 38, 46. For another by Aytoun, cf. p. xxix.
15. Poems, Bann. Club, XV and XVIII of the sonnets to Cœlia. Also a commendatory sonnet by Simon Grahame prefixed to Sophonisba.
16. Works, S. T. S., Vol. I, pp. 47-58, 301-306.
17. Among others, three sonnets by James Melville in Vita et Morte Roberti Rollok, Bann. Club reprint; six by Walter Quin on the heroes of the Gowry Fray in Sertum Poeticum, Edinburgh, 1600; one by Alexander Hume, Poems, S. T. S., p. 9; and a large number by Alexander Craig in his Poeticall Essayes, London, 1604, and Poeticall Recreations, Edinburgh, 1609.
18. In the present collection, XXXIV, XL VII, XLIX, and App. II, IV.