defined and illustrated. Among poets, Spenser stands for the
temperament personified.
But how did it happen that this lightsome creature, whose only business
was
To reign in the air from earth to highest sky,
should have attempted in his greatest work to mix together two such
incoherent things as sermon and poem? In the first place, the age out
of which a man is born is the mother of his mind, and imprints her
own likeness more or less clearly on the features of her child. There
are two destinies from which no one can escape, his own idiosyncrasy,
and that of the time in which he lives. Or shall we say that where
the brain is in flower of its conceptions, the very air is full of
thought-pollen, or some wandering bee will bring it, we know not from
what far field, to hybridize the fruit?
In Spenser’s time England was just going through the vinous stage
of that Puritanic fermentation which became acetous in Milton, and
putrefactive in the Fifth Monarchy men. Here was one motive. But,
besides this, it is evident that Spenser’s fancy had been colored by
the Romances which were popular in his day; and these had all been
allegorized by the monks, who turned them into prose. The adventure
of the San Grail in the “Morte d’Arthur” reads almost like an extract
from the “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Allegories were the fashion, and Spenser
put one on as he did a ruff, not because it was the most convenient or
becoming thing in the world, but because other people did.
Another reason is probably to be found in the nature of the man
himself. The poetical temperament, when it comes down to earth
and mingles with men, is conscious of a certain weakness. On the
unsubstantial skyey floors of its own ideal world it walks firmly
enough, and speaks the native language of the shadowy population
there. But there is a knell at which that beautiful land dissolves
like the baseless fabric of a vision--and that is the dinner bell.
The poetical temperament becomes keenly conscious that it also has a
stomach. It must dine, and commonly it likes rather better dinners
than other people. To this end it must carry its wares to market where
the understanding is master. Will the understanding pay hard money for
the flowers of speech! Only what is practical will do there. “Fine
words,” grumbles the Understanding proverbially, “butter no parsnips;
and then, to make the matter worse, the _parsnips_ are _ideal_.” “But,
my dear sir,” remonstrates Temperament mildly--“Dear me no dears,”
growls Understanding. “Everybody must earn his own salt--I do.” “Let me
read you my beautiful poem.” “Can’t comprehend a word of it. The only
language I know a word of is my old mother tongue, the _useful_. Look
at the towns and ships I’ve built. Nothing ideal _there_, you’ll find.
Ideal, I suppose, is a new-fangled way of spelling idle. It won’t go
_here_.” Suddenly the _useful_ seems a very solid and powerful thing
to our poor friend, the Poetic Temperament. It begins to feel a little
absurd in talking enthusiasm to such a matter-of-fact generation. The
problem is how to translate the ideal into the useful. How shall Master
Edmund Spenser make himself comprehensible to Master John Bull? He will
try a picture-book, and a moral one, too--he will write an Allegory.
Allegory is the Imagination of the Understanding, or what it
supposes to be, which is the same thing. It is the ideal in words
of one syllable, illustrated with cuts, and adapted to the meanest
comprehension.
Spenser was a good and pure-minded man, and wished probably to combine
the sacred office of Teacher with that of Poet. The preaching part
of him came afterwards in Jeremy Taylor, who was Spenser with his
singing-robes off.
Spenser’s mind was so thoroughly imbued with the beautiful that he
makes even the Cave of Mammon a place one would like to live in.
I think it is the want of _human_ interest that makes the “Faëry
Queene” so little read. Hazlitt has said that nobody need be afraid
of the allegory; it will not bite them, nor meddle with them unless
they meddle with it. It was the first poem I ever read, and I had
no suspicion of any double meaning in it. If we think of the moral
as we read it will injure the effect of the poem, because we have an
instinctive feeling that Beauty includes its own moral, and does not
need to have it stuck on.
Charles Lamb made the most comprehensive criticism upon Spenser when
he called him the “poets’ poet.” This was a magic mirror which he held
up to life, where only shapes of loveliness are reflected. A joyous
feeling of the beautiful thrills through the whole poem.
I think that Spenser has come nearer to expressing the unattainable
something than any other poet. He is so purely a poet of beauty that
with him the meaning does not modulate the music of the verse, but
the music is a great part of the meaning. No poet is so splendidly
superfluous as he. He knows too well that in poetry _enough_ is
parsimony. The delight of beauty is that it is like a fountain, forever
changing, forever the same, and forever more than full.
Spenser has characterized his own poem in the song which the Sirens
sing to Sir Guyon in the twelfth canto of the second book. The whole
passage also may be called his musical as distinguished from his
picturesque style.
In reading Spenser one may see all the great galleries of painting
without stepping over his threshold. Michael Angelo is the only artist
that he will not find there. It may be said of him that he is not a
narrative poet at all, that he tells no stories, but paints them.
I have said that among our poets Spenser stands for the personification
of the poetic sense and temperament. In him the senses were so sublimed
and etherealized, and sympathized so harmoniously with an intellect
of the subtlest quality that, with Dr. Donne, we “could almost say
his body thought.” This benign introfusion of sense and spirit it is
which gives his poetry the charm of crystalline purity without loss of
warmth. He is ideal without being merely imaginative; he is sensuous
without any suggestion of flesh and blood. He is full of feeling,
and yet of such a kind that we can neither call it mere intellectual
perception of what is fair and good and touching, nor associate it with
that throbbing warmth which leads us to call sensibility by its human
name of heart. In the world into which he carries us there is neither
space nor time, and so far it is purely intellectual, but then it is
full of form and color and all earthly gorgeousness, and so far it is
sensual. There are no men and women in it, and yet it throngs with airy
and immortal shapes that have the likeness of men and women.
To appreciate fully the sensuous intellectuality of this divine poet,
compare him for a moment with Pope, who had an equal subtlety of brain
without the joyous poetic sense. Pope’s mind was like a perfectly clear
mirror hung in a drawing-room, and reflecting with perfect precision
of outline and vividness of coloring, not man, but good society, every
grace and every folly that belong not to human nature in its broad
meaning, but as it is subordinated by fashion. But Spenser is like a
great calm pool that lies brooding in delicious reverie over its golden
sands in some enchanted world. If we look into it we know not if we see
the shadows of clouds and trees and castles, of bright-armored knights
and peerless dames that linger and are gone; or whether those pellucid
depths are only a mysterious reservoir, where all the fairest dreams of
our youth, dreams that were like hopes, and hopes that were but dreams,
are visionarily gathered. Anon a ripple, born of no breeze, but of the
poet’s own conscious joy, startles it into a dance of sunshine that
fades away around its shores in a lapsing murmur that seems the shadow
of music rather than its substance.
So entirely are beauty and delight the element of Spenser, that
whenever in the “Faëry Queene” you come upon a thought or moral
reflection it gives you a shock of unpleasant surprise, a kind of
grit, as when one’s teeth close upon a bit of gravel in a dish of
strawberries and cream. He is the most fluent of our poets. Sensation
passing over through emotion into reverie is the characteristic of his
manner.
And to read him puts one in the condition of reverie--a state of mind
in which one’s thoughts and feelings float motionless as you may see
fishes do in a swift brook, only vibrating their fins enough to keep
themselves from being swept down the current, while their bodies
yield to all its curvings and quiver with the thrills of its fluid
and sinuous delight. It is a luxury beyond luxury itself, for it is
not only dreaming awake, but dreaming without the trouble of doing it
yourself; letting it be done for you, in truth, by the finest dreamer
that ever lived, who has the art of giving you all his own visions
through the medium of music.
Of the versification of Spenser we need attempt no higher praise than
that it belonged to him. If we would feel the infinite variety of
the Spenserian stanza, as Spenser uses it, its musical intricacies,
its long, sliding cadences, smooth as the green slope on the edge of
Niagara, we have only to read verses of the same measure by other
poets.
As showing his pathos, Mr. Lowell read Una’s lament on her desertion by
the Red Cross Knight, and other pieces, calling attention particularly
to the fact that his females were not women, like those of Shakspeare,
but ideal beings.
We are accustomed to apologize for the grossness of our favorite old
authors by saying that their age was to blame, and not they. Spenser
needs no such excuses. He is the most perfect gentleman among poets.
Through that unrefined time, when ladies drank a quart of ale for
breakfast, and even Hamlet can say a coarse thing to Ophelia, Spenser
passes pure and chaste as another Sir Galahad.
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 “Faëry Queene.” There is a land of pure Heart’s Ease where
no ache or sorrow of spirit can enter. If there be any poet whom we can
love and feel grateful toward, it is Edmund Spenser.
LECTURE VII
MILTON
(_Tuesday Evening, January 30, 1855_)
VII
Between Spenser and Milton occurred the most truly imaginative period
of English poetry. It is the time of Shakspeare and of the other
dramatists only less than he. It seems to have been the moment in which
the English mind culminated.
Even if we subtract Shakspeare, the age remains without a parallel.
The English nature was just then giving a great heave and yearn toward
freedom in politics and religion, and literature could not fail to
partake of the movement.
A wave of enthusiasm seemed to break over England; all that was
poetical in the people found expression in deed or word. Everything
tasted of it--sermons and speeches as well as verses. The travelers
could not write a dry journal, but they somehow blundered into
a poetical phrase that clings to the memory like a perfume. The
sensations of men were as fresh as Adam’s, and the words they found to
speak them in could be beautiful or fragrant with as little effort as
it costs violets to be blue.
It is a remarkable fact that the poetry of Shakspeare is at the same
time more English and more universally human than any that was ever
written. The two great poets who came before Shakspeare had both of
them enlarged the revenues of the English muse. Chaucer had added
character and incident, and had shown the capacities of the language
and of the metre. Spenser left it enriched with a luxury of diction,
with harmony of verse, and with the lovely images of the classical
mythology. But Shakspeare came in like an unthrift heir. He squandered
everything. From king to clown he used up all character; there is no
passion, or fancy, or feeling that he has not spent; no question of
philosophy, morals, politics, or metaphysics that he has not solved;
he poured out all the golden accumulations of diction like water. And
his younger brethren, the other dramatists, helped him. What was there
left? Certainly, this wonderful being has expressed every sentiment,
every thought, that is universal in its relations. All the poetry of
this world he exhausted. Accordingly, in the time immediately following
this splendidly imaginative period, we find only a development of fancy
under one or other of its disguises. Fancy deals with limited and
personal experiences, and interests us by the grace or perfectness of
its expression of these. The Dramatists were tremendously in earnest,
as they had need to be, to please a people who were getting in earnest
themselves. But now the time itself was preparing a drama, and on no
mimic scene, but with England for a stage and with all Europe for
spectators. A real historical play was in rehearsal, no petty war of
York and Lancaster, but the death-grapple of two eras. The time was in
travail with the Ishmael of Puritanism who, exiled from his father’s
house, was to found here in this Western wilderness an empire for
himself and his wandering descendants. England herself was turning
poet, and would add her rhapsody to the great epic of the nations.
That was a day of earnest and painful thinking, and poetical
temperaments naturally found relief in turning away from actual life
to the play of the fancy. We find no trace of high imagination here.
Certainly, Herbert and Vaughan and even Quarles are sometimes snatched
into something above common fancy by religious fervor, but how cold and
experimental is the greater part of their poetry--not poetry, indeed,
but devotional exercises in verse. Cowley wrote imaginary love-songs
to an imaginary mistress, and Waller the same sort of stuff to a real
one. Catullus revived in Herrick, a country parson. Wither, a Puritan,
wrote some poems full of nature and feeling, and remarkable for purity
of sentiment. Donne, a deep thinker, carried on his anatomical studies
into his verse, and dissected his thoughts and feelings to the smallest
nerve. A great many nice things got said, no doubt, and many charming
little poems were written--but the _great_ style appears no longer.
It was during this lull, as we may call it, that followed the mighty
day of the Dramatists, that Milton was growing up. He was born in
London on the ninth of December, 1608, and was therefore in his eighth
year when Shakspeare died. His father was of a good family, which still
adhered to the Roman Catholic faith. What is of more importance, he was
disinherited by _his_ father for having adopted Puritan principles; and
he was a excellent musician. Milton was very early an indefatigable
student, even in his twelfth year seldom leaving his books before
midnight. At the university he was distinguished as a Latin scholar and
writer of Latin verses. He was intended for the Church, but had already
formed opinions of his own which put conformity out of the question.
He was by nature an Independent, and could not, as he says, “subscribe
_slave_.”
Leaving the university in 1632, he passed the five following years in a
studious seclusion at his father’s house at Horton, in Buckinghamshire.
During these five years he wrote most of his smaller poems. In 1638
he set out for Italy. The most important events of his stay in that
country were his meetings with Galileo, and the Marquis Manso, who had
been Tasso’s friend. After refreshing his Protestantism at Geneva, he
passed through France and came back to England to find the Civil War
already begun.
Dr. Johnson sneers at Milton for having come home from Italy because he
could not stay abroad while his countrymen were struggling for their
freedom, and then quietly settling down as a teacher of a few boys
for bread. It might, with equal reason, have been asked of the Doctor
why, instead of writing “Taxation no Tyranny,” he did not volunteer
in the war against the rebel American provinces? Milton sacrificed to
the cause he thought holy something dearer to him than life--the hope
of an earthly immortality in a great poem. He suffered his eyes to be
put out for the sake of his country as deliberately as Scævola thrust
his hand into the flame. He gave to freedom something better than a
sword--words that were victories. Around the memories of Bradshaw and
his illustrious brethren his deathless soldiery still pitch their
invincible tents, still keep their long-resounding march, sure warders
against obloquy and oblivion.
After the death of Cromwell, Milton continued faithful to
republicanism, and on the very eve of the Restoration published his
last political tract, showing a short and easy way to establish
a Christian commonwealth. He had long ago quarreled with the
Presbyterians in discipline, and separated from the Independents in
doctrine. For many years he did not go within any church and had become
a Unitarian. He had begun “Paradise Lost” in 1658, and after the
Restoration, with a broken fortune, but with a constancy which nothing
could break, shattered in health, blind, and for a time in danger, he
continued the composition of it. It was complete in 1665, when Elwood,
the Quaker, had the reading of it, and it was published in 1667.
The translation of the Bible had to a very great extent Judaized the
Puritan mind. England was no longer England, but Israel. Those fierce
enthusiasts could always find Amalek and Philistia in the men who met
them in the field, and one horn or the other of the beast in every
doctrine of their theological adversaries. The spiritual provincialism
of the Jewish race found something congenial in the Anglo-Saxon
intellect. This element of the Puritan character appears in Milton
also, as in that stern sonnet:
Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold,
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old
When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones.
In Milton’s prose there is a constant assertion of himself as a man
set apart to a divine ministry. He seems to translate himself out of
Hebrew into English. And yet so steeped was he in Greek culture that
it is sometimes hard to say whether he would rather call himself the
messenger of Jehovah or the son of Phœbus. Continually the fugitive
mists of dialectics are rent, and through them shine down serene and
solemn peaks that make us feel that we are encamped about by the sacred
mounts of song, but whether of Palestine or of Greece is doubtful.
We may apply to Milton what Schiller says of the poet, “Let the kind
divinity snatch the suckling from his mother’s breast, nourish him
with the milk of a better age, and let him come to maturity beneath a
distant Grecian sky. Then when he has become a man let him return, a
foreign shape, into his century, not to delight it with his apparition,
but terrible, like Agamemnon’s son, to purify it.”
I said that Milton had a sublime egotism. The egotism of a great
character is inspiration because it generalizes self into universal
law. It is a very different thing from the vulgar egotism of a little
nature which contracts universal Law into self. The one expands with
a feeling that it is a part of the law-making power, the other offers
an amendment in town-meeting as if it came from Sinai. Milton’s superb
conception of himself enters into all he does; if _he_ is blind, it
is with excess of light--it is a divine favor, an overshadowing with
angel’s wings. Phineus and Tiresias are admitted among the prophets
because they, too, had lost their sight. There is more merit in
the blindness of Mæonides than in his “Iliad” or “Odyssey.” If the
structure of _his_ mind is undramatic, why, then the English drama is
barbarous, and he will write a tragedy on a Greek model with blind
Samson for a hero.
It results from this that no great poet is so uniformly self-conscious
as he. Dante is individual rather than self-conscious, and the
cast-iron Dante becomes pliable as a field of grain at the breath
of Beatrice, and his whole nature, rooted as it is, seems to flow
away in waves of sunshine. But Milton never lets himself go for a
moment. As other poets are possessed by their theme, so is he always
self-possessed, his great theme being Milton, and his duty being
that of interpreter between John Milton and the world. I speak it
reverently--he was worth translating.
We should say of Shakspeare that he had the power of transforming
himself into everything, and of Milton that he had that of transforming
everything into himself. He is the most learned of poets. Dante, it is
true, represents all the scholarship of his age, but Milton belonged to
a more learned age, was himself one of the most learned men in it, and
included Dante himself among his learning. No poet is so indebted to
books and so little to personal observation as he. I thought once that
he had created out of his own consciousness those exquisite lines in
“Comus”:
A thousand fantasies
Begin to throng into my memory
Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire,
And airy tongues that syllable men’s names
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses.
But I afterwards found that he had built them up out of a dry sentence
in Marco Polo’s “Travels.” The wealth of Milton in this respect is
wonderful. He subsidizes whole provinces of learning to spend their
revenues upon one lavish sentence, and melts history, poetry,
mythology, and philosophy together to make the rich Miltonic metal of a
single verse.
The first noticeable poem of Milton is his “Hymn of the Nativity,” and
the long-enwoven harmony of the versification is what chiefly deserves
attention in it. It is this which marks the advent of a new power into
English poetry.
In Spenser meaning and music are fused together; in Shakspeare the
meaning dominates always (and I intend the sentiment as included
in the word meaning); but in Milton the music is always a primary
consideration. He is always as much musician as poet. And he is a
harmonist, not a melodist. He loves great pomps and sequences of verse,
and his first passages move like long processions, winding with sacred
chant, and priestly robes rich with emblematic gold, and waving of holy
banners, along the echoing aisles of some cathedral. Accordingly, no
reader of Milton can fail to notice that he is fond of lists of proper
names which can have only an acquired imaginative value, and in that
way serve to excite our poetic sensibility, but which also are of deep
musical significance.
This was illustrated by reading various passages from “Paradise Lost.”
Another striking peculiarity of Milton is the feeling of
_spaciousness_ which his poetry gives us, and that not only in whole
paragraphs, but even in single words. His mind was one which demanded
illimitable room to turn in. His finest passages are those in which the
imagination diffuses itself over a whole scene or landscape, or where
it seems to circle like an eagle controlling with its eye broad sweeps
of champaign and of sea, bathing itself in the blue streams of air, and
seldom drawn earthward in the concentrated energy of its swoop.
This shows itself unmistakably in the epithets of his earlier poems. In
“Il Penseroso,” for example, where he hears
The far-off curfew sound
Over some _wide-watered_ shore
Swinging slow with sullen roar;
where he sees
Gorgeous Tragedy
In sceptered pall come sweeping by,
or calls up the great bards who have sung
Of forests and enchantments drear
Where more is meant than meets the ear.