— | Edmund Spenser : His Life & Works Edmund Spenser, the great Elizabethan poet, was born in 1552 in East Smithfield, near the Tower of London. He belonged to a poor family and his parents were not opulent enough to provide him all the facilities of education opened for the sons of the aristocracy. He was educated at the Merchant Taylor’s School founded in 1560 and later on he joined the Cambridge, University. He had to work as a poor sizar and fag for wealthy students at Cambridge. He eamed a scanty living by these humiliating practices. He left Cambridge in 1576 after acquiring familiarity with great Italian posts and Greek masters of art. After leaving Cambridge, Spenser spent a few years of his life in the North of England. He was engaged in-some unknown work or quest for considerable time. It was at the advice of his friend Harvey that he came to London in 1579 bringing along with him a few poems that he had composed during days of precarious existence in his life. He was at once recognised as a man of taste and was admitted to the famous literary circle dominated by Sir Philip Sidney and his uncle, the Earl of Leicester. Sidney took a fancy for Spenser and patronised him im his literary production. The Earl of. Leicester showed special favour to Spenser and introduced him to the Queen. In 1580 Spenser was appointed Secretary to Lord Grey de Wilton, who had been given a new assignment as Deputy-Lord of Ireland. This appointment ich Spenser received was a favour from the Queen, and it was obtained as the result of Sidney’s vigorous pleading for the budding poet. Spenser remained in Ireland for eighteen years and tendered meritorious service to the English Goverment in More than one capacity. He faced the Irish rebellion, Outrage, and misery m a heroic manner. He crushed the Irish rebellion with savage brutality, For this service he was given 12 EDMUND SPENSER immense estate with the castle of Kilcolman, in Ulst an immense 4Sclonged to Earl Desmond, an Irish rebel of great valour and strength. Kilcolman was the seat of nature’s beauties, and here in the atmosphere of nature’s loveliness Spenser started the great epic, Faery Queene, and finished three books in a few years. In 1589 Raleigh visited Spenser at his country seat and was fascinated by the singular charm and beauty of Spenser’s narrative allegory. He hurried the poet off to London and presented him to Queen Elizabeth. His three books of the Faery Queene were immensely appreciated at the court and were acclaimed as the greatest work in the English language. The Queen offered Spenser a yearly ension of pounds. The poet was elated at this brow ut his enthusiasm received a rude shock when the pension- money was not paid to him. Spenser, in sheer disgust, left London. He tumed back to exile and went back to Ireland. Soon after his return to Ireland Spenser fell in love with Elizabeth, an Irish girl, and wrote Amoretti sonnets in her honour. In 1594 the marriage with Elizabeth was solemnised with great eclat and the poet composed his famous Epthalamion in honour of this occasion. The ode is one of the most beautiful wedding hymms in the English language. Spenser’s next visit to London was in 1595. This time he had a better reception. He wrote Astrophel, an elegy on the death of his friend Sir Philip Sidney, who had been so ‘ood to him in his life. The three remaining books of the Faery Queene were also published during his stay in London. Spenser once again went back to Ireland. He was appointed Sheriff of Gork, a queer office for a poet, which probably brought about his rum, The same year a rebellion broke out in Ireland, and the rebels, in the mad fury of their rebellious spirit, bumt the Kilcolman’s Castle, and aimed t0 put an end to the poet’s life. Spenser escaped wife and two children, and found refuge in a friend’s house. He retumed to England in a state of dejectio® a disappintment. His life had lost all charm. He died in a St b of destitution and poverty, ‘for want of bread’ according the statement of Ben Jonson. Whether that is 2 ports “y of saying that he had lost his property or that he actu!EDMUND SPENSER : HIS LIFE & WORKS. 3 died of destitution Will probably remain a_mystery. The end of the poet was certainly pathetic. He met liis death in 1599 and was buried beside his master, Chaucer in Westminster Abbey. The poets of the age attended his funeral, and paid warm homage to the dead poet “by casting their elegies and the pens that had written them into his tomb.” So assed away Edmund Spenser, the great luminary in the literary firmament of the Elizabethan age leaving behind a void which could not easily be filled for many years to come, and has not been filled so far, for a poet of Spenser’s calibre was not bom after his death. The Poetic Works Of Edmund Spenser Shepherd’s Calender : It is modelled on the artificial pastoral popularised by the Renaissance, and inspired by Virgil and Theocritus. In this poem Spenser combines his humanist’s tastes with his love for the soil. There are twelve Eclogues, each of them corresponding to a month in the year and having a certain more or less apparent fitness to its appropriate atmosphere and season. The principles of unity and variety are skilfully blended, the rude eclogues alternating with those loftier in tone. . The matter of the Eclogues is less important. They are found to include three principal themes—love, poetry and religion.. This first published work of Spenser is noteworthy in at least four aspects. (1) It marks the appearance of the first national poet in two centuries. (2) Melody. (3) Pastoral compositions modelled on Virgil (4) It marks the real beginning of the outburst of great Elizabethan poetry. Hymns : From pastoral, Spenser passed to chivalrous poetry. His sense for beauty and love took a platonic tum, and the poet regarded beauty of woman, which inspires love, as the reflection and index of divine beauty. . Therefore where-ever that thou dost behold A comely corpse, with beauty fair endowed, Know this for certain, that the same doth hold A beauteous soule, with fair conditions thewed, Fit to receive the seeds of virtue strewed ; For all that is fair, is by nature good. That is a sign to know the gentle blood. 14 EDMUND SPENSER These views of Spenser are embodied in his Hymms to Beauty and Love. Mother Hubbard’s Tale Throughout his life Spenser was a morose judge of the society of his times, viewing it pessimistically. The personal disappointments contributed much to the blackness of his outlook. His rancour gathered against Lord Burleigh, the t treasurer and counsellor of Elizabeth. Here the diction is without archaism. It is written in Heroic _Couplet of Chaucer. This tale is Spenser’s only poem written with a definite satiric purpose. It reveals a combination of qualities which are not commonly attributed to him—a satiric power ranging from the sly suggestion to savage irony, a shrewd and humorous, knowledge of the world, and a certam primitive understanding ofboth animal and human nature. In Mother Hubbard's Tale, written in the form of the Fox and Ape fable, Burleigh is hidden in the form of fox, the Ape is Duke of Anjou, brother to Henry II of France and a candidate for the Queen’s hand. The Ape becomes King and Fox becomes Prime Minister, and their shameless tyranny prospers until the Lion awakes. Except gaiety and humour, the fable has all the merits of its genre. It reveals the poet’s powers of observation and his vigour. The metre, which is deliberately rude, suits the satirical imtention, and its harshness has that easy amplitude which Spenser evinces in his early poetic work. The Complaints The same condemmation of the age recurs copiously i the Complaints. The entire collection is marked wath a Tote of pessimism and gloom. In two poems Ruins of Time and Tears of the Muses the poet harps upon the decadence of the age both in its supercilious disregard for poetry, and the disoppearanice of great souls and triumph of mean natures. In the Complaints, Spenser aj with the spirit ofthe times.” P Pats #8 out of tune The Complaints include a livelier and a mock-heroic. fable The Fate of the Butterfly. It is a emia goes i elegy, and its plaints, more intimate and sincere than the se omy thetoric of the poems which accompany it, movesEDMUND SPENSER : HIS LIFE & WORKS | Muiopotmos written in 1590 was added to Complaints. The lines were borrowed by Keats— What more felicity can fall to a creature Than to enjoy delight with liberty ? Colin Clout Comes Home Again , It is in the pastoral vein. It is graceful piece of autobiography. Colin Clout is Spenser: himself, He meets another Shepherd, Sir Walter Raleigh who brings him to the Court of Cynthia. Colin pays adoration to Queen. He marvels at the songsters and ladies of the Court. Then his disillusionment follows, and he is disgusted with the base intrigues, jealousies, false promises, and debauchery hidden beneath the seeming decorum, and the malignity masked by courtesy. Angered and disgusted, Colin escapes and returns to his humble and simple shepherd’s life. The form in this satire is pastoral, the manner simple and without omament, but never prosaic, touching the most trivial incident with grace, and capable of rismg without violence to express the deepest emotions. It is the triumph of the familiar style in which so few writers have excelled. To write thus is only possible to one who is both an artist and gentleman. Pope can do it occasionally, but he is not always an artist. The masters in this kind. of verse are Shelley and Spenser. The Amoretti and the Epithalamion Soon after his return to Ireland in 1591, Spenser began his suit to Elizabeth Boyle, to whom are addressed the Amoretti sonnets the superb Epithalamion which concludes them. In them he voices his feelings sincerely ; without any affectation and without any recourse to allegory. These Spenserian sonnets depart from Petrarch’s precedent. There is not here the unquiet of Sidney’in love with Lord Riche’s wife or of Shakespeare whose mistress deceived -him with his friend. Spenser's sohnets are’ unique by their purity They tell a story of love without sin or. remorse. There is a pure atmosphere, and the sonnets are'bathed in white light. - Phey showed: eettee than anything else the juality in Spenser ‘oleridge ni ‘maidenliness’ the virginal in woman. 2 pond edeainess » his love of __, The chastity.of these sonnets’ is néither sh reticence. In many’ of them the poet extols. his Tatreare 2 46 EDMUND SPENSER beauty with a great sensual wealth of detail and col does not conceal the ardour of his desires (Sonnet 83). ad Modem criticism, which has made so damaging an assault upon the sincerity of Elizabethan sonneteers, could hardly be expected to leave this beautiful sequence unassailed ; and the view has lately been advanced that the Amoretti are addressed for the most part to Lady Carey, and hence were written during Spenser’s residence in London. The Amoretti are written with an easy and familiar grace, at once clear and melodious, capable of touching into beauty the ordinary changes and chances of the lover’s fortune, or of voicing the rarer ecstasy to ically Spenserian, of the sonnet Most Glorious Lord of Life. As a series they are incomplete, for when the lover seems already to have reached the goal, venomous tongues cause misunderstanding and separation, and the last four sonnets are in the mirror key. The consummation is read in the Epithalamion, the most magnificent lyric ever penned as love triumphant. The style ranges from utter simplicity to highly wrought and coloured imagery, and draws alike like upon the resources of mediaeval superstition and classic myth. The intricate stanza was suggested by Petrarch. The Epithalamion The Epithalamion is a remarkable poem. In amplitude and splendour it excels all other compositions of the same kind. Its 23 stanzas of 17 to 19 lines, merely describe enthusiastically the whole of the poet’s wedding day, from the dawn of the sun which lit its glorious hours to the night which left the bride in her husband’s arms. Never did hi enius’ show its sovereign power as in the Epithalamion. “The breath which fills each ample strophe and passes unabated through them all to the end, the clear light which floods each successive picture, and the fine classical structure of the whole poem, simple, luminous and inhurtable, make this ote Spenser 4 most perfect production i i of the English Renaissance.” . and the lyrical trump! glish oP Legouis) Spenser celebrated the marriage of another almost 4s successfully as his own in Prothalamion (1596) which 1s filled with smooth images and harmonious lines.EDMUND SPENSER : HIS LIFE & WORKS 7 The Faerie Queene Ti It is the great work on which Spenser’s fame rests. The original plan of the poem included twenty-four books, each of which was to recount the adventure and triumph of a knight who represented a moral virtue. Spenser’s purpose, as indicated in a letter to Raleigh, is as follows :- ; “To portray in Arthur, before he was King, the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve private moral virtues, as Aristotle ath devised ; which is the purpose of these 12 books ;.which if I find to be well accepted, I may be perhaps encouraged to pave the other part of politic virtues in his person, after that he came to be king. The poem in its genesis was meant to be known as ‘Pageants’, 2 collection of splendid pictures, such as the Elizabethans loved passionately. But later on the idea struck the poet to outdo Orlando Furioso in seriousness, and he, therefore, abandoned the Pageants and wrote a vast allegory in order to “fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.” The aim of the poet becomes moral edification through allegorical device. In the first two books the aim of edification is sufficiently fulfilled. The allegory is continuous, the moral constantly to the fore. But in the later books both are obscured and the romance is dcminant. Asan allegory pure and simple, the poem is defective, The poet lacks, firstly the simple restrained line of a good allegorist. He has not the centrai idea, the ardent passion or the unity of design which are essential conditions of a powerful and effective allegory. Instead of unity he has complication. His characters are created for more than one purpose. There are both moral and historical personages. His King Arthur. in love with the Queen is magnificence— the supreme virtue which, according to Aristotle, includes all others—and he is also the symbol for divine grace. Moreover, he suggests Leicester, Elizabeth’s favourite. Tic allegorical story is thus both moral and political and that is its defect. Sometimes the allegories are obscure even in detail, and reveal themselves as puerile when “they are too well sounded. The masque of Cupid, played in th e enchantér Busirane, is an exile. salen toca8 EDMUND SPENSER Pictorialiam is the dominant quality of the Faerie Queene . The Faerie Queene is a picture gallery. 5 jenser is a great painter who never held a brush. It was hi to be bom in a country in which the plastic arts did not flourish until two centuries after his time. Had he been bom in Italy, he might have been another Titian, a secand Veronese : bom in Flanders, he would have forestalled Rubens and Rembrandt. Fortune made him a painter in verse, pi 6 the most wonderful that has ever lived. Many stanzas of the Faerie Queene are descriptions of tapestries and pictures, He paints both the beautiful and the ugly, the Erotesque and the subtle. The horrible Dragon who is slain by Red Cross Knight is as much a masterpiece of painting as the nymph Belphebe. With marvellous success he seeks chiaroscuro effects. His joy in painting never flags. He does not paint things in their static form or in a state of arrested motion, but in movement and progression. He paints costumed characters with expressive gestures, and these characters represent and reveal the abstractions they represent. Moving pictures are found in™Spenser. The description of seven deadly sins or his procession of the seasons and the months represent moving pictorialism in his poetry. He borrowed the idea or subject ofhis pictures from everywhere, from books as well as from paintings and pageants, and the scenes on the stage of his time. He rejects no poetic source. We find in him reminiscences of Homer, Lucretius, Virgil and Ovid, Chaucer, Langland, Lydgate and Malury. Stephen Hawes, Sackville, Ariosto and Tasso—to cite only the chief creditors. The poem has masque qualities. It provided one of the strongest imaginative stimulants to the magnificent masques which came after him. The Faerie Queene may be said to have fixed in a descriptive poem the thasques of the English Renaissance. ° The poem, so artificially constructed, has the unity of atmosphere, Everything is bathed in the same strange fantastic moonlight in which the contrast between whites and shadows is heightened. The romantic atmosphere is im conformity with the romantic element in the poem charms intermittently. and attains to the exquisite only here and there. The reason is that romance went against the moral principle of the allegory. But in Britomart we haveEDMUND SPENSER : HIS LIFE & WORKS 9 the dimensions of a truly romantic creation. She resembles Ariosto’s heroine. It is mainly she who changes the allegory into a romance. She is the chaste and indomitable warrior- maid whose lance makes the most valiant champions bite the dust, and also the passionate woman in love, who knows the tortures of jealousy, and who at last yields, happy in her defeat, to the emotion which possesses her. Spenser concentrates on the portrait of this enamoured herome all the power of subtle analysis of which he is capable. Music For this dream world to which Spenser’s poem introduces us, it was necessary that the long unfoldin; visions should be constantly accompanied by music whic would suspend the activity of logical faculties and help to give credence to the chimeras. The illusion is effected by means of the powerful morotony of the nine-lined stanza of the courtly ballad, with decasyllabic line to which a final Alexandrine is added. Spenser's metre, deliberately lengthened and weighted, is so ample and so slow that its majesty, like that of a deep, evenly flowing river, compensates for the qualities it has lost. Music is created which lulls our intellect and little by little leads us away from the real world to another, a world of order. and harmony where this stanza seems to be the natural rhythm. This stanza is the only fitting medium for the romantic atmosphere of the poem, for it. alone successfully weaves the dreamlike fairy atmosphere. It keeps time in Fairyland. It measures the hours in the region of nowhere, the kingdom of illusion. It has a hypnotic effect. It introduces a slumber in which the things of life are remote and. we are in communion only with the poet’s pictures. Each stanza is unified with the preceding and succeeding stanza. Each adds to the cumulative force of all its predecessors. Every individual stanza appears essential to the general order, and this unconscious recognition of an inevitability of form gives added value to the contents of verses. _ The value of the Faerie Queene should not be judged by its moral value or the thought of the poem. “It is enough for the renown of this great poem that to music of unfailing harmony, it unrolls before our eyes innumerable dazzling visions. It is enough for Spenser’s name. that he was one of. . oi10 EDMUND SPENSER Se teen es the master musicians, and perhaps the greatest of the picture-makers of this world.”—{Legouis. ) In the words of Dixon, “The Faerie Queene is like a labyrinthine flower whose unfolding we can watch, or a liquid evening sky upon which, as we gaze, the magic rope appears, to glow and fade. If this be a national epic it celebrates no national undertaking or achievement, No « foundation is laid of city or state, no imperium established, no Ilion besieged, no Jerusalem captured. It would seem as if we had here a poem typical of inconclusiveness of all romance, beginning from nowhere and leading nowhere.”ee Spenser’s Age and Working of Some Literary Influences Upon Him The position which Spenser has held for centuries among the English poets is a triumph of art. His genius was recognized immediately by his contemporaries who were better qualified to grasp the implications of his religious and political subject-matter than readers in later ages could be ; their admiration of him as a poetic artist was as deep as ours. In the present century his admirers are separated into_ two camps: which, while not necessarily opposed, are certainly aloof from each other. There are those who claim that it is enough to enjoy Spenser’s poetry aesthetically— for its beauty of form, its music, its colour and verbal pageantry, and that it gains nothing as poetry from close probing into its spiritual and philosophical significances. Others hold that his greatness lies at least as much in the complexities and in the profundities of allegory in The Faerie Queene . No doubt the satisfaction which comes from painstaking labour is an additional reward to those who probe the metaphysical depths and dredge the political shallow of Spenser’s works ; yet no doubt also Spenser would remain an almost entirely closed book to the vast majority of modern readers of poetry, which is almost the whole content of the Renaissance mind and spirit moulded (and in certain respects mis-happened) by the circumstances and events of the late sixteenth century. It is more sensible and profitable to get what we can from Spenser—and that is much—than to be entirely baffled from a great deal in him that, on first acquaintance, may appear wearisome, or distasteful, or unintelligible. Moreover, while being a man of the Renaissance, Spenser inherited a strain of medievalism which appears in the large in his addiction to allegory, and in fragmentary detail in his use of archaic words and his WeEDMUND SPENSER ent recourse to alliteration. These later features are an pe ticable part of his literary charm, and without the spell of Spenserian archisms the poetry of Coleridge and Keats, at least, is unimaginable. The poetic magic and mystery which run through The Ancient Mariner echo from “Spenser: . a Eftsooner her shallow ship away did slide, More swift, then swallow sheres the Liquid skie, Withouten oare or Pilot it to guide; Or winged canvas with the wind to flie.... It is not a matter of indebtedness by the latter poet to ~ particular lines in the earlier, but of saturation in the Tomantic atmosphere of Spenser’s poetry. Spenser—the Figure of His Age He has always made a special appeal to poets. He set out with deliberate care to change the style and the language of English poetry, and he succeeded. It is not only his vivid ictures in the Faerie Queene and the music of his words, owever, that have eamed him the name of “the poets’ oet.” He has fired men’s imagination, as he himself was ed. by his enthusiasm for beauty and for all that we call: “romance” ; for that poetry which is, as his friend Sidney put it, “compounded of the best and honourablest things.” Spenser was an adept at describing “dainty damsels” and all kinds of delights, from banquets to beautiful gardens. The moralist to him tried to disapprove, but fortunately the poet and lover of beauty had the upperhand. The Faeire Queene is read and enjoyed to-day, not as a treatise on virtues but for those qualities by which in the worlds of Sidney, poetry “may make the too-much loved earth more lovely.” (L.A.G.Strong and Monica Redlich) All Spenser's early study of poetry—classical, Italian, French and English—as well as his ardent Protestant sentiments, are reflected in these highly artificial yet fresh and.even at times native poems. His admiration for his master, Tityrus (Chaucer) led him to archaise his language, and in those of the eclogues in which he satirizes the clergy of the Anglican Church he writes in the rude accented verse into which English verse had replaced after Chaucer, reproducing Chaucer’s own verse as read in the new English "pronunciation. Spenser is more in his full poetic self in the 12 .SPENSER’S AGE AND WORKING 13 oems on other traditional themes of pastoral poetry : eulogy, as in April song to Queen Elizabeth in the lyrical manner of the Pleiade ; elegiac lament, as in the November eclogue which echoes the poem, Clement Marot ; the praise of poetry and the poet in the noble October eclogue, modelled on Theocritus, the highest strain Spenses hed yet sung, touched already with a sense of ppointment, prophetic of the greater poem to follow. The Faerie Queene as Representative of the Age He was buried besides his master, Chaucer in Westminster Abbey ; and as Chaucer was buried there partly because he was a servant of the king, Spenser may be considered to be the first poet to be laid in Poets’ Comer solely on account of the surpassing worth of his writings. All Spenser’s poems reveal the same qualities, a noble}, idealism expressing itself at times in a vein of mordant satire, a rich but wonderfully pure and delicate sensuousness, a versification whose melody and sweetness seem inexhaustible. The fullest representative of all these , qualities is The Faerie Queene . In the first book, written , while his hopes were yet undimmed, the story and the © allegory of the Christian life and England’s struggle with Rome are most successfully blended. In the second Temperance, the allegory becomes more abstract, but the Cave of Mammon is a piece of noble symbolism, and the book is rich im the voluptuous descriptions in which, following his Italian masters, Spenser reveals a more ardent yet purer and more imaginative beauty. In the third and fourth books, in which the stories are run into one another more closely than in the opening books, Spenser’s idealism is beginning to flag. Faerie Queene in Relation to its Age - The Faerie Queene expresses the ideals of the Renaissance England of its day. ‘When Spenser states that the “generall end.....of all the books is to fashion a gentleman or noble person virtuous and gentle discipline,” he means the complete and balanced training of a man as a whole in body, mind, and spirit, which was the finest product of Renaissance humanism. In Italy this ideal too often led to the cultivation of the personality at the expense of morals, of a combination of animal vigour and14 EDMUND SPENSER intellectual power, in which intelligence outran character, But in England this often pagan Virtu was modified by the Reformation, and in Spenser’s ideal this modification is clearly to be seen. . Elizabethan England was very complex. Not only was the Renaissance modified by the Reformation, the heritage of the Middle Ages lived on too. From the Renaissance itself the insular genius of the English chose with a discrimmation that ignored the fact that various elements of its attempted combination were discordant with one another. The result often bewilders us. As Lytton Strachey juts it : “It is, above all, the contradictions of the age that batile our imagination and perplex our intelligence. Human beings, no doubt, would cease to be human beings unless they were inconsisteat ; but the inconsistency of the Elizabethans exceeds the limits permitted to man.... How is it possible to give a coherent account of their subtlety and their naivete, their delicacy and their brutality, their piety and their lust ?” In Spenser, who has been called the Elizabethan poet par excellence, these contradictions are everywhere present, but not in an extreme form. The dreaming idealist who portrayed the gentle Una of Book | proves himself in his Insh policy shadowed forth in Book V a ruthless realist after the school of Machiavelli. The lover of sensuous beauty cannot came to terms with the puritan moralist ; Sir Guyon in Book [I may destroy the wanton joys of the Bower of Bliss, but Calidore in Book VI looks with pleasure unreproved upon “An hundred naked maidens lilly white, All raunged in a ring, and dauncing in delight.” The worse of Truth can flatter the Queen to the very height of the fashion of the day, and yet condemm her policy and attack her chief minister. The mingling of pagan classical with Christian material is typical convention ; the Bible and the Christian Fathers are supported by Plato, Aristotle, and Seneca, fauns mingle with fairies, the rites at Una’s marriage are mainly Roman. To Spenser, as to his contemporaries, the best of all three worlds, the ancient , the medieval, and the Christian Renaissance, were almost on one plane. Similarly, to Spenser there seemed no difficulty in reconciling ‘Romance and Epic, in fashioning his FaerieSPENSER 'S AGE AND WORKING 15 7 — Queene in the light of the writings of Homer, Virgil, and Ariosto. . The Faerie Queene is deeply influenced by the Bible ; at heart it is, like most Elizabethan poetry, secular. .The age’s particular achievement, the drama, had as its basis “a vigorous mundane vitality” in the words of Dowden, who remarks : “A grand self-culture is that about which Spenser is concemed ; not as with Bunyan the escape of the soul to Heaven ; not the attainment of supematural grace through a point of mystical contact, like the vision which was granted to the virgin knight of the medieval allegory. Seif-culture, the formation of a complete character for the uses of earth, and afterwards, if néed be, for the uses of Heaven, this was subject sufficient for the twenty-four books designed to form the epic of the age of Elizabeth.” The only respect in which Spenser lagged a little behind his age was in his medievalism, which was more than that of his contemporaries. Ascham had roundly condemned the medieval romances. The allegory had become out-of-date. But though he particularly looked back to the “goodly usage of those antique times, in which the sword was servant unto right,” it will not do to underestimate the appeal the now receding Middle Ages made to the Elizabethans. Thus it is very interesting to note that around 1580 there existed “the Worshipful Societie of Archers in London, yearly celebrating the renowned memorie of the magnificient Prince Arthure and his Knightly Order of the Round Table.” Working of Some Literary Influences on Edmund Spenser Men took the pastor in order to flee for a moment into Arcadia, to clothe in pleasant vagueness confessions of the delightful miseries of calf-love, wougk strife stole too often even into Arcadia and goaded the Shepherds into worldly bickerings. Spenser’s pastoral imitators confined themselves for the ‘Most part to the formal eclogue. Guarini and Tasso became the great forces in the pastoral drama, and into this the spirit of Spenser made few incursions. In the Pastoral novel Sannazore and Sidney and Montemayor reigned supreme,16 EDMUND SPENSER although men like Lodge and Greene brought occasional echoes of the Shepherd’s Calender into their tales. The Polyobion of Drayton and the Britannia’s Pastorals of Browne have much talks of shepherds but owe their being to the Faerie Queene . Spenser is the Prime pastoralist of England. The main influence of the Shepherd's Calender was upon the formal eclogue—Spenser put new life into the pastoral by any arrangement pf the eclogues under the headings of months, by an effort to bring more nature in with the attempted but imperfect correspondence of month and mood, by rendering the pastoral thoroughly English through the medium of a new type of language, less academic and more native and by taking the crown from the Roman Tityrus, Virgil, and Placing it on the head of the English Tityrus, Chaucer. After some stumbling imitations by early followers, Drayton and his group adroitly chose these most essential immortations of Spenser’s and brought the English eclogues to their climax of development. The pastoral was more Spenserian. L’Allegro and |! Penseroso show how well Milton could have achieved the light pastoral. But when he wrote his perfect-Lycidas he drew far more from classical literature than from Spenser and his followers. There remained no one who. could perform.the task at the vital moment and the fornial eclogue has perished. Tasso’s Influence on the Pastaral of Spenser Tasso and Spenser both moved back and forth between, the romantic and the pastoral scenes. One might say that the enchanted forest of Tasso and the Arcadian scene are always changing into each other, and that in Spenser's Faerieland is now the Terre Gaste, now Broceliande, at another time Arcadia. The happiest balance in The Faerie Queene was achieved in the Pastorella story, and here, it seems, Spenser brought over from 2 Greek romance some of its lucidity. Whatever the resources, Spenser’s achievement here within a romance brought the pastoral to a depth of spiritual insight not expressed before this in literature. Spenser, beginning as he had, following after Theocritus and Mantuan, was caught up in the seriousness of the pastoral after Montemayor and Tasso. as everybodySPENSER'S AGE AND WORKING ~ 17° as, for almost a century, yet struck out differently. Even as iQ a poem modelled on Ariosto’s he set out to make his own Protestant and patriotic work, so in the celebration of love, in the Pastorella story and in the Hymmes he brought to his conception of holiness and justice and all the virtues a conception of love that belonged with all of them. It was a different perfection than Tasso’s and a complete answer to Arisoto’s fury, and he meant it to be equal to all the attacks of mutability. The great poem, centering on the wanderings of its heroes, and on magnificence and glory and national greatness, will also express happiness. The poem must take that great scene of the hundreds of knights and ladies and magicians and slowly make a world whereat that is said in Ariosto that is true will be said again, and especially at that is said about the richness and variety and deceitfulness of life, although Spenser will leave out something of the intellectuality and much of the Catholic temperament. He will transform all this gradually, although the absence of wit will be immediately made known, for he does his work mostly by a singleness of mind, plainness, a certain still undefeated aspiration towards the heroic, and something zealous, too, one may here call Puritan. And although there will be everywhere in the poem the said sense of time and decay, the effort of his work will be to show that love makes the vast variety of thing a compehensive vision. In the Shepherd's Calender we have the one pastoral composition in English literature which can boast first-rate historical importance. There are not a few later productions in the kind which may be reasonably held to surpass it in poetic merit, but all alike sink into insignificance by the side of Spenser’s eclogues when the influence they exercised on the history of English verse is taken into account. The present is not, of course, the place to discuss this wider influence of Spenser’s work : it is with its relation to pastoral tradition and its influence upon subsequent pastoral work that we are immediately concemed. This is an aspect of the Shepherd’s Calender to which literary historians have naturally devoted less attention. These two Teasons— namely, the intrinsic importance of the work and the neglect Of its pastoral bearing—must excuse a somewhat lengthy“18 ‘ EDMUND SPENSER treatment of a theme that may possibly be regarded as already sufficiently familiar. : ; The Shepherd’s Calender, which first appeared in 1579, was published without author’s ‘name, but with an envoy signed ‘Immerito’. It was dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, and contained a commentary by one E.K., who also signed’ an epistle to Master Gabriel Harvey, fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. ‘Immerito’ was a name uséd by Spenser in his familiar correspondence with Harvey, and can in any case have presented no mystery to his C. midge friends. Among these must clearly be reckoned the Commentator E.K., who may be identified with one Edward Kirke with all but absolute certainty, within certain well- defined limits we may also accept E.K. as a competent exponent of his friend’s work, and his identity, together with that of Rosalind and Menalcas, being matters of but indirect literary interest, may be left to Spenser’s editors and biographers to fight over. It will be cient to add in this place that, however ‘literary’ may have been Spenser’s attachment to Rosalind, there is no reason to suppose that she was not a real person, while however little response his advances may have met with, there is reason to suppose that his sorrow at their rejection was not wholly conventional. Spenser’s design in turing his attention to the pastoral form would not seem hard to apprehend. Less readily may we suppose that any deep philosophical impulse directed his mind towards certain modes of expression, than that in an age of catholic experiment he tumed from the penning of impossible iambic trimeters, ‘minding’ as E.K. direct! infarms us to furnish our ‘tongue with this kind, wherein it faulteth. He was qualified for the task by a wide knowledge of previous pastoral writers from Theocritus and Bion down to Marot, and deliberately ranged himself in line with the previous poets of the regular pastoral tradition. Yet we find side by side in his work two distinct and apparently antagonistic though ually conscious tendencies ; the one towards authority, leading him to borrow motives freely and even to resort to direct paraphrase ; the other towards individuality, nationality, dom, informing his general scheme and regulating the language of his imaginary swains. It is this double nature of his Pastoral work that justifies. us as regarding him, in spite of his alleged orthodoxy, as in reality the first of a series of English writers who combinedSPENSER 'S AGE AND WORKING 19 e traditions of regular pastoral with the wayward graces oashe inspiration. ‘It is true that im Spenser the natural pastoral impulse has lost the spontaniety of the earlier examples, and has passed into the realm of conscious and deliberate art ; but it is nonetheless there, modifying the conventional form. The individual debts owed by Spenser to earlier writers have been collected with admissible leaming and industry by scholars such as Kluge and Reissert, but the investigation of his originality presents at once a more interesting and more important field of inquiry. So, indeed, Spenser himself appears to have though, for the only direct acknowledgement he makes in the work is to Chaucer, although, as a writer to whom the humours of criticism are ever present, has remarked, ‘it might almost seem that Spenser borrowed from Chaucer nothing but his sly way of acknowledging indebtedness chiefly where it was not due.’ It will be seen from the above analysis that the architectonic basis of Spenser’s design consists of the three Colin eclogues standing respectively at the beginning, in the middle and at the close of the year. These are symmetrically arranged : the ‘January’ and ‘December’ are both alike monologues and agree in the stanza used, while the ‘June’ is a dialogue and likewise differs in metrical form. The letter is supported as it were by two subsidiary eclogues, those of April and August, in both of which another shepherd signs one of the Colin’s lays and refers incidentally to his passion for Rosalind. It is upon this framework that are woven the various moral, polemical, and idyllic themes which Spenser introduces. The attempt at uniting a series of Poems into a single fabric is Spenser’s chief contribution to the formal side of pastoral composition. The method by which he sought to correlate the various parts so as to roduce the singleness of impression necessary to a work o: art, and the Measures of success which he achieved, though they belong more strictly to the general history of Poetry, must also detain us for a moment. The chief and most obvious device is that suggested by the title—The Shepherd's Calender— Suggests, what is moreover apparent from the eclogues20 EDMUND SPENSER and fall of the year as typical of the life of man. The moods of the various poems were to be made to somrespond with the seasons represented ; or, conversely, outward nature in its cycle through the year was to reflect and there unify the emotions, thoughts, and passions of the shepherds. This ° was a perfectly legitimate artistic device, and one based on a fundamental principle of our nature, since the appearance of objective phenomena is ever largely modified and coloured by subjective feeling. Nor can it reasonably be objected against the device that in the hands of inferior craftsmen it degenerates but too readily into the absurdities of the ‘pathetic fallacy’, or that Spenser himself is not wholly guiltless of the charge. Winter is come, that blowes the balefull breath, And after Winter commeth timely death. These lines bear witness to Spenser’s intention. But the conceit is not fully or congistently carried out. In several of the eclogues not oniy does the subject in no way reflect the mood of the season—the very nature of the theme at times made this impossible—but the time of year is not so much as mentioned. This is more especially the case im the summer months ; there is no joy of the ‘hygh seysoun,’ and when it is mentioned it is rather by way of contrast than of sympathy. Thus in June Colin moums for other days : The couth | sign of love, and tune my pype Unto my plaintive pleas in verses made : Tho would I seeke for Queene—apples unrype, To give my Rosalind ; and in Sommer shade Dight gaudy Girlonds was my common trade, To crowne her golden locks : but yeeres more ., And losse of her, whose love as lyfe | wayd, Those weary wanton toyes away dyd wype. In the same eclogue we may trace a deliberate contrast between various descriptive passages. Thus Hobbinol feels the magic of the summer woods— Colin, to heare tey rymes and roundelayes,. Which thou were wont on wasttul hylls to singe, | more delight then larke in Sommer dayes : | Whose Echo made the neyghbour groves to ring, And taughi the byrds, which in the lower spring Did shroude in shady leaves from sonny rayes,SPENSER'S AGE AND WORKING 21 Frame to thy songe their chereful cheriping, Or hold theyr peace, for shame of thy swete layes. Closely following upon "this stanza we have Colin’s lament, ‘The God of Shepherds, Tityrus, is dead, containing the lines : aa But, if on me some little drops would flowe Of that the spring way in he learned hedde, * [soone would learne these woods to wayle my woe, I teache the trees their trickling reares to shedde. We have here a specific inversion of the ‘pathetic fallacy. The moods of nature are no longer represented as varying in sympathy with the passions of man, but are deliberately used to heighten an effect by contrast. Even this inverted correspondence, however, is for the most part lacking in the subsequent eclogues, and it must be admitted that in so far Spenser depended on a cyclic correlation for the unifying of his design, he achieved at best but partial effect. Another means by which he sought, consciously or unconsciously, to produce unity of impression was by consistently pitching his song in the minor key. This accounts for the inverted correspondence just noted, and for the fact that even the polemics have an undercurrent of regret in them. In this case the poet has undoubtedly succeeded in carrying out the prevailing mood of the central motive—the Rosalind drama —in the subsidiary scenes, Or shouid he not rather say that he has extracted the general mood of the whole composition, and infused it, in a kind of typical form, into the-three connected poems placed at a critical point of the complex structure ? The unity, however, thus aimed wt. and achieved, is very different from the cyclic or architectonic unity described above, and of a much less definite character. Platonism in Spenser Spenser's knowledge of Platonism while he was still a young man was by io means superficial, nor did he owe it solely to the Book of the Courtier. It was as far as can be Judged, based on a scholarly study of the best sources then available, including Ficino’s Commentariam in Convivium, lus his picture of the birth of Love, already referred to. Was taken either from Ficino or from the. text’ of the22. EDMUND SPENSER Symposium, and it is likely that, even when followi Cast ione and sometimes using his metaphors, he still Ficino in mind. There is mystery here. Whether Spenser actually corrected or ‘amended’ the text of the first two hymns, we do not know, The love he had sung had been spiritual, not carnal love ; but it had still been love for woman, and that is earthly. Perhaps the poet had been chided for singing of any love other than the love of God. In any case, a complete exposition of the Platonic doctrine touching love and beauty might be held to involve a description of the ascent of the soul to that heavenly love which is its final resting place ; and therefore to require the two further hymns which Spenser now composed. . The vision of earthly beauty which inspires in the beholder a spiritual love of the woman from whom this beauty shines, is only the first stage in the ascent of the soul. The Platonists appear to have distinguished six stages, each marking an advance towards the universal and.the divine : thus, for example, in the third stage the lover has risen to a general contemplation of feminine beauty ; in the fourth he sees through the eyes of the soul, an image of the heavenly beauty ; in the fifth, he actually beholds it ; in the last stage he enters into union with it. It is uncertain whether Spenser distinguished all these stages ; but he seems to have had in mind the fourth stage when he wrote in the Hymne in Honour of Love. Such is the powre cf that sweet passion, That it all sordid basenesse doth expel, And the refyned mind doth newly fashion Unto a fairer.forme, which now doth dwell In his high thought, that would it selfe excell ; Which he behoulding still with constant sight, Admires the mirrour of so heavenly light. And the two last stages of the ascent are clearly marked in the splendid concluding stanza of the Hymne, of Heavenly Beautie : And looke at last up to that Soveraine Light, From whose pure beams al perfect Beauty springs. That kindleth love in every godly spright, Even the love of God, which loathing brings Of this vile world and these goy seeming things:SPENSER'S AGE AND WORKING 23 With whose sweet pleasures being so possest, Thy straying thoughts henceforth for ever rest. Ariosto’s Reference on Spenser , ‘Ariosto’s had never introduced that kind of thing, and from the point of view of well-drawn character an narrative Spenser was well-inspired when taking ideas from him. The Orlando Furioso was a splendid romance, full of movement high endeavour, faithfiul loves and noble deeds. True, it included several stories running side b y side ; but the whole narrative was conducted with extraor verve and incomparable dexterity. Scott, when attempting something similar in the second half of Ivanhoe, thought naturally of Ariosto’s achievement. The latter was never at a loss for an episode and knew just when to relieve the tension by a light of cheerful touch and just how to mingle the tragic, the tender and the gay. Above all, he had created wonderful heroines : a lively and amusing heroine, Angelica; and a warlike one. Bradamante. Spenser could not. ‘outgo” him as a story-teller ; but he had a genius for wordpainting and knew how to touch the heart by his portayals of female innocence and distress. The characters of Una and Britomatis are as incomparable in their way as those of Angelica and Bradamante though the first is not developed or maintained as it should have been. Both have been made an object or raillery. No doubt a knight accoutred for battle, accompanied by a meek-looking princess leading a white lamb, and followed at some distance by a dwarf. That lassie seemed, in being ever last Or wearied with bearing of her bag Of needments at his back— may seem a conspicuously unpractical arrangement. which allegory does little to pallite in our finds ee say we | see {hem re how we like to recall them. ordsworth concluded his second sonnet of books, with the words ; *. on the pleasures Two shall be named pre-eminently de The gentle lady married to the Moore, ‘" sek eavenly na with her snow-white lamb, 2 T imaginary animals had occasionally played ‘ ty a _ Part in mediaeval romance, as in Yvain, and it ‘was probably24 EDMUND SPENSER one of these which gave Spenser the idea of introducing number of them. He franat have been struck by the episode of the’ kindly tigress who nourished and protected little Clorinda, in the Gerusalemmune liberaita ; but this part of Tasso’s romance was not included in the 1580 edition and Spenser may have completed the story of Una before he Tead it. If he was fndeed familiar with it before he put the final touches to Book I, the adventure probably seemed too conspicuous to be imitated ; but in that case he presents another large and terrible beast such as a lion, who should rotect his heroine in distress. Hence he shows Una, who ‘as been separated from her knight and who one day has lain down to rest in the shade, as surprised by a lion who Tushes upon her ; who, his heart melted by the sight of her innocence, remains with her and accompanies her on her journey : The lyon would not leave her desolate, But with her went along, as a strong gard Of her chast parson, and a faythfuil mate Of her sad froubls and misfortunes hard : Still, when she slept, he kept both watch and ward, And whenshe wakt, he wayted diligent, With humble srvice fo her will prepared..... Una and the Knight have been separated by the wiles of an enchanter named Archimago and a witch, Duesse (Falsehood). The latter, masquerading under the guise of a fair damsel, Fidessa, seduces the Redcross Knight. In canto vii his downfall is complete and he is imprisoned in the stronghold of giant Pride, whom Duessa addressed by his Italian name of Orgoglio. He is, however, rescued by Prince Arthur, and rejoins Una, and despite a final effort on the part of Archimago and Duessa, they are married. It is possible in Ariosto’s Atlante and Alcina respectively ; but for Duessa, Spenser had a more immediate model in the witch Ligridonia. in L’ Italia Liberata of which he follows some of the episodes rather closely in Book II. There is, however, in the body of Book L, a curious adventure of which the material details come neither from Ariosto nor Trission, but from their predecessor Matteo Boiardo. In Book I, canto xvii, of the Orlando Innumerato, Ranaldo and his companions encounter a a0SPENSER 'S AGE AND WORKING 25 who, fully armed, comes ing towards them urging his horse and trembling s galipin ‘shine incod. * Tasso’s Influence on Spenser But there is another reason for Spenser’s compatative failure as a narrative poet, which is that he was even more careless of verisimilitude than Tasso. The introduction of fairies and enchanters, in a word, of the ‘marvellous,’ was in the tradition of the romantic epic, and the poet was no more at liberty to exclude these things than a modern novelist is to ignore the claims of local colour and a certain amount of documentation. As long as the fairy element was associated with legendary heroes like the Knights of the Round Table or semi-historical personages like Paladius or Charlemagne, verisimilitude did not suffer. Once the convention is accepted, the reader has no more difficulty in believing the adventures of Lancelot or the doings of Vivien and Marlin, than in following the nightmare improbabilities of Le Cousin Pons or delightful and perfectly incredible dogs described in Ursule Mirovet ; in fact he has less. But let fairies mingle in the adventures of characters known to history, and it is different tale. This was Trissino’s error, and in a larger degree Tassos. The mingling of actual battles in Palestine and real persons like Godfrey of Bouillon with Herminias, Clorindas and especially Armidas, puts a strain on or aesthetic creduality, if one may so call it, which it is not able to bear ; it destroys the unity of tone which a verse romance should present. Spenser in a way went further, as W. J. Courthope so truly pointed out, by proclaiming from the outset that his imaginary heroes were to be regarded only as symbols of moral virtues. ‘How, for example, can we believe that the historical Prince Arthur ever came to the allegorical house of Pride, or really fought with the abstract personage, Disdain ? The discipleship of Spenser to Ariosto is so obvious that it has never been necessary to argue it. The influence of Tasso is less marked, aud it has often been played down, in Spite of the fact.that Spenser mentions him as one of his four exemplars. It is said that Tasso’s work came too late to have much effect on The Faerie Queene and as this seems to me demonstrabiy untrue it is as well to establish the dates at the beginning, Tasso won fame in Italy at the age of eighteen when he published his first heroic poem Rinaldo, in