[In the following excerpt, Lewis explores the nature of the relationship between Surrey and Wyatt.]

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey,¹ was in his twenties when Wyatt died and there is no doubt that he greatly admired Wyatt both as a poet and as a man. But the relation between them was not exactly that of master and pupil. Surrey saw Wyatt as one who had ‘dayly’ produced some famous work ‘to turne to Britains gayn’ and ‘taught what might be sayd in ryme’. Though they come in a poetical elegy (where a man was not expected to be precisely critical) these words, as it happens, define pretty well what Wyatt meant to Surrey. He was not so much the technical master as the man who had suggested new possibilities, who had claimed, and partly shown, that the new-fashioned continental poetry could be naturalized in England. In that sense, he inspired Surrey. But Surrey had, of course, his own independent access to the Italians and the Romans, and his technical standards were, in their own way, higher than any that Wyatt could have taught him. In some respects he hardly competes with Wyatt. He is much less affected by the native lyrical tradition: perhaps less related to music at all. The pieces in which he is closest to Wyatt (‘Although I had a check’, ‘O lothsome place’, or ‘Though I regarded not’) are neither his best nor his most characteristic. He does not care for refrains, and is happiest as a lyric poet in octosyllabic stanzas. He loves what was newest (and worst) in Wyatt, the poulter's measure. He is less medieval; with him the Drab Age is fully established.

His Petrarchan pieces are by no means his best; yet even in them it is easy to see why the Elizabethans preferred him to Wyatt. He was more accomplished, more useful. For the sonnet he often adopted that modified form less greedy of rhymes, which Shakespeare perfected, and availed himself of its greater ease to make sonnets which, if never very moving, are smooth and elegant and work up to a tolerable climax. Sometimes he produced equally good results with a more exacting rhyme scheme; as in ‘The Soote Season’ and his sonnet on sleep. His lyrics nearly all have the completeness, the shape, which Wyatt sometimes lacked. But the truth is that his love poetry is usually best when it is least about love. He takes every opportunity of bringing in external nature, or narrative, as if to take a holiday from the erotic treadmill. Oddly enough, the only two poems in which we are really moved by the theme of love are both put into the mouth of a woman; and of these women one certainly is, and the other may be, a wife in love with her husband. The better of the two is the lyric ‘O happie dames’ (freely adapted from an Italian original) which contains the best stanza he ever wrote. The other, in poulter's (‘Good Ladies’), nearly triumphs over that jigging metre.

But if Surrey as a love poet is for the most part ‘correctly cold and regularly low’, he can express real feeling on other subjects: especially on friendship. His elegy on Wyatt has already been mentioned: it is a little clumsy and a little too like a catalogue, yet a credible picture emerges from it. More moving is the epitaph on his follower and comrade in arms, Thomas Clere. Best of all is the poem on his imprisonment at Windsor. It has its flaws (the tiger in l. 11 comes in very oddly) but it has caught the very spirit of that pleasure which flows over like-minded young men when they are all together and making their first friendships. We shall meet so many satires on the Court in the sixteenth century that it is important to learn from Surrey the other side—

The secret thoughtes imparted with such trust,
The wanton talke, the dyuers chaunge of playe,
The frendshipp sworne, eche promyse kept so iust
Wherewith we past the winter nightes away—

for though they were great lords, and skilled knights, huntsmen, and lovers, these courtiers were very young and very crowded, sleeping two in a room and talking late like schoolfellows.

The “Satire” against the citizens of London wins us by its sheer Falstaffian audacity. Surrey is in the Fleet for breaking windows. Breaking windows?—he admits the charge, but claims that he had the highest motives. He was acting as a prophet, almost as ‘the scourge of God’, awaking the conscience of that very wicked city. But the idea, which might have made an amusing epigram, hardly suffices for so long a poem. His religious works—a paraphrase of Ecclesiastes i-v, and another of certain psalms—are, of course, not good. Hebrew poetry, and Pindar, have led better poets than Surrey to disaster, and he had certainly not solved the problem raised by oriental imagery when he wrote—

Butter falles not so softe as doth hys pacyence long.

One line (‘In booste of outwarde works he taketh no delight’) suggests an unexpected sympathy with Lutheran theology. But the real interest of the paraphrases is metrical: not chiefly because in Psalm lv Surrey attempts the unrhymed alexandrine (nothing was to come of that till the Testament of Beauty) but because he is now trying to reform the poulter's measure.

The vices of that metre are two. The medial break in the alexandrine, though it may do well enough in French, quickly becomes intolerable in a language with such a tyrannous stress-accent as ours: the line struts. The fourteener has a much pleasanter movement, but a totally different one; the line dances a jig. Hence in a couplet made of two such yoke-fellows we seem to be labouring up a steep hill in bottom gear for the first line, and then running down the other side of the hill, out of control, for the second. In his Paraphrases (chiefly in the Ecclesiastes) Surrey is, I think, attempting to remedy this by restraining the run-away tendency of the fourteener. He does this sometimes by putting in another pause as strong as that at the eighth syllable, and thus cutting his line in three—

The World is false, man he is fraile, and all his pleasures payne

sometimes by inversions of stress in the neighbourhood of the pause—

Then aged Kings, wedded to will, that worke without advice—

sometimes by trisyllabic feet—

And carrey the roodde that skorgeth them that glorey in their gold.

With the alexandrine he takes fewer liberties, but those which he allows himself yield impressive lines, as

I, Salamon, Dauids sonne, King of Jerusalem,

or

We that live on the earth draw towards our decay.

Even if the process had been carried further it would hardly have made poulter's a good metre, but it might have made more of the fourteener than Chapman ever did, and shows the continually growing and exploring artistry of Surrey.

His greatest exploration was that which led him to translate two books of the Aeneid in what the printer of the first edition called, on his title-page, ‘a strange metre’, and what we call blank verse. In this metre he had been anticipated by the Italians, and it is reasonable to suppose that he derived the idea from them: the suggestion that he found blank verse in the Tale of Melibeus does not seem to me worth considering. Trissino and others had already used the metre and Ippolito de Medici had used it for translating Virgil. Surrey's version exists in the Hargreave MS., in the print by John Day, and in Tottel: variants are numerous and detailed criticism is inhibited by our uncertainty as to which text, if any, represents Surrey's final intentions. Even if that were known, critical judgement would still be difficult: the original is so good that it will triumph over great defects of translation and to calculate what percentage of our pleasure is due to Surrey is a matter of great nicety. If, amid these perplexities, I am to hazard a verdict, it would be this; that Surrey has made a poor translation but good verses—for a pioneer, astonishingly good. A certain stiffness which we feel in his lines is not due to excessive end-stopping. It is rather a syntactical than a metrical stiffness. In his effort to keep close to the Latin Surrey does not leave himself room for flowing sentences. He thus becomes lapidary and laconic. This quality is not fatal to poetry but it is excessively anti-Virgilian. Virgil, like every great poet, is no doubt economic in fact (‘no word he wrote in vain’) but the impression he produces is one of lavishness—as of a rich wine swelled above the brim of the glass. He is full of echoes and vistas and partial repetitions. How different Surrey is, an example will show:

Chorebus then encouraged by this chaunce
Reioising sayd: Hold forth the way of health,
My feres, that hap and manhod hath us taught:
Chaunge we our shields: the grekes arms do we on.
Craft or manhod with foes what reckes it which?

That manhod in the third line is probably a misunderstanding of the Latin does not matter much. What matters is that we have asyndeton where Virgil has atque once and enclitic -que thrice, that my feres, as Surrey tucks the words in, has none of the enthusiasm of o socii, that the construction of reioising sayd (later so dear to the Miltonists) strikes a foreign and ‘classical’ note which nothing in the original would have struck for Roman readers, and that the hortatory inversions of the fourth line prolong the same effect. The generosity of the wine has been lost in the decanting. Surrey's version as a whole is a little too severe, too cold. It is Virgil in corsets. If this effect is wholly unintended, it would be harsh to dwell on it: for we should stand by the first English blank verse as reverently as we stand by the springs of the Thames. But it may not be unintended: it may reflect the humanist or ‘classical’ misunderstanding of the ancients. In no case can Surrey be regarded as a rival to Douglas: he is less medieval and (almost in the same proportion) less Virgilian.

Nearly all that is good, and some things that are bad, in the Drab Age, can be found in Surrey's poetry. He can, in poulter's, give us specimens of its lumbering clownishness—

          Unhappy hand, it had been happy time for me
If when to write thou learned first uniointed hadst thou be.

But he also contributed to our poetry a certain smooth and controlled dignity or propriety: and if the word ‘politeness’ rises to our lips we need not reject it, for the Drab Age has certain real affinities with that of the Augustans. He does not warble woodnotes nor thunder in high astounding terms nor wanton in luscious imagery: when he reminds us of the Elizabethans at all, he reminds us of ‘well languaged Daniel’ or sober Nosce Teipsum. He can make trifles pleasing by their neat structure and by the ease and consistency of his language. Once or twice he goes higher than this. Metrically, he is one of the great road-makers. If we adopted the ludicrous principle of judging poets not by their own work but by their utility to their successors, he would have to rank not only above Wyatt but above Chaucer and Milton; perhaps above Shakespeare too. By any sane standard, however, he is merely a man who served his generation well and has left one or two poems of permanent, though moderate, value.

Note

1. b. 1517. Said to have made good translations from Italian and Spanish as a boy. Intimate with Henry, Duke of Richmond (bastard son of Henry VIII). Married to Frances Vere, d. of Earl of Oxford, 1532. At French court with Richmond, 1532. Begins to live with his wife and to borrow money, 1535. Present at Anne Boleyn's trial; serves under his father against the Pilgrimage of Grace, 1536. Suspected of sympathy with the rebels, strikes one who repeats this story and is imprisoned at Windsor, 1537. In charge of anti-invasion defences in Norfolk, 1539. Distinguishes himself in a tournament, 1540. Knight of the Garter, 1541. Attends execution of Catherine Howard; imprisoned in Fleet, 1542. Again imprisoned in Fleet for breaking Lent and breaking windows, 1543. Serves at siege of Landrecy, 1543. Employs Thomas Churchyard as page, serves at Montreuil, is wounded; reprimanded for exposing himself to unnecessary danger, 1544. His dispatches begin to displease government. He loses a battle at St. Étienne and is relieved of his command. Later arrested on several charges of treason and beheaded, 1547. It is hardly necessary to add that the picture of him given in Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller (1594) is of no biographical value.