I-
We know little of Spenser’s
childhood and nothing of his parents, except that
his father was probably an Edmund Spenser of north-east
Lancashire, a man of good blood and ‘belonging
to a house of ancient fame.’ He was born
in London in 1552, nineteen years after the death of
Ariosto, and when Tasso was about eight years old.
Full of the spirit of the Renaissance, at once passionate
and artificial, looking out upon the world now as
craftsman, now as connoisseur, he was to found his
art upon theirs rather than upon the more humane,
the more noble, the less intellectual art of Malory
and the Minstrels. Deafened and blinded by their
influence, as so many of us were in boyhood by that
art of Hugo, that made the old simple writers seem
but as brown bread and water, he was always to love
the journey more than its end, the landscape more
than the man, and reason more than life, and the tale
less than its telling. He entered Pembroke College,
Cambridge, in 1569, and translated allegorical poems
out of Petrarch and Du Bellay. To-day a young
man translates out of Verlaine and Verhaeren; but
at that day Ronsard and Du Bellay were the living
poets, who promised revolutionary and unheard-of things
to a poetry moving towards elaboration and intellect,
as ours the serpent’s tooth in his
own tail again moves towards simplicity
and instinct. At Cambridge he met with Hobbinol
of The Shepheards Calender, a certain Gabriel
Harvey, son of a rope-maker at Saffron Walden, but
now a Fellow of Pembroke College, a notable man, some
five or six years his elder. It is usual to think
ill of Harvey because of his dislike of rhyme and
his advocacy of classical metres, and because he complained
that Spenser preferred his Faerie Queene to
the Nine Muses, and encouraged Hobgoblin ’to
run off with the Garland of Apollo.’ But
at that crossroad, where so many crowds mingled talking
of so many lands, no one could foretell in what bed
he would sleep after nightfall. Milton was in
the end to dislike rhyme as much, and it is certain
that rhyme is one of the secondary causes of that disintegration
of the personal instincts which has given to modern
poetry its deep colour for colour’s sake, its
overflowing pattern, its background of decorative
landscape, and its insubordination of detail.
At the opening of a movement we are busy with first
principles, and can find out everything but the road
we are to go, everything but the weight and measure
of the impulse, that has come to us out of life itself,
for that is always in defiance of reason, always without
a justification but by faith and works. Harvey
set Spenser to the making of verses in classical metre,
and certain lines have come down to us written in what
Spenser called ‘Iambicum trimetrum.’
His biographers agree that they are very bad, but,
though I cannot scan them, I find in them the charm
of what seems a sincere personal emotion. The
man himself, liberated from the minute felicities
of phrase and sound, that are the temptation and the
delight of rhyme, speaks of his Mistress some thought
that came to him not for the sake of poetry, but for
love’s sake, and the emotion instead of dissolving
into detached colours, into ‘the spangly gloom’
that Keats saw ‘froth and boil’ when he
put his eyes into ‘the pillowy cleft,’
speaks to her in poignant words as if out of a tear-stained
love-letter:
’Unhappie verse, the witnesse of
my unhappie state,
Make thy selfe fluttring winge for thy
fast flying
Thought, and fly forth to my love wheresoever
she be.
Whether lying restlesse in heavy bedde,
or else
Sitting so cheerlesse at the cheerful
boorde, or else
Playing alone carelesse on her heavenlie
virginals.
If in bed, tell hir that my eyes can take
no rest;
If at boorde tell her that my mouth can
eat no meate
If at her virginals, tell her that
I can heare no mirth.’
II-
He left College in his twenty-fourth
year, and stayed for a while in Lancashire, where
he had relations, and there fell in love with one he
has written of in The Shepheards Calender as
’Rosalind, the widdowes daughter of the Glenn,’
though she was, for all her shepherding, as one learns
from a College friend, ‘a gentlewoman of no mean
house.’ She married Menalchus of the Calender
and Spenser lamented her for years, in verses so full
of disguise that one cannot say if his lamentations
come out of a broken heart or are but a useful movement
in the elaborate ritual of his poetry, a well-ordered
incident in the mythology of his imagination.
To no English poet, perhaps to no European poet before
his day, had the natural expression of personal feeling
been so impossible, the clear vision of the linéaments
of human character so difficult; no other’s
head and eyes had sunk so far into the pillowy cleft.
After a year of this life he went to London, and by
Harvey’s advice and introduction entered the
service of the Earl of Leicester, staying for a while
in his house on the banks of the Thames; and it was
there in all likelihood that he met with the Earl’s
nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, still little more than
a boy, but with his head full of affairs of state.
One can imagine that it was the great Earl or Sir
Philip Sidney that gave his imagination its moral
and practical turn, and one imagines him seeking from
philosophical men, who distrust instinct because it
disturbs contemplation, and from practical men who
distrust everything they cannot use in the routine
of immediate events, that impulse and method of creation
that can only be learned with surety from the technical
criticism of poets, and from the excitement of some
movement in the artistic life. Marlowe and Shakespeare
were still at school, and Ben Jonson was but five
years old. Sidney was doubtless the greatest
personal influence that came into Spenser’s life,
and it was one that exalted moral zeal above every
other faculty. The great Earl impressed his imagination
very deeply also, for the lamentation over the Earl
of Leicester’s death is more than a conventional
Ode to a dead patron. Spenser’s verses
about men, nearly always indeed, seem to express more
of personal joy and sorrow than those about women,
perhaps because he was less deliberately a poet when
he spoke of men. At the end of a long beautiful
passage he laments that unworthy men should be in the
dead Earl’s place, and compares them to the
fox an unclean feeder hiding
in the lair ‘the badger swept.’ The
imaginer of the festivals of Kenilworth was indeed
the fit patron for him, and alike, because of the strength
and weakness of Spenser’s art, one regrets that
he could not have lived always in that elaborate life,
a master of ceremony to the world, instead of being
plunged into a life that but stirred him to bitterness,
as the way is with theoretical minds in the tumults
of events they cannot understand. In the winter
of 1579-80 he published The Shepheards Calender,
a book of twelve eclogues, one for every month of the
year, and dedicated it to Sir Philip Sidney.
It was full of pastoral beauty and allegorical images
of current events, revealing too that conflict between
the aesthetic and moral interests that was to run through
well-nigh all his works, and it became immediately
famous. He was rewarded with a place as private
secretary to the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Grey de Wilton,
and sent to Ireland, where he spent nearly all the
rest of his life. After a few years there he
bought Kilcolman Castle, which had belonged to the
rebel Earl of Desmond, and the rivers and hills about
this castle came much into his poetry. Our Irish
Aubeg is ’Mulla mine, whose waves I taught to
weep,’ and the Ballyvaughan Hills, it has its
rise among ‘old Father Mole.’ He never
pictured the true countenance of Irish scenery, for
his mind turned constantly to the courts of Elizabeth
and to the umbrageous level lands, where his own race
was already seeding like a great poppy:
’Both heaven and heavenly graces
do much more
(Quoth he), abound in that same land then
this:
For there all happie peace and plenteous
store
Conspire in one to make contented blisse.
No wayling there nor wretchednesse is
heard,
No bloodie issues nor no leprosies,
No griesly famine, nor no raging sweard,
No nightly bordrags, nor no hue and cries;
The shepheards there abroad may safely
lie
On hills and downes, withouten dread or
daunger,
No ravenous wolves the good mans hope
destroy,
Nor outlawes fell affray the forest raunger,
The learned arts do florish in great honor,
And Poets wits are had in peerlesse price.’
Nor did he ever understand the people
he lived among or the historical events that were
changing all things about him. Lord Grey de Wilton
had been recalled almost immediately, but it was his
policy, brought over ready-made in his ship, that
Spenser advocated throughout all his life, equally
in his long prose book The State of Ireland
as in the Faerie Queene, where Lord Grey was
Artigall and the Iron man the soldiers and executioners
by whose hands he worked. Like an hysterical patient
he drew a complicated web of inhuman logic out of
the bowels of an insufficient premise there
was no right, no law, but that of Elizabeth, and all
that opposed her opposed themselves to God, to civilisation,
and to all inherited wisdom and courtesy, and should
be put to death. He made two visits to England,
celebrating one of them in Colin Clouts come Home
againe, to publish the first three books and the
second three books of the Faerie Queene respectively,
and to try for some English office or pension.
By the help of Raleigh, now his neighbour at Kilcolman,
he had been promised a pension, but was kept out of
it by Lord Burleigh, who said, ‘All that for
a song!’ From that day Lord Burleigh became
that ‘rugged forehead’ of the poems, whose
censure of this or that is complained of. During
the last three or four years of his life in Ireland
he married a fair woman of his neighbourhood, and
about her wrote many intolerable artificial sonnets
and that most beautiful passage in the sixth book
of the Faerie Queene, which tells of Colin
Clout piping to the Graces and to her; and he celebrated
his marriage in the most beautiful of all his poems,
the Epithalamium. His genius was pictorial,
and these pictures of happiness were more natural
to it than any personal pride, or joy, or sorrow.
His new happiness was very brief, and just as he was
rising to something of Milton’s grandeur in
the fragment that has been called Mutabilitie,
’the wandering companies that keep the woods,’
as he called the Irish armies, drove him to his death.
Ireland, where he saw nothing but work for the Iron
man, was in the midst of the last struggle of the
old Celtic order with England, itself about to turn
bottom upward, of the passion of the Middle Ages with
the craft of the Renaissance. Seven years after
Spenser’s arrival in Ireland a large merchant
ship had carried off from Loch Swilly, by a very crafty
device common in those days, certain persons of importance.
Red Hugh, a boy of fifteen, and the coming head of
Tirconnell, and various heads of clans had been enticed
on board the merchant ship to drink of a fine vintage,
and there made prisoners. All but Red Hugh were
released, on finding substitutes among the boys of
their kindred, and the captives were hurried to Dublin
and imprisoned in the Birmingham Tower. After
four years of captivity and one attempt that failed,
Red Hugh and certain of his companions escaped into
the Dublin mountains, one dying there of cold and
privation, and from that to their own country-side.
Red Hugh allied himself to Hugh O’Neil, the
most powerful of the Irish leaders ’Oh,
deep, dissembling heart, born to great weal or woe
of thy country!’ an English historian had cried
to him an Oxford man too, a man of the
Renaissance, and for a few years defeated English
armies and shook the power of England. The Irish,
stirred by these events, and with it maybe some rumours
of The State of Ireland sticking in their stomachs,
drove Spenser out of doors and burnt his house, one
of his children, as tradition has it, dying in the
fire. He fled to England, and died some three
months later in January, 1599, as Ben Jonson says,
‘of lack of bread.’
During the last four or five years
of his life he had seen, without knowing that he saw
it, the beginning of the great Elizabethan poetical
movement. In 1598 he had pictured the Nine Muses
lamenting each one over the evil state in England,
of the things that she had in charge, but, like William
Blake’s more beautiful Whether on Ida’s
shady brow, their lamentations should have been
a cradle-song. When he died Romeo and Juliet,
Richard III., and Richard II., and the
plays of Marlowe had all been acted, and in stately
houses were sung madrigals and love songs whose like
has not been in the world since. Italian influence
had strengthened the old French joy that had never
died out among the upper classes, and an art was being
created for the last time in England which had half
its beauty from continually suggesting a life hardly
less beautiful than itself.
III-
When Spenser was buried at Westminster
Abbey many poets read verses in his praise, and then
threw their verses and the pens that had written them
into his tomb. Like him they belonged, for all
the moral zeal that was gathering like a London fog,
to that indolent, demonstrative Merry England that
was about to pass away. Men still wept when they
were moved, still dressed themselves in joyous colours,
and spoke with many gestures. Thoughts and qualities
sometimes come to their perfect expression when they
are about to pass away, and Merry England was dying
in plays, and in poems, and in strange adventurous
men. If one of those poets who threw his copy
of verses into the earth that was about to close over
his master were to come alive again, he would find
some shadow of the life he knew, though not the art
he knew, among young men in Paris, and would think
that his true country. If he came to England
he would find nothing there but the triumph of the
Puritan and the merchant those enemies
he had feared and hated and he would weep
perhaps, in that womanish way of his, to think that
so much greatness had been, not as he had hoped, the
dawn, but the sunset of a people. He had lived
in the last days of what we may call the Anglo-French
nation, the old feudal nation that had been established
when the Norman and the Angevin made French the language
of court and market. In the time of Chaucer English
poets still wrote much in French, and even English
labourers lilted French songs over their work; and
I cannot read any Elizabethan poem or romance without
feeling the pressure of habits of emotion, and of
an order of life which were conscious, for all their
Latin gaiety, of a quarrel to the death with that new
Anglo-Saxon nation that was arising amid Puritan sermons
and Mar-Prelate pamphlets. This nation had driven
out the language of its conquerors, and now it was
to overthrow their beautiful haughty imagination and
their manners, full of abandon and wilfulness, and
to set in their stead earnestness and logic and the
timidity and reserve of a counting-house. It had
been coming for a long while, for it had made the
Lollards; and when Anglo-French Chaucer was at Westminster
its poet, Langland, sang the office at St. Paul’s.
Shakespeare, with his delight in great persons, with
his indifference to the State, with his scorn of the
crowd, with his feudal passion, was of the old nation,
and Spenser, though a joyless earnestness had cast
shadows upon him, and darkened his intellect wholly
at times, was of the old nation too. His Faerie
Queene was written in Merry England, but when
Bunyan wrote in prison the other great English allegory,
Modern England had been born. Bunyan’s men
would do right that they might come some day to the
Delectable Mountain, and not at all that they might
live happily in a world whose beauty was but an entanglement
about their feet. Religion had denied the sacredness
of an earth that commerce was about to corrupt and
ravish, but when Spenser lived the earth had still
its sheltering sacredness. His religion, where
the paganism that is natural to proud and happy people
had been strengthened by the platonism of the Renaissance,
cherished the beauty of the soul and the beauty of
the body with, as it seemed, an equal affection.
He would have had men live well, not merely that they
might win eternal happiness but that they might live
splendidly among men and be celebrated in many songs.
How could one live well if one had not the joy of
the Creator and of the Giver of gifts? He says
in his Hymn to Beauty that a beautiful soul,
unless for some stubbornness in the ground, makes
for itself a beautiful body, and he even denies that
beautiful persons ever lived who had not souls as beautiful.
They may have been tempted until they seemed evil,
but that was the fault of others. And in his
Hymn to Heavenly Beauty he sets a woman little
known to theology, one that he names Wisdom or Beauty,
above Seraphim and Cherubim and in the very bosom
of God, and in the Faerie Queene it is pagan
Venus and her lover Adonis who create the forms of
all living things and send them out into the world,
calling them back again to the gardens of Adonis at
their lives’ end to rest there, as it seems,
two thousand years between life and life. He
began in English poetry, despite a temperament that
delighted in sensuous beauty alone with perfect delight,
that worship of Intellectual Beauty which Shelley
carried to a greater subtlety and applied to the whole
of life.
The qualities, to each of whom he
had planned to give a Knight, he had borrowed from
Aristotle and partly Christianised, but not to the
forgetting of their heathen birth. The chief of
the Knights, who would have combined in himself the
qualities of all the others, had Spenser lived to
finish the Faerie Queene, was King Arthur, the
representative of an ancient quality, Magnificence.
Born at the moment of change, Spenser had indeed many
Puritan thoughts. It has been recorded that he
cut his hair short and half regretted his hymns to
Love and Beauty. But he has himself told us that
the many-headed beast overthrown and bound by Calidor,
Knight of Courtesy, was Puritanism itself. Puritanism,
its zeal and its narrowness, and the angry suspicion
that it had in common with all movements of the ill-educated,
seemed no other to him than a slanderer of all fine
things. One doubts, indeed, if he could have
persuaded himself that there could be any virtue at
all without courtesy, perhaps without something of
pageant and eloquence. He was, I think, by nature
altogether a man of that old Catholic feudal nation,
but, like Sidney, he wanted to justify himself to his
new masters. He wrote of knights and ladies,
wild creatures imagined by the aristocratic poets
of the twelfth century, and perhaps chiefly by English
poets who had still the French tongue; but he fastened
them with allegorical nails to a big barn door of
common sense, of merely practical virtue. Allegory
itself had risen into general importance with the rise
of the merchant class in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries; and it was natural when that class was
about for the first time to shape an age in its image,
that the last epic poet of the old order should mix
its art with his own long-descended, irresponsible,
happy art.
IV-
Allegory and, to a much greater degree,
symbolism are a natural language by which the soul
when entranced, or even in ordinary sleep, communes
with God and with angels. They can speak of things
which cannot be spoken of in any other language, but
one will always, I think, feel some sense of unreality
when they are used to describe things which can be
described as well in ordinary words. Dante used
allegory to describe visionary things, and the first
maker of The Romance of the Rose, for all his
lighter spirits, pretends that his adventures came
to him in a vision one May morning; while Bunyan,
by his preoccupation with heaven and the soul, gives
his simple story a visionary strangeness and intensity:
he believes so little in the world, that he takes us
away from all ordinary standards of probability and
makes us believe even in allegory for a while.
Spenser, on the other hand, to whom allegory was not,
as I think, natural at all, makes us feel again and
again that it disappoints and interrupts our preoccupation
with the beautiful and sensuous life he has called
up before our eyes. It interrupts us most when
he copies Langland, and writes in what he believes
to be a mood of edification, and the least when he
is not quite serious, when he sets before us some
procession like a court pageant made to celebrate a
wedding or a crowning. One cannot think that he
should have occupied himself with moral and religious
questions at all. He should have been content
to be, as Emerson thought Shakespeare was, a Master
of the Revels to mankind. I am certain that he
never gets that visionary air which can alone make
allegory real, except when he writes out of a feeling
for glory and passion. He had no deep moral or
religious life. He has never a line like Dante’s
‘Thy Will is our Peace,’ or like Thomas
a Kempis’s ’The Holy Spirit has liberated
me from a multitude of opinions,’ or even like
Hamlet’s objection to the bare bodkin. He
had been made a poet by what he had almost learnt
to call his sins. If he had not felt it necessary
to justify his art to some serious friend, or perhaps
even to ‘that rugged forehead,’ he would
have written all his life long, one thinks, of the
loves of shepherdesses and shepherds, among whom there
would have been perhaps the morals of the dovecot.
One is persuaded that his morality is official and
impersonal a system of life which it was
his duty to support and it is perhaps a
half understanding of this that has made so many generations
believe that he was the first poet laureate, the first
salaried moralist among the poets. His processions
of deadly sins, and his houses, where the very cornices
are arbitrary images of virtue, are an unconscious
hypocrisy, an undelighted obedience to the ‘rugged
forehead,’ for all the while he is thinking
of nothing but lovers whose bodies are quivering with
the memory or the hope of long embraces. When
they are not together, he will indeed embroider emblems
and images much as those great ladies of the courts
of love embroidered them in their castles; and when
these are imagined out of a thirst for magnificence
and not thought out in a mood of edification, they
are beautiful enough; but they are always tapestries
for corridors that lead to lovers’ meetings or
for the walls of marriage chambers. He was not
passionate, for the passionate feed their flame in
wanderings and absences, when the whole being of the
beloved, every little charm of body and of soul, is
always present to the mind, filling it with heroical
subtleties of desire. He is a poet of the delighted
senses, and his song becomes most beautiful when he
writes of those islands of Phaedria and Acrasia, which
angered ’that rugged forehead,’ as it
seems, but gave to Keats his Belle Dame sans Merci
and his ‘perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,’
and to William Morris his ‘waters of the wondrous
Isle.’
V-
The dramatists lived in a disorderly
world, reproached by many, persecuted even, but following
their imagination wherever it led them. Their
imagination, driven hither and thither by beauty and
sympathy, put on something of the nature of eternity.
Their subject was always the soul, the whimsical,
self-awakening, self-exciting, self-appeasing soul.
They celebrated its heroical, passionate will going
by its own path to immortal and invisible things.
Spenser, on the other hand, except among those smooth
pastoral scenes and lovely effeminate islands that
have made him a great poet, tried to be of his time,
or rather of the time that was all but at hand.
Like Sidney, whose charm it may be led many into slavery,
he persuaded himself that we enjoy Virgil because of
the virtues of AEneas, and so planned out his immense
poem that it would set before the imagination of citizens,
in whom there would soon be no great energy, innumerable
blameless AEneases. He had learned to put the
State, which desires all the abundance for itself,
in the place of the Church, and he found it possible
to be moved by expedient emotions, merely because
they were expedient, and to think serviceable thoughts
with no self-contempt. He loved his Queen a little
because she was the protectress of poets and an image
of that old Anglo-French nation that lay a-dying,
but a great deal because she was the image of the State
which had taken possession of his conscience.
She was over sixty years old, and ugly and, it is
thought, selfish, but in his poetry she is ‘fair
Cynthia,’ ‘a crown of lilies,’ ‘the
image of the heavens,’ ‘without mortal
blemish,’ and has ‘an angelic face,’
where ’the red rose’ has ‘meddled
with the white’; ’Phoebus thrusts out his
golden head’ but to look upon her, and blushes
to find himself outshone. She is ‘a fourth
Grace,’ ‘a queen of love,’ ‘a
sacred saint,’ and ’above all her sex
that ever yet has been.’ In the midst of
his praise of his own sweetheart he stops to remember
that Elizabeth is more beautiful, and an old man in
Daphnaida, although he has been brought to death’s
door by the death of a beautiful daughter, remembers
that though his daughter ‘seemed of angelic
race,’ she was yet but the primrose to the rose
beside Elizabeth. Spenser had learned to look
to the State not only as the rewarder of virtue but
as the maker of right and wrong, and had begun to
love and hate as it bid him. The thoughts that
we find for ourselves are timid and a little secret,
but those modern thoughts that we share with large
numbers are confident and very insolent. We have
little else to-day, and when we read our newspaper
and take up its cry, above all its cry of hatred,
we will not think very carefully, for we hear the
marching feet. When Spenser wrote of Ireland he
wrote as an official, and out of thoughts and emotions
that had been organised by the State. He was
the first of many Englishmen to see nothing but what
he was desired to see. Could he have gone there
as a poet merely, he might have found among its poets
more wonderful imaginations than even those islands
of Phaedria and Acrasia. He would have found among
wandering story-tellers, not indeed his own power of
rich, sustained description, for that belongs to lettered
ease, but certainly all the kingdom of Faerie, still
unfaded, of which his own poetry was often but a troubled
image. He would have found men doing by swift
strokes of the imagination much that he was doing
with painful intellect, with that imaginative reason
that soon was to drive out imagination altogether and
for a long time. He would have met with, at his
own door, story-tellers among whom the perfection
of Greek art was indeed as unknown as his own power
of detailed description, but who, none the less, imagined
or remembered beautiful incidents and strange, pathetic
outcrying that made them of Homer’s lineage.
Flaubert says somewhere, ’There are things in
Hugo, as in Rabelais, that I could have mended, things
badly built, but then what thrusts of power beyond
the reach of conscious art!’ Is not all history
but the coming of that conscious art which first makes
articulate and then destroys the old wild energy?
Spenser, the first poet struck with remorse, the first
poet who gave his heart to the State, saw nothing
but disorder, where the mouths that have spoken all
the fables of the poets had not yet become silent.
All about him were shepherds and shepherdesses still
living the life that made Theocritus and Virgil think
of shepherd and poet as the one thing; but though he
dreamed of Virgil’s shepherds he wrote a book
to advise, among many like things, the harrying of
all that followed flocks upon the hills, and of all
‘the wandering companies that keep the woods.’
His View of the State of Ireland commends indeed
the beauty of the hills and woods where they did their
shepherding, in that powerful and subtle language
of his which I sometimes think more full of youthful
energy than even the language of the great playwrights.
He is ’sure it is yet a most beautiful and sweet
country as any under heaven,’ and that all would
prosper but for those agitators, ’those wandering
companies that keep the woods,’ and he would
rid it of them by a certain expeditious way.
There should be four great garrisons. ’And
those fowre garrisons issuing foorthe, at such convenient
times as they shall have intelligence or espiall upon
the enemye, will so drive him from one side to another
and tennis him amongst them, that he shall finde nowhere
safe to keepe his creete, or hide himselfe, but flying
from the fire shall fall into the water, and out of
one daunger into another, that in short space his
creete, which is his moste sustenence, shall be
wasted in preying, or killed in driving, or starved
for wante of pasture in the woodes, and he himselfe
brought soe lowe, that he shall have no harte nor abilitye
to indure his wretchednesse, the which will surely
come to passe in very short space; for one winters
well following of him will so plucke him on his knees
that he will never be able to stand up agayne.’
He could commend this expeditious
way from personal knowledge, and could assure the
Queen that the people of the country would soon ’consume
themselves and devoure one another. The proofs
whereof I saw sufficiently ensampled in these late
warres of Mounster; for notwithstanding that the same
was a most rich and plentifull countrey, full of corne
and cattell, that you would have thought they would
have bene able to stand long, yet ere one yeare
and a halfe they were brought to such wretchednesse,
as that any stonye heart would have rued the same.
Out of every corner of the woodes and glynnes they
came creeping forth upon theyr hands, for theyr legges
could not beare them; they looked like anatomyes
of death, they spake like ghosts crying out of their
graves; they did eate of the dead carrions, happy were
they if they could finde them, yea, and one another
soone after, insomuch as the very carcasses they spared
not to scrape out of theyr graves; and if they found
a plot of watercresses or shamrokes, there they flocked
as to a feast for the time, yet not able long to continue
therewithall; that in short space there were none
allmost left, and a most populous and plentifull countrey
suddaynely left voyde of man or beast; yet sure in
all that warre, there perished not many by the sword,
but all by the extremitye of famine.’
VI-
In a few years the Four Masters were
to write the history of that time, and they were to
record the goodness or the badness of Irishman and
Englishman with entire impartiality. They had
seen friends and relatives persecuted, but they would
write of that man’s poisoning and this man’s
charities and of the fall of great houses, and hardly
with any other emotion than a thought of the pitiableness
of all life. Friend and enemy would be for them
a part of the spectacle of the world. They remembered
indeed those Anglo-French invaders who conquered for
the sake of their own strong hand, and when they had
conquered became a part of the life about them, singing
its songs, when they grew weary of their own Iseult
and Guinevere. The Four Masters had not come to
understand, as I think, despite famines and exterminations,
that new invaders were among them, who fought for
an alien State, for an alien religion. Such ideas
were difficult to them, for they belonged to the old
individual, poetical life, and spoke a language even,
in which it was all but impossible to think an abstract
thought. They understood Spain, doubtless, which
persecuted in the interests of religion, but I doubt
if anybody in Ireland could have understood as yet
that the Anglo-Saxon nation was beginning to persecute
in the service of ideas it believed to be the foundation
of the State. I doubt if anybody in Ireland saw
that with certainty, till the Great Demagogue had
come and turned the old house of the noble into ’the
house of the Poor, the lonely house, the accursed
house of Cromwell.’ He came, another Cairbry
Cat Head, with that great rabble, who had overthrown
the pageantry of Church and Court, but who turned
towards him faces full of the sadness and docility
of their long servitude, and the old individual, poetical
life went down, as it seems, for ever. He had
studied Spenser’s book and approved of it, as
we know, finding, doubtless, his own head there, for
Spenser, a king of the old race, carried a mirror
which showed kings yet to come though but kings of
the mob. Those Bohemian poets of the theatres
were wiser, for the States that touched them nearly
were the States where Helen and Dido had sorrowed,
and so their mirrors showed none but beautiful heroical
heads. They wandered in the places that pale
passion loves, and were happy, as one thinks, and
troubled little about those marching and hoarse-throated
thoughts that the State has in its pay. They knew
that those marchers, with the dust of so many roads
upon them, are very robust and have great and well-paid
generals to write expedient despatches in sound prose;
and they could hear mother earth singing among her
cornfields:
’Weep not, my wanton! smile upon
my knee;
When thou art old there’s grief
enough for thee.’
VII-
There are moments when one can read
neither Milton nor Spenser, moments when one recollects
nothing but that their flesh had partly been changed
to stone, but there are other moments when one recollects
nothing but those habits of emotion that made the
lesser poet especially a man of an older, more imaginative
time. One remembers that he delighted in smooth
pastoral places, because men could be busy there or
gather together there, after their work, that he could
love handiwork and the hum of voices. One remembers
that he could still rejoice in the trees, not because
they were images of loneliness and meditation, but
because of their serviceableness. He could praise
‘the builder oake,’ ’the aspine,
good for staves,’ ‘the cypresse funerall,’
’the eugh, obedient to the bender’s will,’
‘the birch for shaftes,’ ‘the sallow
for the mill,’ ’the mirrhe sweete-bleeding
in the bitter wound,’ ‘the fruitful olive,’
and ‘the carver holme.’ He was of
a time before undelighted labour had made the business
of men a desecration. He carries one’s memory
back to Virgil’s and Chaucer’s praise
of trees, and to the sweet-sounding song made by the
old Irish poet in their praise.
I got up from reading the Faerie
Queene the other day and wandered into another
room. It was in a friend’s house, and I
came of a sudden to the ancient poetry and to our
poetry side by side an engraving of Claude’s
‘Mill’ hung under an engraving of Turner’s
‘Temple of Jupiter.’ Those dancing
country-people, those cow-herds, resting after the
day’s work, and that quiet mill-race made one
think of Merry England with its glad Latin heart,
of a time when men in every land found poetry and
imagination in one another’s company and in the
day’s labour. Those stately goddesses,
moving in slow procession towards that marble architrave
among mysterious trees, belong to Shelley’s thought,
and to the religion of the wilderness the
only religion possible to poetry to-day. Certainly
Colin Clout, the companionable shepherd, and Calidor,
the courtly man-at-arms, are gone, and Alastor is wandering
from lonely river to river finding happiness in nothing
but in that star where Spenser too had imagined the
fountain of perfect things. This new beauty,
in losing so much, has indeed found a new loftiness,
a something of religious exaltation that the old had
not. It may be that those goddesses, moving with
a majesty like a procession of the stars, mean something
to the soul of man that those kindly women of the old
poets did not mean, for all the fulness of their breasts
and the joyous gravity of their eyes. Has not
the wilderness been at all times a place of prophecy?
VIII-
Our poetry, though it has been a deliberate
bringing back of the Latin joy and the Latin love
of beauty, has had to put off the old marching rhythms,
that once delighted more than expedient hearts, in
separating itself from a life where servile hands
have become powerful. It has ceased to have any
burden for marching shoulders, since it learned ecstasy
from Smart in his mad cell, and from Blake, who made
joyous little songs out of almost unintelligible visions,
and from Keats, who sang of a beauty so wholly preoccupied
with itself that its contemplation is a kind of lingering
trance. The poet, if he would not carry burdens
that are not his and obey the orders of servile lips,
must sit apart in contemplative indolence playing
with fragile things.
If one chooses at hazard a Spenserian
stanza out of Shelley and compares it with any stanza
by Spenser, one sees the change, though it would be
still more clear if one had chosen a lyrical passage.
I will take a stanza out of Laon and Cythna,
for that is story-telling and runs nearer to Spenser
than the meditative Adonais:
’The meteor to its far morass returned:
The beating of our veins one interval
Made still; and then I felt the blood
that burned
Within her frame, mingle with mine, and
fall
Around my heart like fire; and over all
A mist was spread, the sickness of a deep
And speechless swoon of joy, as might
befall
Two disunited spirits when they leap
In union from this earth’s obscure
and fading sleep.
The rhythm is varied and troubled,
and the lines, which are in Spenser like bars of gold
thrown ringing one upon another, are broken capriciously.
Nor is the meaning the less an inspiration of indolent
muses, for it wanders hither and thither at the beckoning
of fancy. It is now busy with a meteor and now
with throbbing blood that is fire, and with a mist
that is a swoon and a sleep that is life. It is
bound together by the vaguest suggestion, while Spenser’s
verse is always rushing on to some preordained thought.
‘A popular poet’ can still indeed write
poetry of the will, just as factory girls wear the
fashion of hat or dress the moneyed classes wore a
year ago, but ’popular poetry’ does not
belong to the living imagination of the world.
Old writers gave men four temperaments, and they gave
the sanguineous temperament to men of active life,
and it is precisely the sanguineous temperament that
is fading out of poetry and most obviously out of what
is most subtle and living in poetry its
pulse and breath, its rhythm. Because poetry
belongs to that element in every race which is most
strong, and therefore most individual, the poet is
not stirred to imaginative activity by a life which
is surrendering its freedom to ever new elaboration,
organisation, mechanism. He has no longer a poetical
will, and must be content to write out of those parts
of himself which are too delicate and fiery for any
deadening exercise. Every generation has more
and more loosened the rhythm, more and more broken
up and disorganised, for the sake of subtlety of detail,
those great rhythms which move, as it were, in masses
of sound. Poetry has become more spiritual, for
the soul is of all things the most delicately organised,
but it has lost in weight and measure and in its power
of telling long stories and of dealing with great
and complicated events. Laon and Cythna, though
I think it rises sometimes into loftier air than the
Faerie Queene; and Endymion, though its
shepherds and wandering divinities have a stranger
and more intense beauty than Spenser’s, have
need of too watchful and minute attention for such
lengthy poems. In William Morris, indeed, one
finds a music smooth and unexacting like that of the
old story-tellers, but not their energetic pleasure,
their rhythmical wills. One too often misses
in his Earthly Paradise the minute ecstasy
of modern song without finding that old happy-go-lucky
tune that had kept the story marching.
Spenser’s contemporaries, writing
lyrics or plays full of lyrical moments, write a verse
more delicately organised than his and crowd more
meaning into a phrase than he, but they could not have
kept one’s attention through so long a poem.
A friend who has a fine ear told me the other day
that she had read all Spenser with delight and yet
could remember only four lines. When she repeated
them they were from the poem by Matthew Roydon, which
is bound up with Spenser because it is a commendation
of Sir Philip Sidney:
’A sweet, attractive kind of grace,
A full assurance given by looks,
Continual comfort in a face,
The linéaments of Gospel books.’
Yet if one were to put even these
lines beside a fine modern song one would notice that
they had a stronger and rougher energy, a featherweight
more, if eye and ear were fine enough to notice it,
of the active will, of the happiness that comes out
of life itself.
IX-
I have put into this book only
those passages from Spenser that I want to remember
and carry about with me. I have not tried to select
what people call characteristic passages, for that
is, I think, the way to make a dull book. One
never really knows anybody’s taste but one’s
own, and if one likes anything sincerely one may be
certain that there are other people made out of the
same earth to like it too. I have taken out of
The Shepheards Calender only those parts which
are about love or about old age, and I have taken
out of the Faerie Queene passages about shepherds
and lovers, and fauns and satyrs, and a few allegorical
processions. I find that though I love symbolism,
which is often the only fitting speech for some mystery
of disembodied life, I am for the most part bored
by allegory, which is made, as Blake says, ’by
the daughters of memory,’ and coldly, with no
wizard frenzy. The processions I have chosen
are either those, like the House of Mammon, that have
enough ancient mythology, always an implicit symbolism,
or, like the Cave of Despair, enough sheer passion
to make one forget or forgive their allegory, or else
they are, like that vision of Scudamour, so visionary,
so full of a sort of ghostly midnight animation, that
one is persuaded that they had some strange purpose
and did truly appear in just that way to some mind
worn out with war and trouble. The vision of
Scudamour is, I sometimes think, the finest invention
in Spenser. Until quite lately I knew nothing
of Spenser but the parts I had read as a boy.
I did not know that I had read so far as that vision,
but year after year this thought would rise up before
me coming from I knew not where. I would be alone
perhaps in some old building, and I would think suddenly
’out of that door might come a procession of
strange people doing mysterious things with tumult.
They would walk over the stone floor, then suddenly
vanish, and everything would become silent again.’
Once I saw what is called, I think, a Board School
continuation class play Hamlet. There
was no stage, but they walked in procession into the
midst of a large room full of visitors and of their
friends. While they were walking in, that thought
came to me again from I knew not where. I was
alone in a great church watching ghostly kings and
queens setting out upon their unearthly business.
It was only last summer, when I read
the Fourth Book of the Faerie Queene, that
I found I had been imagining over and over the enchanted
persecution of Amoret.
I give too, in a section which I call
‘Gardens of Delight,’ the good gardens
of Adonis and the bad gardens of Phaedria and Acrasia,
which are mythological and symbolical, but not allegorical,
and show, more particularly those bad islands, his
power of describing bodily happiness and bodily beauty
at its greatest. He seemed always to feel through
the eyes, imagining everything in pictures. Marlowe’s
Hero and Leander is more energetic in its sensuality,
more complicated in its intellectual energy than this
languid story, which pictures always a happiness that
would perish if the desire to which it offers so many
roses lost its indolence and its softness. There
is no passion in the pleasure he has set amid perilous
seas, for he would have us understand that there alone
could the war-worn and the sea-worn man find dateless
leisure and unrepining peace.
October, 1902.