SECOND PART OF THE FAERY QUEEN.--SPENSER'S LAST YEARS (1590-1599).
The publication of the _Faery Queen_ in 1590 had made the new poet of
the _Shepherd's Calendar_ a famous man. He was no longer merely the
favourite of a knot of enthusiastic friends, and outside of them only
recognized and valued at his true measure by such judges as Sidney and
Ralegh. By the common voice of all the poets of his time he was now
acknowledged as the first of living English poets. It is not easy for
us, who live in these late times and are familiar with so many literary
masterpieces, to realize the surprise of a first and novel achievement
in literature; the effect on an age, long and eagerly seeking after
poetical expression, of the appearance at last of a work of such power,
richness, and finished art.
It can scarcely be doubted, I think, from the bitter sarcasms
interspersed in his later poems, that Spenser expected more from his
triumph than it brought him. It opened no way of advancement for him in
England. He continued for a while in that most ungrateful and
unsatisfactory employment, the service of the State in Ireland; and that
he relinquished in 1593.[166:1] At the end of 1591 he was again at
Kilcolman. He had written and probably sent to Ralegh, though he did not
publish it till 1595, the record already quoted of the last two year's
events, _Colin Clout's come home again_,--his visit, under Ralegh's
guidance, to the Court, his thoughts and recollections of its great
ladies, his generous criticisms on poets, the people and courtiers whom
he had seen and heard of; how he had been dazzled, how he had been
disenchanted, and how he was come home to his Irish mountains and
streams and lakes, to enjoy their beauty, though in a "salvage" and
"foreign" land; to find in this peaceful and tranquil retirement
something far better than the heat of ambition and the intrigues of
envious rivalries; and to contrast with the profanations of the name of
love which had disgusted him in a dissolute society, the higher and
purer ideal of it which he could honour and pursue in the simplicity of
his country life.
And in Ireland, the rejected adorer of the Rosalind of the _Shepherd's
Calendar_ found another and still more perfect Rosalind, who, though she
was at first inclined to repeat the cruelty of the earlier one, in time
relented, and received such a dower of poetic glory as few poets have
bestowed upon their brides. It has always appeared strange that
Spenser's passion for the first Rosalind should have been so lasting,
that in his last pastoral, _Colin Clout's come home again_, written so
late as 1591, and published after he was married, he should end his poem
by reverting to this long-past love passage, defending her on the ground
of her incomparable excellence and his own unworthiness, against the
blame of friendly "shepherds," witnesses of the "languors of his too
long dying," and angry with her hard-heartedness. It may be that,
according to Spenser's way of making his masks and figures suggest but
not fully express their antitypes,[168:2] Rosalind here bears the image
of the real mistress of this time, the "country lass," the Elizabeth of
the sonnets, who was, in fact, for a while as unkind as the earlier
Rosalind. The history of this later wooing, its hopes and anguish, its
varying currents, its final unexpected success, is the subject of a
collection of Sonnets, which have the disadvantage of provoking
comparison with the Sonnets of Shakespere. There is no want in them of
grace and sweetness, and they ring true with genuine feeling and warm
affection, though they have of course their share of the conceits then
held proper for love poems. But they want the power and fire, as well as
the perplexing mystery, of those of the greater master. His bride was
also immortalized as a fourth among the three Graces, in a
richly-painted passage in the last book of the _Faery Queen_. But the
most magnificent tribute to her is the great Wedding Ode, the
_Epithalamion_, the finest composition of its kind, probably, in any
language: so impetuous and unflagging, so orderly and yet so rapid in
the onward march of its stately and varied stanzas; so passionate, so
flashing with imaginative wealth, yet so refined and self-restrained. It
was always easy for Spenser to open the floodgates of his inexhaustible
fancy. With him,--
The numbers flow as fast as spring doth rise.
But here he has thrown into his composition all his power of
concentration, of arrangement, of strong and harmonious government over
thought and image, over language and measure and rhythm; and the result
is unquestionably one of the grandest lyrics in English poetry. We have
learned to think the subject unfit for such free poetical treatment;
Spenser's age did not.
Of the lady of whom all this was said, and for whom all this was
written, the family name has not been thought worth preserving. We know
that by her Christian name she was a namesake of the great queen, and of
Spenser's mother. She is called a country lass, which may mean anything;
and the marriage appears to have been solemnized in Cork, on what was
then Midsummer Day, "Barnaby the Bright," the day when "the sun is in
his cheerful height," June 11/22, 1594. Except that she survived
Spenser, that she married again, and had some legal quarrels with one of
her own sons about his lands, we know nothing more about her. Of two of
the children whom she brought him, the names have been preserved, and
they indicate that in spite of love and poetry, and the charms of
Kilcolman, Spenser felt as Englishmen feel in Australia or in India. To
call one of them _Sylvanus_, and the other _Peregrine_, reveals to us
that Ireland was still to him a "salvage land," and he a pilgrim and
stranger in it; as Moses called his firstborn Gershom, a stranger
here--"for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land."
In the year after his marriage, he sent over these memorials of it to be
published in London, and they were entered at Stationers' Hall in
November, 1595. The same year he came over himself, bringing with him
the second instalment of the _Faery Queen_, which was entered for
publication the following January, 1595/6. Thus the half of the
projected work was finished; and finished, as we know from one of the
Sonnets (80), before his marriage. After his long "race through Fairy
land," he asks leave to rest, and solace himself with his "love's sweet
praise;" and then "as a steed refreshed after toil," he will "stoutly
that second worke assoyle." The first six books were published together
in 1596. He remained most of the year in London, during which _The Four
Hymns on Love and Beauty, Earthly and Heavenly_, were published; and
also a Dirge (_Daphnaida_) on Douglas Howard, the wife of Arthur Gorges,
the spirited narrator of the Island Voyage of Essex and Ralegh, written
in 1591; and a "spousal verse" (_Prothalamion_), on the marriage of the
two daughters of the Earl of Worcester, late in 1596. But he was only a
visitor in London. The _Prothalamion_ contains a final record of his
disappointments in England.
I, (whom sullein care,
Through discontent of my long fruitlesse stay
In Princes Court, and expectation vayne
Of idle hopes, which still doe fly away,
Like empty shaddowes, did afflict my brayne,)
Walkt forth to ease my payne
Along the shoare of silver streaming Themmes--
His marriage ought to have made him happy. He professed to find the
highest enjoyment in the quiet and retirement of country life. He was in
the prime of life, successful beyond all his fellows in his special
work, and apparently with unabated interest in what remained to be done
of it. And though he could not but feel himself at a distance from the
"sweet civility" of England, and socially at disadvantage compared to
those whose lines had fallen to them in its pleasant places, yet
nature, which he loved so well, was still friendly to him, if men were
wild and dangerous. He is never weary of praising the natural advantages
of Ireland. Speaking of the North, he says,--
And sure it is yet a most beautifull and sweet countrey as any
is under heaven, seamed throughout with many goodly rivers,
replenished with all sortes of fish, most aboundantly
sprinckled with many sweet Ilandes, and goodly lakes, like
litle Inland Seas, that will carry even ships upon theyr
waters, adorned with goodly woodes fitt for building of howses
and shippes, soe comodiously, as that yf some princes in the
world had them, they would soone hope to be lordes of all the
seas, and ere long of all the world; also full of good portes
and havens opening upon England and Scotland, as inviting us
to come to them, to see what excellent comodityes that
countrey can affoord, besides the soyle it self most fertile,
fitt to yeeld all kind of fruite that shal be comitted
therunto. And lastly, the heavens most milde and temperat,
though somewhat more moyst then the part toward the West.
His own home at Kilcolman charmed and delighted him. It was not his
fault that its trout streams, its Mulla and Fanchin, are not as famous
as Walter Scott's Teviot and Tweed, or Wordsworth's Yarrow and Duddon,
or that its hills, Old Mole, and Arlo Hill, have not kept a poetic name
like Helvellyn and "Eildon's triple height." They have failed to become
familiar names to us. But the beauties of his home inspired more than
one sweet pastoral picture in the _Faery Queen_; and in the last
fragment remaining to us of it, he celebrates his mountains and woods
and valleys as once the fabled resort of the Divine Huntress and her
Nymphs, and the meeting-place of the Gods.
There was one drawback to the enjoyment of his Irish country life, and
of the natural attractiveness of Kilcolman. "Who knows not Arlo Hill?"
he exclaims, in the scene just referred to from the fragment on
_Mutability_. "Arlo, the best and fairest hill in all the holy island's
heights." It was well known to all Englishmen who had to do with the
South of Ireland. How well it was known in the Irish history of the
time, may be seen in the numerous references to it, under various forms,
such as Aharlo, Harlow, in the Index to the Irish Calendar of Papers of
this troublesome date, and to continual encounters and ambushes in its
notoriously dangerous woods. He means by it the highest part of the
Galtee range, below which to the north, through a glen or defile, runs
the "river Aherlow." Galtymore, the summit, rises, with precipice and
gully, more than 3000 feet, above the plains of Tipperary, and is seen
far and wide. It was connected with the "great wood," the wild region of
forest, mountain, and bog which stretched half across Munster from the
Suir to the Shannon. It was the haunt and fastness of Irish outlawry and
rebellion in the South, which so long sheltered Desmond and his
followers. Arlo and its "fair forests," harbouring "thieves and wolves,"
was an uncomfortable neighbour to Kilcolman. The poet describes it as
ruined by a curse pronounced on the lovely land by the offended goddess
of the Chase,--
Which too too true that land's in-dwellers since have found.
He was not only living in an insecure part, on the very border of
disaffection and disturbance, but like every Englishman living in
Ireland, he was living amid ruins. An English home in Ireland, however
fair, was a home on the sides of Ætna or Vesuvius: it stood where the
lava flood had once passed, and upon not distant fires. Spenser has left
us his thoughts on the condition of Ireland, in a paper written between
the two rebellions, some time between 1595 and 1598, after the twelve
or thirteen years of so-called peace which followed the overthrow of
Desmond, and when Tyrone's rebellion was becoming serious. It seems to
have been much copied in manuscript, but though entered for publication
in 1598, it was not printed till long after his death in 1633. A copy of
it among the Irish papers of 1598 shows that it had come under the eyes
of the English Government. It is full of curious observations, of shrewd
political remarks, of odd and confused ethnography; but more than all
this, it is a very vivid and impressive picture of what Sir Walter
Ralegh called "the common woe of Ireland." It is a picture of a noble
realm, which its inhabitants and its masters did not know what to do
with; a picture of hopeless mistakes, misunderstandings, misrule; a
picture of piteous misery and suffering on the part of a helpless and
yet untameable and mischievous population--of unrelenting and scornful
rigour on the part of their stronger rulers, which yet was absolutely
ineffectual to reclaim or subdue them. "Men of great wisdom," Spenser
writes, "have often wished that all that land were a sea-pool."
Everything, people thought, had been tried, and tried in vain.
Marry, soe there have beene divers good plottes and wise
counsells cast alleready about reformation of that realme; but
they say, it is the fatall desteny of that land, that noe
purposes, whatsoever are meant for her good, will prosper or
take good effect, which, whether it proceede from the very
GENIUS of the soyle, or influence of the starres, or that
Allmighty God hath not yet appoynted the time of her
reformation, or that He reserveth her in this unquiett state
still for some secrett scourdge, which shall by her come unto
England, it is hard to be knowen, but yet much to be feared.
The unchanging fatalities of Ireland appear in Spenser's account in all
their well-known forms; some of them, as if they were what we were
reading of yesterday. Throughout the work there is an honest zeal for
order, an honest hatred of falsehood, sloth, treachery, and disorder.
But there does not appear a trace of consideration for what the Irish
might feel or desire or resent. He is sensible indeed of English
mismanagement and vacillation, of the way in which money and force were
wasted by not being boldly and intelligently employed; he enlarges on
that power of malignity and detraction which he has figured in the
Blatant Beast of the _Faery Queen_: but of English cruelty, of English
injustice, of English rapacity, of English prejudice, he is profoundly
unconscious. He only sees that things are getting worse and more
dangerous; and though he, like others, has his "plot" for the
subjugation and pacification of the island, and shrinks from nothing in
the way of severity, not even, if necessary, from extermination, his
outlook is one of deep despair. He calculates the amount of force, of
money, of time, necessary to break down all resistance: he is minute and
perhaps skilful in building his forts and disposing his garrisons; he is
very earnest about the necessity of cutting broad roads through the
woods, and building bridges in place of fords; he contemplates restored
churches, parish schools, a better order of clergy. But where the spirit
was to come from of justice, of conciliation, of steady and firm
resistance to corruption and selfishness, he gives us no light. What it
comes to is, that with patience, temper, and public spirit, Ireland
might be easily reformed and brought into order: but unless he hoped for
patience, temper, and public spirit from Lord Essex, to whom he seems to
allude as the person "on whom the eye of England is fixed, and our last
hopes now rest," he too easily took for granted what was the real
difficulty. His picture is exact and forcible, of one side of the
truth; it seems beyond the thought of an honest, well-informed, and
noble-minded Englishman that there was another side.
But he was right in his estimate of the danger, and of the immediate
evils which produced it. He was right in thinking that want of method,
want of control, want of confidence, and an untimely parsimony,
prevented severity from having a fair chance of preparing a platform for
reform and conciliation. He was right in his conviction of the
inveterate treachery of the Irish Chiefs, partly the result of ages of
mismanagement, but now incurable. While he was writing, Tyrone, a
craftier and bolder man than Desmond, was taking up what Desmond had
failed in. He was playing a game with the English authorities which as
things then were is almost beyond belief. He was outwitting or cajoling
the veterans of Irish government, who knew perfectly well what he was,
and yet let him amuse them with false expectations--men like Sir John
Norreys, who broke his heart when he found out how Tyrone had baffled
and made a fool of him. Wishing to gain time for help from Spain, and to
extend the rebellion, he revolted, submitted, sued for pardon but did
not care to take it when granted, fearlessly presented himself before
the English officers while he was still beleaguering their posts, led
the English forces a chase through mountains and bogs, inflicted heavy
losses on them, and yet managed to keep negotiations open as long as it
suited him. From 1594 to 1598, the rebellion had been gaining ground; it
had crept round from Ulster to Connaught, from Connaught to Leinster,
and now from Connaught to the borders of Munster. But Munster, with its
English landlords and settlers, was still on the whole quiet. At the end
of 1597, the Council at Dublin reported home that "Munster was the best
tempered of all the rest at this present time; for that though not long
since sundry loose persons" (among them the base sons of Lord Roche,
Spenser's adversary in land suits) "became Robin Hoods and slew some of
the undertakers, dwelling scattered in thatched houses and remote places
near to woods and fastnesses, yet now they are cut off, and no known
disturbers left who are like to make any dangerous alteration on the
sudden." But they go on to add that they "have intelligence that many
are practised withal from the North, to be of combination with the rest,
and stir coals in Munster, whereby the whole realm might be in a general
uproar." And they repeat their opinion that they must be prepared for a
"universal Irish war, intended to shake off all English government."
In April, 1598, Tyrone received a new pardon; in the following August,
he surprised an English army near Armagh, and shattered it with a
defeat, the bloodiest and most complete ever received by the English in
Ireland. Then the storm burst. Tyrone sent a force into Munster: and
once more Munster rose. It was a rising of the dispossessed proprietors
and the whole native population against the English undertakers; a
"ragged number of rogues and boys," as the English Council describes
them; rebel kernes, pouring out of the "great wood," and from Arlo, the
"chief fastness of the rebels." Even the chiefs, usually on good terms
with the English, could not resist the stream. Even Thomas Norreys, the
President, was surprised, and retired to Cork, bringing down on himself
a severe reprimand from the English Government. "You might better have
resisted than you did, considering the many defensible houses and
castles possessed by the undertakers, who, for aught we can hear, were
by no means comforted nor supported by you, but either from lack of
comfort from you, or out of mere cowardice, fled away from the rebels on
the first alarm." "Whereupon," says Cox, the Irish historian, "the
Munsterians, generally, rebel in October, and kill, murder, ravish and
spoil without mercy; and Tyrone made James Fitz-Thomas, Earl of Desmond,
on condition to be tributary to him; he was the handsomest man of his
time, and is commonly called the _Sugan_ Earl."
On the last day of the previous September (Sept. 30, 1598), the English
Council had written to the Irish Government to appoint Edmund Spenser,
Sheriff of the County of Cork, "a gentleman dwelling in the County of
Cork, who is so well known unto you all for his good and commendable
parts, being a man endowed with good knowledge in learning, and not
unskilful or without experience in the wars." In October, Munster was in
the hands of the insurgents, who were driving Norreys before them, and
sweeping out of house and castle the panic-stricken English settlers. On
December 9th, Norreys wrote home a despatch about the state of the
province. This despatch was sent to England by Spenser, as we learn from
a subsequent despatch of Norreys of December 21.[177:3] It was received
at Whitehall, as appears from Robert Cecil's endorsement, on the 24th of
December. The passage from Ireland seems to have been a long one. And
this is the last original document which remains about Spenser.
What happened to him in the rebellion we learn generally from two
sources, from Camden's _History_, and from Drummond of Hawthornden's
Recollections of Ben Jonson's conversations with him in 1619. In the
Munster insurrection of October, the new Earl of Desmond's followers did
not forget that Kilcolman was an old possession of the Desmonds. It was
sacked and burnt. Jonson related that a little new-born child of
Spenser's perished in the flames. Spenser and his wife escaped, and he
came over to England, a ruined and heart-broken man. He died Jan. 16,
1598/9; "he died," said Jonson, "for lack of bread in King Street
[Westminster], and refused twenty pieces sent to him by my Lord of
Essex, saying that he had no time to spend them." He was buried in the
Abbey, near the grave of Chaucer, and his funeral was at the charge of
the Earl of Essex. Beyond this we know nothing; nothing about the
details of his escape, nothing of the fate of his manuscripts, or the
condition in which he left his work, nothing about the suffering he went
through in England. All conjecture is idle waste of time. We only know
that the first of English poets perished miserably and prematurely, one
of the many heavy sacrifices which the evil fortune of Ireland has cost
to England; one of many illustrious victims to the madness, the evil
customs, the vengeance of an ill-treated and ill-governed people.
One Irish rebellion brought him to Ireland, another drove him out of it.
Desmond's brought him to pass his life there, and to fill his mind with
the images of what was then Irish life, with its scenery, its
antipathies, its tempers, its chances, and necessities. Tyrone's swept
him from Ireland, beggared and hopeless. Ten years after his death, a
bookseller, reprinting the six books of the _Faery Queen_, added two
cantos and a fragment, _On Mutability_, supposed to be part of the
_Legend of Constancy_. Where and how he got them he has not told us. It
is a strange and solemn meditation, on the universal subjection of all
things to the inexorable conditions of change. It is strange, with its
odd episode and fable which Spenser cannot resist about his neighbouring
streams, its borrowings from Chaucer, and its quaint mixture of
mythology with sacred and with Irish scenery, Olympus and Tabor, and his
own rivers and mountains. But it is full of his power over thought and
imagery; and it is quite in a different key from anything in the first
six books. It has an undertone of awe-struck and pathetic sadness.
What man that sees the ever whirling wheel
Of Change, the which all mortal things doth sway,
But that thereby doth find and plainly feel
How Mutability in them doth play
Her cruel sports to many men's decay.
He imagines a mighty Titaness, sister of Hecate and Bellona, most
beautiful and most terrible, who challenges universal dominion over all
things in earth and heaven, sun and moon, planets and stars, times and
seasons, life and death; and finally over the wills and thoughts and
natures of the gods, even of Jove himself; and who pleads her cause
before the awful Mother of all things, figured as Chaucer had already
imagined her:--
Great Nature, ever young, yet full of eld;
Still moving, yet unmoved from her stead;
Unseen of any, yet of all beheld,
Thus sitting on her throne.
He imagines all the powers of the upper and nether worlds assembled
before her on his own familiar hills, instead of Olympus, where she
shone like the Vision which "dazed" those "three sacred saints" on
"Mount Thabor." Before her pass all things known of men, in rich and
picturesque procession; the Seasons pass, and the Months, and the
Hours, and Day and Night, Life, as "a fair young lusty boy," Death, grim
and grisly;--
Yet is he nought but parting of the breath,
Ne ought to see, but like a shade to weene,
Unbodied, unsoul'd, unheard, unseene--
and on all of them the claims of the Titaness, Mutability, are
acknowledged. Nothing escapes her sway in this present state, except
Nature which, while seeming to change, never really changes her ultimate
constituent elements, or her universal laws. But when she seemed to have
extorted the admission of her powers, Nature silences her. Change is
apparent, and not real; and the time is coming when all change shall end
in the final changeless change.
"I well consider all that ye have said,
And find that all things stedfastnesse do hate
And changed be; yet, being rightly wayd,
They are not changed from their first estate;
But by their change their being do dilate,
And turning to themselves at length againe,
Do worke their owne perfection so by fate:
Then over them Change doth not rule and raigne,
But they raigne over Change, and do their states maintaine.
"Cease therefore, daughter, further to aspire,
And thee content thus to be rul'd by mee,
For thy decay thou seekst by thy desire;
But time shall come that all shall changed bee,
And from thenceforth none no more change shal see."
So was the Titanesse put downe and whist,
And Jove confirm'd in his imperiall see.
Then was that whole assembly quite dismist,
And Natur's selfe did vanish, whither no man wist.
What he meant--how far he was thinking of those daring arguments of
religious and philosophical change of which the world was beginning to
be full, we cannot now tell. The allegory was not finished: at least it
is lost to us. We have but a fragment more, the last fragment of his
poetry. It expresses the great commonplace which so impressed itself on
the men of that time, and of which his works are full. No words could be
more appropriate to be the last words of one who was so soon to be in
his own person such an instance of their truth. They are fit closing
words to mark his tragic and pathetic disappearance from the high and
animated scene in which his imagination worked. And they record, too,
the yearning hope of rest not extinguished by terrible and fatal
disaster:--
When I bethinke me on that speech whyleare
Of Mutabilitie, and well it way,
Me seemes, that though she all unworthy were
Of the Heav'ns Rule; yet, very sooth to say,
In all things else she beares the greatest sway:
Which makes me loath this state of life so tickle,
And love of things so vaine to cast away;
Whose flowring pride, so fading and so fickle,
Short Time shall soon cut down with his consuming sickle.
Then gin I thinke on that which Nature sayd,
Of that same time when no more Change shall be,
But stedfast rest of all things, firmely stayd
Upon the pillours of Eternity,
That is contrayr to Mutabilitie;
For all that moveth doth in Change delight:
But thence-forth all shall rest eternally
With Him that is the God of Sabaoth hight:
O! that great Sabaoth God, grant me that Sabaoths sight.
THE END.
FOOTNOTES:
[166:1] Who is _Edmondus Spenser, Prebendary of Effin_ (Elphin)? in a
list of arrears of first fruits; Calendar of State Papers, _Ireland_,
Dec. 8, 1586, p. 222. Church preferments were under special
circumstances allowed to be held by laymen. See the Queen's
"Instructions," 1579; in Preface to Calendar of Carew MSS. 1589-1600, p.
ci.
[168:2] "In these kind of historical allusions Spenser usually perplexes
the subject: he leads you on, and then designedly misleads you."--Upton,
quoted by Craik, iii. 92.
[177:3] I am indebted for this reference to Mr. Hans Claude Hamilton.
See also his Preface to Calendar of Irish Papers, 1574-85, p. lxxvi.
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TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
The following words use an oe ligature in the original:
Belphoebe
Belphoebe's
Phoebus
The following corrections have been made to the text:
Page 6: dust was raised.[6:5][anchor missing in original
Page 41: scenery on which the poet's sweetness[original has
sweetnesss]
Page 42: "[quotation mark missing in original]Shepherd that
did fetch
Page 48: Discourse[original has Discouse] of English Poetrie
Page 76: as deputy for the said Briskett)[ending parenthesis
missing in original]
Page 83: [original has extraneous quotation mark]In the meane
while I must struggle
Page 105: looselie scattered abroad,[original has comma]
Page 122: as most fitte[original has fittte] for the
excellency
Page 151: standard of moral character[original has charater]
Page 173: "Men of great wisdom," Spenser writes[original has
writers]
Page 174: Throughout the work there is an[original has a]
honest zeal
Page 178: through in England.[original has comma] All
conjecture