The Spenserians
Dissatisfaction with a prevalent mood or fashion in literature is apt to
express itself either in a fresh and independent criticism of life, or in
a reversion to older types. But, as original creative genius is not
always forthcoming, a literary revolution commonly begins with imitation.
It seeks inspiration in the past, and substitutes a new set of models as
different as possible from those which it finds currently followed. In
every country of Europe the classical tradition had hidden whatever was
most national, most individual, in its earlier culture, under a smooth,
uniform veneer. To break away from modern convention, England and
Germany, and afterward France, went back to ancient springs of national
life; not always, at first, wisely, but in obedience to a true instinct.
How far did any knowledge or love of the old romantic literature of
England survive among the contemporaries of Dryden and Pope? It is not
hard to furnish an answer to this question. The prefaces of Dryden, the
critical treatises of Dennis, Winstanley, Oldmixon, Rymer, Langbaine,
Gildon, Shaftesbury, and many others, together with hundreds of passages
in prologues and epilogues to plays; in periodical essays like the
_Tatler_ and _Spectator_; in verse essays like Roscommon's, Mulgrave's
and Pope's; in prefaces to various editions of Shakspere and Spenser; in
letters, memoirs, etc., supply a mass of testimony to the fact that
neglect and contempt had, with a few exceptions, overtaken all English
writers who wrote before the middle of the seventeenth century. The
exceptions, of course, were those supreme masters whose genius prevailed
against every change of taste: Shakspere and Milton, and, in a less
degree, Chaucer and Spenser. Of authors strictly mediaeval, Chaucer
still had readers, and there were reprints of his works in 1687, 1721,
and 1737,[1] although no critical edition appeared until Tyrwhitt's in
1775-78. It is probable, however, that the general reader, if he read
Chaucer at all, read him in such modernized versions as Dryden's "Fables"
and Pope's "January and May." Dryden's preface has some admirable
criticism of Chaucer, although it is evident, from what he says about the
old poet's versification, that the secret of Middle English scansion and
pronunciation had already been lost. Prior and Pope, who seem to have
been attracted chiefly to the looser among the "Canterbury Tales," made
each a not very successful experiment at burlesque imitation of
Chaucerian language.
Outside of Chaucer, and except among antiquarians and professional
scholars, there was no remembrance of the whole _corpus poetarum_ of the
English Middle Age: none of the metrical romances, rhymed chronicles,
saints' legends, miracle plays, minstrel ballads, verse homilies, manuals
of devotion, animal fables, courtly or popular allegories and love songs
of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Nor was there
any knowledge or care about the masterpieces of medieval literature in
other languages than English; about such representative works as the
"Nibelungenlied," the "Chanson de Roland," the "Roman de la Rose," the
"Parzival" of Wolfram von Eschenbach, the "Tristan" of Gottfried of
Strasburg, the "Arme Heinrich" of Harmann von Aue, the chronicles of
Villehardouin, Joinville, and Froissart, the "Morte Artus," the "Dies
Irae," the lyrics of the troubadour Bernart de Ventadour, and of the
minnesinger Walter von der Vogelweide, the Spanish Romancero, the poems
of the Elder Edda, the romances of "Amis et Amile" and "Aucassin et
Nicolete," the writings of Villon, the "De Imitatione Christi" ascribed
to Thomas à Kempis. Dante was a great name and fame, but he was virtually
unread.
There is nothing strange about this; many of these things were still in
manuscript and in unknown tongues, Old Norse, Old French, Middle High
German, Middle English, Mediaeval Latin. It would be hazardous to assert
that the general reader, or even the educated reader, of to-day has much
more acquaintance with them at first hand than his ancestor of the
eighteenth century; or much more acquaintance than he has with
Aeschuylus, Thucydides, and Lucretius, at first hand. But it may be
confidently asserted that he knows much more _about_ them; that he thinks
them worth knowing about; and that through modern, popular versions of
them--through poems, historical romances, literary histories, essays and
what not--he has in his mind's eye a picture of the Middle Age, perhaps
as definite and fascinating as the picture of classical antiquity. That
he has so is owing to the romantic movement. For the significant
circumstance about the attitude of the last century toward the whole
medieval period was, not its ignorance, but its incuriosity. It did not
want to hear anything about it.[2] Now and then, hints Pope, an
antiquarian pedant, a university don, might affect an admiration for some
obsolete author:
"Chaucer's worst ribaldry is learned by rote,
And beastly Skelton heads of houses quote:
One likes no language but the 'Faery Queen';
A Scot will fight for 'Christ's Kirk o' the Green.'"[3]
But, furthermore, the great body of Elizabethan and Stuart literature was
already obsolescent. Dramatists of the rank of Marlowe and Webster,
poets like George Herbert and Robert Herrick--favorites with our own
generation--prose authors like Sir Thomas Browne--from whom Coleridge and
Emerson drew inspiration--had fallen into "the portion of weeds and
outworn faces." Even writers of such recent, almost contemporary, repute
as Donne, whom Carew had styled
"--a king who ruled, as he thought fit,
The universal monarch of wit":
Or as Cowley, whom Dryden called the darling of his youth, and who was
esteemed in his own lifetime a better poet than Milton; even Donne and
Cowley had no longer a following. Pope "versified" some of Donne's
rugged satires, and Johnson quoted passages from him as examples of the
bad taste of the metaphysical poets. This in the "Life of Cowley," with
which Johnson began his "Lives of the Poets," as though Cowley was the
first of the moderns. But,
"Who now reads Cowley?"
asks Pope in 1737.[4] The year of the Restoration (1660) draws a sharp
line of demarcation between the old and the new. In 1675, the year after
Milton's death, his nephew, Edward Philips, published "Theatrum
Poetarum," a sort of biographical dictionary of ancient and modern
authors. In the preface, he says: "As for the antiquated and fallen into
obscurity from their former credit and reputation, they are, for the most
part, those that have written beyond the verge of the present age; for
let us look back as far as about thirty or forty years, and we shall find
a profound silence of the poets beyond that time, except of some few
dramatics."
This testimony is the more convincing, since Philips was something of a
_laudator temporis acti_. He praises several old English poets and
sneers at several new ones, such as Cleaveland and Davenant, who were
high in favor with the royal party. He complains that nothing now
"relishes so well as what is written in the smooth style of our present
language, taken to be of late so much refined"; that "we should be so
compliant with the French custom, as to follow set fashions"; that the
imitation of Corneille has corrupted the English state; and that Dryden,
"complying with the modified and gallantish humour of the time," has, in
his heroic plays, "indulged a little too much to the French way of
continual rime." One passage, at least, in Philips' preface has been
thought to be an echo of Milton's own judgment on the pretensions of the
new school of poetry. "Wit, ingenuity, and learning in verse; even
elegancy itself, though that comes nearest, are one thing. True native
poetry is another; in which there is a certain air and spirit which
perhaps the most learned and judicious in other arts do not perfectly
apprehend, much less is it attainable by any study or industry. Nay,
though all the laws of heroic poem, all the laws of tragedy were exactly
observed, yet still this _tour entrejeant_--this poetic energy, if I may
so call it, would be required to give life to all the rest; which shines
through the roughest, most unpolished, and antiquated language, and may
haply be wanting in the most polite and reformed. Let us observe
Spenser, with all his rusty, obsolete words, with all his rough-hewn
clouterly verses; yet take him throughout, and we shall find in him a
graceful and poetic majesty. In like manner, Shakspere in spite of all
his unfiled expressions, his rambling and indigested fancies--the
laughter of the critical--yet must be confessed a poet above many that go
beyond him to literature[5] some degrees."
The laughter of the critical! Let us pause upon the phrase, for it is a
key to the whole attitude of the Augustan mind toward "our old tragick
poet." Shakspere was already a national possession. Indeed it is only
after the Restoration that we find any clear recognition of him, as one
of the greatest--as perhaps himself the very greatest--of the dramatists
of all time. For it is only after the Restoration that criticism begins.
"Dryden," says Dr. Johnson, "may be properly considered as the father of
English criticism, as the writer who first taught us to determine, upon
principles, the merit of composition. . . Dryden's 'Essay of Dramatic
Poesy' [1667] was the first regular and valuable treatise on the art of
writing."[6] The old theater was dead and Shakspere now emerged from
amid its ruins, as the one unquestioned legacy of the Elizabethan age to
the world's literature. He was not only the favorite of the people, but
in a critical time, and a time whole canons of dramatic art were opposed
to his practice, he united the suffrages of all the authoritative leader
of literacy opinion. Pope's lines are conclusive as to the veneration in
which Shakspere's memory was held a century after his death.
"On Avon's banks, where flowers eternal blow,
If I but ask, if any weed can grow;
One tragic sentence if I dare deride
Which Betterton's grave action dignified . . .
How will our fathers rise up in a rage,
And swear, all shame is lost in George's age."[7]
The Shaksperian tradition is unbroken in the history of English
literature and of the English theater. His plays, in one form or
another, have always kept the stage even in the most degenerate condition
of public taste.[8] Few handsomer tributes have been paid to Shakspere's
genius than were paid in prose and verse, by the critics of our classical
age, from Dryden to Johnson. "To begin then with Shakspere," says the
former, in his "Essay of Dramatic Poesy," "he was the man who, of all
modern and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive
soul." And, in the prologue to his adaptation of "The Tempest," he
acknowledges that
"Shakspere's magic could not copied be:
Within that circle none durst walk but he."
"The poet of whose works I have undertaken the revision," writes Dr.
Johnson, "may now begin to assume the dignity of an ancient, and claim
the privilege of established fame and prescriptive veneration."[9]
"Each change of many-colored life he drew,
Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new."[10]
Yet Dryden made many petulant, and Johnson many fatuous mistakes about
Shakspere; while such minor criticasters as Thomas Rymer[11] and Mrs.
Charlotte Lenox[12] uttered inanities of blasphemy about the finest
touches in "Macbeth" and "Othello." For if we look closer, we notice
that everyone who bore witness to Shakspere's greatness qualified his
praise by an emphatic disapproval of his methods. He was a prodigious
genius, but a most defective artist. He was the supremest of dramatic
poets, but he did not know his business. It did not apparently occur to
anyone--except, in some degree, to Johnson--that there was an absurdity
in this contradiction; and that the real fault was not in Shakspere, but
in the standards by which he was tried. Here are the tests which
technical criticism has always been seeking to impose, and they are not
confined to the classical period only. They are used by Sidney, who took
the measure of the English buskin before Shakspere had begun to write; by
Jonson, who measured socks with him in his own day; by Matthew Arnold,
who wanted an English Academy, but in whom the academic vaccine, after so
long a transmission, worked but mildly. Shakspere violated the unities;
his plays were neither right comedies nor right tragedies; he had small
Latin and less Greek; he wanted art and sometimes sense, committing
anachronisms and Bohemian shipwrecks; wrote hastily, did not blot enough,
and failed of the grand style. He was "untaught, unpractised in a
barbarous age"; a wild, irregular child of nature, ignorant of the rules,
unacquainted with ancient models, succeeding--when he did succeed--by
happy accident and the sheer force of genius; his plays were
"roughdrawn," his plots lame, his speeches bombastic; he was guilty on
every page of "some solecism or some notorious flaw in sense."[13]
Langbaine, to be sure, defends him against Dryden's censure. But Dennis
regrets his ignorance of poetic art and the disadvantages under which he
lay from not being conversant with the ancients. If he had known his
Sallust, he would have drawn a juster picture of Caesar; and if he had
read Horace "Ad Pisones," he would have made a better Achilles. He
complains that he makes the good and the bad perish promiscuously; and
that in "Coriolanus"--a play which Dennis "improved" for the new
stage--he represents Menenius as a buffoon and introduces the rabble in a
most undignified fashion.[14] Gildon, again, says that Shakspere must
have read Sidney's "Defence of Posey" and therefore, ought to have known
the rules and that his neglect of them was owing to laziness. "Money
seems to have been his aim more than reputation, and therefore he was
always in a hurry . . . and he thought it time thrown away, to study
regularity and order, when any confused stuff that came into his head
would do his business and fill his house."[15]
It would be easy, but it would be tedious, to multiply proofs of this
patronizing attitude toward Shakspere. Perhaps Pope voices the general
sentiment of his school, as fairly as anyone, in the last words of his
preface.[16] "I will conclude by saying of Shakspere that, with all his
faults and with all the irregularity of his _drama_, one may look upon
his works, in comparison of those that are more finished and regular, as
upon an ancient, majestic piece of Gothic architecture compared with a
neat, modern building. The latter is more elegant and glaring, but the
former is more strong and solemn. . . It has much the greater variety,
and much the nobler apartments, though we are often conducted to them by
dark, odd and uncouth passages. Nor does the whole fail to strike us
with greater reverence, though many of the parts are childish, ill-placed
and unequal to its grandeur." This view of Shakspere continued to be the
rule until Coleridge and Schlegel taught the new century that this child
of fancy was, in reality, a profound and subtle artist, but that the
principles of his art--as is always the case with creative genius working
freely and instinctively--were learned by practice, in the concrete,
instead of being consciously thrown out by the workman himself into an
abstract _theoria_; so that they have to be discovered by a reverent
study of his work and lie deeper than the rules of French criticism.
Schlegel, whose lectures on dramatic art were translated into English in
1815, speaks with indignation of the current English misunderstanding of
Shakspere. "That foreigners, and Frenchmen in particular, who frequently
speak in the strangest language about antiquity and the Middle Age, as if
cannibalism had been first put an end in Europe by Louis XIV., should
entertain this opinion of Shakspere might be pardonable. But that
Englishmen should adopt such a calumniation . . . is to me
incomprehensible."[17]
The beginnings of the romantic movement in England were uncertain. There
was a vague dissent from current literary estimates, a vague discontent
with reigning literary modes, especially with the merely intellectual
poetry then in vogue, which did not feed the soul. But there was, at
first, no conscious, concerted effort toward something of creative
activity. The new group of poets, partly contemporaries of Pope, partly
successors to him--Thomson, Shenstone, Dyer, Akenside, Gray, Collins, and
the Warton brothers--found their point of departure in the loving study
and revival of old authors. From what has been said of the survival of
Shakspere's influence it might be expected that his would have been the
name paramount among the pioneers of English romanticism. There are
several reasons why this was not the case.
In the first place, the genius of the new poets was lyrical or
descriptive, rather than dramatic. The divorce between literature and
the stage had not yet, indeed, become total; and, in obedience to the
expectation that every man of letters should try his hand at
play-writing, Thomson, at least, as well as his friend and disciple
Mallet, composed a number of dramas. But these were little better than
failures even at the time; and while "The Seasons" has outlived all
changes of taste, and "The Castle of Indolence" has never wanted
admirers, tragedies like "Agamemnon" and "Sophonisba" have been long
forgotten. An imitation of Shakspere to any effective purpose must
obviously have take the shape of a play; and neither Gray nor Collins nor
Akenside, nor any of the group, was capable of a play. Inspiration of a
kind, these early romanticists did draw from Shakspere. Verbal
reminiscences of him abound in Gray. Collins was a diligent student of
his works. His "Dirge in Cymbeline" is an exquisite variation on a
Shaksperian theme. In the delirium of his last sickness, he told Warton
that he had found in an Italian novel the long-sought original of the
plot of "The Tempest." It is noteworthy, by the way, that the
romanticists were attracted to the poetic, as distinguished from the
dramatic, aspect of Shakspere's genius; to those of his plays in which
fairy lore and supernatural machinery occur, such as "The Tempest" and "A
Midsummer Night's Dream."
Again, the stage has a history of its own, and, in so far as it was now
making progress of any kind, it was not in the direction of a more poetic
or romantic drama, but rather toward prose tragedy and the sentimental
comedy of domestic life, what the French call _la tragédie bourgeoise_
and _la comédie larmoyante_. In truth the theater was now dying; and
though, in the comedies of Goldsmith and Sheridan, it sent up one bright,
expiring gleam, the really dramatic talent of the century had already
sought other channels in the novels of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett.
After all, a good enough reason why the romantic movement did not begin
with imitation of Shakspere is the fact that Shakspere is inimitable. He
has no one manner that can be caught, but a hundred manners; is not the
poet of romance, but of humanity; nor medieval, but perpetually modern
and contemporaneous in his universality. The very familiarity of his
plays, and their continuous performance, although in mangled forms, was a
reason why they could take little part in a literary revival; for what
has never been forgotten cannot be revived. To Germany and France, at a
later date, Shakspere came with the shock of a discovery and begot
Schiller and Victor Hugo. In the England of the eighteenth century he
begot only Ireland's forgeries.
The name inscribed in large letters on the standard of the new school was
not Shakspere but Spenser. If there is any poet who is _par excellence_
the poet of romance, whose art is the antithesis of Pope's, it is the
poet of the "Faërie Queene." To ears that had heard from childhood the
tinkle of the couplet, with its monotonously recurring rhyme, its
inevitable caesura, its narrow imprisonment of the sense, it must have
been a relief to turn to the amplitude of Spencer's stanza, "the full
strong sail of his great verse." To a generation surfeited with Pope's
rhetorical devices--antithesis, climax, anticlimax--and fatigued with the
unrelaxing brilliancy and compression of his language; the escape from
epigrams and point (snap after snap, like a pack of fire-crackers), from
a style which has made his every other line a proverb or current
quotation--the escape from all this into Spenser's serene, leisurely
manner, copious Homeric similes, and lingering detail must have seemed
most restful. To go from Pope to Spenser was to exchange platitudes,
packed away with great verbal cunning in neat formulas readily portable
by the memory, for a wealth of concrete images: to exchange saws like,
"A little learning is a dangerous thing,"
for a succession of richly colored pictures by the greatest painter among
English poets. It was to exchange the most prosaic of our poets--a poet
about whom question has arisen whether he is a poet at all--for the most
purely poetic of our poets, "the poet's poet." And finally, it was to
exchange the world of everyday manners and artificial society for an
imaginary kingdom of enchantment, "out of space, out of time."
English poetry has oscillated between the poles of Spenser and Pope. The
poets who have been accepted by the race as most truly national, poets
like Shakspere, Milton, and Byron, have stood midway. Neither Spenser
nor Pope satisfies long. We weary, in time, of the absence of passion
and intensity in Spenser, his lack of dramatic power, the want of
actuality in his picture of life, the want of brief energy and nerve in
his style; just as we weary of Pope's inadequate sense of beauty. But at
a time when English poetry had abandoned its true function--the
refreshment and elevation of the soul through the imagination--Spenser's
poetry, the poetry of ideal beauty, formed the most natural corrective.
Whatever its deficiencies, it was not, at any rate, "conceived and
composed in his wits."
Spenser had not fared so well as Shakspere under the change which came
over public taste after the Restoration. The age of Elizabeth had no
literary reviews or book notices, and its critical remains are of the
scantiest. But the complimentary verses by many hands published with the
"Faërie Queene" and the numerous references to Spenser in the whole
poetic literature of the time, leave no doubt as to the fact that his
contemporaries accorded him the foremost place among English poets. The
tradition of his supremacy lasted certainly to the middle of the
seventeenth century, if not beyond. His influence is visible not only in
the work of professed disciples like Giles and Phineas Fletcher, the
pastoral poet William Browne, and Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist,
but in the verse of Jonson, Fletcher, Milton, and many others. Milton
confessed to Dryden that Spenser was his "poetical father." Dryden
himself and Cowley, whose practice is so remote from Spenser's,
acknowledged their debt to him. The passage from Cowley's essay "On
Myself" is familiar: "I remember when I began to read, and to take some
pleasure in it, there was wont to lie in my mother's parlour (I know not
by what accident, for she herself never read any book but of
devotion--but there was wont to lie) Spenser's works. This I happened to
fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with the stories of the knights
and giants and monsters and brave houses which I found everywhere there
(thought my understanding had little to do with all this), and, by
degrees, with the tinkling of the rime and dance of the numbers; so that
I think I had read him all over before I was twelve years old, and was
thus made a poet as irremediably as a child is made an eunuch." It is a
commonplace that Spenser has made more poets than any other one writer.
Even Pope, whose empire he came back from Fairyland to overthrow, assured
Spence that he had read the "Faërie Queene" with delight when he was a
boy, and re-read it with equal pleasure in his last years. Indeed, it is
too readily assumed that writers are insensible to the beauties of an
opposite school. Pope was quite incapable of appreciating it. He took a
great liking to Allan Ramsay's "Gentle Shepherd"; he admired "The
Seasons," and did Thomson the honor to insert a few lines of his own in
"Summer." Among his youthful parodies of old English poets is one piece
entitled "The Alley," a not over clever burlesque of the famous
description of the Bower of Bliss.[18]
As for Dryden, his reverence for Spenser is qualified by the same sort of
critical disapprobation which we noticed in his eulogies of Shakspere.
He says that the "Faërie Queene" has no uniformity: the language is not
so obsolete as is commonly supposed, and is intelligible after some
practice; but the choice of stanza is unfortunate, though in spite of it,
Spenser's verse is more melodious than any other English poet's except
Mr. Waller's.[19] Ambrose Philips--Namby Pamby Philips--whom Thackeray
calls "a dreary idyllic cockney," appealed to "The Shepherd's Calendar"
as his model, in the introduction to his insipid "Pastorals," 1709.
Steele, in No. 540 of the _Spectator_ (November 19, 1712), printed some
mildly commendatory remarks about Spenser. Altogether it is clear that
Spenser's greatness was accepted, rather upon trust, throughout the
classical period, but that this belief was coupled with a general
indifference to his writings. Addison's lines in his "Epistle to
Sacheverel; an Account of the Greatest English Poets," 1694, probably
represent accurately enough the opinion of the majority of readers:
"Old Spenser next, warmed with poetic rage,
In ancient tales amused a barbarous age;
An age that, yet uncultivated and rude,
Wher'er the poet's fancy led, pursued,
Through pathless fields and unfrequented floods,
To dens of dragons and enchanted woods.
But now the mystic tale, that pleased of yore,
Can charm an understanding age no more.
The long-spun allegories fulsome grow,
While the dull moral lies too plain below,
We view well pleased at distance all the sights
Of arms and palfreys, battles, fields and fights,
And damsels in distress and courteous knights,
But when we look too near, the shades decay
And all the pleasing landscape fades away."
Addison acknowledged to Spence that, when he wrote this passage, he had
never read Spenser! As late as 1754 Thomas Warton speaks of him as "this
admired but neglected poet,"[20] and Mr. Kitchin asserts that "between
1650 and 1750 there are but few notices of him, and a very few editions
of his works."[21] There was a reprint of Spenser's works--being the
third folio of the "Faërie Queene"--in 1679, but no critical edition till
1715. Meanwhile the title of a book issued in 1687 shows that Spenser
did not escape that process of "improvement" which we have seen applied
to Shakspere: "Spenser Redivivus; containing the First Book of the 'Faëry
Queene.' His Essential Design Preserved, but his Obsolete Language and
Manner of Verse totally laid aside. Delivered in Heroic Numbers by a
Person of Quality." The preface praises Spenser, but declares that "his
style seems no less unintelligible at this day than the obsoletest of our
English or Saxon dialect." One instance of this deliverance into heroic
numbers must suffice:
"By this the northern wagoner had set
His sevenfold team behind the steadfast star
That was in ocean waves yet never wet,
But firm is fixed, and sendeth light from far
To all that in the wide deep wandering are."
--_Spenser_.[22]
In 1715 John Hughes published his edition of Spenser's works in six
volumes. This was the first attempt at a critical text of the poet, and
was accompanied with a biography, a glossary, an essay on allegorical
poetry, and some remarks on the "Faërie Queene." It is curious to find
in the engravings, from designs by Du Guernier, which illustrate Hughes'
volumes, that Spenser's knights wore the helmets and body armor of the
Roman legionaries, over which is occasionally thrown something that looks
very much like a toga. The lists in which they run a tilt have the
façade of a Greek temple for a background. The house of Busyrane is
Louis Quatorze architecture, and Amoret is chained to a renaissance
column with Corinthian capital and classical draperies. Hughes' glossary
of obsolete terms includes words which are in daily use by modern
writers: aghast, baleful, behest, bootless, carol, craven, dreary,
forlorn, foray, guerdon, plight, welkin, yore. If words like these, and
like many which Warton annotates in his "Observations," really needed
explanation, it is a striking proof, not only of the degree in which our
older poets had been forgotten, but also of the poverty to which the
vocabulary of English poetry had been reduced by 1700.
In his prefatory remarks to the "Faërie Queene," the editor expresses the
customary regrets that the poet should have chosen so defective a stanza,
"so romantick a story," and a model, or framework for the whole, which
appears so monstrous when "examined by the rules of epick poetry"; makes
the hackneyed comparison between Spenser's work and Gothic architecture,
and apologizes for his author, on the ground that, at the time when he
wrote, "the remains of the old Gothick chivalry were not quite
abolished." "He did not much revive the curiosity of the public," says
Johnson, in his life of Hughes; "for near thirty years elapsed before his
edition was reprinted." Editions of the "Faërie Queene" came thick and
fast about the middle of the century. One (by Birch) was issued in 1751,
and three in 1758; including the important edition by Upton, who, of all
Spenser's commentators, has entered most elaborately into the
interpretation of the allegory.
In the interval had appeared, in gradually increasing numbers, that
series of Spenserian imitations which forms an interesting department of
eighteenth-century verse. The series was begun by a most unlikely
person, Matthew Prior, whose "Ode to the Queen," 1706, was in a ten-lined
modification of Spenser's stanza and employed a few archaisms like _weet_
and _ween_, but was very unspenserian in manner. As early as the second
decade of the century, the horns of Elfland may be heard faintly blowing
in the poems of the Rev. Samuel Croxall, the translator of Aesop's
"Fables." Mr. Gosse[23] quotes Croxall's own description of his poetry,
as designed "to set off the dry and insipid stuff" of the age with "a
whole piece of rich and glowing scarlet." His two pieces "The Vision,"
1715, and "The Fair Circassian," 1720, though written in the couplet,
exhibit a rosiness of color and a luxuriance of imagery manifestly
learned from Spenser. In 1713 he had published under the pseudonym of
Nestor Ironside, "An Original Canto of Spenser," and in 1714 "Another
Original Canto," both, of course, in the stanza of the "Faërie Queene."
The example thus set was followed before the end of the century by scores
of poets, including many well-known names, like Akenside, Thomson,
Shenstone, and Thomas Warton, as well as many second-rate and third-rate
versifiers.[24]
It is noteworthy that many, if not most, of the imitations were at first
undertaken in a spirit of burlesque; as is plain not only from the poems
themselves, but from the correspondence of Shenstone and others.[25] The
antiquated speech of an old author is in itself a challenge to the
parodist: _teste_ our modern ballad imitations. There is something
ludicrous about the very look of antique spelling, and in the sound of
words like _eftsoones_ and _perdy_; while the sign _Ye Olde Booke Store_,
in Old English text over a bookseller's door, strikes the public
invariably as a most merry conceited jest; especially if the first letter
be pronounced as a _y_, instead of, what it really is, a mere
abbreviation of _th_. But in order that this may be so, the language
travestied should not be too old. There would be nothing amusing, for
example, in a burlesque imitation of Beowulf, because the Anglo-Saxon of
the original is utterly strange to the modern reader. It is conceivable
that quick-witted Athenians of the time of Aristophanes might find
something quaint in Homer's Ionic dialect, akin to that quaintness which
we find in Chaucer; but a Grecian of to-day would need to be very Attic
indeed, to detect any provocation to mirth in the use of the genitive
in-oio, in place of the genitive in-ou. Again, as one becomes familiar
with an old author, he ceases to be conscious of his archaism: the final
_e_ in Chaucer no longer strikes him as funny, nor even the circumstance
that he speaks of little birds as _smalë fowlës_. And so it happened,
that poets in the eighteenth century who began with burlesque imitation
of the "Faërie Queen" soon fell in love with its serious beauties.
The only poems in this series that have gained permanent footing in the
literature are Shenstone's "Schoolmistress" and Thomson's "Cast of
Indolence." But a brief review of several other members of the group
will be advisable. Two of them were written at Oxford in honor of the
marriage of Frederick, Prince of Wales in 1736: one by Richard Owen
Cambridge;[26] the other by William Thompson, then bachelor of arts and
afterward fellow of Queen's College. Prince Fred, it will be remembered,
was a somewhat flamboyant figure in the literary and personal gossip of
his day. He quarreled with his father, George II, who "hated boetry and
bainting," and who was ironically fed with soft dedication by Pope in his
"Epistle to Augustus"; also with his father's prime minister, Sir Robert
Walpole, "Bob, the poet's foe." He left the court in dudgeon and set up
an opposition court of his own where he rallied about him men of letters,
who had fallen into a neglect that contrasted strangely with their former
importance in the reign of Queen Anne. Frederick's chief ally in this
policy was his secretary, George Lord Lyttelton, the elegant if somewhat
amateurish author of "Dialogues of the Dead" and other works; the friend
of Fielding, the neighbor of Shenstone at Hagley, and the patron of
Thomson, for whom he obtained the sinecure post of Surveyor of the
Leeward Islands.
Cambridge's spousal verses were in a ten-lined stanza. His "Archimage,"
written in the strict Spenserian stanza, illustrates the frequent
employment of this form in occasional pieces of a humorous intention. It
describes a domestic boating party on the Thames, one of the oarsmen
being a family servant and barber-surgeon, who used to dress the
chaplain's hair:
"Als would the blood of ancient beadsman spill,
Whose hairy scalps he hanged in a row
Around his cave, sad sight to Christian eyes, I trow."
Thompson's experiments, on the contrary, were quite serious. He had
genuine poetic feeling, but little talent. In trying to reproduce
Spenser's richness of imagery and the soft modulation of his verse, he
succeeds only in becoming tediously ornate. His stanzas are nerveless,
though not unmusical. His college exercise, "The Nativity," 1736, is a
Christmas vision which comes to the shepherd boy Thomalin, as he is
piping on the banks of Isis. It employs the pastoral machinery, includes
a masque of virtues,--Faith, Hope, Mercy, etc.,--and closes with a
compliment to Pope's "Messiah." The preface to his "Hymn to May," has
some bearing upon our inquiries: "As Spenser is the most descriptive and
florid of all our English writers, I attempted to imitate his manner in
the following vernal poem. I have been very sparing of the antiquated
words which are too frequent in most of the imitations of this
author. . . His lines are most musically sweet, and his descriptions
most delicately abundant, even to a wantonness of painting, but still it
is the music and painting of nature. We find no ambitious ornaments or
epigrammatical turns in his writings, but a beautiful simplicity which
pleases far above the glitter of pointed wit." The "Hymn to May" is in
the seven-lined stanza of Phineas Fletcher's "Purple Island"; a poem,
says Thompson, "scarce heard of in this age, yet the best in the
allegorical way (next to 'The Fairy Queen') in the English language."
William Wilkie, a Scotch minister and professor, of eccentric habits and
untidy appearance, published, in 1759, "A Dream: in the Manner of
Spenser," which may be mentioned here not for its own sake, but for the
evidence that it affords of a growing impatience of classical restraints.
The piece was a pendant to Wilkie's epic, the "Epigoniad." Walking by
the Tweed, the poet falls asleep and has a vision of Homer, who
reproaches him with the bareness of style in his "Epigoniad." The
dreamer puts the blame upon the critics,
"Who tie the muses to such rigid laws
That all their songs are frivolous and poor."
Shakspere, indeed,
"Broke all the cobweb limits fixed by fools";
but the only reward of his boldness
"Is that our dull, degenerate age of lead
Says that he wrote by chance, and that he scare could read."
One of the earlier Spenserians was Gilbert West, the translator of
Pindar, who published, in 1739, "On the Abuse of Travelling: A Canto in
Imitation of Spenser."[27] Another imitation, "Education," appeared in
1751. West was a very tame poet, and the only quality of Spenser's which
he succeeded in catching was his prolixity. He used the allegorical
machinery of the "Faërie Queene" for moral and mildly satirical ends.
Thus, in "The Abuse of Traveling," the Red Cross Knight is induced by
Archimago to embark in a painted boat steered by Curiosity, which wafts
him over to a foreign shore where he is entertained by a bevy of light
damsels whose leader "hight Politessa," and whose blandishments the
knight resists. Thence he is conducted to a stately castle (the court of
Louis XV. whose minister--perhaps Cardinal Fleury?--is "an old and
rankled mage"); and finally to Rome, where a lady yclept Vertù holds
court in the ruins of the Colosseum, among mimes, fiddlers, pipers,
eunuchs, painters, and _ciceroni_.
Similarly the canto on "Education" narrates how a fairy knight, while
conducting his young son to the house of Paidia, encounters the giant
Custom and worsts him in single combat. There is some humor in the
description of the stream of science into which the crowd of infant
learners are unwillingly plunged, and upon whose margin stands
"A _birchen_ grove that, waving from the shore,
Aye cast upon the tide its falling bud
And with its bitter juice empoisoned all the flood."
The piece is a tedious arraignment of the pedantic methods of instruction
in English schools and colleges. A passage satirizing the artificial
style of gardening will be cited later. West had a country-house at
Wickham, in Kent, where, says Johnson,[28] "he was very often visited by
Lyttelton and Pitt; who, when they were weary of faction and debates,
used at Wickham to find books and quiet, a decent table and literary
conversation. There is at Wickham, a walk made by Pitt." Like many
contemporary poets, West interested himself in landscape gardening, and
some of his shorter pieces belong to that literature of inscriptions to
which Lyttelton, Akenside, Shenstone, Mason, and others contributed so
profusely. It may be said for his Spenserian imitations that their
archaisms are unusually correct[29]--if that be any praise--a feature
which perhaps recommended them to Gray, whose scholarship in this, as in
all points, was nicely accurate. The obligation to be properly
"obsolete" in vocabulary was one that rested heavily on the consciences
of most of these Spenserian imitators. "The Squire of Dames," for
instance, by the wealthy Jew, Moses Mendez, fairly bristles with
seld-seen costly words, like _benty_, _frannion_, etc., which it would
have puzzled Spenser himself to explain.
One of the pleasantest outcomes of this literary fashion was William
Shenstone's "Schoolmistress," published in an unfinished shape in 1737
and, as finally completed, in 1742. This is an affectionate
half-humorous description of the little dame-school of Shenstone's--and
of everybody's--native village, and has the true idyllic touch.
Goldsmith evidently had it in memory when he drew the picture of the
school in his "Deserted Village."[30] The application to so humble a
theme of Spenser's stately verse and grave, ancient words gives a very
quaint effect. The humor of "The Schoolmistress" is genuine, not
dependent on the more burlesque, as in Pope's and Cambridge's
experiments; and it is warmed with a certain tenderness, as in the
incident of the hen with her brood of chickens, entering the open door of
the schoolhouse in search of crumbs, and of the grief of the little
sister who witnesses her brother's flogging, and of the tremors of the
urchins who have been playing in the dame's absence:
"Forewarned, if little bird their pranks behold,
'Twill whisper in her ear and all the scene unfold."
But the only one among the professed scholars of Spenser who caught the
glow and splendor of the master was James Thomson. It is the privilege
of genius to be original even in its imitations. Thomson took shape and
hue from Spenser, but added something of his own, and the result has a
value quite independent of its success as a reproduction. "The Castle of
Indolence," 1748,[31] is a fine poem; at least the first part of it is,
for the second book is tiresomely allegorical, and somewhat involved in
plot. There is a magic art in the description of the "land of
drowsy-head," with its "listless climate" always "atween June and
May,"[32] its "stockdove's plaint amid the forest deep," its hillside
woods of solemn pines, its gay castles in the summer clouds, and its
murmur of the distance main. The nucleus of Thomson's conception is to
be found in Spenser's House of Morpheus ("Faërie Queene," book i. canto
i. 41), and his Country of Idlesse is itself an anticipation of
Tennyson's Lotus Land, but verse like this was something new in the
poetry of the eighteenth century:
"Was nought around but images of rest:
Sleep-soothing groves and quiet lawns between;
And flowery beds that slumberous influence kest,
From poppies breathed; and beds of pleasant green,
Where never yet was creeping creatures seen.
"Meantime unnumbered glittering streamlets played
And hurlëd everywhere their waters sheen;
That, as they bickered through the sunny glade,
Though restless still themselves, a lulling murmur made."
"The Castle of Indolence" had the romantic iridescence, the "atmosphere"
which is lacking to the sharp contours of Augustan verse. That is to
say, it produces an effect which cannot be wholly accounted for by what
the poet says; an effect which is wrought by subtle sensations awakened
by the sound and indefinite associations evoked by the words. The secret
of this art the poet himself cannot communicate. But poetry of this kind
cannot be translated into prose--as Pope's can--any more than music can
be translated into speech, without losing its essential character. Like
Spenser, Thomson was an exquisite colorist and his art was largely
pictorial. But he has touches of an imagination which is rarer, if not
higher in kind, than anything in Spenser. The fairyland of Spenser is an
unreal, but hardly an unearthly region. He seldom startles by glimpses
behind the curtain which hangs between nature and the supernatural, as in
Milton's
"Airy tongues that syllable men's names
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses."
There is something of this power in one stanza, at least, of "The Castle
of Indolence:"
"As when a shepherd of the Hebrid Isles,
Placed far amid the melancholy main
(Whether it be lone fancy him beguiles,
Or that aerial beings sometimes deign
To stand embodied to our sense plain),
The whilst in ocean Phoebus dips his wain,
A vast assembly moving to and fro,
Then all at once in air dissolves the wondrous show."
It may be guessed that Johnson and Boswell, in their tour to the Hebrides
or Western Islands, saw nothing of the "spectral puppet play" hinted at
in this passage--the most imaginative in any of Spenser's school till we
get to Keats'
"Magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn."
William Julius Mickle, the translator of the "Lusiad," was a more
considerable poet than any of the Spenserian imitators thus far reviewed,
with the exception of Thomson and the possible exception of Shenstone.
He wrote at least two poems that are likely to be remembered. One of
these was the ballad of "Cumnor Hall" which suggested Scott's
"Kenilworth," and came near giving its name to the novel. The other was
the dialect song of "The Mariner's Wife," which Burns admired so greatly:
"Sae true his heart, sae smooth his speech,
His breath like caller air,
His very foot has music in't,
As he comes up the stair,
For there's nae luck about the house,
There is nae luck at a',
There's little pleasure in the house
When our gudeman's awa',"[33]
Mickle, like Thomson, was a Scotchman who came to London to push his
literary fortunes. He received some encouragement from Lyttelton, but
was disappointed in his hopes of any substantial aid from the British
Maecenas. His biographer informs us that "about his thirteenth year, on
Spenser's 'Faërie Queene' falling accidentally in his way, he was
immediately struck with the picturesque descriptions of that much admired
ancient bard and powerfully incited to imitate his style and manner."[34]
In 1767 Mickle published "The Concubine," a Spenserian poem in two
cantos. In the preface to his second edition, 1778, in which the title
was changed to "Syr Martyn," he said that: "The fullness and wantonness
of description, the quaint simplicity, and, above all, the ludicrous, of
which the antique phraseology and manner of Spenser are so happily and
peculiarly susceptible, inclined him to esteem it not solely as the best,
but the only mode of composition adapted to his subject."
"Syr Martyn" is a narrative poem not devoid of animation, especially
where the author forgets his Spenser. But in the second canto he feels
compelled to introduce an absurd allegory, in which the nymph Dissipation
and her henchman Self-Imposition conduct the hero to the cave of
Discontent. This is how Mickle writes when he is thinking of the "Faërie
Queene":
"Eke should he, freed from fous enchanter's spell,
Escape his false Duessa's magic charms,
And folly quaid, yclept an hydra fell
Receive a beauteous lady to his arms;
While bards and minstrels chaunt the soft alarms
Of gentle love, unlike his former thrall:
Eke should I sing, in courtly cunning terms,
The gallant feast, served up by seneschal,
To knights and ladies gent in painted bower or hall."
And this is how he writes when he drops his pattern:
"Awake, ye west winds, through the lonely dale,
And, Fancy, to thy faerie bower betake!
Even now, with balmy freshness, breathes the gale,
Dimpling with downy wing the stilly lake;
Through the pale willows faltering whispers wake,
And evening comes with locks bedropt with dew;
On Desmond's moldering turrets slowly shake
The trembling rye-grass and the harebell blue,
And ever and anon fair Mulla's plaints renew."
A reader would be guilty of no very bad guess who should assign this
stanza--which Scott greatly admired--to one of he Spenserian passages
that prelude the "Lady of the Lake."
But it is needless to extend this catalogue any farther. By the middle
of the century Spenserian had become so much the fashion as to provoke a
rebuke from Dr. Johnson, who prowled up and down before the temple of the
British Muses like a sort of classical watch-dog. "The imitation of
Spenser," said the _Rambler_ of May 14, 1751, "by the influence of some
men of learning and genius, seems likely to gain upon the age. . . To
imitate the fictions and sentiments of Spenser can incur no reproach, for
allegory is perhaps one of the most pleasing vehicles of instruction.
But I am very far from extending the same respect to his diction or his
stanza. His style was, in his own words and peculiarities of phrase, and
so remote from common use that Jonson boldly pronounces him _to have
written no language_. His stanza is at once difficult and unpleasing:
tiresome to the ear by its uniformity, and to the attention by its
length. . . Life is surely given us for other purposes than to gather
what our ancestors have wisely thrown away and to learn what is of no
value but because it has been forgotten."[35] In his "Life of West,"
Johnson says of West's imitations of Spenser, "Such compositions are not
to be reckoned among the great achievements of intellect, because their
effect is local and temporary: they appeal not to reason or passion, but
to memory, and presuppose an accidental or artificial state of mind. An
imitation of Spenser is nothing to a reader, however acute, by whom
Spenser has never been perused."
The critic is partly right. The nice points of a parody are lost upon a
reader unacquainted with the thing parodied. And as for serious
imitations, the more cleverly a copyist follows his copy, the less value
his work will have. The eighteenth-century Spenserians, like West,
Cambridge, and Lloyd, who stuck most closely to their pattern, oblivion
has covered. Their real service was done in reviving a taste for a
better kind of poetry than the kind in vogue, and particularly in
restoring to English verse a stanza form, which became so noble an
instrument in the hands of later poets, who used it with as much freedom
and vigor as if they had never seen the "Faërie Queene." One is seldom
reminded of Spenser while reading "Childe Harold"[36] or "Adonais" or
"The Eve of Saint Agnes"; but in reading West or Cambridge, or even in
reading Shenstone and Thomson, one is reminded of him at every turn. Yet
if it was necessary to imitate anyone, it might be answered to Dr.
Johnson that it was better to imitate Spenser than Pope. In the
imitation of Spenser lay, at least, a future, a development; while the
imitation of Pope was conducting steadily toward Darwin's "Botanic
Garden."
It remains to notice one more document in the history of this Spenserian
revival, Thomas Warton's "Observations on the Faërie Queen," 1754.
Warton wrote with a genuine delight in his subject. His tastes were
frankly romantic. But the apologetic air which antiquarian scholars
assumed, when venturing to recommend their favorite studies to the
attention of a classically minded public, is not absent from Warton's
commentary. He writes as if he felt the pressure of an unsympathetic
atmosphere all about him. "We who live in the days of writing by rule
are apt to try every composition by those laws which we have been taught
to think the sole criterion of excellence. Critical taste is universally
diffused, and we require the same order and design which every modern
performance is expected to have, in poems where they never were regarded
or intended. . . If there be any poem whose graces please because they
are situated beyond the reach of art[37] . . . it is this. In reading
Spenser, if the critic is not satisfied, yet the reader is transported."
"In analyzing the plan and conduct of this poem, I have so far tried it
by epic rules, as to demonstrate the inconveniences and incongruities
which the poet might have avoided, had he been more studious of design
and uniformity. It is true that his romantic materials claim great
liberties; but no materials exclude order and perspicacity." Warton
assures the reader that Spenser's language is not "so difficult and
obsolete as it is generally supposed to be;" and defends him against
Hume's censure,[38] that "Homer copied true natural manners . . . but the
pencil of the English poet was employed in drawing the affectations and
conceits and fopperies of chivalry."
Yet he began his commentary with the stock denunciations of "Gothic
ignorance and barbarity." "At the renaissance it might have been
expected that, instead of the romantic manner of poetical
composition . . . a new and more legitimate taste of writing would have
succeeded. . . But it was a long time before such a change was effected.
We find Ariosto, many years after the revival of letters, rejecting truth
for magic, and preferring the ridiculous and incoherent excursions of
Boiardo to the propriety and uniformity of the Grecian and Roman models.
Nor did the restoration of ancient learning produce any effectual or
immediate improvement in the state of criticism. Beni, one of the most
celebrated critics of the sixteenth century, was still so infatuated with
a fondness for the old Provençal vein, that he ventured to write a
regular dissertation, in which he compares Ariosto with Homer." Warton
says again, of Ariosto and the Italian renaissance poets whom Spenser
followed, "I have found no fault in general with their use of magical
machinery; notwithstanding I have so far conformed to the reigning maxims
of modern criticism as to recommend classical propriety."
Notwithstanding this prudent determination to conform, the author takes
heart in his second volume to speak out as follows about the
pseudo-classic poetry of his own age: "A poetry succeeded in which
imagination gave way to correctness, sublimity of description to delicacy
of sentiment, and majestic imagery to conceit and epigram. Poets began
now to be more attentive to words than to things and objects. The nicer
beauties of happy expression were preferred to the daring strokes of
great conception. Satire, that bane of the sublime, was imported from
France. The muses were debauched at court; and polite life and familiar
manners became their only themes."
By the time these words were written Spenser had done his work. Color,
music, fragrance were stealing back again into English song, and
"golden-tongued romance with serene lute" stood at the door of the new
age, waiting for it to open.
[1] A small portion of "The Canterbury Tales." Edited by Morell.
[2] The sixteenth [_sic. Quaere_, seventeenth?] century had an instinctive
repugnance for the crude literature of the Middle Ages, the product of so
strange and incoherent a civilization. Here classicism finds nothing but
grossness and barbarism, never suspecting that it might contain germs,
which, with time and genius, might develop into a poetical growth,
doubtless less pure, but certainly more complex in its harmonies, and of
a more expressive form of beauty. The history of our ancient poetry,
traced in a few lines by Boileau, clearly shows to what degree he either
ignored or misrepresented it. The singular, confused architecture of
Gothic cathedrals gave those who saw beauty in symmetry of line and
purity of form but further evidence of the clumsiness and perverted taste
of our ancestors. All remembrances of the great poetic works of the
Middle Ages is completely effaced. No one supposes in those barbarous
times the existence of ages classical also in their way; no one imagines
either their heroic songs or romances of adventure, either the rich
bounty of lyrical styles or the naïve, touching crudity of the Christian
drama. The seventeenth century turned disdainfully away from the
monuments of national genius discovered by it; finding them sometimes
shocking in their rudeness, sometimes puerile in their refinements.
These unfortunate exhumations, indeed, only serve to strengthen its cult
for a simple, correct beauty, the models of which are found in Greece and
Rome. Why dream of penetrating the darkness of our origin? Contemporary
society is far too self-satisfied to seek distraction in the study of a
past which it does not comprehend. The subjects and heroes of domestic
history are also prohibited. Corneille is Latin, Racine is Greek; the
very name of Childebrande suffices to cover an epopee with
ridicule.--_Pellissier_, pp. 7-8.
[3] "Epistle to Augustus."
[4] "Epistle of Augustus."
[5] _I.e._, learning.
[6] "Life of Dryden."
[7] "Epistle to Augustus."
[8] The tradition as to Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton is almost equally
continuous. A course of what Lowell calls "penitential reading," in
Restoration criticism, will convince anyone that these four names already
stood out distinctly, as those of the four greatest English poets. See
especially Winstanley, "Lives of the English Poets," 1687; Langbaine, "An
Account of the English Dramatic Poets," 1691; Dennis, "Essay on the
Genius and Writings of Shakspere," 1712; Gildon, "The Complete Art of
Poetry," 1718. The fact mentioned by Macaulay, that Sir Wm. Temple's
"Essay on Ancient and Modern Learning" names none of the four, is without
importance. Temple refers by name to only three English "wits," Sidney,
Bacon, and Selden. This very superficial performance of Temple's was a
contribution to the futile controversy over the relative merits of the
ancients and moderns, which is now only of interest as having given
occasion to Bentley to display his great scholarship in his "Dissertation
on the Epistles of Phalaris," (1698), and to Swift to show his powers of
irony in "The Battle of the Books" (1704).
[9] Preface to the "Plays of Shakspere," 1765.
[10] Prologue, spoken by Garrick at the opening of Drury Lane Theater,
1747.
[11] "The Tragedies of the Last Age Considered and Examined," 1678.
[12] "Shakspere Illustrated," 1753.
[13] See Dryden's "Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy" and "Defence of the
Epilogue to the Conquest of Granada."
[14] "Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakspere," 1712.
[15] "The Art of Poetry," pp. 63 and 99. _Cf_. Pope, "Epistle to
Augustus":
"Shakspere (whom you and every play-house bill
Style the divine, the matchless, what you will)
For gain, not glory, winged his roving flight,
And grew immortal in his own despite."
[16] Pope's "Shakspere," 1725.
[17] For a fuller discussion of this subject, consult "A History of
Opinion on the Writings of Shakspere," in the supplemental volume of
Knight's Pictorial Edition. Editions of Shakspere issued within a
century following the Restoration were the third Folio, 1664; the fourth
Folio, 1685; Rowe's (the first critical edition, with a Life, etc.) 1709
(second edition, 1714); Pope's, 1725 (second edition, 1728); Theobald's,
1733; Hanmer's 1744; Warburton-Pope's, 1747; and Johnson's 1765.
Meanwhile, though Shakspere's plays continued to be acted, it was mostly
in doctored versions. Tate changed "Lear" to a comedy. Davenant and
Dryden made over "The Tempest" into "The Enchanted Island," turning blank
verse into rhyme and introducing new characters, while Shadwell altered
it into an opera. Dryden rewrote "Troilus and Cressida"; Davenant,
"Macbeth." Davenant patched together a thing which he called "The Law
against Lovers," from "Measure for Measure" and "Much Ado about Nothing."
Dennis remodeled the "Merry Wives of Windsor" as "The Comical Gallant";
Tate, "Richard II." as "The Sicilian Usurper"; and Otway, "Romeo and
Juliet," as "Caius Marius." Lord Lansdowne converted "The Merchant of
Venice" into "The Jew of Venice," wherein Shylock was played as a comic
character down to the time of Macklin and Kean. Durfey tinkered
"Cymbeline." Cibber metamorphosed "King John" into "Papal Tyranny," and
his version was acted till Macready's time. Cibber's stage version of
"Richard III." is played still. Cumberland "engrafted" new features upon
"Timon of Athens" for Garrick's theater, about 1775. In his life of Mrs.
Siddons, Campbell says that "Coriolanus" "was never acted genuinely from
the year 1660 till the year 1820" (Phillimore's "Life of Lyttelton," Vol.
I. p. 315). He mentions a revision by Tate, another by Dennis ("The
Invader of his Country"), and a third brought out by the elder Sheridan
in 1764, at Covent Garden, and put together from Shakspere's tragedy and
an independent play of the same name by Thomson. "Then in 1789 came the
Kemble edition in which . . . much of Thomson's absurdity is still
preserved."
[18] "Faërie Queene," II. xii. 71
[19] "Essay on Satire." Philips says a good word for the Spenserian
stanza: "How much more stately and majestic in epic poems, especially of
heroic argument, Spenser's stanza . . . is above the way either of
couplet or alternation of four verses only, I am persuaded, were it
revived, would soon be acknowledged."--_Theatrum Poetatarum_, Preface,
pp. 3-4.
[20] "Observations on the Faëry Queene," Vol. II. p. 317.
[21] "The Faëry Queene," Book I., Oxford, 1869. Introduction, p. xx.
[22] "Canto" ii. stanza i.
"Now had Bootes' team far passed behind
The northern star, when hours of night declined."
--_Person of Quality_
[23] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 139.
[24] For a full discussion of this subject the reader should consult
Phelps' "Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement," chap. iv., "The
Spenserian Revival." A partial list of Spenserian imitations is given in
Todd's edition of Spenser, Vol. I. But the list in Prof. Phelps'
Appendix, if not exhaustive, is certainly the most complete yet published
and may be here reproduced. 1706: Prior: "Ode to the Queen." 1713-21:
Prior(?): "Colin's Mistakes." 1713 Croxall: "An Original Canto of
Spenser." 1714: Croxall: "Another Original Canto." 1730 (_circa_):
Whitehead: "Vision of Solomon," "Ode to the Honorable Charles Townsend,"
"Ode to the Same." 1736: Thompson: "Epithalamium." 1736: Cambridge:
"Marriage of Frederick." 1736-37: Boyse: "The Olive," "Psalm XLII."
1737: Akenside: "The Virtuoso." 1739: West: "Abuse of Traveling." 1739:
Anon.: "A New Canto of Spenser's Fairy Queen." 1740: Boyse: "Ode to the
Marquis of Tavistock." 1741 (_circa_): Boyse: "Vision of Patience."
1742: Shenstone: "The Schoolmistress." 1742-50: Cambridge: "Archimage."
1742: Dodsley: "Pain and Patience." 1743: Anon.: "Albion's Triumph."
1744 (_circa_): Dodsley: "Death of Mr. Pope." 1744: Akenside: "Ode to
Curio." 1746: Blacklock: "Hymn to Divine Love," "Philantheus." 1747:
Mason: Stanzas in "Musaeus." 1747: Ridley: "Psyche." 1747: Lowth:
"Choice of Hercules." 1747: Upton: "A New Canto of Spenser's Fairy
Queen." 1747: Bedingfield: "Education of Achilles." 1747: Pitt: "The
Jordan." 1748: T. Warton, Sr.: "Philander." 1748: Thomson: "The Castle
of Indolence." 1749: Potter: "A Farewell Hymn to the Country." 1750: T.
Warton: "Morning." 1751: West: "Education." 1751: T. Warton: "Elegy on
the Death of Prince Frederick." 1751: Mendes: "The Seasons," 1751:
Lloyd: "Progress of Envy." 1751: Akenside: "Ode." 1751: Smith:
"Thales." 1753: T. Warton: "A Pastoral in the Manner of Spenser." 1754:
Denton: "Immortality." 1755: Arnold: "The Mirror." 1748-58: Mendez:
"Squire of Dames." 1756: Smart: "Hymn to the Supreme Being." 1757:
Thompson: "The Nativity," "Hymn to May." 1758: Akenside: "To Country
Gentlemen of England." 1759: Wilkie: "A Dream" 1759: Poem in "Ralph's
Miscellany." 1762: Denton: "House of Superstition." 1767: Mickle: "The
Concubine." 1768: Downman: "Land of the Muses." 1771-74: Beattie: "The
Ministrel." 1775: Anon.: "Land of Liberty." 1775: Mickle: Stanzas from
"Introduction to the Lusiad."
[25] See Phelps, pp. 66-68.
[26] See the sumptuous edition of Cambridge's "Works," issued by his son
in 1803.
[27] "Mr. Walpole and I have frequently wondered you should never mention
a certain imitation of Spenser, published last year by a namesake of
yours, with which we are all enraptured and enmarvelled."--_Letter form
Gray to Richard West_, Florence, July 16, 1740. There was no
relationship between Gilbert West and Gray's Eton friend, though it seems
that the former was also an Etonian, and was afterwards at Oxford,
"whence he was seduced to a more airy mode of life," says Dr. Johnson,
"by a commission in a troop of horse, procured him by his uncle."
Cambridge, however, was an acquaintance of Gray, Walpole, and Richard
West, at Eton. Gray's solitary sonnet was composed upon the death of
Richard West in 1742; and it is worth noting that the introduction to
Cambridge's works are a number of sonnets by his friend Thomas Edwards,
himself a Spenser lover, whose "sugared sonnets among his private
friends" begin about 1750 and reach the number of fifty.
[28] "Life of West."
[29] Lloyd, in "The Progress of Envy," defines _wimpled_ as "hung down";
and Akenside, in "The Virtuoso," employs the ending _en_ for the singular
verb!
[30] Cf. "And as they looked, they found their horror grew."
--Shenstone.
"And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew."
--Goldsmith.
"The noises intermixed, which thence resound,
Do learning's little tenement betray."
--Shenstone.
"There in his noisy mansion, skilled to rule." etc.
--Goldsmith.
[31] The poem was projected, and perhaps partly written, fourteen or
fifteen years earlier.
[32] _Cf_. Tennyson's "land in which it seemed always afternoon."--_The
Lotus Eaters_.
[33] Mickle's authorship of this song has been disputed in favor of one
Jean Adams, a poor Scotch school-mistress, whose poems were printed at
Glasgow in 1734.
[34] Rev. John Sim's "Life of Mickle" in "Mickle's Poetical Works," 1806,
p. xi.
[35] _Cf._ Joseph Warton's "Essay on Pope," Vol. II. p. 35. "It has been
fashionable of late to imitate Spenser; but the likeness of most of these
copies hath consisted rather in using a few of his ancient expressions
than in catching his real manner. Some, however, have been executed with
happiness, and with attention to that simplicity, that tenderness of
sentiment and those little touches of nature that constitute Spenser's
character. I have a peculiar pleasure in mentioning two of them, 'The
Schoolmistress' by Mr. Shenstone, and 'The Education of Achilles' by Mr.
Bedingfield. And also, Dr. Beattie's charming 'Minstrel.' To these must
be added that exquisite piece of wild and romantic imagery, Thomson's
'Castle of Indolence.'"
[36] Byron, to be sure, began his first canto with conscious Spenserian.
He called his poem a "romaunt," and his valet, poor Fletcher, a "stanch
yeomán," and peppered his stanzas thinly with _sooths_ and _wights_ and_
whiloms_, but he gave over this affectation in the later cantos and made
no further excursions into the Middle Ages.
[37] Pope's, "Snatch a grace beyond the reach of art."
--_Essay on Criticism_.
[38] "History of England," Vol. II. p. 739.