[In the following essay, Davie argues that although it may be difficult for the modern reader to appreciate Sackville's poetry, if one considers Elizabethan tastes the poet deserves the critical praise he received.]

In fact of course he is a very uncommon reader indeed. He may even be extinct, and in a strict sense perhaps he never existed. But if he does not exist it is necessary to invent him; or if he has become extinct it is essential to pretend that he has not. For without him criticism must die. He is the reader that every critic addresses; and the best of critics fall short of the common reader in their reading. For the common reader is the reader without bias, the critic without an axe to grind, the reader open to persuasion who may give the work its one and only ‘right reading’. This reader then is not common in the sense that he is to be found with ease; indeed, it is not strictly speaking the reader that is common, but his reading. The good critic respects him because he reads the body of work with which the critic is for the moment concerned, in common with many other comparable bodies of writing. The common reader is he who reads (say) sixteenth-century English poetry in common with modern American fiction, ancient Greek drama, and so on. In fact he is the amateur of literature; and criticism must always be amateur—which is not to say, amateurish.

The scholar however is a professional; and the poets respect him and need him, in his capacities as editor, bibliographer, lexicographer. The nigger in the woodpile is the literary historian. For what is he—scholar, or critic? Professional, or amateur? And the only plausible answer is that he must needs be both—which is absurd. Yet he is indispensable.

In practice, it is the poets of an age that decide what bodies of earlier writing lie open to the common reader, what others may be left to become the precincts of the professional. For the poetry they write is addressed to the common reader, the amateur; and by taking up into their own writing certain phases of a tradition rather than others, that is, by presupposing in their readers a familiarity with some bodies of earlier writing rather than others, they impel the amateur to get on terms with these. Those parts of the tradition, those bodies of earlier writing, of which they make little use, are thus abandoned to the professionals.

In the age of F. T. Palgrave, the common reader was expected to know the sixteenth-century poets; he had to, if he was to enjoy Tennyson. Sweet Thames runs softly through ‘The Waste Land’; but among the many poems that Eliot's readers are required to know, the poems of Spenser do not bulk very large. In the last several decades, sixteenth-century poetry has been turned over to the professionals; and it is in the interest of the critic to make the common reader once more free of this territory, as his grandfather was. Perhaps the critic cannot effect this by himself, but must wait for the poet who will make his readers into Spenser's readers too. What is apparent is that when such a poet appears, when the common reader breaks into the sixteenth century again, there will be many hurdles he will have to circumvent. For the professionals have not been idle and the country has been improved out of all recognition.

The improvement is a real one. No one wants the common reader to find in sixteenth-century poetry what is not there; and it must seem that our grandfathers, esteeming Philip Sidney for his ‘spontaneity’, did just that. It is no good, for instance, pretending that only a good ear is required to read the sonnets of Wyatt without discomfort. Wyatt's irregularity is due to Pynson's Chaucer, or else to his misreading of French verse, or else to the fifteenth-century heroic line. The common reader cannot be expected to adjudicate between these possibilities, but I fear he must listen to the scholars debating them. At the very least he will only be able to read Wyatt by ear, when the ear has been trained to unfamiliar harmonies. And in the long run, the surest expedient would be the salvaging of English prosody from its present chaos, which has brought it into such disrepute. There, to begin with, is a massive obstacle which must be surmounted before the most amateur of readers can enjoy sixteenth-century poetry. Here the scholars are in the right of it, and the critics have to rely on them.

Where rhetoric is concerned, the position is rather different. It is true that, after scholarly research into the school-primers and the rhetoric-manuals, we can no longer admire the Elizabethans for their ‘spontaneity’. And it is also true that without knowing about Elizabethan rhetoric we cannot account for certain features of the poetry. It is worth insisting, however, that we are still at liberty to find those features unfortunate. The common reader has been derided too long for calling some poetry ‘rhetorical’, and meaning by that that he dislikes it. The term will have to be used with more care in future. The scholars have established that all the poets from Chaucer to Marvell were rhetoricians; but this does not mean (as most scholars seem to imply) that we must applaud them for being so. It is still possible to deplore the influence of rhetoric on some if not all of this poetry. And it seems to me indeed that good sense and good taste require us to do so.

Dr. Swart,¹ for instance, detects brachylogia in line 445 of the ‘Induction’ to ‘The Complaint of Henrie Duke of Buckinghame.’ When we look up this line² we find it to read:

that cities towres welth world and all shall quaile.

And, on looking up Puttenham to learn about brachylogia, we find the following:

We use sometimes to proceede all by single words, without any close or coupling, saving that a little pause or comma is geven to every word. This figure for pleasure may be called in our vulgar the cutted comma, for that there cannot be a shorter division than at every words end. The Greekes in their language call it short language, as thus,

Envy, malice, flattery, disdaine,
Avarice, deceit, falshed, filthy gaine.

If this loose language be used, not in single words, but in long clauses, it is called Asindeton, and in both cases we utter in that fashion, when either we be earnest or would seeme to make hast.

It is hard to see what good our labour has done us. In fairness to Dr. Swart, it must be said that he nowhere suggests that finding brachylogia or antimetabole or cacosyntheton will make any difference to the value we assign to Sackville's poem. For his part he claims to examine Sackville's poetry without raising any question of value at all³—a contention I find it hard to swallow. Dr. Swart's intention is to establish the fact that Sackville knew and drew upon the rhetoric-books—purely, one gathers, as a matter of historical curiosity. And he might therefore be willing to admit that the common reader is under no obligation to follow him into Puttenham or Hoskyns or Sherry or whomever else.

But not all scholars are so accommodating. Miss Tuve, for instance, seems to imply that no one can read (say) Sackville unless he is able to recognize icon or prosopopeia when he meets with it. No one, that is, can read Sackville correctly without that aid; no one can read him in any other way and derive from the reading the sort of pleasure that is really there. It seems to follow that, if we want the common reader to read sixteenth-century poetry for what it truly has to offer, we have to send him into the rhetoric books on the heels of scholarship. It is this implication that we examine by asking just what we stand to gain from linking Sackville's line with Puttenham's observations on the cutted comma.

I suggest that the irritation we feel when we refer to Puttenham is the same we feel when we detect in an Elizabethan poem an elaborate scheme of reference to astrology, or to symbolic colours and numbers. Now where astrology is concerned we have learnt to check our immediate irritation at what seems a piece of archaic pedantry; for we have learnt that very often what seems to be quibbling and trivial in these matters is part and parcel of a comprehensive ‘world-picture’. We may not accept the detailed application of a hierarchical scheme which yet, in its totality, may be impressive and significant. And once we apprehend the consistency of the vast conception, we cannot deny a grudging admiration to the ingenuity with which that pattern is made to apply in minute detail. It may seem that, in the case of rhetoric, the situation is the same; that we ought not to be irritated by the quibbling over brachylogia, because this is only the application in detail of a critical scheme which is comprehensive and consistent, and therefore impressive as a whole.

But this is not the case. Elizabethan rhetoric is neither comprehensive nor consistent. And one sees its deficiencies most plainly, not in the trivialities it accounts for, but in the momentous matters on which it never touches at all. More precisely, we are justified in calling brachylogia trivial, when we discover whole ranges of artifice in the manipulation of language for which Puttenham has no terms at all.

Sackville, for instance, in one of the best passages of the ‘Complaint’ (which seems to me, incidentally, quite as good as the ‘Induction’) rings the changes, through several stanzas, on one simple but effective syntactical arrangement. In stanzas 142, 143, Buckingham is made to apostrophize Rome and reproach her for her ungrateful treatment of the patriot, Camillus:

Rome thou that once advaunced up so hie
thie staie, patron, and flour of excelence
hast now throwen him to depth of miserie
exiled him that was thie hole defence
no comptes it not a horrible offence
to reaven him of honnour and of fame
that wan yt the whan thou had lost the same.
Behold Camillus he that erst revived
the state of Rome that dienge he did find
of his own state is now alas deprived
banisht by them whom he did thus detbind
that cruell age unthankfull and unkind
declared well their fals unconstancie
and fortune eke her mutabilitie.

The construction ‘exiled him that was thie hole defence’ is natural enough and would go unnoticed were it not echoed almost at once—

to reaven him of honnour and of fame
that wan yt the whan thou had lost the same,

and echoed again in the next stanza—

banisht by them whom he did thus detbind.

The little tune comes again and again, re-stated in each of the next three stanzas. Buckingham apostrophizes Scipio, who—

art now exild as though thow not deserved
to rest in her whom thow had so preserved.

He turns again on Rome—

Ingratefull Rome hast shewed thie crueltie
on him by whom thow livest yet in fame.

And finally, approving Scipio's contemptuous gesture—

his cinders yet lo doth he them denie
that him denied amongst them for to die.

The sentence itself has a little tragic plot, with the peripeteia at the turn on the relative pronoun. As Miss Tuve herself has said so well, to handle syntax with this nicety is to come as near as may be to the impossible ideal of a silent eloquence.

The point is that surely this little trick is a rhetorical figure at least as important as the cutted comma. But one looks through Puttenham in vain (I hold by him; other rhetoricians may be better), for any acknowledgment of devices of this kind. Indeed, except for zeugma and its modifications (prozeugma, mezozeugma and so on), which Puttenham lists confusingly under ‘figures auricular’, there are no figures which refer in the first place to the arrangement of clauses in a complex sentence. Instead there are classifications of imagery (ikon, allegoria), of tone (the broad floute, the privie nippe), and of chime, internal rhyme, and repetition. The whole system is such as to encourage accumulation of word, phrase, and clause, rather than tight organization of them. Spenser's prolixity and diffuseness are the sort of thing that could be expected of one of Puttenham's readers. Sackville by contrast is taut and close; and indeed Sackville and Gascoigne too, as Yvor Winters has noticed, make a better showing in this respect than the ‘high’ Elizabethans of Spenser's generation. If Gascoigne and Sackville are rhetorical, their rhetoric is more rapid and concise than Spenser's is, or Drayton's.

However that may be, it follows that we may not be impressed when Dr. Swart, true to his code of never venturing a value-judgment, points out instead that the later Elizabethans valued Sackville no more highly than other contributors to ‘The Mirror for Magistrates’, Ferrers, for instance, and Phaer.⁴ For it appears that in part, at any rate, his achievement was such as the later Elizabethans neither sought for themselves nor esteemed, when they found it in others. I mean economy and compactness, syntax, silent eloquence. And here another illustration is called for. There is, in the ‘Complaint’, a justly famous lyrical digression on sleep and night (stanzas 159, 160, 161). But while the beauty and pathos of these stanzas is acknowledged, I do not know that anyone has tried to account for their powerful effect, coming where they do. To do so, one needs to quote not the three stanzas alone, but a block of seven—

For by this wretch I being strait bewraied
to one John mitton shreif of shropshere then
all sodenlie was taken and convaied
to Salsburie with rout of harnest men
unto King Richard ther encamped then
fast by the citie with a mightie host
withouten dome wher hed and lief I lost.
And with those wordes as if the ax even there
dismembred had his hed and corps apart
ded fell he doune and we in wofull feare
amasd beheld him when he wold revart
but greifes on greifes stil heapt about his hart
that still he laie sometime revivd with pain
and with a sigh becoming ded againe.
Mid night was come and everie vitall thing
with swete sound slepe their wearie lims did rest
the bestes were still the little burdes that sing
now sweteli slept beside their mothers brest
the old and all were shrouded in their nest
the waters calm the cruell seas did cesse
the woods and feldes and all things held their peace
The golden stars weare whirld amid their race
and on the erth did laugh with twinkling light
when ech thing nestled in his resting place
forgat daies pain withe plesure of the night
the hare had not the gredy houndes in sight
the ferfull dere of deth stode not in doubt
the partridge dremd not of the sparhaukes fote
The ouglie bear now minded not the stake
nor how the cruel mastives did him tere
the stag laie stil unroused from the brake
the fomie bore ferd not the hunters spere
al thing was stil in desert bush and brere
with quiet hart now from their travels cest
soundlie they slept in midst of all their rest.
Whan Buckingham amid his plaint opprest
with surging sorowes and with pinching paines
in sorte thus sowned and with a sigh he cest
to tellen forth the trecherie and the traines
of Banaster which him so sore distraines
that from a sigh he fals in to a sound
and from a sound lieth raging on the ground
So twitching wear the panges that he assaied
And he so sore with rufull rage distraught
To think upon the wretche that him betraied
whome erst he made a gentleman of nought
That more and more agreved with this thought
he stormes out sights and with redoubled sore
Shryke with the furies rageth more and more.

It is plain that if a modern editor were to punctuate this, he would make one sentence of stanza 157 (the first quoted) and probably of 158 also. 159 however contains six sentences, 160 has four, 161 has five, 162 and 163, resuming the narrative, seem to make up one sentence between them. In fact, it seems to be Sackville's normal procedure to make the metrical unit (the stanza), the grammatical unit also. From this flowing melody, it is easy for Sackville to modulate into a plangent strain by putting into the stanza several short and simple, poignant sentences. Of course this does not ‘explain’ the effect; to begin with not all the eloquence is silent, and we certainly need Dr. Swart's admirable account of Sackville's diction. On the other hand, it is one more version of a sort of eloquence which the rhetoricians do not recognize. And it is not surprising if the Elizabethans, trained on the rhetoric-books, failed to applaud it.

Sackville, in fact, is a good example of the poet who is not seen most truly when seen through the eyes of his contemporaries. There are such writers; though one would not think so, hearing the chorused admonition to see Shakespeare ‘in Elizabethan terms’, and so on. It is hardly too much to say that one sees Sackville most clearly in Augustan terms. That is not quite true, of course, as Dr. Swart shows when he investigates the diction. But it was the Augustans, pre-eminently, who recognized the virtue of compact syntax such as one finds in Sackville's verse. This is that ‘strength of Denham’, which Johnson found in ‘lines and couplets, which … convey much meaning in few words, and exhibit the sentiment with more weight than bulk’. Sackville's verse can recall Pope's. And it is interesting to know what Pope thought of him.⁵

Mr. Sackville (afterwards first Earl of Dorset of that name) was the best English poet between Chaucer's and Spenser's time. His tragedy of Gorboduc is written in a much purer style than Shakespeare's was in several of his first plays. Sackville imitates the manner of Seneca's tragedies very closely, and writes without affectation or bombast: the two great sins of our oldest tragic writers. ‘The Induction’ in the ‘Mirrour for Magistrates’ was written by him too, and is very good and very poetical.⁶

We can put beside this another of Pope's judgments recorded by Spence—

Shakespeare generally used to stiffen his style with high words and metaphors for the speeches of his kings and great men: he mistook it for a mark of greatness. This is strongest in his early plays; …⁷

Clearly, there are grounds for supposing that when Pope praised the purity of Sackville's style, at least one of the things he had in mind was that writer's relatively sparing use of metaphor. This indeed is in accordance with Augustan practice; one of the principal virtues of the Augustan critic was his realization that metaphor was not the only way to concentration of poetic meaning, but that syntax, for instance, could be managed to the same end. Pope's phrasing is vague, but there are grounds for thinking that he meant something of this sort when he praised Sackville.

If so, his judgment comes nearer than Elizabethan judgments to defining the distinctive sort of pleasure to be got from Sackville by the sympathetic reader. Certainly it seems more to the point than later discussions about whether the Porch of Hell passage, for instance, is Virgilian or Dantesque. It is true, on the other hand, that Sackville's sort of ‘strength’ and his sort of ‘purity’ will hardly appeal to a generation such as our own which appreciates poetry in terms of ‘images’.

Notes

1. J. Swart. ‘Thomas Sackville. A Study in Sixteenth-Century Poetry’. Groningen Studies in English, I (Groningen 1949), p. 93.

2. In numbering of lines and stanzas from Sackville, I follow throughout Marguerite Hearsey's edition (Yale University Press, 1936), of the MS. in St. John's College, Cambridge. The manuscript differs widely in these respects from the ‘Mirror for Magistrates’ text.

3. Swart, op. cit., pp. 1, 2.

4. Swart, op. cit., pp. 124, 125.

5. Pope had ‘Gorboduc’ given him by the elder Warton, and read enough of it not to fall into the blunders of Dryden and Oldham, who both thought Gorboduc a queen. Cf. Pope's Works ed. Elwin and Courthope (vol. IX, pp. 67, 68).

6. Spence's Anecdotes. A Selection ed. Underhill, p. 165.

7. Ibid., p. 172.