CHAPTER IV_A History of Elizabethan Literature

"THE FAERIE QUEENE" AND ITS GROUP

"Velut inter ignes luna minores"

There is no instance in English history of a poet receiving such immediate

recognition, and deserving it so thoroughly, as did Edmund Spenser at the

date of _The Shepherd's Calendar_. In the first chapter of this volume the

earlier course of Elizabethan poetry has been described, and it will have

been seen that, with great intention, no very great accomplishment had been

achieved. It was sufficiently evident that a poetic language and a general

poetic spirit were being formed, such as had not existed in England since

Chaucer's death; but no one had yet arisen who could justify the

expectation based on such respectable tentatives. It seems from many minute

indications which need not be detailed here, that at the advent of _The

Shepherd's Calendar_ all the best judges recognised the expected poet. Yet

they could hardly have known how just their recognition was, or what

extraordinary advances the poet would make in the twenty years which passed

between its publication and his death.

The life of Spenser is very little known, and here and elsewhere the

conditions of this book preclude the reproduction or even the discussion of

the various pious attempts which have been made to supply the deficiency of

documents. The chief of these in his case is to be found in Dr. Grosart's

magnificent edition, the principal among many good works of its editor.

That he belonged to a branch--a Lancashire branch in all probability--of

the family which produced the Le Despensers of elder, and the Spencers of

modern English history, may be said to be unquestionable. But he appears to

have been born about 1552 in London, and to have been educated at Merchant

Taylors', whence in May 1569 he matriculated at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge,

as a sizar. At or before this time he must have contributed (though there

are puzzles in the matter) certain translations of sonnets from Petrarch

and Du Bellay to a book called _The Theatre of Voluptuous Worldlings_,

published by a Brabanter, John van der Noodt. These, slightly changed from

blank verse to rhyme, appeared long afterwards with his minor poems of

1590. But the original pieces had been claimed by the Dutchman; and though

there are easy ways of explaining this, the thing is curious. However it

may be with these verses, certainly nothing else of Spenser's appeared in

print for ten years. His Cambridge life, except for some vague allusions

(which, as usual in such cases, have been strained to breaking by

commentators and biographers), is equally obscure; save that he certainly

fulfilled seven years of residence, taking his Bachelor's Degree in 1573,

and his Master's three years later. But he did not gain a fellowship, and

the chief discoverable results of his Cambridge sojourn were the thorough

scholarship which marks his work, and his friendship with the notorious

Gabriel Harvey--his senior by some years, a Fellow of Pembroke, and a

person whose singularly bad literary taste, as shown in his correspondence

with Spenser, may be perhaps forgiven, first, because it did no harm, and

secondly, because without him we should know even less of Spenser than we

do. It is reasonably supposed from the notes of his friend, "E. K."

(apparently Kirke, a Pembroke man), to _The Shepherd's Calendar_, that he

went to his friends in the north after leaving Cambridge and spent a year

or two there, falling in love with the heroine, poetically named Rosalind,

of _The Calendar_, and no doubt writing that remarkable book. Then

(probably very late in 1578) he went to London, was introduced by Harvey

to Sidney and Leicester, and thus mixed at once in the best literary and

political society. He was not long in putting forth his titles to its

attention, for _The Shepherd's Calendar_ was published in the winter of

1579, copiously edited by "E. K.," whom some absurdly suppose to be Spenser

himself. The poet seems to have had also numerous works (the titles of

which are known) ready or nearly ready for the press. But all were

subsequently either changed in title, incorporated with other work, or

lost. He had already begun _The Faerie Queene_, much to the pedant Harvey's

disgust; and he dabbled in the fashionable absurdity of classical metres,

like his inferiors. But he published nothing more immediately; and powerful

as were his patrons, the only preferment which he obtained was in that

Eldorado-Purgatory of Elizabethan ambition--Ireland. Lord Grey took him as

private secretary when he was in 1580 appointed deputy, and shortly

afterwards he received some civil posts in his new country, and a lease of

abbey lands at Enniscorthy, which lease he soon gave up. But he stayed in

Ireland, notwithstanding the fact that his immediate patron Grey soon left

it. Except a few bare dates and doubtful allusions, little or nothing is

heard of him between 1580 and 1590. On the eve of the latter year (the 1st

of December 1589) the first three books of _The Faerie Queene_ were entered

at Stationers' Hall, and were published in the spring of the next year. He

had been already established at Kilcolman in the county Cork on a grant of

more than three thousand acres of land out of the forfeited Desmond

estates. And henceforward his literary activity, at least in publication,

became more considerable, and he seems to have been much backwards and

forwards between England and Ireland. In 1590 appeared a volume of minor

poems (_The Ruins of Time_, _The Tears of the Muses_, _Virgil's Gnat_,

_Mother Hubbard's Tale_, _The Ruins of Rome_, _Muiopotmos_, and the

_Visions_), with an address to the reader in which another list of

forthcoming works is promised. These, like the former list of Kirke, seem

oddly enough to have also perished. The whole collection was called

_Complaints_, and a somewhat similar poem, _Daphnaida_, is thought to have

appeared in the same year. On the 11th of June 1594 the poet married

(strangely enough it was not known whom, until Dr. Grosart ingeniously

identified her with a certain Elizabeth Boyle _alias_ Seckerstone), and in

1595 were published the beautiful _Amoretti_ or love sonnets, and the still

more beautiful _Epithalamion_ describing his courtship and marriage, with

the interesting poem of _Colin Clout's Come Home Again_; while in the same

year (old style; in January 1596, new style) the fourth, fifth, and sixth

books of _The Faerie Queene_ were entered for publication and soon

appeared. The supposed allusions to Mary Stuart greatly offended her son

James. The _Hymns_ and the _Prothalamion_ followed in the same year.

Spenser met with difficulties at Court (though he had obtained a small

pension of fifty pounds a year), and had like other Englishmen troubles

with his neighbours in Ireland; yet he seemed to be becoming more

prosperous, and in 1598 he was named Sheriff of Cork. A few weeks later the

Irish Rebellion broke out; his house was sacked and burnt with one of his

children; he fled to England and died on the 16th of January 1599 at King

Street, Westminster, perhaps not "for lack of bread," as Jonson says, but

certainly in no fortunate circumstances. In the year of his misfortune had

been registered, though it was never printed till more than thirty years

later, his one prose work of substance, the remarkable _View of the Present

State of Ireland_; an admirable piece of prose, and a political tract, the

wisdom and grasp of which only those who have had to give close attention

to Irish politics can fully estimate. It is probably the most valuable

document on any given period of Irish history that exists, and is certainly

superior in matter, no less than in style, to any political tract in

English, published before the days of Halifax eighty years after.

It has been said that _The Shepherd's Calendar_ placed Spenser at once at

the head of the English poets of his day; and it did so. But had he written

nothing more, he would not (as is the case with not a few distinguished

poets) have occupied as high or nearly as high a position in quality, if

not in quantity, as he now does. He was a young man when he published it;

he was not indeed an old man when he died; and it would not appear that he

had had much experience of life beyond college walls. His choice of

models--the artificial pastorals in which the Renaissance had modelled

itself on Virgil and Theocritus, rather than Virgil and Theocritus

themselves--was not altogether happy. He showed, indeed, already his

extraordinary metrical skill, experimenting with rhyme-royal and other

stanzas, fourteeners or eights and sixes, anapaests more or less irregular,

and an exceedingly important variety of octosyllable which, whatever may

have been his own idea in practising it, looked back to early Middle

English rhythms and forward to the metre of _Christabel_, as Coleridge was

to start it afresh. He also transgressed into religious politics, taking

(as indeed he always took, strange as it may seem in so fanatical a

worshipper of beauty) the Puritan side. Nor is his work improved as poetry,

though it acquires something in point of quaint attractiveness, by good Mr.

"E. K.'s" elaborate annotations, introductions, explanations, and general

gentleman-usherings--the first in English, but most wofully not the last by

hundreds, of such overlayings of gold with copper. Yet with all these

drawbacks _The Shepherd's Calendar_ is delightful. Already we can see in it

that double command, at once of the pictorial and the musical elements of

poetry, in which no English poet is Spenser's superior, if any is his

equal. Already the unmatched power of vigorous allegory, which he was to

display later, shows in such pieces as _The Oak and the Briar_. In the less

deliberately archaic divisions, such as "April" and "November," the command

of metrical form, in which also the poet is almost peerless, discovers

itself. Much the same may be said of the volume of _Complaints_, which,

though published later than _The Faerie Queene_, represents beyond all

question very much earlier work. Spenser is unquestionably, when he is not

at once spurred and soothed by the play of his own imagination, as in _The

Queene_, a melancholy poet, and the note of melancholy is as strong in

these poems as in their joint title. It combines with his delight in

emblematic allegory happily enough, in most of these pieces except _Mother

Hubbard's Tale_. This is almost an open satire, and shows that if Spenser's

genius had not found a less mongrel style to disport itself in, not merely

would Donne, and Lodge, and Hall, and Marston have had to abandon their

dispute for the post of first English satirist, but the attainment of

really great satire in English might have been hastened by a hundred years,

and _Absalom and Achitophel_ have been but a second. Even here, however,

the piece still keeps the Chaucerian form and manner, and is only a kind of

exercise. The sonnets from and after Du Bellay and others are more

interesting. As in the subsequent and far finer _Amoretti_, Spenser prefers

the final couplet form to the so-called Petrarchian arrangement; and,

indeed, though the most recent fashion in England has inclined to the

latter, an impartial judgment must pronounce both forms equally good and

equally entitled to place. The _Amoretti_ written in this metre, and

undoubtedly representing some, at least, of Spenser's latest written work,

rank with the best of Sidney's, and hardly below the best of Shakespere's;

while both in them and in the earlier sonnets the note of regret mingled

with delight--the special Renaissance note--sounds as it rarely does in any

other English verse. Of the poems of the later period, however (leaving

_The Faerie Queene_ for a moment aside), the _Epithalamion_ and the _Four

Hymns_ rank undoubtedly highest. For splendour of imagery, for harmony of

verse, for delicate taste and real passion, the _Epithalamion_ excels all

other poems of its class, and the _Four Hymns_ express a rapture of

Platonic enthusiasm, which may indeed be answerable for the unreadable

_Psyches_ and _Psychozoias_ of the next age, but which is itself married to

immortal verse in the happiest manner.

Still, to the ordinary reader, Spenser is the poet of _The Faerie Queene_,

and for once the ordinary reader is right. Every quality found in his other

poems is found in this greatest of them in perfection; and much is found

there which is not, and indeed could not be, found anywhere else. Its

general scheme is so well known (few as may be the readers who really know

its details) that very slight notice of it may suffice. Twelve knights,

representing twelve virtues, were to have been sent on adventures from the

Court of Gloriana, Queen of Fairyland. The six finished books give the

legends (each subdivided into twelve cantos, averaging fifty or sixty

stanzas each) of Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, and

Courtesy; while a fragment of two splendid "Cantos on Mutability" is

supposed to have belonged to a seventh book (not necessarily seventh in

order) on Constancy. Legend has it that the poem was actually completed;

but this seems improbable, as the first three books were certainly ten

years in hand, and the second three six more. The existing poem

comprehending some four thousand stanzas, or between thirty and forty

thousand lines, exhibits so many and such varied excellences that it is

difficult to believe that the poet could have done anything new in kind. No

part of it is as a whole inferior to any other part, and the fragmentary

cantos contain not merely one of the most finished pictorial pieces--the

Procession of the Months--to be found in the whole poem, but much of the

poet's finest thought and verse. Had fortune been kinder, the volume of

delight would have been greater, but its general character would probably

not have changed much. As it is, _The Faerie Queene_ is the only long poem

that a lover of poetry can sincerely wish longer.

It deserves some critical examination here from three points of view,

regarding respectively its general scheme, its minor details of form in

metre and language, and lastly, its general poetical characteristics. The

first is simple enough in its complexity. The poem is a long _Roman

d'Aventure_ (which it is perhaps as well to say, once for all, is not the

same as a "Romance of Chivalry," or a "Romance of Adventure"), redeemed

from the aimless prolixity incident to that form by its regular plan, by

the intercommunion of the adventures of the several knights (none of whom

disappears after having achieved his own quest), and by the constant

presence of a not too obtrusive allegory. This last characteristic attaches

it on the other side to the poems of the _Roman de la Rose_ order, which

succeeded the _Romans d'Aventures_ as objects of literary interest and

practice, not merely in France, but throughout Europe. This allegory has

been variously estimated as a merit or defect of the poem. It is sometimes

political, oftener religious, very often moral, and sometimes purely

personal--the identifications in this latter case being sometimes clear, as

that of Gloriana, Britomart, and Belphoebe with Queen Elizabeth, sometimes

probable, as that of Duessa with Queen Mary (not one of Spenser's most

knightly actions), and of Prince Arthur with Leicester, and sometimes more

or less problematical, as that of Artegall with Lord Grey, of Timias the

Squire with Raleigh, and so forth. To those who are perplexed by these

double meanings the best remark is Hazlitt's blunt one that "the allegory

won't bite them." In other words, it is always perfectly possible to enjoy

the poem without troubling oneself about the allegory at all, except in its

broad ethical features, which are quite unmistakable. On the other hand, I

am inclined to think that the presence of these under-meanings, with the

interest which they give to a moderately instructed and intelligent person

who, without too desperate a determination to see into millstones,

understands "words to the wise," is a great addition to the hold of the

poem over the attention, and saves it from the charge of mere

desultoriness, which some, at least, of the other greatest poems of the

kind (notably its immediate exemplar, the _Orlando Furioso_) must undergo.

And here it may be noted that the charge made by most foreign critics who

have busied themselves with Spenser, and perhaps by some of his countrymen,

that he is, if not a mere paraphrast, yet little more than a transplanter

into English of the Italian, is glaringly uncritical. Not, perhaps, till

Ariosto and Tasso have been carefully read in the original, is Spenser's

real greatness understood. He has often, and evidently of purpose,

challenged comparison; but in every instance it will be found that his

beauties are emphatically his own. He has followed his leaders only as

Virgil has followed Homer; and much less slavishly.

It is strange to find English critics of this great if not greatest English

poem even nowadays repeating that Spenser borrowed his wonderful stanza

from the Italians. He did nothing of the kind. That the _ottava rima_ on

the one hand, and the sonnet on the other, may have suggested the idea of

it is quite possible. But the Spenserian stanza, as it is justly called, is

his own and no one else's, and its merits, especially that primal merit of

adaptation to the subject and style of the poem, are unique. Nothing else

could adapt itself so perfectly to the endless series of vignettes and

dissolving views which the poet delights in giving; while, at the same

time, it has, for so elaborate and apparently integral a form, a singular

faculty of hooking itself on to stanzas preceding and following, so as not

to interrupt continuous narrative when continuous narrative is needed. Its

great compass, admitting of an almost infinite variety of cadence and

composition, saves it from the monotony from which even the consummate art

of Milton could not save blank verse now and then, and from which no writer

has ever been able to save the couplet, or the quatrain, or the stanzas

ending with a couplet, in narratives of very great length. But the most

remarkable instance of harmony between metrical form and other

characteristics, both of form and matter, in the metrist has yet to be

mentioned. It has been said how well the stanza suits Spenser's pictorial

faculty; it certainly suits his musical faculty as well. The slightly (very

slightly, for he can be vigorous enough) languid turn of his grace, the

voluptuous cadences of his rhythm, find in it the most perfect exponent

possible. The verse of great poets, especially Homer's, has often been

compared to the sea. Spenser's is more like a river, wide, and deep, and

strong, but moderating its waves and conveying them all in a steady, soft,

irresistible sweep forwards. To aid him, besides this extraordinary

instrument of metre, he had forged for himself another in his language. A

great deal has been written on this--comments, at least of the

unfavourable kind, generally echoing Ben Jonson's complaint that Spenser

"writ no language"; that his dialect is not the dialect of any actual place

or time, that it is an artificial "poetic diction" made up of Chaucer, and

of Northern dialect, and of classicisms, and of foreign words, and of

miscellaneous archaisms from no matter where. No doubt it is. But if any

other excuse than the fact of a beautiful and satisfactory effect is wanted

for the formation of a poetic diction different from the actually spoken or

the ordinarily written tongue of the day (and I am not sure that any such

excuse is required) it is to be found at once. There was no actually spoken

or ordinarily written tongue in Spenser's day which could claim to be

"Queen's English." Chaucer was obsolete, and since Chaucer there was no

single person who could even pretend to authority. Every writer more or

less endowed with originality was engaged in beating out for himself, from

popular talk, and from classical or foreign analogy, an instrument of

speech. Spenser's verse language and Lyly's prose are the most remarkable

results of the process; but it was, in fact, not only a common but a

necessary one, and in no way to be blamed. As for the other criterion

hinted at above, no one is likely to condemn the diction according to that.

In its remoteness without grotesqueness, in its lavish colour, in its

abundance of matter for every kind of cadence and sound-effect, it is

exactly suited to the subject, the writer, and the verse.

It is this singular and complete adjustment of worker and implement which,

with other peculiarities noted or to be noted, gives _The Faerie Queene_

its unique unicity, if such a conceit may be pardoned. From some points of

view it might be called a very artificial poem, yet no poem runs with such

an entire absence of effort, with such an easy eloquence, with such an

effect, as has been said already, of flowing water. With all his learning,

and his archaisms, and his classicisms, and his Platonisms, and his isms

without end, hardly any poet smells of the lamp less disagreeably than

Spenser. Where Milton forges and smelts, his gold is native. The endless,

various, brightly-coloured, softly and yet distinctly outlined pictures

rise and pass before the eyes and vanish--the multiform, sweetly-linked,

softly-sounding harmonies swell and die and swell again on the ear--without

a break, without a jar, softer than sleep and as continuous, gayer than the

rainbow and as undiscoverably connected with any obvious cause. And this is

the more remarkable because the very last thing that can be said of Spenser

is that he is a poet of mere words. Milton himself, the severe Milton,

extolled his moral teaching; his philosophical idealism is evidently no

mere poet's plaything or parrot-lesson, but thoroughly thought out and

believed in. He is a determined, almost a savage partisan in politics and

religion, a steady patriot, something of a statesman, very much indeed of a

friend and a lover. And of all this there is ample evidence in his verse.

Yet the alchemy of his poetry has passed through the potent alembics of

verse and phrase all these rebellious things, and has distilled them into

the inimitably fluent and velvet medium which seems to lull some readers to

inattention by its very smoothness, and deceive others into a belief in its

lack of matter by the very finish and brilliancy of its form. The show

passages of the poem which are most generally known--the House of Pride,

the Cave of Despair, the Entrance of Belphoebe, the Treasury of Mammon, the

Gardens of Acrasia, the Sojourn of Britomart in Busirane's Castle, the

Marriage of the Thames and Medway, the Discovery of the False Florimel,

Artegall and the Giant, Calidore with Meliboeus, the Processions of the

Seasons and the Months--all these are not, as is the case with so many

other poets, mere purple patches, diversifying and relieving dullness, but

rather remarkable, and as it happens easily separable examples of a power

which is shown constantly and almost evenly throughout. Those who admire

them do well; but they hardly know Spenser. He, more than almost any other

poet, must be read continuously and constantly till the eye and ear and

mind have acquired the freedom of his realm of enchantment, and have learnt

the secret (as far as a mere reader may learn it) of the poetical spells

by which he brings together and controls its wonders. The talk of

tediousness, the talk of sameness, the talk of coterie-cultivation in

Spenser shows bad taste no doubt; but it rather shows ignorance. The critic

has in such cases stayed outside his author; he speaks but of what he has

_not_ seen.

The comparative estimate is always the most difficult in literature, and

where it can be avoided it is perhaps best to avoid it. But in Spenser's

case this is not possible. He is one of those few who can challenge the

title of "greatest English poet," and the reader may almost of right demand

the opinion on this point of any one who writes about him. For my part I

have no intention of shirking the difficulty. It seems to me that putting

Shakespere aside as _hors concours_, not merely in degree but in kind, only

two English poets can challenge Spenser for the primacy. These are Milton

and Shelley. The poet of _The Faerie Queene_ is generally inferior to

Milton in the faculty of concentration, and in the minting of those

monumental phrases, impressive of themselves and quite apart from the

context, which often count highest in the estimation of poetry. His

vocabulary and general style, if not more remote from the vernacular, have

sometimes a touch of deliberate estrangement from that vernacular which is

no doubt of itself a fault. His conception of a great work is looser, more

excursive, less dramatic. As compared with Shelley he lacks not merely the

modern touches which appeal to a particular age, but the lyrical ability in

which Shelley has no equal among English poets. But in each case he redeems

these defects with, as it seems to me, far more than counterbalancing

merits. He is never prosaic as Milton, like his great successor Wordsworth,

constantly is, and his very faults are the faults of a poet. He never (as

Shelley does constantly) dissolves away into a flux of words which simply

bids good-bye to sense or meaning, and wanders on at large, unguided,

without an end, without an aim. But he has more than these merely negative

merits. I have seen long accounts of Spenser in which the fact of his

invention of the Spenserian stanza is passed over almost without a word of

comment. Yet in the formal history of poetry (and the history of poetry

must always be pre-eminently a history of form) there is simply no

achievement so astonishing as this. That we do not know the inventors of

the great single poetic vehicles, the hexameter, the iambic Senarius, the

English heroic, the French Alexandrine, is one thing. It is another that in

Spenser's case alone can the invention of a complicated but essentially

integral form be assigned to a given poet. It is impossible to say that

Sappho invented the Sapphic, or Alcaeus the Alcaic: each poet may have been

a Vespucci to some precedent Columbus. But we are in a position to say that

Spenser did most unquestionably invent the English Spenserian stanza--a

form only inferior in individual beauty to the sonnet, which is itself

practically _adespoton_, and far superior to the sonnet in its capacity of

being used in multiples as well as singly. When the unlikelihood of such a

complicated measure succeeding in narrative form, the splendid success of

it in The _Faerie Queene_, and the remarkable effects which have

subsequently been got out of it by men so different as Thomson, Shelley,

and Lord Tennyson, are considered, Spenser's invention must, I think, be

counted the most considerable of its kind in literature.

But it may be very freely admitted that this technical merit, great as it

is, is the least part of the matter. Whosoever first invented butterflies

and pyramids in poetry is not greatly commendable, and if Spenser had done

nothing but arrange a cunning combination of eight heroics, with interwoven

rhymes and an Alexandrine to finish with, it may be acknowledged at once

that his claims to primacy would have to be dismissed at once. It is not

so. Independently of _The Faerie Queene_ altogether he has done work which

we must go to Milton and Shelley themselves to equal. The varied and

singularly original strains of _The Calendar_, the warmth and delicacy

combined of the _Epithalamion_, the tone of mingled regret and wonder (not

inferior in its characteristic Renaissance ring to Du Bellay's own) of _The

Ruins of Rome_, the different notes of the different minor poems, are all

things not to be found in any minor poet. But as does not always happen,

and as is perhaps not the case with Milton, Spenser's greatest work is also

his best. In the opinion of some at any rate the poet of _Lycidas_, of

_Comus_, of _Samson Agonistes_, even of the _Allegro_ and _Penseroso_,

ranks as high as, if not above, the poet of _Paradise Lost_. But the poet

of _The Faerie Queene_ could spare all his minor works and lose only, as

has been said, quantity not quality of greatness. It is hardly necessary at

this time of day to repeat the demonstration that Macaulay in his famous

jibe only succeeded in showing that he had never read what he jibed at; and

though other decriers of Spenser's masterpiece may not have laid themselves

open to quite so crushing a retort, they seldom fail to show a somewhat

similar ignorance. For the lover of poetry, for the reader who understands

and can receive the poetic charm, the revelation of beauty in metrical

language, no English poem is the superior, or, range and variety being

considered, the equal of _The Faerie Queene_. Take it up where you will,

and provided only sufficient time (the reading of a dozen stanzas ought to

suffice to any one who has the necessary gifts of appreciation) be given to

allow the soft dreamy versicoloured atmosphere to rise round the reader,

the languid and yet never monotonous music to gain his ear, the mood of

mixed imagination and heroism, adventure and morality, to impress itself on

his mind, and the result is certain. To the influence of no poet are the

famous lines of Spenser's great nineteenth-century rival so applicable as

to Spenser's own. The enchanted boat, angel-guided, floating on away, afar,

without conscious purpose, but simply obeying the instinct of sweet poetry,

is not an extravagant symbol for the mind of a reader of Spenser. If such

readers want "Criticisms of Life" first of all, they must go elsewhere,

though they will find them amply given, subject to the limitations of the

poetical method. If they want story they may complain of slackness and

deviations. If they want glorifications of science and such like things,

they had better shut the book at once, and read no more on that day nor on

any other. But if they want poetry--if they want to be translated from a

world which is not one of beauty only into one where the very uglinesses

are beautiful, into a world of perfect harmony in colour and sound, of an

endless sequence of engaging event and character, of noble passions and

actions not lacking their due contrast, then let them go to Spenser with a

certainty of satisfaction. He is not, as are some poets, the poet of a

certain time of life to the exclusion of others. He may be read in

childhood chiefly for his adventure, in later youth for his display of

voluptuous beauty, in manhood for his ethical and historical weight, in age

for all combined, and for the contrast which his bright universe of

invention affords with the work-day jejuneness of this troublesome world.

But he never palls upon those who have once learnt to taste him; and no

poet is so little of an acquired taste to those who have any liking for

poetry at all. He has been called the poet's poet--a phrase honourable but

a little misleading, inasmuch as it first suggests that he is not the poet

of the great majority of readers who cannot pretend to be poets themselves,

and secondly insinuates a kind of intellectual and aesthetic Pharisaism in

those who do admire him, which may be justly resented by those who do not.

Let us rather say that he is the poet of all others for those who seek in

poetry only poetical qualities, and we shall say not only what is more than

enough to establish his greatness but what, as I for one believe, can be

maintained in the teeth of all gainsayers.[23]

[23] Of Spenser as of two other poets in this volume, Shakespere and

Milton, it seemed to be unnecessary and even impertinent to give any

extracts. Their works are, or ought to be, in all hands; and even if it

were not so, no space at my command could give sample of their infinite

varieties.

The volume, variety, and vigour of the poetical production of the period in

which Spenser is the central figure--the last twenty years of the sixteenth

century--is perhaps proportionally the greatest, and may be said to be

emphatically the most distinguished in purely poetical characteristics of

any period in our history. Every kind of poetical work is represented in

it, and every kind (with the possible exception of the semi-poetical kind

of satire) is well represented. There is, indeed, no second name that

approaches Spenser's, either in respect of importance or in respect of

uniform excellence of work. But in the most incomplete production of this

time there is almost always that poetical spark which is often entirely

wanting in the finished and complete work of other periods. I shall,

therefore, divide the whole mass into four groups, each with certain

distinguished names at its head, and a crowd of hardly undistinguished

names in its rank and file. These four groups are the sonneteers, the

historians, the satirists, and lastly, the miscellaneous lyrists and

poetical miscellanists.

Although it is only recently that its mass and its beauty have been fully

recognised, the extraordinary outburst of sonnet-writing at a certain

period of Elizabeth's reign has always attracted the attention of literary

historians. For many years after Wyatt and Surrey's work appeared the form

attracted but little imitation or practice. About 1580 Spenser himself

probably, Sidney and Thomas Watson certainly, devoted much attention to it;

but it was some dozen years later that the most striking crop of sonnets

appeared. Between 1593 and 1596 there were published more than a dozen

collections, chiefly or wholly of sonnets, and almost all bearing the name

of a single person, in whose honour they were supposed to be composed. So

singular is this coincidence, showing either an intense _engouement_ in

literary society, or a spontaneous determination of energy in individuals,

that the list with dates is worth giving. It runs thus:--In 1593 came

Barnes's _Parthenophil and Parthenophe_, Fletcher's _Licia_, and Lodge's

_Phillis_. In 1594 followed Constable's _Diana_, Daniel's _Delia_,[24] the

anonymous _Zepheria_, Drayton's _Idea_, Percy's _Coelia_, and Willoughby's

_Avisa_; 1595 added the _Alcilia_ of a certain J. C., and Spenser's perfect

_Amoretti_; 1596 gave Griffin's _Fidessa_, Lynch's _Diella_, and Smith's

_Chloris_, while Shakespere's earliest sonnets were probably not much

later. Then the fashion changed, or the vein was worked out, or (more

fancifully) the impossibility of equalling Spenser and Shakespere choked

off competitors. The date of Lord Brooke's singular _Coelica_, not

published till long afterwards, is uncertain; but he may, probably, be

classed with Sidney and Watson in period.

[24] _Delia_ had appeared earlier in 1592, and partially in 1591; but the

text of 1594 is the definitive one. Several of these dates are doubtful or

disputed.

Fulke, or, as he himself spelt it, Foulke Greville, in his later years Lord

Brooke,[25] was of a noble house in Warwickshire connected with the

Beauchamps and the Willoughbys. He was born in 1554, was educated at

Shrewsbury with Philip Sidney, whose kinsman, lifelong friend, and first

biographer he was--proceeded, not like Sidney to Oxford, but to Cambridge

(where he was a member, it would seem, of Jesus College, not as usually

said of Trinity)--received early lucrative preferments chiefly in

connection with the government of Wales, was a favourite courtier of

Elizabeth's during all her later life, and, obtaining a royal gift of

Warwick Castle, became the ancestor of the present earls of Warwick. In

1614 he became Chancellor of the Exchequer. Lord Brooke, who lived to a

considerable age, was stabbed in a rather mysterious manner in 1628 by a

servant named Haywood, who is said to have been enraged by discovering that

his master had left him nothing in his will. The story is, as has been

said, mysterious, and the affair seems to have been hushed up. Lord Brooke

was not universally popular, and a very savage contemporary epitaph on him

has been preserved. But he had been the patron of the youthful Davenant,

and has left not a little curious literary work, which has only been

recently collected, and little of which saw the light in his own lifetime.

Of his two singular plays, _Mustapha_ and _Alaham_ (closet-dramas having

something in common with the Senecan model), _Mustapha_ was printed in

1609; but it would seem piratically. His chief prose work, the _Life of

Sidney_, was not printed till 1652. His chief work in verse, the singular

_Poems of Monarchy_ (ethical and political treatises), did not appear till

eighteen years later, as well as the allied _Treatise on Religion_. But

poems or tracts on human learning, on wars, and other things, together with

his tragedies as above, had appeared in 1633. This publication, a folio

volume, also contained by far the most interesting part of his work, the

so-called sonnet collection of Coelica--a medley, like many of those

mentioned in this chapter, of lyrics and short poems of all lengths and

metrical arrangements, but, unlike almost all of them, dealing with many

subjects, and apparently addressed to more than one person. It is here, and

in parts of the prose, that the reader who has not a very great love for

Elizabethan literature and some experience of it, can be recommended to

seek confirmation of the estimate in which Greville was held by Charles

Lamb, and of the very excusable and pious, though perhaps excessive,

admiration of his editor Dr. Grosart. Even _Coelica_ is very unlikely to

find readers as a whole, owing to the strangely repellent character of

Brooke's thought, which is intricate and obscure, and of his style, which

is at any rate sometimes as harsh and eccentric as the theories of poetry

which made him compose verse-treatises on politics. Nevertheless there is

much nobility of thought and expression in him, and not unfrequent flashes

of real poetry, while his very faults are characteristic. He may be

represented here by a piece from _Coelica_, in which he is at his very

best, and most poetical because most simple--

[25] He is a little liable to be confounded with two writers (brothers of a

patronymic the same as his title) Samuel and Christopher Brooke, the latter

of whom wrote poems of some merit, which Dr. Grosart has edited.

"I, with whose colours Myra dressed her head,

I, that ware posies of her own hand making,

I, that mine own name in the chimnies read

By Myra finely wrought ere I was waking:

Must I look on, in hope time coming may

With change bring back my turn again to play?

"I, that on Sunday at the church-stile found

A garland sweet with true love knots in flowers,

Which I to wear about mine arms, was bound

That each of us might know that all was ours:

Must I lead now an idle life in wishes,

And follow Cupid for his loaves and fishes?

"I, that did wear the ring her mother left,

I, for whose love she gloried to be blamed,

I, with whose eyes her eyes committed theft,

I, who did make her blush when I was named:

Must I lose ring, flowers, blush, theft, and go naked,

Watching with sighs till dead love be awaked?

"I, that when drowsy Argus fell asleep,

Like jealousy o'erwatched with desire,

Was ever warned modesty to keep

While her breath, speaking, kindled Nature's fire:

Must I look on a-cold while others warm them?

Do Vulcan's brothers in such fine nets arm them?

"Was it for this that I might Myra see

_Washing the water with her beauties white_?

Yet would she never write her love to me:

Thinks wit of change when thoughts are in delight?

Mad girls may safely love as they may leave;

No man can print a kiss: lines may deceive."

Had Brooke always written with this force and directness he would have been

a great poet. As it is, he has but the ore of poetry, not the smelted

metal.

For there is no doubt that Sidney here holds the primacy, not merely in

time but in value, of the whole school, putting Spenser and Shakespere

aside. That thirty or forty years' diligent study of Italian models had

much to do with the extraordinary advance visible in his sonnets over those

of Tottel's _Miscellany_ is, no doubt, undeniable. But many causes besides

the inexplicable residuum of fortunate inspiration, which eludes the most

careful search into literary cause and effect, had to do with the

production of the "lofty, insolent, and passionate vein," which becomes

noticeable in English poetry for the first time about 1580, and which

dominates it, if we include the late autumn-summer of Milton's last

productions, for a hundred years. Perhaps it is not too much to say that

this makes its very first appearance in Sidney's verse, for _The Shepherd's

Calendar_, though of an even more perfect, is of a milder strain. The

inevitable tendency of criticism to gossip about poets instead of

criticising poetry has usually mixed a great deal of personal matter with

the accounts of _Astrophel and Stella_, the series of sonnets which is

Sidney's greatest literary work, and which was first published some years

after his death in an incorrect and probably pirated edition by Thomas

Nash. There is no doubt that there was a real affection between Sidney

(Astrophel) and Penelope Devereux (Stella), daughter of the Earl of Essex,

afterwards Lady Rich, and that marriage proving unhappy, Lady Mountjoy. But

the attempts which have been made to identify every hint and allusion in

the series with some fact or date, though falling short of the unimaginable

folly of scholastic labour-lost which has been expended on the sonnets of

Shakespere, still must appear somewhat idle to those who know the usual

genesis of love-poetry--how that it is of imagination all compact, and that

actual occurrences are much oftener occasions and bases than causes and

material of it. It is of the smallest possible importance or interest to a

rational man to discover what was the occasion of Sidney's writing these

charming poems--the important point is their charm. And in this respect

(giving heed to his date and his opportunities of imitation) I should put

Sidney third to Shakespere and Spenser. The very first piece of the series,

an oddly compounded sonnet of thirteen Alexandrines and a final heroic,

strikes the note of intense and fresh poetry which is only heard afar off

in Surrey and Wyatt, which is hopelessly to seek in the tentatives of

Turberville and Googe, and which is smothered with jejune and merely

literary ornament in the less formless work of Sidney's contemporary,

Thomas Watson. The second line--

"That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain,"

the couplet--

"Oft turning others' leaves to see if thence would flow

Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburnt brain,"

and the sudden and splendid finale--

"'Fool!' said my muse, 'look in thy heart and write!'"

are things that may be looked for in vain earlier.

A little later we meet with that towering soar of verse which is also

peculiar to the period:

"When Nature made her chief work--Stella's eyes,

In colour black why wrapt she beams so bright?"--

lines which those who deprecate insistence on the importance of form in

poetry might study with advantage, for the thought is a mere commonplace

conceit, and the beauty of the phrase is purely derived from the cunning

arrangement and cadence of the verse. The first perfectly charming sonnet

in the English language--a sonnet which holds its own after three centuries

of competition--is the famous "With how sad steps, O moon, thou climbst the

skies," where Lamb's stricture on the last line as obscure seems to me

unreasonable. The equally famous phrase, "That sweet enemy France," which

occurs a little further on is another, and whether borrowed from Giordano

Bruno or not is perhaps the best example of the felicity of expression in

which Sidney is surpassed by few Englishmen. Nor ought the extraordinary

variety of the treatment to be missed. Often as Sidney girds at those who,

like Watson, "dug their sonnets out of books," he can write in the learned

literary manner with the best. The pleasant ease of his sonnet to the

sparrow, "Good brother Philip," contrasts in the oddest way with his

allegorical and mythological sonnets, in each of which veins he indulges

hardly less often, though very much more wisely than any of his

contemporaries. Nor do the other "Songs of variable verse," which follow,

and in some editions are mixed up with the sonnets, display less

extraordinary power. The first song, with its refrain in the penultimate

line of each stanza,

"To you, to you, all song of praise is due,"

contrasts in its throbbing and burning life with the faint and misty

imagery, the stiff and wooden structure, of most of the verse of Sidney's

predecessors, and deserves to be given in full:--

"Doubt you to whom my Muse these notes intendeth;

Which now my breast o'ercharged to music lendeth?