PROSE OF THE RENAISSANCE.
A great, indeed an inestimable influence in literature at this
juncture, was that of the long-forgotten Greek language, Greek poetry,
and Greek philosophy. When Erasmus, who then had little Greek, arrived
in England and visited Oxford (1499), he found there Grocyn, Linacre,
and Colet, who had acquired Greek on the continent; and, with Sir
Thomas More, were already competent classical scholars. But their Greek
learning was mainly turned into the channel of theology, the study
of the sources of Christian doctrine, the New Testament, the Greek
Fathers; and they were attracted by the philosophy of Plato which
appeared to "utter a Christian voice" much more clearly than do the
writings of the idol of the Middle Ages, Aristotle.
Greek, however, does not visibly affect the poetic literature of
England much, before the date of Spenser, about 1580. The violent times
of Henry VIII and Mary Tudor were not favourable to severe study and
exquisite appreciation of the Greek genius, a most desirable corrective
of the prolixity of mediaevalism, and of the English passion for
horrors in stage plays. To most people knowledge of the contents of the
Greek classics came through translations, and these translations, as in
the case of the historian Thucydides, were done from French versions,
while Plato was read through Italian commentators, much influenced by
Plato's disciples in early Christian times, the Neoplatonists, dreamers
of beautiful dreams concerning things that cannot be uttered.
Study produced also a very wide acquaintance with Greek
mythology--Shakespeare's humblest characters have heard of many
a Grecian fable--yet the spirit, the exquisite balance, and the
refinement of the Greek genius, hardly affected our authors. We may
detect it in More's (1478-1535) "Utopia," where the adventurers carry
with them to "Nowhere" a "pretty fardel," or parcel, of the cheap
neat Greek books printed by Aldus. The fancied State of Utopia, with
its comfortable communism and perfect freedom in religion, is derived
from the "Republic" of Plato, and in religion is more liberal than, in
his later work, "The Laws," he would have permitted it to be. But the
"Utopia," written in Latin, was meant for the learned.
Though the "Utopia" was published in 1516, and became famous in Europe,
it did not reach unlearned English readers till an English translation,
by Ralph Robynson, appeared in 1551. They now had More's eloquent
advocacy of communism before them as regulated in his imaginary state,
with a Six Hours' Day, universal training of men and women for war,
and habit of assassinating the leaders of hostile nations. There is
tolerance of all religions which accept a deity and the immortality of
the soul: atheists are disqualified for public offices.
In his English works on religious and social controversy, which are
little read, More is not only a Catholic and a Conservative, but
in discussion is given to abusive and violent language which would
have horrified the courteous Plato, the urbane Aristotle, and that
model of a devout and ardent student, and perfect gentleman, Pico
della Mirandola, whose Life More gave in English. On both sides the
controversialists of the Reformation delighted in violent personal
abuse, in some Greek orators they found examples of that art. The first
effect of Greek in England, by producing a new Biblical criticism and
an attack on the foundations of the mediaeval Church, was to "bring not
peace but a sword," the wars of religion.
Elyot.
No man did more for the intelligence of Greek than Sir Thomas Elyot
(1499 1546)1 author of "The Governour," a long treatise, on the
education of a gentleman, and on the nature of forms of government.
Elyot bubbles over with Greek, and translates such passages of Homer as
he quotes into English verse, the alternate lines rhyming. He is of
the Greek opinion that a gentleman should be taught, if he has a taste
for art, to draw, paint, and execute works in sculpture, not as a base
professional artist, but as an amateur.[1] Elyot would have a boy, at 7
years old, begin with Greek, learning it through Latin, which he picks
up, with French, in conversation. Grammars of Greek are now almost
innumerable. Grammar, he says with much truth, "if it be made too long
and exquisite to the learner, in a manner mortifieth his courage. And
by that time he cometh to the most sweet and pleasant reading of old
authors, the spark of fervent desire of learning is soon quenched
with the burden of grammar." Elyot would start his pupil as early as
possible with what will interest a child, Æsop's Fables in Greek, and
then pass to Lucian, who is amusing as well as elegant. "But I fear me
to be too long from noble Homer, from whom as from a fountain proceeded
all eloquence and learning." Throughout, Elyot wishes first to interest
the pupil; but where, he asks, is he to find qualified schoolmasters?
They were as cruel as in the days of St. Augustine, and while Elyot's
system of education, in sports as well as in books, is free and joyous,
like that of Gargantua in Rabelais, little boys were suffering the
horrors described by Agrippa d'Aubigné in his Memoirs. Elyot translated
works of Isocrates, Plutarch, and others, wrote a medical work "The
Castle of Health," was clerk of the Privy Council, and went on various
diplomatic missions. Elyot was not a professional instructor of youth:
he was, it seems, educated privately, and of neither university;
what pleases us in him is his unstaled zest for learning, his fresh
enthusiasm.
The best English of the age and the most durable is that of Thomas
Cranmer (1489-1556) as we read it in the Liturgy of the Church of
England, while much of the merit of King James's Authorized Version
of the Bible rests on the foundation of Miles Coverdale's translation
(1488-1568). How easy it is to translate the Bible into English which
is not a marvel of diction and rhythm, we are too frequently reminded
by the Revised Version.
Ascham.
Roger Ascham (1515-1568) was a Yorkshire man of the middle classes,
who lived by his learning, and did not find that it paid him as well
as he wished. Going early to St. John's College, Cambridge, he was a
pupil of the famous Sir John Cheke, who introduced the English way
of pronouncing Greek. It is certainly wrong--no people pronounce
the vowels as we do; but if Cheke resisted the pronunciation of the
modern Greeks, perhaps he is not much to be blamed. Ascham obtained
a Fellowship and a Readership in Greek, the Fellowship he lost when
he married: he did not long retain his tutorship to the Princess
Elizabeth; as secretary to an ambassador in Germany he continued
to teach Greek to his chief; and in his letters, Latin or English,
we find him often in straits for money and begging for assistance.
Camden, writing under James I, says that he lost money at dicing, and
in his attack on gambling, in his "Toxophilus," a dialogue on Archery
(1545), Ascham shows a rather unholy knowledge of all the tricks on the
dice-board. Probably he had paid for his education. He contemplated a
work on the noble sport of cock fighting, on which, of course, there
was betting, and perhaps Ascham was not in all respects so severe a
Puritan as in his unworthy attacks on that noblest of romances, "The
Morte d'Arthur". Sir Lancelot is a better gentleman than many who were
to be met at a cock fight. Ascham had little sympathy with the Italian
influences that were so potent in Elizabethan literature. Italy was
certainly profligate and luxurious,
An Englishman that is Italianate
Doth quickly prove a devil incarnate,
was an English translation of an Italian proverb. Ascham, like his
contemporaries, was nothing if not patriotic. The bow of yew and the
grey goose shaft had won many a victory over Scots and French, as in
"Toxophilus," Ascham reminds these peoples; therefore he desired that
archery should be universally practised. But the harquebus, a musket
lighter than the heavy hand gun of the fifteenth century, was already,
in disciplined hands, more than a match for the bow.
"Toxophilus," to our age, appears pedantic. We have endless classical
examples, and learn that the Trojans drew the bow-string only to the
breast, not the ear (which is true), while they used iron arrow-heads
as against the bronze arrow-heads of the Greeks, a fact not so certain.
When he does come to practice, Ascham's teaching in archery is reckoned
sound and good. His ideas are summed up in the prayer that the English
Through Christ, King Henry, the Book, and the Bow
May all manner of enemies quite overthrow.
In writing English, Ascham was all for plain English. Foreign words
Anglicized make such a mixture "as if you put malmsey and sack, red
wine and white, ale and beer, all in one pot". Yet he advocates in
his "School Master," published after his death, a yet more unhallowed
blend, the use of Greek measures in English verse. "Our English tongue
in avoiding barbarous _rhyming_ may as well receive right _quantity_ of
syllables as either Greek or Latin." (He means "quantity" as opposed
to accent, as if one said car_pen_ter.) As an example he quotes Mr.
Watson's rendering of the third line of the "Odyssey" into two English
hexameters
All travellers do gladly report great praise of Ulysses,
For that he knew many men's manners and saw many cities.
Obviously if we are to say "men's man_ners_," making "man" in "manners"
long, we must not make "vellers" in "travellers" short, as Mr. Watson
does. We are reduced to
Gladly report great praise of Ulysses do the tra_vellers._
This absurd manner of imitating Greek measures in English was
upheld, twenty years later, by Gabriel Harvey, who, for a moment,
nearly corrupted the practice of Spenser, the most naturally
musical of poets. Ascham's own prose style is unaffected, not
corrupted by eccentricities, but not harmonious. A new perfection,
a false perfection, was to be sought later, through the antitheses,
alliterations, and pedantic wit of Lyly's "Euphues!"
Lyly's Euphues.
The prose of Ascham was clear and was plain, disdaining decoration and
far-fetched gorgeous phrases. But for the gorgeous and the exotic, the
taste of the Elizabethan Age was pronounced, as we see in the strange
over-gaudy costumes of the period, the various ruffs, the jewelled
velvets and silks, worn by men and women. A like dressing for thoughts
was demanded, and the supply was provided by John Lyly, whose plays are
to be mentioned later. Lyly was born a Kentish man (1554?); Magdalen,
in Oxford, was his college; his plays, acted by the boys of the Chapel
Royal and St. Paul's, are of 1584-1594. But he made his mark earlier,
as a prose writer, in his "Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit" (1579), and
the sequel, "Euphues and his England" (1580). The style became a
fashion, a fashion which affected even those who, like Sidney, were in
would-be revolt against it. Lyly, like all writers of the periods just
before and after him, was copious in classical allusions. He was not
the first to hunt in all directions, especially in fictitious natural
history, for similes, and needless decorations; but he hunted further
and more assiduously: emphatically his style is that of the unresting
Bird of Paradise. Every sentence is a thing bristling with points and
antitheses and alliterations. The first part of the book was a kind
of novel; two friends, at Naples, woo the same woman, quarrel, write
long letters, and the question of education, in the wide sense in which
the Renaissance understood education, is always prominent. There is
endless conversation and discussion of life, love, and learning, always
in the same style of fantastic decoration and allusion: all continued
when Euphues arrives in England, all conveying general information not
verified by experiment. "I have read that the bull, being tied to a fig
tree, loseth his strength; that a whole herd of deer stand at the gaze
if they smell a sweet apple"; facts on which the cattle-breeder or the
hunter would not, if well advised, rely. This was the kind of science
against which Bacon uprose. But Lyly appealed, in his Dedication, and
with success, "To the Ladies and Gentlewomen of England," who found in
the book a kind of love-story, much philosophizing on that dear theme;
and a pleasurable example of a new way of being witty and romantic.
Lyly was the chief cause of the difficulty in telling a plain tale
plainly which besets the minor writers of the age of Elizabeth.
Before approaching the chief prose writers of Elizabeth's time, we must
turn aside to her greatest poet, and his friend, to Spenser and Sir
Philip Sidney, and to the Drama.
Sidney.
Spenser did not more surely attain immortality by his verse than Sir
Philip Sidney (1554-1586) by his life, writings, and character. He was
one of those who, as Plato says, are born good, exemplars of natural
charm and excellence. He is the ideal gentleman of the type which
Spenser professed to educate by the examples of his virtuous knights,
brave, pious, courteous, and just. The son of Sir Henry Sidney and
nephew of Elizabeth's Leicester, Philip Sidney was born into the Court,
but was not of it; his heart was set on other things than pleasure,
splendour, flattery, and promotion. Educated at Shrewsbury School,
he went to Christ Church at 14, being already the friend of the noble
Fulke Greville, who, however, went from Shrewsbury to Cambridge. In
1572 he was attached to the English embassy in France, and, on the
night of the Bartholomew massacre was sheltered in the house of his
future father-in-law, Walsingham. Till 1575 he travelled, chiefly
in Germany, and made the acquaintance of his constant correspondent
and adviser, Languet, whom he celebrates as a shepherd of the Ister,
and as his own religious Mentor. In Venice his portrait was painted
by Veronese; at Vienna he perfected himself in horsemanship under
Pugliano, whose enthusiasm he describes so amusingly in his "Defence
of Poesie". For a man so earnest as Sidney was, he had a fine sense of
humour.
Returning to England in 1575, he, like Gascoigne, was with Elizabeth
at the famous pastimes at Kenilworth, now best known through Scott's
novel, "Kenilworth". Afterwards, at the house of the Earl of Essex, he
met the Earl's daughter, Penelope, later Lady Rich, the Stella of his
sonnets. Essex desired their marriage, but fate decided otherwise. In
1577 Sidney went, a young diplomatist, to the Emperor and the German
Princes, and later, was obliged to attend the Court, while his mind was
set on adventures beyond the Atlantic; on failing in that, he trifled
with the idea of introducing Greek metres into English poetry. In 1579,
he quarrelled with the Earl of Oxford in the tennis court. A duel was
not permitted, but as Sidney also gave Elizabeth his opinion about her
distasteful flirtation with the odious Duc d'Anjou, the worst of the
bad Valois Princes, he retired to Wilton, the house of his sister, Lady
Pembroke, and there wrote the pastoral romance, "Arcadia".
He was recalled to Court, sat in Parliament for Kent, and in 1583
parried a daughter of Walsingham. He was forbidden to join Drake's
American expedition of 1585, in fact he was always thwarted in his
desire for action and for such deeds of chivalry as the conditions of
his age permitted--they leaned somewhat to piracy and filibustering. At
length, as Governor of Flushing, while Leicester commanded the forces
engaged against Spain in the Low Countries, he fell in a cavalry charge
against a superior force at Zutphen. His leg was broken by a musket
bullet from the Spanish trenches: it was now that he handed the cup of
water that was at his lips to the soldier whose need was greater than
his. He lingered for some weeks, and died on 17 October, 1586.
The beautiful character of Sidney cannot be more strongly attested
than by the agony of grief exhibited, at his death, by the handsome
and wicked Master of Gray. He was about to be sent on the Scottish
embassy to plead for the life of Mary Stuart, while his desire was to
be fighting under Sidney's banner. He expresses, in a touching letter,
the sudden revulsion of his nature from his wonted treacheries; and,
contrary to the falsehood of tradition, he did not betray, but, to his
own loss, did his best to save the Queen whose cause he had previously
deserted.
As a poet, Sidney, whose works were all published after his death,
is best remembered for the sonnets of Astrophel to Stella, Lady
Rich. There is a controversy as to whether these are mere exercises
in gallant but "platonic" love-verse, or whether they reveal a true
passion, as Charles Lamb maintained. The sonnet in which he says that
he has found his fortune too late, and has lost what he had unwittingly
won,
O punisht eyes
That I had been more foolish or more wise,
seems to set forth a truly tragic situation. Perhaps only poets can be
the critics in such a case as this of Sidney.
The sonnets vary much in poetic value; some are written in
Alexandrines, a metre not consonant with the traditions of the English
Muse.
_Sidney's_ "_Defence of Poesie._"
Readers who fail to find brilliant merit in English literary poetry
between Chaucer and Spenser may not be ill-pleased to note that Sir
Philip Sidney was strong on their side. Acquainted as he was with
the poetry of Greece, Rome, Italy, and France, he could see nothing
to admire in the efforts and experiments of such writers as Occleve,
Lydgate, Hawes, Googe, Churchyard, and Turbervile. His "Defence of
Poesie" (or, according to the title of the first edition (1595), his
"Apologie for Poesie") was elicited by the unauthorized dedication
to himself of Stephen Gosson's "School of Abuse". Gosson was a young
Oxford man who had tried his hand as a playwright, and been disgusted,
he says, by the disorders of the playhouses, where his comedy and
morality may have been hooted. He therefore tried to make himself
notorious, or he expressed his penitence, by assailing poets who deal
in the silly conceits of Lyly's "Euphues".
"The scarab flies over many a sweet flower and lights in a cow-shard...
it is the manner of swine to forsake the fair fields and wallow in
the mire: and the whole practice of poets, either with fables to show
their abuses, or with plain terms to unfold their mischief, discover
their shame, discredit themselves, and disperse their poison through
the world". Gosson chooses Virgil as one of his terrible examples, and
whether he is a genuine or a hypocritical puritan, or a mere fribble
in search of notoriety, he made a mistake when he thought to find a
patron or a butt in Sidney, who does not advertise Gosson's name in the
"Defence of Poesie".
After a general defence of poetry furnished with precedents drawn from
every quarter, even from the respect paid to their minstrels by the
Irish, Sidney defines the final end of poetry as being "to lead and
draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse
by their clay lodgings, can be capable of...." If poetry does not
always attain this end, "it is not the fault of the art, but that by
few men that art can be accomplished". He quotes Aristotle's "Poetics"
to the effect that poetry is more philosophical and more serious than
philosophy. Nothing in history is so noble but that "the poet may, if
he list, make it his own, beautifying it both for further teaching, and
more delighting, as it please him, having all, from Dante's heaven to
his hell, under the authority of his pen". Here Sidney seems to differ
from Scott, who regarded some examples of human fortunes, for example
in the case of Mary Stuart, as beyond the range of the poetic art. But
Sidney, foreseeing the objection, adds, "I speak of the art, not of the
artificer". Sidney then discusses the various Kinds of poetry. As to
the Comedy, "naughty play-makers and stage-keepers have made it justly
odious,"--so far he sides with the Puritans of his time. In speaking
of the lyric, he says: "I must confess mine own barbarousness; I never
heard the old song of Percy and Douglas" ("Chevy Chase"), "that I found
not my heart moved more than with a trumpet". Indeed the true spirit
of poetry did dwell, disregarded by wits and courtiers, in the popular
poetry and the ballads. But poetry, he knows not why, finds, in our
time, a hard welcome in England: "I think the very earth laments it,
and therefore decks our soil with fewer laurels than it was accustomed,
for heretofore poets have in England also flourished". If poets are
not esteemed it is because they do not deserve esteem, for we are
"taking upon us to be poets in despite of Pallas," _invita Minerva._
Our would-be poets are destitute of genius--which was very true.
"Chaucer undoubtedly did excellently in his 'Troilus and Cressida': of
whom truly I know not whether to marvel more either that he, in that
misty time, could see so clearly, or that we, in this clear age, go so
stumblingly after him."
What ailed Sidney's age was lack of terseness and clearness. Most
poets did not know what they would be at; they were confused by the
tumult of religion, the loss of old ideals, the language in transition,
the tyranny of the misunderstood classics, the constant effort to
imitate Greece, Rome, France, and Italy. They could not yet see life
and literature steadily, and see them whole. Sidney found little that
"had poetical sinews," except in Chaucer; parts of "The Mirror for
Magistrates," the Earl of Surrey's lyrics, and Spenser's "'Shepherd's
Calendar' hath much poetry in his 'Eclogues,' indeed worthy the
reading, if. I be not deceived. That same framing of his style to an
old rustic language I cannot allow..."
Sidney then banters the absurdities of the lawless stage, of the
alliterative writers, of the seekers after unnatural history, like Lyly
in his "Euphues," and of the love poets. "If I were a mistress never
would they persuade me that they were in love, so coldly they apply
fiery speeches," "swelling phrases" learned from books.
It was poetry, not the English poets of his age, that Sidney defended,
and he might well marvel at our modern zeal which devotes time and
scholarship to a chaos of tentative experiments by men who wished to be
poets without possessing the poetic genius.
Sidney's best poems and his "Defence of Poesie" retain their freshness;
but that book of his which was most popular suffers from the changes
of time and taste. At most periods prose fiction is more welcome to
human nature than poetry or criticism. Sidney's book "The Countess
of Pembroke's Arcadia," is a novel, written by the author at Wilton,
when, as we saw, he was neither in favour at Court nor permitted to
risk himself in adventures on sea or land. The book was to Sidney what
"The Faery Queen" was to Spenser, a wilderness of delights of his own
creation, a retreat into a world of fantasy. He wrote it in sheets
read, or sent as soon as finished, to his sister, the Countess of
Pembroke; the book was meant for her, not for the world. Not long after
his death, an unauthorized copy was published (1590), and unauthorized
edition followed, and the general delight in the romance is attested by
its constant reissues.
The author did not construct any regular plot, he allowed his fancy
to wander among the shipwrecks and piratical adventures of the late
Greek romances; and in an Arcadia which never existed, and a Laconia
most unhistorical. But the high and chivalrous ideals of the author,
in his rural prose idylls, as in his battles and combats; the truth
and constancy of his lovers; the beauty of his descriptions, made this
mixture of the Spanish heroic romances that infatuated Don Quixote with
the Arcadian pastorals, the delight of four generations. Milton blamed
the captive Charles I for copying the beautiful and appropriate prayer
of the captive Pamela, long after Shakespeare had interwoven with the
story of King Lear, Sidney's tale of the blind King of Paphlagonia.
In its new mode "The Arcadia" was to four generations what Malory's
"Morte Arthur" had been in its day. As late as 1660, we find Sir
George Mackenzie imitating the "Arcadia" in his heroic and historic
romance, "Aretina," where Argyll and Montrose play their parts. Indeed
the "Arcadia" was a fruitful parent of the interminable heroic French
romances which Major Bellenden laughs at in "Old Mortality," and from
which Scott did not disdain to borrow a description in "Ivanhoe". It
is indeed curious to compare Sidney's description of an Amazon (Book
I, Chap, XII.) with an actual representation of a genuine Amazon by a
Hittite artist, discovered on the stone work of a gate at Boghaz Keui.
That lady-warrior wears a corslet of scale armour, while Sidney's has
a doublet of sky-coloured satin, covered with plates of gold. Her feet
are shod in crimson velvet buskins, while the massive legs of the
real Amazon are naked. The contrast of fact and fancy are violent,
of course, throughout the romance. The style is less conceited than
that of "Euphues," and is always noble, but the long sentences and
overabundance of parentheses are not in accordance with modern taste.
The profusion of love-passages and of martial adventures, "with notable
images of virtues, vices, or what else," and the poetic if uncurbed
fancies, were what the world demanded from a novel, and what Sidney
gave in the Arcadia, with many lyrics, and imitations of the amœbean
verse of the shepherds of Theocritus.
Spenser.
After two centuries of verse that was tuneless or tentative, the second
great English poet came, Edmund Spenser (1552?-1599). We know from his
"Prothalamion" that Spenser was born in London--
my most kyndly Nurse,
That to me gave this Lifes first native sourse,
Though from another place I take my name,
An house of auncient fame--
that is, the House of the Spencers of Althorp who are in the ancestry
of the Duke of Marlborough's Churchills.
Spenser was certainly their kinsman, in what degree is unknown, but his
own family must have been poor. He was educated at Merchant Taylors'
School, was aided by the munificent Robert Nowell, and obtained a
Sizarship (corresponding to the old Oxford servitorship), at Pembroke
Hall, Cambridge (1569). Here he made two friends, Gabriel Harvey, a
true friend, if a rather pedantic don (the Hobbinol of his "Shepherd's
Calendar"), and E. Kirke, the E. K. who furnished the notes explanatory
of old English words in that poem. Spenser also gained the good graces
of Grindal, then Bishop of London, later Primate, a puritan, who fell
into Elizabeth's disgrace, and is applauded as Algrind by Spenser in
the "Shepherd's Calendar".
Spenser's youth was passed in an England disturbed by the claims of the
captive Mary Stuart to the Crown; by the rebellion of her adherents
in the North; by the papal excommunication of Elizabeth, and by the
pretensions of the extreme puritan exiles who, driven abroad by the
Marian persecution, had imbibed at Geneva the doctrines of Calvin.
In their attacks on the English Bishops they out-wearied even the
successors of Calvin in Geneva, who regarded them as men not to be
satisfied by any concessions; "a sect of perilous consequence who
would have no king but a presbytery," said Elizabeth. Here were all
the elements which caused Elizabeth's cruel persecution of Catholics,
the long struggle of the puritans under Elizabeth and James I, the
wars under Charles I, and the strife with Spain and Catholic Ireland.
In the words of James VI, it was "a world-wolter," and Spenser, as
a poor young man, eager to make his fortune, had to swim as best he
might in the cross-currents of this troublesome world. He never enjoyed
the peaceful leisure of a Tennyson or a Wordsworth; he had to play an
active part in strenuous and most unhappy affairs.
His nature, too, was divided. With all his love of pleasure and of
beauty he leaned, though not virulently, towards the puritan party,
and, as a good patriot, loathed and detested Rome.
It is probable that, when a freshman at the age of 17, he contributed
to a Miscellany, Van der Noodt's "Theatre of Worldlings" (1569),
translations in blank verse of certain sonnets of the French poet
Joachim du Bellay, and of Petrarch. These, re-cast into the form of
sonnets, recur in a volume of Spenser's, of 1591.
After taking his Master's degree (1576) Spenser visited Lancashire,
and if his words as Colin Clout in the "Shepherd's Calendar" be
autobiographical, lost his heart to a lady whom he calls Rosalind,
"the widow's daughter of the glen". According to Gabriel Harvey she
"christened him her _Signior Pegaso_," though neither his poetry nor
his wooing won her from her cruelty. Many years later he still writes
of her with chivalrous affection, so, like Scott, he had his heart
broken and cleverly pieced again.
By 1579 Spenser was in London, a literary retainer or _protégé_ of
Elizabeth's favourite, the Earl of Leicester; while he also enjoyed
the friendship of Leicester's nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, the Flower of
Chivalry, himself a poet, and the best beloved man of his time. Now
(1579) Spenser published, and dedicated to Sidney, his "Shepherd's
Calendar," a set of twelve eclogues or pastoral poems, one for
each month. The pastoral had wandered far from the rural beauty of
Theocritus, and, in the hands of Mantuan and Clement Marot, had become
a vehicle for allegory, and even of Protestant argumentation. Spenser
does not stray far into party and puritanic politics, but they are not
unknown to his shepherds. In January, as Colin Clout, he bewails the
coldness of Rosalind,
She laughs the songs that Colin Clout doth make,
which is carrying cruelty very far. February is occupied with a rustic
dispute between youth and age: the metre is one of the measures of the
"Lay of the Last Minstrel":--
Who will not suffer the stormy time,
Where will he live tyll the lustry prime?
(_Shepherd's Calendar_, Feb., 11. 15, 16.)
They burn'd the chapel for very rage
And cursed Lord Cranstoun's Goblin-page.
(_Lay of the Last Minstrel_, C. II., Stanza, 33).
March, with the dialogue of Willie and Thomalin about the strange
bird, Love, is adapted from the Greek of Bion in a most pleasant
manner, and April contains a melodious song of fair Eliza, a Maiden
Queen; which probably procured Spenser's presentation to Elizabeth.
The great variety of melodious verse of which Spenser was already a
perfect master is, for us, perhaps the chief merit of his pastorals.
Through life Spenser keeps up the shepherd's mask, and Raleigh, in his
verse, is "The Shepherd of Ocean". The rival Protestant and Catholic
clergy also appear as shepherds, good or bad, while in another eclogue
the perfect poet, Cuddie, complains, like Theocritus, of public
indifference, and is advised to sing of redoubted knights: and, indeed,
Spenser had already conceived the idea of his knightly romantic poem
"The Faery Queen," and was ambitious to excel his model, Ariosto. In
this Harvey discouraged him; "Hobgoblin" must not "run away with the
garland from Apollo".
Fortunately Spenser followed his own genius, and, though he dallied
with the fashion for wedding Greek measures to English words, as in the
English hexameters of Watson and Harvey, he dropped many projects at
which he had glanced, and was constant to his "Faery Queen".
The manuscript of that great poem must have been the companion of
Spenser in many strange wanderings,
In savage soil far from Parnassus Mount,
as he says. He was attached, as we have seen, in 1578, to the household
of Leicester, and may have gone on a mission of his to France. To
be patronized by Leicester was to risk incurring the enmity of
Burleigh. The long rivalry between Elizabeth's brilliant and wavering
favourite--who once so nearly brought her into a plight almost as bad
as that of Mary Stuart--and her sagacious counsellor, Sir William
Cecil (Lord Burleigh)--who now and again saved his Queen "as by
fire"--might have furnished Spenser with a high theme for a poetic
allegory. But chance had made him Leicester's man, not Burleigh's man,
so that he never won the fortune for which he sought. Who, indeed,
would seek fortune in Ireland? Spenser did, accompanying Lord Grey of
Wilton to an isle more than commonly distressful.
To the natural hatred between the Irish and their English invaders was
now added the fury of religious rancour. Rebellion after rebellion was
punished by horrible reprisals. Lord Grey is notorious for his massacre
of six hundred disarmed Italian and Spanish filibusters at Smerwick
(November, 1580), and the poet of the "Faery Queen" was present at
this abominable deed. It was neither without precedent nor imitation.
Seventy years later David Leslie, urged on by a preacher, massacred
the remnant of Montrose's Irish contingent at Dunaverty. Spenser
himself in his most Interesting "View of the Present State of Ireland"
says concerning the foreign prisoners, "there was no other way but
to make that short way with them which was made". He defends Grey's
ruthless policy; he had made Ireland "ready for reformation" when he
was recalled, on the charge of being "a bloody man" who had left the
country in ashes (1582). Grey was pursued by the clamour of a horrified
people, that is, he was Spenser's Sir Arthegal, molested by the Blatant
Beast, the public. The idea of the public is a Blatant Beast is
borrowed from Plato.
It was in the service of Grey, and in a land laid waste, that Spenser,
acting as Grey's secretary during the horrors of the war in Munster,
wrote part of the "Faery Queen". He held public posts, was Clerk of
Decrees, and Clerk of the Council of Munster, he received 3000 acres of
land, and a ruinous castle of the Desmond family, Kilcolman, between
Mallow and Limerick (1586).
Unhappy was his fortune, but, in absence from London, he had the
advantage of being beyond the influences of the critical literary
society of the capital with its reviews in form of pamphlets, its
satires, jealousies, and quarrels. There is a record of a conversation
of 1584 (published in 1606) in which Spenser described to his friends
the aim and scope of the "Faery Queen". Each virtue was to be
incarnate in a knight, whose adventures should teach it by example.
In a letter to Raleigh, whom he met in Ireland, Spenser says that
Prince Arthur (as in the first Canto) is to be a perfect exemplar
of "the twelve private virtues". The Faery Queen herself is, first,
Glory in general and next Gloriana, the royal and "most virtuous and
beautiful" Queen Elizabeth, who also appears as Belphœbe. He is to
begin in the middle, before telling how knights, ladies, dwarfs, and a
palmer bearing an infant with bloody hands came seeking adventures to a
festival of the Faery Queen. "Many other adventures are intermeddled."
The "Faery Queen" is not, and does not aim at being an epic. It is
without beginning, middle, or end, for the last six books were not
written, or the manuscript perished when Spenser was driven from
Kilcolman.
The original scheme is that of the "Morte d'Arthur," moralized, and
intermingled with allegory. The poem is an allegorical romance adapted
to the state of England, Ireland, and the Continent under Elizabeth,
and to the war of the Reformation against the dragon of Rome and the
Scarlet Woman of the Seven Hills, the seeming fair and inwardly filthy
Duessa, who is occasionally meant for Mary Stuart. Such unity as the
poem possesses is given by the conflict of Good, as Spenser understood
it, against Evil, private and public, the vices, and the Church of
Rome. The Red Cross Knight wears the armour which St. Paul describes,
and in which Bunyan equipped Christian and Greatheart.
There are people, says Spenser, who prefer to have Virtue "sermoned
at large, as they use". But while Spenser insists on being taken as
a moral preacher in his way, his true ideal is Beauty, and it is
the gleam of Beauty that he follows as he wanders with knights and
ladies through enchanted forests, and "awtres dire". Like the knights
in the "Morte d'Arthur" he "rides at adventure"; in every page a new
adventure opens, and leads to others endlessly, through conflicts
with Saracens,--_Sansfoy, Sansloy, Sansjoy_,--with the wily Magician,
Archimage, and his glamour; with Despair, in a wonderful passage;
with dragons and dragonettes, with Acrasia and all the charms of her
abode of wanton bliss, which is depicted with great enthusiasm (Book
II, Canto XII). This canto is remote indeed from the puritan taste,
despite its moral ending
Let Gryll be Gryll, and have his hoggish mind,
But let us hence depart, whilst weather serves and wind.
The whole is derived, in the last resort, from the palace of Circe
in the Tenth book of the "Odyssey," and it is curious to compare the
severe and classic charm of the Greek with the boundless luxury of the
Italian Renaissance in Spenser.
The "Faery Queen," indeed, despite the moral intention, which is
perfectly sincere, is the very Lotusland of poetry. It is a garden of
endless varieties of delight, endless but not prolix, for there is a
perpetual change of scene and of characters and nothing is constant but
the long and ever-varying music of the verse, Spenser's own measure, in
which each stanza is a poem, while the strong stream of melody carries
the half-dreaming reader down the enchanted river, and forth into the
fairy seas.
The Spenserian measure with the Alexandrine that ends the stanza may
not be the best vehicle for narrative. But Spenser's stream does flow
from the mountains of Lotusland, and the air of Lotusland occasionally
lulls the vigilance of the poet as well as of the the reader. The
stanza (Book VI, Canto X) which opens
One day, as they all three together went
To the greene wood to gather strawberries,
There chaunst to them'a dangerous accident:
A Tigre forth out of the wood did rise,
narrates an accident as unexpected as dangerous! We cannot but be
reminded of the "Swiss Family Robinson," and when Spenser makes Sir
Calidore kill the tiger and cut off its head with a shepherd's crook,
he is plainly overcome by "drowsihead".[2]
It is true that Spenser soon lost hold of his main allegory, and
allegorized the moving events and some of the personages of his time.
The gods, in Euripides, make a false Helen of clouds and sunbeams and
for her the Trojans and Achæans war and die. So, in Spenser's poem, the
witch makes a false Florimel of snow, informed by "a wicked spright"
with burning eyes for the destruction of mankind, and the false
Florimel is another form of the white witch, Mary Stuart. The affairs
of Ireland, France, "Belge," and Spain appear in knightly or magical
disguise in the procession of dissolving views; a pageant of the rivers
of Ireland and England anticipates Drayton's "Polyolbion": the romance
becomes, like "Piers Plowman," a farrago of all that is in the poet's
mind.
Of Spenser, Ben Jonson might have said, as of Shakespeare,
_Sufflaminandus erat_, "he needed to have the drag put on". Like Pindar
in youth, "he sowed from the sack, not from the hand". His archaic
words and unsuccessful imitations of archaic words annoyed the critics
of his time more than they vex us. If he "writ no language," "writ the
language of no time," as Ben Jonson said, the "Iliad" and "Odyssey,"
too, are in the language of no time, represent no one dialect that ever
was actually spoken. But Spenser was writing about no actual time: his
own age is confused with the fairy age of chivalry, and the ages of
the "Morte d'Arthur," and of Greek mythology. With Spenser we are "out
of space, out of time," and of his adoration of Chaucer, his ancient
words keep us in mind. That great and noble effort towards perfection,
the spirit of chivalry, was his ideal; and in Sir Philip he saw the
last of the gentle and perfect knights. To the flattery of Elizabeth we
must submit: she needed it all if to her subjects she was to, stand for
England and their love of England.
Spenser's blemishes are of his age; no pure and perfect work of
immaculate art could arise in a poetry which was only emerging from
a kind of chaos, too much learning being the successor of too much
ignorance, and a divine genius being left at large with no control from
sane and temperate criticism.
Somewhat eclipsed by the new star of Elizabeth's fresh favourite,
Essex, Raleigh visited his Irish lands in 1589, met Spenser, read the
"Faery Queen" in manuscript, and brought "Colin Clout Home again".
The poem of that name (1591) while full of sugared compliments to
Elizabeth, is also touched with satire of her new courtiers. Sidney was
dead, Leicester was dead, Burleigh "hated poetry and painting". The
first part of the "Faery Queen" (1590) had made Spenser famous, but
had won him no prize of Court favour save a small pension.
His "Mother Hubberd's Tale of the Ape and the Fox" may have been
written earlier and now was published; in this the satire is much more
keen; the poet finds even "the Comic Stage defaced and vulgarized, in
his 'Tears of the Muses,' where "our pleasant Willy that is dead of
late," cannot conceivably be Shakespeare--the silence of John Lyly may
be intended.
When Spenser returned to Ireland a collection of his miscellaneous
poems was published, containing, among other things, "Mother Hubberd's
Tale," "The Tears of the Muses," "The Ruines of Rome" (sonnets from the
French of Joachim du Bellay).
The "Ruines of Time," dedicated to "Sidney's sister, Pembroke's
mother," Lady Pembroke, begins with a vision of the genius of the
ruined Roman city, Verulam, and in a far-off way reminds us of the
Anglo-Saxon poem on the Ruined City. There is a lament for the fall of
ancient empires, and the sorrows of the House of Dudley.
Spenser's mood was that of melancholy and disappointment, presently
cheered by his marriage with Elizabeth Boyle. From his love came his
sonnets, and his matchless "Epithalamion," his "love-learned song".
If the "Faery Queen," and all else that Spenser did were lost, the
"Epithalamion" and the "Prothalamion" would win for him the crown of
the chief of English poets before Shakespeare. The marriage occurred
in June, 1594: then troubles with the Irish whom he had supplanted,
or some other cause, sent him to England, with the last three books
of his romance. The affair of Duessa's treatment caused James VI
to remonstrate through Bower, the English ambassador to Holyrood,
and though the poet was not punished, his designs may not have been
advanced. He now published his Hymns to Love and Beauty, Earthly
and Heavenly, the latter under the influence of Plato, and his
"Prothalamion" for the Ladies Elizabeth and Katherine Somerset. These
splendid poems were his swan-song; Ireland called him, and in October,
1598, the natives whom he had despoiled drove him from Kilcolman, which
they burned. Spenser died, a ruined man, in Westminster (16 January,
1599), Essex paid for his funeral, he lies in Westminster Abbey.
As Hephæstus, when he fashioned the arms of Achilles, melted bronze
and gold and silver in his furnace, so Spenser combined the wealth of
Greece and Italy, France, Rome, and England in the great crucible of
his genius. In the "Epithalamium," for example, we find a translation
of four lines from a sonnet of Ronsard, mingling with notes from
Theocritus and the Song of Songs, with all the beautiful things of
all the creeds. It would, perhaps, be unfair to call the style of
Spenser, as it appears in the "Faery Queen," "Corinthian". Yet the
metal in which he works is like that "Corinthian bronze" formed, at the
conflagration of the city, from the molten gold and silver and copper
of the sacred vessels and images of the gods. The spoils of all old
poetry are mingled with his own. He has been called "the poets' poet";
his successors have taken from him his very tones. As has been said
well, when Spenser writes--
Scarcely had Phœbus in the glowing East
Yet harnessëd his fiery-footed team,
that is Shakespeare, the Shakespeare of "Romeo and Juliet".
And taking usury of time forepast
Fit for such ladies and such lovely knights,
that is Shakespeare again, the Shakespeare of the Sonnets.
Many an Angel's voice
Singing before the eternal Majesty
For their triune triplicities on high:
that is the younger voice of Milton.
And ever and anon the rosy red
Flasht thro' her face,
one might fancy the unmistakable note and accent of Tennyson.[3]
English poetry fell with the neglect of Spenser, who was buried and
forgotten from the middle of the seventeenth century till Thomson
revived his measures in the middle of the eighteenth, and English
poetry came fully to her own again when the magic book of Spenser was
opened by Keats.
[1] A well-known diplomatist of Queen Elizabeth, Harry Killigrew, is
said to have been "a Holbein in oils".
[2] On this and on the more than mediaeval size of "The Faery Queen,"
see Mr. Mackail's "Springs of Helicon," pp. 132-28.
[3] Mackail, "Springs of Helicon," pp. 90, 91.