From Chaucer to Tennyson
changes since Chaucer's time, which made his scansion obsolete. The
accent of many words of French origin, like _nature_, _courage_,
_virtue_, _matere_, had shifted to the first syllable, and the _e_ of
the final syllables _es_, _en_, _ed_, and _e_, had largely disappeared.
But the language of poetry tends to keep up archaisms of this kind, and
in Stephen Hawes, who wrote a century after Chaucer, we still find such
lines as these:
But he my strokes might right well endure,
He was so great and huge of puissance.[19]
Hawes's practice is variable in this respect, and so is his
contemporary, Skelton's. But in Wiat and Surrey, who wrote only a few
years later, the reader first feels sure that he is reading verse
pronounced quite in the modern fashion.
[Footnote 19: Trisyllable--like creature neighebour, etc., in Chaucer.]
But Chaucer's example still continued potent. Spenser revived many of
his obsolete words, both in his pastorals and in his _Faerie Queene_,
thereby imparting an antique remoteness to his diction, but incurring
Ben Jonson's censure, that he "writ no language." A poem that stands
midway between Spenser and the late mediaeval work of Chaucer's
school--such as Hawes's _Passetyme of Pleasure_--was the induction
contributed by Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, in 1563 to a collection
of narrative poems called the _Mirrour for Magistrates_. The whole
series was the work of many hands, modeled upon Lydgate's _Falls of
Princes_ (taken from Boccaccio), and was designed as a warning to great
men of the fickleness of fortune. The _Induction_ is the only noteworthy
part of it. It was an allegory, written in Chaucer's seven-lined stanza,
and described, with a somber imaginative power, the figure of Sorrow,
her abode in the "griesly lake" of Avernus, and her attendants, Remorse,
Dread, Old Age, etc. Sackville was the author of the first regular
English tragedy _Gorboduc_; and it was at his request that Ascham wrote
the _Schoolmaster_.
Italian poetry also fed the genius of Edmund Spenser (1552-1599). While
a student at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, he had translated some of the
_Visions of Petrarch_, and the _Visions of Bellay_, a French poet, but
it was only in 1579 that the publication of his _Shepheard's Calendar_
announced the coming of a great original poet, the first since Chaucer.
The _Shepheard's Calendar_ was a pastoral in twelve eclogues--one for
each month in the year. There had been a revival of pastoral poetry in
Italy and France, but, with one or two insignificant exceptions,
Spenser's were the first bucolics in English. Two of his eclogues were
paraphrases from Clement Marot, a French Protestant poet, whose psalms
were greatly in fashion at the court of Francis I. The pastoral
machinery had been used by Vergil and by his modern imitators, not
merely to portray the loves of Strephon and Chloe, or the idyllic charms
of rustic life; but also as a vehicle of compliment, elegy, satire, and
personal allusion of many kinds. Spenser, accordingly, alluded to his
friends, Sidney and Harvey, as the shepherds Astrophel and Hobbinol;
paid court to Queen Elizabeth as Cynthia; and introduced, in the form of
anagrams, names of the High-Church Bishop of London, Aylmer, and the
Low-Church Archbishop Grindal. The conventional pastoral is a somewhat
delicate exotic in English poetry, and represents a very unreal Arcadia.
Before the end of the 17th century the squeak of the oaten pipe had
become a burden, and the only poem of the kind which it is easy to read
without some impatience is Milton's wonderful _Lycidas_. The
_Shepheard's Calendar_, however, though it belonged to an artificial
order of literature, had the unmistakable stamp of genius in its style.
There was a broad, easy mastery of the resources of language, a grace,
fluency, and music which were new to English poetry. It was written
while Spenser was in service with the Earl of Leicester, and enjoying
the friendship of his nephew, the all-accomplished Sidney and it was,
perhaps, composed at the latter's country seat of Penshurst. In the
following year Spenser went to Ireland as private secretary to Arthur,
Lord Grey of Wilton, who had just been appointed Lord Deputy of that
kingdom. After filling several clerkships in the Irish government,
Spenser received a grant of the castle and estate of Kilcolman, a part
of the forfeited lands of the rebel Earl of Desmond. Here, among
landscapes richly wooded, like the scenery of his own fairy land, "under
the cooly shades of the green alders by the Mulla's shore," Sir Walter
Raleigh found him, in 1589, busy upon his _Faerie Queene_. In his poem,
_Colin Clout's Come Home Again_, Spenser tells, in pastoral language,
how "the shepherd of the ocean" persuaded him to go to London, where he
presented him to the queen, under whose patronage the first three books
of his great poem were printed, in 1590. A volume of minor poems,
entitled _Complaints_, followed in 1591, and the three remaining books
of the _Faerie Queene_ in 1596. In 1595-1596 he published also his
_Daphnaida, Prothalamion,_ and the four hymns on _Love_ and _Beauty_,
and on _Heavenly Love_ and _Heavenly Beauty_. In 1598, in Tyrone's
rebellion, Kilcolman Castle was sacked and burned, and Spenser, with his
family, fled to London, where he died in January, 1599.
The _Faerie Queene_ reflects, perhaps, more fully than any other English
work, the many-sided literary influences of the Renascence. It was the
blossom of a richly composite culture. Its immediate models were
Ariosto's _Orlando Furioso_, the first forty cantos of which were
published in 1515, and Tasso's _Gerusalemme Liberata_, printed in 1581.
Both of these were, in subject, romances of chivalry, the first based
upon the old Charlemagne epos--Orlando being identical with the hero of
the French _Chanson de Roland_: the second upon the history of the first
crusade, and the recovery of the Holy City from the Saracen. But in both
of them there was a splendor of diction and a wealth of coloring quite
unknown to the rude mediaeval romances. Ariosto and Tasso wrote with the
great epics of Homer and Vergil constantly in mind, and all about them
was the brilliant light of Italian art, in its early freshness and
power. The _Faerie Queene_, too, was a tale of knight-errantry. Its hero
was King Arthur, and its pages swarm with the familiar adventures and
figures of Gothic romance: distressed ladies and their champions,
combats with dragons and giants, enchanted castles, magic rings, charmed
wells, forest hermitages, etc. But side by side with these appear the
fictions of Greek mythology and the personified abstractions of
fashionable allegory. Knights, squires, wizards, hamadryads, satyrs, and
river gods, Idleness, Gluttony, and Superstition jostle each other in
Spenser's fairy land. Descents to the infernal shades, in the manner of
Homer and Vergil, alternate with descriptions of the Palace of Pride in
the manner of the _Romaunt of the Rose_. But Spenser's imagination was a
powerful spirit, and held all these diverse elements in solution. He
removed them to an ideal sphere "apart from place, withholding time,"
where they seem all alike equally real, the dateless conceptions of the
poet's dream.
The poem was to have been "a continued allegory or dark conceit," in
twelve books, the hero of each book representing one of the twelve moral
virtues. Only six books and the fragment of a seventh were written. By
way of complimenting his patrons and securing contemporary interest,
Spenser undertook to make his allegory a double one, personal and
historical, as well as moral or abstract. Thus Gloriana, the Queen of
Faery, stands not only for Glory but for Elizabeth, to whom the poem was
dedicated. Prince Arthur is Leicester, as well as Magnificence. Duessa
is Falsehood, but also Mary Queen of Scots. Grantorto is Philip II. of
Spain. Sir Artegal is Justice, but likewise he is Arthur Grey de Wilton.
Other characters shadow forth Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Philip Sidney,
Henry IV. of France, etc.; and such public events as the revolt of the
Spanish Netherlands, the Irish rebellion, the execution of Mary Stuart,
and the rising of the northern Catholic houses against Elizabeth are
told in parable. In this way the poem reflects the spiritual struggle of
the time, the warfare of young England against popery and Spain.
The allegory is not always easy to follow. It is kept up most carefully
in the first two books, but it sat rather lightly on Spenser's
conscience, and is not of the essence of the poem. It is an ornament put
on from the outside and detachable at pleasure. The "Spenserian stanza,"
in which the _Faerie Queene_ was written, was adapted from the _ottava
rima_ of Ariosto. Spenser changed somewhat the order of the rimes in
the first eight lines and added a ninth line of twelve syllables, thus
affording more space to the copious luxuriance of his style and the
long-drawn sweetness of his verse. It was his instinct to dilate and
elaborate every image to the utmost, and his similies, especially--each
of which usually fills a whole stanza--have the pictorial amplitude of
Homer's. Spenser was, in fact, a great painter. His poetry is almost
purely sensuous. The personages in the _Faerie Queene_ are not
characters, but richly colored figures, moving to the accompaniment of
delicious music, in an atmosphere of serene remoteness from the earth.
Charles Lamb said that he was the poet's poet, that is, he appealed
wholly to the artistic sense and to the love of beauty. Not until Keats
did another English poet appear so filled with the passion for outward
shapes of beauty, so exquisitively alive to all impressions of the
senses. Spenser was, in some respects, more an Italian than an English
poet. It is said that the Venetian gondoliers still sing the stanzas of
Tasso's _Gerusalemme Liberata_. It is not easy to imagine the Thames
bargees chanting passages from the _Faerie Queene_. Those English poets
who have taken strongest hold upon their public have done so by their
profound interpretation of our common life. But Spenser escaped
altogether from reality into a region of pure imagination. His aerial
creations resemble the blossoms of the epiphytic orchids, which have no
root in the soil, but draw their nourishment from the moisture of the
air.
_Their_ birth was of the womb of morning dew,
And _their_ conception of the glorious prime.
Among the minor poems of Spenser the most delightful were his
_Prothalamion_ and _Epithalamion_. The first was a "spousal verse," made
for the double wedding of the Ladies Catherine and Elizabeth Somerset,
whom the poet figures as two white swans that come swimming down the
Thames, the surface of which the nymphs strew with lilies, till it
appears "like a bride's chamber-floor."
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
is the burden of each stanza. The _Epithalamion_ was Spenser's own
marriage song, written to crown his series of _Amoretti_ or love
sonnets, and is the most splendid hymn of triumphant love in the
language. Hardly less beautiful than these was _Muiopotmos; or, the Fate
of the Butterfly_, an addition to the classical myth of Arachne, the
spider. The four hymns in praise of _Love_ and _Beauty_, _Heavenly Love_
and _Heavenly Beauty_, are also stately and noble poems, but by reason
of their abstractness and the Platonic mysticism which they express, are
less generally pleasing than the others mentioned. Allegory and
mysticism had no natural affiliation with Spenser's genius. He was a
seer of visions, of _images_ full, brilliant, and distinct; and not,
like Bunyan, Dante, or Hawthorne, a projector into bodily shapes of
_ideas_, typical and emblematic; the shadows which haunt the conscience
and the mind.
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