SOURCE: MacDonagh, Thomas. “Introductory,” “Campion's Life and Works,” and “The Beginnings of English Prosody: Campion's ‘Observations’.” In Thomas Campion and the Art of English Poetry, pp. 1-21. Dublin: Hodges, Figgis & Co., Ltd., 1913.

[In the following excerpt, MacDonagh provides an overview of Campion's literary output and his importance in the history of English literature.]

A man of faire parts and good reputation.

Samuel Daniel.

“The great period of English poetry,” says Arthur Symons, “begins half-way through the sixteenth century, and lasts half-way into the seventeenth. In the poetry strictly of the sixteenth century, before the drama had absorbed poetry into the substance of its many energies, verse is used as speech, and becomes song by way of speech. Music had come from Italy, and had found for once a home in England. It was an age of music. Music, singing, and dancing made then, and then only, the ‘Merry England’ of the phrase. And the words, growing out of the same soil as the tunes, took equal root. Campion sums up for us a whole period, a perfect craftsman in the two arts.”

Thomas Campion was a contemporary of William Shakespeare, and his equal in age from birth to death—Shakespeare, 1564-1616; Campion, 1567-1620. Others of his equals, in this sense, were his opponents in the metrical controversy, Samuel Daniel (1562-1619); Joshua Sylvester (1563-1618), to whom one of his most beautiful songs was for long attributed; Michael Drayton, born in 1563; Christopher Marlowe, born in 1564; and Thomas Nashe (1567-1601), his friend and admirer, honoured by him in his Latin verses. Ben Jonson and John Donne, great poets, the powerful influences of the next generation, were six years younger than Campion. This matter of dates may at first sight seem to count for little, but, to draw a comparison from the main part of this dissertation, the unit, the essential, is the period; the poet articulates the period. This was a period of music and power, and each good poet of it was the higher and stronger for the height and strength of his contemporaries. The phenomenon occurred again in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and then the wave came double-crested—Wordsworth (b. 1770), Scott (b. 1771), Coleridge (b. 1772), Byron (1788-1824), Shelley (1792-1822), Keats (1795-1821).

Two or three other such lists include all but a few of the great writers of the English language. There are some that are heard like a single word in the night, but in general the history of literature is like a line of verse, “a succession of sounds and silences,” each sound syllabled, vowelled.

Campion was, then, a close contemporary of Shakespeare; yet in only one contemporary record that we know of are the two poets mentioned together. In no record of their time can they have been mentioned with greater honour, “laudati a laudato viro.” Camden, in his Remaines of a Greater Worke concerning Britaine, published in 1605, passes from “some Poeticall descriptions of our auncient Poets” to his contemporaries: “If I would come to our time, what a world could I present to you out of Sir Philipp Sidney, Ed. Spencer, Samuel Daniel, Hugh Holland, Ben. Jonson, Th. Campion, Mich. Drayton, George Chapman, John Marston, William Shakespeare, and other most pregnant witts of these our times, whom succeeding ages may justly admire.” With the exception of Hugh Holland, who reminds one of the Hugh O'Lara of Lady Gregory's Image, one succeeding age or another has admired them indeed. With that one exception, Thomas Campion is last to receive his meed. From 1619 to 1814 there is a blank in his bibliography. The first edition of Palgrave's Golden Treasury knew him not. Later editions have wronged him by the inclusion of some of his inferior work and by the exclusion of some of his most lovely songs.

In 1814 he had appeared in Sir Egerton Brydges' Excerpta Tudoriana. The following year saw the first modern reprint of his Observations in the Art of English Poesie, in Hazlewood's Ancient Critical Essays. Then again a long blank till 1887, which gave us Lyrics from the Song Books. The year 1889 brought the editio princeps of his collected works, edited by Mr. A. H. Bullen. Campion had then been dead two hundred and sixty-nine years. There are at present two important editions of his works—Mr. Bullen's and Mr. Percival Vivian's—and three or four minor cheap editions. Now that after such long waiting he has won the admiration of a succeeding age, his fame is certain to stand, poised delicately on slight, graceful, strong foundations of beauty. We recognise in Campion a true poet, as truly a poet for his age as was his contemporary Shakespeare for all time. He is a poet of the Elizabethan song-books. His highest praise is that he is the best poet of the song-books.

For students of the art of English poesy his work has a further rare interest and value. He was a metrist in theory and practice. Here again, in theory, he was of his age; in practice he was a precursor. He was a scholar in an age of much wrong-headed learning. He was a sweet singer in an age of song. He wrote more poems in Latin than in English. He wrote of English verse as if it were imitation Latin verse. He tried to train himself to a foreign mode of poetic speech. He strove to write by rule and not by ear. He “whose commendable rimes had given to the world the best notice of his worth,”¹ was at much pains to show that the natural graces of English verse were vain and unworthy. He became, as Daniel laments, “an enemy of rime.” He railed against “shifting rime, that easy flatterer,” against “the fatness of rime”—he, whose rimes and cadences, composed both before and after his railing, are unsurpassed in English song. But his ear triumphed. He followed his rule only a little way. Soon again he “tuned his music to the heart.” He was too true a lyric poet to tune it to the false tones of the erring schoolmen.

And even in his railing and in his error his acute perception gives him glimpses of truth. His Observations is by far the ablest of the Elizabethan treatises on quantitative verse.² If the Elizabethan age was the greatest in matter of poetic achievement, it was so because it was free from self-consciousness. Campion, thinking much more highly of his English sapphics and of his Latin epigrams, referred to his lovely “Airs” as “after the fashion of the time, ear-pleasing rimes without art.” Shakespeare's notes were to the greatest poet of the next age “native wood-notes wild,” ear-pleasing, without art. But Campion and Milton sang native wood-notes too, in spite of what they thought to be their knowledge of higher things, in spite of the Renaissance and its sequel. Shakespeare the dramatist spoke through his masks the nervous, eager, living language of his tongue. Shakespeare unlocked his heart—or did not³—with the sonnet key which he found to his hand, imported and adapted by his immediate predecessors. Shakespeare, the lover of music, “warbled his native wood-notes wild,” careless, most probably ignorant, of quantity, and stress, and “isochronous periods,” and all the rules of English metrics—of all but what makes the best knowledge and creates earpleasing rimes without art, concealing art.

Campion, like Milton, was a musician. It would be interesting to trace the effect of Milton's musical knowledge on his verse, not merely on his verse of organ voice, but on the lyric measures of Arcades and Comus and Samson Agonistes. In Campion the effect is obvious and evident. His verse suggests music. All his lyrics are “airs,” songs set to music, published with their tunes. Always in his verse he “chiefly aimed,” as he says, “to couple words and music lovingly together.” He is essentially a craftsman of the two arts.

CAMPION'S LIFE AND WORKS

Sweet Master Campion.

Marginal in a copy of William Covell's Polimanteia (1595).

We ought to maintain as well in notes as in action a manly carriage.

Campion.

I have relegated to an appendix my detailed account of the life of Thomas Campion. Here, before proceeding to treat of the poet's works, I deal in passing with two points which do not fit into a chronological enumeration of the facts of his life. Very little is known with certainty of the grandson of John Campion of Dublin. I hope that further investigations will throw some new light on his ancestry. Mr. Percival Vivian, his most recent and most thorough biographer, brushes aside the Irish connection of his family, and fixes John Campion the elder as a Hertfordshire man, who “may have visited Ireland on some venture, commercial or otherwise, or held a paltry office there.” The minutes of the Parliament held in the Middle Temple in 1565 do not give colour to this surmise. Therein the poet's father, John Campion, is described as “son and heir of John Campion of Dublin, Ireland, deceased.” There were Campions in Ireland at the time. The name, which appears to have been formerly pronounced Champion in Ireland and England, was one of the English forms of the Irish name O'Crowley, in Gaelic O Cruaidhlaoich, the descendant of the Hard Warrior, or Champion. It is quite common to the present day in Kilkenny and Queen's County. This, however, is not the place to go into the question of the poet's pedigree or to examine in detail Mr. Vivian's conclusions and inferences concerning his family. In the appendix I have given in chronological order the accepted facts.

The poet was born on Ash Wednesday, 12th February, 1567, and christened the following day at St. Andrew's Church, Holborn, of which parish his father was assistant or vestryman. Dr. Jessop in The Dictionary of National Biography, Mr. A. H. Bullen in his editions of Campion, and Mr. Vivian in his small “Muses' Library” edition, have been at some pains to prove the poet a Catholic. They have drawn inferences from the religion of his most intimate friends, the Mychelburnes, Sir Thomas Monson, and others; from the possibility of relationship between him and Edmund Campion, the Jesuit martyr, “the Pope's Champion”; from the fact that he did not proceed to a degree in Cambridge, though he was known to have been of the university;⁴ and from his attacks on the Puritans. Researches made by Mr. Vivian or at his instance have now made it known that he belonged to Peterhouse, Cambridge; his not taking a degree argues nothing as to his faith. It is certain that his family adhered to the religion by law established. While satirising the Puritans—in itself no proof at the time of Catholicism—he hailed Elizabeth as “Faith's pure shield, the Christian Diana,” and in his Latin poem “Ad Thamesin (de Hyspanorum fuga)” wrote:

“Nec Romana feret purgatis Orgia fanis
Reffluere, aut vetitas fieri libamen ad aras.
O pietas odiosa deo, sclerataque sacra,
Quae magis inficiunt (damnosa piacula) sontes.”

Mr. Vivian in his complete edition of Campion recants his former pleading, and writes the poet down a moderate Anglican.

In the very first poem that we know for certain to be his, Campion is already “a curious metrist,” in the phrase of W. E. Henley. This poem, “Canto Primo” of Poems and Sonets of Sundry Other Noblemen and Gentlemen, printed with a surreptitious edition of Sidney's Astrophel and Stella in 1591, and reprinted in A Book of Airs, 1601, is indeed amongst the best examples in English of the beauty of hovering or wavering rhythms. “Canto Secundo” of the same set is an experiment in classical rhythms:

“Whát faíre / pómpe haue I spíde / óf glitteríng / Ladíes,”

an accentual imitation of the Latin Asclepiad Minor. Of these I shall treat in the body of this dissertation. Here they are worth noting as indicating already the double bent of the poet—to classical theorising and imitation on the one hand, and on the other to freedom of lyric singing, won from practice of music and the lute.

Campion was twenty-four when these first-fruits of his genius appeared. It is probable that other poems of his were well known in the literary circles of London, for in 1593, eight years before the publication of A Book of Airs, George Peele had already addressed him as:

                                                                                                                                                      “Thou
That richly cloth'st conceite with well made words,
Campion.”

In 1595 was published his first acknowledged work, Thomœe Campiani Poemata, Latin poems which established him, in the opinion of his contemporaries, as one of the greatest “Englishmen being Latine poets.”

In 1601 came A Booke of Ayres, set foorth to be song to the Lute, Orpherian, and Base Violl, by Philip Rosseter, Lutenist. The book is dedicated by Rosseter, on the authority of Master Campion, to Sir Thomas Monson; and in the dedicatory epistle half the airs are spoken of as of Campion's “own composition, made at his vacant houres, and privately emparted to his friends, whereby they grew both publicke, and (as coine crackt in exchange) corrupted.” The words of all the songs are Campion's, and by these alone he takes rank as the first poet of the Elizabethan song-books. The singing quality of most of these songs, the grave, solemn music and earnest poetry of some, the metrical originality, the lovely grace and variety of the rime, mark their author as the friend and master of this kind of poetry.

And yet his next work showed him an enemy of rime. In 1602 he published his Observations in the Art of English Poesie, dedicated, strangely enough, to the famous author of the Induction to the Mirrour for Magistrates, one of the finest masters of English rimed verse.⁵

In 1607 appeared Campion's Masque in Honour of Lord Hayes and his Bride. This is followed by a comparatively long silence, broken only by an occasional complimentary reference to the “rare Doctor.” The silence ends in 1613, his annus mirabilis. The Masque for Lord Knowles, the Lords' Masque, Songs of Mourning, Two Books of Airs, and the Masque for the Marriage of the Earl of Somerset, are the harvest of that year. The masques are full of good things, always of songs that take one with lovely first lines. Few poets have excelled Campion in winning openings of song. “Advance your choral motions now,” in the Lords' Masque, sings itself; other measures dance themselves, heel and toe:

“Come ashore, come, merry mates,
With your nimble heels and pates.”(6)

The first of the Two Books of Airs contains “Divine and Moral Songs.” “His devotional poetry,” says Mr. Bullen, “impresses the reader by its sincerity. To fine religious exaltation Campion joined the true lyric faculty, and such a union is one of the rarest of literary phenomena. In richness of imagination the man who wrote ‘When thou must home to shades of underground’ and ‘Hark, all you ladies that do sleep’ was the equal of Crashawe; but he never failed to exhibit in his sacred poetry that sobriety of judgment in which Crashawe was sometimes painfully deficient.”⁷ And in this poetry of his again is the sound of the harp with the words; and, like David's harp in Bacon's fine phrase, it has “as many hearse-like airs as carols.” The poem “Where are all thy beauties now, all hearts enchaining?” with its solemn three-lined stanzas and double rimes, has something of the fall of the “Dies Iræ,” and the great, earnest music of doom.

“Thy rich state of twisted gold to bays is turnéd!
Cold, as thou art, are thy loves, that so much burnéd!
Who die in flatterers' arms are seldom mournéd.”

Of even a higher mood are “Never weather-beaten sail” and “Come, cheerful day, part of my life to me,” while “To music bent is my retiréd mind” and “Tune thy music to thy heart” have the grace of simple singing rhythm that gave to the lyrics of that age a great part of their ineffable charm.

The second of the two books, the Light Conceits of Lovers, has some things for which Campion thought it right in the dedication to apologise, but enough of unsullied song to outshine all the rest. “What harvest half so sweet is,” “The peaceful western wind,” “There is none, O none but you,” are masterpieces of melody.

In 1614 Campion published the Masque for the Marriage of the Earl of Somerset, composed and produced in the previous year. During the two following years he was in trouble, implicated in the plot for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, though quite innocent of guilt. In 1617, the Third and Fourth Books of Airs. In these again is an ever new variety of rhythm and rime and colour, if we may call it so. It is impossible ever to speak of the “subject” of a poem of Campion's; it is never with him a matter of theme and treatment, as modern reviewers would have it. His gift was song—“to sing and not to say,” as Swinburne claimed of Collins—and his achievement, “full-throated ease.” Mr. Bullen has drawn attention to the extraordinary and ever-recurring “difference” of Campion. On opposite pages of his Third Book of Airs are “Now winter nights enlarge” and “Awake, thou spring of speaking grace! mute rest becomes not thee!” and again, “Shall I come, sweet love, to thee?” and “Thrice toss these oaken ashes in the air.”

The finest songs of these two books are also the most interesting metrically.⁸ And yet, when one has said so, the thought of some others, simple and uncarved, gives one pause.⁹

Here may be mentioned poems which are with good reason attributed to him, and some occasional verses. The most interesting of the latter is the hymn to Neptune—“Of Neptune's empire let us sing”—with its one strange sliding line in each verse. Of the former class, and almost certainly his, is an exquisite poem published by Richard Alison in his Hour's Recreation in Music (1606), “What if a day, or a month, or a year?” For the rest, complimentary verses, dedicatory verses, verses prefixed to the works of the poet's friends, and the like, though always graceful and occasionally distinguished, are to us less interesting than one little poem attributed to Campion by Mr. Bullen on grounds of style alone—a poem which brings for the first time into English verse a cadence which in our age, joined to an artifice of rime not unknown to Campion,¹⁰ has won, or largely helped to win, for one poem a place in a most select class, beside Gray's Elegy and Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.¹¹ One hears the music of Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat in these lines:

“The rarer pleasure is, it is more sweet,
And friends are kindest when they seldom meet.
Who would not hear the nightingale still sing,
Or who grew ever weary of the spring?”

In 1618 was published The Airs that were sung and played at Brougham Castle in the King's Entertainment, almost certainly written by Campion, though composed by others. The song for a dance, “Robin is a lovely lad,” has all his quaintness and musical dexterity. It was probably in the same year that he issued A New Way for making Four Parts in Counterpoint, a very technical treatise, long a standard book, and frequently reprinted. It afforded a rule of thumb for the harmonisation of tunes with simple concords.

In 1619 Campion published a splendid volume of Latin verse, containing four hundred and fifty-three epigrams, thirteen elegies, and one long poem. Judging from his prefaces, Campion considered these Latin poems his great work. To us their interest lies in their introducing us to the poet's literary circle. He addresses epigrams to William Camden, Charles Fitzgeoffrey, the three Mychelburnes, William Percy, Thomas Nashe, John Dowland, Edmund Spenser, Sir John Davies, and others.

In the second book of the Epigrams, No. 23, we get a description of the poet himself—a lean man, envious of the fat:

“Crassis invideo tenuis nimis ipse, videtur
Satque mihi felix qui sat obesus erit …”

On one day, March 1st, 1620, Campion made his will, died, and was buried. His sole legatee was his lifelong friend, Philip Rosseter; his place of burial, St. Dunstan's in the West, Fleet Street.

THE BEGINNINGS OF ENGLISH PROSODY: CAMPION'S OBSERVATIONS

How now Doctor Champion, musicks and poesies stout Champion,
Will you nere leave prating?

From MS. commonplace book of a Cambridge student (circa 1611).

Is this faire excusing? O, no, all is abusing.

Campion.

Campion's Observations in the Art of English Poesie, which appeared in the year 1602, is the third in order of time among the metrical treatises of importance published in English. It is, in the opinion of that most competent judge, Mr. T. S. Omond, by far the ablest of the Elizabethan treatises on quantitative verse. In 1575 had appeared George Gascoigne's Certayne Notes of Instruction in English Verse, and in 1589 George (or Richard) Puttenham's (or another's) The Art of English Poesie. Other works, half a dozen or so, had looked in at the door of prosody, but only these two had entered and stayed. Even they scarcely affect Campion's work and the matter in hand; they affect it, indeed, rather less than some of the minor works, such as William Webbe's Discourse of English Poetrie, from which he takes points, or the famous correspondence between Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spenser about English accent and quantity. Nearly all the writers of the age who interested themselves in the grammar of the craft were infected with a passion for the “reform” of English verse, to remake it nearer to the heart's desire of classical schoolmen. And as the schoolmen in both France and England, ignorant of scientific philology, blundered at almost every step in their spelling reforms, so these prosodists, ignorant of the true nature of quantity and accent, blundered. The reformation failed because poets sing by ear and not by rule. The language was true to itself in its poetry. It is a joy to find Campion's worthy antagonist, the poet Samuel Daniel, proclaiming in his Defence of Ryme the duty of a literature to the genius of its language.¹² Yet Campion himself is a greater joy. He writes, now shrewdly, incisively, suggestively, of English verse, now all wrongly, led astray by his reverence for accent and his love of quantity, as he understood it. Always he writes with energy and earnestness, always with the zeal and ardour of a poet with music in him. The voice that breaks into those exquisite lyric openings of song after song in his Book of Airs is the same voice that presses so eloquently another business in the Observations—in the prose arguments of his treatise. For what are these “versings” of his, quoted as examples (or, indeed, as I suspect, the first springs of the whole train)—what are they to his rimed songs:

“There is none, O, none but you,”

or:

“Awake, thou spring of speaking grace!—

How can one choose among them?

I can well believe that Campion, in his youth certainly just the poet to be quickly responsive to all the influences of his age, wrote some at least of the unrimed poems printed by him in his Observations, before he thought of settin up as a prosodist. It must always be a strong temptation to poets of metrical originality to show their contemporaries that their innovations are not due to ignorance of the conventional ways of verse, and are not arbitrary irregularities. This is not to say that such innovations and such matrical irregularity are conscious, studied, arranged beforehand. One cannot repeat often enough the truth that the true poet sings by ear and not by rule, his ear no doubt formed by the music of the verse of his language, but his own, hearing that music in his own way, directing his tongue to utter his music in his own way. Afterwards, the rule. The good conventional critics of all the ages have reproved poets who made new music, have declared it no music. It must always be a strong temptation to the poets of the new melody to reply, to explain, to lay down rules of justification. If they do so, they probably will leave unsaid more than they say; they will easily give wrong explanations. If he is to make a new music, the poet in a man must be far in advance of the grammarian. In some men the poet and the grammarian have little to do with each other. Such a man was Edgar Allan Poe;¹³ such a man was Wordsworth;¹⁴ such a man was Campion. In him the poet had much to do with Master Campion, who “in his vacant hours” composed music, who “neglected these light fruits as superfluous blossoms of his deeper studies.”¹⁵ He “chiefly aimed,” as he said, “to couple words and notes lovingly together.” He never published a lyric without its musical setting. In him the grammarian, the author of the Observations, had to do with “sweet Master Campion” of Cambridge, the “scholarly learned,” the “gentlemanlike qualified,”¹⁶ with Thomas Campianus who had “attained renown and place among Englishmen, being Latine poets.”¹⁷ Thomas Campion, student of Gray's Inn, was one or the other at different times. Thomas Campion, doctor in physic, scarcely intruded into either personality.

Notes

1. Samuel Daniel, A Defence of Ryme, 1603.

2. T. S. Omond, English Metrists.

3. Wordsworth: “… With this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart.” Browning: “Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!”

4. “It was quite usual at this period for Englishmen who had conscientious objections to the religious tests enforced at both universities to abstain from matriculating or taking a degree.”—Percival Vivian in “Muses' Library” Edition.

5. Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset (1536-1608), part author of the first English tragedy, Gorboduc or Ferrex and Porrex. The “Induction” is a stately poem, a solemn monotone pealing in a sombre hall. “It forms,” says Hallam, “a link which unites the school of Chaucer and Lydgate with The Faery Queen. Mr. Saintsbury styles Sackville the “author of some of the finest rime-royal in the language.”

6. Masque for Marriage of Earl of Somerset.

7. I give this as I find it. “Sobriety” generally produces dulness, but “sobriety” is not really a quality of Campion's poetry.

8. “Kind are her answers,” “Break now my heart and die,” “Fire, fire,” “Every dame affects good fame,” “To his sweet lute,” “Love me or not.”

9. “Sleep, angry beauty,” “Never love unless you can,” “Turn all thy thoughts to eyes.”

10. The inclusion of an unrimed line in a rimed stanza.

11. It is difficult to find a definition to cover the Elegy, the Ancient Mariner, and the Rubaiyat; yet for other reasons than comparative similarity of length they must occupy a place together in English poetry.

12. I have made a special appendix (Appendix D) for Daniel and his Defence. He was not only “a good poet in his day,” but a splendid master of prose. I give some excerpts from his book.

13. See Poe's Rationale of Verse and some of his essays and “marginalia.” He resembles Campion not a little, in his incisiveness when right, and in his ingenuity when wrong.

14. See the famous preface to the Lyrical Ballads. “Most of our attempted explanations of artistic merit (which contains elements non-moral and non-intellectual) are incomplete and misleading. Among such explanations must be ranked Wordsworth's essays. It would not be safe for any man to believe that he had produced true poetry because he had fulfilled Wordsworth's conditions.”—F. W. H. Myers.

15. Rosseter's dedication to A Book of Airs.

16. William Covell's Polimanteia.

17. Meres' Palladis Thamia.