"chiefly skill to ride seems a science
Proper to gentle blood,"
which reminds one of Lord Herbert of Cherbury's saying that the finest
sight God looked down on was a fine man on a fine horse.
Wordsworth, in the supplement to his preface, tells us that the "Faery
Queen" "faded before" Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas. But
Wordsworth held a brief for himself in this case, and is no exception to
the proverb about men who are their own attorneys. His statement is
wholly unfounded. Both poems, no doubt, so far as popularity is
concerned, yielded to the graver interests of the Civil War. But there is
an appreciation much weightier than any that is implied in mere
popularity, and the vitality of a poem is to be measured by the kind as
well as the amount of influence it exerts. Spenser has _coached_ more
poets and more eminent ones than any other writer of English verse. I
need say nothing of Milton, nor of professed disciples like Browne, the
two Fletchers, and More. Oowley tells us that he became "irrecoverably a
poet" by reading the "Faery Queen" when a boy. Dryden, whose case is
particularly in point because he confesses having been seduced by Du
Bartas, tells us that Spenser had been his master in English. He regrets,
indeed, comically enough, that Spenser could not have read the rules of
Bossu, but adds that "no man was ever born with a greater genius or more
knowledge to support it." Pope says, "There is something in Spenser that
pleases one as strongly in one's old age as it did in one's youth. I read
the _Faery Queen_ when I was about twelve with a vast deal of delight;
and I think it gave me as much when I read it over about a year or two
ago." Thomson wrote the most delightful of his poems in the measure of
Spenser; Collins, Gray, and Akenside show traces of him; and in our own
day his influence reappears in Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats.
Landor is, I believe, the only poet who ever found him tedious. Spenser's
mere manner has not had so many imitators as Milton's, but no other of
our poets has given an impulse, and in the right direction also, to so
many and so diverse minds; above all, no other has given to so many young
souls a consciousness of their wings and a delight in the use of them. He
is a standing protest against the tyranny of Commonplace, and sows the
seeds of a noble discontent with prosaic views of life and the dull uses
to which it may be put.
Three of Spenser's own verses best characterize the feeling his poetry
gives us:--
"Among wide waves set like a little nest,"
"Wrapt in eternal silence far from enemies,"
"The world's sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil."
We are wont to apologize for the grossness of our favorite authors
sometimes by saying that their age was to blame and not they; and the
excuse is a good one, for often it is the frank word that shocks us while
we tolerate the thing. Spenser needs no such extenuations. No man can
read the "Faery Queen" and be anything but the better for it. Through
that rude age, when Maids of Honor drank beer for breakfast and Hamlet
could say a gross thing to Ophelia, he passes serenely abstracted and
high, the Don Quixote of poets. Whoever can endure unmixed delight,
whoever can tolerate music and painting and poetry all in one, whoever
wishes to be rid of thought and to let the busy anvils of the brain be
silent for a time, let him read in the "Faery Queen." There is the land
of pure heart's ease, where no ache or sorrow of spirit can enter.
Footnotes:
[263] Though always misapplied in quotation, as if he had used the
word in that generalized meaning which is common now, but which could
not without an impossible anachronism have been present to his mind.
He meant merely freedom from prison.
[264] In his "Defence of Poesy" he condemns the archaisms and
provincialisms of the "Shepherd's Calendar."
[265] "There is, as you must have heard Wordsworth point out, a
language of pure, intelligible English, which was spoken in Chaucer's
time, and is spoken in ours; equally understood then and now; and of
which the Bible is the written and permanent standard, as it has
undoubtedly been the great means of preserving it." (Southey's Life
and Correspondence, III. 193, 194.)
[266] Nash, who has far better claims than Swift to be called the
English Rabelais, thus at once describes and parodies Harvey's
hexameters in prose, "that drunken, staggering kind of verse, which
is all up hill and down hill, like the way betwixt Stamford and
Beechneld, and goes like a horse plunging through the mire in the
deep of winter, now soused up to the saddle, and straight aloft on
his tiptoes." It was a happy thought to satirize (in this inverted
way) prose written in the form of verse.
[267] Edmund Bolton in his _Hypercritica_ says, "The works of Sam
Daniel contained somewhat a flat, but yet withal a very pure and
copious English, and words as warrantable as any man's, and _fitter
perhaps for prose than measure_." I have italicized his second
thought, which chimes curiously with the feeling Daniel leaves in the
mind. (See Haslewood's Ancient Crit. Essays, Vol. II.) Wordsworth, an
excellent judge, much admired Daniel's poem to the Countess of
Cumberland.
[268] Mr. Hales, in the excellent memoir of the poet prefixed to the
Globe edition of his works, puts his birth a year earlier, on the
strength of a line in the sixtieth sonnet. But it is not established
that this sonnet was written in 1593, and even if it were, a sonnet
is not upon oath, and the poet would prefer the round number forty,
which suited the measure of his verse, to thirty-nine or forty-one,
which might have been truer to the measure of his days.
[269] This has been inferred from a passage in one of Gabriel
Harvey's letters to him. But it would seem more natural, from the
many allusions in Harvey's pamphlets against Nash, that it was his
own wrongs which he had in mind, and his self-absorption would take
it for granted that Spenser sympathized with him in all his grudges.
Harvey is a remarkable instance of the refining influence of
classical studies. Amid the pedantic farrago of his omni-sufficiency
(to borrow one of his own words) we come suddenly upon passages whose
gravity of sentiment, stateliness of movement, and purity of diction
remind us of Landor. These lucid intervals in his overweening vanity
explain and justify the friendship of Spenser. Yet the reiteration of
emphasis with which he insists on all the world's knowing that Nash
had called him an ass, probably gave Shakespeare the hint for one of
the most comic touches in the character of Dogberry.
[270] The late Major C. G. Halpine, in a very interesting essay,
makes it extremely probable that Rosalinde is the anagram of Rose
Daniel, sister of the poet and married to John Florio He leaves
little doubt, also, that the name of Spenser's wife (hitherto
unknown) was Elizabeth Nagle. (See "Atlantic Monthly," Vol II 674
November, 1858.) Mr. Halpine informed me that he found the substance
of his essay among the papers of his father, the late Rev. N. J.
Halpine, of Dublin. The latter published in the series of the
Shakespeare Society a sprightly little tract entitled "Oberon,"
which, if not quite convincing, is well worth reading for its
ingenuity and research.
[271] In his prose tract on Ireland, Spenser, perhaps with some
memory of Ovid in his mind, derives the Irish mainly from the
Scythians.
[272] Compare Shakespeare's LXVI. Sonnet.
[273] This poem, published in 1591, was, Spenser tells us in his
dedication, "long sithens composed in the raw conceit of my youth."
But he had evidently retouched it. The verses quoted show a firmer
hand than is generally seen in it, and we are safe in assuming that
they were added after his visit to England. Dr. Johnson
epigrammatized Spenser's indictment into
"There mark what ills the scholar's life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail,"
but I think it loses in pathos more than it gains in point.
[274] Paradiso, XI. 4-12 Spenser was familiar with the "Divina
Commedia," though I do not remember that his commentators have
pointed out his chief obligations to it.
[275] His own words as reported by Lodowick Bryskett. (Todd's
Spenser, I. lx.) The whole passage is very interesting as giving us
the only glimpse we get of the living Spenser in actual contact with
his fellow-men. It shows him to us, as we could wish to see him,
surrounded with loving respect, companionable and helpful. Bryskett
tells us that he was "perfect in the Greek tongue," and "also very
well read in philosophy both moral and natural." He encouraged
Bryskett in the study of Greek, and offered to help him in it.
Comparing the last verse of the above citation of the "Faery Queen"
with other passages in Spenser, I cannot help thinking that he wrote,
"do not love amiss."
[276]
"And know, sweet prince, when you shall come to know,
That 'tis not in the power of kings to raise
A spirit for verse that is not born thereto;
Nor are they born in every prince's days"
_Daniel's Dedic Trag. of "Philotas."_
[277] Louis XIV. is commonly supposed in some miraculous way to have
created French literature. He may more truly be said to have
petrified it so far as his influence went. The French _renaissance_
in the preceding century was produced by causes similar in essentials
to those which brought about that in England not long after. The
_grand siècle_ grew by natural processes of development out of that
which had preceded it, and which, to the impartial foreigner at
least, has more flavor, and more French flavor too, than the
Gallo-Roman usurper that pushed it from its stool. The best modern
French poetry has been forced to temper its verses in the colder
natural springs of the ante-classic period.
[278] In the Elizabethan drama the words "England" and "France" we
constantly used to signify the kings of those countries.
[279] I say supposed, for the names of his two sons, Sylvanus and
Peregrine, indicate that they were born in Ireland, and that Spenser
continued to regard it as a wilderness and his abode there as exile.
The two other children are added on the authority of a pedigree drawn
up by Sir W. Betham and cited in Mr. Hales's Life of Spenser prefixed
to the Globe edition.
[280] Ben Jonson told Drummond that one child perished in the flames.
But he was speaking after an interval of twenty-one years, and, of
course, from hearsay. Spenser's misery was exaggerated by succeeding
poets, who used him to point a moral, and from the shelter of his
tomb launched many a shaft of sarcasm at an unappreciative public.
Giles Fletcher in his "Purple Island" (a poem which reminds us of the
"Faery Queen" by the supreme tediousness of its allegory, but in
nothing else) set the example in the best verse he ever wrote:--
"Poorly, poor man, he lived; poorly, poor man, he died."
Gradually this poetical tradition established itself firmly as
authentic history. Spenser could never have been poor, except by
comparison. The whole story of his later days has a strong savor of
legend. He must have had ample warning of Tyrone's rebellion, and
would probably have sent away his wife and children to Cork, if he
did not go thither himself. I am inclined to think that he did,
carrying his papers with him, and among them the two cantos of
Mutability, first published in 1611. These, it is most likely, were
the only ones he ever completed, for, with all his abundance, he was
evidently a laborious finisher. When we remember that ten years were
given to the elaboration of the first three books, and that five more
elapsed before the next three were ready, we shall waste no vain
regrets on the six concluding books supposed to have been lost by the
carelessness of an imaginary servant on their way from Ireland.
[281] Sir Philip Sidney did not approve of this. "That same framing
of his style to an old rustic language I dare not allow, since
neither Theocritus in Greek, Virgil in Latin, nor Sannazzaro in
Italian did affect it." ("Defence of Poesy.") Ben Jonson, on the
other hand, said that Guarini "kept not decorum in making shepherds
speak as well as himself could." ("Conversations with Drummond.") I
think Sidney was right, for the poets' Arcadia is a purely ideal
world, and should be treated accordingly. But whoever looks into the
glossary appended to the "Calendar" by E.K., will be satisfied that
Spenser's object was to find unhackneyed and poetical words rather
than such as should seem more on a level with the speakers. See also
the "Epistle Dedicatory." I cannot help thinking that E.K. was
Spenser himself, with occasional interjections of Harvey. Who else
could have written such English as many passages in this Epistle?
[282] It was at Penshurst that he wrote the only specimen that has
come down to us, and bad enough it is. I have said that some of
Sidney's are pleasing.
[283] See "My Study Windows," 264 _seqq_.
[284] Of course _dillies_ and _lilies_ must be read with a slight
accentuation of the last syllable (permissible then), in order to
chime with _delice_. In the first line I have put _here_ instead of
_hether_, which (like other words where _th_ comes between two
vowels) was then very often a monosyllable, in order to throw the
accent back more strongly on _bring_, where it belongs. Spenser's
innovation lies in making his verses by ear instead of on the
finger-tips, and in valuing the stave more than any of the single
verses that compose it. This is the secret of his easy superiority to
all others in the stanza which he composed, and which bears his name.
Milton (who got more of his schooling in these matters from Spenser
than anywhere else) gave this principle a greater range, and applied
it with more various mastery. I have little doubt that the tune of
the last stanza cited above was clinging in Shakespeare's ear when he
wrote those exquisite verses in "Midsummer Night's Dream" ("I know a
bank"), where our grave pentameter is in like manner surprised into a
lyrical movement. See also the pretty song in the eclogue for August.
Ben Jonson, too, evidently caught some cadences from Spenser for his
lyrics. I need hardly say that in those eclogues (May, for example)
where Spenser thought he was imitating what wiseacres used to call
the _riding-rhyme_ of Chaucer, he fails most lamentably. He had
evidently learned to scan his master's verses better when he wrote
his "Mother Hubberd's Tale."
[285] Drummond, it will be remarked, speaking from memory, takes
Cuddy to be Colin. In Milton's "Lycidas" there are reminiscences of
this eclogue as well as of that for May. The latter are the more
evident, but I think that Spenser's
"Cuddie, the praise is better than the price,"
suggested Milton's
"But not the praise,
Phoebus replied, and touched my trembling ears."