All is possible! Whoso list believe, Trust therefore first, and after preve; As men wed ladies by license and leave; In poems of this kind Wyatt was, no doubt, helped to his form by the circumstance that poetry was not yet v divorced from music. Music, as we see from Castiglione's Courtier, was a necessary accomplishment for a gentleman. Henry VIII. was passionately fond of it, and almost all Wyatt's love lyrics were composed for the accompaniment of the lute. The dropping of the final e in the language, as spoken, enabled the poet to produce extremely musical combinations of words for the purposes of singing, as appears in that most harmonious ballad The Nut-Brown | Maid, which is certainly a composition not later than the early part of the sixteenth century : Yet take good hede, for ever I drede That ye shall not sustayne The thornie waies, the deep valleyes, We must lodge on the plaine, None other roof us two aboof But a brake bushe or twayne. The reader will have observed in all the poems of Wyatt cited above a weightiness of matter, prevailing over elegance of form, and accordingly ill adapted to modes of composition in which elaborate terseness or harmony of expression is indispensable. Want of a perfect instrument, as well as errors of imperfect taste, are very visible in Wyatt's epigrams. In these he does not aim so much at the condensed expression of a witty thought, as at the invention of an ingenious paradox. His model is Serafino, five of whose Strambotti he has rendered into English; and whose form-the ottava rima stanza— he generally uses, whether he is expressing a thought of his own, or giving a version of ideas met with in the 1 Works, vol. ii. p. 216. course of his reading. Among the many authors to whom he is indebted for the matter of his epigrams are Josephus, Seneca, Plato, and Pandulfo Collinutio; and the character of his style may be illustrated by his version of the following epigram ascribed to Plato : χρυσὸν ἀνὴρ εὑρὼν ἔλιπεν βρόχον· αὐτὰρ ὁ χρυσὸν It would be impossible to condense more thought into two lines; indeed, the idea is so closely packed, that it would be unintelligible to any one who did not know the story on which the epigram is based. Ausonius, in his Latin version, expanded the couplet into four lines: Thesauro invento qui limina mortis inibat Liquit ovans laqueum quo periturus erat. Wyatt treats the idea in Serafino's eight-line stanza :— For shamefast harm of great and hateful need His stumbling foot did find an hoard, lo! So that while he gives Ausonius' last two lines, almost word for word in his closing couplet, he takes six lines to work up to the point, nor does he even then contrive to tell the story distinctly. On the other hand, where he expresses a sincere feeling of his own, he is often admirably energetic, as is shown by the verses I have already cited, written to Bryan from the Tower, and by his Farewell to the Tagus. 1 Ausonius, Epigrammata xxii. It may be rendered into English A man, about to hang himself one day, By chance found gold, and flung his noose away. 2 Works, vol. ii. p. 65. The same strength of individual feeling appears in Wyatt's Satires. These are the fruit of his retirement at Allington, and are undoubtedly the most pleasing of all his regular compositions. They express the ardent love of country life natural to an English gentleman conversant with affairs, and all the disdain and indignation proper to a lofty mind familiar with the mean servility prevalent among the creatures of a Court. But even when he is dealing with matters so congenial, Wyatt gets his inspiration from foreign models. He is indebted for the form of his Satire to Luigi Alamanni, one of the few truly noble Italians of the sixteenth century, who were ready to suffer all things in behalf of that ideal of liberty and patriotism which they inherited as the late descendants of republican Rome. After making a vain stand against the restoration of the despotic power of the Medici in Florence, his native city, Alamanni withdrew to France, where he was received by Francis I. with the honour that he deserved. His Satires breathe a fiery indignation against the corruptions of his time, and the following very fine verses may be cited in apt illustration of the continuous tradition cherished by the Italian poets; they show how readily the allusive and metaphorical style of Dante and Petrarch lent itself to the purposes of Satire: Oggi ha d'altr' acqua Roma ed altra sete, Non chi si pente, ma si monda e scarca Che di chi di Cefas riporta 'l nome, Più disnor tu, che 'l tuo Luter Martino, Ti mena al fin, che già veggiam vicino. La Marca, il Romagnuol, ma più chi plora, In his twelfth Satire, Alamanni sets forth the various arts of the Courtier which he professes himself unequal to acquire; and Wyatt, in his second Satire, has adapted this poem with much spirit and success to his own circumstances in England. He has also borrowed Alamanni's terza rima as the vehicle for his first and third satires, in the former of which he imitates Horace's Fable of the Town and Country Mouse, and in the latter the Latin poet's Advice of Tiresias.2 The opening "Of the mean and sure estate" is extremely picturesque, and shows Wyatt's satirical style at its best : My mother's maids, when they did sew and spin, And worse than that, bare meat there did remain 1 Alamanni, Satire iii. : "To-day Rome has other water and thirst for other water than that of Samaria, and takes with other net than once did the good fisherman, other fish. Now by another path climbs to heaven, not the penitent; but he who stretches out his hand to the shepherd with gold is purged and discharged. With a richer pilot, with shrouds of silk and sails of gold, the holy bark crosses new waves far from Galilee. By thee is woven the web of Simon, other than the one who takes his name from Cephas, smitten with that love which is hidden from thine eyes. O he that could see the truth would see that thou bringest upon thyself more dishonour and a more grievous burden than does that Martin Luther of thine. 'Tis not Germany, no! but ease, wine, avarice, ambition, luxury, and gluttony, that are bringing thee to the end which we see to be so near. Nor is it I alone who say this, nor France alone, nor Spain, but all Italy to boot, which holds thee as the school of heresy and vice; and he who does not believe this, let him ask at any time Urbino, Ferrara, Orsino, Colonna, La Marca, Romagna, but most of all her who through thee weeps in slavery, though she was once the mistress of others." I presume by the last words he means Florence. 2 Hor. Sat. lib. ii. Sats. v. and vi. Sometimes a barley corn, sometimes a bean, And when her store was 'stroyed with the flood, Then well-away! for she undone was clean.1e messe The moral of the Satire is conveyed in language full of energy, plainly coming straight from the heart of the writer, and extremely significant as the reflection of a man so widely experienced in the ways of the world :— Then seek no more out of thyself to find a The thing that thou hast sought so long before; b Let present pass, and gape on time to come, But when the rage doth lead them from the right, e f e And whilst they clasp their lusts in arms across, In this passage we find a vein of sentiment which runs through the works of many of the religious Reformers, and makes a link between that party and the men of the Renaissance. As the first men of letters in mediæval Europe found a metaphysical connection between the doctrines of Christianity and the philosophy of Plato, so their successors, who opposed the corruptions of the scholastic system in the beginning of the sixteenth century, fell back on the works of those classical authors who most largely embodied the morality of the Stoics. Very many of the scholars and philosophers of that age were, in one aspect or another, favourers of the reform movement, and in this way much of the Pagan imagery employed by the Latin and Greek poets came insensibly to be associated with Christian dogma. 1 Works, vol. ii. p. 82. 2 Persius, Sat. iii. 88, "Virtutem videant intabescantque relicta." |