Among My Books Volume Ii Part 16

Nowhere does his genius soar and sing with such continuous aspiration, nowhere is his phrase so decorously stately, though rising to an enthusiasm which reaches intensity while it stops short of vehemence, as in his Hymns to Love and Beauty, especially the latter. There is an exulting spurn of earth in it, as of a soul just loosed from its cage. I shall make no extracts from it, for it is one of those intimately coherent and transcendentally logical poems that "moveth altogether if it move at all," the breaking off a fragment from which would maim it as it would a perfect group of crystals. Whatever there is of sentiment and pa.s.sion is for the most part purely disembodied and without s.e.x, like that of angels,--a kind of poetry which has of late gone out of fashion, whether to our gain or not may be questioned. Perhaps one may venture to hint that the animal instincts are those that stand in least need of stimulation. Spenser's notions of love were so n.o.bly pure, so far from those of our common ancestor who could hang by his tail, as not to disqualify him for achieving the quest of the Holy Grail, and accordingly it is not uninstructive to remember that he had drunk, among others, at French sources not yet deboshed with _absinthe_.[292] Yet, with a purity like that of thrice-bolted snow, he had none of its coldness. He is, of all our poets, the most truly sensuous, using the word as Milton probably meant it when he said that poetry should be "simple, sensuous, and pa.s.sionate." A poet is innocently sensuous when his mind permeates and illumines his senses; when they, on the other hand, muddy the mind, he becomes sensual. Every one of Spenser's senses was as exquisitely alive to the impressions of material, as every organ of his soul was to those of spiritual beauty. Accordingly, if he painted the weeds of sensuality at all, he could not help making them "of glorious feature." It was this, it may be suspected, rather than his "praising love," that made Lord Burleigh shake his "rugged forehead." Spenser's gamut, indeed, is a wide one, ranging from a purely corporeal delight in "precious odors fetched from far away" upward to such refinement as

"Upon her eyelids many graces sate Under the shadow of her even brows,"

where the eye shares its pleasure with the mind. He is court-painter in ordinary to each of the senses in turn, and idealizes these frail favorites of his majesty King l.u.s.ty Juventus, till they half believe themselves the innocent shepherdesses into which he travesties them.[293]

In his great poem he had two objects in view: first the ephemeral one of pleasing the court, and then that of recommending himself to the permanent approval of his own and following ages as a poet, and especially as a moral poet. To meet the first demand, he lays the scene of his poem in contemporary England, and brings in all the leading personages of the day under the thin disguise of his knights and their squires and lady-loves. He says this expressly in the prologue to the second book:--

"Of Faery Land yet if he more inquire, By certain signs, here set in sundry place, He may it find; ...

And thou, O fairest princess under sky, In this fair mirror mayst behold thy face And thine own realms in land of Faery."

Many of his personages we can still identify, and all of them were once as easily recognizable as those of Mademoiselle de Scudery. This, no doubt, added greatly to the immediate piquancy of the allusions. The interest they would excite may be inferred from the fact that King James, in 1596, wished to have the author prosecuted and punished for his indecent handling of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, under the name of Duessa.[294] To suit the wider application of his plan's other and more important half, Spenser made all his characters double their parts, and appear in his allegory as the impersonations of abstract moral qualities.

When the cardinal and theological virtues tell Dante,

"Noi siam qui ninfe e in ciel siamo stelle,"

the sweetness of the verse enables the fancy, by a slight gulp, to swallow without solution the problem of being in two places at the same time. But there is something fairly ludicrous in such a duality as that of Prince Arthur and the Earl of Leicester, Arthegall and Lord Grey, and Belphoebe and Elizabeth.

"In this same interlude it doth befall That I, one Snout by name, present a wall."

The reality seems to heighten the improbability, already hard enough to manage. But Spenser had fortunately almost as little sense of humor as Wordsworth,[295] or he could never have carried his poem on with enthusiastic good faith so far as he did. It is evident that to him the Land of Faery was an unreal world of picture and illusion,

"The world's sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil,"

in which he could shut himself up from the actual, with its shortcomings and failures.

"The ways through which my weary steps I guide In this delightful land of Faery Are so exceeding s.p.a.cious and wide, And sprinkled with such sweet variety Of all that pleasant is to ear and eye, That I, nigh ravisht with rare thoughts' delight, My tedious travail do forget thereby, And, when I 'gin to feel decay of might, It strength to me supplies, and cheers my dulled spright."

Spenser seems here to confess a little weariness; but the alacrity of his mind is so great that, even where his invention fails a little, we do not share his feeling nor suspect it, charmed as we are by the variety and sweep of his measure, the beauty or vigor of his similes, the musical felicity of his diction, and the mellow versatility of his pictures. In this last quality Ariosto, whose emulous pupil he was, is as Bologna to Venice in the comparison. That, when the personal allusions have lost their meaning and the allegory has become a burden, the book should continue to be read with delight, is proof enough, were any wanting, how full of life and light and the other-worldliness of poetry it must be. As a narrative it has, I think, every fault of which that kind of writing is capable. The characters are vague, and, even were they not, they drop out of the story so often and remain out of it so long, that we have forgotten who they are when we meet them again; the episodes hinder the advance of the action instead of relieving it with variety of incident or novelty of situation; the plot, if plot it may be called,

"That shape has none Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb,"

recalls drearily our ancient enemy, the Metrical Romance; while the fighting, which, in those old poems, was tediously sincere, is between shadow and shadow, where we know that neither can harm the other, though are tempted to wish he might. Hazlitt bids us not mind the allegory, and says that it won't bite us nor meddle with us if we do not meddle with it. But how if it bore us, which after all is the fatal question? The truth is that it is too often forced upon us against our will, as people were formerly driven to church till they began to look on a day of rest as a penal inst.i.tution, and to transfer to the Scriptures that suspicion of defective inspiration which was awakened in them by the preaching. The true type of the allegory is the Odyssey, which we read without suspicion as pure poem, and then find a new pleasure in divining its double meaning, as if we somehow got a better bargain of our author than he meant to give us. But this complex feeling must not be so exacting as to prevent our lapsing into the old Arabian Nights simplicity of interest again. The moral of a poem should be suggested, as when in some mediaeval church we cast down our eyes to muse over a fresco of Giotto, and are reminded of the transitoriness of life by the mortuary tablets under our feet. The vast superiority of Bunyan over Spenser lies in the fact that we help make his allegory out of our own experience. Instead of striving to embody abstract pa.s.sions and temptations, he has given us his own in all their pathetic simplicity. He is the Ulysses of his own prose-epic.

This is the secret of his power and his charm, that, while the representation of what may happen to all men comes home to none of us in particular, the story of any one man's real experience finds its startling parallel in that of every one of us. The very homeliness of Bunyan's names and the everydayness of his scenery, too, put us off our guard, and we soon find ourselves on as easy a footing with his allegorical beings as we might be with Adam or Socrates in a dream.

Indeed, he has prepared us for such incongruities by telling us at setting out that the story was of a dream. The long nights of Bedford jail had so intensified his imagination, and made the figures with which it peopled his solitude so real to him, that the creatures of his mind become _things_, as clear to the memory as if we had seen them. But Spenser's are too often mere names, with no bodies to back them, entered on the Muses' musterroll by the specious trick of personification. There is likewise, in Bunyan, a childlike simplicity and taking-for-granted which win our confidence. His Giant Despair,[296] for example, is by no means the Ossianic figure into which artists who mistake the vague for the sublime have misconceived it. He is the ogre of the fairy-tales, with his malicious wife; and he comes forth to us from those regions of early faith and wonder as something beforehand accepted by the imagination.

These figures of Bunyan's are already familiar inmates of the mind, and, if there be any sublimity in him, it is the daring frankness of his verisimilitude. Spenser's giants are those of the later romances, except that grand figure with the balances in the second Canto of Book V., the most original of all his conceptions, yet no real giant, but a pure eidolon of the mind. As Bunyan rises not seldom to a natural poetry, so Spenser sinks now and then, through the fault of his topics, to unmistakable prose. Take his description of the House of Alma,[297] for instance:--

"The master cook was cald Concoction, A careful man, and full of comely guise; The kitchen-clerk, that hight Digestion, Did order all the achates in seemly wise."

And so on through all the organs of the body. The author of Ecclesiastes understood these matters better in that last pathetic chapter of his, blunderingly translated as it apparently is. This, I admit, is the worst failure of Spenser in this kind; though, even here, when he gets on to the organs of the mind, the enchantments of his fancy and style come to the rescue and put us in good-humor again, hard as it is to conceive of armed knights entering the chamber of the mind, and talking with such visionary damsels as Ambition and Shamefastness. Nay, even in the most prosy parts, unless my partiality deceive me, there is an infantile confidence in the magical powers of Prosopopoeia which half beguiles us as of children who _play_ that everything is something else, and are quite satisfied with the transformation.

The problem for Spenser was a double one: how to commend poetry at all to a generation which thought it effeminate trifling,[298] and how he, Master Edmund Spenser, of imagination all compact, could commend _his_ poetry to Master John Bull, the most practical of mankind in his habitual mood, but at that moment in a pa.s.sion of religious anxiety about his soul. _Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci_ was not only an irrefragable axiom because a Latin poet had said it, but it exactly met the case in point. He would convince the scorners that poetry might be seriously useful, and show Master Bull his new way of making fine words b.u.t.ter parsnips, in a rhymed moral primer. Allegory, as then practised, was imagination adapted for beginners, in words of one syllable and ill.u.s.trated with cuts, and would thus serve both his ethical and pictorial purpose. Such a primer, or a first instalment of it, he proceeded to put forth; but he so bordered it with bright-colored fancies, he so often filled whole pages and crowded the text hard in others with the gay frolics of his pencil, that, as in the Grimani missal, the holy function of the book is forgotten in the ecstasy of its adornment. Worse than all, does not his brush linger more lovingly along the rosy contours of his sirens than on the modest wimples of the Wise Virgins? "The general end of the book," he tells us in his Dedication to Sir Walter Raleigh, "is to fashion a gentleman of n.o.ble person in virtuous and gentle discipline." But a little further on he evidently has a qualm, as he thinks how generously he had interpreted his promise of cuts: "To some I know this method will seem displeasant, which had rather have good discipline delivered plainly in way of precepts or sermoned at large,[299] as they use, than thus cloudily enwrapped in allegorical devices." Lord Burleigh was of this way of thinking, undoubtedly, but how could poor Clarion help it? Has he not said,

"And whatso else, _of virtue good or ill,_ Grew in that garden, fetcht from far away, Of every one he takes and tastes at will, And on their pleasures greedily doth prey"?

One sometimes feels in reading him as if he were the pure sense of the beautiful incarnated to the one end that he might interpret it to our duller perceptions So exquisite was his sensibility,[300] that with him sensation and intellection seem identical, and we "can almost say his body thought." This subtle interfusion of sense with spirit it is that gives his poetry a crystalline purity without lack of warmth. He is full of feeling, and yet of such a kind that we can neither say it is mere intellectual perception of what is fair and good, nor yet a.s.sociate it with that throbbing fervor which leads us to call sensibility by the physical name of heart.

Charles Lamb made the most pithy criticism of Spenser when he called him the poets' poet. We may fairly leave the allegory on one side, for perhaps, after all, he adopted it only for the reason that it was in fashion, and put it on as he did his ruff, not because it was becoming, but because it was the only wear. The true use of him is as a gallery of pictures which we visit as the mood takes us, and where we spend an hour or two at a time, long enough to sweeten our perceptions, not so long as to cloy them. He makes one think always of Venice; for not only is his style Venetian,[301] but as the gallery there is housed in the sh.e.l.l of an abandoned convent, so his in that of a deserted allegory. And again, as at Venice you swim in a gondola from Gian Bellini to t.i.tian, and from t.i.tian to Tintoret, so in him, where other cheer is wanting, the gentle sway of his measure, like the rhythmical impulse of the oar, floats you lullingly along from picture to picture.

"If all the pens that ever poet held Had fed the feeling of their master's thoughts, And every sweetness that inspired their hearts Their minds and muses on admired themes, If all the heavenly quintessence they still From their immortal flowers of poesy, If these had made one poem's period, And all combined in beauty's worthiness; Yet should there hover in their restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder at the best, Which into words no virtue can digest."[302]

Spenser, at his best, has come as near to expressing this unattainable something as any other poet. He is so purely poet that with him the meaning does not so often modulate the music of the verse as the music makes great part of the meaning and leads the thought along its pleasant paths. No poet is so splendidly superfluous as he; none knows so well that in poetry enough is not only not so good as a feast, but is a beggarly parsimony. He spends himself in a careless abundance only to be justified by incomes of immortal youth.

"Pensier canuto ne molto ne poco Si pu quivi albergare in alcun cuore; Non entra quivi disagio ne inopia, Ma vi sta ogn'or col corno pien la Copia."[303]

This delicious abundance and overrunning luxury of Spenser appear in the very structure of his verse. He found the _ottava rima_ too monotonously iterative; so, by changing the order of his rhymes, he shifted the let from the end of the stave, where it always seems to put on the brakes with a jar, to the middle, where it may serve at will as a brace or a bridge; he found it not roomy enough, so first ran it over into another line, and then ran that added line over into an alexandrine, in which the melody of one stanza seems forever longing and feeling forward after that which is to follow. There is no ebb and flow in his metre more than on the sh.o.r.es of the Adriatic, but wave follows wave with equable gainings and recessions, the one sliding back in fluent music to be mingled with and carried forward by the next. In all this there is soothingness indeed, but no slumberous monotony; for Spenser was no mere metrist, but a great composer. By the variety of his pauses--now at the close of the first or second foot, now of the third, and again of the fourth--he gives spirit and energy to a measure whose tendency it certainly is to become languorous. He knew how to make it rapid and pa.s.sionate at need, as in such verses as,

"But he, my lion, and my n.o.ble lord, How does he find in cruel heart to hate Her that him loved and ever most adored As the G.o.d of my life? Why hath he me abhorred?"[304]

or this,

"Come hither, come hither, O, come hastily!"[305]

Joseph Warton objects to Spenser's stanza, that its "constraint led him into many absurdities." Of these he instances three, of which I shall notice only one, since the two others (which suppose him at a loss for words and rhymes) will hardly seem valid to any one who knows the poet.

It is that it "obliged him to dilate the thing to be expressed, however unimportant with trifling and tedious circ.u.mlocutions, namely, Faery Queen, II. ii. 44:--

"'Now hath fair Phoebe with her silver face Thrice seen the shadows of this nether world, Sith last I left that honorable place, In which her royal presence is enrolled.'

"That is, it is three months since I left her palace."[306] But Dr. Warton should have remembered (what he too often forgets in his own verses) that, in spite of Dr. Johnson's dictum, poetry is not prose, and that verse only loses its advantage over the latter by invading its province.[307] Verse itself is an absurdity except as an expression of some higher movement of the mind, or as an expedient to lift other minds to the same ideal level. It is the cothurnus which gives language an heroic stature. I have said that one leading characteristic of Spenser's style was its s.p.a.ciousness, that he habitually dilates rather than compresses. But his way of measuring time was perfectly natural in an age when everybody did not carry a dial in his poke as now. He is the last of the poets, who went (without affectation) by the great clock of the firmament. Dante, the miser of words, who goes by the same timepiece, is full of these roundabout ways of telling us the hour. It had nothing to do with Spenser's stanza, and I for one should be sorry to lose these stately revolutions of the _superne ruote_. Time itself becomes more n.o.ble when so measured; we never knew before of how precious a commodity we had the wasting. Who would prefer the plain time of day to this?

"Now when Aldebaran was mounted high Above the starry Ca.s.siopeia's chair";

or this?

"By this the northern wagoner had set His seven-fold team behind the steadfast star That was in ocean's waves yet never wet, But firm is fixt and sendeth light from far To all that in the wide deep wandering are";

or this?

"At last the golden oriental gate Of greatest heaven gan to open fair, And Phoebus, fresh as bridegroom to his mate, Came dancing forth, shaking his dewy hair And hurls his glistening beams through dewy air."

The generous indefiniteness, which treats an hour more or less as of no account, is in keeping with that sense of endless leisures which it is one chief merit of the poem to suggest. But Spenser's dilatation extends to thoughts as well as to phrases and images. He does not love the concise. Yet his dilatation is not mere distension, but the expansion of natural growth in the rich soil of his own mind, wherein the merest stick of a verse puts forth leaves and blossoms. Here is one of his, suggested by Homer:[308]

"Upon the top of all his lofty crest A bunch of hairs discolored diversly, With sprinkled pearl and gold full richly drest, Did shake, and seemed to dance for jollity; Like to an almond-tree mounted high On top of green Selinus all alone With blossoms brave bedecked daintily, Whose tender locks do tremble every one At every little breath that under heaven is blown."

And this is the way he reproduces five pregnant verses of Dante:--

"Seggendo in piume In fama non si vien, ne sotto coltre, Senza la qual chi sua vita consuma, Cotal vestigio in terra di se lascia Qual fumo in aere ed in acqua la schiuma."[309]

"Whoso in pomp of proud estate, quoth she, Does swim, and bathes himself in courtly bliss, Does waste his days in dark obscurity And in oblivion ever buried is; Where ease abounds it's eath to do amiss: But who his limbs with labors and his mind Behaves with cares, cannot so easy miss.

Abroad in arms, at home in studious kind, Who seeks with painful toil shall Honor soonest find.

"In woods, in waves, in wars, she wonts to dwell, And will be found with peril and with pain, Ne can the man that moulds in idle cell Unto her happy mansion attain; Before her gate high G.o.d did Sweat ordain, And wakeful watches ever to abide; But easy is the way and pa.s.sage plain To pleasure's palace; it may soon be spied, And day and night her doors to all stand open wide."[310]

Spenser's mind always demands this large elbow-room. His thoughts are never pithily expressed, but with a stately and sonorous proclamation, as if under the open sky, that seems to me very n.o.ble. For example,--

"The n.o.ble heart that harbors virtuous thought And is with child of glorious-great intent Can never rest until it forth have brought The eternal brood of glory excellent."[311]

One's very soul seems to dilate with that last verse. And here is a pa.s.sage which Milton had read and remembered:--