Among My Books Volume Ii Part 15

In 1594 he had been married to the lady celebrated in his somewhat artificial _amoretti_. By her he had four children. He was now at the height of his felicity; by universal acclaim the first poet of his age, and the one obstacle to his material advancement (if obstacle it was) had been put out of the way by the death of Lord Burleigh, August, 1598. In the next month he was recommended in a letter from Queen Elizabeth for the shrievalty of the county of Cork. But alas for Polycrates! In October the wild kerns and gallowgla.s.ses rose in no mood for sparing the house of Pindarus. They sacked and burned his castle, from which he with his wife and children barely escaped.[280] He sought shelter in London and died there on the 16th January, 1599, at a tavern in King Street, Westminster.

He was buried in the neighboring Abbey next to Chaucer, at the cost of the Earl of Ess.e.x, poets bearing his pall and casting verses into his grave. He died poor, but not in want. On the whole, his life may be reckoned a happy one, as in the main the lives of the great poets must have commonly been. If they feel more pa.s.sionately the pang of the moment, so also the compensations are incalculable, and not the least of them this very capacity of pa.s.sionate emotion. The real good fortune is to be measured, not by more or less of outward prosperity, but by the opportunity given for the development and free play of the genius. It should be remembered that the power of expression which exaggerates their griefs is also no inconsiderable consolation for them. We should measure what Spenser says of his worldly disappointments by the bitterness of the unavailing tears be shed for Rosalind. A careful a.n.a.lysis of these leaves no perceptible residuum of salt, and we are tempted to believe that the pa.s.sion itself was not much more real than the pastoral accessories of pipe and crook. I very much doubt whether Spenser ever felt more than one profound pa.s.sion in his life, and that luckily was for his "Faery Queen."

He was fortunate in the friendship of the best men and women of his time, in the seclusion which made him free of the still better society of the past, in the loving recognition of his countrymen. All that we know of him is amiable and of good report. He was faithful to the friendships of his youth, pure in his loves, unspotted in his life. Above all, the ideal with him was not a thing apart and unattainable, but the sweetener and enn.o.bler of the street and the fireside.

There are two ways of measuring a poet, either by an absolute aesthetic standard, or relatively to his position in the literary history of his country and the conditions of his generation. Both should be borne in mind as coefficients in a perfectly fair judgment. If his positive merit is to be settled irrevocably by the former, yet an intelligent criticism will find its advantage not only in considering what he was, but what, under the given circ.u.mstances, it was possible for him to be.

The fact that the great poem of Spenser was inspired by the Orlando of Ariosto, and written in avowed emulation of it, and that the poet almost always needs to have his fancy set agoing by the hint of some predecessor, must not lead us to overlook his manifest claim to originality. It is not what a poet takes, but what he makes out of what he has taken, that shows what native force is in him. Above all, did his mind dwell complacently in those forms and fashions which in their very birth are already obsolescent, or was it instinctively drawn to those qualities which are permanent in language and whatever is wrought in it?

There is much in Spenser that is contemporary and evanescent; but the substance of him is durable, and his work was the deliberate result of intelligent purpose and ample culture. The publication of his "Shepherd's Calendar" in 1579 (though the poem itself be of little interest) is one of the epochs in our literature. Spenser had at least the originality to see clearly and to feel keenly that it was essential to bring poetry back again to some kind of understanding with nature. His immediate predecessors seem to have conceived of it as a kind of bird of paradise, born to float somewhere between heaven and earth, with no very well defined relation to either. It is true that the nearest approach they were able to make to this airy ideal was a shuttlec.o.c.k, winged with a bright plume or so from Italy, but, after all, nothing but cork and feathers, which they bandied back and forth from one stanza to another, with the useful ambition of _keeping it up_ as long as they could. To my mind the old comedy of "Gammer Gurton's Needle" is worth the whole of them. It may be coa.r.s.e, earthy, but in reading it one feels that he is at least a man among men, and not a humbug among humbugs.

The form of Spenser's "Shepherd's Calendar," it is true, is artificial, absurdly so if you look at it merely from the outside,--not, perhaps, the wisest way to look at anything, unless it be a jail or a volume of the "Congressional Globe,"--but the spirit of it is fresh and original We have at last got over the superst.i.tion that shepherds and shepherdesses are any wiser or simpler than other people. We know that wisdom can be on only by wide commerce with men and books, and that simplicity, whether of manners or style, is the crowning result of the highest culture. But the pastorals of Spenser were very different things, different both in the moving spirit and the resultant form from the later ones of Browne or the "Piscatory Eclogues" of Phinehas Fletcher. And why? Browne and Fletcher wrote because Spenser had written, but Spenser wrote from a strong inward impulse--an instinct it might be called--to escape at all risks into the fresh air from that horrible atmosphere into which rhymer after rhymer had been pumping carbonic-acid gas with the full force of his lungs, and in which all sincerity was on the edge of suffocation. His longing for something truer and better was as honest as that which led Tacitus so long before to idealize the Germans, and Rousseau so long after to make an angel of the savage.

Spenser himself supremely overlooks the whole chasm between himself and Chaucer, as Dante between himself and Virgil. He called Chaucer master, as Milton was afterwards to call _him_. And, even while he chose the most artificial of all forms, his aim--that of getting back to nature and life--was conscious, I have no doubt, to himself, and must be obvious to whoever reads with anything but the ends of his fingers. It is true that Sannazzaro had brought the pastoral into fashion again, and that two of Spenser's are little more than translations from Marot; but for manner he instinctively turned back to Chaucer, the first and then only great English poet. He has given common instead of cla.s.sic names to his personages, for characters they can hardly be called. Above all, he has gone to the provincial dialects for words wherewith to enlarge and freshen his poetical vocabulary.[281]

I look upon the "Shepherd's Calendar" as being no less a conscious and deliberate attempt at reform than Thomson's "Seasons" were in the topics, and Wordsworth's "Lyrical Ballads" in the language of poetry. But the great merit of these pastorals was not so much in their matter as their manner. They show a sense of style in its larger meaning hitherto displayed by no English poet since Chaucer. Surrey had brought back from Italy a certain inkling of it, so far as it is contained in decorum. But here was a new language, a choice and arrangement of words, a variety, elasticity, and harmony of verse most grateful to the ears of men. If not pa.s.sion, there was fervor, which was perhaps as near it as the somewhat stately movement of Spenser's mind would allow him to come. Sidney had tried many experiments in versification, which are curious and interesting, especially his attempts to naturalize the _sliding_ rhymes of Sannazzaro in English. But there is everywhere the uncertainty of a 'prentice hand. Spenser shows himself already a master, at least in verse, and we can trace the studies of Milton, a yet greater master, in the "Shepherd's Calendar" as well as in the "Faery Queen." We have seen that Spenser, under the misleading influence of Sidney[282] and Harvey, tried his hand at English hexameters. But his great glory is that he taught his own language to sing and move to measures harmonious and n.o.ble. Chaucer had done much to vocalize it, as I have tried to show elsewhere,[283] but Spenser was to prove

"That no tongue hath the muse's utterance heired For verse, and that sweet music to the ear Struck out of rhyme, so naturally as this."

The "Shepherd's Calendar" contains perhaps the most picturesquely imaginative verse which Spenser has written. It is in the eclogue for February, where he tells us of the

"Faded oak Whose body is sere, whose branches broke, Whose naked arms stretch unto the fire."

It is one of those verses that Joseph Warton would have liked in secret, that Dr. Johnson would have proved to be untranslatable into reasonable prose, and which the imagination welcomes at once without caring whether it be exactly conformable to _barbara_ or _celarent_. Another pretty verse in the same eclogue,

"But gently took that ungently came,"

pleased Coleridge so greatly that he thought it was his own. But in general it is not so much the sentiments and images that are new as the modulation of the verses in which they float. The cold obstruction of two centuries' thaws, and the stream of speech, once more let loose, seeks out its old windings, or overflows musically in unpractised channels. The service which Spenser did to our literature by this exquisite sense of harmony is incalculable. His fine ear, abhorrent of barbarous dissonance, his dainty tongue that loves to prolong the relish of a musical phrase, made possible the transition from the cast-iron stiffness of "Ferrex and Porrex" to the Damascus pliancy of Fletcher and Shakespeare. It was he that

"Taught the dumb on high to sing, And heavy ignorance aloft to fly That added feathers to the learned's wing, And gave to grace a double majesty."

I do not mean that in the "Shepherd's Calendar" he had already achieved that trans.m.u.tation of language and metre by which he was afterwards to endow English verse with the most varied and majestic of stanzas, in which the droning old alexandrine, awakened for the first time to a feeling of the poetry that was in him, was to wonder, like M. Jourdain, that he had been talking prose all his life,--but already he gave clear indications of the tendency and premonitions of the power which were to carry it forward to ultimate perfection. A harmony and alacrity of language like this were unexampled in English verse:--

"Ye dainty nymphs, that in this blessed brook Do bathe your breast, Forsake your watery bowers and hither look At my request....

And eke you virgins that on Parna.s.s dwell, Whence floweth Helicon, the learned well, Help me to blaze Her worthy praise, Which in her s.e.x doth all excel."

Here we have the natural gait of the measure, somewhat formal and slow, as befits an invocation; and now mark how the same feet shall be made to quicken their pace at the bidding of the tune:--

"Bring here the pink and purple columbine, With gilliflowers; Bring coronations and sops in wine, Worne of paramours; Strow me the ground with daffadowndillies, And cowslips and kingcups and loved lilies; The pretty paunce And the chevisance Shall match with the fair flowerdelice."[284]

The argument prefixed by E.K. to the tenth Eclogue has a special interest for us as showing how high a conception Spenser had of poetry and the poet's office. By Cuddy he evidently means himself, though choosing out of modesty another name instead of the familiar Colin. "In Cuddy is set forth the perfect pattern of a Poet, which finding no maintenance of his state and studies, complaineth of the contempt of Poetry and the causes thereof, specially having been in all ages, and even amongst the most barbarous, always of singular account and honor, _and being indeed so worthy and commendable an art, or rather no art, but a divine gift and heavenly instinct not to be gotten by labor and learning, but adorned with both, and poured into the wit by a certain Enthousiasmos and celestial inspiration_, as the author hereof elsewhere at large discourseth in his book called THE ENGLISH POET, which book being lately come into my hands, I mind also by G.o.d's grace, upon further advis.e.m.e.nt, to publish." E. K., whoever he was, never carried out his intention, and the book is no doubt lost; a loss to be borne with less equanimity than that of Cicero's treatise _De Gloria_, once possessed by Petrarch. The pa.s.sage I have italicized is most likely an extract, and reminds one of the long-breathed periods of Milton. Drummond of Hawthornden tells us, "he [Ben Jonson] hath by heart some verses of Spenser's 'Calendar,' about wine, between Coline and Percye" (Cuddie and Piers).[285] These verses are in this eclogue, and are worth quoting both as having the approval of dear old Ben, the best critic of the day, and because they are a good sample of Spenser's earlier verse:--

"Thou kenst not, Percie, how the rhyme should rage; O, if my temples were distained with wine, And girt in garlands of wild ivy-twine, How I could rear the Muse on stately stage And teach her tread aloft in buskin fine With quaint Bellona in her equipage!"

In this eclogue he gives hints of that s.p.a.cious style which was to distinguish him, and which, like his own Fame,

"With golden wings aloft doth fly Above the reach of ruinous decay, And with brave plumes doth beat the azure sky, Admired of base-born men from far away."[286]

He was letting his wings grow, as Milton said, and foreboding the "Faery Queen":--

"Lift thyself up out of the lowly dust * * * * *

"To 'doubted knights whose woundless armor rusts And helms unbruised waxen daily brown: There may thy Muse display her fluttering wing, And stretch herself at large from East to West."

Verses like these, especially the last (which Dryden would have liked), were such as English ears had not yet heard, and curiously prophetic of the maturer man. The language and verse of Spenser at his best have an ideal lift in them, and there is scarce any of our poets who can so hardly help being poetical.

It was this instantly felt if not easily definable charm that forthwith won for Spenser his never-disputed rank as the chief English poet of that age, and gave him a popularity which, during his life and in the following generation, was, in its select quality, without a compet.i.tor.

It may be thought that I lay too much stress on this single attribute of diction. But apart from its importance in his case as showing their way to the poets who were just then learning the accidence of their art and leaving them a material to work in already mellowed to their hands, it should be remembered that it is subtle perfection of phrase and that happy coalescence of music and meaning, where each reinforces the other, that define a man as poet and make all ears converts and partisans.

Spenser was an epicure in language. He loved "seld-seen costly" words perhaps too well, and did not always distinguish between mere strangeness and that novelty which is so agreeable as to cheat us with some charm of seeming a.s.sociation. He had not the concentrated power which can sometimes pack infinite riches in the little room of a single epithet, for his genius is rather for dilatation than compression.[287] But he was, with the exception of Milton and possibly Gray, the most learned of our poets. His familiarity with ancient and modern literature was easy and intimate, and as he perfected himself in his art, he caught the grand manner and high bred ways of the society he frequented. But even to the last he did not quite shake off the blunt rusticity of phrase that was habitual with the generation that preceded him. In the fifth book of the "Faery Queen," where he is describing the pa.s.sion of Britomart at the supposed infidelity of Arthegall, he descends to a Teniers-like realism,[288]--he whose verses generally remind us of the dancing Hours of Guido, where we catch but a glimpse of the real earth and that far away beneath. But his habitual style is that of gracious loftiness and refined luxury.

He shows his mature hand in the "Muiopotmos," the most airily fanciful of his poems, a marvel for delicate conception and treatment, whose breezy verse seems to float between a blue sky and golden earth in imperishable sunshine. No other English poet has found the variety and compa.s.s which enlivened the octave stanza under his sensitive touch. It can hardly be doubted that in Clarion the b.u.t.terfly he has symbolized himself, and surely never was the poetic temperament so picturesquely exemplified:--

"Over the fields, in his frank l.u.s.tiness, And all the champain o'er, he soared light, And all the country wide he did possess, Feeding upon their pleasures bounteously, That none gainsaid and none did him envy.

"The woods, the rivers, and the meadows green, With his air-cutting wings he measured wide, Nor did he leave the mountains bare unseen, Nor the rank gra.s.sy fens' delights untried; But none of these, however sweet they been, Mote please his fancy, or him cause to abide; His choiceful sense with every change doth flit; No common things may please a wavering wit.

"To the gay gardens his unstaid desire Him wholly carried, to refresh his sprights; There lavish Nature, in her best attire, Pours forth sweet odors and alluring sights, And Art, with her contending doth aspire, To excel the natural with made delights; And all that fair or pleasant may be found, In riotous excess doth there abound.

"There he arriving, round about doth flie, From bed to bed, from one to the other border, And takes survey with curious busy eye, Of every flower and herb there set in order, Now this, now that, he tasteth tenderly, Yet none of them he rudely doth disorder, Ne with his feet their silken leaves displace, But pastures on the pleasures of each place.

"And evermore with most variety And change of sweetness (for all change is sweet) He casts his glutton sense to satisfy, Now sucking of the sap of herbs most meet, Or of the dew which yet on them doth lie, Now in the same bathing his tender feet; And then he percheth on some branch thereby To weather him and his moist wings to dry.

"And then again he turneth to his play, To spoil [plunder] the pleasures of that paradise; The wholesome sage, the lavender still gray, Rank-smelling rue, and c.u.mmin good for eyes, The roses reigning in the pride of May, Sharp hyssop good for green wounds' remedies Fair marigolds, and bees-alluring thyme, Sweet marjoram and daisies decking prime,

"Cool violets, and orpine growing still, Embathed balm, and cheerful galingale, Fresh costmary and breathful camomill, Dull poppy and drink-quickening setuale, Vein-healing vervain and head-purging dill, Sound savory, and basil hearty-hale, Fat coleworts and comforting perseline, Cold lettuce, and refreshing rosemarine.[289]

"And whatso else of virtue good or ill, Grew in this garden, fetched from far away, Of every one he takes and tastes at will, And on their pleasures greedily doth prey; Then, when he hath both played and fed his fill, In the warm sun he doth himself embay, And there him rests in riotous suffisance Of all his gladfulness and kingly joyance.

"What more felicity can fall to creature Than to enjoy delight with liberty, And to be lord of all the works of nature?

To reign in the air from earth to highest sky, To feed on flowers and weeds of glorious feature, To take whatever thing doth please the eye?

Who rests not pleased with such happiness, Well worthy he to taste of wretchedness."

The "Muiopotmos" pleases us all the more that it vibrates in us a string of cla.s.sical a.s.sociation by adding an episode to Ovid's story of Arachne.

"Talking the other day with a friend (the late Mr. Keats) about Dante, he observed that whenever so great a poet told us anything in addition or continuation of an ancient story, he had a right to be regarded as cla.s.sical authority. For instance, said he, when he tells us of that characteristic death of Ulysses, ... we ought to receive the information as authentic, and be glad that we have more news of Ulysses than we looked for."[290]

We can hardly doubt that Ovid would have been glad to admit this exquisitely fantastic illumination into his margin.

No German a.n.a.lyzer of aesthetics has given us so convincing a definition of the artistic nature as these radiant verses. "To reign in the air" was certainly Spenser's function. And yet the commentators, who seem never willing to let their poet be a poet pure and simple, though, had he not been so, they would have lost their only hold upon life, try to make out from his "Mother Hubberd's Tale" that he might have been a very sensible matter of-fact man if he would. For my own part, I am quite willing to confess that I like him none the worse for being _un_practical, and that my reading has convinced me that being too poetical is the rarest fault of poets. Practical men are not so scarce, one would think, and I am not sure that the tree was a gainer when the hamadryad flitted and left it nothing but ship-timber. Such men as Spenser are not sent into the world to be part of its motive power. The blind old engine would not know the difference though we got up its steam with attar of roses, nor make one revolution more to the minute for it. What practical man ever left such an heirloom to his countrymen as the "Faery Queen"?

Undoubtedly Spenser wished to be useful and in the highest vocation of all, that of teacher, and Milton calls him "our sage and serious poet, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas."

And good Dr. Henry More was of the same mind. I fear he makes his vices so beautiful now and then that we should not be very much afraid of them if we chanced to meet them; for he could not escape from his genius, which, if it led him as philosopher to the abstract contemplation of the beautiful, left him as poet open to every impression of sensuous delight.

When he wrote the "Shepherd's Calendar" he was certainly a Puritan, and probably so by conviction rather than from any social influences or thought of personal interests. There is a verse, it is true, in the second of the two detached cantos of "Mutability,"

"Like that ungracious crew which feigns demurest grace,"

which is supposed to glance at the straiter religionists, and from which it has been inferred that he drew away from them as he grew older. It is very likely that years and widened experience of men may have produced in him their natural result of tolerant wisdom which revolts at the hasty destructiveness of inconsiderate zeal. But with the more generous side of Puritanism I think he sympathized to the last. His rebukes of clerical worldliness are in the Puritan tone, and as severe a one as any is in "Mother Hubberd's Tale," published in 1591.[291] There is an iconoclastic relish in his account of Sir Guyon's demolishing the Bower of Bliss that makes us think he would not have regretted the plundered abbeys as perhaps Shakespeare did when he speaks of the winter woods as "bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang";--

"But all those pleasant bowers and palace brave Guyon broke down with rigor pitiless, Ne ought their goodly workmanship might save Them from the tempest of his wrathfulness, But that their bliss he turned to balefulness; Their groves he felled, their gardens did deface, Their arbors spoil, their cabinets suppress, Their banquet-houses burn, their buildings rase, And of the fairest late now made the foulest place."

But whatever may have been Spenser's religious opinions (which do not nearly concern us here), the bent of his mind was toward a Platonic mysticism, a supramundane sphere where it could shape universal forms out of the primal elements of things, instead of being forced to put up with their fortuitous combinations in the unwilling material of mortal clay.

He who, when his singing robes were on, could never be tempted nearer to the real world than under some subterfuge of pastoral or allegory, expatiates joyously in this untrammelled ether:--

"Lifting himself out of the lowly dust On golden plumes up to the purest sky."