November 21, 1918 
LAND &> WATER 
15 
Sir Walter Raleigh : By Arthur Symons 
THERE was a large gathering at the Mansion 
House, October 30th, including many Americans, 
who met to do honour to the memory of Sir 
Walter Raleigh and the three hundredth anni- 
versary of his execution in Old Palace Yard." 
The Tcry name of the man resounds across these centuries, 
with no blast from heaven nor hell, but rather in Swinburne's 
lines : 
I set the trumpet to my lips and blow. 
The height of night is shaken, the skies break. 
The winds and stars and waters come and go 
By fits of breath and Ught and sound, that wake 
Us out of sleep, and perish as the show 
Built up of sleep, when all her strength forsake 
The sense-compelling spirit. 
Mis genius is certainly not universal, but singular, and 
passionate, and strange ; often sinister, often sombre, often 
sad. He has none of the morbid, nervous, hesitating, intel- 
lectually dispassionate qualities of John Donne ; none of 
his complexities of passion, none of his monstrous agility of 
mind, none of his pedantic modernity, nor of his ferocities, 
and ecstacies, and entanglements of sentiment. Donne's 
poetry is full of "masculine persuasive force" ; it has not, 
as the greater part of love-poetry has, a feminine pathos, 
but the passion of a man. The subtlety of a great brain 
waits upon a " naked thinking heart " ; the result is a new 
kind of poetry, which Donne invented for himself, and in 
which he has no successor. 
But there is something in Raleigh's genius that seems to 
me not unsimilar with that of Michael Drayton, who came 
nearer to being a great poet than any other not quite great 
poet of his period. He has written, perhaps, the greatest 
sonnet in English : " Since there's no help, come, let us kiss 
and part," which seems to have something of the tremendous 
ardency and sense of hate and of love, of passion and of desire 
that makes Catullus the greatest of Latin poets and one of 
the greatest poets who ever lived. Drayton is never, in any 
part of his work, at his best for long together ; even the 
great sonnet is marked by an inversion, and no long poem 
is .strictly grammatical throughout. 
It must not be forgotten that Donne, at twenty-three, was 
a soldier against Spain under Raleigh, and went on the 
"Islands Voyage." Nor can it ever have been forgotten 
that, among all the restless, insurgent, adventurous, and 
fervid spirits of the Elizabethan age, none is more con- 
spicuous for their characteristics than Raleigh. He was a 
soldier from his youth, and at an early period he was con- 
nected with the great maritime monuments of his time ; 
he was ever the foremost hater and antagonist of Spain and 
all its works ; one of the first to conceive the idea of colonisa- 
tion and to attempt to realise it, and at the same time taking 
an active part in the party intrigues and contentions of a 
Court where the struggle for place and favour never ceased 
raging ; yet, amidst all his enterprises and schemes, ignoble 
and noble as these certainly had to be, finding leisure for far 
other pursuits and interests therefore, for all these reasons 
and in a singular degree, he is a representative of the vigorous 
versatility of the Elizabethan period. 
In regard to Raleigh, it must be said that the substitution 
of an intellectual for an ideal end, of energetic mental action 
for passionate spiritual emotion as the means towards that 
end, is as good a test as may be taken of the difference in 
kind rather than in eloquence between the first and the 
second order of imaginative artists. The lesser artists, with 
less liberty of action, will be less likelier of the two to show 
less loyalty of submission to the eternal laws of thought, 
which find their full and natural expression in the eternal 
canons of art. Those are not the greatest among men of 
whom we can reasonably say that circumstances might have 
made them as great in s<ime different way from which they 
walked. We can imagine Raleigh setting up almost any 
debateablc theorem as a subject for dispute in the school of 
rhetoric, and maintaining his most indefensible position with 
as much cunning and energy of argument as his native mind 
could bring to the support of his acquired skill of fence : 
we can conceive in his case he would argue his point and 
reinforce his reasoning with passion and profusion of thought. 
In certain sense he is not unlike Pica della Mirandula, 
who had an inexhaustible, unrivalled thirst for knowledge, 
the strange, confused, uncritical learning o( that age, and 
who supposed he had all the secrfets of Eastern languages. 
And, as one glances into a page of their forgottcjn books, it is 
like a glance into one of those ancient sepulchres upon which 
the wanderer in classical lands has sometimes stumbled, 
with the old disused monuments and furniture of a world 
wholly unlike ours still fresh in them. That whole concep- 
tion of nature is so different from our own. And, above all, 
there is a constant sense in reading these two writers that 
their thoughts, however little their positive value may be, 
are connected with springs beneath them of deep and pas- 
sionate emotion. But "the shaping spirit of imagination." 
Coleridge's phrase — proper to all great men, and varying in 
each case from all others, reforms of itself its own missjiapen 
work, treads down and triumphs over its own faults and 
errors, and resumes its undiminished reign. 
Raleigh is not a great prose writer. For the most part, 
his prose is a kind of thinking aloud, and the form is wholly 
lost in the pursuit of ideas. With his love for the absolute, 
why is it that he does not seek after an absolute in words 
considered as style, as well as in words considered as the 
expression of thought ? Wliere he is really at his best is in 
such sentences as these, in which he writes as if he spoke. 
He refers to the Caribs in Guiana. "The casigue that was a 
stranger had his wife staying at the port where we anchored, 
and in all my life 1 have seldom seen a better-favoured woman. 
She was of good stature, and black eyes, fat of body, of an 
excellent countenance, and taking great pride therein." 
And in his description of a storm off Plymouth he seems 
almost to anticipate Joseph Conrad. I give one sentence : 
"But the night following, the Thursday, Friday, and Satur- 
day, the storm so increased, the ships were weighty, the 
ordnance great, and the billows so raised and enraged, that 
we could carry out no sail which to our judgment would not 
have rent off the yards by the wind ; and yet our ships 
rolled so vehemently, and so disjoined themselves, that we 
were driven either to force it again with our courses, or to 
sink." 
If in the case of Raleigh there are traces of what 
was then called dishonesty, he was on the whole one of the 
most honest and upright men who lived in his century. 
His "Hymn" is certainly Catholic ; as for his "Pilgrimage," 
in its mixture of sublime and passionate passages and of 
amazing metaphors, and in lines such as these : 
Tliat since my flesh must die so soon. 
And want a head to dine next noon. 
Just at the stroke, when my veins start and spread. 
Set on my soul an everlasting head : 
1 can only compare it— with leagues of imagmation between 
them — with "The Everlasting Gospel" of Blake. The Lie 
has in it magnificence ; a life and a death's confession ; a 
denunciation and a grim and tragic humour ; an abstract 
passion that almost rises to the heat of white fire. 
In his adventurous spirit he had a lust for gold and for 
its discovery, as when he writes : 
Gold values all, and all things equal gold. 
He has also, as most artists of his period have, a sense of 
luxury ; as, for instance, when he speaks of " the western 
spice" and of "French wine," which vividly recall to me 
Sidney's exquisite lines : 
Having this day, my horse, my hand, my lance. 
Guided so well that I obtained the prize. 
Both by the judgment of the English eyes. 
And of some sent from that sweet enemy — France. 
And, for one who so unjustly endured thirteen years' con- 
finement in the Tower, it is with an acute pathos, and even 
then, with his still refined sense of luxury that he writes : 
What doth it help a wretch in prison pent. 
Long since with biting hunger over pressed. 
To see without, or smell within, the scent 
Of dainty fare for others' tables dressed ? 
It is often forgotten that Raleigh is a considerable English 
poet. His rough verse, which seems always so intent on 
saying a given thing with emphasis, is really poetry. It is 
a knotted and gnarled kind of poetry, and in the poem which 
is certainly his. 
As you come from the Holy Land 
Of Walsinghame, 
he has played remarkable variations on a kind of folk-time ; 
the kind of. folk-tune which we get in Shakespeare's " How 
should I your true love know ? " Later on, Blake is to do a 
not wholly dissimilar kind of transposition, putting wild 
meanings into ballad stanzas. In some other poems Raleigh 
has the same hard, tight, intellectual pathos. His personal 
humour speaks always with disconcerting directness ; his 
character, crotchety and self-reliant. 
