Spenser
[In the following excerpt from his study of major English Renaissance poets, Mackail discusses Spenser's work with a focus on poetic influences and techniques.]
I
The Middle Ages died hard; and nowhere harder than in this island of the West, which was already marked among other nations by two specific qualities—a tenacious conservatism, and an instinct for adapting rather than replacing old institutions, for making changes and even revolutions under accustomed names and inherited forms. The coming of the Renaissance into England was strange, troubled, irregular. In some ways one might say it never came at all, or came in so imperfect a shape, with such transformed features, that it seems to demand another name. This was so over the whole field of civilisation, in religion and politics as well as in art. But in poetry the process of change was especially intricate: the threads of influence, the lines of growth, are complex and not easy to disentangle.
The fifteenth century was emphatically, not only in this country but throughout Europe, not an age of great poetry. In England the Chaucerians continued, with ever-dwindling inspiration, with growing loss of imaginative hold on life and power of interpreting it, the tradition created and fixed by Chaucer himself. Beyond the Chaucerians we have the mystery plays, the ballads, a small supply of scattered lyrics: a heap of confused scraps, among which the vital process most visible is rather the decay which precedes germination than germination itself. The earlier Italian Renaissance had in poetry been succeeded by a long period of stagnation. Petrarch and Boccaccio died in 1374 and 1375; for a full century afterwards there is no Italian poet of the first or second rank, no outstanding mark in the progress of poetry. The quattrocentisti are the painters. In literature it was the age not of the poets but of the scholars. Just at the end of the fifteenth century comes Boiardo's Orlando. Boiardo died in 1494, the year of the French invasion of Italy. In France there had been the same lull and pause; François Villon is there the chief poet of a century which was in the main occupied with other things than poetry.
Early in the sixteenth century there was a great revival of poetry in Italy, and, a little later, in France, under an impulse partly native, partly communicated from Italy. The impact of this movement reached England just at a time when, even apart from it, there were signs of a poetic revival. The joy of life had come back to letters; and the joy of letters once more flooded over life. When the head of the English Petrarch fell on the scaffold in 1547, the new movement had been fully launched on its course.
In the age which followed—Spenser's age, though it was too various and too splendid in its poetical progress and achievement to be described adequately as the age of Spenser—we may then trace and mark at least four intertwined motive forces or impulses; the native, the classical, the French, and the Italian. The interaction of these impulses was in the highest degree complex and subtle. We need not be too curious in attempting to assign to each a separate and proper force; still less can we assign to any one such exclusive preponderance as would allow us to regard the others as relatively unimportant. But we shall never properly appreciate Spenser and Spenser's age unless we realise vividly in him, and in it, the presence of all four in mutual interaction.
First then—and it is proper to place it first, because the poetry of every country must be considered as what it is, a function of the national life—we see in the English poetry of this age an authentic revival of the native lyrical impulse. In this, English poetry holds of none and borrows of none. It is apart from scholarship, apart from any effect of foreign models, apart from the Renaissance itself, regarded as a European movement which overflowed into England. The English lyric poetry of the sixteenth century is as self-originating, as independent of external influences, as the Greek lyric poetry of the seventh and sixth centuries before Christ. Secondly, we have the classical impulse; the effect on poetry of the revival of learning in the previous generation, that golden age of the scholars, of Greece rediscovered and Rome revitalised; and, together with this, the revived and enlarged appreciation of the earlier Italian classics, of Petrarch and to a less extent of Dante. Thirdly, we have the continuous impulse of the immense and splendid body of contemporary Italian poetry, right through the sixteenth century, from Sannazaro and Ariosto at its beginning to Guarini and Tasso towards its end. This impulse came in part directly; in part as transmitted through the French Renaissance, and thus inextricably interwoven with the fourth and last influence, that of France. The French Pléiade, just in the middle of the century, had an immediate and long-continued effect on the development of poetry in England which can scarcely be over-estimated. Spenser's own earlier poetry is modelled more immediately and obviously on that of Clément Marot than on the Italian poets from whom Marot drew; and the French influence continued to grow more and more important in English poetry for upwards of a century, through the successive stages of its history—in Du Bellay and Ronsard, in Du Bartas, in Corneille and the classicists. But, as had been the case already in the age of Chaucer, while the influence of French form and structure was more immediate, more extensive, and more patent, we must look beyond these for the deeper inspiration. The progress of poetry (that I may quote Gray's brief and pregnant words) was from Greece to Italy, and from Italy to England.
All these influences, native, classical, French Renaissance, and Italian, mingle and accumulate in Spenser. It is thus—as well as from his own genius and from the imposing mass and brilliance of his production—that he is the central figure in the English poetry of the sixteenth century.
With Spenser we are at the full centre of the English Renaissance. For all his Chaucerianism, he is, as Chaucer in his time had been, a modern of the moderns. The change in the sky from evening to morning had passed a generation earlier. Surrey and Wyatt, slender as is the volume of their work, had quietly made ancient literature of the whole of earlier English poetry. They changed an epoch, or at least unmistakeably marked its change. Gawain Douglas's translation of Virgil and Surrey's are only thirty years apart in time: but they belong to two different worlds. The change was just consummated when Spenser was born. Six years later, the Elizabethan age began. Six years more bring us to the birth of Shakespeare.
Thus in Spenser we see the full tide of the Renaissance surging up through many channels round the stranded ship of English poetry, floating her, and bearing her off by confused currents upon a new and adventurous voyage. That age, like our own, went almost mad over education; and Spenser represents not only the enlarged outlook and heightened ambitions of the new world, but also its rich scholarship. He went to Cambridge at seventeen, and studied there for seven years; it was an education almost as full and elaborate as Milton's or Virgil's. There he lived among a circle of ardent scholars, and received that bent towards classicism, as classicism was then understood, which is one of the main threads of influence that run through the whole of his poetry.
That classicism of the sixteenth century was a very mixed and intricate thing. On one side, following the great Italian humanists, it plunged deeply into Plato and the Platonic school. On another, Ovid was its master, and it sought to reinstate the brilliance, the dexterity, the accomplishment, which the Græsco-Roman civilisation had reached before it fell into decay. On yet another, it read largely and deeply in ancient history, to gain knowledge of the past which might be applied to actual life, and to recover what it described in a compendious phrase as the wisdom of the ancients. On literature it had an influence for both good and evil. The fatal tendency of classicism is to see life through books, and to take it at second hand. Its natural instinct is to copy, and in doing so, to copy the inferior classics, who are more copiable, and then to go on copying itself. Its scholarship tends towards pedantry; its poets tend to become rhetoricians. The influence of Ovid colours the whole mass of Elizabethan poetry; that of Seneca greatly hampered the growth of the English drama. Bembo and Politian were ranked as masters alongside of Virgil. "The tragedies of Buchanan do justly bring forth a divine admiration," says Sidney in his Apology for Poetry. Bembo himself was urgent on Ariosto to write Latin poetry only, as bringing greater fame and more assured permanence. There was a similar delusion among the circle of scholars with whom Spenser lived and studied at Cambridge. They held one or both of two positions. Latin was the common international language of educated Europe, and therefore all poetry that should make a universal appeal must be written in Latin; or at least, the Latin poets were the classics, and therefore any English poetry which meant to take rank as classical must be written as nearly as possible in the Latin manner. If only the former of these doctrines had been held, no great harm would have been done. The native instinct for poetry might have been trusted to take care of itself. But it was different with the latter. A serious and what might have been a disastrous attempt was made to guide the stream of poetry into artificial channels; to copy the conventions of Latin poetry; even to transplant its metrical forms, as those of Greece had been transplanted into Latin poetry itself.
But this is a sort of thing that cannot be done in the same language twice; and in English poetry it had already been done once. The conquest and almost complete submergence of the native English metrical forms, under the influence of the first Renaissance and the decisive effect of Chaucer's genius, had fixed the lines of English poetry once for all. In his furnace the two metals had run into an alloy which was finer, harder, and more ductile than either of its two constituents. Something of loss there had been, but a greater gain. The Chaucerian metal became the basis of a standard currency, capable indeed of modification, enrichment, refinement, but in its main substance national and permanent. It was fine enough to be run into the most delicate moulds, flexible enough to meet, age after age, the ever-shifting and moving requirements of poetry. If Spenser had at any time been in danger of being carried away by the new ideas, he was saved from this by two things; his own admiration and almost worship of Chaucer on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the education which had made him familiar not only with the Latin and with some of the Greek classics, but with the consummate achievements already made by French and Italian poets in their own languages in the age just preceding his own, and those still being made by their successors. The goal of his poetical ambition lay clear before him; it was to be the English Ariosto, the English Ronsard; perhaps to be even more, but this was denied to him, the English Virgil.
When Spenser left Cambridge in 1576, he was the chief figure among a closely associated circle of poets and scholars which may remind us in many ways of the circle of Virgil during the years previous to the appearance of the Eclogues. They were full of the enthusiasm of youth. In other European countries the poetry of the late Renaissance was at its greatest visible splendour; it had reached the full maturity which is recognised afterwards—not at the time—as presaging the decline. The Lusiads had appeared in 1572; the Aminta in 1573; the Sepmaine followed in 1579; and the Gierusalemme Liberata in 1581. English poetry was still on its full curve of ascent. It felt itself at the beginning of a new age.
Just then Spenser, returning to London after two years of further study and practice in the north of England, made that acquaintance with Philip Sidney which disengaged the movement of English poetry in its complete force. The new Virgil had found his Gallus. Sidney was two years younger than Spenser, but he was one of those in whom natural precocity has been stimulated yet further by circumstance and education. The eldest son of the Lord President of Wales, he had been marked out from birth for great things, and his education had been, even for that age, elaborate almost beyond example. He came to Oxford at thirteen. Four years there were followed by three more spent in travelling all over the Continent, making the Grand Tour on a scale and with advantages which sent him back with a European reputation and conversant with the whole civilised life of Europe. He returned to England a finished soldier, courtier, patriot, and poet. When he met Spenser he was only four-and-twenty; but he had already been English ambassador to the Emperor, and was already hailed in the ecstatic language of that age as the Messiah of poetry. His death at thirty-two was said to have plunged all England into mourning: both during his life and afterwards he was idolised by almost every one who had known him. Not himself by the amount or quality of his poetry rising into the rank of the great poets, "having slipt into the title of a poet," as he says of himself, he yet still impresses us, as he impressed them, with a sense of poetical distinction and even genius. Not only so, but he had a native critical faculty which was developed by study, by wide and varied reading, and by acquaintance with the whole movement of contemporary culture, into an instrument of exquisite fineness, to which his serious Puritan temper lent a yet keener edge. Of the function of poetry he says, in a few simple words that are startling in their clear insight and exactness, that it is "to make the too much loved earth more lovely."
On Spenser at all events (as through Spenser on the whole subsequent course of English poetry) the influence of Sidney was momentous. Its first result was the publication, in the year after they became acquainted, of the Shepherds Calendar. This was the manifesto of the new poetry. It was dedicated to Sidney as Virgil's Eclogues were to Gallus; and like them, it not only placed its author at the head of contemporary poets, but was the symbol and keynote of a new world in poetry.
Its importance in this respect was at once recognised by the world, as it had been by Spenser himself and by the whole circle to which he belonged. Perhaps no work in poetry has ever been launched on its course more elaborately, with such an armament of defence, explanation, and apology. The twelve poems of which it consists were embedded in a mass of prefaces, introductions, and commentaries. How far these were the work of E. K. (if E. K. be a real person, Edward Kirke or another), how far of Spenser himself, or of others, is not clear: what is certain is that they represent the views and enthusiasm of the whole school, and that in speaking of Spenser as they do, under the title of "our new poet," they meant to enforce, with all the emphasis in their power, their confidence that this was the new poetry. The curious verses, and these are Spenser's own, attached as an envoi to the end of the volume, while for form's sake they disclaim rivalry with the great poets of an earlier age, Chaucer and Lang-land, yet make the claim formally and expressly for the new poetry that it shall outwear time and continue till the world's dissolution. The claim was really made not for these twelve poems, but for the new poetry, for the English poetry of the Elizabethan age. It was a great claim; and it was fully justified.
Of the twelve eclogues themselves there is no particular occasion to speak here in detail. They are a strange, almost chaotic, mixture of styles and manners, ranging in metre from the elaborate artificiality of the sestine in the eighth to the jigging couplets of the second and fifth, and in subject from the exquisite pastoral lyric of the fourth to the ecclesiastical polemics of the ninth. All, and more than all, of the adverse criticism that may be made against Virgil's Eclogues may be made against these. Of them, as of their Virgilian prototypes, it may be said, "They have all the vices and weaknesses of imitative poetry. Nor are these failings redeemed by any brilliant finish of workmanship. The execution is uncertain, hesitating, sometimes extraordinarily feeble. Even the versification is curiously unequal and imperfect." Yet of these Spenserian eclogues also one may go on to say, as of Virgil's, that granted all this, it does not touch the specific charm of which these poems first disclosed the secret. The Shepherds Calendar has no distinct style, but it has the germination of many. It is full of metrical device and experiment. It contains, in the tenth eclogue, preludings of large-scale work in chivalrous romance. Finally, here and there, and especially in the first and twelfth, which are really a single poem cut into two in order to open and close the collection, may be distinctly heard the new note that is personal to Spenser, his unmatched fluency of melody.
From the moment of the appearance of this volume Spenser became not only the leading representative of the new poetry, but the recognised head of living English poets. This position he retained until his death. In the twenty years between, the mass of his production was enormous. The three volumes of 1590, 1591, and 1596 contain between forty and fifty thousand lines. Much more, according both to probability and to direct evidence, was written by him, and either suppressed or lost. The Faerie Queene alone, as we possess it, extends to close on thirty-five thousand lines; and we have little more than half of it as it was planned. An allegorical romance of seventy thousand lines in length is a thing that imagination almost boggles at—or would do so at least in any age less adventurous, less confident, and less profuse than that of the matured Renaissance.
Throughout the whole sphere of life, in its crimes and virtues, in its attempts and achievements, that age was possessed by a spirit of excess, an intoxication of greatness. It set itself deliberately to outdo all that had hitherto been done. It built and voyaged and discovered and conquered colossally. In our own National Gallery, where it is one of the splendours of the great Venetian Room, is a portrait, by the Brescian painter Moretto, of Count Martinengo-Cesaresco, killed young in the French wars of religion. He is richly dressed in silk and furs, a gilded sword-hilt showing from under the heavy cloak. On a table by him are an antique lamp and some coins. His elbow rests on a pile of silken cushions, and his head leans, with a sort of intensity of languor, on his open palm. The face is that of one in the full prime of life and of great physical strength; very handsome, heavy and yet tremulously sensitive, the large eyes gazing at something unseen, and seeming to dream of vastness. On his bonnet is a golden plaque, with three words of Greek inscribed on it,… "Oh, I desire too much." Who the Giulia was whom he desired is among the things that have gone to oblivion; but the longing which the portrait has immortalised is not for one woman, were she like Beatrice or Helen, but for the whole world. These ambiguous words are a cloudy symbol; and that picture is a portrait of the spirit of the Renaissance.
As regards poetry in particular, that age ran to length, to extravagance, to redundance. This is true of almost all the Elizabethan poetry except in what is perhaps its finest flower, its lyrics; and even in these, taken collectively and not singly, the same quality is found in their superabundant profusion. The tradition of endlessness in poems was indeed not new; it was an inheritance from the Middle Ages. The romances of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries handed on the quality of exorbitant length to the romantic epics of the sixteenth. But the new age bettered the example, and in this one point unhappily learned no lesson from its classical models. With regard to no time are the lines addressed by Tennyson to the ancient poets more appropriate:
You should be jubilant that you flourished here
Before the love of letters, overdone,
Had swampt the sacred poets with themselves.
The Roman de la Rose is often quoted as an instance of the mediæval extravagance. But its twenty-two thousand lines are a modest figure compared with the thirty-five thousand of the Orlando Innamorato and the forty thousand of the Orlando Furioso. The earlier Italian Renaissance, with its slenderer resources and its purer taste, had kept within the bounds of the ancient precedent. The Divina Commedia is shorter than the Iliad; the Teseide is the same length as the Aeneid. Spenser in the Faerie Queene proposed to himself to outdo Ariosto, as much as Ariosto had outdone all his predecessors. For this intention of his we have express evidence. Harvey, who from his narrow classical prejudices, as well as from his severer taste, disliked the whole scheme of the poem, and would have recalled poetry from the extravagances of chivalrous romance to a more antique or more modern concentration, wrote to Spenser in 1580 in these words: "The Orlando Furioso you will needs seem to emulate and hope to overgo, as you flatly professed yourself in one of your last letters." But apart from any particular ambition to produce a larger poem than had hitherto been known, Spenser possessed the terrible Elizabethan fluency to a degree beyond all his contemporaries. Under the stimulus of his example, reinforcing the instinct for profusion which is the note of the whole period, this torrent of poetic fluency poured on until the language sank exhausted under it. Then, and not till then, the inevitable and wholesome reaction came towards precision and succinctness. That reaction was powerfully aided by the strenuous scholarship of the seventeenth century, and by the impression made throughout the whole republic of letters by the French classical school. Moderation, sobriety, clarity became the aim of poets; and limits were set to the length as well as to the scope of poems which the general sense of later times has accepted as proper. The Paradise Lost reverts to the scale of the Aeneid. Even in the nineteenth century the most fluent and melodious of modern English poets kept, by instinct or judgment, within the same limits. The Life and Death of Jason and the Story of Sigurd the Volsung are, for all their copiousness and even diffuseness, each a little shorter than Milton's epic.
Yet Spenser's instinct, like that of all great artists as regards their own art, was in the main sound; for it is the mass and volume of his poetry, not less than its lavish and intricate beauty, that gives him his place and importance among the poets. He has been a vast quarry and playground for generation after generation of poets: like the Precious Strand in his own poem, a land
He is the most inexhaustible and, in a way, the most various of the English poets. All his successors have loved, admired, plundered, imitated him; Milton and Pope, Wordsworth and Keats, a hundred others; not one but has dug in that gravel and brought away golden ore from it for his own use. In him they found that "enormous bliss" which Milton, in a phrase of daring felicity, ascribes to his Earthly Paradise:
A wilderness with thicket overgrown
Grotesque and wild: and overhead upgrew
Insuperable height of loftiest shade,
Cedar and pine and fir and branching palm,
A silvan scene, and as the ranks ascend
Shade above shade, a woody theatre
Of stateliest view. Yet higher than their tops
The verdurous wall of Paradise upsprung,
And higher than that wall a circling row
Of goodliest trees loaden with fairest fruit,
Blossoms and fruits at once of golden hue,
Appeared, with gay enamell'd colours mixt
On which the sun more glad impressed his beams
Than in fair evening cloud, or humid bow
When God hath showered the earth: so lovely seemed
That landscape.
Over and over again, as one plunges through the depths of that wilderness—
A wilderness of sweets, for nature here
Wantoned as in her prime and played at will
Her virgin fancies—
one comes, scarcely with surprise, on phrases and passages that might be those of our greatest poets in their most superb and characteristic manner. It is impossible here, though it would be fascinating, to pursue this into detail; but two or three instances will show what I mean.
Scarcely had Phœbus in the glooming East
Yet harnessed his fiery-footed team:
that is Shakespeare, the Shakespeare of Romeo and Juliet.
And taking usury of time forepast
Fit for such ladies and such lovely knights:
that is Shakespeare again, the Shakespeare of the Sonnets.
that is the younger voice of Milton.
And ever and anon the rosy red
Flasht thro' her face:
one might fancy that the unmistakeable note and accent of Tennyson.
This immense poetic flexibility, this amazing profusion and variety in style as well as in language—for in his vocabulary, too, Spenser is copious beyond the common copiousness of the Elizabethans—is a poetical quality of rare value; it is not of the essence, and does not imply the quality, of a supreme poet. As poetry produces its greatest effects through few and simple words, so some of the greatest poets have been scrupulously frugal in their language, and their style has been simple to austerity. Higher than the verdurous wall of Paradise, higher than the encircling fruit-laden trees, is the secret hill-top where the Muse sits among her chosen, and gives them, as Milton says, large prospect into the nether empire.
The image of perfection which art condenses out of the flying vapours of the world may be only blurred and dispersed by copiousness of invention and splendour of ornament: so hard is it for a rich man to enter into the kingdom.
To compare one great artist with another is often futile, and not seldom misleading; but such comparison may be more suggestive, and is less dangerous, when there can be no question of setting the two against one another. So far as there can be any analogy between arts so wholly different as those of poetry and history, Spenser might be called the English Livy. In both you have the same fluency and melodiousness, the same power of handling language on an immense scale with unexhausted elasticity. Both deliberately set themselves to outdo, in scale and volume, what had hitherto been done in a special field of literature, and succeeded in achieving their purpose. Both chose a subject-matter of great intricacy, involving many tedious passages and much repetition; neither ever tires of repeating himself, or seems to lose interest in what he is doing. Doubt has been expressed whether, if the Faerie Queene had been completed, any reader would ever have got to the end of it; the same apprehension may be, and indeed has been, hinted at as regards the one hundred and seven lost books of the Historiae ab Urbe Condita. Both authors were possessed by the greatness of a floating and imperfectly grasped ideal; Rome to Livy, chivalry to Spenser, mean all that is noble and glorious, but their power of hard thought is not great, and they are often found draping in their stately and musical rhetoric not only commonplaces, but absurdities. Innovators and conquerors in the field of letters, they were at the same time impassioned though not profound or accurate lovers and students of the earlier and purer national literature. They gave a new copiousness, a new range and flexibility to their language; but to the eyes of scholars and critics they often made wild work of it. The Patavinity which was reproached in Livy has its analogy in Spenser, whose use of the Chaucerian language and idiom is extraordinarily erratic, and whose archaism, while, according to the testimony of Fuller, it impaired his popularity and even diminished his sales, is so inaccurate as to fill scientific students of language with a feeling little short of horror. Both he and Livy were borne on through their immense task not merely by fluency and enthusiasm, but by a love of commonplace moralising which was inexhaustible, and by an almost complete absence of humour. Livy never felt that his story was flat; Spenser never felt that his romanticism was absurd. No one who had the gift of laughter, who felt the comedy of life, could have gone gravely on through the third book of the Faerie Queene. Over and over again it moves a smile in the reader, but never once in the writer. In this book, it is true, there occur the only two passages in the whole poem which it is possible to regard as intentionally humorous. There is something like a flicker of amusement in the description of Britomartis and her nurse at church in the second canto; but such humour as there is in the stanza is more probably unconscious:—
Early the morrow next, before that day
His joyous face did to the world reveal,
They both uprose and took their ready way
Unto the Church, their prayers to appeal
With great devotion, and with little zeal:
For the fair Damsel from the holy herse
Her love-sick heart to other thoughts did steal;
And that old Dame said many an idle verse
Out of her daughter's heart fond fancies to reverse.
One can fancy with what an exquisite blending of fun and tenderness Chaucer would have treated the scene. The other passage is where the Squire of Dames, in the seventh canto, tells the story of the three women who had repelled his advances. In it Spenser apprend d'être fif with rather calamitous results. The story itself is a traditional fabliau, a piece of ponderous mediæval wit. It is incorporated rather than assimilated by Spenser: its proper place is in the Moyen de Parvenir, not in the Faerie Queene, where it is strikingly out of tone with its surroundings. "Thereat full heartily laughed Satyrane," we are told: he may have done so, but probably no reader of the poem has ever felt inclined to follow his example.
So too, with his feeling about the past and his attitude towards his own age. Following the common fashion of his period, which was indeed more or less the common fashion of human nature, he is perpetually, even to weariness, insisting on the degeneracy of modern times, on the vices of civilisation, the decay of chivalry, the treachery and ingratitude of courts. "O goodly usage of these antique times, in which the sword was servant unto right:" this is a theme on which he is perpetually embroidering, much as Orlando (not Ariosto's Orlando, Shakespeare's) eulogises "the constant service of the antique world, when service sweat for duty, not for meed." He is fond of thinking of his romantic imaginary world, "this delightful land of faerie," as he truly calls it, as though it were some golden age that had actually existed in the past, when
He was not only a romantic dreamer and student, but a man of large and disappointed ambitions. In a famous passage in his Mother Hubberd's Tale he draws, with mordant truth, and in swift brilliant couplets worthy of Pope himself, the wretchedness of a courtier's life:
So pitiful a thing is suitor's state!
Most miserable man, whom wicked fate
Hath brought to court, to sue for had-ywist,
That few have found, and many one hath missed!
Full little knowest thou that hast not tried
What hell it is in suing long to bide:
To lose good days that might be better spent,
To waste long nights in pensive discontent,
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow,
To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow,
To have thy prince's grace, yet want her peers',
To have thy asking, yet wait many years,
To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares,
To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs,
To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run,
To spend, to give, to want, to be undone.
His View of the Present State of Ireland shows him on this side of his nature, the keen, hard, not over-scrupulous Puritan politician. In the prologue to the fifth book of the Faerie Queene he sets forth a sort of philosophy of history, in which the gorgeous language and versification give an imposing semblance of coherence to what is in effect a combination of the romantic cry, that glory and loveliness have passed away, with an ecstatic eulogy of Tudor absolutism. The Platonic doctrine of the Great Year is there used with extraordinary effect to enforce the progressive degeneracy of the world; but he does not, like Virgil in the fourth Eclogue, regard the vast cycle as nearing its close, and a new golden age in prospect; the movement is still on its downward arc: and poetry itself is the anodyne rather than the vital function of life. It is just this want of touch between art and life that prevents Spenser, with all his poetical gift and accomplishment, from taking a place in the first rank of poets. "This," he says himself in another of these prologues into which he put his deepest thought, or what he took for thought,
and such indeed is the matured judgment of posterity. But abundance has never been more inexhaustible, or forgery more magnificently painted. Like his own magic crystal devised by Merlin,
Into that crystal we may still plunge our eyes with ever renewed fascination.
The Platonism which is expressly set forth in many passages like that which I have cited, and in whole poems like the Hymns to Heavenly Love and Heavenly Beauty, was the side of Greek literature which appealed most strongly to the Renaissance. It satisfied, and fed to a greater intensity, their sense of vastness, their intoxication with language, their longing to transcend all limits. It is the only side of Greece which had a visible influence on Spenser himself. He was, according to contemporary testimony which may be taken for what it is worth, "perfect in the Greek tongue"; an accomplished scholar, that is to say, according to the standard of what was in England not an age of high or severe scholarship. But the distinctively Greek quality is wholly absent from his poetry; he is, in that sense of the terms, a romantic and not a classic. This is patent as regards the whole tone and colour of his poetry; and even for traces of any influence on him from Homer, from the Greek lyrists, or from the Attic tragedians we may search through him in vain. The only specific translations or adaptations from the Greek that are to be noted throughout the Faerie Queene are from Græco-Roman epigrams in the Anthology, and these he very likely knew only in Latin versions. Among the Greek poets proper, he seems scarcely to have gone back beyond Theocritus. The Greek clarity, the Greek purity, were alien from his luxurious romantic temperament. This is not said in disparagement; for he too had heard the Muses singing, though not on the mountain or in seven-gated Thebes; and we can hardly wish him to have been other than he was.
A great deal of well-meant nonsense has been talked about Spenser's purity, in the other sense of that ambiguous word. He was a poet of high if rather vague and sentimental idealisms. The scope of the Faerie Queene is expressly stated by him to be the fashioning twelve moral virtues. But its end, he says, in words which are more significant, is to fashion a gentleman. There is a profound difference between a gentleman and a saint; and the gentleman of that age, in Tennyson's phrase, hovered between war and wantonness; he inherited the corruption of the age of chivalry as well as the rich sensuousness of the Renaissance. It has been a fashion to extol Spenser at the expense of Ariosto. But the lightheartedness, the gay inconsequence, of the Italian poet is combined with a natural goodness quite as great as that underlying Spenser's rather heavy and forced morality. Ariosto had no consciousness of a mission, beyond that of producing an endless stream of melodious and brilliant poetry. He belongs to a time before the Renaissance had sickened of its own Palace of Art; he accepted life in a large way, he saw all the humour and beauty and brightness of it. The beauty of goodness always appeals to him. His Bradamante is as pure as Britomartis, and ten times more loveable. He has no sentimental illusions about his world of knights and ladies; but he frankly thinks it a very good and beautiful world. The gran bontà de' cavalieri antichi is a thing about which he is quite in earnest. It is not without significance that his greatest enthusiasm is for Vittoria Colonna; a very different kind of patroness and heroine from Queen Elizabeth. He certainly makes no parade of morals. But with one or two exceptions, there is hardly anything in the Orlando Furioso that is not suitable to be read aloud, even according to the taste of the present day; the same cannot be said of the Faerie Queene. And when Spenser lapses into sensuousness, it is with a certain clumsiness from which Ariosto was saved, not by a higher ideal, but by a more refined and educated taste. In Spenser, as in so much English art—as in so much English work beyond the sphere of art—there is a trace left of the insular grossness, a strain of something a little forced and exaggerated. He is hardly of the centre.
But the centre had for the time been lost. An iron age had displaced the golden time of Raphael and Ariosto and Erasmus. The brave attempt of Humanism to breathe fresh life into the Middle Ages, and carry the old world alive and unbroken into the new age, had been made and had failed. The religious wars broke out before the middle of the sixteenth century. Thenceforth the whole of life became one vast field of battle between the revolutionary Reformation and the Catholic reaction. These bitter enemies had one, and but one, disastrous feature in common, a fanatical hatred of great and humane art. In Italy the sunset of the Renaissance lingered; but the shadow of the Catholic reaction is already visible in Tasso's romantic epic. In England the revolution which, in the historian's striking words, laid its foundations in the murder of the English Erasmus, and set up its gates in the blood of the English Petrarch, left a long heritage of sombre restlessness, of doubt and gloom. It has often been remarked as strange, even as unaccountable, that throughout the earlier years of the Elizabethan age there is an all but universal cry that poetry is dead or dying, that barbarism and ignorance have flooded in. The Tears of the Muses, published by Spenser in 1591, and written not long before, is one prolonged complaint of this.
Heaps of huge words uphoarded hideously
With horrid sound though having little sense,
are all, he says, that is left of the palace of poetry. The truth was that, in her secular movement, poetry was breaking up and transforming herself. A new generation was already at the doors, one which was in turn to sweep up and put away the Renaissance, as the Renaissance had swept up and put away the Middle Ages.
It was not only at the doors, but within them. Night's candles were burnt out, and jocund day stood tiptoe on the misty mountain tops. The world was moving at a prodigious speed, and poetry had to quit her ancient seats, to whirl and follow the sun. The year 1591 is remarkable in letters, not only for the Tears of the Muses volume, but for another work in which there is a satirical allusion to the Tears of the Muses. That work was the Midsummer Night's Dream. Of the life of Nicholas Bottom (who has been called, not without some colour of reason, the hero of that play) we unhappily know as little as we do of the lives of Autolycus' aunts. But if he did not marry till middle life, his son might very well have handled a pike at Naseby.
Thus Spenser, like so many other great poets, represents the late splendour of a descending and fast disappearing tradition. The realm in which he was so great an innovator, so wide an explorer and conqueror, was even before his death passing into other hands. Much of his work has faded away and become obsolete; but his great argosy came into harbour. He lives effectively in a few sonnets, in one superb ode, and in the Faerie Queene.
The Epithalamion, in Johnson's stately phrase of compliment, "it were vain to blame, and useless to praise." For sustained beauty of execution, for melodiousness in which the most melodious of English poets excels even his own standard, for richness of ornament that stops just short of excess, and does not either blur the outline or clog the movement, it easily takes the first place, not only among Spenser's own lyrics, but among all English odes. The mechanism of the verse is a marvel of delicate intricacy. The twenty-three long undulating stanzas into which it is divided by the recurrent but perpetually varying refrain are all based on the same general rhythmical scheme of subdivision, but with variations of internal structure devised with extreme skill to prevent monotony, to give the play and freedom of a live organism. It is possible to read the poem, even to be familiar with it, and not to recognise until after more minute inspection that the normal nineteen-line stanza is varied with three other forms of stanza, two of eighteen and one of seventeen lines, and that the arrangement of the rhymes has further delicate variations. The Ode was Spenser's latest lyric, written after his hand had for years been occupied on the large decorative canvas of the allegorical epic. It was written for a personal occasion:
Take these lines, look lovingly and nearly,
Lines I write the first time and the last time.
He who works in fresco steals a hair-brush,
Makes a strange art of an art familiar,
Fills his lady's missal-marge with flowerets.
From it he returned to his main work, to the Faerie Queene; and to his main work we may now turn. Edward Phillips, nearly a century afterwards, speaks of it as "being for great invention and poetic height judged little inferior, if not equal, to the chief of the ancient Greeks and Latins, or the modern Italians." What Phillips said or thought would itself be of little importance; but there is reason to believe that the judgment he speaks of is that of Milton.
II
In reading the Faerie Queene, as in reading all poetry, we cannot appreciate it duly without the study and the effort requisite to let us place ourselves more or less at the poet's point of view, to let us understand, or not wholly misunderstand, what he meant by poetry and what poetry meant to him. But we cannot appreciate it, in its essential quality as poetry, at all, unless we approach it with an unclouded mind, and disengage ourselves from commentaries and theories. The child's vision must, if it were possible, be combined with the scholar's understanding. This is a hard saying, but the thing itself is hard. The course lies straight and narrow between the rock and the whirlpool. Appreciation only comes of study; study too often dims and sophisticates appreciation. The attempt to be made here must be not to lose ourselves either in a mist of theories, or in a quicksand of facts; but to disengage, as far as may be, the poetical quality of the poem in form and substance; to estimate, as far as may be, the degree to which it actually condenses, from the flying vapour of language and life, an image of perfection. For while the value of a poem is manifold, its value as poetry is just this.
Spenser has left us in no doubt as to what he meant by poetry and what he meant to do in his great poem. It is a subject on which he is never tired of discoursing. He recurs to it over and over again, both in his elaborate prefaces and introductions, and more incidentally in many passages of the Faerie Queene itself. The loose construction and leisurely movement of the poem give him full opportunity for personal digressions and passages of homiletic or imaginative exposition. In these expositions of his doctrine and practice there is the same melodious fluency which is the primary quality of his poetry itself; the same fecundity of illustration and ornament, the same lofty if somewhat vague and inconsequent idealism. The image of perfection which he set himself to embody was, in his own words, that of a noble person fashioned in virtuous and gentle discipline. It was life at its utmost height and richness. Before it lay the whole pageant of the world, the kingdom and the power and the glory of it. "In that Faery Queen," he says, in words which for him are unusually precise, "I mean glory." This word of glory is the keynote of the whole Renaissance; the glory of discovery, of conquest, of possession, of mastery. The achievement of this glory was "virtue"; the virtue of the statesman, the ruler, and the soldier, enlarged by liberal studies and bathed in the splendours of romance. The twelve moral virtues, to the glorification of which the twelve books of the Faerie Queene were to be devoted, were all summed up in the crowning virtue of magnificence; and this "magnificence" is almost the same thing as "courtesy," courtiership, the conduct of life by the masters of the world, lords over the five senses and the visible earth. Such glory was transitory, like this world itself; but it was the nearest approach which this world gave to immortality.
The vehicle chosen by Spenser to set forth his vision of the world's glory was that of the chivalrous romance. The Faerie Queene is not an epic; both in its author's genius and in its own purpose it is alien from the epic tension and concentration. He speaks of following Homer and Virgil; but this is because the Iliad and the Aeneid were read by him, and affected him, as romances. The romantic epic, as it had been lately attempted by Tasso, was a hybrid product, destined to be sterile. Spenser does not seem himself to notice any distinction of kind between Tasso and Ariosto. But his own poem is a still more complex hybridisation; it is the spirit of Tasso working on the method of Ariosto. The Faerie Queene has not, and was not meant to have, the epic unity, the epic structural and organic composition. It has no story, or if it has, the story has neither beginning nor end, and does not really matter. It has no dramatic life, no tragical interplay of human will and passion. It has no hero, for its hero is an abstraction, or rather a shifting series of abstractions. It is a romance wrapped in the imperial robes of the epic, but lacking her sceptre and crown. It is a pageant and allegory of life, while the epic is the imaginative embodiment of life itself.
All poetry is an allegory, in the sense that it embodies, in concrete symbols, a meaning larger and nobler than that which its literal words convey. In this sense, the amount of allegory in a poem depends not so much on the poet as on the reader. Homer and Virgil were allegorised, both in ancient and in modern times, to such an extent that their true outlines were lost, their true quality as poetry obscured, though it was still instinctively felt. But in Spenser the allegory is throughout conscious and purposed; it is of the structure and essence of the poem. In his prefatory letter prefixed to the Faerie Queene, he describes it in set terms as a continued allegory; and this is the case. But his specific use of allegory, and with it the specific quality of the poem, was determined by the fact that, with immense imagination and endless fertility of invention and language, he had neither the narrative nor the dramatic gift. He has little power—one might say he has little wish—of telling a story or realising a situation. The Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory more expressly and closely than the Faerie Queene. But Bunyan's narrative gift is so certain, his dramatic instinct is so fine, that the allegorical abstractions with which he purports to be dealing take flesh and blood on them almost without his will, and become real human beings. There are no real human beings in the Faerie Queene.
The amount of allegory in it of course varies very much, as does its quality and complexity. In its large lines the poem is an allegorising of abstractions, of virtues or vices, of physical or mental functions, of philosophical or theological ideas, even of political situations. Each book allegorises one of the virtues. Many of the episodes are elaborate and detailed allegories on their own account: such as the long and tedious description of the human body as the Castle of Alma in the ninth canto of the second book, or the siege of that same castle at the wards of the five senses in the eleventh canto. Others follow the mediæval manner more closely. An impersonation like Lady Praise-Desire in the House of Temperance, with the poplar-branch in her hand, or the description of the entrance to the temple of Venus, with its porters Doubt and Delay, and its gate of Good Desert guarded by the giant Danger, might come straight from the Romaunt of the Rose, and belongs to a tradition which never had been very happy, and from which Chaucer himself had long ago decisively broken away. This is hardly allegory at all; still less so are those parts of the poem which deal with contemporary history after the fashion of the roman à clef. It is in these that the poetry is at its lowest temperature; they are not so much poetry as versified politics. Much of the fifth book is of this kind. The trial of Duessa before Mercilla is mere pamphleteering. All that is needed to convert it into a political tract is to replace the names; to speak plainly of Mary and Elizabeth instead of calling them Duessa and Mercilla, and to substitute for the names of Care and Zeal those of Cecil and Walsingham. In the three cantos which follow, even this slight veil is dropped, because it was not really worth while keeping it up. Belgium, Spain, Henry of Bourbon, are introduced openly under their own names. The poetic imagination ebbs away, leaving only a sort of bleached rhetorical framework. Even the language becomes little removed from that of prose. Except for a few inversions of order brought about by the necessities of rhyme, there is stanza after stanza that has nothing, either in imagination or in style, to distinguish it from the florid heavy prose of that period. It is Spenser become mechanical, the Spenserian manner become a trick. How nobly he recovered himself later, those will not need to be reminded who have followed the poem to the end—or not to the end, for there is none, but to the point where it was broken off by the poet's death.
There is a natural tendency in the human mind to confuse imagination with imagery. The difference between them is that between creation on the one hand and invention on the other, and it is vital. Spenser thought (so far as he did think) in images. His inventiveness, his faculty for pouring forth an endless stream of imagery, is unsurpassed, just as is his faculty for conveying this imagery in unfailingly fluent and melodious language. He is a complete master of decorative art, so far as this very fertility and fluency do not, as we may think, lead him to make his decoration too intricate, to overload his ornament. But while all art is decoration, it is not in its merely decorative quality that art can be great art, can fully realise its function. To do this, it must rise from invention to creation. Its imagery must be transmuted by imagination; it must not only adorn, but interpret and, in a sense, make life.
If Spenser is not, in the full sense of the term, one of the first order of poets, it is because, while he does possess this higher gift of creative and interpretative imagination, he possesses it intermittently, capriciously, and imperfectly. The Faerie Queene does not move. It lives, but hardly with full life. It is not that his poetry does not represent the actual world. No poetry does. It is that it does not create a world more real than the actual world. It drifts, at the suggestion of complex influences, through a sea of dreams. It fluctuates between moral allegory and unmoralised romance, now swerving into passages of crude realism, and again soaring to ideal heights of imagination. But the poet's genius is so great, his resources are so vast, and his handling of them so easy and adroit, that he absorbs the reader into his own dream. His fabric rises into the air like an exhalation; as the gleaming pageant floats and passes before us, we are hardly conscious, any more than we are conscious in actual dreaming, of its inconsequence and unsubstantiality. Scenes melt into one another; nothing is surprising. It is all iridescent, magnified, wrapped and floating in a luminous mist.
In the last canto of the last completed book of the Faerie Queene, Spenser himself makes a claim for the poem which is of a different nature. The image of the epic, with its high imaginative tension and concentrated creative energy, hung before him as a poetic ideal; but it became in his hands, like his ideal figures and scenes, something filmy, elusive, and unsubstantial. In this passage he lays claim to unity and purpose in his long train of romantic imagery; and does so, very characteristically, by means of a new piece of romantic imagery of just the same texture as the rest.
Like as a ship, that through the ocean wide
Directs her course unto one certain coast,
Is met of many a counter wind and tide
With which her winged speed is let and crost,
And she herself in stormy surges tost,
Yet, making many a board and many a bay,
Still winneth way, ne hath her compass lost;
Right so it fares with me in this long way
Whose course is often stayed, yet never is astray.
Right so it does nothing of the sort. Even had he lived to catch up all the interlaced or floating threads of the poem, and to bring them out to a conclusion, it would not have made any material difference. We are not in the least interested in the progress of the action in the Faerie Queene; or rather, there is no progress of the action for us to be interested in. It is difficult to remember, as we read it, whom we are reading about, or how they came there. They drop out and reappear capriciously; we are pleased to meet them, we half think we have seen them before, and it does not matter when they are gone. They move among one another, weaving intricate and lovely patterns, and as the pattern still flows out of the loom, "his web, reeled off, curls and goes out like steam." Into these chambers of imagery the breath of fresh outer air hardly enters; it would blow the whole fabric away.
This enchanted atmosphere, this luminous mist of romantic feeling and glittering imagery, pervades the whole poem. But it varies from point to point, like some actual vapour that collects or clears, lifts or drops, under light variable airs.
Far off they saw the silver-misty morn,
Rolling her smoke about the royal mount,
That rose between the forest and the field.
At times the summit of the high city flashed:
At times the spires and turrets half-way down
Pricked thro' the mist; at times the great gate shone
Only, that opened on the field below;
Anon, the whole fair city had disappeared.
Sometimes it condenses into a cloud through which we move heavily, and the figures loom indistinct and spectral. Sometimes a rift of sky blows open, and a corner of the landscape is seen in clear daylight. In these little clear islets we may find what is perhaps Spenser at his best, though not at his most characteristic: in those rare and pleasant simpler touches where the poetry becomes lucid and close to life, or in those passages, not rare, where it rises to some great nobleness of expression, some great elevation of sentiment. Spenser's Chaucerianism was no mere muddle of antiquarian pedantry; it was a real love and admiration, a poetical sympathy that makes him write now and then, for a few lines together, with the freshness and charm of Chaucer. If I may venture to put it so, he sometimes drops into poetry. When he has almost wearied us with Britomartis, he suddenly writes of her thus:
One day, whenas she long had sought for ease
In every place, and every place thought best,
Yet found no place that could her liking please,
She to a window came that opened west,
Towards which coast her love his way addrest:
There, looking forth, she in her heart did find
Many vain fancies working her unrest,
And sent her winged thoughts more swift than wind
To bear unto her love the message of her mind.
It is like cool water. The same clear simplicity comes with the same lovely effect in many single lines. Calepine, when he is recovered of his wounds, goes out, as Palamon or Arcite might go, "to take the air and hear the thrushes' song." "What Maygame hath misfortune made of you?" the Amazon asks Artegall when she finds him in prison, touched by surprise to forget all her rhetoric. In the beautiful pastoral incident which fills several cantos of the sixth book, Spenser reverts not only to the free romantic manner of the Arcadia, but to a simpler, fresher style and language than that to which he had wrought himself when he planned to make his poem not only a romance but an epic and an allegory of life.
One day, as they all three together went
To the green wood to gather strawberries—
how unlike this is to the highly-charged, slowly-wheeling, rich verse that we think of as Spenserian!
Of course he cannot keep it up; the traditions of high romance must be observed; and the first thing that happens in the wood is that a tiger comes out of it, "with fell claws full of fierce gormandise, and greedy mouth wide-gaping like hell-gate." The hero, who has "no weapon but his shepherd's hook to serve the vengeance of his wrathful will," at once fells the tiger to the earth with it, and before the formidable beast can recover, hews off its head—whether with the shepherd's hook or not, the chivalrous spirit of romance does not pause to inquire.
And just as Spenser's genuine love and admiration of Chaucer combine with the instinctive resurgence in him, as in all the poetry of his age, of the native lyrical impulse, to make him write now and then with Chaucerian freshness and simplicity, so his genuine love and admiration of the classics make the Faerie Queene in many passages rise to an almost classic height. In the flowing loosely-woven texture of the poem there are many lines and stanzas, and even whole passages, which stand out from the rest in virtue of a concentration, a precision, a dignity which are the qualities of the classics. It would be tedious to develop this point by large illustration; and in any case the search and the selection must be made by each reader for himself; and the search is delightful, even apart from the added delight of recognition or discovery. It would be easy to collect and dwell upon many single lines that have this quality of exalted beauty, lines like the famous
Glistering in arms and battailous array;
or
Wasting the strength of her immortal age;
or
Spreading pavilions for the birds to bower.
It is curious to notice how all these lines, though they were not chosen in order to bring out the point, but simply for their own sake, are participial; they convey an image incidentally in the course of the main movement of the passages in which they are set. This is true of the poem generally. It is like the English architecture of the same period, still Gothic in main substance and structure, but enriched by classic detail. Its classicism is decorative, not constructional. This is the case likewise with the longer passages or whole stanzas which reach, or suggest, the classic manner.
Both roof and floor and walls were all of gold,
But overgrown with dust and old decay,
And hid in darkness, that none could behold
The hue thereof; for view of cheerful day
Did never in that house itself display,
But a faint shadow of uncertain light:
Such as a lamp whose life does fade away,
Or as the moon, clothed with cloudy night,
Does shew to him that walks in fear and sad affright.
That is the classical manner; not that of the great classics, it is true; … it is a diluted secondary classicism more like that of Apollonius or Statius. But the stanza is only one out of three in which the House of Riches is described; the other two, which precede and follow it, are in the loaded intricate manner which is normal to Spenser, and which is in direct antithesis to the classical. Nor would it be possible, even if the poet had wished to do so, to adapt the classical manner to the imaginative substance of the poem (if substance it might be called that substance had none), which is that of a vast pageant moving through a dream.
This pageant-like or dream-like quality makes the Faerie Queene approximate to a masque or interlaced series of masques rather than to an epic. There is no difference of plane between the figures and the ornament; for the figures are the ornament; "You shamefast are, but shamefastness itself is she," says Alma to Guyon; she might equally well have put it the other way. The episodes nearly always break off in the middle, or rather, do not so much break off as melt away. It is singular how many of the cantos end on this note of vanishing:
Eftsoons he fled away and might nowhere be seen—
or
The while false Archimage and Atin fled apace—
or
And from Prince Arthur fled with wings of idle fear—
or most strikingly, and with most studied and splendid effect, in the wonderful line which closes the Mutability cantos,
And Nature's self did vanish, whither no man wist.
It is a piece of deliberate art with Spenser that he hardly ever finishes a story. He does finish the story of Cambell and Canace in the fourth book, and makes a sad bungle of it. The variations in the texture of the poem are given, the stages in its movement are marked, chiefly by points at which the continuous pageantry, like a stream spreading into pools, expands, rather than concentrates, into set pageants of unusual elaboration and magnificence. The Masque of Cupid, at the end of the third book, is the best known of these, as it is perhaps the greatest. Almost as well known is the pageant of the Months in the seventh book. Of the same type, though with a difference of subject and treatment, is the chronicle of the kings of Britain, a sort of masque of British history, towards the end of the second book, and the marriage procession of the rivers towards the end of the fourth. To the ninth, tenth, and eleventh cantos of the sixth book, which stand quite by themselves, some further reference will be made.
So much it is indispensable to keep in view with regard to the quality and substance of the Faerie Queene as poetry. We may now go on to consider with a fuller appreciation the metrical vehicle which Spenser chose for it, the famous Spenserian stanza. It is one of the four great English metrical forms for poetry written on a large scale; and it is rightly and indissolubly connected with the name of Spenser; for he both introduced it and perfected it. No one of the other three metres is called after the name of a single poet. Chaucer invented (or to all intents and purposes invented) two of them, the rhyme-royal and the heroic couplet. The former of the two he also carried to perfection. But for various reasons, it has not been so continuously and habitually used by later poets as the other three; and to call it the Chaucerian verse would do injustice to Chaucer's other and greater invention: for though Chaucer's crowning masterpiece is in the former metre, the larger part of his mature work, and that by which he is most universally known, is in the latter. The heroic couplet itself was used by Chaucer with consummate skill, and established by him as a standard form of English verse. But it afterwards underwent great changes and developments. It cannot be associated exclusively with any poet's name, but it is perhaps associated most closely in common usage with a later age and with the shape it took in the hands of Dryden and Pope. The last of the four dominant forms of English verse, the unrhymed decasyllable, has also passed through many phases and received new qualities from more than one great poet. But the Spenserian verse was not only created and established by Spenser, but left by him in its final form. It has never gone out of use. It was written freely through both the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. In the great renascence of English poetry a hundred years ago it occupied a leading position. Shelley, Byron, Scott, Keats, all used it largely. None of them gave it any new quality: and it still remains exactly what Spenser left it.
Technically the Spenserian stanza consists of the interlaced double quatrain (what metrical treatises call the eight-line ballad-stave) which was introduced into England by Chaucer, with the addition of a twelve-syllabled ninth line rhyming with the eighth. But this addition completely changes its character; it gives it a new rhythm and a new balance, and one totally unlike that of any form of verse previously used. Spenser's stanza is, in the full sense of the words, a fresh creation. Careful scrutiny may indeed pick out, here and there in the earlier part of the Faerie Queene, a stanza in which the ninth line comes as a sort of afterthought, and the other eight preserve something of the ballad-stave cadence; but these are few, and only recognisable when one looks for them. Normally and habitually the ninth line is felt coming through the whole stanza, which implies it and converges upon it.
Spenser was no doubt led to the invention of his stanza by the desire to find an English form of verse which should be the equivalent, and a little more than the equivalent, of the Italian rhymed octave. From Boccaccio to Tasso, the ottava rima had reigned undisputed in Italy as the vehicle for the heroic romance and for the regular epic. It was one admirably suited to the genius and structure of the Italian language. But it did not accommodate itself well to English, nor to French, in which the English metricists sought their models. Chaucer instinctively passed by the metre of Boccaccio; Spenser, as instinctively, passed by the metre of Ariosto and Tasso. Chaucer syncopated the octave stanza into the rhyme-royal, Spenser expanded it into the Spenserian. In both cases the effect was to produce a vehicle that was more romantic and complex; that fell short possibly of the serenity and balance of the Italian octave, but gained in richness and harmony. The long swaying rhythms of the new stanza were exactly suited to a style like Spenser's, loaded with ornament and almost stationary in movement. It allowed him full amplitude; it held, it even invited and reinforced, the quality of boundlessness in his genius, the immense superflux of language and fancy. It is worth noting that the rhyme-royal where Spenser uses it, in the four Hymns, gives something of the effect of a curtailed Spenserian; it has not the authentic cadence. But these poems were written after he had invented and begun to use his proper medium.
Like most metrical forms, the Spenserian stanza has its excellences and its defects. For poetry which consists of a stream of pageants it is exactly suited. It is no less apt as a vehicle of imaginative reflection, for thought translating itself in images. It lends itself to rich effects produced by accumulated touches. When, as it often does, it swells up to the very end; or when, to produce a different effect, it slowly ebbs off; or when, as is equally characteristic with Spenser, it slides forward with equable rhythms till near the end, and then, in the eighth and ninth lines, rises into a great crescendo and storm of sound, it is little short of miraculous. To embark on quotations is a formidable matter, but just one instance of each kind of effect may be given. An instance of the first, almost too well known, but still endlessly delightful to repeat, is from the description of the Garden of Acrasia (II. xii. 71):
The joyous birds, shrouded in cheerful shade,
Their notes unto the voice attempered sweet:
The angelical soft trembling voices made
To the instruments divine respondence meet:
The silver-sounding instruments did meet
With the base murmur of the water's fall:
The water's fall, with difference discreet,
Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call:
The gentle warbling wind low answered to all.
As an instance of the second may be taken a stanza of equal beauty and celebrity, the famous invocation to Chaucer (IV. ii. 34), with its singular likeness, in phrasing and rhythm as well as in substance, to those exquisite verses of William Morris which come as the envoi to the Earthly Paradise:
Then pardon, O most sacred happy spirit,
That I thy labours lost may thus revive
And steal from thee the meed of thy due merit
That none durst ever whilst thou wast alive:
And being dead, in vain yet many strive:
Ne dare I like; but thro' infusion sweet
Of thine own spirit which doth in me survive
I follow here the footing of thy feet
That with thy meaning so I may the rather meet.
For an instance, finally, of the third kind, we may go to one of the innumerable combats between a knight and two Paynims—mostly in common form and a little tedious, but in this case lifted to a new splendour by the blaze and crash of the final line (II. viii. 37):
Horribly then he gan to rage and rail
Cursing his gods and himself damning deep.
But when his brother saw the red blood rail
Adown so fast, and all his armour steep,
For very fellness loud he gan to weep,
And said: Caitiff, curse on thy cruel hand
That twice hath sped; yet shall it not thee keep
From the third brunt of this my fatal brand:
Lo! where the dreadful Death behind thy back doth stand.
Such are some, and only some, of the effects of which the stanza is capable. On the other hand, it often drags and becomes languid. The last line sometimes seems pure surplusage; sometimes one may say the same of more than the last line. The thought, and even the imagery, become exhausted before the end of the stanza is reached. Spenser's fluency is unfailing; but there are many places where the fluency becomes mere verbosity, many where the stanza seems stuffed out with anything that comes first to hand. It is this that lies at the root of Spenser's strange lapses into bald prose. He recovers from them swiftly, but there they are: in single lines like
Though otherwise it did him little harm;
or
Then very doubtful was the war's event;
or
But the rude porter, that no manners had;
and even more markedly in some longer passages that are mere untransmuted lumps from the debased prose romances of the period, such as,
But turn we now back to that lady free
Whom late we left riding upon an ass;
or the amazing account of her adventures given by Priscilla to Calidore in the second canto of Book VI. It fills eight stanzas, and is all as bad as can be; I will only give one gem out of the heap:
Then, as it were to avenge his wrath on me,
When forward we should fare he flat refused
To take me up (as this young man did see)
But forced to trot on foot, and foul misused,
Punching me with the butt-end of his spear.
Doll Tearsheet might talk so: did talk so in fact, the very next year, in the squalid but powerful scene where she makes her last appearance on Shakespeare's stage.
Finally, as a vehicle for narrative poetry, the Spenserian verse is inherently faulty, because it lacks speed. Its movement is not progressive; it is like that of spreading and interlacing circles. Spenser was no doubt naturally without that rare quality, the narrative gift; but he deliberately (and very likely rightly) chose a metrical form for the Faerie Queene which emphasised this deficiency. The same thing is true of the stanza as used by other poets. Compare Keats's two masterpieces; how heavy, how struggling, is the narrative movement in the Eve of St. Agnes when set beside the swift, clear brightness of Lamia! or compare the endless circumvolutions of Shelley in the Revolt of Islam with the sense of life and movement in the Witch of Atlas. Even Byron, the swiftest of English poets, becomes slow and almost languid in Childe Harold. In his Don Juan, where rapidity was essential, he abandoned the Spenserian verse, and boldly launched into the Italian rhymed octave, though he did not succeed in naturalising it, and Don Juan remains a long metrical tour de force. And if we take Byron where he is swiftest and most himself—the Byron of the Giaour—the difference is almost incredible.
The foremost Tartar's in the gap
Conspicuous by his yellow cap—
it is safe to say that Spenser, or any one writing in the Spenserian manner, would have spent a whole stanza in getting over the ground that this fierce swift couplet covers in a single stride. Byron himself could hardly have done otherwise; for so essentially is the Spenserian stanza Spenser's creation, that it cannot be written at all except in a manner nearly akin to his.
This perilous fluency, this unbounded melodiousness, is at once Spenser's strength and his weakness as an artist. It displeased the classicists of his own time. His friend Harvey honestly disliked the Faerie Queene, and said so roundly to Spenser himself. "Hobgoblin running away with the garland from Apollo" he calls it, in a phrase which one can hardly fancy Spenser would either forgive or forget. He sets the whole thing down, rather petulantly, to some foolish ambition in Spenser to outdo Ariosto on his own lines. Harvey's opinions on poetry were not those of a poet, and are perhaps not of special value. But in this instance he expresses the feeling not merely of classicist pedantry, but of classical judgment. Every one knows that we have only half of the Faerie Queene as planned; that it was to have extended to twelve books, and something like sixty thousand or seventy thousand lines. What is not so widely known, or at least so clearly remembered, is that these twelve books were only the first part of a still more gigantic scheme. If that scheme had been carried out, we should have had a poem, or a mass of poetry, of something more like one hundred and fifty thousand lines. This would substantially exceed even the sixty thousand couplets into which the Shah Nameh, through successive accretions, became swollen in the hands of Firdausi and his pupils or continuators. It would have been a poem which, in Lord Cockbum's celebrated phrase, would have exhausted Time and encroached on Eternity.
But towards the end of the sixth book of the Faerie Queene we become conscious of a great and significant change of tone. It occurs subtly and silently, like dawn overspreading the sky. But it means that the spirit of the poet, and of his art, has changed. The Renaissance is tiring of itself; poetry is returning to life: and with the same movement life is returning to poetry.
The note of change comes with the reversion to pastoral at the opening of the ninth canto.
Now turn again my team, thou jolly swain,
Back to the furrow which I lately left.
The note here is very different from that of the elaborate high-flown introductions to which we have been accustomed hitherto. The immediate reference is merely to his customary process of taking up the dropped thread of his romance. But it suggests more: it suggests a return to the furrow in another sense, a return to the pleasant villages and farms, to the opener air, from the enchanted atmosphere, heavy and luminous, of courtly romance.
A soft air fans the cloud apart; there comes
A glimpse of that dark world where I was born.
The Faerie Queene becomes a Winter's Tale in the beautiful episode which follows. The
are those of the Shepherds Calendar back again, but softened, etherealised, lit by romance. Pastorella, the one figure in the whole of the Faerie Queene who is all but human, reminds one of Shakespeare's Perdita. Like Perdita she needs must turn in the story into a king's daughter lost and hidden among shepherds; such was the tradition of romance, that might not lightly be broken. But, king's daughter or not, she brings with her the breath and beauty of common life. The vanity of ambition is a theme on which throughout the poem Spenser has been perpetually discoursing; but here, for the first time, it brings with it the vanity of courtliness, the evanescence of the Renaissance ideal. Melibœus the shepherd, Pastorella's reputed father, has been a courtier himself in his youth, has sold himself for hire and spent his youth in vain; now, in one of Spenser's most exquisite stanzas, he tells how he has gone back to sweet peace, and "this lovely quiet life which I inherit here." His sermon on content and simplicity is Spenser speaking in his own voice, sincerely, without either self-consciousness or strain. Pastorella-Perdita "had ever learned to love the lowly things." With the reversion towards simplicity is mingled a strain of grave religion. It is not only that "happy peace" and "the perfect pleasures" grow in common life, and all the rest is but a "painted shadow of false bliss": it is that the whole gorgeous fabric of romantic chivalry is a lure, "set to entrap unwary fools in their eternal bales." And so, when the shepherds are "met to make their sports and merry glee, as they are wont in fair sunshiny weather," we are reminded not only of the Winter's Tale but of the Pilgrim's Progress. "If a man was to come here in the summer time, and if he also delighted himself in the sight of his eyes, he might see that that would be delightful to him. Some have wished that the next way to their Father's house were here, that they might be troubled no more with either hills or mountains to go over; but the way is the way, and there's an end."
This new land is as yet but dimly seen: it is coloured and half concealed by the iridescent vapour. While still among the shepherds, Calidore strays back into fairyland, to the Acidalian hill where he sees the Graces dancing, not to the lyre of Apollo, but to the pipe of Colin Clout. But when he moves towards them, they all vanish out of his sight, "and are clean gone, which way he never knew," and Colin Clout is left piping on the hillside alone. The candles of the mediæval world are burned out; but the eyes of those who issue from the brilliantly lit palace are still dazzled and cannot see things clearly. In the uncertain light, that pleasant simple countryside seems one in which tigers attack strawberry-gatherers, and are decapitated with sheephooks. "Exit pursued by a bear," is the famous stage-direction at the end of the first part of the Winter's Tale: sixteen years pass, and then "enter Autolycus, singing."
So Spenser pulls himself back, at the opening doorway into daylight and the new world. Calidore's life among the shepherds was making him unmindful of his vow and of the queen's commands. He leaves Pastorella-Perdita and goes on the quest of the Blatant Beast. We are back in the full current of allegorical romance. But the spell, once snapped, cannot be quite rewoven; the poem flutters for a little on a broken wing, and stops.
It stops, or the poet's death stopped it. The story of the last three months of his life is one of confused horror. Fire and sword of an Irish rising; his home sacked and burned, and his newborn child perishing in the flames; a wretched winter-flight to England; a stony welcome there, a month or two of misery and illness, and death "for lack of bread" they said, if it be not incredible: such was the tragic end. Twelve years later was published the magnificent fragment, "two Cantos of Mutability, which, both for form and matter, appear to be the parcel of some following book of the Faerie Queene, under the legend of Constancy." They may be conjectured to have been written in the last year of his life, and perhaps with some premonition of its approaching end. They renew the earlier splendours of the poem, but with a deeper and graver music. In single lines and phrases there is an organ-tone that can scarcely be matched elsewhere in Spenser; and the Titaness, proud and fair,
Being of stature tall as any there
Of all the Gods, and beautiful of face
As any of the Goddesses in place,
stands out among the swaying tapestry-figures of Spenser's pageantries like some colossal sculpture of Michelangelo's. He lapses into his old decorative manner in the episode of Arlo-hill; in the simile of the cat in the dairy (the forty-seventh stanza of the first of the two cantos) it almost looks as if he were parodying himself. But from that he rises again to the great speech of Mutability; to the summoning and appearing before the throne of Nature of the procession of the Seasons and the Months, Day and Night, the Hours, Life and Death; and to the final doom pronounced by Nature, which sums up, in a few majestic words, the whole system and government of the Universe. Then Nature herself vanishes: the lights go out; silence falls; and through the silence comes one last echo and cadence of sound, a prayer to be granted the Eternal Peace.
Thus Spenser, in the old Northern phrase, "changed his life," and was laid beside Chaucer in the Abbey Church at Westminster. His life, his vision of poetry as a pageant of life, his conception of poetry as a function of life, were splendid and transitory. They ceased; while life, and with it poetry, moved on.
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