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SPENSER
BY
R. W. CHURCH,
DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S,
HONORARY FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE.
London:
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1879
_The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved._
NOTICE.
As the plan of these volumes does not encourage footnotes, I wish to say
that, besides the biographies prefixed to the various editions of
Spenser, there are two series of publications, which have been very
useful to me. One is the series of Calendars of State Papers, especially
the State Papers on Ireland and the Carew MSS. at Lambeth, with the
prefaces of Mr. Hans Claude Hamilton and the late Professor Brewer. The
other is Mr. E. Arber's series of reprints of old English books, and his
Transcript of the Stationers' Registers, a work, I suppose, without
parallel in its information about the early literature of a country, and
edited by him with admirable care and public spirit. I wish also to say
that I am much indebted to Mr. Craik's excellent little book on _Spenser
and his Poetry_.
R. W. C.
_March, 1879._
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
SPENSER'S EARLY LIFE (1552-1579) 1
CHAPTER II.
THE NEW POET--THE SHEPHERD'S CALENDAR (1579) 29
CHAPTER III.
SPENSER IN IRELAND (1580) 51
CHAPTER IV.
THE FAERY QUEEN--THE FIRST PART (1580-1590) 81
CHAPTER V.
THE FAERY QUEEN 118
CHAPTER VI.
SECOND PART OF THE FAERY QUEEN--SPENSER'S LAST
YEARS (1590-1599) 166
SPENSER.
CHAPTER I.
SPENSER'S EARLY LIFE.
[1552-1579.]
Spenser marks a beginning in English literature. He is the first
Englishman who, in that great division of our history which dates from
the Reformation, attempted and achieved a poetical work of the highest
order. Born about the same time as Hooker (1552-1554), in the middle of
that eventful century which began with Henry VIII., and ended with
Elizabeth, he was the earliest of our great modern writers in poetry, as
Hooker was the earliest of our great modern writers in prose. In that
reviving English literature, which, after Chaucer's wonderful promise,
had been arrested in its progress, first by the Wars of the Roses, and
then by the religious troubles of the Reformation, these two were the
writers who first realized to Englishmen the ideas of a high literary
perfection. These ideas vaguely filled many minds; but no one had yet
shown the genius and the strength to grasp and exhibit them in a way to
challenge comparison with what had been accomplished by the poetry and
prose of Greece, Rome, and Italy. There had been poets in England since
Chaucer, and prose writers since Wycliffe had translated the Bible.
Surrey and Wyatt have deserved to live, while a crowd of poets, as
ambitious as they, and not incapable of occasional force and sweetness,
have been forgotten. Sir Thomas More, Roger Ascham, Tyndale, the
translator of the New Testament, Bishop Latimer, the writers of many
state documents, and the framers, either by translation or composition,
of the offices of the English Prayer Book, showed that they understood
the power of the English language over many of the subtleties and
difficulties of thought, and were alive to the music of its cadences.
Some of these works, consecrated by the highest of all possible
associations, have remained, permanent monuments and standards of the
most majestic and most affecting English speech. But the verse of
Surrey, Wyatt, and Sackville, and the prose of More and Ascham were but
noble and promising efforts. Perhaps the language was not ripe for their
success; perhaps the craftsmen's strength and experience were not equal
to the novelty of their attempt. But no one can compare the English
styles of the first half of the sixteenth century with the contemporary
styles of Italy, with Ariosto, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, without
feeling the immense gap in point of culture, practice, and skill--the
immense distance at which the Italians were ahead, in the finish and
reach of their instruments, in their power to handle them, in command
over their resources, and facility and ease in using them. The Italians
were more than a century older; the English could not yet, like the
Italians, say what they would; the strength of English was, doubtless,
there in germ, but it had still to reach its full growth and
development. Even the French prose of Rabelais and Montaigne was more
mature. But in Spenser, as in Hooker, all these tentative essays of
vigorous but unpractised minds have led up to great and lasting works.
We have forgotten all these preliminary attempts, crude and imperfect,
to speak with force and truth, or to sing with measure and grace. There
is no reason why they should be remembered, except by professed
inquirers into the antiquities of our literature; they were usually
clumsy and awkward, sometimes grotesque, often affected, always
hopelessly wanting in the finish, breadth, moderation, and order which
alone can give permanence to writing. They were the necessary exercises
by which Englishmen were recovering the suspended art of Chaucer, and
learning to write; and exercises, though indispensably necessary, are
not ordinarily in themselves interesting and admirable. But when the
exercises had been duly gone through, then arose the original and
powerful minds, to take full advantage of what had been gained by all
the practising, and to concentrate and bring to a focus all the hints
and lessons of art which had been gradually accumulating. Then the
sustained strength and richness of the _Faery Queen_ became possible;
contemporary with it, the grandeur and force of English prose began in
Hooker's _Ecclesiastical Polity_; and then, in the splendid Elizabethan
Drama, that form of art which has nowhere a rival, the highest powers of
poetic imagination became wedded, as they had never been before in
England or in the world, to the real facts of human life, and to its
deepest thoughts and passions.
More is known about the circumstances of Spenser's life than about the
lives of many men of letters of that time; yet our knowledge is often
imperfect and inaccurate. The year 1552 is now generally accepted as the
year of his birth. The date is inferred from a passage in one of his
Sonnets,[4:1] and this probably is near the truth. That is to say that
Spenser was born in one of the last two years of Edward VI.; that his
infancy was passed during the dark days of Mary; and that he was about
six years old when Elizabeth came to the throne. About the same time
were born Ralegh, and, a year or two later (1554), Hooker and Philip
Sidney. Bacon (1561), and Shakespere (1564), belong to the next decade
of the century.
He was certainly a Londoner by birth, and early training. This also we
learn from himself, in the latest poem published in his life-time. It is
a bridal ode (_Prothalamion_), to celebrate the marriage of two
daughters of the Earl of Worcester, written late in 1596. It was a time
in his life of disappointment and trouble, when he was only a rare
visitor to London. In the poem he imagines himself on the banks of
London's great river, and the bridal procession arriving at Lord Essex's
house; and he takes occasion to record the affection with which he still
regarded "the most kindly nurse" of his boyhood.
Calm was the day, and through the trembling air
Sweet-breathing Zephyrus did softly play,
A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay
Hot Titan's beams, which then did glister fair:
When I, (whom sullen care,
Through discontent of my long fruitless stay
In Princes Court, and expectation vain
Of idle hopes, which still do fly away,
Like empty shadows, did afflict my brain,)
Walkt forth to ease my pain
Along the shore of silver-streaming Thames;
Whose rutty bank, the which his river hems,
Was painted all with variable flowers,
And all the meads adorned with dainty gems
Fit to deck maidens' bowers,
And crown their paramours
Against the bridal day, which is not long:
Sweet Thames! run softly, till I end my song.
* * * * *
At length they all _to merry London came,
To merry London, my most kindly nurse,
That to me gave this life's first native source,
Though from another place I take my name,
A house of ancient fame_.
There, when they came, whereas those bricky towers
The which on Thames broad aged back do ride,
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,
There whilome wont the Templar Knights to bide,
Till they decayed through pride:
Next whereunto there stands a stately place,
_Where oft I gained gifts and goodly grace[5:2]
Of that great Lord, which therein wont to dwell;
Whose want too well now feels my friendless case;
But ah! here fits not well
Old woes, but joys, to tell_
Against the bridal day, which is not long:
Sweet Thames! run softly, till I end my song:
Yet therein now doth lodge a noble peer,[5:3]
Great England's glory and the wide world's wonder,
Whose dreadful name late through all Spain did thunder,
And Hercules two pillars, standing near,
Did make to quake and fear.
Fair branch of honour, flower of chivalry!
That fillest England with thy triumph's fame,
Joy have thou of thy noble victory,[5:4]
And endless happiness of thine own name
That promiseth the same.
That through thy prowess, and victorious arms,
Thy country may be freed from foreign harms;
And great Elisa's glorious name may ring
Through all the world, filled with thy wide alarms.
Who his father was, and what was his employment we know not. From one of
the poems of his later years we learn that his mother bore the famous
name of Elizabeth, which was also the cherished one of Spenser's wife.
My love, my life's best ornament,
By whom my spirit out of dust was raised.[6:5]
But his family, whatever was his father's condition, certainly claimed
kindred, though there was a difference in the spelling of the name, with
a house then rising into fame and importance, the Spencers of Althorpe,
the ancestors of the Spencers and Churchills of modern days. Sir John
Spencer had several daughters, three of whom made great marriages.
Elizabeth was the wife of Sir George Carey, afterwards the second Lord
Hunsdon, the son of Elizabeth's cousin and Counsellor. Anne, first, Lady
Compton, afterwards married Thomas Sackville, the son of the poet, Lord
Buckhurst, and then Earl of Dorset. Alice, the youngest, whose first
husband, Lord Strange, became Earl of Derby, after his death married
Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper, Baron Ellesmere, and then Viscount
Brackley. These three sisters are celebrated by him in a gallery of the
noble ladies of the Court,[6:6] under poetical names--"Phyllis, the
flower of rare perfection," "Charillis, the pride and primrose of the
rest," and "Sweet Amaryllis, the youngest but the highest in degree."
Alice, Lady Strange, Lady Derby, Lady Ellesmere and Brackley, and then
again Dowager Lady Derby, the "Sweet Amaryllis" of the poet, had the
rare fortune to be a personal link between Spenser and Milton. She was
among the last whom Spenser honoured with his homage: and she was the
first whom Milton honoured; for he composed his Arcades to be acted
before her by her grandchildren, and the _Masque of Comus_ for her
son-in-law, Lord Bridgewater, and his daughter, another Lady Alice. With
these illustrious sisters Spenser claimed kindred. To each of these he
dedicated one of his minor poems; to Lady Strange, the _Tears of the
Muses_; to Lady Compton, the Apologue of the Fox and the Ape, _Mother
Hubberd's Tale_; to Lady Carey, the Fable of the Butterfly and the
Spider, _Muiopotmos_. And in each dedication he assumed on their part
the recognition of his claim.
The sisters three,
The honour of the noble family,
Of which I meanest boast myself to be.
Whatever his degree of relationship to them, he could hardly even in the
days of his fame have ventured thus publicly to challenge it, unless
there had been some acknowledged ground for it. There are obscure
indications, which antiquarian diligence may perhaps make clear, which
point to East Lancashire as the home of the particular family of
Spensers to which Edmund Spenser's father belonged. Probably he was,
however, in humble circumstances.
Edmund Spenser was a Londoner by education as well as birth. A recent
discovery by Mr. R. B. Knowles, further illustrated by Dr. Grosart,[7:7]
has made us acquainted with Spenser's school. He was a pupil, probably
one of the earliest ones, of the grammar school, then recently (1560)
established by the Merchant Taylors' Company, under a famous teacher,
Dr. Mulcaster. Among the manuscripts at Townley Hall are preserved the
account books of the executors of a bountiful London citizen, Robert
Nowell, the brother of Dr. Alexander Nowell, who was Dean of St. Paul's
during Elizabeth's reign, and was a leading person in the ecclesiastical
affairs of the time. In these books, in a crowd of unknown names of
needy relations and dependents, distressed foreigners, and parish
paupers, who shared from time to time the liberality of Mr. Robert
Nowell's representatives, there appear among the numerous "poor
scholars" whom his wealth assisted, the names of Richard Hooker, and
Lancelot Andrewes. And there, also, in the roll of the expenditure at
Mr. Nowell's pompous funeral at St. Paul's in February, 1568/9, among
long lists of unknown men and women, high and low, who had mourning
given them, among bills for fees to officials, for undertakers' charges,
for heraldic pageantry and ornamentation, for abundant supplies for the
sumptuous funeral banquet, are put down lists of boys, from the chief
London schools, St. Paul's, Westminster, and others, to whom two yards
of cloth were to be given to make their gowns: and at the head of the
six scholars named from Merchant Taylors' is the name of Edmund Spenser.
He was then, probably, the senior boy of the school, and in the
following May he went to Cambridge. The Nowells still helped him: we
read in their account books under April 28, 1569, "to Edmond Spensore,
scholler of the m'chante tayler scholl, at his gowinge to penbrocke
hall in chambridge, x{s}." On the 20th of May, he was admitted sizar,
or serving clerk at Pembroke Hall; and on more than one occasion
afterwards, like Hooker and like Lancelot Andrewes, also a Merchant
Taylors' boy, two or three years Spenser's junior, and a member of the
same college, Spenser had a share in the benefactions, small in
themselves, but very numerous, with which the Nowells after the fine
fashion of the time, were accustomed to assist poor scholars at the
Universities. In the visitations of Merchant Taylors' School, at which
Grindal, Bishop of London, was frequently present,[9:8] it is not
unlikely that his interest was attracted, in the appositions or
examinations, to the promising senior boy of the school. At any rate
Spenser, who afterwards celebrated Grindal's qualities as a bishop, was
admitted to a place, one which befitted a scholar in humble
circumstances, in Grindal's old college. It is perhaps worth noticing
that all Spenser's early friends, Grindal, the Nowells, Dr. Mulcaster,
his master, were north country men.
Spenser was sixteen or seventeen when he left school for the university,
and he entered Cambridge at the time when the struggle which was to
occupy the reign of Elizabeth was just opening. At the end of the year
1569, the first distinct blow was struck against the queen and the new
settlement of religion, by the Rising of the North. In the first ten
years of Elizabeth's reign, Spenser's school time at Merchant Taylors',
the great quarrel had slumbered. Events abroad occupied men's minds; the
religious wars in France, the death of the Duke of Guise (1563), the
loss of Havre, and expulsion of the English garrisons, the close of the
Council of Trent (1563), the French peace, the accession of Pius V.
(1565/6). Nearer home, there was the marriage of Mary of Scotland with
Henry Darnley (1565), and all the tragedy which followed, Kirk of Field
(1567), Lochleven, Langside, Carlisle, the imprisonment of the pretender
to the English Crown (1568). In England, the authority of Elizabeth had
established itself, and the internal organization of the Reformed Church
was going on, in an uncertain and tentative way, but steadily. There was
a struggle between Genevan exiles, who were for going too fast, and
bishops and politicians who were for going too slow; between authority
and individual judgment, between home-born state traditions and foreign
revolutionary zeal. But outwardly, at least, England had been peaceful.
Now however a great change was at hand. In 1566, the Dominican
Inquisitor, Michael Ghislieri, was elected Pope, under the title of Pius
V.
In Pius (1566-72), were embodied the new spirit and policy of the Roman
Church, as they had been created and moulded by the great Jesuit order,
and by reforming bishops like Ghiberti of Verona, and Carlo Borromeo of
Milan. Devout and self-denying as a saint, fierce and inflexible against
abuses as a puritan, resolute and uncompromising as a Jacobin idealist
or an Asiatic despot, ruthless and inexorable as an executioner, his
soul was bent on re-establishing, not only by preaching and martyrdom,
but by the sword and by the stake, the unity of Christendom and of its
belief. Eastwards and westwards, he beheld two formidable foes and two
serious dangers; and he saw before him the task of his life in the
heroic work of crushing English heresy and beating back Turkish
misbelief. He broke through the temporizing caution of his predecessors
by the Bull of Deposition against Elizabeth in 1570. He was the soul of
the confederacy which won the day of Lepanto against the Ottomans in
1571. And though dead, his spirit was paramount in the slaughter of St.
Bartholomew in 1572.
In the year 1569, while Spenser was passing from school to college, his
emissaries were already in England, spreading abroad that Elizabeth was
a bastard and an apostate, incapable of filling a Christian throne,
which belonged by right to the captive Mary. The seed they sowed bore
fruit. In the end of the year, southern England was alarmed by the news
of the rebellion of the two great Earls in the north, Percy of
Northumberland and Neville of Westmoreland. Durham was sacked and the
mass restored by an insurgent host, before which an "aged gentleman,"
Richard Norton with his sons, bore the banner of the Five Wounds of
Christ. The rebellion was easily put down, and the revenge was stern. To
the men who had risen at the instigation of the Pope and in the cause of
Mary, Elizabeth gave, as she had sworn "such a breakfast as never was in
the North before." The hangman finished the work on those who had
escaped the sword. Poetry, early and late, has recorded the dreary fate
of those brave victims of a mistaken cause, in the ballad of the _Rising
of the North_, and in the _White Doe of Rylstone_. It was the signal
given for the internecine war which was to follow between Rome and
Elizabeth. And it was the first great public event which Spenser would
hear of in all men's mouths, as he entered on manhood, the prelude and
augury of fierce and dangerous years to come. The nation awoke to the
certainty--one which so profoundly affects sentiment and character both
in a nation and in an individual--that among the habitual and fixed
conditions of life is that of having a serious and implacable enemy ever
to reckon with.
And in this year, apparently in the transition time between school and
college, Spenser's literary ventures began. The evidence is curious, but
it seems to be clear. In 1569, a refugee Flemish physician from Antwerp,
who had fled to England from the "abominations of the Roman Antichrist"
and the persecutions of the Duke of Alva, John Vander Noodt, published
one of those odd miscellanies, fashionable at the time, half moral and
poetical, half fiercely polemical, which he called a "_Theatre_, wherein
be represented as well the Miseries and Calamities which follow the
voluptuous Worldlings, as also the great Joys and Pleasures which the
Faithful do enjoy--an argument both profitable and delectable to all
that sincerely love the word of God." This "little treatise," was a
mixture of verse and prose, setting forth in general, the vanity of the
world, and, in particular, predictions of the ruin of Rome and
Antichrist: and it enforced its lessons by illustrative woodcuts. In
this strange jumble are preserved, we can scarcely doubt, the first
compositions which we know of Spenser's. Among the pieces are some
Sonnets of Petrarch, and some Visions of the French poet Joachim du
Bellay, whose poems were published in 1568. In the collection itself,
these pieces are said by the compiler to have been translated by him
"out of the Brabants speech," and "out of Dutch into English." But in a
volume of "poems of the world's vanity," and published years afterwards
in 1591, ascribed to Spenser, and put together, apparently with his
consent, by his publisher, are found these very pieces from Petrarch and
Du Bellay. The translations from Petrarch are almost literally the same,
and are said to have been "formerly translated." In the Visions of Du
Bellay there is this difference, that the earlier translations are in
blank verse, and the later ones are rimed as sonnets; but the change
does not destroy the manifest identity of the two translations. So that
unless Spenser's publisher, to whom the poet had certainly given some of
his genuine pieces for the volume, is not to be trusted,--which, of
course, is possible, but not probable--or unless,--what is in the last
degree inconceivable,--Spenser had afterwards been willing to take the
trouble of turning the blank verse of Du Bellay's unknown translator
into rime, the Dutchman who dates his _Theatre of Worldlings_ on the
25th May, 1569, must have employed the promising and fluent school boy,
to furnish him with an English versified form, of which he himself took
the credit, for compositions which he professes to have known only in
the Brabants or Dutch translations. The sonnets from Petrarch are
translated with much command of language; there occurs in them, what was
afterwards a favourite thought of Spenser's:--
--The Nymphs,
That sweetly in accord did _tune their voice
To the soft sounding of the waters' fall_.[13:9]
It is scarcely credible that the translator of the sonnets could have
caught so much as he has done of the spirit of Petrarch without having
been able to read the Italian original; and if Spenser was the
translator, it is a curious illustration of the fashionableness of
Italian literature in the days of Elizabeth, that a school-boy just
leaving Merchant Taylors' should have been so much interested in it. Dr.
Mulcaster, his master, is said by Warton to have given special attention
to the teaching of the English language.
If these translations were Spenser's, he must have gone to Cambridge
with a faculty of verse, which for his time may be compared to that with
which winners of prize poems go to the universities now. But there was
this difference, that the school-boy versifiers of our days are rich
with the accumulated experience and practice of the most varied and
magnificent poetical literature in the world; while Spenser had but one
really great English model behind him; and Chaucer, honoured as he was,
had become in Elizabeth's time, if not obsolete, yet in his diction,
very far removed from the living language of the day. Even Milton, in
his boyish compositions, wrote after Spenser and Shakespeare, with their
contemporaries, had created modern English poetry. Whatever there was in
Spenser's early verses of grace and music was of his own finding: no one
of his own time, except in occasional and fitful snatches, like stanzas
of Sackville's, had shown him the way. Thus equipped, he entered the
student world, then full of pedantic and ill-applied learning, of the
disputations of Calvinistic theology, and of the beginnings of those
highly speculative puritanical controversies, which were the echo at the
University of the great political struggles of the day, and were soon to
become so seriously practical. The University was represented to the
authorities in London as being in a state of dangerous excitement,
troublesome and mutinous. Whitgift, afterwards Elizabeth's favourite
archbishop, Master, first of Pembroke, and then of Trinity, was
Vice-Chancellor of the University; but as the guardian of established
order, he found it difficult to keep in check the violent and
revolutionary spirit of the theological schools. Calvin was beginning to
be set up there as the infallible doctor of Protestant theology.
Cartwright from the Margaret Professor's chair was teaching the
exclusive and divine claims of the Geneva platform of discipline, and in
defiance of the bishops and the government was denouncing the received
Church polity and ritual as Popish and anti-Christian. Cartwright, an
extreme and uncompromising man, was deprived in 1570; but the course
which things were taking under the influence of Rome and Spain gave
force to his lessons and warnings, and strengthened his party. In this
turmoil of opinions, amid these hard and technical debates, these fierce
conflicts between the highest authorities, and this unsparing violence
and bitterness of party recriminations, Spenser, with the tastes and
faculties of a poet, and the love not only of what was beautiful, but of
what was meditative and dreamy, began his university life.
It was not a favourable atmosphere for the nurture of a great poet. But
it suited one side of Spenser's mind, as it suited that of all but the
most independent Englishmen of the time, Shakespere, Bacon, Ralegh.
Little is known of Spenser's Cambridge career. It is probable, from the
persons with whom he was connected, that he would not be indifferent to
the debates around him, and that his religious prepossessions were then,
as afterwards, in favour of the conforming puritanism in the Church, as
opposed to the extreme and thorough-going puritanism of Cartwright. Of
the conforming puritans, who would have been glad of a greater
approximation to the Swiss model, but who, whatever their private wishes
or dislikes, thought it best, for good reasons or bad, to submit to the
strong determination of the government against it, and to accept what
the government approved and imposed, Grindal, who held successively the
great sees of London, York, and Canterbury, and Nowell, Dean of St.
Paul's, Spenser's benefactor, were representative types. Grindal, a
waverer like many others in opinion, had also a noble and manly side to
his character, in his hatred of practical abuses, and in the courageous
and obstinate resistance which he could offer to power, when his sense
of right was outraged. Grindal, as has been said, was perhaps
instrumental in getting Spenser into his own old college, Pembroke Hall,
with the intention, it may be, as was the fashion of bishops of that
time, of becoming his patron. But certainly after his disgrace in 1577,
and when it was not quite safe to praise a great man under the
displeasure of the Court, Grindal is the person whom Spenser first
singled out for his warmest and heartiest praise. He is introduced under
a thin disguise, "Algrind," in Spenser's earliest work after he left
Cambridge, the _Shepherd's Calendar_, as the pattern of the true and
faithful Christian pastor. And if Pembroke Hall retained at all the tone
and tendencies of such masters as Ridley, Grindal, and Whitgift, the
school in which Spenser grew up was one of their mitigated puritanism.
But his puritanism was political and national, rather than religious. He
went heartily with the puritan party in their intense hatred of Rome and
Roman partisans; he went with them also in their denunciations of the
scandals and abuses of the ecclesiastical government at home. But in
temper of mind and intellectual bias he had little in common with the
puritans. For the stern austerities of Calvinism, its fierce and eager
scholasticism, its isolation from human history, human enjoyment, and
all the manifold play and variety of human character, there could not be
much sympathy in a man like Spenser, with his easy and flexible nature,
keenly alive to all beauty, an admirer even when he was not a lover of
the alluring pleasures of which the world is full, with a perpetual
struggle going on in him, between his strong instincts of purity and
right, and his passionate appreciation of every charm and grace. He
shows no signs of agreement with the internal characteristics of the
puritans, their distinguishing theology, their peculiarities of thought
and habits, their protests, right or wrong, against the fashions and
amusements of the world. If not a man of pleasure, he yet threw himself
without scruple into the tastes, the language, the pursuits, of the gay
and gallant society in which they saw so much evil: and from their
narrow view of life, and the contempt, dislike, and fear, with which
they regarded the whole field of human interest, he certainly was parted
by the widest gulf. Indeed, he had not the sternness and concentration
of purpose, which made Milton the great puritan poet.
Spenser took his Master's degree in 1576, and then left Cambridge. He
gained no Fellowship, and there is nothing to show how he employed
himself. His classical learning, whether acquired there or elsewhere,
was copious, but curiously inaccurate; and the only specimen remaining
of his Latin composition in verse is contemptible in its mediæval
clumsiness. We know nothing of his Cambridge life except the friendships
which he formed there. An intimacy began at Cambridge of the closest and
most affectionate kind, which lasted long into after-life, between him
and two men of his college, one older in standing than himself, the
other younger; Gabriel Harvey, first a fellow of Pembroke, and then a
student or teacher of civil law at Trinity Hall, and Edward Kirke, like
Spenser, a sizar at Pembroke, recently identified with the E. K., who
was the editor and commentator of Spenser's earliest work, the anonymous
_Shepherd's Calendar_. Of the younger friend this is the most that is
known. That he was deeply in Spenser's confidence as a literary
coadjutor, and possibly in other ways, is shown in the work which he
did. But Gabriel Harvey was a man who had influence on Spenser's ideas
and purposes, and on the direction of his efforts. He was a classical
scholar of much distinction in his day, well read in the Italian authors
then so fashionable, and regarded as a high authority on questions of
criticism and taste. Except to students of Elizabethan literary history,
he has become an utterly obscure personage; and he has not usually been
spoken of with much respect. He had the misfortune, later in life, to
plunge violently into the scurrilous quarrels of the day, and as he was
matched with wittier and more popular antagonists, he has come down to
us as a foolish pretender, or at least as a dull and stupid scholar who
knew little of the real value of the books he was always ready to quote,
like the pedant of the comedies, or Shakespere's schoolmaster
Holofernes. Further, he was one who, with his classical learning, had
little belief in the resources of his mother tongue, and he was one of
the earliest and most confident supporters of a plan then fashionable,
for reforming English verse, by casting away its natural habits and
rhythms, and imposing on it the laws of the classical metres. In this he
was not singular. The professed treatises of this time on poetry, of
which there were several, assume the same theory, as the mode of
"reforming" and duly elevating English verse. It was eagerly accepted by
Philip Sidney and his Areopagus of wits at court, who busied themselves
in devising rules of their own--improvements as they thought on those of
the university men--for English hexameters and sapphics, or as they
called it, artificial versifying. They regarded the comparative value of
the native English rhythms and the classical metres, much as our
ancestors of Addison's day regarded the comparison between Gothic and
Palladian architecture. One, even if it sometimes had a certain romantic
interest, was rude and coarse; the other was the perfection of polite
art and good taste. Certainly in what remains of Gabriel Harvey's
writing, there is much that seems to us vain and ridiculous enough; and
it has been naturally surmised that he must have been a dangerous friend
and counsellor to Spenser. But probably we are hard upon him. His
writings, after all, are not much more affected and absurd in their
outward fashion than most of the literary composition of the time; his
verses are no worse than those of most of his neighbours; he was not
above, but he was not below, the false taste and clumsiness of his age;
and the rage for "artificial versifying" was for the moment in the air.
And it must be said, that though his enthusiasm for English hexameters
is of a piece with the puritan use of scripture texts in divinity and
morals, yet there is no want of hard-headed shrewdness in his remarks;
indeed, in his rules for the adaptation of English words and accents to
classical metres, he shows clearness and good sense in apprehending the
conditions of the problem, while Sidney and Spenser still appear
confused and uncertain. But in spite of his pedantry, and though he had
not, as we shall see, the eye to discern at first the genius of the
_Faery Queen_, he has to us the interest of having been Spenser's first,
and as far as we can see, to the last, dearest friend. By both of his
younger fellow-students at Cambridge, he was looked up to with the
deepest reverence, and the most confiding affection. Their language is
extravagant, but there is no reason to think that it was not genuine. E.
Kirke, the editor of Spenser's first venture, the _Shepherd's Calendar_,
commends the "new poet" to his patronage, and to the protection of his
"mighty rhetoric," and exhorts Harvey himself to seize the poetical
"garland which to him alone is due." Spenser speaks in the same terms;
"_veruntamen te sequor solum; nunquam vero assequar_." Portions of the
early correspondence between Harvey and Spenser have been preserved to
us, possibly by Gabriel Harvey's self-satisfaction in regard to his own
compositions. But with the pedagogue's jocoseness, and a playfulness
which is like that of an elephant, it shows on both sides easy
frankness, sincerity, and warmth, and not a little of the early
character of the younger man. In Spenser's earliest poetry, his
pastorals, Harvey appears among the imaginary rustics, as the poet's
"special and most familiar friend," under the name of Hobbinol,--
"Good Hobbinol, that was so true."
To him Spenser addresses his confidences, under the name of Colin Clout,
a name borrowed from Skelton, a satirical poet of Henry VIII.'s time,
which Spenser kept throughout his poetical career. Harvey reappears in
one of Spenser's latest writings, a return to the early pastoral, _Colin
Clout's come home again_, a picture drawn in distant Ireland, of the
brilliant but disappointing court of Elizabeth. And from Ireland in
1586, was addressed to Harvey by "his devoted friend during life," the
following fine sonnet, which, whatever may have been the merit of
Harvey's criticisms and his literary quarrels with Greene and Nash,
shows at least Spenser's unabated honour for him.
TO THE RIGHT WORSHIPFUL, MY SINGULAR GOOD FRIEND, M.
GABRIEL HARVEY, DOCTOR OF THE LAWS.
HARVEY, the happy above happiest men
I read; that, sitting like a looker on
Of this world's stage, dost note with critic pen
The sharp dislikes of each condition;
And, as one careless of suspicion,
Ne fawnest for the favour of the great;
Ne fearest foolish reprehension
Of faulty men, which danger to thee threat;
But freely dost, of what thee list, entreat,
Like a great lord of peerless liberty;
Lifting the good up to high honour's seat,
And the evil damning over more to die;
For life and death is in thy doomful writing;
So thy renown lives ever by enditing.
Dublin, this xviii. of July, 1586. Your devoted friend, during life,
EDMUND SPENSER.
Between Cambridge and Spenser's appearance in London, there is a short
but obscure interval. What is certain is, that he spent part of it in
the North of England; that he was busy with various poetical works, one
of which was soon to make him known as a new star in the poetical
heaven; and lastly, that in the effect on him of a deep but unrequited
passion, he then received what seems to have been a strong and
determining influence on his character and life. It seems likely that
his sojourn in the north, which perhaps first introduced the London-bred
scholar, the "Southern Shepherd's Boy," to the novel and rougher country
life of distant Lancashire, also gave form and local character to his
first considerable work. But we do not know for certain where his abode
was in the north; of his literary activity, which must have been
considerable, we only partially know the fruit; and of the lady whom he
made so famous, that her name became a consecrated word in the poetry of
the time, of Rosalind, the "Widow's Daughter of the Glen," whose refusal
of his suit, and preference for another, he lamented so bitterly, yet
would allow no one else to blame, we know absolutely nothing. She would
not be his wife; but apparently, he never ceased to love her through all
the chances and temptations, and possibly errors of his life, even
apparently in the midst of his passionate admiration of the lady whom,
long afterwards, he did marry. To her kindred and condition, various
clues have been suggested, only to provoke and disappoint us. Whatever
her condition, she was able to measure Spenser's powers: Gabriel Harvey
has preserved one of her compliments--"Gentle Mistress Rosalind once
reported him to have all the intelligences at commandment; and at
another, christened him her _Signior Pegaso_." But the unknown Rosalind
had given an impulse to the young poet's powers, and a colour to his
thoughts, and had enrolled Spenser in that band and order of
poets,--with one exception, not the greatest order,--to whom the
wonderful passion of love, in its heights and its depths, is the element
on which their imagination works, and out of which it moulds its most
beautiful and characteristic creations.
But in October, 1579, he emerges from obscurity. If we may trust the
correspondence between Gabriel Harvey and Spenser, which was published
at the time, Spenser was then in London.[22:1] It was the time of the
crisis of the Alençon courtship, while the Queen was playing fast and
loose with her Valois lover, whom she playfully called her frog; when
all about her, Burghley, Leicester, Sidney, and Walsingham, were
dismayed, both at the plan itself, and at her vacillations; and just
when the Puritan pamphleteer, who had given expression to the popular
disgust at a French marriage, especially at a connexion with the family
which had on its hands the blood of St. Bartholomew, was sentenced to
lose his right hand as a seditious libeller. Spenser had become
acquainted with Philip Sidney, and Sidney's literary and courtly
friends. He had been received into the household of Sidney's uncle, Lord
Leicester, and dates one of his letters from Leicester House. Among his
employments he had written, "_Stemmata Dudleiana_." He is doubting
whether or not to publish, "to utter," some of his poetical
compositions: he is doubting, and asks Harvey's advice, whether or not
to dedicate them to His Excellent Lordship, "lest by our much cloying
their noble ears he should gather contempt of myself, or else seem
rather for gain and commodity to do it, and some sweetness that I have
already tasted." Yet, he thinks, that when occasion is so fairly offered
of estimation and preferment, it may be well to use it: "while the iron
is hot, it is good striking; and minds of nobles vary, as their
estates." And he was on the eve of starting across the sea to be
employed in Leicester's service, on some permanent mission in France,
perhaps in connexion with the Alençon intrigues. He was thus launched
into what was looked upon as the road of preferment; in his case, as it
turned out, a very subordinate form of public employment, which was to
continue almost for his lifetime. Sidney had recognized his unusual
power, if not yet his genius. He brought him forward; perhaps he
accepted him as a friend. Tradition makes him Sidney's companion at
Penshurst; in his early poems, Kent is the county with which he seems
most familiar. But Sidney certainly made him known to the queen; he
probably recommended him as a promising servant to Leicester: and he
impressed his own noble and beautiful character deeply on Spenser's
mind. Spenser saw and learned in him what was then the highest type of
the finished gentleman. He led Spenser astray. Sidney was not without
his full share of that affectation, which was then thought refinement.
Like Gabriel Harvey, he induced Spenser to waste his time on the
artificial versifying which was in vogue. But such faults and mistakes
of fashion, and in one shape or another they are inevitable in all ages,
were as nothing, compared to the influence on a highly receptive nature,
of a character so elevated and pure, so genial, so brave and true. It
was not in vain that Spenser was thus brought so near to his
"Astrophel."
These letters tell us all that we know of Spenser's life at this time.
During these anxious eighteen months, and connected with persons like
Sidney and Leicester, Spenser only writes to Harvey on literary
subjects. He is discreet, and will not indulge Harvey's "desire to hear
of my late being with her Majesty." According to a literary fashion of
the time, he writes and is addressed as _M. Immerito_, and the great
business which occupies him and fills the letters is the scheme devised
in Sidney's _Areopagus_ for the "general surceasing and silence of bald
Rymers, and also of the very best of them too; and for prescribing
certain laws and rules of quantities of English syllables for English
verse." Spenser "is more in love with his English versifying than with
ryming,"--"which," he says to Harvey, "I should have done long since, if
I would then have followed your counsel." Harvey, of course, is
delighted; he thanks the good angel which puts it into the heads of
Sidney and Edward Dyer, "the two very diamonds of her Majesty's court,"
"our very Castor and Pollux," to "help forward our new famous enterprise
for the exchanging of barbarous rymes for artificial verses;" and the
whole subject is discussed at great length between the two friends; "Mr.
Drant's" rules are compared with those of "Mr. Sidney," revised by "Mr.
Immerito;" and examples, highly illustrative of the character of the
"famous enterprise" are copiously given. In one of Harvey's letters we
have a curious account of changes of fashion in studies and ideas at
Cambridge. They seem to have changed since Spenser's time.
I beseech you all this while, what news at _Cambridge_?
_Tully_ and _Demosthenes_ nothing so much studied as they were
wont: _Livy_ and _Sallust_ perhaps more, rather than less:
_Lucian_ never so much: _Aristotle_ much named but little
read: _Xenophon_ and _Plato_ reckoned amongst discoursers, and
conceited superficial fellows; much verbal and sophistical
jangling; little subtle and effectual disputing. _Machiavel_ a
great man: _Castilio_, of no small repute: _Petrarch_ and
_Boccace_ in every man's mouth: _Galateo_ and _Guazzo_ never
so happy: but some acquainted with _Unico Aretino_: the
_French_ and _Italian_ highly regarded: the _Latin_ and
_Greek_ but lightly. The _Queen Mother_ at the beginning or
end of every conference: all inquisitive after news: new
_books_, new fashions, new laws, new officers, and some after
new elements, some after new heavens and hells too. _Turkish_
affairs familiarly known: castles built in the air: much ado,
and little help: in no age so little so much made of; every
one highly in his own favour. Something made of nothing, in
spight of Nature: numbers made of cyphers, in spight of Art.
Oxen and asses, notwithstanding the absurdity it seemed to
_Plautus_, drawing in the same yoke: the Gospel taught, not
learnt; Charity cold; nothing good, but by imputation; the
Ceremonial Law in word abrogated, the Judicial in effect
disannull'd, the Moral abandon'd; _the Light, the Light_ in
every man's lips, but mark their eyes, and you will say they
are rather like owls than eagles. As of old books, so of
ancient virtue, honesty, fidelity, equity, new abridgments;
every day spawns new opinions: heresy in divinity, in
philosophy, in humanity, in manners, grounded upon hearsay;
doctors contemn'd; the _devil_ not so hated as the _pope_;
many invectives, but no amendment. No more ado about caps and
surplices; Mr. _Cartwright_ quite forgotten.
* * * * *
_David_, _Ulysses_, and _Solon_, feign'd themselves fools and
madmen; our fools and madmen feign themselves _Davids_,
_Ulysses's_, and _Solons_. It is pity fair weather should do
any hurt; but I know what peace and quietness hath done with
some melancholy pickstraws.
The letters preserve a good many touches of character which are
interesting. This, for instance, which shows Spenser's feeling about
Sidney. "New books," writes Spenser, "I hear of none, but only of one,
that writing a certain book called _The School of Abuse_, [Stephen
Gosson's _Invective against poets, pipers, players, &c._] and dedicating
to M. Sidney, was for his labour scorned: _if at least it be in the
goodness of that nature to scorn_." As regards Spenser himself, it is
clear from the letters that Harvey was not without uneasiness lest his
friend, from his gay and pleasure-loving nature, and the temptations
round him, should be carried away into the vices of an age, which,
though very brilliant and high-tempered, was also a very dissolute one.
He couches his counsels mainly in Latin; but they point to real danger;
and he adds in English,--"Credit me, I will never lin [= cease] baiting
at you, till I have rid you quite of this yonkerly and womanly humour."
But in the second pair of letters of April, 1580, a lady appears.
Whether Spenser was her husband or her lover, we know not; but she is
his "sweetheart." The two friends write of her in Latin. Spenser sends
in Latin the saucy messages of his sweetheart, "meum corculum," to
Harvey; Harvey, with academic gallantry, sends her in Latin as many
thanks for her charming letter as she has hairs, "half golden, half
silver, half jewelled, in her little head;"--she is a second little
Rosalind--"altera Rosalindula," whom he salutes as "Domina Immerito, mea
bellissima Colina Clouta." But whether wife or mistress, we hear of her
no more. Further, the letters contain notices of various early works of
Spenser. The "new" _Shepherd's Calendar_, of which more will be said,
had just been published. And in this correspondence of April, 1580, we
have the first mention of the _Faery Queen_. The compositions here
mentioned have been either lost, or worked into his later poetry; his
_Dreams_, _Epithalamion Thamesis_, apparently in the "reformed verse,"
his _Dying Pelican_, his _Slumber_, his _Stemmata Dudleiana_, his
_Comedies_. They show at least the activity and eagerness of the writer
in his absorbing pursuit. But he was still in bondage to the belief that
English poetry ought to try to put on a classical dress. It is strange
that the man who had written some of the poetry in the _Shepherd's
Calendar_ should have found either satisfaction or promise in the
following attempt at Trimeter Iambics.
And nowe requite I you with the like, not with the verye
beste, but with the verye shortest, namely, with a few
Iambickes: I dare warrant they be precisely perfect for the
feete (as you can easily judge), and varie not one inch from
the Rule. I will imparte yours to Maister _Sidney_ and Maister
_Dyer_ at my nexte going to the Courte. I praye you, keepe
mine close to your selfe, or your verie entire friends,
Maister _Preston_, Maister _Still_, and the reste.
_Iambicum Trimetrum._
Unhappie Verse, the witnesse of my unhappie state,
Make thy selfe fluttring wings of thy fast flying
Thought, and fly forth unto my Love wheresoever she be:
Whether lying reastlesse in heavy bedde, or else
Sitting so cheerlesse at the cheerfull boorde, or else
Playing alone carelesse on hir heavenlie Virginals.
If in Bed, tell hir, that my eyes can take no reste:
If at Boorde, tell hir that my mouth can eate no meate:
If at hir Virginals, tell hir, I can heare no mirth.
Asked why? say: Waking Love suffereth no sleepe:
Say, that raging Love dothe appall the weake stomacke:
Say, that lamenting Love marreth the Musicall.
Tell hir, that hir pleasures were wonte to lull me asleepe:
Tell hir, that hir beautie was wonte to feede mine eyes:
Tell hir, that hir sweete Tongue was wonte to make me mirth.
Nowe doe I nightly waste, wanting my kindely reste:
Nowe doe I dayly starve, wanting my lively foode:
Nowe doe I alwayes dye, wanting thy timely mirth.
And if I waste, who will bewaile my heavy chaunce?
And if I starve, who will record my cursed end?
And if I dye, who will saye: _this was Immerito_?
FOOTNOTES:
[4:1]
----Since the winged god his planet clear
Began in me to move, one year is spent:
The which doth longer unto me appear
Than _all those forty_ which my life outwent.
_Sonnet_ LX., probably written in 1593 or 1594.
[5:2] Leicester House, then Essex House, in the Strand.
[5:3] Earl of Essex.
[5:4] At Cadiz, June 21, 1596.
[6:5] _Sonnet_ LXXIV.
[6:6] _Colin Clout's come Home again_, l. 536. Craik, _Spenser_, i. 9.
10.
[7:7] See _The Spending of the Money of Robert Nowell_, 1568-1580: from
the MSS. at Towneley Hall. Edited by Rev. A. B. Grosart, 1877.
[9:8] H. B. Wilson, _Hist. of Merchant Taylors' School_, p. 23.
[13:9] Comp. _Sheph. Cal._ April l. 36. June l. 8. F. Q. 6. 10. 7.
[22:1] Published in June, 1580. Reprinted incompletely in Haslewood,
_Ancient Critical Essays_ (1815), ii. 255. Extracts given in editions of
Spenser by Hughes, Todd, and Morris. The letters are of April, 1579, and
October, 1580.