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I have dealt as briefly as possible with the Lord Treasurer’s life, because no one could pretend that the history of his embassies or his occupations of office could have any interest save to a student of the age of Elizabeth. But as a too-much-neglected poet I should like presently to quote the opinions of those well qualified to judge, showing that he was, at least, something of a pioneer in English literature—crude, of course, and uniformly gloomy; too gloomy to read, save as a labour of love or conscience; but nevertheless the author—or part-author—of the earliest English tragedy, and, in some passages, a poet of a certain sombre splendour. That he was a true poet, I think, is unquestionable, unlike his descendant Charles, who by virtue of one song in particular continues to survive in anthologies, but who was probably driven into verse by the fashion of his age rather than by any genuine urgency of creation.

The tragedy of Gorboduc, whose title was afterwards altered to Ferrex and Porrex, was written in collaboration with Thomas Norton, although the exact share of each author is not precisely known and has been much argued.

To the modern reader [says Professor Saintsbury] Gorboduc is scarcely inviting, but that is not a condition of its attractiveness to its own contemporaries. [It] is of the most painful regularity; and the scrupulosity with which each of the rival princes is provided with a counsellor and a parasite to himself, and the other parts are allotted with similar fairness, reaches such a point that it is rather surprising that Gorboduc was not provided with two queens—a good and a bad. But even these faults are perhaps less trying to the modern reader than the inchoate and unpolished condition of the metre in the choruses, and indeed in the blank verse dialogue. Here and there there are signs of the stateliness and poetical imagery of the Induction, but for the most part the decasyllables stop dead at their close and begin afresh at their beginning with a staccato movement and a dull monotony of cadence which is inexpressibly tedious.

Professor Saintsbury rightly points out that the dullness of Gorboduc to our ideas is not a criterion of the effect it produced on readers of its own day. Sir Philip Sidney, for example, while excepting it from the particular charges he brings against all other English tragedies and comedies, and granting that “it is full of stately speeches and well-sounding phrases, climbing to the height of Seneca his style, and as full of notable morality, which it doth most delightfully teach, and so obtain the very end of poesy,” finds fault with it in an unexpected quarter, namely, that it fails in two unities, of time and place, so that the modern criticism of its “painful regularity” was far from occurring to a mind intent upon a yet more rigorous form.

In spite of its manifest imperfections [says the Cambridge Modern History], the tragedy of Gorboduc has two supreme claims to honourable commemoration. It introduced Englishmen who knew no language but their own to an artistic conception of tragedy, and it revealed to them the true mode of tragic expression.

I might also quote here the sonnet of a greater poet, who owed much, if not to Gorboduc, at least to the Induction—Edmund Spenser.

In vain I think, right honourable lord,

By this rude rhyme to memorize thy name,

Whose learnèd muse hath writ her own record

In golden verse worthy immortal fame.

Thou much more fit (were leisure to the same)

Thy gracious sovereign’s praises to compile,

And her imperial majesty to frame

In lofty numbers and heroic style.

But sith thou may’st not so, give leave awhile

To baser wit his power therein to spend,

Whose gross defaults thy dainty pen may file,

And unadvisèd oversights amend.

But evermore vouchsafe it to maintain

Against vile Zoylus’ backbitings vain.

There is also a sonnet by Joshua Sylvester, of which I will only quote the anagram prefixed to it:

Sackvilus Comes Dorsetius

Vas Lucis Esto decor Musis

Sacris Musis celo devotus

But although there can scarcely be two opinions about Gorboduc—that it is sometimes noble, and always dull—Sackville’s two other poems, the Induction to the Mirror for Magistrates and the Complaint of Henry Duke of Buckingham, have never met with the recognition they deserve, save for the discriminating applause of men of letters. I do not say that they are works which can be read through with an unvarying degree of pleasure; there are stagnant passages which have to be waded through in between the more admirable portions. But such portions, when they are reached, do contain much of the genuine stuff of poetry, impressive imagery, a surprising absence of cumbersome expression—especially when the reader bears in mind that Sackville was writing before Spenser, and long before Marlowe—and a diction which is consistently dignified and suitable to the gravity of the theme. Take these stanzas for instance:

And first within the porch and jaws of hell

Sat deep Remorse of Conscience, all besprent

With tears; and to herself oft would she tell

Her wretchedness, and cursing never stent

To sob and sigh; but ever thus lament,

With thoughtful care, as she that, all in vain,

Would wear and waste continually in pain.

Next saw we Dread, all trembling: how he shook

With foot uncertain, proffered here and there,

Benumbed of speech, and, with a ghastly look,

Searched every place, all pale and dead for fear,

His cap borne up with staring of his hair,

’Stoin’d and amazed at his own shade for dread

And fearing greater dangers than he need.

And next, in order sad, Old Age we found,

His beard all hoar, his eyes hollow and blind,

With drooping cheer still poring on the ground,

As on the place where Nature him assigned

To rest, when that the sisters had untwined

His vital thread, and ended with their knife

The fleeting course of fast-declining life.

These stanzas are from the Induction. Or take the following from the Complaint of the Duke of Buckingham:

Midnight was come, and every vital thing

With sweet sound sleep their weary limbs did rest;

The beasts were still, the little birds that sing

Now sweetly slept beside their mother’s breast,

The old and all well shrouded in their nest;

The waters calm, the cruel seas did cease,

The woods, the fields, and all things held their peace.

The golden stars were whirled amid their race,

And on the earth did with their twinkling light,

When each thing nestled in his resting place,

Forget day’s pain with pleasure of the night;

The fearful deer of death stood not in doubt,

The partridge dreamt not of the falcon’s foot.

These quotations will give some kind of idea of Sackville’s matter and manner, and of the Mirror, which survives among the classic monuments of English poetry, says Courthope, only by virtue of the genius of Sackville. For the rest, not wishing to be thought prejudiced, I should like to quote copiously from Professor Saintsbury’s Elizabethan Literature, since therein is expressed, a great deal better than I could express it, my own view of Sackville’s poetry, and by calling in the testimony of so excellent, scholarly, and delightful an authority I may be freed from the charge of partiality which I should not at all like to incur.

The next remarkable piece of work done in English poetry after Tottel’s Miscellany—a piece of work of greater actual poetic merit than anything in the Miscellany itself—was... the famous Mirror for Magistrates, or rather that part of it contributed by Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst.... The Induction and the Complaint of Buckingham, which Sackville furnished to it in 1559, though they were not published till four years later, completely outweigh all the rest in value. His contributions to the Mirror for Magistrates contain the best poetry written in the English language between Chaucer and Spenser, and are most certainly the originals or at least the models of some of Spenser’s finest work. He has had but faint praise of late years.... I have little hesitation in saying that no more astonishing contribution to English poetry, when the due reservations of that historical criticism which is the life of all criticism are made, is to be found anywhere. The bulk is not great: twelve or fifteen hundred lines must cover the whole of it. The form is not new, being merely the 7–line stanza already familiar in Chaucer. The arrangement is in no way novel, combining as it does the allegorical presentment of embodied virtues, vices, and qualities with the melancholy narrative common in poets for many years before. But the poetical value of the whole is extraordinary. The two constituents of that value, the formal and the material, are represented here with a singular equality of development. There is nothing here of Wyatt’s floundering prosody, nothing of the well-intentioned doggerel in which Surrey himself indulges and in which his pupils simply revel. The cadences of the verse perfect, the imagery fresh and sharp, the presentation of nature singularly original, when it is compared with the battered copies of the poets with whom Sackville must have been most familiar, the followers of Chaucer from Occleeve to Hawes. Even the general plan of the poem—the weakest part of nearly all poems of this time—is extraordinarily effective and makes one sincerely sorry that Sackville’s taste or his other occupations did not permit him to carry out the whole scheme on his own account. The Induction, in which the author is brought face to face with Sorrow, and the central passages of the Complaint of Buckingham, have a depth and fullness of poetical sound and sense for which we must look backwards a hundred and fifty years, or forwards nearly five and twenty....

He has not indeed the manifold music of Spenser—it would be unreasonable to expect that he should have it. But his stanzas are of remarkable melody, and they have about them a command, a completeness of accomplishment within the writer’s intentions, which is very noteworthy in so young a man. The extraordinary richness and stateliness of the measure has escaped no critic. There is indeed a certain one-sidedness about it, and a devil’s advocate might urge that a long poem couched in verse (let alone the subject) of such unbroken gloom would be intolerable. But Sackville did not write a long poem, and his complete command within his limits of the effect at which he evidently aimed is most remarkable.

THE GREAT STAIRCASE (UPPER FLIGHT)

Built by Thomas Sackville, 1604–8

The second thing to note about the poem is the extraordinary freshness and truth of its imagery. From a young poet we always expect second-hand presentations of nature, and in Sackville’s day second-hand presentation of nature had been elevated to the rank of a science.... It is perfectly clear that Thomas Sackville had, in the first place, a poetical eye to see, within as well as without, the objects of poetical presentment; in the second place, a poetical vocabulary in which to clothe the results of his seeing; and in the third place, a poetical ear by aid of which to arrange his language in the musical co-ordination necessary to poetry. Wyatt had been notoriously wanting in the last; Surrey had not been very obviously furnished with the first; and all three were not to be possessed by anyone else till Edmund Spenser arose to put Sackville’s lessons in practice on a wider scale and with a less monotonous lyre. It is possible that Sackville’s claims in drama may have been exaggerated—they have of late years rather been undervalued; but his claims in poetry proper can only be overlooked by those who decline to consider the most important part of poetry. In the subject of even his part of the Mirror there is nothing new; there is only a following of Chaucer, and Gower, and Occleeve, and Lydgate, and Hawes, and many others. But in the handling there is one novelty which makes all others of no effect or interest: it is the novelty of a new poetry.