SPENSER.

Chaucer had been in his grave one hundred and fifty years ere England had

secreted choice material enough for the making of another great poet. The

nature of men living together in societies, as of the individual man,

seems to have its periodic ebbs and floods, its oscillations between the

ideal and the matter-of-fact, so that the doubtful boundary line of shore

between them is in one generation a hard sandy actuality strewn only with

such remembrances of beauty as a dead sea-moss here and there, and in the

next is whelmed with those lacelike curves of ever-gaining, ever-receding

foam, and that dance of joyous spray which for a moment catches and holds

the sunshine.

From the two centuries between 1400 and 1600 the indefatigable Ritson in

his _Bibliographia Poetica_ has made us a catalogue of some six hundred

English poets, or, more properly, verse-makers. Ninety-nine in a hundred

of them are mere names, most of them no more than shadows of names, some

of them mere initials. Nor can it be said of them that their works have

perished because they were written in an obsolete dialect; for it is the

poem that keeps the language alive, and not the language that buoys up

the poem. The revival of letters, as it is called, was at first the

revival of _ancient_ letters, which, while it made men pedants, could do

very little toward making them poets, much less toward making them

original writers. There was nothing left of the freshness, vivacity,

invention, and careless faith in the present which make many of the

productions of the Norman Trouvères delightful reading even now. The

whole of Europe during the fifteenth century produced no book which has

continued readable, or has become in any sense of the word a classic. I

do not mean that that century has left us no illustrious names, that it

was not enriched with some august intellects who kept alive the apostolic

succession of thought and speculation, who passed along the still

unextinguished torch of intelligence, the _lampada vitae_, to those who

came after them. But a classic is properly a book which maintains itself

by virtue of that happy coalescence of matter and style, that innate and

exquisite sympathy between the thought that gives life and the form that

consents to every mood of grace and dignity, which can be simple without

being vulgar, elevated without being distant, and which is something

neither ancient nor modern, always new and incapable of growing old. It

is not his Latin which makes Horace cosmopolitan, nor can Béranger's

French prevent his becoming so. No hedge of language however thorny, no

dragon-coil of centuries, will keep men away from these true apples of

the Hesperides if once they have caught sight or scent of them. If poems

die, it is because there was never true life in them, that is, that true

poetic vitality which no depth of thought, no airiness of fancy, no

sincerity of feeling, can singly communicate, but which leaps throbbing

at touch of that shaping faculty the imagination. Take Aristotle's

ethics, the scholastic philosophy, the theology of Aquinas, the Ptolemaic

system of astronomy, the small politics of a provincial city of the

Middle Ages, mix in at will Grecian, Roman, and Christian mythology, and

tell me what chance there is to make an immortal poem of such an

incongruous mixture. Can these dry bones live? Yes, Dante can create such

a soul under these ribs of death that one hundred and fifty editions of

his poem shall be called for in these last sixty years, the first half of

the sixth century since his death. Accordingly I am apt to believe that

the complaints one sometimes hears of the neglect of our older literature

are the regrets of archaeologists rather than of critics. One does not

need to advertise the squirrels where the nut-trees are, nor could any

amount of lecturing persuade them to spend their teeth on a hollow nut.

On the whole, the Scottish poetry of the fifteenth century has more meat

in it than the English, but this is to say very little. Where it is meant

to be serious and lofty it falls into the same vices of unreality and

allegory which were the fashion of the day, and which there are some

patriots so fearfully and wonderfully made as to relish. Stripped of the

archaisms (that turn every _y_ to a meaningless _z_, spell which

_quhilk_, shake _schaik_, bugle _bowgill_, powder _puldir_, and will not

let us simply whistle till we have puckered our mouths to _quhissill_) in

which the Scottish antiquaries love to keep it disguised,--as if it were

nearer to poetry the further it got from all human recognition and

sympathy,--stripped of these, there is little to distinguish it from the

contemporary verse-mongering south of the Tweed. Their compositions are

generally as stiff and artificial as a trellis, in striking contrast with

the popular ballad-poetry of Scotland (some of which possibly falls

within this period, though most of it is later), which clambers,

lawlessly if you will, but at least freely and simply, twining the bare

stem of old tradition with graceful sentiment and lively natural

sympathies. I find a few sweet and flowing verses in Dunbar's "Merle and

Nightingale,"--indeed one whole stanza that has always seemed exquisite

to me. It is this:--

"Ne'er sweeter noise was heard by living man

Than made this merry, gentle nightingale.

Her sound went with the river as it ran

Out through the fresh and flourished lusty vale;

O merle, quoth she, O fool, leave off thy tale,

For in thy song good teaching there is none,

For both are lost,--the time and the travail

Of every love but upon God alone."

But except this lucky poem, I find little else in the serious verses of

Dunbar that does not seem to me tedious and pedantic. I dare say a few

more lines might be found scattered here and there, but I hold it a sheer

waste of time to hunt after these thin needles of wit buried in unwieldy

haystacks of verse. If that be genius, the less we have of it the better.

His "Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins," over which the excellent Lord

Hailes went into raptures, is wanting in everything but coarseness; and

if his invention dance at all, it is like a galley-slave in chains under

the lash. It would be well for us if the sins themselves were indeed such

wretched bugaboos as he has painted for us. What he means for humor is

but the dullest vulgarity; his satire would be Billingsgate if it could,

and, failing, becomes a mere offence in the nostrils, for it takes a

great deal of salt to keep scurrility sweet. Mr. Sibbald, in his

"Chronicle of Scottish Poetry," has admiringly preserved more than enough

of it, and seems to find a sort of national savor therein, such as

delights his countrymen in a _haggis_, or the German in his

_sauer-kraut_. The uninitiated foreigner puts his handkerchief to his

nose, wonders, and gets out of the way as soon as he civilly can.

Barbour's "Brus," if not precisely a poem, has passages whose simple

tenderness raises them to that level. That on Freedom is familiar.[263]

But its highest merit is the natural and unstrained tone of manly courage

in it, the easy and familiar way in which Barbour always takes chivalrous

conduct as a matter of course, as if heroism were the least you could ask

of any man. I modernize a few verses to show what I mean. When the King

of England turns to fly from the battle of Bannockburn (and Barbour with

his usual generosity tells us he has heard that Sir Aymer de Valence led

him away by the bridle-rein against his will), Sir Giles d'Argente

"Saw the king thus and his menie

Shape them to flee so speedily,

He came right to the king in hy [hastily]

And said, 'Sir, since that is so

That ye thus gate your gate will go,

Have ye good-day, for back will I:

Yet never fled I certainly,

And I choose here to bide and die

Than to live shamefully and fly.'"

The "Brus" is in many ways the best rhymed chronicle ever written. It is

national in a high and generous way, but I confess I have little faith in

that quality in literature which is commonly called nationality,--a kind

of praise seldom given where there is anything better to be said.

Literature that loses its meaning, or the best part of it, when it gets

beyond sight of the parish steeple, is not what I understand by

literature. To tell you when you cannot fully taste a book that it is

because it is so thoroughly national, is to condemn the book. To

say it of a poem is even worse, for it is to say that what should be

true of the whole compass of human nature is true only to some

north-and-by-east-half-east point of it. I can understand the nationality

of Firdusi when, looking sadly back to the former glories of his country,

he tells us that "the nightingale still sings old Persian"; I can

understand the nationality of Burns when he turns his plough aside to

spare the rough burr thistle, and hopes he may write a song or two for

dear auld Scotia's sake. That sort of nationality belongs to a country of

which we are all citizens,--that country of the heart which has no

boundaries laid down on the map. All great poetry must smack of the soil,

for it must be rooted in it, must suck life and substance from it, but it

must do so with the aspiring instinct of the pine that climbs forever

toward diviner air, and not in the grovelling fashion of the potato. Any

verse that makes you and me foreigners is not only not great poetry, but

no poetry at all. Dunbar's works were disinterred and edited some thirty

years ago by Mr. Laing, and whoso is national enough to like thistles may

browse there to his heart's content. I am inclined for other pasture,

having long ago satisfied myself by a good deal of dogged reading that

every generation is sure of its own share of bores without borrowing from

the past.

A little later came Gawain Douglas, whose translation of the Aeneid is

linguistically valuable, and whose introductions to the seventh and

twelfth books--the one describing winter and the other May--have been

safely praised, they are so hard to read. There is certainly some poetic

feeling in them, and the welcome to the sun comes as near enthusiasm as

is possible for a ploughman, with a good steady yoke of oxen, who lays

over one furrow of verse, and then turns about to lay the next as

cleverly alongside it as he can. But it is a wrong done to good taste to

hold up this _item_ kind of description any longer as deserving any other

credit than that of a good memory. It is a mere bill of parcels, a

_post-mortem_ inventory of nature, where imagination is not merely not

called for, but would be out of place. Why, a recipe in the cookery-book

is as much like a good dinner as this kind of stuff is like true

word-painting. The poet with a real eye in his head does not give us

everything, but only the _best_ of everything. He selects, he combines,

or else gives what is characteristic only; while the false style of which

I have been speaking seems to be as glad to get a pack of impertinences

on its shoulders as Christian in the Pilgrim's Progress was to be rid of

his. One strong verse that can hold itself upright (as the French critic

Rivarol said of Dante) with the bare help of the substantive and verb, is

worth acres of this dead cord-wood piled stick on stick, a boundless

continuity of dryness. I would rather have written that half-stanza of

Longfellow's, in the "Wreck of the Hesperus," of the "billow that swept

her crew like icicles from her deck," than all Gawain Douglas's tedious

enumeration of meteorological phenomena put together. A real landscape is

never tiresome; it never presents itself to us as a disjointed succession

of isolated particulars; we take it in with one sweep of the eye,--its

light, its shadow, its melting gradations of distance: we do not say it

is this, it is that, and the other; and we may be sure that if a

description in poetry is tiresome there is a grievous mistake somewhere.

All the pictorial adjectives in the dictionary will not bring it a

hair's-breadth nearer to truth and nature. The fact is that what we see

is in the mind to a greater degree than we are commonly aware. As

Coleridge says,--

"O lady, we receive but what we give,

And in our life alone doth Nature live!"

I have made the unfortunate Dunbar the text for a diatribe on the subject

of descriptive poetry, because I find that this old ghost is not laid

yet, but comes back like a vampire to suck the life out of a true

enjoyment of poetry,--and the medicine by which vampires were cured was

to unbury them, drive a stake through them, and get them under ground

again with all despatch. The first duty of the Muse is to be delightful,

and it is an injury done to all of us when we are put in the wrong by a

kind of statutory affirmation on the part of the critics of something to

which our judgment will not consent, and from which our taste revolts. A

collection of poets is commonly made up, nine parts in ten, of this

perfunctory verse-making, and I never look at one without regretting that

we have lost that excellent Latin phrase, _Corpus poetarum_. In fancy I

always read it on the backs of the volumes,--a _body_ of poets, indeed,

with scarce one soul to a hundred of them.

One genuine English poet illustrated the early years of the sixteenth

century,--John Skelton. He had vivacity, fancy, humor, and originality.

Gleams of the truest poetical sensibility alternate in him with an almost

brutal coarseness. He was truly Rabelaisian before Rabelais. But there is

a freedom and hilarity in much of his writing that gives it a singular

attraction. A breath of cheerfulness runs along the slender stream of his

verse, under which it seems to ripple and crinkle, catching and casting

back the sunshine like a stream blown on by clear western winds.

But Skelton was an exceptional blossom of autumn. A long and dreary

winter follows. Surrey, who brought back with him from Italy the

blank-verse not long before introduced by Trissino, is to some extent

another exception. He had the sentiment of nature and unhackneyed

feeling, but he has no mastery of verse, nor any elegance of diction. We

have Gascoyne, Surrey, Wyatt, stiff, pedantic, artificial, systematic as

a country cemetery, and, worst of all, the whole time desperately in

love. Every verse is as flat, thin, and regular as a lath, and their

poems are nothing more than bundles of such tied trimly together. They

are said to have refined our language. Let us devoutly hope they did, for

it would be pleasant to be grateful to them for something. But I fear it

was not so, for only genius can do that; and Sternhold and Hopkins are

inspired men in comparison with them. For Sternhold was at least the

author of two noble stanzas:--

"The Lord descended from above

And bowed the heavens high,

And underneath his feet he cast

The darkness of the sky;

On cherubs and on cherubims

Full royally he rode,

And on the wings of all the winds

Came flying all abroad."

But Gascoyne and the rest did nothing more than put the worst school of

Italian love poetry into an awkward English dress. The Italian proverb

says, "Inglese italianizzato, Diavolo incarnato," that an Englishman

Italianized is the very devil incarnate, and one feels the truth of it

here. The very titles of their poems set one yawning, and their wit is

the cause of the dulness that is in other men. "The lover, deceived by

his love, repenteth him of the true love he bare her." As thus:--

"Where I sought heaven there found I hap;

From danger unto death,

Much like the mouse that treads the trap

In hope to find her food,

And bites the bread that stops her breath,--

So in like case I stood."

"The lover, accusing his love for her unfaithfulness, proposeth to live

in liberty." He says:--

"But I am like the beaten fowl

That from the net escaped,

And thou art like the ravening owl

That all the night hath waked."

And yet at the very time these men were writing there were simple

ballad-writers who could have set them an example of simplicity, force,

and grandeur. Compare the futile efforts of these poetasters to kindle

themselves by a painted flame, and to be pathetic over the lay figure of

a mistress, with the wild vigor and almost fierce sincerity of the "Twa

Corbies":--

"As I was walking all alone

I heard twa corbies making a moan.

The one unto the other did say,

Where shall we gang dine to-day?

In beyond that old turf dyke

I wot there lies a new slain knight;

And naebody kens that he lies there

But his hawk and his hound and his lady fair.

His hound is to the hunting gone,

His hawk to fetch the wild fowl home,

His lady has ta'en another mate,

So we may make our dinner sweet.

O'er his white bones as they lie bare

The wind shall blow forevermair."

There was a lesson in rhetoric for our worthy friends, could they have

understood it. But they were as much afraid of an attack of nature as of

the plague.

Such was the poetical inheritance of style and diction into which Spenser

was born, and which he did more than any one else to redeem from the

leaden gripe of vulgar and pedantic conceit. Sir Philip Sidney, born the

year after him, with a keener critical instinct, and a taste earlier

emancipated than his own, would have been, had he lived longer, perhaps

even more directly influential in educating the taste and refining the

vocabulary of, his contemporaries and immediate successors. The better of

his pastoral poems in the "Arcadia" are, in my judgment, more simple,

natural, and, above all, more pathetic than those of Spenser, who

sometimes strains the shepherd's pipe with a blast that would better suit

the trumpet. Sidney had the good sense to feel that it was

unsophisticated sentiment rather than rusticity of phrase that befitted

such themes.[264] He recognized the distinction between simplicity and

vulgarity, which Wordsworth was so long in finding out, and seems to have

divined the fact that there is but one kind of English that is always

appropriate and never obsolete, namely, the very best.[265] With the

single exception of Thomas Campion, his experiments in adapting classical

metres to English verse are more successful than those of his

contemporaries. Some of his elegiacs are not ungrateful to the ear, and

it can hardly be doubted that Coleridge borrowed from his eclogue of

Strephon and Klaius the pleasing movement of his own _Catullian

Hendecasyllabics_. Spenser, perhaps out of deference to Sidney, also

tried his hand at English hexameters, the introduction of which was

claimed by his friend Gabriel Harvey, who thereby assured to himself an

immortality of grateful remembrance. But the result was a series of jolts

and jars, proving that the language had run off the track. He seems to

have been half conscious of it himself, and there is a gleam of mischief

in what he writes to Harvey: "I like your late English hexameter so

exceedingly well that I also enure my pen sometime in that kind, which I

find indeed, as I have often heard you defend in word, neither so hard

nor so harsh but that it will easily yield itself to our mother-tongue.

For the only or chiefest hardness, which seemeth, is in the accent, which

sometime gapeth, and, as it were, yawneth ill-favoredly, coming short of

that it should, and sometime exceeding the measure of the number, as in

_Carpenter_; the middle syllable being used short in speech, when it

shall be read long in verse, seemeth like a lame gosling that draweth one

leg after her; and _Heaven_ being used short as one syllable, when it is

in verse stretched out with a diastole, is like a lame dog that holds up

one leg."[266] It is almost inconceivable that Spenser's hexameters

should have been written by the man who was so soon to teach his native

language how to soar and sing, and to give a fuller sail to English

verse.

One of the most striking facts in our literary history is the

pre-eminence at once so frankly and unanimously conceded to Spenser by

his contemporaries. At first, it is true, he had not many rivals. Before

the "Faery Queen" two long poems were printed and popular,--the "Mirror

for Magistrates" and Warner's "Albion's England,"--and not long after it

came the "Polyolbion" of Drayton and the "Civil Wars" of Daniel. This was

the period of the saurians in English poetry, interminable poems, book

after book and canto after canto, like far-stretching _vertebrae_, that

at first sight would seem to have rendered earth unfit for the habitation

of man. They most of them sleep well now, as once they made their readers

sleep, and their huge remains lie embedded in the deep morasses of

Chambers and Anderson. We wonder at the length of face and general

atrabilious look that mark the portraits of the men of that generation,

but it is no marvel when even their relaxations were such downright hard

work. Fathers when their day on earth was up must have folded down the

leaf and left the task to be finished by their sons,--a dreary

inheritance. Yet both Drayton and Daniel are fine poets, though both of

them in their most elaborate works made shipwreck of their genius on the

shoal of a bad subject. Neither of them could make poetry coalesce with

gazetteering or chronicle-making. It was like trying to put a declaration

of love into the forms of a declaration in trover. The "Polyolbion"

is nothing less than a versified gazetteer of England and

Wales,--fortunately Scotland was not yet annexed, or the poem would have

been even longer, and already it is the plesiosaurus of verse. Mountains,

rivers, and even marshes are personified, to narrate historical episodes,

or to give us geographical lectures. There are two fine verses in the

seventh book, where, speaking of the cutting down some noble woods, he

says,--

"Their trunks like aged folk now bare and naked stand,

As for revenge to heaven each held a withered hand";

and there is a passage about the sea in the twentieth book that comes

near being fine; but the far greater part is mere joiner-work. Consider

the life of man, that we flee away as a shadow, that our days are as a

post, and then think whether we can afford to honor such a draft upon our

time as is implied in these thirty books all in alexandrines! Even the

laborious Selden, who wrote annotations on it, sometimes more

entertaining than the text, gave out at the end of the eighteenth book.

Yet Drayton could write well, and had an agreeable lightsomeness of

fancy, as his "Nymphidia" proves. His poem "To the Cambro-Britons on

their Harp" is full of vigor; it runs, it leaps, clashing its verses like

swords upon bucklers, and moves the pulse to a charge.

Daniel was in all respects a man of finer mould. He did indeed refine our

tongue, and deserved the praise his contemporaries concur in giving him

of being "well-languaged."[267] Writing two hundred and fifty years ago,

he stands in no need of a glossary, and I have noted scarce a dozen

words, and not more turns of phrase, in his works, that have become

obsolete. This certainly indicates both remarkable taste and equally

remarkable judgment. There is an equable dignity in his thought and

sentiment such as we rarely meet. His best poems always remind me of a

table-land, where, because all is so level, we are apt to forget on how

lofty a plane we are standing. I think his "Musophilus" the best poem of

its kind in the language. The reflections are natural, the expression

condensed, the thought weighty, and the language worthy of it. But he

also wasted himself on an historical poem, in which the characters were

incapable of that remoteness from ordinary associations which is

essential to the ideal. Not that we can escape into the ideal by _merely_

emigrating into the past or the unfamiliar. As in the German legend the

little black Kobold of prose that haunts us in the present will seat

himself on the first load of furniture when we undertake our flitting, if

the magician be not there to exorcise him. No man can jump off his own

shadow, nor, for that matter, off his own age, and it is very likely that

Daniel had only the thinking and languaging parts of a poet's outfit,

without the higher creative gift which alone can endow his conceptions

with enduring life and with an interest which transcends the parish

limits of his generation. In the prologue to his "Masque at Court" he has

unconsciously defined his own poetry:--

"Wherein no wild, no rude, no antic sport,

But tender passions, motions soft and grave,

The still spectator must expect to have."

And indeed his verse does not snatch you away from ordinary associations

and hurry you along with it as is the wont of the higher kinds of poetry,

but leaves you, as it were, upon the bank watching the peaceful current

and lulled by its somewhat monotonous murmur. His best-known poem,

blunderingly misprinted in all the collections, is that addressed to the

Countess of Cumberland. It is an amplification of Horace's _Integer

Vitae_, and when we compare it with the original we miss the point, the

compactness, and above all the urbane tone of the original. It is very

fine English, but it is the English of diplomacy somehow, and is never

downright this or that, but always has the honor to be so or so, with

sentiments of the highest consideration. Yet the praise of

_well-languaged_, since it implies that good writing then as now demanded

choice and forethought, is not without interest for those who would

classify the elements of a style that will wear and hold its colors well.

His diction, if wanting in the more hardy evidences of muscle, has a

suppleness and spring that give proof of training and endurance. His

"Defence of Rhyme," written in prose (a more difficult test than verse),

has a passionate eloquence that reminds one of Burke, and is more

light-armed and modern than the prose of Milton fifty years later. For us

Occidentals he has a kindly prophetic word:--

"And who in time knows whither we may vent

The treasure of our tongue? to what strange shores

The gain of our best glory may be sent

To enrich unknowing nations with our stores?

What worlds in the yet unformed Occident

May come refined with accents that are ours?"

During the period when Spenser was getting his artistic training a great

change was going on in our mother-tongue, and the language of literature

was disengaging itself more and more from that of ordinary talk. The

poets of Italy, Spain, and France began to rain influence and to modify

and refine not only style but vocabulary. Men were discovering new worlds

in more senses than one, and the visionary finger of expectation still

pointed forward. There was, as we learn from contemporary pamphlets, very

much the same demand for a national literature that we have heard in

America. This demand was nobly answered in the next generation. But no

man contributed so much to the transformation of style and language as

Spenser; for not only did he deliberately endeavor at reform, but by the

charm of his diction, the novel harmonies of his verse, his ideal method

of treatment, and the splendor of his fancy, he made the new manner

popular and fruitful. We can trace in Spenser's poems the gradual growth

of his taste through experiment and failure to that assured

self-confidence which indicates that he had at length found out the true

bent of his genius,--that happiest of discoveries (and not so easy as it

might seem) which puts a man in undisturbed possession of his own

individuality. Before his time the boundary between poetry and prose had

not been clearly defined. His great merit lies not only in the ideal

treatment with which he glorified common things and gilded them with a

ray of enthusiasm, but far more in the ideal point of view which he first

revealed to his countrymen. He at first sought for that remoteness, which

is implied in an escape from the realism of daily life, in the

pastoral,--a kind of writing which, oddly enough, from its original

intention as a protest in favor of naturalness, and of human as opposed

to heroic sentiments, had degenerated into the most artificial of

abstractions. But he was soon convinced of his error, and was not long in

choosing between an unreality which pretended to be real and those

everlasting realities of the mind which seem unreal only because they lie

beyond the horizon of the every-day world and become visible only when

the mirage of fantasy lifts them up and hangs them in an ideal

atmosphere. As in the old fairy-tales, the task which the age imposes on

its poet is to weave its straw into a golden tissue; and when every

device has failed, in comes the witch Imagination, and with a touch the

miracle is achieved, simple as miracles always are after they are

wrought.

Spenser, like Chaucer a Londoner, was born in 1553.[268] Nothing is known

of his parents, except that the name of his mother was Elizabeth; but he

was of gentle birth, as he more than once informs us, with the natural

satisfaction of a poor man of genius at a time when the business talent

of the middle class was opening to it the door of prosperous preferment.

In 1569 he was entered as a sizar at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, and in due

course took his bachelor's degree in 1573, and his master's in 1576. He

is supposed, on insufficient grounds, as it appears to me, to have met

with some disgust or disappointment during his residence at the

University.[269] Between 1576 and 1578 Spenser seems to have been with

some of his kinsfolk "in the North" It was during this interval that he

conceived his fruitless passion for the Rosalinde, whose jilting him for

another shepherd, whom he calls Menalcas, is somewhat perfunctorily

bemoaned in his pastorals[270] Before the publication of his "Shepherd's

Calendar" in 1579, he had made the acquaintance of Sir Philip Sidney, and

was domiciled with him for a time at Penshurst, whether as guest or

literary dependant is uncertain. In October, 1579, he is in the household

of the Earl of Leicester. In July, 1580 he accompanied Lord Grey de

Wilton to Ireland as Secretary, and in that country he spent the rest of

his life, with occasional flying visits to England to publish poems or in

search of preferment. His residence in that country has been compared to

that of Ovid in Pontus. And, no doubt, there were certain outward points

of likeness. The Irishry by whom he was surrounded were to the full as

savage, as hostile, and as tenacious of their ancestral habitudes as the

Scythians[271] who made Tomi a prison, and the descendants of the earlier

English settlers had degenerated as much as the Mix-Hellenes who

disgusted the Latin poet. Spenser himself looked on his life in Ireland

as a banishment. In his "Colm Clout's come Home again" he tells us that

Sir Walter Raleigh, who visited him in 1589, and heard what was then

finished of the "Faery Queen,"--

"'Gan to cast great liking to my lore

And great disliking to my luckless lot,

That banisht had myself, like wight forlore,

Into that waste, where I was quite forgot

The which to leave thenceforth he counselled me,

Unmeet for man in whom was aught regardful,

And wend with him his Cynthia to see,

Whose grace was great and bounty most rewardful."

But Spenser was already living at Kilcolman Castle (which, with 3,028

acres of land from the forfeited estates of the Earl of Desmond, was

confirmed to him by grant two years later), amid scenery at once placid

and noble, whose varied charm he felt profoundly. He could not complain,

with Ovid,--

"Non liber hie ullus, non qui mihi commodet aurem,"

for he was within reach of a cultivated society, which gave him the

stimulus of hearty admiration both as poet and scholar. Above all, he

was fortunate in a seclusion that prompted study and deepened meditation,

while it enabled him to converse with his genius disengaged from those

worldly influences which would have disenchanted it of its mystic

enthusiasm, if they did not muddle it ingloriously away. Surely this

sequestered nest was more congenial to the brooding of those ethereal

visions of the "Faery Queen" and to giving his "soul a loose" than

"The smoke, the wealth, and noise of Rome,

And all the busy pageantry

That wise men scorn and fools adore."

Yet he longed for London, if not with the homesickness of Bussy-Rabutin

in exile from the Parisian sun, yet enough to make him joyfully accompany

Raleigh thither in the early winter of 1589, carrying with him the first

three books of the great poem begun ten years before. Horace's _nonum

prematur in annum_ had been more than complied with, and the success was

answerable to the well-seasoned material and conscientious faithfulness

of the work. But Spenser did not stay long in London to enjoy his fame.

Seen close at hand, with its jealousies, intrigues, and selfish

basenesses, the court had lost the enchantment lent by the distance of

Kilcolman. A nature so prone to ideal contemplation as Spenser's would be

profoundly shocked by seeing too closely the ignoble springs of

contemporaneous policy, and learning by what paltry personal motives the

noble opportunities of the world are at any given moment endangered. It

is a sad discovery that history is so mainly made by ignoble men.

"Vide questo globo

Tal ch'ei sorrise del suo vil sembiante."

In his "Colin Clout," written just after his return to Ireland, he speaks

of the Court in a tone of contemptuous bitterness, in which, as it seems

to me, there is more of the sorrow of disillusion than of the gall of

personal disappointment. He speaks, so he tells us,--

"To warn young shepherds' wandering wit

Which, through report of that life's painted bliss,

Abandon quiet home to seek for it

And leave their lambs to loss misled amiss;

For, sooth to say, it is no sort of life

For shepherd fit to live in that same place,

Where each one seeks with malice and with strife

To thrust down other into foul disgrace

Himself to raise; and he doth soonest rise

That best can handle his deceitful wit

In subtle shifts....

To which him needs a guileful hollow heart

Masked with fair dissembling courtesy,

A filëd tongue furnisht with terms of art,

No art of school, but courtiers' schoolery.

For arts of school have there small countenance,

Counted but toys to busy idle brains,

And there professors find small maintenance,

But to be instruments of others' gains,

Nor is there place for any gentle wit

Unless to please it can itself apply.

* * * * *

"Even such is all their vaunted vanity,

Naught else but smoke that passeth soon away.

* * * * *

"So they themselves for praise of fools do sell,

And all their wealth for painting on a wall.

* * * * *

"Whiles single Truth and simple Honesty

Do wander up and down despised of all."[272]

And again in his "Mother Hubberd's Tale," in the most pithy and masculine

verses he ever wrote:--

"Most miserable man, whom wicked Fate

Hath brought to Court to sue for _Had-I-wist_

That few have found and many one hath mist!

Full httle knowest thou that hast not tried

What hell it is in suing long to bide;

To lose good days that might be better spent,

To waste long nights in pensive discontent,

To speed to day, to be put back to-morrow,

To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow,

To have thy prince's grace yet want her Peers',

To have thy asking yet wait many years,

To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares,

To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs,

To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run,

To spend, to give, to want, to be undone.

* * * * *

"Whoever leaves sweet home, where mean estate

In safe assurance, without strife or hate,

Finds all things needful for contentment meek,

And will to court for shadows vain to seek,

* * * * *

"That curse God send unto mine enemy!"[273]

When Spenser had once got safely back to the secure retreat and serene

companionship of his great poem, with what profound and pathetic

exultation must he have recalled the verses of Dante!--

"Chi dietro a jura, e chi ad aforismi

Sen giva, e chi seguendo sacerdozio,

E chi regnar per forza e per sofismi,

E chi rubare, e chi civil negozio,

Chi nei diletti della carne involto

S' affaticava, e chi si dava all' ozio,

Quando da tutte queste cose sciolto,

Con Beatrice m' era suso in cielo

Cotanto gloriosamente accolto."[274]

What Spenser says of the indifference of the court to learning and

literature is the more remarkable because he himself was by no means an

unsuccessful suitor. Queen Elizabeth bestowed on him a pension of fifty

pounds, and shortly after he received the grant of lands already

mentioned. It is said, indeed, that Lord Burleigh in some way hindered

the advancement of the poet, who more than once directly alludes to him

either in reproach or remonstrance. In "The Ruins of Time," after

speaking of the death of Walsingham,

"Since whose decease learning lies unregarded,

And men of armes do wander unrewarded,"

he gives the following reason for their neglect.--

"For he that now wields all things at his will,

Scorns th' one and th' other in his deeper skill.

O grief of griefs! O gall of all good hearts,

To see that virtue should despisëd be

Of him that first was raised for virtuous parts,

And now, broad spreading like an aged tree,

Lets none shoot up that nigh him planted be:

O let the man of whom the Muse is scorned

Nor live nor dead be of the Muse adorned!"

And in the introduction to the fourth book of the "Faery Queen," he says

again:--

"The rugged forehead that with grave foresight

Wields kingdoms' causes and affairs of state,

My looser rhymes, I wot, doth sharply wite

For praising Love, as I have done of late,--

* * * * *

"By which frail youth is oft to folly led

Through false allurement of that pleasing bait,

That better were in virtues discipled

Than with vain poems' weeds to have their fancies fed.

"Such ones ill judge of love that cannot love

Nor in their frozen hearts feel kindly flame;

Forthy they ought not thing unknown reprove,

Ne natural affection faultless blame

For fault of few that have abused the same:

For it of honor and all virtue is

The root, and brings forth glorious flowers of fame

That crown true lovers with immortal bliss,

The meed of them that love and do not live amiss."

If Lord Burleigh could not relish such a dish of nightingales' tongues as

the "Faery Queen," he is very much more to be pitied than Spenser. The

sensitive purity of the poet might indeed well be wounded when a poem in

which he proposed to himself "to discourse at large" of "the ethick part

of Moral Philosophy"[275] could be so misinterpreted. But Spenser speaks

in the same strain and without any other than a general application in

his "Tears of the Muses," and his friend Sidney undertakes the defence of

poesy because it was undervalued. But undervalued by whom? By the only

persons about whom he knew or cared anything, those whom we should now

call Society and who were then called the Court. The inference I would

draw is that, among the causes which contributed to the marvellous

efflorescence of genius in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, the

influence of direct patronage from above is to be reckoned at almost

nothing.[276] Then, as when the same phenomenon has happened elsewhere,

there must have been a sympathetic public. Literature, properly so

called, draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature's common and

everlasting sympathies, the gathered leaf-mould of countless generations

([Greek: oiae per phullon geneae]), and not from any top-dressing

capriciously scattered over the surface at some master's bidding.[277]

England had long been growing more truly insular in language and

political ideas when the Reformation came to precipitate her national

consciousness by secluding her more completely from the rest of Europe.

Hitherto there had been Englishmen of a distinct type enough, honestly

hating foreigners, and reigned over by kings of whom they were proud or

not as the case might be, but there was no England as a separate entity

from the sovereign who embodied it for the time being.[278] But now an

English people began to be dimly aware of itself. Their having got a

religion to themselves must have intensified them much as the having a

god of their own did the Jews. The exhilaration of relief after the long

tension of anxiety, when the Spanish Armada was overwhelmed like the

hosts of Pharaoh, while it confirmed their assurance of a provincial

deity, must also have been like sunshine to bring into flower all that

there was of imaginative or sentimental in the English nature, already

just in the first flush of its spring.

("The yongë sonne

Had in _the Bull_ half of his course yronne.")

And just at this moment of blossoming every breeze was dusty with the

golden pollen of Greece, Rome, and Italy. If Keats could say, when he

first opened Chapman's Homer,--

"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He stared at the Pacific, and all his men

Looked at each other with a wild surmise,"

if Keats could say this, whose mind had been unconsciously fed with the

results of this culture,--results that permeated all thought, all

literature, and all talk,--fancy what must have been the awakening shock

and impulse communicated to men's brains by the revelation of this new

world of thought and fancy, an unveiling gradual yet sudden, like that of

a great organ, which discovered to them what a wondrous instrument was in

the soul of man with its epic and lyric stops, its deep thunders of

tragedy, and its passionate _vox humana!_ It might almost seem as if

Shakespeare had typified all this in Miranda, when she cries out at first

sight of the king and his courtiers,

"O, wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O, brave new world

That hath such people in't!"

The civil wars of the Roses had been a barren period in English

literature, because they had been merely dynastic squabbles, in which no

great principles were involved which could shake all minds with

controversy and heat them to intense conviction. A conflict of opposing

ambitions wears out the moral no less than the material forces of a

people, but the ferment of hostile ideas and convictions may realize

resources of character which before were only potential, may transform a

merely gregarious multitude into a nation proud in its strength, sensible

of the dignity and duty which strength involves, and groping after a

common ideal. Some such transformation had been wrought or was going on

in England. For the first time a distinct image of her was disengaging

itself from the tangled blur of tradition and association in the minds of

her children, and it was now only that her great poet could speak

exultingly to an audience that would understand him with a passionate

sympathy, of

"This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in a silver sea,

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,

This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,

England, bound in with the triumphant sea!"

Such a period can hardly recur again, but something like it, something

pointing back to similar producing causes, is observable in the revival

of English imaginative literature at the close of the last and in the

early years of the present century. Again, after long fermentation, there

was a war of principles, again the national consciousness was heightened

and stung by a danger to the national existence, and again there was a

crop of great poets and heroic men.

Spenser once more visited England, bringing with him three more books of

the "Faery Queen," in 1595. He is supposed to have remained there during

the two following years.[279]

In 1594 he had been married to the lady celebrated in his somewhat

artificial _amoretti_. By her he had four children. He was now at the

height of his felicity; by universal acclaim the first poet of his age,

and the one obstacle to his material advancement (if obstacle it was) had

been put out of the way by the death of Lord Burleigh, August, 1598. In

the next month he was recommended in a letter from Queen Elizabeth for

the shrievalty of the county of Cork. But alas for Polycrates! In October

the wild kerns and gallowglasses rose in no mood for sparing the house of

Pindarus. They sacked and burned his castle, from which he with his wife

and children barely escaped.[280] He sought shelter in London and died

there on the 16th January, 1599, at a tavern in King Street, Westminster.

He was buried in the neighboring Abbey next to Chaucer, at the cost of

the Earl of Essex, poets bearing his pall and casting verses into his

grave. He died poor, but not in want. On the whole, his life may be

reckoned a happy one, as in the main the lives of the great poets must

have commonly been. If they feel more passionately the pang of the

moment, so also the compensations are incalculable, and not the least of

them this very capacity of passionate emotion. The real good fortune is

to be measured, not by more or less of outward prosperity, but by the

opportunity given for the development and free play of the genius. It

should be remembered that the power of expression which exaggerates their

griefs is also no inconsiderable consolation for them. We should measure

what Spenser says of his worldly disappointments by the bitterness of the

unavailing tears be shed for Rosalind. A careful analysis of these leaves

no perceptible residuum of salt, and we are tempted to believe that the

passion itself was not much more real than the pastoral accessories of

pipe and crook. I very much doubt whether Spenser ever felt more than one

profound passion in his life, and that luckily was for his "Faery Queen."

He was fortunate in the friendship of the best men and women of his time,

in the seclusion which made him free of the still better society of the

past, in the loving recognition of his countrymen. All that we know of

him is amiable and of good report. He was faithful to the friendships of

his youth, pure in his loves, unspotted in his life. Above all, the ideal

with him was not a thing apart and unattainable, but the sweetener and

ennobler of the street and the fireside.

There are two ways of measuring a poet, either by an absolute aesthetic

standard, or relatively to his position in the literary history of his

country and the conditions of his generation. Both should be borne in

mind as coefficients in a perfectly fair judgment. If his positive merit

is to be settled irrevocably by the former, yet an intelligent criticism

will find its advantage not only in considering what he was, but what,

under the given circumstances, it was possible for him to be.

The fact that the great poem of Spenser was inspired by the Orlando of

Ariosto, and written in avowed emulation of it, and that the poet almost

always needs to have his fancy set agoing by the hint of some

predecessor, must not lead us to overlook his manifest claim to

originality. It is not what a poet takes, but what he makes out of what

he has taken, that shows what native force is in him. Above all, did his

mind dwell complacently in those forms and fashions which in their very

birth are already obsolescent, or was it instinctively drawn to those

qualities which are permanent in language and whatever is wrought in it?

There is much in Spenser that is contemporary and evanescent; but the

substance of him is durable, and his work was the deliberate result of

intelligent purpose and ample culture. The publication of his "Shepherd's

Calendar" in 1579 (though the poem itself be of little interest) is one

of the epochs in our literature. Spenser had at least the originality to

see clearly and to feel keenly that it was essential to bring poetry back

again to some kind of understanding with nature. His immediate

predecessors seem to have conceived of it as a kind of bird of paradise,

born to float somewhere between heaven and earth, with no very well

defined relation to either. It is true that the nearest approach they

were able to make to this airy ideal was a shuttlecock, winged with a

bright plume or so from Italy, but, after all, nothing but cork and

feathers, which they bandied back and forth from one stanza to another,

with the useful ambition of _keeping it up_ as long as they could. To my

mind the old comedy of "Gammer Gurton's Needle" is worth the whole of

them. It may be coarse, earthy, but in reading it one feels that he is at

least a man among men, and not a humbug among humbugs.

The form of Spenser's "Shepherd's Calendar," it is true, is artificial,

absurdly so if you look at it merely from the outside,--not, perhaps, the

wisest way to look at anything, unless it be a jail or a volume of the

"Congressional Globe,"--but the spirit of it is fresh and original We

have at last got over the superstition that shepherds and shepherdesses

are any wiser or simpler than other people. We know that wisdom can be on

only by wide commerce with men and books, and that simplicity, whether of

manners or style, is the crowning result of the highest culture. But the

pastorals of Spenser were very different things, different both in the

moving spirit and the resultant form from the later ones of Browne or the

"Piscatory Eclogues" of Phinehas Fletcher. And why? Browne and Fletcher

wrote because Spenser had written, but Spenser wrote from a strong inward

impulse--an instinct it might be called--to escape at all risks into the

fresh air from that horrible atmosphere into which rhymer after rhymer

had been pumping carbonic-acid gas with the full force of his lungs, and

in which all sincerity was on the edge of suffocation. His longing for

something truer and better was as honest as that which led Tacitus so

long before to idealize the Germans, and Rousseau so long after to make

an angel of the savage.

Spenser himself supremely overlooks the whole chasm between himself and

Chaucer, as Dante between himself and Virgil. He called Chaucer master,

as Milton was afterwards to call _him_. And, even while he chose the most

artificial of all forms, his aim--that of getting back to nature and

life--was conscious, I have no doubt, to himself, and must be obvious to

whoever reads with anything but the ends of his fingers. It is true that

Sannazzaro had brought the pastoral into fashion again, and that two of

Spenser's are little more than translations from Marot; but for manner he

instinctively turned back to Chaucer, the first and then only great

English poet. He has given common instead of classic names to his

personages, for characters they can hardly be called. Above all, he has

gone to the provincial dialects for words wherewith to enlarge and

freshen his poetical vocabulary.[281]

I look upon the "Shepherd's Calendar" as being no less a conscious and

deliberate attempt at reform than Thomson's "Seasons" were in the topics,

and Wordsworth's "Lyrical Ballads" in the language of poetry. But the

great merit of these pastorals was not so much in their matter as their

manner. They show a sense of style in its larger meaning hitherto

displayed by no English poet since Chaucer. Surrey had brought back from

Italy a certain inkling of it, so far as it is contained in decorum. But

here was a new language, a choice and arrangement of words, a variety,

elasticity, and harmony of verse most grateful to the ears of men. If not

passion, there was fervor, which was perhaps as near it as the somewhat

stately movement of Spenser's mind would allow him to come. Sidney had

tried many experiments in versification, which are curious and

interesting, especially his attempts to naturalize the _sliding_ rhymes

of Sannazzaro in English. But there is everywhere the uncertainty of a

'prentice hand. Spenser shows himself already a master, at least in

verse, and we can trace the studies of Milton, a yet greater master, in

the "Shepherd's Calendar" as well as in the "Faery Queen." We have seen

that Spenser, under the misleading influence of Sidney[282] and Harvey,

tried his hand at English hexameters. But his great glory is that he

taught his own language to sing and move to measures harmonious and

noble. Chaucer had done much to vocalize it, as I have tried to show

elsewhere,[283] but Spenser was to prove

"That no tongue hath the muse's utterance heired

For verse, and that sweet music to the ear

Struck out of rhyme, so naturally as this."

The "Shepherd's Calendar" contains perhaps the most picturesquely

imaginative verse which Spenser has written. It is in the eclogue for

February, where he tells us of the

"Faded oak

Whose body is sere, whose branches broke,

Whose naked arms stretch unto the fire."

It is one of those verses that Joseph Warton would have liked in secret,

that Dr. Johnson would have proved to be untranslatable into reasonable

prose, and which the imagination welcomes at once without caring whether

it be exactly conformable to _barbara_ or _celarent_. Another pretty

verse in the same eclogue,

"But gently took that ungently came,"

pleased Coleridge so greatly that he thought it was his own. But in

general it is not so much the sentiments and images that are new as the

modulation of the verses in which they float. The cold obstruction of two

centuries' thaws, and the stream of speech, once more let loose, seeks

out its old windings, or overflows musically in unpractised channels. The

service which Spenser did to our literature by this exquisite sense of

harmony is incalculable. His fine ear, abhorrent of barbarous dissonance,

his dainty tongue that loves to prolong the relish of a musical phrase,

made possible the transition from the cast-iron stiffness of "Ferrex and

Porrex" to the Damascus pliancy of Fletcher and Shakespeare. It was he

that

"Taught the dumb on high to sing,

And heavy ignorance aloft to fly

That added feathers to the learned's wing,

And gave to grace a double majesty."

I do not mean that in the "Shepherd's Calendar" he had already achieved

that transmutation of language and metre by which he was afterwards to

endow English verse with the most varied and majestic of stanzas, in

which the droning old alexandrine, awakened for the first time to a

feeling of the poetry that was in him, was to wonder, like M. Jourdain,

that he had been talking prose all his life,--but already he gave clear

indications of the tendency and premonitions of the power which were to

carry it forward to ultimate perfection. A harmony and alacrity of

language like this were unexampled in English verse:--

"Ye dainty nymphs, that in this blessed brook

Do bathe your breast,

Forsake your watery bowers and hither look

At my request....

And eke you virgins that on Parnass dwell,

Whence floweth Helicon, the learned well,

Help me to blaze

Her worthy praise,

Which in her sex doth all excel."

Here we have the natural gait of the measure, somewhat formal and slow,

as befits an invocation; and now mark how the same feet shall be made to

quicken their pace at the bidding of the tune:--

"Bring here the pink and purple columbine,

With gilliflowers;

Bring coronations and sops in wine,

Worne of paramours;

Strow me the ground with daffadowndillies,

And cowslips and kingcúps and loved lilies;

The pretty paunce

And the chevisance

Shall match with the fair flowërdelice."[284]

The argument prefixed by E.K. to the tenth Eclogue has a special interest

for us as showing how high a conception Spenser had of poetry and the

poet's office. By Cuddy he evidently means himself, though choosing out

of modesty another name instead of the familiar Colin. "In Cuddy is set

forth the perfect pattern of a Poet, which finding no maintenance of his

state and studies, complaineth of the contempt of Poetry and the causes

thereof, specially having been in all ages, and even amongst the most

barbarous, always of singular account and honor, _and being indeed so

worthy and commendable an art, or rather no art, but a divine gift and

heavenly instinct not to be gotten by labor and learning, but adorned

with both, and poured into the wit by a certain Enthousiasmos and

celestial inspiration_, as the author hereof elsewhere at large

discourseth in his book called THE ENGLISH POET, which book being lately

come into my hands, I mind also by God's grace, upon further advisement,

to publish." E. K., whoever he was, never carried out his intention, and

the book is no doubt lost; a loss to be borne with less equanimity than

that of Cicero's treatise _De Gloria_, once possessed by Petrarch. The

passage I have italicized is most likely an extract, and reminds one of

the long-breathed periods of Milton. Drummond of Hawthornden tells us,

"he [Ben Jonson] hath by heart some verses of Spenser's 'Calendar,' about

wine, between Coline and Percye" (Cuddie and Piers).[285] These verses

are in this eclogue, and are worth quoting both as having the approval of

dear old Ben, the best critic of the day, and because they are a good

sample of Spenser's earlier verse:--

"Thou kenst not, Percie, how the rhyme should rage;

O, if my temples were distained with wine,

And girt in garlands of wild ivy-twine,

How I could rear the Muse on stately stage

And teach her tread aloft in buskin fine

With quaint Bellona in her equipage!"

In this eclogue he gives hints of that spacious style which was to

distinguish him, and which, like his own Fame,

"With golden wings aloft doth fly

Above the reach of ruinous decay,

And with brave plumes doth beat the azure sky,

Admired of base-born men from far away."[286]

He was letting his wings grow, as Milton said, and foreboding the "Faery

Queen":--

"Lift thyself up out of the lowly dust

* * * * *

"To 'doubted knights whose woundless armor rusts

And helms unbruised waxen daily brown:

There may thy Muse display her fluttering wing,

And stretch herself at large from East to West."

Verses like these, especially the last (which Dryden would have liked),

were such as English ears had not yet heard, and curiously prophetic of

the maturer man. The language and verse of Spenser at his best have an

ideal lift in them, and there is scarce any of our poets who can so

hardly help being poetical.

It was this instantly felt if not easily definable charm that forthwith

won for Spenser his never-disputed rank as the chief English poet of that

age, and gave him a popularity which, during his life and in the

following generation, was, in its select quality, without a competitor.

It may be thought that I lay too much stress on this single attribute of

diction. But apart from its importance in his case as showing their way

to the poets who were just then learning the accidence of their art and

leaving them a material to work in already mellowed to their hands, it

should be remembered that it is subtle perfection of phrase and that

happy coalescence of music and meaning, where each reinforces the other,

that define a man as poet and make all ears converts and partisans.

Spenser was an epicure in language. He loved "seld-seen costly" words

perhaps too well, and did not always distinguish between mere strangeness

and that novelty which is so agreeable as to cheat us with some charm of

seeming association. He had not the concentrated power which can

sometimes pack infinite riches in the little room of a single epithet,

for his genius is rather for dilatation than compression.[287] But he

was, with the exception of Milton and possibly Gray, the most learned of

our poets. His familiarity with ancient and modern literature was easy

and intimate, and as he perfected himself in his art, he caught the grand

manner and high bred ways of the society he frequented. But even to the

last he did not quite shake off the blunt rusticity of phrase that was

habitual with the generation that preceded him. In the fifth book of the

"Faery Queen," where he is describing the passion of Britomart at the

supposed infidelity of Arthegall, he descends to a Teniers-like

realism,[288]--he whose verses generally remind us of the dancing Hours

of Guido, where we catch but a glimpse of the real earth and that far

away beneath. But his habitual style is that of gracious loftiness and

refined luxury.

He shows his mature hand in the "Muiopotmos," the most airily fanciful of

his poems, a marvel for delicate conception and treatment, whose breezy

verse seems to float between a blue sky and golden earth in imperishable

sunshine. No other English poet has found the variety and compass which

enlivened the octave stanza under his sensitive touch. It can hardly be

doubted that in Clarion the butterfly he has symbolized himself, and

surely never was the poetic temperament so picturesquely exemplified:--

"Over the fields, in his frank lustiness,

And all the champain o'er, he soared light,

And all the country wide he did possess,

Feeding upon their pleasures bounteously,

That none gainsaid and none did him envy.

"The woods, the rivers, and the meadows green,

With his air-cutting wings he measured wide,

Nor did he leave the mountains bare unseen,

Nor the rank grassy fens' delights untried;

But none of these, however sweet they been,

Mote please his fancy, or him cause to abide;

His choiceful sense with every change doth flit;

No common things may please a wavering wit.

"To the gay gardens his unstaid desire

Him wholly carried, to refresh his sprights;

There lavish Nature, in her best attire,

Pours forth sweet odors and alluring sights,

And Art, with her contending doth aspire,

To excel the natural with made delights;

And all that fair or pleasant may be found,

In riotous excess doth there abound.

"There he arriving, round about doth flie,

From bed to bed, from one to the other border,

And takes survey with curious busy eye,

Of every flower and herb there set in order,

Now this, now that, he tasteth tenderly,

Yet none of them he rudely doth disorder,

Ne with his feet their silken leaves displace,

But pastures on the pleasures of each place.

"And evermore with most variety

And change of sweetness (for all change is sweet)

He casts his glutton sense to satisfy,

Now sucking of the sap of herbs most meet,

Or of the dew which yet on them doth lie,

Now in the same bathing his tender feet;

And then he percheth on some branch thereby

To weather him and his moist wings to dry.

"And then again he turneth to his play,

To spoil [plunder] the pleasures of that paradise;

The wholesome sage, the lavender still gray,

Rank-smelling rue, and cummin good for eyes,

The roses reigning in the pride of May,

Sharp hyssop good for green wounds' remedies

Fair marigolds, and bees-alluring thyme,

Sweet marjoram and daisies decking prime,

"Cool violets, and orpine growing still,

Embathed balm, and cheerful galingale,

Fresh costmary and breathful camomill,

Dull poppy and drink-quickening setuale,

Vein-healing vervain and head-purging dill,

Sound savory, and basil hearty-hale,

Fat coleworts and comforting perseline,

Cold lettuce, and refreshing rosemarine.[289]

"And whatso else of virtue good or ill,

Grew in this garden, fetched from far away,

Of every one he takes and tastes at will,

And on their pleasures greedily doth prey;

Then, when he hath both played and fed his fill,

In the warm sun he doth himself embay,

And there him rests in riotous suffisance

Of all his gladfulness and kingly joyance.

"What more felicity can fall to creature

Than to enjoy delight with liberty,

And to be lord of all the works of nature?

To reign in the air from earth to highest sky,

To feed on flowers and weeds of glorious feature,

To take whatever thing doth please the eye?

Who rests not pleased with such happiness,

Well worthy he to taste of wretchedness."

The "Muiopotmos" pleases us all the more that it vibrates in us a string

of classical association by adding an episode to Ovid's story of Arachne.

"Talking the other day with a friend (the late Mr. Keats) about Dante, he

observed that whenever so great a poet told us anything in addition or

continuation of an ancient story, he had a right to be regarded as

classical authority. For instance, said he, when he tells us of that

characteristic death of Ulysses, ... we ought to receive the information

as authentic, and be glad that we have more news of Ulysses than we

looked for."[290]

We can hardly doubt that Ovid would have been glad to admit this

exquisitely fantastic illumination into his margin.

No German analyzer of aesthetics has given us so convincing a definition

of the artistic nature as these radiant verses. "To reign in the air" was

certainly Spenser's function. And yet the commentators, who seem never

willing to let their poet be a poet pure and simple, though, had he not

been so, they would have lost their only hold upon life, try to make out

from his "Mother Hubberd's Tale" that he might have been a very sensible

matter of-fact man if he would. For my own part, I am quite willing to

confess that I like him none the worse for being _un_practical, and that

my reading has convinced me that being too poetical is the rarest fault

of poets. Practical men are not so scarce, one would think, and I am not

sure that the tree was a gainer when the hamadryad flitted and left it

nothing but ship-timber. Such men as Spenser are not sent into the world

to be part of its motive power. The blind old engine would not know the

difference though we got up its steam with attar of roses, nor make one

revolution more to the minute for it. What practical man ever left such

an heirloom to his countrymen as the "Faery Queen"?

Undoubtedly Spenser wished to be useful and in the highest vocation of

all, that of teacher, and Milton calls him "our sage and serious poet,

whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas."

And good Dr. Henry More was of the same mind. I fear he makes his vices

so beautiful now and then that we should not be very much afraid of them

if we chanced to meet them; for he could not escape from his genius,

which, if it led him as philosopher to the abstract contemplation of the

beautiful, left him as poet open to every impression of sensuous delight.

When he wrote the "Shepherd's Calendar" he was certainly a Puritan, and

probably so by conviction rather than from any social influences or

thought of personal interests. There is a verse, it is true, in the

second of the two detached cantos of "Mutability,"

"Like that ungracious crew which feigns demurest grace,"

which is supposed to glance at the straiter religionists, and from which

it has been inferred that he drew away from them as he grew older. It is

very likely that years and widened experience of men may have produced in

him their natural result of tolerant wisdom which revolts at the hasty

destructiveness of inconsiderate zeal. But with the more generous side of

Puritanism I think he sympathized to the last. His rebukes of clerical

worldliness are in the Puritan tone, and as severe a one as any is in

"Mother Hubberd's Tale," published in 1591.[291] There is an iconoclastic

relish in his account of Sir Guyon's demolishing the Bower of Bliss that

makes us think he would not have regretted the plundered abbeys as

perhaps Shakespeare did when he speaks of the winter woods as "bare

ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang";--

"But all those pleasant bowers and palace brave

Guyon broke down with rigor pitiless,

Ne ought their goodly workmanship might save

Them from the tempest of his wrathfulness,

But that their bliss he turned to balefulness;

Their groves he felled, their gardens did deface,

Their arbors spoil, their cabinets suppress,

Their banquet-houses burn, their buildings rase,

And of the fairest late now made the foulest place."

But whatever may have been Spenser's religious opinions (which do not

nearly concern us here), the bent of his mind was toward a Platonic

mysticism, a supramundane sphere where it could shape universal forms out

of the primal elements of things, instead of being forced to put up with

their fortuitous combinations in the unwilling material of mortal clay.

He who, when his singing robes were on, could never be tempted nearer to

the real world than under some subterfuge of pastoral or allegory,

expatiates joyously in this untrammelled ether:--

"Lifting himself out of the lowly dust

On golden plumes up to the purest sky."

Nowhere does his genius soar and sing with such continuous aspiration,

nowhere is his phrase so decorously stately, though rising to an

enthusiasm which reaches intensity while it stops short of vehemence, as

in his Hymns to Love and Beauty, especially the latter. There is an

exulting spurn of earth in it, as of a soul just loosed from its cage. I

shall make no extracts from it, for it is one of those intimately

coherent and transcendentally logical poems that "moveth altogether if it

move at all," the breaking off a fragment from which would maim it as it

would a perfect group of crystals. Whatever there is of sentiment and

passion is for the most part purely disembodied and without sex, like

that of angels,--a kind of poetry which has of late gone out of fashion,

whether to our gain or not may be questioned. Perhaps one may venture to

hint that the animal instincts are those that stand in least need of

stimulation. Spenser's notions of love were so nobly pure, so far from

those of our common ancestor who could hang by his tail, as not to

disqualify him for achieving the quest of the Holy Grail, and accordingly

it is not uninstructive to remember that he had drunk, among others, at

French sources not yet deboshed with _absinthe_.[292] Yet, with a purity

like that of thrice-bolted snow, he had none of its coldness. He is, of

all our poets, the most truly sensuous, using the word as Milton probably

meant it when he said that poetry should be "simple, sensuous, and

passionate." A poet is innocently sensuous when his mind permeates and

illumines his senses; when they, on the other hand, muddy the mind, he

becomes sensual. Every one of Spenser's senses was as exquisitely alive

to the impressions of material, as every organ of his soul was to those

of spiritual beauty. Accordingly, if he painted the weeds of sensuality

at all, he could not help making them "of glorious feature." It was this,

it may be suspected, rather than his "praising love," that made Lord

Burleigh shake his "rugged forehead." Spenser's gamut, indeed, is a wide

one, ranging from a purely corporeal delight in "precious odors fetched

from far away" upward to such refinement as

"Upon her eyelids many graces sate

Under the shadow of her even brows,"

where the eye shares its pleasure with the mind. He is court-painter in

ordinary to each of the senses in turn, and idealizes these frail

favorites of his majesty King Lusty Juventus, till they half believe

themselves the innocent shepherdesses into which he travesties them.[293]

In his great poem he had two objects in view: first the ephemeral one of

pleasing the court, and then that of recommending himself to the

permanent approval of his own and following ages as a poet, and

especially as a moral poet. To meet the first demand, he lays the scene

of his poem in contemporary England, and brings in all the leading

personages of the day under the thin disguise of his knights and their

squires and lady-loves. He says this expressly in the prologue to the

second book:--

"Of Faery Land yet if he more inquire,

By certain signs, here set in sundry place,

He may it find; ...

And thou, O fairest princess under sky,

In this fair mirror mayst behold thy face

And thine own realms in land of Faery."

Many of his personages we can still identify, and all of them were once

as easily recognizable as those of Mademoiselle de Scudéry. This, no

doubt, added greatly to the immediate piquancy of the allusions. The

interest they would excite may be inferred from the fact that King James,

in 1596, wished to have the author prosecuted and punished for his

indecent handling of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, under the name of

Duessa.[294] To suit the wider application of his plan's other and more

important half, Spenser made all his characters double their parts, and

appear in his allegory as the impersonations of abstract moral qualities.

When the cardinal and theological virtues tell Dante,

"Noi siam qui ninfe e in ciel siamo stelle,"

the sweetness of the verse enables the fancy, by a slight gulp, to

swallow without solution the problem of being in two places at the same

time. But there is something fairly ludicrous in such a duality as that

of Prince Arthur and the Earl of Leicester, Arthegall and Lord Grey, and

Belphoebe and Elizabeth.

"In this same interlude it doth befall

That I, one Snout by name, present a wall."

The reality seems to heighten the improbability, already hard enough to

manage. But Spenser had fortunately almost as little sense of humor as

Wordsworth,[295] or he could never have carried his poem on with

enthusiastic good faith so far as he did. It is evident that to him the

Land of Faery was an unreal world of picture and illusion,

"The world's sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil,"

in which he could shut himself up from the actual, with its shortcomings

and failures.

"The ways through which my weary steps I guide

In this delightful land of Faery

Are so exceeding spacious and wide,

And sprinkled with such sweet variety

Of all that pleasant is to ear and eye,

That I, nigh ravisht with rare thoughts' delight,

My tedious travail do forget thereby,

And, when I 'gin to feel decay of might,

It strength to me supplies, and cheers my dullëd spright."

Spenser seems here to confess a little weariness; but the alacrity of his

mind is so great that, even where his invention fails a little, we do not

share his feeling nor suspect it, charmed as we are by the variety and

sweep of his measure, the beauty or vigor of his similes, the musical

felicity of his diction, and the mellow versatility of his pictures. In

this last quality Ariosto, whose emulous pupil he was, is as Bologna to

Venice in the comparison. That, when the personal allusions have lost

their meaning and the allegory has become a burden, the book should

continue to be read with delight, is proof enough, were any wanting, how

full of life and light and the other-worldliness of poetry it must be. As

a narrative it has, I think, every fault of which that kind of writing is

capable. The characters are vague, and, even were they not, they drop out

of the story so often and remain out of it so long, that we have

forgotten who they are when we meet them again; the episodes hinder the

advance of the action instead of relieving it with variety of incident or

novelty of situation; the plot, if plot it may be called,

"That shape has none

Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb,"

recalls drearily our ancient enemy, the Metrical Romance; while the

fighting, which, in those old poems, was tediously sincere, is between

shadow and shadow, where we know that neither can harm the other, though

are tempted to wish he might. Hazlitt bids us not mind the allegory, and

says that it won't bite us nor meddle with us if we do not meddle with

it. But how if it bore us, which after all is the fatal question? The

truth is that it is too often forced upon us against our will, as people

were formerly driven to church till they began to look on a day of rest

as a penal institution, and to transfer to the Scriptures that suspicion

of defective inspiration which was awakened in them by the preaching. The

true type of the allegory is the Odyssey, which we read without suspicion

as pure poem, and then find a new pleasure in divining its double

meaning, as if we somehow got a better bargain of our author than he

meant to give us. But this complex feeling must not be so exacting as to

prevent our lapsing into the old Arabian Nights simplicity of interest

again. The moral of a poem should be suggested, as when in some mediaeval

church we cast down our eyes to muse over a fresco of Giotto, and are

reminded of the transitoriness of life by the mortuary tablets under our

feet. The vast superiority of Bunyan over Spenser lies in the fact that

we help make his allegory out of our own experience. Instead of striving

to embody abstract passions and temptations, he has given us his own in

all their pathetic simplicity. He is the Ulysses of his own prose-epic.

This is the secret of his power and his charm, that, while the

representation of what may happen to all men comes home to none of us in

particular, the story of any one man's real experience finds its

startling parallel in that of every one of us. The very homeliness of

Bunyan's names and the everydayness of his scenery, too, put us off our

guard, and we soon find ourselves on as easy a footing with his

allegorical beings as we might be with Adam or Socrates in a dream.

Indeed, he has prepared us for such incongruities by telling us at

setting out that the story was of a dream. The long nights of Bedford

jail had so intensified his imagination, and made the figures with which

it peopled his solitude so real to him, that the creatures of his mind

become _things_, as clear to the memory as if we had seen them. But

Spenser's are too often mere names, with no bodies to back them, entered

on the Muses' musterroll by the specious trick of personification. There

is likewise, in Bunyan, a childlike simplicity and taking-for-granted

which win our confidence. His Giant Despair,[296] for example, is by no

means the Ossianic figure into which artists who mistake the vague for

the sublime have misconceived it. He is the ogre of the fairy-tales, with

his malicious wife; and he comes forth to us from those regions of early

faith and wonder as something beforehand accepted by the imagination.

These figures of Bunyan's are already familiar inmates of the mind, and,

if there be any sublimity in him, it is the daring frankness of his

verisimilitude. Spenser's giants are those of the later romances, except

that grand figure with the balances in the second Canto of Book V., the

most original of all his conceptions, yet no real giant, but a pure

eidolon of the mind. As Bunyan rises not seldom to a natural poetry, so

Spenser sinks now and then, through the fault of his topics, to

unmistakable prose. Take his description of the House of Alma,[297] for

instance:--

"The master cook was cald Concoctiön,

A careful man, and full of comely guise;

The kitchen-clerk, that hight Digestion,

Did order all the achates in seemly wise."

And so on through all the organs of the body. The author of Ecclesiastes

understood these matters better in that last pathetic chapter of his,

blunderingly translated as it apparently is. This, I admit, is the worst

failure of Spenser in this kind; though, even here, when he gets on to

the organs of the mind, the enchantments of his fancy and style come to

the rescue and put us in good-humor again, hard as it is to conceive of

armed knights entering the chamber of the mind, and talking with such

visionary damsels as Ambition and Shamefastness. Nay, even in the most

prosy parts, unless my partiality deceive me, there is an infantile

confidence in the magical powers of Prosopopoeia which half beguiles us

as of children who _play_ that everything is something else, and are

quite satisfied with the transformation.

The problem for Spenser was a double one: how to commend poetry at all to

a generation which thought it effeminate trifling,[298] and how he,

Master Edmund Spenser, of imagination all compact, could commend _his_

poetry to Master John Bull, the most practical of mankind in his habitual

mood, but at that moment in a passion of religious anxiety about his

soul. _Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci_ was not only an

irrefragable axiom because a Latin poet had said it, but it exactly met

the case in point. He would convince the scorners that poetry might be

seriously useful, and show Master Bull his new way of making fine words

butter parsnips, in a rhymed moral primer. Allegory, as then practised,

was imagination adapted for beginners, in words of one syllable and

illustrated with cuts, and would thus serve both his ethical and

pictorial purpose. Such a primer, or a first instalment of it, he

proceeded to put forth; but he so bordered it with bright-colored

fancies, he so often filled whole pages and crowded the text hard in

others with the gay frolics of his pencil, that, as in the Grimani

missal, the holy function of the book is forgotten in the ecstasy of its

adornment. Worse than all, does not his brush linger more lovingly along

the rosy contours of his sirens than on the modest wimples of the Wise

Virgins? "The general end of the book," he tells us in his Dedication to

Sir Walter Raleigh, "is to fashion a gentleman of noble person in

virtuous and gentle discipline." But a little further on he evidently has

a qualm, as he thinks how generously he had interpreted his promise of

cuts: "To some I know this method will seem displeasant, which had rather

have good discipline delivered plainly in way of precepts or sermoned at

large,[299] as they use, than thus cloudily enwrapped in allegorical

devices." Lord Burleigh was of this way of thinking, undoubtedly, but how

could poor Clarion help it? Has he not said,

"And whatso else, _of virtue good or ill,_

Grew in that garden, fetcht from far away,

Of every one he takes and tastes at will,

And on their pleasures greedily doth prey"?

One sometimes feels in reading him as if he were the pure sense of the

beautiful incarnated to the one end that he might interpret it to our

duller perceptions So exquisite was his sensibility,[300] that with him

sensation and intellection seem identical, and we "can almost say his

body thought." This subtle interfusion of sense with spirit it is that

gives his poetry a crystalline purity without lack of warmth. He is full

of feeling, and yet of such a kind that we can neither say it is mere

intellectual perception of what is fair and good, nor yet associate it

with that throbbing fervor which leads us to call sensibility by the

physical name of heart.

Charles Lamb made the most pithy criticism of Spenser when he called him

the poets' poet. We may fairly leave the allegory on one side, for

perhaps, after all, he adopted it only for the reason that it was in

fashion, and put it on as he did his ruff, not because it was becoming,

but because it was the only wear. The true use of him is as a gallery of

pictures which we visit as the mood takes us, and where we spend an hour

or two at a time, long enough to sweeten our perceptions, not so long as

to cloy them. He makes one think always of Venice; for not only is his

style Venetian,[301] but as the gallery there is housed in the shell of

an abandoned convent, so his in that of a deserted allegory. And again,

as at Venice you swim in a gondola from Gian Bellini to Titian, and from

Titian to Tintoret, so in him, where other cheer is wanting, the gentle

sway of his measure, like the rhythmical impulse of the oar, floats you

lullingly along from picture to picture.

"If all the pens that ever poet held

Had fed the feeling of their master's thoughts,

And every sweetness that inspired their hearts

Their minds and muses on admired themes,

If all the heavenly quintessence they still

From their immortal flowers of poesy,

If these had made one poem's period,

And all combined in beauty's worthiness;

Yet should there hover in their restless heads

One thought, one grace, one wonder at the best,

Which into words no virtue can digest."[302]

Spenser, at his best, has come as near to expressing this unattainable

something as any other poet. He is so purely poet that with him the

meaning does not so often modulate the music of the verse as the music

makes great part of the meaning and leads the thought along its pleasant

paths. No poet is so splendidly superfluous as he; none knows so well

that in poetry enough is not only not so good as a feast, but is a

beggarly parsimony. He spends himself in a careless abundance only to be

justified by incomes of immortal youth.

"Pensier canuto nè molto nè poco

Si può quivi albergare in alcun cuore;

Non entra quivi disagio nè inopia,

Ma vi sta ogn'or col corno pien la Copia."[303]

This delicious abundance and overrunning luxury of Spenser appear in the

very structure of his verse. He found the _ottava rima_ too monotonously

iterative; so, by changing the order of his rhymes, he shifted the let

from the end of the stave, where it always seems to put on the brakes

with a jar, to the middle, where it may serve at will as a brace or a

bridge; he found it not roomy enough, so first ran it over into another

line, and then ran that added line over into an alexandrine, in which the

melody of one stanza seems forever longing and feeling forward after that

which is to follow. There is no ebb and flow in his metre more than on

the shores of the Adriatic, but wave follows wave with equable gainings

and recessions, the one sliding back in fluent music to be mingled with

and carried forward by the next. In all this there is soothingness

indeed, but no slumberous monotony; for Spenser was no mere metrist, but

a great composer. By the variety of his pauses--now at the close of the

first or second foot, now of the third, and again of the fourth--he gives

spirit and energy to a measure whose tendency it certainly is to become

languorous. He knew how to make it rapid and passionate at need, as in

such verses as,

"But he, my lion, and my noble lord,

How does he find in cruel heart to hate

Her that him loved and ever most adored

As the God of my life? Why hath he me abhorred?"[304]

or this,

"Come hither, come hither, O, come hastily!"[305]

Joseph Warton objects to Spenser's stanza, that its "constraint led him

into many absurdities." Of these he instances three, of which I shall

notice only one, since the two others (which suppose him at a loss for

words and rhymes) will hardly seem valid to any one who knows the poet.

It is that it "obliged him to dilate the thing to be expressed, however

unimportant with trifling and tedious circumlocutions, namely, Faery

Queen, II. ii. 44:--

"'Now hath fair Phoebe with her silver face

Thrice seen the shadows of this nether world,

Sith last I left that honorable place,

In which her royal presence is enrolled.'

"That is, it is three months since I left her palace."[306] But Dr. Warton

should have remembered (what he too often forgets in his own verses)

that, in spite of Dr. Johnson's dictum, poetry is not prose, and that

verse only loses its advantage over the latter by invading its

province.[307] Verse itself is an absurdity except as an expression of

some higher movement of the mind, or as an expedient to lift other minds

to the same ideal level. It is the cothurnus which gives language an

heroic stature. I have said that one leading characteristic of Spenser's

style was its spaciousness, that he habitually dilates rather than

compresses. But his way of measuring time was perfectly natural in an age

when everybody did not carry a dial in his poke as now. He is the last of

the poets, who went (without affectation) by the great clock of the

firmament. Dante, the miser of words, who goes by the same timepiece, is

full of these roundabout ways of telling us the hour. It had nothing to

do with Spenser's stanza, and I for one should be sorry to lose these

stately revolutions of the _superne ruote_. Time itself becomes more

noble when so measured; we never knew before of how precious a commodity

we had the wasting. Who would prefer the plain time of day to this?

"Now when Aldebaran was mounted high

Above the starry Cassiopeia's chair";

or this?

"By this the northern wagoner had set

His seven-fold team behind the steadfast star

That was in ocean's waves yet never wet,

But firm is fixt and sendeth light from far

To all that in the wide deep wandering are";

or this?

"At last the golden oriental gate

Of greatest heaven gan to open fair,

And Phoebus, fresh as bridegroom to his mate,

Came dancing forth, shaking his dewy hair

And hurls his glistening beams through dewy air."

The generous indefiniteness, which treats an hour more or less as of no

account, is in keeping with that sense of endless leisures which it is

one chief merit of the poem to suggest. But Spenser's dilatation extends

to thoughts as well as to phrases and images. He does not love the

concise. Yet his dilatation is not mere distension, but the expansion of

natural growth in the rich soil of his own mind, wherein the merest stick

of a verse puts forth leaves and blossoms. Here is one of his, suggested

by Homer:[308]

"Upon the top of all his lofty crest

A bunch of hairs discolored diversly,

With sprinkled pearl and gold full richly drest,

Did shake, and seemed to dance for jollity;

Like to an almond-tree mounted high

On top of green Selinus all alone

With blossoms brave bedeckëd daintily,

Whose tender locks do tremble every one

At every little breath that under heaven is blown."