He left College in his twenty-fourth year, and stayed for a while in
Lancashire, where he had relations, and there fell in love with one he
has written of in _The Shepheards Calender_ as 'Rosalind, the widdowes
daughter of the Glenn,' though she was, for all her shepherding, as one
learns from a College friend, 'a gentlewoman of no mean house.' She
married Menalchus of the _Calender_ and Spenser lamented her for years,
in verses so full of disguise that one cannot say if his lamentations
come out of a broken heart or are but a useful movement in the elaborate
ritual of his poetry, a well-ordered incident in the mythology of his
imagination. To no English poet, perhaps to no European poet before his
day, had the natural expression of personal feeling been so impossible,
the clear vision of the lineaments of human character so difficult; no
other's head and eyes had sunk so far into the pillowy cleft. After a
year of this life he went to London, and by Harvey's advice and
introduction entered the service of the Earl of Leicester, staying for a
while in his house on the banks of the Thames; and it was there in all
likelihood that he met with the Earl's nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, still
little more than a boy, but with his head full of affairs of state. One
can imagine that it was the great Earl or Sir Philip Sidney that gave
his imagination its moral and practical turn, and one imagines him
seeking from philosophical men, who distrust instinct because it
disturbs contemplation, and from practical men who distrust everything
they cannot use in the routine of immediate events, that impulse and
method of creation that can only be learned with surety from the
technical criticism of poets, and from the excitement of some movement
in the artistic life. Marlowe and Shakespeare were still at school, and
Ben Jonson was but five years old. Sidney was doubtless the greatest
personal influence that came into Spenser's life, and it was one that
exalted moral zeal above every other faculty. The great Earl impressed
his imagination very deeply also, for the lamentation over the Earl of
Leicester's death is more than a conventional Ode to a dead patron.
Spenser's verses about men, nearly always indeed, seem to express more
of personal joy and sorrow than those about women, perhaps because he
was less deliberately a poet when he spoke of men. At the end of a long
beautiful passage he laments that unworthy men should be in the dead
Earl's place, and compares them to the fox--an unclean feeder--hiding in
the lair 'the badger swept.' The imaginer of the festivals of Kenilworth
was indeed the fit patron for him, and alike, because of the strength
and weakness of Spenser's art, one regrets that he could not have lived
always in that elaborate life, a master of ceremony to the world,
instead of being plunged into a life that but stirred him to bitterness,
as the way is with theoretical minds in the tumults of events they
cannot understand. In the winter of 1579-80 he published _The Shepheards
Calender_, a book of twelve eclogues, one for every month of the year,
and dedicated it to Sir Philip Sidney. It was full of pastoral beauty
and allegorical images of current events, revealing too that conflict
between the aesthetic and moral interests that was to run through
well-nigh all his works, and it became immediately famous. He was
rewarded with a place as private secretary to the Lord Lieutenant, Lord
Grey de Wilton, and sent to Ireland, where he spent nearly all the rest
of his life. After a few years there he bought Kilcolman Castle, which
had belonged to the rebel Earl of Desmond, and the rivers and hills
about this castle came much into his poetry. Our Irish Aubeg is 'Mulla
mine, whose waves I taught to weep,' and the Ballyvaughan Hills, it has
its rise among 'old Father Mole.' He never pictured the true countenance
of Irish scenery, for his mind turned constantly to the courts of
Elizabeth and to the umbrageous level lands, where his own race was
already seeding like a great poppy:
'Both heaven and heavenly graces do much more
(Quoth he), abound in that same land then this:
For there all happie peace and plenteous store
Conspire in one to make contented blisse.
No wayling there nor wretchednesse is heard,
No bloodie issues nor no leprosies,
No griesly famine, nor no raging sweard,
No nightly bordrags, nor no hue and cries;
The shepheards there abroad may safely lie
On hills and downes, withouten dread or daunger,
No ravenous wolves the good mans hope destroy,
Nor outlawes fell affray the forest raunger,
The learned arts do florish in great honor,
And Poets wits are had in peerlesse price.'
Nor did he ever understand the people he lived among or the historical
events that were changing all things about him. Lord Grey de Wilton had
been recalled almost immediately, but it was his policy, brought over
ready-made in his ship, that Spenser advocated throughout all his life,
equally in his long prose book _The State of Ireland_ as in the _Faerie
Queene_, where Lord Grey was Artigall and the Iron man the soldiers and
executioners by whose hands he worked. Like an hysterical patient he
drew a complicated web of inhuman logic out of the bowels of an
insufficient premise--there was no right, no law, but that of Elizabeth,
and all that opposed her opposed themselves to God, to civilisation, and
to all inherited wisdom and courtesy, and should be put to death. He
made two visits to England, celebrating one of them in _Colin Clouts
come Home againe_, to publish the first three books and the second three
books of the _Faerie Queene_ respectively, and to try for some English
office or pension. By the help of Raleigh, now his neighbour at
Kilcolman, he had been promised a pension, but was kept out of it by
Lord Burleigh, who said, 'All that for a song!' From that day Lord
Burleigh became that 'rugged forehead' of the poems, whose censure of
this or that is complained of. During the last three or four years of
his life in Ireland he married a fair woman of his neighbourhood, and
about her wrote many intolerable artificial sonnets and that most
beautiful passage in the sixth book of the _Faerie Queene_, which tells
of Colin Clout piping to the Graces and to her; and he celebrated his
marriage in the most beautiful of all his poems, the _Epithalamium_. His
genius was pictorial, and these pictures of happiness were more natural
to it than any personal pride, or joy, or sorrow. His new happiness was
very brief, and just as he was rising to something of Milton's grandeur
in the fragment that has been called _Mutabilitie_, 'the wandering
companies that keep the woods,' as he called the Irish armies, drove him
to his death. Ireland, where he saw nothing but work for the Iron man,
was in the midst of the last struggle of the old Celtic order with
England, itself about to turn bottom upward, of the passion of the
Middle Ages with the craft of the Renaissance. Seven years after
Spenser's arrival in Ireland a large merchant ship had carried off from
Loch Swilly, by a very crafty device common in those days, certain
persons of importance. Red Hugh, a boy of fifteen, and the coming head
of Tirconnell, and various heads of clans had been enticed on board the
merchant ship to drink of a fine vintage, and there made prisoners. All
but Red Hugh were released, on finding substitutes among the boys of
their kindred, and the captives were hurried to Dublin and imprisoned in
the Birmingham Tower. After four years of captivity and one attempt
that failed, Red Hugh and certain of his companions escaped into the
Dublin mountains, one dying there of cold and privation, and from that
to their own country-side. Red Hugh allied himself to Hugh O'Neil, the
most powerful of the Irish leaders--'Oh, deep, dissembling heart, born
to great weal or woe of thy country!' an English historian had cried to
him--an Oxford man too, a man of the Renaissance, and for a few years
defeated English armies and shook the power of England. The Irish,
stirred by these events, and with it maybe some rumours of _The State of
Ireland_ sticking in their stomachs, drove Spenser out of doors and
burnt his house, one of his children, as tradition has it, dying in the
fire. He fled to England, and died some three months later in January,
1599, as Ben Jonson says, 'of lack of bread.'
During the last four or five years of his life he had seen, without
knowing that he saw it, the beginning of the great Elizabethan poetical
movement. In 1598 he had pictured the Nine Muses lamenting each one
over the evil state in England, of the things that she had in charge,
but, like William Blake's more beautiful _Whether on Ida's shady brow_,
their lamentations should have been a cradle-song. When he died _Romeo
and Juliet_, _Richard III._, and _Richard II._, and the plays of Marlowe
had all been acted, and in stately houses were sung madrigals and love
songs whose like has not been in the world since. Italian influence had
strengthened the old French joy that had never died out among the upper
classes, and an art was being created for the last time in England which
had half its beauty from continually suggesting a life hardly less
beautiful than itself.