The Elizabethan Lumber Room
These magnificent volumes[2] are not often, perhaps, read through. Part
of their charm consists in the fact that Hakluyt is not so much a book
as a great bundle of commodities loosely tied together, an emporium, a
lumber room strewn with ancient sacks, obsolete nautical instruments,
huge bales of wool, and little bags of rubies and emeralds. One is for
ever untying this packet here, sampling that heap over there, wiping the
dust off some vast map of the world, and sitting down in semi-darkness
to snuff the strange smells of silks and leathers and ambergris, while
outside tumble the huge waves of the uncharted Elizabethan sea.
For this jumble of seeds, silks, unicorns’ horns, elephants’ teeth,
wool, common stones, turbans, and bars of gold, these odds and ends of
priceless value and complete worthlessness, were the fruit of
innumerable voyages, traffics, and discoveries to unknown lands in the
reign of Queen Elizabeth. The expeditions were manned by “apt young men”
from the West country, and financed in part by the great Queen herself.
The ships, says Froude, were no bigger than modern yachts. There in the
river by Greenwich the fleet lay gathered, close to the Palace. “The
Privy council looked out of the windows of the court . . . the ships
thereupon discharge their ordnance . . . and the mariners they shouted
in such sort that the sky rang again with the noise thereof.” Then, as
the ships swung down the tide, one sailor after another walked the
hatches, climbed the shrouds, stood upon the mainyards to wave his
friends a last farewell. Many would come back no more. For directly
England and the coast of France were beneath the horizon, the ships
sailed into the unfamiliar; the air had its voices, the sea its lions and
serpents, its evaporations of fire and tumultuous whirlpools. But God too
was very close; the clouds but sparely hid the divinity Himself; the limbs
of Satan were almost visible. Familiarly the English sailors pitted their
God against the God of the Turks, who “can speake never a word for
dulnes, much lesse can he helpe them in such an extremitie. . . .
But howsoever their God behaved himself, our God showed himself a God
indeed. . .” God was as near by sea as by land, said Sir Humphrey
Gilbert, riding through the storm. Suddenly one light disappeared; Sir
Humphrey Gilbert had gone beneath the waves; when morning came, they
sought his ship in vain. Sir Hugh Willoughby sailed to discover the
North-West Passage and made no return. The Earl of Cumberland’s men,
hung up by adverse winds off the coast of Cornwall for a fortnight,
licked the muddy water off the deck in agony. And sometimes a ragged and
worn-out man came knocking at the door of an English country house and
claimed to be the boy who had left it years ago to sail the seas. “Sir
William his father, and my lady his mother knew him not to be their son,
until they found a secret mark, which was a wart upon one of his knees.”
But he had with him a black stone, veined with gold, or an ivory tusk,
or a silver ingot, and urged on the village youth with talk of gold
strewn over the land as stones are strewn in the fields of England. One
expedition might fail, but what if the passage to the fabled land of
uncounted riches lay only a little further up the coast? What if the
known world was only the prelude to some more splendid panorama? When,
after the long voyage, the ships dropped anchor in the great river of
the Plate and the men went exploring through the undulating lands,
startling grazing herds of deer, seeing the limbs of savages between the
trees, they filled their pockets with pebbles that might be emeralds or
sand that might be gold; or sometimes, rounding a headland, they saw,
far off, a string of savages slowly descending to the beach bearing on
their heads and linking their shoulders together with heavy burdens for
the Spanish King.
These are the fine stories used effectively all through the West country
to decoy “the apt young men” lounging by the harbour-side to leave their
nets and fish for gold. But the voyagers were sober merchants into the
bargain, citizens with the good of English trade and the welfare of
English work-people at heart. The captains are reminded how necessary it
is to find a market abroad for English wool; to discover the herb from
which blue dyes are made; above all to make inquiry as to the methods of
producing oil, since all attempts to make it from radish seed have
failed. They are reminded of the misery of the English poor, whose
crimes, brought about by poverty, make them “daily consumed by the
gallows”. They are reminded how the soil of England had been enriched by
the discoveries of travellers in the past; how Dr. Linaker brought seeds
of the damask rose and tulipas, and how beasts and plants and herbs,
“without which our life were to be said barbarous”, have all come to
England gradually from abroad. In search of markets and of goods, of the
immortal fame success would bring them, the apt young men set sail for
the North, and were left, a little company of isolated Englishmen
surrounded by snow and the huts of savages, to make what bargains they
could and pick up what knowledge they might before the ships returned in
the summer to fetch them home again. There they endured, an isolated
company, burning on the rim of the dark. One of them, carrying a charter
from his company in London, went inland as far as Moscow, and there saw
the Emperor “sitting in his chair of estate with his crown on his head,
and a staff of goldsmiths’ work in his left hand”. All the ceremony that
he saw is carefully written out, and the sight upon which the English
merchant first set eyes has the brilliancy of a Roman vase dug up and
stood for a moment in the sun, until, exposed to the air, seen by
millions of eyes, it dulls and crumbles away. There, all these
centuries, on the outskirts of the world, the glories of Moscow, the
glories of Constantinople have flowered unseen. The Englishman was
bravely dressed for the occasion, led “three fair mastiffs in coats of
red cloth”, and carried a letter from Elizabeth “the paper whereof did
smell most fragrantly of camphor and ambergris, and the ink of perfect
musk”. And sometimes, since trophies from the amazing new world were
eagerly awaited at home, together with unicorns’ horns and lumps of
ambergris and the fine stories of the engendering of whales and
“debates” of elephants and dragons whose blood, mixed, congealed into
vermilion, a living sample would be sent, a live savage caught somewhere
off the coast of Labrador, taken to England, and shown about like a wild
beast. Next year they brought him back, and took a woman savage on board
to keep him company. When they saw each other they blushed; they blushed
profoundly, but the sailors, though they noted it, knew not why. Later
the two savages set up house together on board ship, she attending to
his wants, he nursing her in sickness. But, as the sailors noted again,
the savages lived together in perfect chastity.
All this, the new words, the new ideas, the waves, the savages, the
adventures, found their way naturally into the plays which were being
acted on the banks of the Thames. There was an audience quick to seize
upon the coloured and the high-sounding; to associate those
frigates bottom’d with rich Sethin planks,
Topt with the lofty firs of Lebanon
with the adventures of their own sons and brothers abroad. The Verneys,
for example, had a wild boy who had gone as pirate, turned Turk, and
died out there, sending back to Claydon to be kept as relics of him some
silk, a turban, and a pilgrim’s staff. A gulf lay between the spartan
domestic housecraft of the Paston women and the refined tastes of the
Elizabethan Court ladies, who, grown old, says Harrison, spent their
time reading histories, or “writing volumes of their own, or translating
of other men’s into our English and Latin tongue”, while the younger
ladies played the lute and the citharne and spent their leisure in the
enjoyment of music. Thus, with singing and with music, springs into
existence the characteristic Elizabethan extravagance; the dolphins and
lavoltas of Greene; the hyperbole, more surprising in a writer so terse
and muscular, of Ben Jonson. Thus we find the whole of Elizabethan
literature strewn with gold and silver; with talk of Guiana’s rarities,
and references to that America—“O my America! my new-foundland”—which
was not merely a land on the map, but symbolised the unknown territories
of the soul. So, over the water, the imagination of Montaigne brooded in
fascination upon savages, cannibals, society, and government.
But the mention of Montaigne suggests that though the influence of the
sea and the voyages, of the lumber-room crammed with sea beasts and
horns and ivory and old maps and nautical instruments, helped to inspire
the greatest age of English poetry, its effects were by no means so
beneficial upon English prose. Rhyme and metre helped the poets to keep
the tumult of their perceptions in order. But the prose writer, without
these restrictions, accumulated clauses, petered out in interminable
catalogues, tripped and stumbled over the convolutions of his own rich
draperies. How little Elizabethan prose was fit for its office, how
exquisitely French prose was already adapted, can be seen by comparing
a passage from Sidney’s _Defense of Poesie_ with one from Montaigne’s
Essays.
He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margent
with interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulness: but he
cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either
accompanied with, or prepared for the well enchanting Skill of Music,
and with a tale (forsooth) he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth
children from play, and old men from the Chimney corner; and pretending
no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue;
even as the child is often brought to take most wholesome things by
hiding them in such other as have a pleasant taste: which if one should
begin to tell them the nature of the _Aloës_ or _Rhubarbarum_ they
should receive, would sooner take their physic at their ears than at
their mouth, so is it in men (most of which are childish in the best
things, till they be cradled in their graves) glad they will be to hear
the tales of Hercules. . . .
And so it runs on for seventy-six words more. Sidney’s prose is an
uninterrupted monologue, with sudden flashes of felicity and splendid
phrases, which lends itself to lamentations and moralities, to long
accumulations and catalogues, but is never quick, never colloquial,
unable to grasp a thought closely and firmly, or to adapt itself
flexibly and exactly to the chops and changes of the mind. Compared with
this, Montaigne is master of an instrument which knows its own powers
and limitations, and is capable of insinuating itself into crannies and
crevices which poetry can never reach; of cadences different but no less
beautiful; capable of subtleties and intensities which Elizabethan prose
entirely ignores. He is considering the way in which certain of the
ancients met death:
. . . ils l’ont faicte couler et glisser parmy la lascheté de leurs
occupations accoustumées entre des garses et bons compaignons; nul
propos de consolation, nulle mention de testament, nulle affectation
ambitieuse de constance, nul discours de leur condition future; mais
entre les jeux, les festins, facecies, entretiens communs et populaires,
et la musique, et des vers amoureux.
An age seems to separate Sidney from Montaigne. The English compared
with the French are as boys compared with men.
But the Elizabethan prose writers, if they have the formlessness of
youth have, too, its freshness and audacity. In the same essay Sidney
shapes language, masterfully and easily, to his liking; freely and
naturally reaches his hand for a metaphor. To bring this prose to
perfection (and Dryden’s prose is very near perfection) only the
discipline of the stage was necessary and the growth of
self-consciousness. It is in the plays, and especially in the comic
passages of the plays, that the finest Elizabethan prose is to be found.
The stage was the nursery where prose learnt to find its feet. For on
the stage people had to meet, to quip and crank, to suffer
interruptions, to talk of ordinary things.
_Cler_. A box of her autumnal face, her pieced beauty! there’s no man
can be admitted till she be ready now-a-days, till she has painted, and
perfumed, and washed, and scoured, but the boy here; and him she wipes
her oiled lips upon, like a sponge. I have made a song (I pray thee hear
it) on the subject. [Page sings]
Still to be neat, still to be drest &c.
_True_. And I am clearly on the other side: I love a good dressing
before any beauty o’ the world. O, a woman is then like a delicate
garden; nor is there one kind of it; she may vary every hour; take often
counsel of her glass, and choose the best. If she have good ears, show
them; good hair, lay it out; good legs, wear short clothes; a good hand,
discover it often: practise any art to mend breath, cleanse teeth,
repair eyebrows; paint and profess it.
So the talk runs in Ben Jonson’s _Silent Woman_, knocked into shape by
interruptions, sharpened by collisions, and never allowed to settle into
stagnancy or swell into turbidity. But the publicity of the stage and
the perpetual presence of a second person were hostile to that growing
consciousness of one’s self, that brooding in solitude over the
mysteries of the soul, which, as the years went by, sought expression
and found a champion in the sublime genius of Sir Thomas Browne. His
immense egotism has paved the way for all psychological novelists,
autobiographers, confession-mongers, and dealers in the curious shades
of our private life. He it was who first turned from the contacts of men
with men to their lonely life within. “The world that I regard is
myself; it is the microcosm of my own frame that I cast mine eye on; for
the other I use it but like my globe, and turn it round sometimes for my
recreation.” All was mystery and darkness as the first explorer walked
the catacombs swinging his lanthorn. “I feel sometimes a hell within
myself; Lucifer keeps his court in my breast; Legion is revived in me.”
In these solitudes there were no guides and no companions. “I am in the
dark to all the world, and my nearest friends behold me but in a cloud.”
The strangest thoughts and imaginings have play with him as he goes
about his work, outwardly the most sober of mankind and esteemed the
greatest physician in Norwich. He has wished for death. He has doubted
all things. What if we are asleep in this world and the conceits of life
are as mere dreams? The tavern music, the Ave Mary bell, the broken pot
that the workman has dug out of the field—at the sight and sound of
them he stops dead, as if transfixed by the astonishing vista that opens
before his imagination. “We carry with us the wonders we seek without
us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.” A halo of wonder
encircles everything that he sees; he turns his light gradually upon the
flowers and insects and grasses at his feet so as to disturb nothing in
the mysterious processes of their existence. With the same awe, mixed
with a sublime complacency, he records the discovery of his own
qualities and attainments. He was charitable and brave and averse from
nothing. He was full of feeling for others and merciless upon himself.
“For my conversation, it is like the sun’s, with all men, and with a
friendly aspect to good and bad.” He knows six languages, the laws, the
customs and policies of several states, the names of all the
constellations and most of the plants of his country, and yet, so
sweeping is his imagination, so large the horizon in which he sees this
little figure walking that “methinks I do not know so many as when I did
but know a hundred, and had scarcely ever simpled further than
Cheapside”.
He is the first of the autobiographers. Swooping and soaring at the
highest altitudes he stoops suddenly with loving particularity upon the
details of his own body. His height was moderate, he tells us, his eyes
large and luminous; his skin dark but constantly suffused with blushes.
He dressed very plainly. He seldom laughed. He collected coins, kept
maggots in boxes, dissected the lungs of frogs, braved the stench of the
spermaceti whale, tolerated Jews, had a good word for the deformity of
the toad, and combined a scientific and sceptical attitude towards most
things with an unfortunate belief in witches. In short, as we say when
we cannot help laughing at the oddities of people we admire most, he was
a character, and the first to make us feel that the most sublime
speculations of the human imagination are issued from a particular man,
whom we can love. In the midst of the solemnities of the Urn Burial we
smile when he remarks that afflictions induce callosities. The smile
broadens to laughter as we mouth out the splendid pomposities, the
astonishing conjectures of the _Religio Medici_. Whatever he writes is
stamped with his own idiosyncrasy, and we first become conscious of
impurities which hereafter stain literature with so many freakish
colours that, however hard we try, make it difficult to be certain
whether we are looking at a man or his writing. Now we are in the
presence of sublime imagination; now rambling through one of the finest
lumber rooms in the world—a chamber stuffed from floor to ceiling with
ivory, old iron, broken pots, urns, unicorns’ horns, and magic glasses
full of emerald lights and blue mystery.
[Footnote 2: _Hakluyf’s Collection of the Early Voyages, Travels,
and Discoveries of the English Nation_, five volumes, 4 to, 1810.]