-------------The salvage brood,
Who, having been with acorns always fed,
Can no whit cherish this celestial food;
But, with base thoughts, are unto blindness led,
And kept from looking on the lightsome day.
After these indignant effusions, Spenser in proceeding with the "Faery
Queen" tergiversated in his feelings. The poet had shadowed with some
tenderness the calamities of the Scottish Mary, in the gentle characters
of Amoret and Florizel. Yielding to political changes, the Queen of
Scots is suddenly horribly transformed into the false Duessa. For the
honour of the poet we may concede that he partook of those
party-passions which great statesmen know to raise up at will, and which
never fail to influence contemporaries. Burleigh never paused till he
laid the head of Mary on the block.[5] In the fifth book of the "Faery
Queen" the poet has exhibited the trial of this state victim, and has
made her sister-sovereign gracefully conceal tears which possibly were
never shed; but who could expect that "the rugged forehead"--him whom he
had denounced that "alive or dead" should by "the muse be ever
scorned"--should appear with all the dignity of wisdom!
The sage old Sire, that had to name
The kingdom's care, with a white silver head,
That many high regards and reasons 'gainst her read.
The poet did worse as he advanced in his work, for in the sixth book he
absolutely denies that it was his intention in any of his "former writs"
to reflect on "this mighty peer." To what "former writs" Spenser alludes
is not clear. The matchless picture of the fruitless days of a
court-expectant in "Mother Hubbard's Tale," which many of my readers may
have by heart, is supposed to have been represented to Lord Burleigh by
"backbiters" as a censure on him; it was an immortal one! and the
application was easy.
It was after the appearance of the "Faery Queen" that Elizabeth,
economical as were her bounties, sealed her delight by a permanent
pension. Was it on this occasion that the remonstrance of the prudential
Lord Treasurer diminished by half its amount? "All this for a song!"
exclaimed Burleigh. "Then give him what is reason," rejoined the Queen.
The words were remembered by the bard, but the royal command lay
neglected at the exchequer. On a progress Spenser reminded her Majesty,
by a petition, in the smallest space that ever suitor presented one, and
in a style of which it was not easy to forget a word.[6] The Lord
Treasurer got reprimanded, and the poet present payment. We cannot avoid
associating the anecdote with these lines--
To have thy Prince's grace, yet want her Peer's;
To have thy asking, yet wait many years.
We may now close with Burleigh; but much remains to be developed in the
fortunes of a court-suitor, as we trace them in the history of our
Spenser. The coldness of the Lord Treasurer may not have been the only
cause of the poet's deep and constant laments. The sojourner in the
circle of a court may be mortified not only by its repulse or its
neglect, but also by the capricious favour of his patron. A devotion of
service may provoke offence, whether it be from zeal too improvident,
from officiousness too busy, or from an ingenuousness too open. He is
thrown into a position in which he must preserve silence, and cannot
always hope for pardon.
One incident of this nature deeply affected our poet in his intercourse
with Lord Leicester. We only discover it by a remarkable dedicatory
sonnet to his translation of Virgil's "Gnat." Had the poet not decided
that the mysterious tale should reach posterity, he would not have
published the sonnet several years after it was composed, for it is
dedicated "to the deceased lord!" The poet has energetically described
the delicacy and difficulty of the position into which he had been cast.
_Wrong'd, yet not daring to express my pain_
To you, good lord! the causer of my care,
In cloudy tears my case _I thus complain
Unto yourself, that only privy are_.
But if that any Oedipus, unware,
Shall chance, through power of some divining spright,
To read _the secret of this riddle rare_,
And know the purport of my evil plight;
Let him rest pleased with his own insight,
Ne further seek to gloze upon the text;
_But grief enough it is to grieved wight,
To feel hit fault_, and not be further vext.
But what so by myself may not be shown,
May by this Gnat's complaint be easily known.
The Gnat of Virgil, observing a serpent in the act of darting on a
sleeping swain, stings the eye of the sleeper; starting at the pain, the
disturbed man crushes the gnat, but, thus awakened, he saves himself
from the crested serpent. The poem turns on the remonstrance of the
ghost of the gnat, which had no other means than by inflicting its
friendly sting to warn him of his peril who had thus hastily deprived it
of its own innocent existence. What was "the serpent," and why the poet
was hardly used as "the gnat," and why he was
Wrong'd, yet not daring to express his pain,
and yet "grieved to feel _his fault_," is "a riddle rare," supposed to
require some Oedipus of secret history to solve. The moral is obvious.
The character of the royal favourite may give rise to many suggestions;
but if I may venture a conjecture on what the parties themselves "were
only privy to," Spenser had touched on some high matter, where his
affectionate zeal, however sagacious, on this occasion hurt the pride of
Leicester--too haughty or too mortified to be lessoned by his familiar
dependant, who, like the gnat, found that his timely warning was "his
fault."
A sage of the antiquarian school imagined that he could solve the enigma
of Spenser's sorrows, by arranging, with dates and accounts of salaries,
the official situations which the poet held. To remove the odium
attached to Burleigh's prepossessions against the poet, he assumes that
without the Lord Treasurer's consent Spenser could not have received his
lands or his pensions. But the royal grant of the forfeited lands was
obviously the reward for his conduct, suggested by those under whose eye
he had served: the patronage of Sidney and the Lords Leicester and Grey
may be imagined to have greatly outweighed any cavils of Burleigh.
George Chalmers infers that all the complaints of the poet are "too
highly coloured, _if they really were complaints respecting himself_!"
and concludes that all the poet's querulousness must be ascribed, not to
Burleigh, but to the Irish rebellion. But the calamity of the Irish
rebellion occasioned no complaints from the poet--only his death! for we
have not a line by Spenser during the short interval which elapsed
between his flight from Ireland and his decease in London.
It was not by an estimate of salaries and an arrangement of dates, which
yield no result, but by a statement of feelings, in which the "secret
sorrows" of Spenser lie concealed, that we can decide on the real source
of his continued complaints. The poet must be judged by the habits of
his mind, and by those interior conflicts which are often unconnected
with those external circumstances open to common observers. Of all the
tuneful train Spenser was the most poetical in the gentlest attributes
of the poet. That robust force which the enterprise of active life
demands was not lodged in that soul of tenderness; and worldly cares,
like that cancer in the breast which the sufferer hides from others,
dejected the fancy which at all times was working ceaselessly among its
bright creations. His vein was inexhaustible, and we have lost perhaps
more than we possess of his writings. The author of "The Faery Queen"
required above all things leisure and the muse. His first steppings into
life were auspicious. To Sir Philip Sidney he had opened the first
cantos of his romantic epic; the catastrophe of that poet-hero made our
poet a mourner all his days. There was no substitute for a congenial
patron: all other patrons could be but the very statues of patronage,
cold representatives of the departed, but no longer the bosom companion
of the poet's thoughts, and the generous arbiter of his fortunes.
In his last days Spenser has not dropped even one "melodious tear;" but
he was wept by his brothers the poets, who held his pall and bestrewed
his hearse with their elegies, and beheld in the fate of their great
master their own. And thus truly, though ambiguously, Phineas Fletcher
described his destiny--
Poorly, poor man! he lived; poorly, poor man! he died.
So many living details of that golden bondage into which our poet was
thrown, from his earliest to his latter days, discover the real source
of his "secret sorrows"--his unceasing and vain solicitation at court,
the suitor of so many patrons; the _res angusta domi_ perpetually
pressed on the morbid imagination of the fortuneless man.
I know of no satire aimed at SPENSER; a singular fate for a great poet:
even "satyric Nash" revered the character of the author of "The Faery
Queen." I have often thought that among the numerous critics of SPENSER,
the truest was his keen and witty contemporary; for this town-wit has
stamped all our poet's excellences by one felicitous word--"HEAVENLY
SPENSER."