I: Sidney and Spenser
At the outset of this chapter I once more beg the reader to remember that the adjective Golden is not here used in a eulogistic sense. By ‘Golden poetry’ I do not mean simply good poetry (that is another question) but poetry in its innocent—as the theologians would say, its ‘once-born’—condition. Marlowe’s ‘Come liue with me’ is Golden, Donne’s answer to it is not. The rhythm in ‘beauty making beautiful old rhyme’ is Golden, that in ‘Burnt after them to the bottomless pit’ is not. Phoebus dancing forth from the oriental gate is a Golden image; snow coming down to periwig the baldpate woods is far otherwise. A clear recognition of the difference should be common to those whose preferences are quite opposed.
Though individual critics will be noticed as we proceed, it will be well to start with a glance at the general outlook on poetry which lies behind the whole Golden achievement. This outlook was expressed in a more or less common defence and theory of poetry; criticism on particular poems was less plentiful and much less important.
The defence of poetry will not be rightly understood unless we keep two facts carefully in mind. In the first place, it is a defence not of poetry as against prose but of fiction as against fact. The word poetry often covered all imaginative writing whether in prose or verse, and even those critics who did not so extend it thought of poetry primarily as invention. What is in question is not man’s right to sing but his right to feign, to ‘make things up’. In the second place, the attack which necessitates this defence is not, save locally and accidentally, a puritan attack. In England, no doubt, most of the attackers were Protestants. But so were most of the defenders. The controversy had begun far from England and long before the Reformation. Boccaccio’s De Genealogia Deorum (XIV and XV) is as much a defence as Sidney’s Apology. So is Plutarch’s De Audiendis Poetis. Our sixteenth-century critics are really contributing to, or concluding, an age-old debate; and that debate, properly viewed, is simply the difficult process by which Europe became conscious of fiction as an activity distinct from history on the one hand and from lying on the other.
It was, of course, Plato who opened this debate, and he made two very different contributions to it. On the one hand, in the Ion and the Phaedrus, he stated in an extreme form the doctrine of inspiration. He denied that poetry was an art. It was produced in a divine alienation of mind by men who did not know what they were doing. The non-human beings who were its real creators showed this by sometimes choosing as their mouthpiece the worst of men or even the worst of poets. On the other hand, in the Republic he condemned poetry along with all the other ‘mimetic’ or representational arts. This condemnation was two-sided. In part it is directed (and so indeed is his theory of inspiration) against the old error, still dangerous when Plutarch wrote, of mistaking art for science and treating Homer as an encyclopedia. To that extent it was a real advance. In part it was metaphysical. Nature, the phenomenal world, is in Plato’s dualism a copy of the real and supersensuous world. Dialectic leads us up from unreal Nature to her real original. But the arts which imitate Nature lead us down, further away from reality, to ‘the copy of a copy’.
Two different answers were given to Plato, which may roughly be called the Aristotelian and the neo-Platonic. Aristotle gave his almost at once. Poetry, he maintained, does not copy the particulars of Nature; it disengages and represents her general characteristics. The poetic myth shows us what would necessarily or probably or possibly happen in all situations of a certain kind. If you like, it reveals the universal and is thus more scientific (φιλοσοφώτερον) than history. The neo-Platonic answer, far later and more gradually, arose from prolonged reflection on sacred iconography; even, it would appear, from reflection on a single sacred image. In the first century A.D. we find Dio Chrysostom putting into the mouth of Pheidias the words, ‘What is hardest in making such a work as my Olympian Zeus is that the same image has to be preserved unchanged in the mind of the artist until he has finished the statue, which may be a matter of years’. The model, apparently, is not a natural object, but an image in the artist’s mind, invented, says Dio, because ‘wisdom and reason cannot be directly portrayed. Therefore, knowing the object in which they do occur, we have recourse to it and attach a human shape to wisdom and reason, showing forth the invisible by the visible’ (Orat. XII, De Dei Cognitione). This could, by a little manipulation, be reconciled with Aristotle, but is already pointing in a different direction. A century later Philostratus has gone farther. Again citing the works of Pheidias, and this time adding those of Praxiteles, he says that they were never produced by imitating nature. ‘Imagination made them, and she is a better artist than imitation; for where the one carves only what she has seen, the other carves what she has not seen’ (De Vita Apollonii, VI. xix). In the third century Plotinus completes the theory. ‘If anyone disparages the arts on the ground that they imitate Nature’, he writes, ‘we must remind him that natural objects are themselves only imitations, and that the arts do not simply imitate what they see but re-ascend to those principles (λόγους) from which Nature herself is derived. . . . Pheidias used no visible model for his Zeus’ (Ennead, V. viii). Art and Nature thus become rival copies of the same supersensuous original, and there is no reason why Art should not sometimes be the better of the two. Such a theory leaves the artist free to exceed the limits of Nature. Of these two conceptions it is the neo-Platonic, not the Aristotelian, which is really demanded by most Golden poetry; by the Furioso, the Liberata, the Arcadia, the Faerie Queene, and by many elements in Shakespearian ‘comedy’. It is also directly asserted by some of the critics. ‘The poet,’ says Scaliger (Poet. I. i), ‘maketh a new Nature and so maketh himself as it were a new God.’ It will be remembered how closely Sidney follows him. The poet, unlike the historian, is not ‘captiued to the trueth of a foolish world’ but can ‘deliuer a golden’. Bacon defines poetry as ‘feigned history’, and the purpose of the feigning is to give us ‘some shadow of satisfaction’ in those points where ‘the nature of things doth deny it’. To most moderns this will necessarily appear a kind of ‘escapism’. It did not seem so to Scaliger, Sidney, or Bacon, because they inherited, in a Christianized form, the Platonic dualism. Nature was not the whole. Above earth was heaven: behind the phenomenal, the metaphysical. To that higher region the human soul belonged. The natural world, as Bacon said, was ‘in proportion inferior to the soul’. Such a conception excluded that kind and degree of reverence for natural fact which romanticism and science have combined to instil into us. The man who, in his ‘feigned history’, improved on Nature and painted what might be or ought to be, did not feel that he was retreating from reality into a merely subjective refuge; he was reascending from a world which he had a right to call ‘foolish’ and asserting his divine origin.
Such unambiguous statements of the neo-platonic creed are not, however, very common. The men of that age were such inveterate syncretists, so much more anxious to reconcile authorities than to draw out their differences, that the Aristotelian and neo-Platonic views are not clearly opposed and compared, but are rather contaminated by each other and by many more influences as well. Aristotle himself was sometimes misinterpreted in a sense which brought him very close to Plotinus. Thus Fracastorius (1483–1553) in his Naugerius explains that while other writers give us the naked fact (rem), the poet gives us the form (ideam) clothed in all its beauties (pulchritudinibus vestitam) ‘which Aristotle calleth the vniuersal’. These ‘beauties’ however are not very relevant to Aristotle’s immanent universal—the general character in situations of a given kind, the ‘sort of thing that might happen’; they have come in because Fracastorius is really thinking of a Platonic and transcendent form, a reality prior to, and exalted above, Nature. And Aristotle himself had unwittingly invited such a confusion when he allowed, in contexts which had nothing to do with poetry, that Nature often tends to or aims at (βούλεται ποιει̃ν) a greater perfection than the indeterminacy of matter allows her to achieve (De. Gen. Anim. 778a; Polit. 1255b); words which Sidney remembered when he wrote in the Arcadia (1590, II. xi) of forms such as ‘Nature, often erring, yet shewes she would faine make’. Aristotle was also contaminated by that late and vulgarized version of his own poetics which appears in Horace’s Ars Poetica. Here the doctrine of the universal has shrunk into a doctrine of fixed theatrical types, arbitrary rules abound, and the seed of neo-classicism is sown. Side by side with this, the medieval doctrine of allegorical interpretation throve with unabated vigour, and with it the old error refuted by Plato and Plutarch which treated poems as encyclopedias. Added to all this, and forming the most characteristic common mark of the whole school, was the Platonic theory of inspiration. On this Politian (in the Nutricia), Ficino (De Furore Poetico), Scaliger, Tasso, Spenser, and Milton are agreed, and Horace’s rationalism is ignored.
It is important to realize that these claims to inspiration are not, like similar claims in the Romantics, rhetorically or hyperbolically made. They are serious and literal. Tasso and Milton invoke the Holy Ghost; but inspiration could also be traced to a lower, though still superhuman, source. When Scaliger (Poet. III. xxv) attributes compositions to his Genius he does not mean by that word some condition of his own mind. He means an objective, created, personal being, distinct from himself; known to him, indeed, only by its effects, but to some favoured people actually audible or visible. This pneumatology may lie behind Shakespeare’s line about the rival poet and his ‘spirit by spirits taught to write’.
The Golden poetics, it will be seen, are by no means free from confusion. But it is, in my opinion, the claim to inspiration and to limitless freedom of invention, and not the occasional Horatianisms about following Nature, that really provide the key. Most of the Golden poetry was not primarily intended either to reflect the actual world or to express the personality of the poet. Shakespeare himself might well have agreed with Professor Stoll that his great heroines are not such women as we may ever hope to meet. The poets of that age were full of reverence—for God, for kings, for fathers, for authority—but not of our reverence for the actual. Fortune (which in some contexts we call ‘history’) was a blind hussy, a strumpet. To adorn external Nature with conceits and mythical personifications was as legitimate as to tie a ribbon round the neck of one’s own kitten or cut one’s own yew-tree into the shape of a peacock; for we are of a higher birth than nature and her masters by divine right. In his graver enthousiasmos the poet calls down fire from his native heaven to make this ‘foolish’ though lovely world ‘more lovelie’. His aim is indeed ethical as well as aesthetic, docere et delectare, docere delectando, jucunda doctrina. But this is part of the loveliness, for virtue is lovely, not merely obligatory; a celestial mistress, not a categorical imperative.
The change which English poetry underwent at the hands of the Golden poets was twofold: a great change in power (a change from worse to better) and a slighter change in character. ‘Drab’ does not mean ‘bad’, but most Drab poetry had been bad in fact. The Golden poets rejected some of its metres almost entirely, set a new standard of melody for those they retained, and purged its vocabulary. The change in character was, as I have said, slighter. The chief merit of good Drab—plain statement which carries the illusion of the speaking voice—was not lost, but it becomes very subordinate. The main effort is directed towards richness, to a poetry which no one could mistake for speech; and this is increasingly so as the Golden Age proceeds. With the Golden manner there goes, usually, a Golden matter; ideally ardent lovers or ideally heroic wars in an ideally flowery and fruitful landscape are the staple. Verse is praised for being ‘sugared’ or ‘with Nectar sprinkeled’. These two changes, taken together, make up what might in the cant sense be called a ‘revolution’. It is, however, important to realize that the Golden poets were not revolutionary in the same sense as Donne, or the pioneers, of Vers libre. They wrote the same kinds, if not the same kind, of poetry as their predecessors. The Golden sonneteers had Wyatt, Surrey, and other Tottelians behind them. Spenser and Marlowe translated from the Latin as Surrey, Turberville, and Drant had done. The neo-medieval work of Spenser follows the Court of Love, certain pieces in Tottel, Googe’s ‘Cupido Conquered’ and ‘Churchyard’s Dream’. Erotic epyllia such as Hero and Leander or Venus and Adonis had prototypes in Peend or the Fable of Narcissus. Barclay and Googe preceded Spenser in Eclogues. The historical impulse seen in the Mirror continues in Drayton’s epics and Heroical Epistles. This possibly helps to explain the arrival of the Golden Age. We do not know why men of genius are born at one period rather than another. But granted the genius, it may find more or less favourable conditions. And surely no genius is so fortunate as he who has the power and wish to do well what his predecessors have been doing badly. He need neither oppose an existing taste nor create a new one: he has only to satisfy a desire which is already aroused. None of his powers are dissipated or embittered by the struggle to make his aims understood: he can get to work at once. This advantage the Golden poets enjoyed. Perhaps it is under such conditions that the perfect work comes, ripe and not overripe: a Jane Austen following on a Fanny Burney, a Racine on a Corneille, an Ariosto on a Boiardo.
Though Spenser was two years older than Sidney, Sidney’s work was done before Spenser had published anything of comparable value. To settle the exact precedence between them would be difficult; if I here treat Sidney first, the reason is, I confess, pedagogic. To reverse the order would mean beginning with the Shepherd’s Calendar and thus helping to maintain the importance—in my opinion, mistaken—which critical tradition has come to give it. Spenser’s effective contribution to our Golden literature begins with the first fragment of the Faerie Queene in 1590; the revised Arcadia, a work equally Golden and perhaps even more influential upon the Elizabethan and Jacobean mind, belongs to the early eighties.
Even at this distance Sidney is dazzling. He is that rare thing, the aristocrat in whom the aristocratic ideal is really embodied. Leicester’s nephew, Pembroke’s brother-in-law, an eligible parti for a princess, painted by Veronese, poet and patron of poets, statesman, knight, captain—fate has dealt such hands before, but they have very seldom been so well played. Little of the Spenser whom we love is to be found in the letters to Harvey or the View of the State of Ireland; but the Sidney revealed in his life and letters is just what the author of the Arcadia ought to have been. He is a young man ambitious of learning, anxious to read Aristotle in the Greek, though French will do for Plutarch, sufficiently of his age to like the Imprese of Ruscelli and to quote Buchanan, yet independent enough of its worst folly to call Ciceronianism ‘the cheife abuse of Oxford’. He is a serious-minded young man, zealous for the whole European respublica Christiana (of which he thinks Rome a putridum membrum) and fervent as Ascham against the corruptions of Italy. He is a keen student of affairs, policies, constitutions, but also of ‘the true points of Honour’, best learned from the French and Spaniards ‘wherein if they seeme ouer curious, it is an easie matter to cutt of, when a man sees the bottome’. He complains (perhaps yielding somewhat to the fashion) of melancholy, but there is little of it to be found in his letters; least of all when he is once launched on his utterly hopeless command in the Netherlands. It is then, as one critic rightly says, that his words breathe a certain exaltation. If the Queen were the fountain, he would see nothing ahead but despair. But she is only a means. Even if she cried off altogether ‘other springes would ryse to help this action’; for we are engaged against ‘the great abusers of the world’. Before he sailed he had ‘cast his count’ not of danger only, but of ‘want and disgrace’. In those last few months the man rises above the author. His care for ‘the miserable souldier’, and the famous sacrifice of the cup of water at Zutphen, are traits we might not have anticipated from the Arcadia.
Apart from the Lady of May (1578), a trifle now chiefly remembered for the possible connexion between its Rombus and Shakespeare’s Holofernes, Sidney’s poetical output consists of the Arcadian pieces and the Astrophel and Stella, with some poems added to it in the folio of 1598.
It is not on the Arcadian group that Sidney’s lasting fame depends, but they establish his position as the pioneer of Golden poetry. This is best seen by comparing him with one of his predecessors. Here are three lines of Sackville:
O Sorrow, alas, sith Sorrow is thy name,
And that to thee this drere doth well pertaine,
In vayne it were to seeke to cease the same . . .
And here three of Sidney’s:
You Gote-heard Gods that love the grassie mountaines,
You Nimphes that haunt the springs in pleasant vallies,
You Satyrs joyde with free and quiet forrests . . .
Everyone feels the clogged, laborious movement of the first, the sense of liberation and ease in the second. And some of the causes are obvious; the hissing alliterations in Sackville, and the lack of vocalic melody; against this, in Sidney, the admirable variety of vowels (Nimphes and springs being the only exception) and the sub-alliterations of G—GR, FR—F. But there is a difference even more important than this. In the Sackville the words which make any appeal to the emotions or imagination are almost lost in dull connectives. Thus in the second line the noun drere is the only live word. In Sidney every single word, except the inevitable that’s and the’s and with, does something for us; there are gods, nymphs, and satyrs who love and haunt and enjoy, grass on the mountains, water and pleasure in the valleys, and, best of all, liberty and silence in the woods. There are no non-conductors. Sidney knows, what few Drab poets ever learned, that verse must carry the smallest possible cargo of words which exist solely for the sake of other words.
If this example seems unduly favourable to the Gold and unduly hard on the Drab, I will take another where the Drab may, without absurdity, be preferred. Petrarch writes:
Rotta è l’alta colonna e ’l verde lauro
Che facean ombra al mio stanco pensero;
Perduto ho quel che ritrovar non spero
Dal boreo a l’austro a dal mar indo al mauro . . .
Wyatt adapts it thus:
The pillar perish’d is whereto I leante
The strongest stay of mine vnquiet minde;
The like of it no man agayne can finde,
From east to weste stil seekynge though he wente.
And here is the opening of a dirge for a dead Arcadian king;
Farewell O Sunn, Arcadias clearest light;
Farewell O pearl, the poore mans plenteous treasure:
Farewell O golden staffe, the weake mans might:
Farewell O Joy, the joyfulls onely pleasure.
Wisdom farewell, the skillesse mans direction:
Farewell with thee, farewell all our affection.
The Drab specimen here seems to me sound, masculine writing in Wyatt’s graver manner, and the vapidity of the fourth line in the Golden specimen will be obvious to everyone. What here concerns us is to notice how Wyatt (perhaps not for purely aesthetic reasons) has, so to speak, turned down the lights of the Petrarch. The picturable rotta has become the highly general perished: the green laurel has gone; the first person of perduto ho has become the gnomic ‘no man’; and the last line substitutes east and west for two winds and two seas. In Sidney we see a sun eclipsed, a pearl lost, a wand of gold destroyed, poor men enriched, weak men strengthened, ignorant men guided. Notice, too, how the Farewell phrase runs to four syllables in the first two lines, then to six in the third, then back to four in the fourth, is reversed in the fifth, and doubled in the last, giving the illusion of chant-like monotony without monotony itself. The bad fourth line reveals the temper of Golden poetry as clearly as the others; where it lacks riches it will still pretend to have them.
In his Arcadian poems Sidney offers a much wider range of metrical experiment than Spenser. He has a more delicate ear and is more learned in the art. The poems which stand out will usually be found to do so by some novelty or other excellence in their music. Such are ‘The ladd Philisides’, which may have suggested the stanza of Milton’s Hymn on the Nativity, ‘Get hence foul grief’, which pleases by its metre alone, and the stately ‘Why dost thou haste?’ Even the pieces in classical metres, which Sidney understands far better than either Harvey or Spenser, are not all failures. The Asclepiads (‘O sweet woods’) have real charm.
Since Astrophel and Stella is the first full-blown sonnet-sequence we have met, something must be said about that misunderstood Form. The difference between the Vita Nuova and Petrarch’s Rime is that Petrarch has abandoned the prose links; and it was they that carried the narrative. The first thing to grasp about the sonnet sequence is that it is not a way of telling a story. It is a form which exists for the sake of prolonged lyrical meditation, chiefly on love but relieved from time to time by excursions into public affairs, literary criticism, compliment, or what you will. External events—a quarrel, a parting, an illness, a stolen kiss—are every now and then mentioned to provide themes for the meditation. Thus you get an island, or (if the event gives matter for more than one piece) an archipelago, of narrative in the lyrical sea. It is not there in order to interest you in the history of a love affair, after the manner of the novelist. To concentrate on these islands, and to regard the intervening pieces as mere links between them, is as if you valued a Mozartian opera chiefly for the plot. You are already turning away from the work of art which has been offered you. To go further and seek for the ‘real’ (that is, the biographical) story is to turn your back on it altogether. To go further still and to start rearranging the pieces in the hope of mending the story or squaring it with other biographical data is, in my opinion, to commit yourself to unresisted illusion. If you arrange things to make a story, then of course a story will result from your rearrangement; have we not all done it as a parlour game with pictures torn at random from the daily papers?
Facts may, of course, lie behind (and any distance behind) a work of art. But the sonnet sequence does not exist to tell a real, or even a feigned, story. And we must not listen at all to critics who present us with the preposterous alternative of ‘sincerity’ (by which they mean autobiography) and ‘literary exercise’. The only poet (unless I am mistaken) who has edited Sidney, Mr. Drinkwater, makes short work of that dichotomy. ‘Look in thy heart and write’ is good counsel for poets; but when a poet looks in his heart he finds many things there besides the actual. That is why, and how, he is a poet.
The narrative, still more the biographical, reading of a sonnet sequence may obscure its real qualities. Where the poet (thinking symphonically, not historically) has put in a few lighter or more reflective sonnets for relief or variety, the reader who wants a ‘human document’ will thrust them aside as frigid and miss any structural fitness they may really have. Something like this has happened with Sidney. Scholars draw a distinction between the first thirty-two sonnets and the rest. At XXXIII the ‘real’ (that is, the historical) passion is supposed to begin. The change, we are told, coincides with the marriage of Penelope Devereux to Lord Rich; and XXIV, which does not fit the theory, must have been put in (as God, in some anti-Darwinian theologies, put in the fossils) to deceive us. My concern is not with the truth or falsehood of the theory, but with its inutility. Grant it true, and what have we gained? Nothing, apparently, but an obstacle to our appreciation of the first thirty-two sonnets. These seem dull only because they do not fit into the story. Read without the perverse demand for story, they will not be found to differ much from the others either in subject or merit. They introduce most of the themes on which the sequence is built. We have in them sonnets about sonnet-writing (why not? Milton writes about the epic in his epic, Pindar about odes in his odes) as we shall have again in XXXIV, L, LVI, and XC. We have glances at the outer world of moralists, losengiers, and impertinents; we shall meet them again in XXXV and XLVIII. The ‘Platonic’ solution which occupies us from LXIX to LXXI has already been hinted in XI. The direct or conceited celebration of the lady’s beauty occurs as often after the thirty-third sonnet as before it. That none of the most passionate sonnets come before XXXIII is true. I know no reason why they should. The earlier pieces deal with the conflict between Love and Virtue (or ‘Reason’). Structurally it is very proper that this theme should come at the beginning. Such a conflict may not interest all modern readers so much as the pictures of passion triumphant, but it interested Sidney. Pyrocles and Musidorus talk about it at great length in the Arcadia. It is significant that the poet makes no attempt to explain what particular circumstances threw Love and Virtue into opposition. He takes the opposition for granted. Everyone knew that Passion and Reason, or Will and Wit, were antagonists. It was assumed that they would be at loggerheads, as we assume that a dog will go for a cat. Similarly, when he deals with a lovers’ quarrel (Song 10 to Sonnet XCV) he does not say what the quarrel was about. Everyone knows that lovers have quarrels. He is writing not a love story but an anatomy of love.
There is so much careless writing in Astrophel and Stella that malicious quotation could easily make it appear a failure. Sidney can hiss like a serpent (‘Sweet swelling lips well maist thou swell’), gobble like a turkey (‘Moddels such be wood globes’), and quack like a duck (‘But God wot, wot not what they mean’). But non ego paucis. With all its faults this work towers above everything that had been done in poetry, south of the Tweed, since Chaucer died. The fourth song alone, with its hurried and (as it were) whispered metre, its inimitable refrain, its perfect selection of images, is enough to raise Sidney above all his contemporaries. Here at last a situation is not merely written about: it is created, presented, so as to compel our imaginations. Or consider Sonnet LXXI. In almost any other poet the first thirteen lines would have the air of being a mere ‘build up’ for the sake of the last. But Sidney’s sonnet might have ended quite differently and still been equally, though diversely, admirable. Nearly all the trochaic songs hint at the incantatory music of the Phoenix and the Turtle. They do not quite achieve it. Lines rhythmically dead, such as ‘But when their tongues could not speake’ always break in and mar the spell. But to have gone so far is immense praise.
Considered historically, then, and in relation to his predecessors, Sidney is one of our most important poets. Nothing which that century had yet produced could have led us to predict the music, passion, and eloquence of Astrophel and Stella. It is not all in the ‘sugared’ manner. Sidney can come down to earth when he chooses—‘He cannot love: no, no; let him alone’, or even ‘Is it not ill that such a beast wants hornes?’ And these passages may please the modern reader as much as any. The historian, who comes to it almost numbed with Drab, is more likely to notice what is unprecedented, the conceits that ‘with wings of love in aire of wonder flie’, the ‘golden sea whose waves in curles are broken’ or the
shafts of light
Closed with their quivers in Sleeps armorie.
Notice again how few of these words exist only for the sake of other words; notice the variety of the vowels; notice the hint, the finer spirit, of alliteration. Then consider how far it overgoes the common (though excellent) equation of eye-glances with arrows, and yet preserves it. There had been nothing like this in English before. There had hardly been anything like it in Latin; you must go back to Greeks, whom Sidney almost certainly did not know, to find a parallel.
Poetry still has its militant, though tiny, audience: but the taste for romance seems in our age to be dead, and the very corpse mutilated and mocked. Yet if we are ever to enter into the life of our ancestors we must try to appreciate the Arcadia as well as the Astrophel and Stella. For those (I am not one of them) who find it unattractive the first step must be to replace it in its setting. It was not, when Sidney wrote it, a bizarre, irrelevant book. Its style may not be what they now call ‘functional’; no more were the architecture, clothes, furniture, and etiquette of the period that begot it. As we read it we must have in mind the ruffs, the feathers, the tapestries, the rich carvings, the mannered gardens, the elaborate courtesies. Even its sentiment was at no such distance from life as we suppose. How near it came to Sidney’s own life we know; when he threw away his cuisses at Zutphen, by which he got his death wound, he was obeying a heroic punctilio worthy of Argalus or Amadis. But love could be as romantic as war. ‘He told him of a gentleman who not long before found all the people bewailing the death of a gentlewoman that had lived there, and grew so in love with the description that he grew desperately melancholy and would goe to a mount where the print of her foote was cutt and lie there pining and kissing of it all the day long, till at length death concluded his languishment.’ You would think that was from a heroic romance: actually, it comes from Lucy Hutchinson’s memoir of her husband, and his own passion, a few pages later, is almost of the same kind. Many readers may ask whether the reality is not as foolish and tasteless as the fiction. It is a good question; and sympathetic reading of the Arcadia will enrich our data for answering it. To judge between one ethos and another, it is necessary to have got inside both, and if literary history does not help us to do so it is a great waste of labour.
Some time between 1577 and 1580 Sidney wrote for his sister a prose romance; an ‘idle worke’, partly written in her presence and partly sent to her sheet by sheet. In 1581 or 1582, as we know from a letter of Greville’s, he began to rewrite it in a more serious spirit and on a much larger scale, but left off in the middle of a sentence in Book III. This fragment was published by Ponsonby after Sidney’s death in the quarto of 1590. Such a truncated text must have tormented all gentle hearts, and in 1593 the best that could now be contrived was given them in Ponsonby’s folio: this reprints the fragment which had appeared in the quarto and adds Books III to V ‘out of the Authors owne writings and conceits’. This composite text is the Arcadia which our ancestors knew. But the original ‘idle worke’ had not perished, and in the present century several manuscripts of it have been discovered. It was then found that this ‘old Arcadia’ differed in some respects not only from the revised fragment (as we knew it would) but also from those later parts of the Ponsonby folio which had been ‘supplied’ from Sidney’s ‘owne writings and conceits’. It thus comes about that, instead of the work which Sidney intended to leave us, we have three things: (1) The ‘old’ or cancelled Arcadia in its entirety, (2) the fragment of revised Arcadia, (3) the last three Books (III–V) of the cancelled Arcadia modified for inclusion in the folio.
The difference between the first and second is structural. The cancelled Arcadia had told a fairly simple tale; in the revised fragment Sidney complicated it by a labyrinth of interwoven stories in conformity with the epic practice of his time. He turned, in fact, from something like the technique of the modern novel to the technique of Spenser, Ariosto, Malory, the French prose romances, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It was therefore to be expected that many modern critics, bred on the novel, should prefer the cancelled Arcadia to the revised; but to say that it was better, that Sidney in his revision was spoiling his work, would be rather ingenuous. Our own taste in fiction has not yet lasted as long as the taste for the interwoven sort lasted. When we find ourselves rejecting a method in which so many spirited and polished generations took pleasure, it requires great boldness—or impudence—to assume that we are in the right.
The differences between the cancelled Arcadia and the later parts of the folio are small but important: the two that matter most are these. In the cancelled Arcadia, at the end of Book III, Philoclea (under very extenuating circumstances) surrenders her virginity to Pyrocles without marriage; and earlier in the same book (under circumstances of most aggravated treachery) Musidorus is restrained from the rape of Pamela only by a timely interruption. In the corresponding parts of the folio the honour of Philoclea and the good faith of Musidorus are both preserved. This does not imply any change of morality, for the acts which are omitted in the folio had been condemned in the cancelled version. The artistic value of the change is very difficult to judge. For those of us who have been early steeped in the traditional version, the difficulty is not one of morals but of credibility. We cannot suspend our disbelief in a Musidorus who commits indecent assaults: it is as if, in some re-discovered first draft of Emma, we were asked to accept a Mr. Woodhouse who fought a duel with Frank Churchill. Philoclea’s lapse is in comparison a trifle; and in the folio text, where so much of the scene is retained and the main purpose of the scene omitted, the result is certainly inferior.
It is tempting to assume that Lady Pembroke made these changes with no authority, in obedience to what some call her ‘prudery’. But this is by no means certain. Ponsonby said that the later books were derived not from Sidney’s writings only, but from his ‘writings and conceits’. This may, no doubt, be merely a redundant expression; but it is equally possible that Ponsonby means what he says, and that Lady Pembroke retouched the ‘writings’ or manuscripts in the light of the ‘conceits’—that is, of alterations which, to her knowledge, Sidney had intended to make. In revising his romance, he was turning it from a ‘toyfull booke’ into a prose epic which would have no need to shun ‘severer eyes’. This might well have involved heroines more chaste and heroes more heroical than he had previously intended, and it would be natural enough that he should discuss these changes with his sister. It was, after all, her book.
But these questions, however interesting to the student of Sidney, do not much concern the literary historian. To him ‘the Arcadia’ must mean the composite text of 1593: it, and it alone, is the book which lived; Shakespeare’s book, Charles I’s book, Milton’s book, Lamb’s book, our own book long before we heard of textual criticism. If the recovery of the cancelled version is to prevent our looking steadily at the text which really affected the English mind, it will have been a disaster.
The two great influences on Sidney’s romance are the Arcadia (1501) of Sannazaro and the Ethiopian History (fourth century A.D.) of Heliodorus. There are of course others; Malory possibly, Amadis probably, and Montemayor’s Diana. But Montemayor is himself largely a disciple of Sannazaro: it is from Sannazaro and Heliodorus that the two kinds of fiction which Sidney is fusing really descend.
Sannazaro’s work belongs formally to an extinct species, the Varronian Satura Menippea in alternating proses and metres, as used by Boethius and Alanus. Since it was originally entitled Ecloghe we may perhaps conclude that for Sannazaro the poems were the important thing and the intervening proses were intended merely as links. If so, his actual achievement is different from, and better than, his design. The thread of narrative in the proses, though enriched with epic material (the funeral games in XI) and romantic (the subterranean journey in XII or the Wood of Dreadful Beauty in X) is indeed very slight. But it has a momentous effect. It creates for the singing shepherds a landscape, a social structure, a whole world; a new image, only hinted by previous pastoralists, has come into existence—the image of Arcadia itself. That is why Sannazaro’s work, though in one sense highly derivative—it is claimed that almost every phrase has a classical origin—is, in another, so new and so important. If Pope was able to take it for granted that ‘Pastoral is an image of what they call the Golden Age’, this was largely the result of Sannazaro’s Arcadia. It was Sannazaro, more than any one else, who turned pastoral away from the harshness of Mantuan (or our own Barclay), made of it something to be pictured not in grotesque woodcuts but in the art of Poussin, and so created one of the great dreams of humanity. To that extent he is a founder.
Heliodorus, translated by Thomas Underdowne in 1569, not from the Greek but from an intermediate Latin version, had in Sidney’s time an importance which the successive narrowings of our classical tradition have since obscured. In order to see that importance we must once more remind ourselves that the word ‘poesie’ could cover prose fiction. We must remember the taste for interlocked and endlessly varied narrative to which the medieval romances and Italian epics equally bear witness. These facts, taken together, explain why Scaliger cites the Aithiopica as a model of epic construction; why Sidney and Tasso both mention it among heroic poems, and Racine (it is said) thought of turning it into a tragedy. And though it is not literature of the greatest sort, it partly deserved Scaliger’s praise. The plot is cleverly devised so as to combine a breathless variety of adventure with an ultimate unity of action. Thus supplied the delectare; the docere was provided by the constancy, lawfulness, and (almost medieval) courtesy of the love between Theagenes and Chariclea. It was widely read. Shakespeare makes Orsino remember its ‘Egyptian thief’. Fletcher in his Shepherdess borrows from it the taper that will not burn the chaste. Details about the ‘church’ and priesthood of Isis reappear in Spenser’s story of Britomart. Its elaborate descriptions of dress may have encouraged an existing Elizabethan taste for such things.
From Sannazaro Sidney took over the Menippean form (though he made his proses so long that we hardly notice it) and the idea of Arcadia itself. From Heliodorus he took over the conception of the prose epic, filling his story with shipwreck, disguise, battle, and intrigue. For the battles he drew upon Homer (but no doubt, Homer strained through Virgil). The first thing we need to know about the Arcadia is that it is a heroic poesy; not Arcadian idyll, not even Arcadian romance, but Arcadian epic.
To call it a pastoral romance is misleading. The title seems to promise that, and the first few pages keep the promise. But almost at once Sidney leads us away from ‘the shepherdish complaynts of Strephon’ to a shipwreck, to the house of a country gentleman, to affairs of state, and to the royal family. The shepherds sink to the rank of minor characters, their eclogues to a recurrent interlude. It is true that Basilius and his court for the sake of the plot are in rustic retirement. But they are not figures in an idyll; their complicated domestic life contains both tragic and comic elements. The loves of the major characters are not ‘shepherdish’. Those of the heroes are heroical, that of Basilius, senile and ridiculous, that of Gynecia, a sinister obsession like the love of Phèdre, and felt as such by its victim. But as the Arcadia is not mainly pastoral, so neither is it wholly amatory. Already in the first two books we are struck by the high proportion of chivalrous adventure to amorous complaint. When we reach the third the epic quality increases. There is less interweaving of separate stories in the medieval manner. There is an increasingly tragic atmosphere. The battles, though no less chivalrous, are more filled with Homeric echoes. The main story, now marching steadily forward, holds us for its own sake.
But even when we have added the heroic to the amatory and realized that the pastoral is quite subordinate, we have still left out one of the elements that go to make the Arcadia. Sidney is not merely a lover and a knight; he is also a moralist, a scholar, and a man of affairs. He aspires to teach not only virtue but prudence. He often exchanges his poetical prose for that style which the ancients called politike; and he dearly loves a debate or a set speech. No one has really tasted the Arcadia who does not remember the epistle of Philanax in Book I, Zelmane’s speech to the rebels in Book II, the discussions on beauty and on the existence of God in Book III, or that on suicide in Book IV—not to mention the maxims of law, government, morals, or psychology, which are scattered on nearly every page. It is significant that the whole story moves neither to a martial nor an amorous, but to a forensic, climax; the great trial scene almost fills the fifth book. We are expected to enjoy the rhetoric of the chief speakers and (what is really part of their rhetoric) their carefully chosen dress. We are expected to revere the inflexible gravity of Euarchus. It was only the conventional modesty of a ‘gentle’ author that led Sidney to describe even his cancelled version as a ‘toyfull booke’; and to the real Arcadia such words have no application at all. Beyond all doubt he was intending to express totius vitae imaginem. If he offers sweets in plenty for the young and amorous reader, he also provides solid nourishment for maturer stomachs.
This many-sided appeal can easily be misrepresented by a one-sided choice of quotations. We can paint Arcadia all ‘humble vallies comforted with refreshing of siluer riuers’, all trees that ‘maintaine their flourishing olde age with the onely happinesse of their seat, being clothed with a continual spring because no beautie here should euer fade’. We can people it with lovers who ‘stoppe their eares lest they grow mad with musicke’ and who, on seeing their mistress in an orchard, exclaim ‘the apples, me thought, fell downe from the trees to do homage to the apples of her breast’. We can mention the war horse ‘milk white but that vpon his shoulder and withers he was fretned with red staines as when a few strawberies are scattered into a dish of creame’, his mane and tail ‘died in carnation’ and his harness ‘artificially made’ like vine branches. Such is the Arcadia we know from popular tradition before we open the book. And all this is really there. But it is not there alone. Against these passages we can quote almost as many of a sterner and graver kind. ‘Judgement’, says Euarchus (as if he had been reading Burke), ‘must vndoubtedly bee done, not by a free discourse of reason and skill of philosophy, but must be tied to the lawes of Greece and municipall statutes of this kingdome’ (1593, V). ‘Hope’, says Pamela, ‘is the fawning traitour of the minde, while vnder the colour of friendship, it robbes it of his chiefe force of resolution’ (III. xxxvii). Noble youths ‘looke through loue vpon the maiesty of vertue’ (III. xvii) and ‘the journey of high honour . . . lies not in plaine wayes’ (II. xxiii). If Charles I used Pamela’s prayer in prison, he was not ill advised: even the less known prayer of Musidorus, if somewhat unregenerate in its object, is noble in style and rhythm (1593, IV). The fantastic equipage of the knights does not mean that Sidney ignores the reality of battle. He draws both sides of that picture and himself points the contrast:
For at the first, though it were terrible, yet Terror was deckt so brauelie with rich furniture, guilte swords, shining armours, pleasant pensils, that the eye with delight had scarce leasure to be afraide; But now all vniuersally defiled with dust, blood, broken armours, mangled bodies, tooke away the maske, and sette foorth Horror in his owne horrible manner (III. viii).
Quotation to illustrate this less Arcadian side of Sidney could be endless, but I must content myself with one more specimen, the magnificent viximus of Musidorus and Pyrocles in their condemned cell:
We haue liued, and liued to be good to our selues and others: our soules, which are put into the sturring earth of our bodyes, haue atchieved the causes of their hither coming: They haue knowne, and honoured with knowledge, the cause of their creation, and to many men (for in this time, place and fortune, it is lawfull for vs to speake gloriously) it hath bene behouefull that we should liue (1593, V).
The elaboration of the style, always, of course, most noticeable to those who nave no taste for the matter, seems to me to lessen as the book goes on. But even at its most elaborate it does not exclude reality, though it is usually a heightened reality. Most of the characters are, no doubt, types and much that happens is improbable; but Sidney contrives to let us know very well the sort of people he is talking about. His artificiality is not of the kind which needs to be carefully protected; whenever he pleases he can drop into simplicity and no shock is felt; as in the sentence ‘At that Philoclea smiled with a little nod’ (II. xx). He can afford to let us hear Zelmane stuttering or Kalander lecturing the young men on early hours. He can show us Zoilus ‘turning up his mustachoes and marching as if he would begin a paven’, or old Basilius ‘stroking vp’ his stockings and nodding his head ‘as though they mistook him much that thought he was not his wiues maister’ (1593, III). The comic relief supplied by Dametas and his family is by no means contemptible; at the end of the old fourth, in the story of the buried treasure and the ash-tree, it is really good. Sidney does not, like Shakespeare, love his clowns, but he has made me laugh.
Of the characters, Basilius is a stock comic type and the two heroes, though adequate in their context, do not live on in the mind. It is in his women that Sidney shows himself a true maker. Gynecia I have already compared to Phèdre, not, of course, because there is any equality of art between Sidney and Racine, but because both are studies of the same thing, and against the same background of Augustinian theology. Each pictures the tormented human will, impotent against the depravity of fallen human nature. The horror of Gynecia’s state is that, while the will is instantly enslaved, the judgement of good and evil remains clear. Her very virtues, being merely natural, and therefore only splendida vitia, give her no help against the ‘hideous thing’, nay rather aggravate her fall: in Sidney’s terrible words she had been ‘guiltie of a long exercised virtue which made this vice the fuller of deformitie’. In defiance of the supposed paganism of Arcadia he allows her to make the theology explicit when she says, ‘strange mixture of humaine mindes! Only so much good left as to make vs languish in our owne euills’ (1593, III).
Pamela and Philoclea, on the other hand, are true natives of Arcadia. They can be praised without reservation. English literature had seen no women to compare with them since Chaucer’s Crisseid; and, apart from Shakespeare, was to wait centuries for their equals. They are, of course, idealized; but then they are lifelike as well. It is easy to produce lifeless idealisms; it is perhaps easier than we suppose to paint people (think of Trollope’s Johnny Eames) as real, and also as dull, as some people we meet. But to idealize discreetly, to go beyond Nature yet on Nature’s lines, to paint dreams which have not come through the ivory gate, to embody what reality hints, forms such as ‘Nature, often erring, yet shewes she would fame make’—this is a very rare achievement. And Sidney has almost done it. I do not think that the majesty of Pamela is ever strained or the simplicity of Philoclea ever insipid. The contrast between the two cynosures, worked out in every detail, down to the difference of their toilets in prison (III. v, x), helps to save them from abstraction. Here are great ladies; the first fruits of returning civilization and an earnest that this civilization will rise high and last long.
Yet characterization is not Sidney’s main interest. The heart of the Arcadia, the thing for which it exists, which wrung from Milton even in his anger an admission of its ‘wit and worth’, is its nobility of sentiment. We can almost say of Sidney as Johnson said of Richardson, ‘You must read him for the sentiment.’ Sidney assumes in his readers an agreed response to certain ideals of virtue, honour, friendship, and magnanimity. His conception of love is a Platonic elaboration of medieval Frauendienst—the theory, later expressed by Patmore, that erotic love can be a sensuous appetite of intelligible good. Hence he can speak of noble women as having ‘throwne reason vpon our desires and, as it were, giuen eyes to Cupid’ (I. i). We are meant to feel as an unpurchasable grace that single kiss which Pamela vouchsafes to her lover, ‘either loue so commanding her, which doubted how long they should enioy one another; or of a liuely spark of noblenes, to descende in most favour to one when he is lowest in affliction’. And the second alternative is to be taken seriously. A lover is not to be suspected of self-deception when he says
the roote of my desire
Was vertue cladde in constant loues attire (1593, III).
At the same time, there is no notion that love has a right to override all claims. Infinite, so to speak, in one direction, it is, in another, rigidly bounded by different parts of the pattern of honour. It leaves the laws of friendship sacred. ‘Life of my desires,’ says Musidorus to Philoclea, ‘what is mine euen to my soule is yours; but the secret of my friend is not mine.’ And the friendship of which we here speak is ‘a child and not the father of Vertue’. Everything proposed for our admiration in the Arcadia is on that level, everything is good and fair and beyond the common reach. It was not written for a democracy. And though this exaltation may strain a modern reader it is never itself strained, never rings false like the later heroic drama. We can hardly doubt that it was among the lofty romances which Milton acknowledged as his textbooks of love and chastity, replete with those beauties whereof ‘not to be sensible argues a gross and swainish disposition’.
In that way the Arcadia is a kind of touchstone. What a man thinks of it, far more than what he thinks of Shakespeare or Spenser or Donne, tests the depth of his sympathy with the sixteenth century. For it is, as Carrara says of the earlier Italian Arcadia, a work of distillation. It gathers up what a whole generation wanted to say. The very gallimaufry that it is—medieval, Protestant, pastoral, Stoical, Platonic—made it the more characteristic and, as long as that society lasted, more satisfactory.
The style is not one that naturally appeals to most modern ears. Its essence is fullness, its danger, overfullness. Every rift is loaded with ore; this ‘ore’ mostly consisting of descriptive detail, simile, metaphor, or conceit. The sentences are usually long: whether too long, may be disputed. A sentence is too long either when length makes it obscure or unpronounceable, or else when the matter is too little to fill it. Sidney seldom offends against the first canon; about the second it is not so easy to decide. Much that seems otiose if we consider only the necessities of plot and character, may yet be necessary to the atmosphere. The looks and clothes and retinues of the characters, and the scenes in which they appear, are really essential to the Arcadian quality. The world which Sidney is imagining could not, perhaps, be described without conceits. Even the real world, as he saw it, was allegorical, emblematic: Arcadia, of course, more so. I believe we should seldom blame Sidney for saying too much if we were in full sympathy with his mode of appreciating external nature. When the princesses are drying after their bathe, ‘the water (with some drops) seemed to weepe that it should parte from such bodies’ (II. xi). We are apt to regard such conceits as a frigid substitute for real observation and enjoyment. More probably they are fantasies wrought upon an observation and enjoyment which were real but very different from ours. I remarked before that the Elizabethans had neither the romantic, nor the scientific, reverence for nature. Her beauties were, for them, not degraded but raised by being forced into real service to, or fanciful connexion with, the needs and moods of humanity. Their outlook was anthropocentric to a degree now hardly imaginable. This comes out well in a place where Sidney is not writing fantastically at all. He tells us that the shepherds’ arena was surrounded by ‘such a sort of trees as eyther excellency of fruit, statelines of growth, continuall greennes, or poeticall fancies haue made at any time famous’ (I. xix). Every one of these qualifications is illuminating. Sidney likes things to be useful, healthy, and perfect in their own kinds. To that extent he is at one with Jane Austen’s Edward Ferrars; ‘I do not like crooked, twisted, blasted trees. I admire them much more if they are tall, straight and flourishing. . . . I am not fond of nettles or thistles or heath blossoms.’ But, unlike Ferrars, he is a poet, a mythologist, and a scholar. He wants ‘poeticall fancies’ and ‘fame’ as well as fruit and shade. He values, in fact, those parts of nature which, for whatever reason, have already made good their claim on man’s attention. His ‘Nature’ is a nature thoroughly humanized, thoroughly subjugated to man’s pleasure, and now, after so many centuries of planting, pruning, mowing, myth-making, after so many physic gardens, emblems, languages of flowers, and topiary, almost an extension of ourselves. He would not understand our objection to the conceits. The Romantic poet wishes to be absorbed into Nature, the Elizabethan, to absorb her.
The case against the Arcadia does not rest upon its style. Doubtless it is no perfect style, but it has its own appropriateness and admits more vigour and variety than is popularly supposed. Probably no man, qualified in other respects to enjoy the book, was ever really deterred by its style. Those who dislike Sidney’s manner also dislike his matter. A simple style could not carry that matter at all. In that sense his decorations can be called ‘functional’, if not in each particular sentence, yet in their total effect. Jonson placed him beside Hooker as a master, not only of invention and judgement, but of language.
A more serious criticism against him might be that the elements he has taken from Sannazaro do not really lie down at ease with those he has taken from Heliodorus. Sannazaro’s Arcadia was a golden world; Heliodorus offers us a world of battle, murder, and sudden death. When Sidney has blended the two, some may ask how Arcadia can admit such disorders, or what was the use of taking us to Arcadia at all if this is what we find there. But I think such criticism would reveal a misunderstanding. Sidney by no means commits himself to the claim that his Arcadia represents the state of innocence in any strictly Christian or Stoical sense. Its woods are greener, its rivers purer, its sky brighter than ours. But its inhabitants are ‘ideal’ only in the sense that they are either more beautiful or more ugly, more stately or more ridiculous, more vicious or more virtuous, than those whom we meet every day. The world he paints is, in fact, simplified and heightened; because it is the poet’s business to feign ‘notable images’ of virtues and vices. But we must not exaggerate the extent to which he intends his heroes and heroines for images of virtue. Their faults are conceived, no doubt, as the faults of noble natures: yet still as faults. Musidorus exhorts Pyrocles against the ‘base affection’ of love (1590, I. ix) as a thing which will ‘divert his thoughts from the way of goodnesse’ (ibid. xii); when conquered himself, he apostrophizes love as a ‘celestial or infernal spirit’ (ibid. 342 xviii). Not that Sidney thinks thus of love simpliciter; but he sees in these loves an element of ‘ill governed passion’ and they lead to actions which he does not approve. In that respect the expurgation of Philoclea’s weakness and Musidorus’ attempted rape alter the nature of the story only in degree. Imperfection, not condoned because it is lovely imperfection, remains and is rebuked by Euarchus: ‘Loue may have no such priviledge. That sweete and heavenly vniting of mindes, which properly is called loue, hath no other knot but vertue, and therefore if it be a right loue, it can never slide into any action which is not vertuous.’ The ‘uniting of mindes’ does not here, of course, exclude the uniting of bodies in marriage; what is condemned is disguise, trickery, hypocrisy, and abduction—and probably marriage without parents’ consent. These things bring his heroes within an ace of death under the sentence of a just judge.
Theoretically we are all pagans in Arcadia, and there is nothing necessarily foreign to paganism in the judgement of Euarchus. Nevertheless, Christian theology is always breaking in. Thus a single phrase like ‘Since neither we made ourselves nor bought ourselves’ (1593, IV) casually and perhaps unconsciously lets in the whole doctrine of the Redemption. Pamela’s prayer is Christian in all but name. This superficial discrepancy does no more harm here than in Comus or in the Winter’s Tale, where Leontes consults the Delphic oracle but Polixenes knows all about original sin, ‘the imposition hereditary ours’. The convention was well understood, and very useful. In such works the gods are God incognito and everyone is in the secret. Paganism is the religion of poetry through which the author can express, at any moment, just so much or so little of his real religion as his art requires.
The Arcadia, as I have said, is a work of sentiment. It expresses an ideal. Whatever we think of that ideal, we must not mistake it for a mere emotional indulgence. The balance and tension within it of many diverse ardours—erotic, heroic, political, ethical, religious—save it from that charge. In Dryden’s heroic plays all is subordinate to Iove, in Mackenzie, all to ‘feeling’, in Kipling, all to discipline. Sidney is not like that. His ideal is not a reverie but a structure. A sane man could—I think sane men did—attempt to live by it. His constancy to so builded an ideal gives to him, as to the young Milton, the quality of joyful seriousness. And that, to some tastes, compensates for many faults.
The Defence of Poesie or Apology for Poetry, as the two quartos of 1595 respectively name it, is, I suppose, universally accepted as the best critical essay in English before Dryden; and it is not obvious that Dryden wrote anything so good. In his comments on individual writers he is no doubt happier than Sidney, but in the theory of poetry he is much less consistent and complete. He lives from hand to mouth. Sidney’s theory, for good or ill, springs organically from his whole attitude to life. If we want to refute it we must grub up the roots.
Because that attitude was widely shared Sidney can make much use of his predecessors. His central doctrine, that the poet is a second Creator producing a second Nature, is taken from Scaliger. The historical doctrine that poetry is the eldest of the arts probably comes from Minturno. Aristotle is misunderstood and pressed into the service of a Poetics different from his own. His ‘universal’ becomes ‘what is fit to be said or done’ and the unities of place and time are foisted upon him. Sometimes a commonplace in Sidney has a longer and more complicated history than this; the idea that poetry is a ‘speaking picture’ is to be found in Vives, Horace, and (perhaps this is the fountain head) Simonides. Behind Scaliger, as we have seen, lies Plotinus. Rummaging thus in the genealogy of ideas we may get the impression that the copious works of our ancestors were all spun out of a very small stock of thought, but posterity, rummaging in our works, may find the same. It is when a commonplace ceases to be common that it is first recognized as such.
Sidney’s own taste is that of a chivalrous, heroic, and romantic person, slightly modified at certain points by humanistic rule of thumb. Thus, on the one hand, he welcomes, from Minturno, the idea, unknown to Aristotle, that tragedy should move admiration. He thinks ‘high flying libertie of conceit’ proper to a poet. Epic is the ‘best and most accomplished’ (that is, the most perfect) of the kinds. He thinks peace may be hostile to poetry, for it is the companion of camps. A soldier will never reject Ariosto or ‘honest king Arthur’—where ‘honest’ is probably a conscious contradiction of Ascham. Chaucer, unexpectedly but delightfully, is praised not for the Tales but for Troilus. Even compositions which Sidney the humanist feels bound to disparage, such as Amadis and the ballad of Chevy Chase, are obviously dear to him. On the other hand, Gorboduc is praised for its Senecal style and damned (along with all our rising school of drama) for its disobedience to the unities. The ‘olde rusticke language’ of Spenser’s Calendar is disapproved not on any analysis of its effect but solely on the ground that it does not follow precedent—‘neither Theocritus in Greeke, Virgill in Latine, nor Sannazaro in Italian’ had used it. In what sense this is true of Theocritus he does not explain. Sidney’s discussion of comedy is unsatisfactory and perhaps inconsistent. On the general state of English poetry in his own time he does better. The frigidity of most love poetry (it lacks Energia), the excessive alliteration, the ‘surfet’ of similes from ‘beasts, fowles, and fishes’ were real faults. On versification he seems to understand his own meaning better than most Elizabethan writers. Accent here means, as it does not always, stress accent, and he has some notion of its importance for our prosody. On More’s Utopia he makes a good distinction between the ‘Way’ or method and the commonwealth presented, reserving his praise for the former.
When we have eliminated the Exordium (with Chria) and the jocular peroration, the logical structure of the Defence becomes plain with one exception. The exact relation between Sidney’s first account of the poet as maker or ποιητής and the ‘more ordinarie opening of him’ as an imitator is not at once apparent. In reality the ‘more ordinarie opening’ is concessive and strategical. If the first account has seemed to some readers too ambitious and metaphysical, here for their comfort is something ‘which no man will denie’. But when once we have been thus lured into agreement we shall find that it all comes to the same thing in the end and we are committed to Sidney’s full doctrine. For of poets, thus ‘more ordinarily opened’ there are three kinds, the devotional, the philosophical, and the fictional, and it is the third who are ‘indeed right Poets’ and with whom the rest of the Defence is to be concerned. And these imitate in such a curious sense (it is not explained) that they ‘to imitate, borrow nothing of what is, hath bin, or shall be, but range onely reined with learned discretion into the divine consideration of what may be and should be’. And so we return to the real Sidneian position.
The basis of that position is the de jure superiority of Man in the natural universe. He is set ‘beyond and over’ it. Nothing shows both that superiority and its loss (de facto) by the Fall so clearly as poetry. For in it we produce what surpasses Nature; our ‘erected wit’ still enabling us to conceive perfection though our ‘infected wil’ hinders us from achieving it in action. Because the infection lies in our will, not in our wit, the pretensions of the moral philosopher are spurious. The ‘inward light’ has already shown us the goodness he professes to teach. What keeps us back is not defect of reason, but our ‘combersome servant passion’—to whom the philosopher has nothing to say. He heals that in us which is not sick and abandons that which is. Passion needs to be enticed to virtue, and poetry provides the enticement by her ‘notable images of vertues, vices, or what els’. This is her share in the common function of all learnings, which is ‘to lift up the minde . . . to the enjoying of his owne diuine essence’. To that end she is set free from Nature, not ‘captived’ like history to ‘the trueth of a foolish world’ but licenced to create ‘things either better than nature bringeth foorth, or quite anew, formes such as never were’. Or, if she is in some way dependent on Nature, she acts and plays not what Nature in fact produces, but what Nature ‘will have set forth’ (doubtless Aristotle’s βούλεται ποιει̃ν). Sidney is aware that this conception may seem megalomaniac—‘too saucy’ are his own words. But it is seriously held. Sidney has faced the objection that poetry does not ‘make’ anything in the sense in which Nature makes, because the products of poetry are not real. (‘The workes of the one be essenciall, the other in imitation or fiction.’) To this there are two answers. What matters about anything is not its reality in the sense demanded but its idea. What would it add to the idea of Pickwick if parish registers and death certificates told us that such a man had veritably lived and died? And secondly, in so far as poetry makes its readers enamored of virtue and thus modifies their behaviour, poetry does produce results in the historical world. In that sense, Xenophon by feigning one Cyrus may have helped to make ‘many Cyrusses’ who are not feigned.
In this abstract the danger is lest Sidney’s theory should seem too bleakly didactic. And there is one point at which it threatens to become so in reality. When he defends the poet from the charge of lying by the example of the lawyer who puts a case under the names of ‘John of the Stile and John of the Nokes’ or the chess player who calls a piece of wood a bishop, and continues ‘the Poet nameth Cyrus and Aeneas no other way then to shewe what men of their fames, fortunes, and estates, should doo’, we become uneasy. The respectable theory that poetry is ‘delightfull teaching’ is here ready to slip into the manifestly absurd theory that the scenes and persons of the poem are mere examples, in themselves as arbitrary and sapless as the symbols of algebra. But any such development is precluded by the whole nature of Sidney’s thought. If poetry does not ravish, it is for him nothing. The ‘Golden world’ which it presents must be set forth ‘in so rich Tapistry’ as Nature never knew, must lure us into itself. The images of virtue are no mere moralitas, no powder hidden under jam. They are the final sweetness of that sweet world, ‘the form of goodness, which seen we cannot but love’. The assumption (to put it in our language) that the ethical is the aesthetic par excellence is so basic to Sidney that he never argues it. He thought we would know.
Many causes make it unlikely that most of my readers will accept Sidney’s theory of poetry. One element in it has indeed been too cavalierly dismissed. His belief that poetry (by which he means fiction) can help men to be good now raises a smile; yet in a world where no discussion of juvenile delinquency is complete without a reference to the dangers of the film, this is surely very strange. Why should fiction be potent to corrupt and powerless to edify? But to accept Sidney in his entirety a man would have to share his theology, his ethics, and his delight in heroic narrative. If he did share them, he would not find Sidney’s theory easy to reject. That is where its greatness lies. It was not manufactured and the facts, as Sidney saw them, did not have to be falsified to fit it. Apart from the few humanistic pedantries which I have noted, it is the form into which the actual taste and ethics and religion and poetic practice of his age and class (some courtiers have ‘a more sound stile’ than scholars) naturally fell when reflected on and harmonized. This does not by any means imply that he ever follows mere fashion; he explicitly dissents from the popular Platonic doctrine of Inspiration. He is not a man following a ‘Movement’. He is the man in whom the ‘Golden’ poetics, as by right, become most fully articulate.
There is great variety in Sidney’s prose style, ranging from the richly decorated parts of the Arcadia to that of the Letter to Molyneux (‘I assure you before God that if ever I know you do so muche as reede any lettre I wryte to my Father, without his commandement, or my consente, I will thruste my Dagger into you. And truste to it, for I speake it in earnest’). The style of the Defence lies about in the middle; rich, but not overrich, in images, pressing on at a good pace, and full (like all his work) of gusto.
We know Edmund Spenser (1552–99) as a man less well than we know Sidney; and probably, as a man, he was less worth knowing. He developed more slowly. Sidney’s work rises out of the contemporary Drab almost as a rocket rises: Spenser climbed out slowly and painfully, like Christian from the slough. His work has, nevertheless, excited a wider and more enduring interest. It has perhaps more commerce than Sidney’s with our subconscious and semi-conscious minds; probes deeper. That may be his compensation for being a more ordinary man, less clever, less easily articulate. Here, as often, defects and virtues are closely connected. His not infrequent dullness and flatness may owe something to that same simplicity and quietness of mind which give his great passages their peculiar depth and, as it were, rectitude. We feel that they could not have been otherwise, that nothing has been merely ‘made up’.
Before dealing with his poetry I shall touch briefly on some people and things which may be supposed to have influenced him.
Of his old headmaster, Richard Mulcaster (1530?–1611) we know a good deal, and though his Positions did not appear till 1581 nor his First Part of the Elementary till 1582 they were probably based on ideas and experience which he already had when Spenser worked under him, and it will be convenient to deal with them here. He is on many accounts a memorable man. First, for his style. I should not blame a student who at sight attributed the following to the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity:
For we do confesse that this multiplicitie and manifold vse in the force and seruice of our letters, wold haue som distinction, whereby to be known, if generall acquaintance with our own writing be not sufficient enough to perceiue that in vse which we put down by vse; but withall we defend and maintain the multiplicitie it self, as a thing much vsed in the best tungs, and therefore not vnlawfull, tho’ there were no distinction (Elementary, XIV).
It is not only Hooker’s manner; the very quality of Hooker’s mind is there, the sequaciousness, the gentle, quiet persistence. At his best Mulcaster is Hooker’s precursor in English prose. But of course he is not always at his best. He is more euphuistic than Hooker and fond of alliteration; one of his reasons for loving English was that he thought it a tongue which ‘doth admit such dalliance with the letter as I knowe not anie’ (ibid. Peroration). Unlike Hooker he is often obscure, and is apt to plunge into refinements before he has made the main issue perfectly clear. He is impenitently aware that his style is not easy. He did not mean it to be; he wanted it ‘to print depe euen bycause it semes dark, and contains a matter, which must be thrise lookt on, ear it be once gotten’ (ibid.). We are to ‘read at leasur and not all at once’ (ibid.). It is a high tone from a man who is writing a glorified spelling book; for that, after all, is Mulcaster’s achievement. The Positions—by ‘positions’ he means postulates or preliminary maxims—introduces the ‘first part’ of the Elementary, and the four other parts which he failed to write would still not have brought the pupil to his Latin grammar. If we quail at the prospect, then we are shallow creatures in Mulcaster’s eyes, smatterers who only ‘bid a book goodmorrow’; he does not write for us. Nil in studiis parvum est—‘leave time to dogs and apes’. There is a kind of heroical absurdity in all this. Indeed it is impossible to read Mulcaster long without smiling. Sometimes he meant us to smile. He recalls innumerable scenes in head-masters’ studies when he writes of the father who will ‘very carefully commend his silly poore boy at his first entry, to his maisters charge, not omitting euen how much his mother makes of him, if she come not her selfe and do her owne commendation’ (Positions, IV). But he is quite serious when he recommends holding the breath as a beneficial physical exercise ‘though all men can tell what a singular benefit breathing is’ (ibid. XV) or writes ‘Consider but the vse of our legges, how necessarie they be’ (ibid. XX). Yet as we read on we become aware that we are dealing with a learned, an original, and almost a great mind. In Mulcaster humanism has grown ripe and is beginning to correct its first harshness and narrowness. He accepts the doctrine of a classical age in every tongue (Elementary, XII), but he is also aware of tongues as living and growing organisms each governed (as we should say) by its ‘genius’ in his language by its ‘prerogatiue’, which is its ‘secret misterie, or rather quikning spirit’. For ‘there is som soulish substance in euerie spoken tung’. Hence after a language has been ‘fined’ into its classical period it will again decay ‘and a new period groweth, different from the old, tho’ excellent in the altered kinde, and yet it selfe to depart and make room for another, when the circular turn shall have ripened alteration’ (ibid. XXIII). These words lay the foundations for a genuinely historical and sensitive philology and sweep away (perhaps more effectively than Mulcaster knew) a great deal of ignorant dogmatism. On loan words (ibid. XXII) he goes at once to the root of the matter, and his refutation of phonetic spelling (XII) is far in advance of much that is talked and printed in modern England. Though deeply in love with learning he is well aware of the cruelty involved in breeding to it more men than the learned professions can support, and faces the problem honestly (Positions, XXXVI, XXXVII, et passim). He is a great defender of women and advocates their education; not because he would be progressive, but, on the contrary, because it is already ‘the manner and custome of my countrey’ (ibid. XXXVIII). The reason is characteristic. Mulcaster again and again expresses his reverence for custom. He deliberately writes so that he need ‘feare no note of noueltie’: he is ‘nothing giuen to the vnpossible’. That is why he abandons the Burtonian or Shandean habit of supporting everything with Classical or continental authorities. For in reality the ‘circunstance of the countrie’ usually makes such transplanted maxims irrelevant and ‘the likeness of vnlike things’ is deceptive (ibid. III). Here again we are reminded of the caution of Hooker, or of Burke: Mulcaster is no doctrinaire with a blue print. ‘Ripeness’ is one of his favourite words. He reverences the spirit of actual institutions as he reverences the spirit of a language. In that way, though he sometimes happens to agree with the moderns, he is a true Elizabethan. He values learning as ‘the instrument of quietnesse’. Students must have ‘mindes giuen to peace’. Rest, private and public, is the true end of all activities. (Elementary, Epistle, and Peroration.)
Though I believe that we of the teaching professions often exaggerate the influence of teachers, it is irresistible to glance through Mulcaster for thoughts that possibly influenced, or were at least congenial to, the mind of Spenser. Thus we may notice that for Mulcaster Ate is one of the great enemies (Elementary, I), that the body is likened to a house in which the brain occupies the ‘principall chamber’ (ibid. VII), and that the defence against phonetic spelling takes the form of an allegorical history of Old King Sound (ibid. XII). Mulcaster professes himself a reader of Ariosto (Positions, XXXVIII). The passage quoted above about the ‘circular turn’ which brings in excellence in an altered kind may, to some readers, suggest lines in Nature’s answer to Mutabilitie; and it is certainly hard to keep the Faerie Queene out of mind when we read in the Peroration to the Elementary ‘euerie priuat man traueleth in this world to win rest after toil, to haue ease after labor’. But none of these goes beyond easy possibilities of coincidence. We are on safer ground if we attend more to Mulcaster’s general attitudes—his reverence for usage and order, his reverence for women, his delight in the vernacular, his longing for ‘honest contentment and rest . . . the priuat man’s hauen’—and admit that he may have passed on some of them to his pupil. About the possible significance of Mulcaster’s love for archery something will be said presently.
The picture would not be complete without some notice of Mulcaster’s cruelty. He was, as Fuller tells us, plagosus Orbilius, inexorable as Atropos; ‘the prayers of cockering mothers . . . rather increasing than mitigating his severity’. (He had observed in the Positions that ‘parentes and freindes will be medlars sometime’.) In this, as in all else, he followed the custom. But whatever else he may have been, he was certainly a character; and that, at least in memory, heals many wounds. It is better (in retrospect) to have been flogged by Keate than smacked by Perrin.
Spenser was in his second year at Pembroke Hall when Gabriel Harvey became a fellow, and a close friendship arose between them. Of Harvey our materials offer us three pictures. First, we have Spenser’s sonnet, ‘Harvey, the happie above happiest men’. It is a clear and striking portrait of the tranquil spectator in the world’s show, the man detached ‘as if he were God’s spy’. Secondly, we have Harvey as he is revealed in contemporary records or in his own books and letters. This is Nashe’s Harvey, ‘Gorboduc Huddleduddle’; a misfit, arrogant, unclubbable, unpopular, tactless, vindictive, laboriously jocose, a man who feels himself above his profession. ‘I neuer found ani fault with them for duelling in there own stale questions’, he writes; or again, ‘You suppose vs students happye . . . Look them in the face . . . they are the dryest, leanist, ill-favoriddist, abiectist, base-minddist carrions.’ Thirdly (which is rather unfair) we have the secret Harvey, Harvey in solitude, pouring out his thoughts in commonplace book and marginalia. This Harvey sees the world as his oyster and has not the slightest doubt of his ability to open it. He hardly mentions religion; he cares nothing for learning; he abhors the life of a scholar. ‘The foole hideth his Talent. Λαθε βιωσας is a beggarly maxim’ (ignavum praeceptum). Only an ass wastes time on studies that lack ‘sum prospect to actual commodity and praeferment’. A man must be ruthless, practical, realistic. ‘We live in Smith’s commonwealth not More’s Utopia.’ ‘From tablets to meditation, from meditation to action’ is the rule. Fortunately, if one is a great man, one of the megalandri, it is astonishingly easy to arrive. Examples of those who have risen with meteoric speed from obscurity to power are always before his mind: especially Joan of Arc. Fencing, riding, and shooting can each be learned in a week: any art or science in the same time. Every profession or faculty is ‘but a feate and a slight’. ‘Gallant audacity is neuer out of countenance.’ One must become ‘a right fellow to practise in the world, one that knowith fasshions . . . Machiaevel and Aretine knew fasshions’. Machiavel is a ‘principal author’. In every emergency you must ask yourself ‘What would Speculator or Machiavel aduise?’ All this can be reconciled with the Harvey of the records. Putting the two together, we get the tragi-comedy of the man; in dreams a Machiavellian, a ‘politique’ who admires Wolsey and Cromwell; in reality, worsted by every college intrigue. Nothing indeed was less practical than the desperate practicality of his maxims. He was one of those men who are always (in fantasy) surrendering their virtue to glittering temptations which neither their talents nor their circumstances will ever present to them. There remains, on the other side, Spenser’s sonnet. We could, of course, suppose that Spenser (following a precedent then well established in encomiastic verse) hid advice as flattery and recommended virtues by feigning that they already existed. We could, on the other hand, suppose that Spenser was deceived. The Harvey of the sonnet may have been the persona which Harvey presented to his few friends. It would be quite in character that he should laugh away among them the slights and rebuffs at which he writhed when he was alone. But after we have explained the sonnet we still have to explain the friendship that begot it. One would not willingly believe that the man whom Spenser loved was simply Nashe’s Huddleduddle. It is not certain that the marginalia reveal the deepest truth. They may give us only Harvey’s imagination of Harvey, and the real man might be better than that. I am inclined to think that in a tête-à-tête, his watchful inferiority complex lulled asleep, this uncouth creature may have revealed qualities of loyalty and affection. He seems to have been a good brother. And whatever else he may have been, the marginalia (unlike the letters) show that, off his guard, he was not a bore.
Despite their friendship his influence on Spenser was, I believe, superficial. Poets are not so like putty as is sometimes implied. There were differences of outlook between them about which Spenser was quite immovable. A modern critic has expressed it by saying that Harvey objected to Spenser’s ‘backward looking views’. That seems to me about right. Spenser looked by preference to the past. There is no evidence that he resented it when Harvey jeered at his ‘elvish queene’; but also no evidence that he paid the slightest attention. He would probably have resented it more if he had been less sure that he was making the right choice. He liked looking at the past, the legendary past, and continued to look; and out of it he made not, as we idly say, a dream—for the dreamer takes all he sees to be reality—but a vast, invented structure which other men could walk all round and in and out of for four centuries. Harvey was quite a different sort of man. He was almost, like a modern, concerned with period, with being contemporary, anxious to follow the change of times. He proclaims in 1595 that ‘the date of idle vanityes is expired’ and a new age of Spartan austerity about to begin. Much earlier he had announced that the great period of ‘the tunges and eloquence’ was coming to an end, and philosophy in ‘diuers morall [and] naturall matters’ would soon have all the credit. He is thus to be classed with Willes as a very early instance of that historical attitude towards the present which has since become so common. I have often wondered that modern critics do not on that account make more of him. Perhaps it is still to come.
Of Harvey’s views about English metre I will speak presently. As a critic in general (and there are many short critical dicta in his works) he is neither good nor notably bad; certainly not worse than most of his contemporaries. Praise of the ancients tells us nothing, for all then praised them. He admires Chaucer, Lydgate, and Henryson for ‘notable descriptions and not anie so artificiall in Latine or Greeke’, but significantly admires still more their ‘Astronomie, philosophie and other parts of profound or cunning art’. Of the moderns he praises Guevara, Tasso, Sidney, Watson, Daniel, Heywood, and of course Spenser, having apparently come in the end to admire ‘the pure sanguine’ of the Faerie Queene: but he also praises the translations of Drant, Golding, Stanyhurst, and the Senecans. His favourite poet, the one to whose praises he returns most often, is Bartasius, du Bartas. His polemical writings (we can hardly call them controversial) are not quite without merit. He was drawn into them almost by accident. In his Three Proper and witty Letters (1580) Harvey wrote some English hexameters on Tuscanism which reflected on, or were held to reflect on, the Earl of Oxford. Lyly, on Oxford’s side, replied with some flyting of Harvey in his anti-Marprelate Pappe with an Hatchet. Harvey thus became involved with Lyly, Greene, and Nashe and the results were the Four Letters (1592), A New Letter (1593), two pamphlets both entitled Pierce’s Supererogation and both dated 1593, and the Trimming of Thomas Nashe (1597). Although he was lashing the anti-Martinists Harvey was by no means a Martinist. In the Supererogation he strongly deprecates any attempt to thrust the Genevan theocracy upon England, though his grounds are not those which would please either a modern Christian or a modern atheist. Harvey’s view is that England is a monarchy with aristocratic elements and that in such a state you must not ‘build a reformation . . . vpon a popular foundation or a mechanicall plott’. Calvin had been dealing with a town of ‘meane marchantes and meaner artificers’. ‘M. Cartwright or M. Traverse’ are welcome to try their hands ‘on any like popular towne . . . where Democraty ruleth the rost’; it will not do here. But for the most part Harvey’s only concern is to retaliate personal offences. He is completely overmatched by Nashe in comic abuse and what is fun to the adversary is death to him. Yet that future rehabilitator of Harvey whom I anticipate will not find his work absolutely hopeless. It is true that the ‘hard sanctimoniousness’ (I quote Grosart) with which Harvey gloats and jeers over Greene for dying in poverty and over Marlowe, as far as we can make out, for dying at all—Harvey thought it was the plague that had killed him—were revolting to nineteenth-century taste, as they are to mine. But standards change and a day may come when such worm’s work will no longer militate against Harvey’s fame. What is more certainly damaging is that Harvey gives us at his best only what we can get better elsewhere. Many Elizabethans were good at flyting and he is not in the first rank. Much weight will have to be placed by his defender on those passages where he seems aware, as his contemporaries so seldom seem, of the greatness of his own age, talking with spirit of the Armada, the western voyages, and Lepanto ‘the glory of Christendom’. This is in the Supererogation.
With Gabriel Harvey we naturally associate the glossator of the Shepherd’s Calendar, E. K. It matters little whether his name was Kirke or not, but it would matter a good deal if we supposed him to be Spenser himself. Good scholars have thought so, but I cannot understand why. E. K. dislikes alliteration which Spenser loves, and despises Marot whom Spenser translates. Above all, he twice goes out of his way (in the Glosses on April and June) to express his humanistic and Protestant detestation of that medieval or ‘Gothic’ mythology which was Spenser’s lifelong delight. It is for him ‘unlawfull leasing’, feigned by ‘bald Friers’, and he would ‘roote that rancke opinion of Elfes oute of mens hearts’. It is a little surprising that he does not add a more literary objection on the ground of decorum to Spenser’s mixing fairies and nymphs in the same line. Perhaps he had not the wit: or perhaps Spenser silenced him by pointing to Ronsard’s ‘Afin de voir au soir les Nymphes et les Fées’. However that maybe, it seems to me certain that E. K., far from being Spenser, is a very good specimen of the friendly, yet in the long run wholly uncongenial, coterie who patronized Spenser in his nonage but from whose principles he departed as widely and easily as the duckling from the hen that mothered it. The rift already existed when the Calendar appeared. If Spenser had fully shared their tastes he would not have written the lines about fairies. Indeed that text and that gloss make very clear the curious modus vivendi between him and his set. He will let them gloss his lines but will not delete them: they will let him print the lines but not without protest. It speaks well for all concerned that there is no trace of a quarrel: but the balance of power could not last long. E. K. and Harvey and the rest (there must have been others: there always are in such a covin) would have killed Spenser poetically if he had let them. For the rest, E. K. is a very ridiculous person. His learning is shaky and his positive contribution to our understanding of the text is pretty fairly represented by glosses like ‘Neighbour towne, the next towne: expressing the Latine Vicina’.
A full account of Spenser’s reading would perhaps illuminate his work more than an account of his friendships. But it is not very easy to be sure what he had read. He was not an exact scholar, and his mind was so concoctive and esemplastic that the fruits of his reading met and mingled and transformed one another till they became unrecognizable—as happens on the ‘road to Xanadu’. If Phaedrus and Phaedo and Xenophon and Cicero are all confused in a single passage (F.Q IV, Prol. iii), as one scholar maintains, we cannot thence conclude with certainty that he had never read Plato. Lodowick Bryskett who introduces Spenser as a speaker in his Discourse of Civil Life pronounces him ‘perfect in the Greek tongue’ and ‘very well read in Philosophie both morall and naturall’. But a man is not on his oath in an Erasmian colloquy and we do not know Bryskett’s qualifications as a judge of scholarship. For the natural philosophy we can check his evidence by Harvey’s statement that Spenser admitted with shame his lack of skill in ‘the Canons, Tables, and instruments’ of astronomy; while at the same time he delighted in Du Bartas (Week I, Day iv) as ‘the proper profession of Urania’. This, I suppose to be characteristic; that Day, with its riot of quaint anthropomorphism, was a sort of astronomy that suited Spenser much better than the tables and instruments. Aristotle’s Ethics I think he had read—or as the schoolboys say ‘done’—probably with much help from a Latin version, but it was clearly not one of the books he had lived with. The Bible and the commoner classics we may take for granted; and with them masses of neo-Latin—Pico, Ficino, Palingenius, Erasmus Natalis Comes, Bodinus, Sannazarus, Buchanan. It is in that direction that his reading most often goes beyond ours. Marot and the Pléiade he knew well. The great, lifelong influences upon him were the Bible, Ovid, Boiardo, and Ariosto. From the two last he derived almost exclusively his conception both of romantic matter and romantic method, though he seems also to have looked at Arthur of Little Britain and some metrical romances. Chaucer and pseudo-Chaucer were less important to him than he himself liked to believe. Of Malory he made extraordinarily little use; I shall suggest a reason for this below.
It is of some importance to remember that Spenser’s imagination was molded by many extinct arts. A more or less agreed mythology and allegory poured in upon him from masque, pageant, tapestry, emblem, carvings, tournaments, woodcuts (and their manuscript predecessors). This provided the forms with which he found it natural to work. Some of his figures were instantly recognizable by his first readers; as if a modern poet used Father Christmas, John Bull, Johnny Walker, and Father Time. But Father Time (his name was once Saturn) is the only form common to Spenser’s age and ours.
Finally we must remember the long years in Ireland, though we can only guess how they affected him. Between him and the Irish (though he rather liked some of their poetry in translation) no relations save those of the lex talionis were possible; but we note with some surprise that he was charmed by the countryside. He would have been more typical of his age if he had regarded it as a howling wilderness only endurable in the hope of release and promotion. Instead, we read of its rivers ‘no lesse famous than the rest’, spacious Shenan and ‘fishy fruitfull Ban’ and Mulla superlative for trout, of the shady grove under Slewboome, of Arlo hill dear to the Olympians with its oaks and marble and flowery dales. What sort of reactions lurk behind all this we do not know, but what Ireland can do to some minds we learn from Bernard Shaw: ‘Such colours in the sky . . . such lure in the distances . . . such sadness in the evenings. Oh, the dreaming! the torturing, heartscalding, never satisfying dreaming!’ It would be very rash to assume that Spenser felt that, but it is not quite impossible. The endless quest on which, with no authority, he sent his Arthur, would fit in well with such an experience. Not, of course, that he would, like Shaw, have regarded it as a horrible form of spiritual dram-drinking. That is the language of a progressive and one who worships the élan vital. To a Christian Platonist these formless longings would logically appear as among the sanest and most fruitful experiences we have; for their object really exists and really draws us to itself. This is, however, the merest conjecture. We are on rather more certain ground in thinking that Spenser was increasingly reconciled, though never perfectly, to the rusticity, the homeliness, and the freedom of life in a wild country. The passages in which he forswears court and courtly shows and praises the hermit’s or the shepherd’s life do not sound to me like affectation or the cry of sour grapes. I think they represent a real, though only recurrent, mood; and that mood perhaps, while it lasted, the deepest. His exile may have been a gain to English poetry. But it is high time to turn from these supposals to the works he actually wrote.
Let us notice at the outset that Spenser’s publications, taken in their chronological order do not represent his actual career as a poet. The Shepherd’s Calendar indeed may have appeared exactly when and as he would have wished. Vida and others had laid it down that a young poet should begin with Pastoral. Yet this début according to the rules may have owed more to the orthodox humanism of friends than to Spenser’s own initiative. From the editorial matter in the Calendar we learn that Spenser had already written Dreames, Legendes, Pageaunts, ‘sonetts’, and a Court of Cupide. We learn also that he was reluctant to publish them; while at the same time nine words from one of them, ‘that feeles the deep delight that is in death’ (quoted in the gloss on October) are better, and more characteristically Spenserian, poetry than anything in the Calendar itself. It will also be noticed that the single line which E. K. quotes from the Pageants (‘An hundred graces on her eyelids satte’) is very close to Faerie Queene, II. iii. 25, and that in II. i. 33 the knights refer to their own quests as ‘pageants’. And it is obvious that matter suitable to the titles of the lost works might well be equally suitable for later inclusion in the Faerie Queene. It is therefore quite possible that in 1579 Spenser had already written work better than the Calendar and more like the Faerie Queene, some of which the Faerie Queene absorbed. If so, the Calendar itself was in some sort the interruption of a life’s work already begun. But however that may be, it is certain that Spenser very soon after 1579, embarked on his gigantic project. This project, I believe, satisfied him completely as a poet; but as a man he was faced with the problem of keeping his name before his patrons and the public while he worked at the epic. His solution was to seize the chance of a holiday from Ireland in 1590 and bring out a specimen of ‘work in progress’—Books I to III. There is no reason to believe that he had any aesthetic grounds for choosing to publish just those Books in just that state of finish in that particular year. On the contrary, in order to give the fragment some appearance of completeness, he had to patch up a provisional happy ending for the story of Amoret. The fragment was a success and of course his publisher urged him to follow it up. Hence a volume of Complaints (1591) was put together from such manuscripts, mostly old ones, as he could offer. Then came a pièce d’occasion, the regrettable Daphnaïda. In 1595 he was once more on leave in England. This time he had fresh work to publish (Amoretti and Epithalamium) but he also refurbished the earlier Colin Clout’s Come Home Again and brought out an extremely belated elegy on the death of Sidney. In 1596 came the second fragment of Faerie Queene and two Platonic poems, written in ‘the greener times of his youth’, were furnished with a ‘retractation’ as the Four Hymns. It will be seen that very few of Spenser’s works indicate the interests, or the powers, which were his at the moment of publication. It will also be seen how profoundly right the common reader has shown himself in regarding Spenser almost exclusively as the poet of the Faerie Queene. Almost everything else he did was something of a digression. All his life he was in the position of a painter who, while engaged on some great work, frequently has visitors in the studio. They have to be entertained (it is his only chance as a man, if not as an artist) with anything he can lay his hands on. Old canvases that he himself cares nothing about will be brought forward. Worse still, they must be shown the great work itself in various stages of incompleteness. This helps to explain the extraordinary disparity in value between the Faerie Queene and nearly all the minor poems. Virgil without the Aeneid, Milton without Paradise Lost, Goethe without Faust, would still rank as great poets. But if Spenser were shorn of the Faerie Queene, though the Epithalamium (perhaps truncated) would appear in anthologies, the rest of his work would be known only to professional scholars. Even as things are, it is perhaps read by hardly anyone else.
The earliest poetry of Spenser’s that we have was printed anonymously. In 1569 appeared the English translation of a tract by the Dutch Protestant refugee Van der Noodt. Its cumbersome title is usually abbreviated as the Theatre of Voluptuous Worldlings. Most of it is in prose but what concerns us is the verse. This amounts to twenty-one pieces, with woodcuts, which fall into three classes. In the first are six pieces translated from Marot’s version of Petrarch’s Rime; perhaps by one who glanced at the original Italian as well as the French. In the second are eleven translations from du Bellay’s Songe ou Vision. In the third are four pieces based on the Apocalypse. The first or Petrarchan group are rhymed, the remaining fifteen in blank verse. Now in the Complaints of 1591 Spenser printed The Visions of Petrarch: formerly translated. They are seven sonnets of which six are almost identical with the first group of poems in the Theatre, except that in four instances twelve-line pieces in the Theatre are extended to make them full sonnets. It is therefore clear that Spenser is the author of the first six in the Theatre. In the Complaints he also printed fifteen sonnets which he entitled The Visions of Bellay. There is here no mention of former translation and the eleven of these sonnets which correspond to the second group in the Theatre have many variants from the text of that group. These variants, however, are no greater than would necessarily be involved in cobbling blank verse into the rhyme-scheme of the sonnet. It is therefore overwhelmingly probable that Spenser wrote the second group of poems in the Theatre. The four Apocalyptic pieces in the third group were never reprinted in any of Spenser’s publications. A man who wished to maintain that he was not their author would therefore have no external evidence against him; but he would be introducing an unknown poet into the Theatre without necessity and thus breaking Occam’s rule against ‘multiplication of entities’.
These early translations are not of much poetical value. Such interest as they have for us is twofold. First, their reappearance in the Complaints illustrates what was said above about Spenser’s methods of publication. Secondly, they contain several departures from regular metre; such as
Cruell death vanquishing so noble beautie.
Vnto the gentle sounding of the waters fall.
To beare the frame, four great Lions of golde.
In the Complaints the second of these has been altered from an alexandrine into a five-beat line,
To the soft sounding of the waters fall,
but the others remain. Their preservation may be taken, I suppose, as evidence that in the Theatre they were not bungles but deliberate experiments; and a critic who disagrees with my view about Wyatt’s irregularities might find help in this.
The plentiful literature which scholars have written about the Shepherd’s Calendar (1579) is concerned much more with the problems it gives rise to than with its poetical merits. This is inevitable. From the first it invited such treatment. E. K.’s learned (or what he thought learned) deck-hamper is so disproportionate to the small cargo of poetry that if the book were not known to be Spenser’s it would now be mentioned chiefly to be mocked. Some find the confidence with which E. K. announces the new poet impressive. But it is impressive only in the light of Spenser’s later works. In itself it is not remarkable; to hear young men proclaiming that their circle or someone whom their circle has ‘taken up’ is the only hope for poetry is no more wonder than to see a goose go barefoot. This time they were not so far wrong; but the more we study E. K., the more we shall be convinced that he was only lucky, not judicious. I cannot help thinking that any other poet who was a Cambridge man, and who would write in a humanistic form and let E. K. write Notes, would have received equal commendation from E. K. He hails Harvey as a ‘most excellent poete’.
Two ways in pastoral lay open before Spenser. One, which we may venture to call the true way since it led to the Muses’ Elizium and Lycidas, was that of delicate Arcadian idealization; the way of Sannazaro and Guarini. The other was that of Barclay: rough, superficially realistic, full of hard words, satiric, and much indebted to Mantuan. His simple plan was to follow the first method in January, April, June, October, November, December, and the second in February, March, May, July, and September. August partakes of both. In three ‘aeglogues’ of the second type (February, May, and September) we find metre which is by later standards anomalous. August, the composite aeglogue, begins with nine regular decasyllables and then changes into the rougher verse. April is the strangest. We begin with thirty-six decasyllabics and then have a Ronsardian ode. Long and short lines are mixed in a regular pattern and the two stanzas have a regular iambic movement. In the later stanzas the short lines become irregular (cf. 62, 67, 74, 76, 79, 83, 85, 88, &c., with their earlier counterparts 38, 40, 43, 44, 47, 49, 52, 53, 56). Some even of the longer lines cease to be plain decasyllables—as 60, 84. Line 87, ‘Such follie great sorrow to Niobe did breede’, is pure Barclay or Hawes, and the penultimate stanza ends with a rough trimeter ‘shall match with the fayre flowre Délice’ (for delice here must be pronounced to rhyme with lillies).
I could wish that critics had devoted less time to praising this ode and more to explaining its structure; but elsewhere I do not think Spenser’s rougher metres raise any great problem. Looking through the English poetry of his own century, Spenser found two kinds of verse; the syllabic verse of Surrey, Sackville, Gascoigne, and others, but also the roughly rhythmical (or even wholly unrhythmical) verse of Tottel Nos. 217 and 220, of Seager’s and Ferrers’s pieces and Flodden and James I in the Mirror, not to mention Barclay, Hawes, Skelton’s rhyme royal, and the pseudo-Chaucerian Pilgrim’s Tale. This kind had been attributed to Chaucer by Gascoigne in his Notes of Instruction, and is used, if not as Harvey said in ‘the most part’ of Sidney, at least in the song ‘Who hath euer felt the change of love’. I do not think any contemporary reader would have been puzzled by the metre of February; it was part of the English inheritance. I think it seemed rude and archaic in 1579; that, no doubt, was why Spenser thought it suitable to pastoral, and especially to pastorals in his rougher style. Sometimes, for a few lines, it does perhaps really achieve the pungent, homely effect that he intended. More often it is detestable, and to compare it with the delicacies of Christabel is an injury to Coleridge. But Harvey would have liked it and encouraged it.
Other problems are raised by the fact that the Calendar is a roman à clef. Hobbinol, we know, is Harvey. (Note in January the suggestion of pederasty advanced to show that we are classical, and withdrawn in the gloss to show that we are Christians.) Algrin is pretty certainly Grindal. Thomalin, Rosalind, and the rest continue to afford the pleasures of the chase to many researchers. The possible or probable chronology of the aeglogues has been discussed as a key to details in Spenser’s biography: perhaps certainty cannot be reached.
The theological position of Spenser in the Calendar is not easily determined, and since it may have changed during the period of composition we are hampered by not knowing the order of the poems. Cambridge in his day was certainly a centre of Puritanism; but Harvey, as we have seen, explicitly rejected the puritan position. May and September ostensibly attack the Roman and defend the Protestant clergy and E. K.’s gloss on May (118) tells us that what is said against Roman prelates is not meant ‘to deny fatherly rule and godly gouernance (as some malitiously of late haue done)’. This is clearly intended to dissociate Spenser’s position from the puritan attack on Anglican episcopacy. But then it may well be that this was part of Spenser’s and E. K.’s strategy—to write what all friends would recognize as ‘Marprelate’ work, but in such a way that it could always, at need, be defended to government as merely antipapistical. In September, Diggon Davie appears to one excellent editor as ‘a central Anglican parson defending his kind’ and even cursing those puritans who attack it as Piers had done in May, 73–102. But was Spenser’s purpose in putting that curse into Diggon’s mouth ironical? In July we seem to be on firmer ground. Algrin is almost certainly Grindal and is certainly approved by the poet, and Grindal (London 1565, York 1570, Canterbury 1576) had suffered at Elizabeth’s hands for his failure to suppress puritan ‘prophesyings’. Yet one scholar has questioned Grindal’s puritan sympathies. Much depends on our interpretation of February. The moral of that fable is that the Briar who wants the Oak cut down will find, when his wish is granted, that he cannot get on without it. Yet at the same time the Briar’s dislike of the Oak is almost (certainly not quite) condoned by the fact that the Oak has been associated with popery (207–12). The most natural explanation seems to be that the Briar is Protestantism and the Oak episcopacy; if this is accepted, then Spenser, at least when he wrote February, held the official Anglican position. His tenderness for the Oak, as for all medieval survivals, combined with his frank admission that it had been contaminated with ‘foolerie’, and his dislike for the cocksure and upstart character of the Briar, would fit in well with all that we know of his outlook.
Some scholars find in Spenser an ‘extreme antipathy to marriage among the clergy’. It is not impossible that he felt so: Elizabeth did, and in the Faerie Queene Spenser praises both vocations, marriage and celibacy, with equal ardour. But the relevant passages—May 81–102, September 112–15, and Mother Hubberd’s Tale 475–8—do not prove it. The two first apply to the clergy the perennial complaint ces pères defamille sont capables de tout. But when we complain thus of any profession we do not necessarily mean that it ought to be filled only by celibates, though of course we are incidentally providing ammunition for those who do. In Mother Hubberd the idle and ignorant parson congratulates himself on being free to marry. But he also congratulates himself on having no ‘penie Masses’, Complines, Dirges, Trentals, and Confessions. We are not obliged to infer that Spenser desires the revival of celibacy any more than that he desires the revival of all these; which is highly improbable.
Of the Shepherd’s Calendar as poetry we must frankly confess that it commits the one sin for which, in literature, no merits can compensate; it is rather dull. It would be interesting to know whether a hundred people (or ten) not officially connected with English studies have read it in the last fifty years. I have never in my life met anyone who spoke of it in the tones that betray real enjoyment. Nothing at all is gained by talking as if it were comparable in value to the best, or even the second best, of Sidney’s poetry. The fables in February and May are told not badly: that is as far as praise of them can extend. The roundelay in August goes with a swing, but much real popular poetry, even in that century, had been better. The real merit of the Calendar lies in achieving more often and keeping up for longer stretches the easy, liquid movement which Gascoigne sometimes just reached. Lines like
The blossome which my braunch of youth did beare,
With breathed sighes is blowne away and blasted,
or
Whence is it, that the flowret of the field doth fade
And lyeth buryed long in Winters bale?
are not much in themselves. But they are the medium in which much can be done. In December there are beautiful metrical audacities, not to be confused with the joltings of his February,
Áll was blówne awáy of the wávering wýnd
or
Gáther yé togéther my líttle flócke
But Spenser was soon to write and had perhaps already written poetry which deprives the Calendar of all importance. We know from E. K. that he was slow to publish, and I think the friends he then had would encourage him to publish his worst work. Pastorals were so very classical, and gave a pretext for Satire, and Rosalind and Hobbinol and the whole circle could be brought in. It was the next best thing to publishing a poem themselves.
In 1580 appeared Three Proper and witty familiar letters, followed in the same year by Two other very commendable letters. The Three Proper contain one letter from Spenser to Harvey and two from Harvey to Spenser; the Two other, one from each. The letters in the second publication were written before those in the first. Harvey afterwards talked as if they had been published without his consent. As specimens of the epistolary art all five letters are dull, laboured things and we read them only because they show Spenser exploring what was for him a dead-end in English prosody. For at that time the attempt to use classical metres in English could hardly lead to good. Most of those who discussed the project lacked certain necessary knowledge. They did not clearly understand what quantity and accent are; that the first of merry is short and the first of Mary is long, though both are accented. They did not clearly understand that prosody is based on phonetic fact, not arbitrary rule, and that spelling has nothing to do with it; that the two (graphic) R’s in merry are irrelevant, or that Latin bellum has the first long not because the Romans wrote, but because they pronounced, a double consonant. This is revealed by Spenser’s and Harvey’s controversy about the scansion of carpenter. Spenser assumes that the ‘middle sillable’ is ‘shorte in speache’ but will have to ‘be read long in Verse’. Harvey replies that since it is short in speech it must be short in verse too. By ‘short’ both really mean ‘unaccented’, and are puzzled because unaccented syllables (very naturally) do not conform to the supposed Latin ‘rules’ about ‘length by position’. (There are, of course, no such rules: it is a fact, not a rule, that cumber takes longer to say than cutter.) Spenser, if I understand him, would solve it by having a distorted pronunciation for verse, while Harvey will boldly substitute accent for quantity throughout. Thus Harvey is, if you like, wiser than Spenser, for Spenser is embarking nowhither and Harvey is sailing to a possible, though in my judgement very undesirable, destination: the accentual hexameters of Longfellow.
Ascham had begun the mischief. Drant—‘gorbellied’ Drant the translator of Horace—had evolved rules of prosody. Harvey, independently of Drant, had experimented himself and urged Spenser to do likewise. At that time Spenser had ignored Harvey’s advice, as he so often did. Later, when he found himself at Leicester House and ‘in some vse of familiarity’ with Sidney and the shadowy ‘Master Dyer’, who were already at work on a modified version of Drant’s system, he was ‘drawen’ into their ‘faction’. His allegiance did not continue long and none of his surviving experiments were successful. Sidney did better. In 1582 came Richard Stanyhurst’s First Four Books of Virgil his Aeneis in hexameters, a monstrosity which Harvey admired but Nashe and Joseph Hall and Thomas Warton trounced as it deserves. It has no place in the history even of the English hexameter, for it is barely English. Richard Barnefield in Hellen’s Rape used the same metre much better for a comic purpose; which is perhaps its proper English use. Campion, who is an exception to all rules, the seraphic doctor of English prosody, will be dealt with in his proper place.
The most important work of Spenser’s youth lies outside the Calendar. We know that the Faerie Queene had been begun, and a specimen of it sent to Harvey, early in 1580. If we could identify the earliest passages in it—which of course need not be those that come first in the text—they would be the proper starting-point for a study of Spenser’s effective career as a poet. There are also some minor poems which may be as early as the Calendar, or very little later. Virgil’s Gnat is dated 1580 by a good critic. Mother Hubberd’s Tale, if the most popular interpretation of it is correct, cannot in its original form, be much later than 1579. Both these are more interesting and accomplished than the Calendar.
The Gnat is a version of the Virgilian Culex in ottava rima. It has its faults, but to compare it with the verse-translations which we painfully studied in an earlier chapter is to realize that here at any rate the ascent from the Drab to the Golden is not like a slope but like a cliff. It keeps on the whole very close to its corrupt and difficult original but there is very little constraint, and there are lines of what must at that time have been a startling beauty:
And paint with pallid greene her buds of gold
or
The Sunnes sad daughters waylde the rash decay
Of Phaeton
or the whole stanza which begins ‘The verie nature of the place’. The ugly anacoluthon at line 170 is Virgil’s fault, not Spenser’s. But it is Spenser who unfortunately gives the gnat’s ghost a ‘grieslie countenance and visage grim’, unsuitable I think to the tone of the poem. The prefatory sonnet to Leicester hints, in words not meant to be understood by an outsider, that Spenser had some special intention either in translating the Culex at all or in dedicating it at some particular juncture to that patron. Everything in his version is, however, fully accounted for by the original, and allegorical interpretations are now purely speculative.
In Mother Hubberd’s Tale Spenser assumes his true role as a neo-medieval poet. He ignores Roman satire and goes back to the Renard tradition. Critics usually connect his Ape with the French agent Simier (‘My Ape’ as Elizabeth called him) who visited England in 1579 in the hope of making a match between the queen and his master the Duc d’Alençon. Apart from the phonetic relation of Simier and simius the resemblance is not really very strong: that between the Fox and Burghley is in some passages stronger. The allusion, on any view, concerns only the last episode in Spenser’s poem, which is probably a mass of allusions but not a detailed and unified allegory like Dryden’s Absalom. Thus the Lion is certainly the queen in line 629 but probably not the queen when rated for sloth in line 1327; and the picture of tyranny supported by foreign mercenaries (1118–24), though it may glance at the probable results of a marriage with Alençon, may also be merely general political wisdom from classical sources such as Republic, 567d. Spenser, looking round on a great variety of evils (sturdy vagabonds disguised as old soldiers, idle parsons, dishonest and venal patrons, frivolity and unmanliness at court, and the insolence of upstarts in office) invents as their cause the ubiquitous activities of an Ape and a Fox. His poem is thus a satire on nearly all ‘estates’. It escapes the dullness to which such things are liable, partly by its thread of narrative which is often very lively (note, especially the Ape’s approach to the sleeping Lion, 1005–14), and partly because Spenser, unlike some satirists, can paint his positive ideal in contrast to the abuses. Nowhere else do we find him at the same time so far away from the Faerie Queene and so good. But the distance must not be exaggerated. If the tempo of the Tale is brisk, that of the Faerie Queene is not nearly so languid as skimming readers suppose; and
To plough, to plant, to reap, to rake, to sowe (263)
is close to the tone of Terpin’s.
To spin, to card, to sew, to wash, to wring. (F.Q. V. iv. 31.) The Ape has much in common with Braggadocchio. I have often wondered in re-reading this poem why, with all its brilliance, it does not wholly please, and am inclined to think it leaves the ear unsatisfied. The couplets are very often end-stopped but they lack the balance and resonance which the Augustans (I think, rightly) have taught us to expect in that form. There are too many rhymes on unaccented syllables. The effect is a little flaccid. No doubt Spenser would point out to me his warning ‘Base is the style, and matter meane withall’; but what is intentional is not therefore necessarily good.
Muiopotmos, from its metre and subject, looks as if it might have been written soon after the Gnat. If we were sure of its allegorical meaning we might be able to date it accurately: but we are not sure that it has an allegorical meaning at all. Some think it concerns an abortive duel between Essex and Raleigh in 1588 or between Sidney and Oxford in 1579. The parallel between a successful assassination (which is what happens in the poem) and an unfought duel escapes me. Spenser’s poem is 440 lines long. Forty of these are a description of a garden; eighty are an adaptation of Ovid (Met. vi. 70–145); forty an account of the butterfly’s armour; eight an apology to Cupid for preferring its wings to his; twenty-four describe a cobweb. The topical allegory must presumably come in the remaining two hundred and fifty-two. We can never prove that it does not, but the whole poem, as a playful exhibition of artifice in the Alexandrian manner, seems to require no such explanation. It is full of sunshine and flowers and short enough for its levity not to weary the reader. From it and from the Gnat we can see that Spenser did not reject ottava rima for his epic because he found it difficult. Its speed and lightness become him very well, but they were excellences he deliberately rejected from the Faerie Queene.
I believe it is impossible to date the Tears of the Muses. Some put it later than 1588 because Clio says ‘I nothing noble have to sing’ and they think she ought not to have said this after the defeat of the Armada; but later on Melpomene complains that ‘mourning matter she has none’. Euterpe says that ‘now no pastorall is to bee hard’, which hardly fits any of the possible dates. The ‘light foote Faeries’ of line 31 might seem to ‘link’ it (as critics say) with the Calendar which has ‘lightfote Nymphes’ (June, 26), and ‘Ye gentle Spirits breathing from aboue’ (361) with ‘Most gentle spirite breathed from aboue’ in the Ruins of Time (281), and the collocation ‘carefull comfortlesse’ (349) with Faerie Queene, I. vi. 6. But it is not obvious that when poets repeat themselves they must be repeating their recent works: they are surely at least as likely to repeat lines written so long ago that they do not recognize the repetition. Again, we might place it early because in it so much of the Drab Age manner survives; its impotent violence and ill-timed realism. The lamentation of Spenser’s Muses consists of ‘yelling shrieks’, ‘shrikes and groanes’, and ‘lowd shrieks’, till we think we are at a cats’ concert. They cry till their eyes are ‘swollen’. Ineffective epithets abound: ‘dismall heavinesse’, ‘dreadful uglinesse’, ‘loathly idleness’, ‘lamentable wounds’. Urania tells us at some length that we know by means of knowledge. Unfortunately, however, these are faults that Spenser never quite outgrew; we call him a Golden poet because there is so much gold, not because there is so little Drab, in his work. The complaints which the Muses make of contemporary bad taste and indifference to poetry are far too general to date the poem; authors in nearly all ages say that kind of thing. I should like to believe that the Tears is early, for it is a helpless, laboured thing.
The rest of the 1591 volume of Complaints was filled out with the Ruins of Rome, a poor translation from Du Bellay’s Antiquités, the Visions of ‘Bellay’ and Petrarch, cobbled up from the Theatre, the Visions of the World’s Vanity, and the Ruins of Time. The World’s Vanity consists of twelve sonnets all illustrating one theme (that great things can be destroyed or helped by small) with emblematic instances. There are interesting peculiarities of metre, and the ninth and twelfth have some merit.
The remaining piece in the Complaints is the only one which we know to have been recent work when that volume appeared in 1591. This is the Ruins of Time which refers to the deaths of Sidney (1586), Leicester (1588), and Walsingham (1590). When Spenser visited England in 1590 he found himself criticized for not having lamented these deaths. That is the external occasion of the poem. There may well have been internal pressure; an exile back on leave feels mutability with a fiercer shock than home dwellers for whom change proceeds gradually. The England to which Spenser returned was not the England for which he had been homesick. He had also been reading in Camden or others about the vanished splendours of the Roman city of Verulam. Following the precedent of du Bellay’s Antiquités de Rome, and unconsciously reviving a favourite theme of Anglo-Saxon poetry (Hryð ge ða ederas, woriap pa winsalo, waldend licgap), he made Verulam the ostensible theme of his poem. The ruined city personified appears to the poet and laments her fate, passing gradually into elegies on the lately dead. This is one of the weightiest, the most chastened, and the most sonorous of Spenser’s minor poems. It is almost entirely free from rhetorical violence and sometimes approaches a harder and more austere and genuinely classical manner than was usual with him; as in the lines
For not to have been dipt in Lethe lake
Could save the sonne of Thetis from to die (428).
It thus occupies among his works somewhat the same place as Laodamia among Wordsworth’s. The nine stanzas on Sidney are the best elegiac poetry he ever wrote. The choice and preservation of tone (in Dr. I. A. Richards’s sense of that word) was not Spenser’s strong point, but here both are excellent. I think the Ruins would have been better without its coda of six emblematic visions, but even these are much better than most things of their sort. One of them glances at an episode for the Faerie Queene which was either never written or not included in the surviving fragments.
It is a pity that Spenser was not whisked away from court and England, and back to Ireland and the Faerie Queene immediately after finishing the Ruins of Time. Unfortunately he remained to write Daphnaïda, an elegy on the wife of Arthur Gorges. Here, as in Mother Hubberd, he chose the neo-medieval manner. He resolved to bring up to date the Boke of the Duchesse. Nothing could show more clearly how imperceptively he read the Chaucer whom he so revered. I do not think the fault is personal to Spenser. Daphnaïda really brings to light an aspect of what I have called the New Ignorance, for its immense inferiority to the Duchesse (itself by no means one of Chaucer’s best works) is not an inferiority of technique, but of what we should now call civilization; what the medieval poets themselves would have called freedom, gentilesse, and mesure. It is instructive to compare Chaucer’s man in black with Spenser’s. Chaucer’s man is found dressed in black, sitting against a tree, composing verses, and looking wonderfully sad. He apologizes for not having replied to Chaucer’s first question (‘Be not wrooth, I herde thee not’) and accepts Chaucer’s apology. Spenser’s man has to be a pilgrim with ‘carelesse locks, vncombed and vnshorne’ and ‘beard all ouer growne’, glancing aside ‘as in disdainefull wise’ and ‘half wrothfully’ bidding Spenser ‘Cease foolish man’. There is an equally disastrous contrast between Spenser and another poet whom he approaches in Daphnaïda. Bembo in his Rime says that the death of the beloved has left the day without sun, the night without stars, the birds without song. Spenser’s Alcyon instead of saying that the world has altered, commands it to do so:
Let birds be silent on the naked spray,
And shady woods resound with dreadful yells—
thus turning a legitimately hyperbolical expression of what passion really can do to our minds into a shrill witch’s or maniac’s curse. Thus throughout the poem we have ‘endless labour to be wrong’. Chaucer’s is like a piece of wood-carving, not of the finest workmanship but showing (when you examine it) the traces of a sound tradition and of an honest workman who blundered at times but was a man of sense and feeling; Spenser’s is a great, flamboyant, garish thing of stucco disguised as marble. There are, to be sure, good lines and good images, but it is radically vulgar. I think it reasonable to lay the blame chiefly on the age, because Spenser (like Sidney and Shakespeare) spent most of his literary career in successfully resisting and curing the new vulgarity. But on this occasion it conquered him.
By December 1591 we find Spenser restored to poetical health, to his own house at Kilcolman, and probably to the Faerie Queene, and dedicating to Raleigh a poem which narrates the inception, progress, and results of his recent English holiday: Colin Clout’s Come Home Againe. Under a thin disguise of pastoral this is the most familiar and autobiographical of Spenser’s poems. Its mood is ambivalent. On the one hand, England is a paradise governed by a goddess, and the court a constellation of excellent poets and bright nymphs: on the other, that same court is a den of false loves, backbiting and intrigue, no place ‘for any gentle wit’, from which Cohn ‘rather chose back to his sheep to tourne’. This is very natural. Thus many an exile feels when he comes back (he had almost said ‘comes home’) to his post after the longed for, the exciting, and yet ultimately disappointing holiday in England. Doubly disappointing, because he has failed to get the job in England that he hoped for, and also wonders whether there are not, after all, many consolations for living abroad. I think that with Spenser these consolations were now more valuable than he fully realized, for though the poem contains bitter lines the prevailing air is one of cheerfulness. This pleasant work, like Mother Hubberd, fails to satisfy the ear. The truth is that Spenser’s ample Muse was unwise ever to appear in public without the corsage of stanzaic form; continuous alternate rhyme was not enough. The catalogue of recent or contemporary poets and wits is naturally of great interest to scholars. William Alabaster (a neo-Latin poet) and Daniel are mentioned by name. Alcyon (Arthur Gorges), Palemon (Churchyard), Thestylis (Ludovic Bryskett), and Urania (Lady Pembroke) can be identified. After others the hunt is still up. When we learn that Aetion has been variously taken for Marlowe, Drayton, and Thomas Edwards, or Harpalus for Churchyard, Googe, Puttenham, Sackville, and Turberville, we may perhaps conclude that the quarry is in no imminent danger.
Colin Clout’s Come Home Againe was partly rewritten and published in 1595 along with elegies by various hands on the death of Sidney. Spenser’s own contribution to this collection is Astrophel, a poem difficult to date. A priori we should expect it to have been written soon after Sidney’s death in 1586; especially since Ludovic Bryskett’s contribution, The Mourning Muse of Thestylis, appears in the Stationers’ Register in 1587. But then in the Dedicatory Epistle to the Ruins of Time (1590) Spenser confessed that at that date he had still failed to elegize Sidney. It is not impossible that he had already written Astrophel and rightly judged it unworthy of the occasion. Nine years later, anxious once more to fill up a volume for the press, he might have glanced at the old manuscript and suffered one of those recrudescences of partiality which are among the dangers of a literary life. In such a mood, with an eager publisher at his elbow, he might come to think that it would just do after all. If so, he was mistaken, but not dreadfully mistaken. Astrophel has none of the elaborate ugliness of Daphnaïda. It is merely insipid. The eighth stanza has some merit.
In June 1594 Spenser was married, not for the first time. In November of the same year the volume entitled Amoretti and Epithalamium. Written not long since was entered in the Stationers’ Register. I think we were meant to believe that all the Amoretti were addressed to Elizabeth Boyle, the bride of the Epithalamium, and present a poetic picture of his recent courtship, and there is really no reason why we should not; though, of course, the merit of the sonnet sequence does not depend on any narrative qualities, much less on their historical value. Spenser was not one of the great sonneteers. Yet his Amoretti do not quite fall into the class of works which are negligible because all they can do for us is done better elsewhere. I can imagine (though I have not yet experienced) a day, an hour, and a mood in which they would be the one book we desired. More brilliant and certainly more passionate love poetry is easy to find; but nowhere else exactly this devout, quiet, harmonious pattern. The effect (perhaps incompatible with some other and more exciting beauties) is close to Petrarch’s own but without the melancholy. Spenser refers of course to the pains of love; but I cannot help thinking that his love, if not the best kind to read about, was a happy kind to live in. This is confirmed (as the Amoretti themselves are eclipsed) by their glorious lyrical sequel.
The Epithalamium is our only evidence that Spenser, had he chosen, might have been among the very greatest lyrical poets: lyrical, of course, after the manner of Pindar, not that of Herrick or Burns. The song, as practised by Wyatt, was a form which he either never attempted or attempted so unsuccessfully that he destroyed the result; his talents did not lie in that direction. But for the Greater Ode he had powers unequalled in English. The Epithalamium, despite its Italian and Latin affinities, is the most Pindaric thing we have. It has one, or perhaps two, faults; the refrain loses some of its beauty when, at line 333, it has to pass into the negative, and the choir of frogs that make us ‘wish theyr choking’ is either too comic or else not comic enough. All the rest is, I think, perfection, and here, if nowhere else, the Drab has been completely purged away. The resemblance to Pindar lies in the festal sublimity (a thing much rarer than tragic sublimity) and in the triumphant fusion of many different elements. The Bacchanalian or fescennine jollity of the fourteenth strophe, the hushed sensuousness of the seventeenth, the grotesque night fears of the nineteenth, the realism of ‘Those trouts and pikes all others doo excell’, and the transformation whereby a small Protestant church becomes a Salomonic or even a pagan temple and at the same time a great cathedral of the old religion with high altar, roaring organs, and crowds of hovering angels, are very different and drawn from different traditions. What organizes them all is the steady progression of the bridal day. Catullus began with evening: thus losing all the alacrity of Spenser’s earlier strophes with their ‘Awake’, ‘Bid her awake’, ‘Hymen is awake’, ‘The wished day is come at last’. Joy does not begin to pass into ‘merriment’ (with a medieval chorus of birds) till strophe five. The suggestion of heat (it is high summer) is delayed till seven. At the same time the emotional development is artfully varied and interrupted as in a good symphony. The lustiness which breaks out fully in fourteen had been just hinted by the ‘strong confused noyse’ in eight and then hushed by the processional movement of the five that follow. The moonlight in twenty-one comes as unexpectedly as a new turn in a novel or a play. The intense desire for posterity (who will people not only earth but heaven) and the astrological connexion of this with the ‘thousand torches flaming bright’ above the house-tops add not only a public but almost a cosmic solemnity to the poem; which remains, none the less, a thoroughly personal love poem—‘Let this day let this one day be myne’—with a remembrance of ‘sorrowes past’.
In the Prothalamium (1596) his success was not so complete. The central structural idea, that of the swans’ gliding progress down the river, is a happy one, and the refrain is more emotionally relevant than the refrain of the Epithalamium. But I cannot feel that perfect unity has been achieved. The references to Spenser’s own discontents, to the history of the Temple, and to the achievements of Essex, interesting as they are in themselves, do not seem to have been made to contribute much to the total effect. And there is perhaps a little awkwardness at the end of the sixth strophe.
In 1596 came Four Hymns. This presents so many problems that, unless our discussion is to be out of all proportion to the literary value of the text, I must beg leave to state my views with a somewhat dogmatic brevity. In the dedication Spenser tells us that the two first ‘Hymns’ were composed in ‘the greener times of his youth’. I do not doubt that this is honest, but it is vague, and I do not believe that we can fix their date by internal evidence. Spenser’s style does not, like Shakespeare’s or Milton’s, develop through well-marked periods; he wrote sometimes better and sometimes worse but his virtues and vices were much the same throughout, save when he essayed a different genre as in Mother Hubberd. Secondly I believe that the Four Hymns defy all attempts (I have made many) to read them as an exposition of the ‘Ladder’ in the Symposium. The first two do not provide steps or rungs by which to climb to the position adopted in the third and fourth. The latter are simply, as Spenser says, a ‘retractation’ on the lines of ‘I lothe that I did loue’ (Tottel, 212) or the end of Troilus. The mood which found it necessary to retract loves so very chaste and honest as those celebrated in the first two hymns is surprising. It is not Christian, for all Christians allow marriage; nor Protestant, for Protestants exalted marriage and distrusted celibacy; nor Florentine-Platonic, for Ficino said of the two loves, natural and mystical, uterque honestus et probandus (In Platonis Convivium, II. vii); and it is wholly inconsistent with the tenor of the Faerie Queene. Some scholars have thought that even if there is no ladder in the Hymns as a whole, some rungs can be discovered in the first two. I cannot agree. The Hymn of Love is in general very much more medieval than Platonic. The invocation to the God of Love and the Muses (1–35), the cruelties of Cupid (120–61), the effects of love in producing nobility and knightly deeds (176–237), the pains of jealousy (252–72), the passage from Love’s Purgatory to Love’s Heaven (273–93), and the concluding collect (294–307), are exactly in the manner of Frauendienst and its religion of love. But for the language, they could all have been written two hundred years earlier. They are well done, though not in Spenser’s greatest manner, and by them the poem stands or falls. The birth of Love and his cosmic operations (43–91) owe much to the Symposium, though the dreadful blunder which gives Love three parents (52, 53) was not Plato’s fault. Nor will Ficino’s two Veneres help us here, for in his commentary (VI. vii) there is no question of the second Venus at this point, and Penia (Spenser’s Penurie) is simply the first Venus herself, the receptive intelligence of the angelic mind, before Porus (Spenser’s Plentie), the ray of Deity, illuminates it. At lines 99–112 we get what looks for a moment like a possible rung. But Spenser’s distinction does not seem to be between those who desire carnal fruition and those who desire union of souls (Plato’s fourth rung), but between those who merely wish to ‘quench the flame’ and those who desire progeny ‘for eternitie’ (cf. Epithalamium, 420 et seq.). Lines 190–7 are, I admit, obscure, but I see no evidence that their obscurity conceals a rung. The Hymn of Beauty contains much more Platonic or neo-Platonic matter. The Form of Beauty, the supercelestial Venus, the model from which the Creator drew the visible universe (29–63) is the παράδειγμα of Timaeus, 28 c et seq. Her relation to Ficino’s complexities is not so easily determined. His First Venus is the Angelic Mind considered in its contemplation of Divine Beauty. His Second is the generative power in the Anima Mundi (a being inferior to the angels). Since this Second Venus endeavours to procreate material things in the image of the Divine Beauty (Ficino, op. cit. II. vii), Spenser’s Venus ought really to be the Divine Beauty itself. Perhaps he was not following Ficino closely at this point. By lines 99–112 he is I think much less concerned with any of these metaphysical Veneres than with the astrological Venus in the third sphere; and his interpretation of Phaedrus, 252 and 253 (in lines 197–203) is also astrological. Plato’s doctrine that the beloved finds his own beauty mirrored in the lover is used at 176. Spenser, envisaging of course a heterosexual love, wants this to be reciprocal, and that, I believe, was the real meaning of lines 190–6 in the previous hymn. In the lady the lover sees his potential and more beautiful self. But Spenser sadly bungles the idea by likening the two lovers to two mirrors which face one another. Surely the results would be very uninteresting. Lines 211–31 tell us that the lover, in his imagination, fashions the beloved fairer than she really is. If this led him to pass on from her to all beautiful bodies and thence to the beauty of laws and sciences we should at last have our feet on the Platonic ladder. But it does nothing of the sort. Spenser immediately returns to courtly love and winds up with a medieval prayer to Venus (now Love pure and simple with no Plato or Ficino about her) and to his ‘Soueraine’ Lady.
It is we, after all, not Spenser, who have called these poems Platonic. They are substantially meditations on chivalrous, monogamous, English love, enriched with colourings from Plato, Ficino, Lucretius, and the medieval poets. If we speak of the Platonic colourings at all we have to do so at some length because they are difficult: not because they are of immense importance.
In the Heavenly Love we bid farewell to Platonism almost completely. Most of this poem is a straight account of the Creation, Fall, and Redemption, such as any child in a Christian family learns before he is twelve. The earlier stanzas can be pressed into something Platonic (and heretical) if great skill and force are applied to them. The gravamen of the charge is that Spenser describes God as ‘begetting’ the angels. I think Spenser would have been astonished if anyone had supposed that he was confusing the creation of the angels with the eternal generation of the Son (’ere flitting Time could wag his eyas wings’). I think it would have seemed to him obvious that the word beget (like the word Father) could be used in this lower sense, especially when rhyme encouraged it. He could always defend himself by Luke iii. 38. One critic thinks it ‘important’ and neo-Platonic that Spenser describes the Son as creating Man (127–8): but Spenser, long before he heard of Ficino, had learned from the Fourth Gospel and the Nicene Creed that the Son created everything. The truth is that the Hymn of Heavenly Love is a very simple, pious poem; eloquent and (to Spenser’s co-religionists) edifying, but not, on its poetic or philosophical merits, to be very strongly pressed on other readers.
The Hymn of Heavenly Beauty is a little harder. We begin, in correct Pauline fashion, by contemplating the beauty of the visible universe. Having ascended through the spheres we pass, as Dante does in Paradiso XXX and Plato dreams of doing in Phaedrus, 247 c, beyond the Primum Mobile into the ‘supercelestial place’. It also has its hierarchical divisions: lowest the abode of blessed souls, then the region of Forms, and above that the angelic orders. From then, on to line 182, we have a simple and orthodox meditation on the Divine majesty. But this gives way to the figure of Sapience. No doubt Spenser chose this feminine image to provide a parallel to the Venus of the second hymn. Her chief origin is in the Book of Wisdom, but Spenser is also remembering Phaedrus, 250 c-d. We have seen all the forms—Justice, Beauty, Wisdom, and the rest—when we too, before our birth, were in the supercelestial place. In the present life it is the reminders of Beauty that especially inflame us. And Plato explains why. Not because Beauty in herself is more desirable than the others, but because the reminders of Beauty are visual, and sight is the clearest of our faculties. If the reminders of Wisdom could come home to our senses in the same way—why, then δεινοὺς ἄν παρει̃χεν έ̉ρωτας, terrible would be the fire of longing in which we should burn. Hence Spenser’s words (239–45) about the direct vision of Sapience to be enjoyed hereafter. Sapience in the fourth hymn thus, in a sense, recovers from that unfair disadvantage (invisibility) which led us to exalt Beauty in the second. The vision of the Divine Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) is not purely a bookish conception. She has had her place in Christian devotions: Soloviev claimed to have met her face to face even in this life. She is, of course, a being higher than Ficino’s First Venus: for even the First Venus is an aspect of created (angelic) mind, whereas Sapience is a Divine attribute personified or even the Second Person of the Trinity, from a particular point of view. I cannot find anything either confused or heretical in this poem. The Angelology is that of Dante and ultimately of Dionysius. The Christian saints in bliss and the Platonic Forms are conceptions which, though they do not imply, do not contradict, one another; and if both exist, where should they be except in the supercelestial place?—which is as much as to say, in no Place at all.
The length of this discussion must not be taken to mean that I reckon the Four Hymns among Spenser’s best works. Their riot of syncretism, for reasons which I shall explain later, is not to be counted as a fault. Their confusions produce only local discomfort. Nor in their simpler passages—the medieval praise of love or the Christian gratitude for Redemption—do they lack honest and wholesome poetry. The trouble is that honest and wholesome poetry is utterly inadequate for the themes that Spenser is attempting. You cannot carry a reader beyond the flaming bounds of space and time simply by sincerity and conscientious workmanship. Poetry that deals with such towering conceptions as these must be either a continuous blaze of dazzling splendour or else fail completely. Great subjects do not make great poems; usually, indeed, the reverse.
With the Four Hymns our account of Spenser’s minor poems may end, but two pieces of prose must be mentioned before we turn to the Faerie Queene.
In 1592 Cuthbert Burbie published A most excellent Dialogue by Plato the Phylosopher . . . Translated . . . by Edw. Spenser. It is a version, mainly through the Latin, of the Axiochus, and many scholars suppose it to be by the poet. The attribution to an Edward not an Edmund, of that name is not fatal to their view; but it contains passages of verse translation which I do not believe that Edmund Spenser could have written at any stage of his career.
A View of the present state of Ireland was certainly written in 1596, though never printed till 1633. In it Spenser is speaking chiefly, but not exclusively, as a civil servant and a supporter of Lord Grey. His political theory (if that is not too grand a name for it) depends on a sharp antithesis between Natural Law—‘the streight rule of right’ and ‘Ius Polliticum’. The latter, though ‘not of yt self Iust’, becomes so ‘by applycacion or rather necessitie . . . and this onelye respecte maketh all lawes iust’. From such principles it follows of course that ‘all is the Conquerors, as Tullie to Brutus saith’ and that ‘a mischief’ is better than an ‘inconuenience’. The morality of his own plan for the reduction of Ireland has been shown to be not so indefensible as quotations might make it appear, but any stronger apologia would be a burden beyond my shoulders. Let Dryghten deme. As literature, the View does not rank very high. Spenser made little attempt to breathe dramatic life into the dialogue form. The prose, despite a few vivid phrases, is Drab. Even in describing things that he loves, Spenser has none of the liveliness of Harrison: the sentences are long and nerveless. Yet his essay will always have a certain interest not only for historians but for students of Spenser’s poetry. His religious views are elusive, and he twice professes his laic ignorance; but they are certainly not those of a Protestant missionary nor of a bigot. He is sure that popery is not ‘the pure springe of lyfe’ but ‘nothing doubtes’ the salvation of many Papists. He loves Ireland strongly, in his own way, pronouncing Ulster ‘a most bewtifull and sweete countrie as any is vnder heauen’. And he gives free rein to those antiquarian interests so characteristic of his age. The ‘pleasure’ of such studies is a recurrent theme and Eudoxus makes it clear that Spenser hoped to publish a substantial prose work on Irish antiquities.
Spenser did not live to complete the great poem which was his life’s work. It would be salutary if instead of talking about the Faerie Queene we sometimes talked of Fragment A (I-III), B (IV-VI) and Fragment C (Mutabilitie). This would help to remind us that the inconsistencies we find in it are those of a partially written work. The letter to Raleigh prefixed to Fragment A gives us, no doubt, the design that was uppermost in Spenser’s mind when he wrote that letter. It had not, in its entirety, been in his mind at all stages during the composition of that Fragment. It had been in some degree abandoned when he wrote Fragment C. There is nothing surprising about this. There is a stage in the invention of any long story at which the outsider would see nothing but chaos. Numerous alternatives, written, half-written, and unwritten (the latter possibly the most influential of all) ferment together. Passages which no longer fit the main scheme are retained because they seem too good to lose: they will be harmonized somehow later on if the author lives to complete his work. Even a final revision often leaves ragged edges; unnoticed by generations of readers but pointed out in the end by professional scholars. There is a psychological law which makes it harder for the author to detect them than for the scholar. To the scholar an event in fiction is as firm a datum as an event in real life: he did not choose and cannot change it. The author has chosen it and changed it and seen it in its molten condition passing from one shape to another. It has as many rivals for its place in his memory as it had for its place in the final text. This cause of error is of course aggravated if the story is labyrinthine, as Spenser’s was. And it is aggravated still further if his professional duties permit him to work on his story only at rare intervals. Returning to work on an interrupted story is not like returning to work on a scholarly article. Facts, however long the scholar has left them untouched in his notebook, will still prove the same conclusions; he has only to start the engine running again. But the story is an organism: it goes on surreptitiously growing or decaying while your back is turned. If it decays, the resumption of work is like trying to coax back to life an almost extinguished fire, or to recapture the confidence of a shy animal which you had only partially tamed at your last visit. But if (as is far more probable) it grows, proliferates, ‘wantons in its prime’, then you will come back to find it
Changed like a garden in the heat of spring
After an eight-days’ absence.
Fertile chaos has obliterated the paths. I do not know whether Spenser could have triumphed over all these difficulties if he had lived to revise his poem; but the actual imperfections are no more than we might expect. At the same time I think it quite impossible to reconstruct historically the phases in his invention of which particular inconsistencies are, so to speak, the fossils. The process is far too subtle and complicated for that.
Formally considered, the Faerie Queene is the fusion of two kinds, the medieval allegory and the more recent romantic epic of the Italians. Because it is allegory, and allegory neither strictly religious nor strictly erotic but universal, every part of the poet’s experience can be brought in: because it is romantic epic, a certain unity is immediately imposed on all that enters it, for all is embodied in romantic adventures. ‘Faerie land’ itself provides the unity—a unity not of plot but of milieu. A priori the ways of Faerie Land might seem ‘so exceeding spatious and wide’ that such a unity amounted to nothing, but this is not found to be so. Few poems have a greater harmony of atmosphere. The multiplicity of the stories, far from impairing the unity, supports it; for just that multiplicity, that packed fullness of ‘vehement adventures’, is the quality of Faerie Land; as tragedy is the quality of Hardy’s Wessex.
When I last wrote about the Faerie Queene some fifteen years ago, I do not think I sufficiently emphasized the originality and fruitfulness of this structural invention. Perhaps it can be best brought out by considering the problems it solves. Spenser, let us say, has experienced in himself and observed in others sensual temptation; frivolous gallantry; the imprisonment and frustration of long, serious, and self-condemned passions; happy love; and religious melancholy. You could, perhaps, get all this into a lengthy, biographical novel, but that form did not exist in his time. You could get it into half a dozen plays; but only if your talent were theatrical, and only if you were ready to see these states of the heart (which were Spenser’s real concern) almost smothered by the Elizabethan demands for an exciting plot and comic relief. But in Faerie Land it is all quite simple. All the states become people or places in that country. You meet the first in the Bower of Acrasia, the second in Malecasta’s castle, the third in the House of Busirane, the fourth on Mount Acidale, and the fifth in Orgoglio’s dungeons and Despair’s cave. And this is not scissors and paste work. Such bowers, such castles, such ogres are just what we require to meet in Faerie Land: they are as necessary for filling the country as the country is for accommodating them. Whatever incidental faults the poem may have, it has, so to speak, a healthy constitution: the matter and the form fit each other like hand and glove.
This primary structural idea is reinforced by two others, the first internal to each book, and the second striding across from book to book through the whole poem. Thus in each book Spenser decided that there should be what I have called an ‘allegorical core’ (or shrine, or inner stage) where the theme of that book would appear disentangled from the complex adventures and reveal its unity: the House of Holiness in I, the House of Alma in II, the Garden of Adonis in III, the Temple of Venus in IV, the Church of Isis in V, Mount Acidale in VI, and the whole appeal of Mutabilitie in the unfinished book. (Since the position of the core within the book is variable, no conclusion can be based on the numbering of those two cantos.) Next in dignity to the core in each book comes the main allegorical story of the book (Guyon’s or Calidore’s quest). Beyond that is a loose fringe of stories which may be fully allegorical (like Scudamore’s visit to the cottage of Care) or merely typical (like Paridell’s seduction of Hellenore) or not allegorical at all (like the story told by the Squire of Dames to Satyrane). Thus the appearance, so necessary to the poem’s quality, of pathless wandering is largely a work of deliberate and successful illusion. Spenser, for reasons I have indicated, may not always know where he is going as regards the particular stories: as regards the symphony of moods, the careful arrangement of different degrees of allegory and different degrees of seriousness, he is always in command.
The second of the subordinate structural ideas is, of course, the quest of Arthur for Gloriana. In approaching Spenser’s Arthur we must empty our minds of many associations. Very few places in Spenser’s work show with certainty the influence of Malory, and most of them come late; in the Fifth Book of the Faerie Queene or the State of Ireland. His Merlin can be fully accounted for by Ariosto. If he had not used the form Igrayne (for Geoffrey’s Igerne) in the Letter to Raleigh we might almost conclude that he had never met Malory’s book till late in life. But the truth is that Malory’s Arthur would not serve the Elizabethans’ turn. He was too closely connected with the old religion and too little connected with later English history. The Arthur whom Camden in 1586 pointed out as suitable matter for a poet was a different figure. The same blood flowed in his veins as in Elizabeth’s. In opposing the Saxons he had very nearly been opposing the Pope. At Henry VII’s coronation the Red Dragon of Cadwallader had been advanced, and Henry’s son was named Arthur (as Bacon says) ‘in honour of the British race of which himself was’. Arthur’s conquests supported our claims to Ireland. There may even have been in Spenser’s mind associations of a more homely and bourgeois sort. Mulcaster in later life—and perhaps when Spenser sat under him—belonged to an archers’ club in London who called themselves the knights not of King Arthur but of Prince (the magnificent Prince) Arthur.
Such an Arthur belonged to the antiquaries and to the patriots far more than to Malory; but even from this new Arthur Spenser turned away. He invented enfances for his hero which had no precedent either in Tudor or in medieval tradition. His Arthur was to be a lover endlessly seeking an unknown mistress whom he had loved in a vision. For that theme he was presumably indebted to Arthur of Little Britain; whose hero, it must be remembered, was not the British king at all. But it is in Spenser that the myth of the visionary mistress effectively enters modern literature. His prince is the precursor of Novalis’s Heinrich, of Alastor, and of Keats’s Endymion. Allegorically, we are told, he is Magnificence; and it is clear that, in so far as this means anything Aristotelian, it means Aristotle’s Magnanimity. He is seeking Gloriana who is glory, and glory is honour, and honour is the goal of Aristotle’s Magnanimous Man. The name of his foster-father, Timon, underlines this. But then glory and honour are difficult words. We found in Douglas’s Palace that the sight of true Honour was the vision of God. We know, if we are Christians, that glory is what awaits the faithful in heaven. We know, if we are Platonists—and a reading of Boethius would make us Platonists enough for this—that every inferior good attracts us only by being an image of the single real good. The false Florimell attracts by being like the true, the true Florimell by being like Beauty itself. Earthly glory would never have moved us but by being a shadow or idolon of the Divine Glory, in which we are called to participate. Gloriana is ‘the idole of her Makers great magnificence’. The First Fair is desired in all that is desired. It is only, I think, in the light of such conceptions that the quest of Spenser’s Arthur can be understood. Arthur is an embodiment of what Professor Nygren calls ‘Eros religion’, the thirst of the soul for the Perfection beyond the created universe. Only this explains the terms in which Spenser describes his preliminary vision of Gloriana (I. ix). The laughter of all Nature, the grassy bed shared with the ‘royall Mayd’, the ravishing words (‘no living man like wordes did ever heare’) must, it seems to me, be taken for a picture not of nascent ambition and desire for fame but either of natural or celestial love; and they are certainly not simply a picture of the former. Only this explains the scene in which Arthur pursues Florimell (III. i, iv). Those who accuse him of inconstancy forget that he had seen the glory only in a vision by night. Hence, following Florimell,
Oft did he wish that Lady faire mote bee
His Faery Queene for whom he did complaine,
Or that his Faery Queene were such as shee (III. iv. 54).
The best parallel to this is the repeated (and always disappointed) belief of the Trojans in Aeneid, III, that they have already found the mansuram urbem. It is in the very nature of the Platonic quest and the Eros religion that the soul cannot know her true aim till she has achieved it. The seeker must advance, with the possibility at each step of error, beyond the false Florimells to the true, and beyond the true Florimell to the Glory. Only such an interpretation will explain the deep seriousness and the explicitly religious language of Arthur’s sequent soliloquy (55–60).
We must not, of course, forget that Gloriana is also Queen Elizabeth. This was much less chilling and shocking to the sixteenth century than it is to us. Quite apart from any prudent desire to flatter his prince (in an age when flattery had a ceremonial element in it) or from any romantic loyalty which he may have felt and probably did feel as an individual, Spenser knew that even outside poetry all reigning sovereigns were ex officio vicegerents and images of God. No orthodox person doubted that in this sense Elizabeth was ‘an idole’ of the divine magnificence. It is also easy to misunderstand the sentence ‘Gloriana is Elizabeth’. She is Elizabeth in a sense which does not prevent Belphoebe from also being Elizabeth nor Elizabeth from being also a remote, unborn descendant of Arthegall and Britomart who are contemporaries of Gloriana. Modern readers, trained on a strict roman-à-clef like Dryden’s Absalom, hardly know how to sit lightly enough to what is called the ‘historical allegory’ in Spenser. ‘Historical parallels’ or ‘fugitive historical allusions’ would be better names. The scene we have just been discussing is a good example. Arthur may at some moments and in some senses ‘be’ Leicester: but the poet is certainly not meaning to proclaim to the public that Elizabeth had shared her favourite’s bed. (For though Arthur met Gloriana in a vision, it was not quite a vision: there was ‘pressed gras where she had lyen’.) In general it must be remembered that the identifications of Gloriana and Belphoebe are the only two in the whole poem that have Spenser’s authority. That of Duessa was made so early that we may take it for certain. As for the rest, it is well to remember Spenser’s own warning ‘how doubtfully all allegories may be construed’. He can never have expected most of his historical meanings to be clear to more than a privileged minority of readers: it is reasonable to suppose that he seldom wrote a canto which depended on them for its main interest. No poet would embark his fame in such an unseaworthy vessel. Nor do I think that attempts in our own day to recover such meanings are at all likely to be fruitful. Great learning and skill have been spent on them. Every increase in our knowledge suggests a fresh allegory. If historical parallels were harder to come by they would convince more; but their multiplicity rather suggests to me how hard it is for a poet to feign an event which will not resemble some real event—or half a dozen real events.
In addition to the structural elements which I have already mentioned, Spenser at one time thought of stiffening his poem by dovetailing into it the Virtues out of Aristotle’s Ethics. He was thinking that way when he wrote the Letter to Raleigh as a preface for Fragment A. Presumably he had not thought of Aristotle when he wrote Book I, and had ceased thinking of Aristotle when he decided to write a legend of Constancy. Aristotle’s doctrine of the Mean is (rather dully) allegorized in II. ii. But the Aristotelian influence on Spenser is fitful and superficial. The Ethics was not at all his kind of book. His treatment of Justice suggests that he had forgotten, or never read, most of what Aristotle says about it.
Hitherto I have been speaking about the structural or (in that sense) ‘poetic’ ideas of the Faerie Queene, the inventions which make it the poem it is. Critics often, however, speak of a poet’s ‘ideas’ in quite a different sense, meaning his opinions or (in extreme cases) his philosophy. These are not often so important in a work of art as its ‘idea’ or ‘ideas’ in the first sense; the first two books of Gulliver depend much more on the ‘idea’ of big and little men than on any great novelty or profundity in Swift’s ‘ideas’ about politics and ethics. Spenser’s thought, however, has been so variously estimated that we cannot pass it over without some discussion.
Some scholars believe that in parts of the Faerie Queene they can find Spenser systematically expounding the doctrines of a school. But if so, the school can hardly be defined as anything narrower than Platonized Protestantism. He certainly believes in Predestination. ‘Why shouldst thou then despeire, that chosen art?’ says Una to the Redcrosse Knight (I. ix. 53). But this will hardly make Spenser Calvinist as distinct from Lutheran, nor either as distinct from Augustinian, or simply Pauline. It is also true that the virtues we meet in the House of Holiness—Humility, Zeal, Reverence, Faith, Hope, Charity, Mercy, and Contemplation—can all be paralleled in Calvin’s Institutio; but they are not arranged in the same order, and the things themselves would be likely to occur in any Christian teaching whatever. It is argued, again, that the quests on which the faerie knights are engaged, and especially the scene (I. x. 63) in which Contemplation commands St. George to turn back from the vision of the New Jerusalem and finish the ‘royal maides bequeathed care’, reflect the activism of Protestant (and, particularly, Calvinist) ethics and its rejection of the contemplative life. They may: but it is not certain. The quests of the knights are after all allegorical. A combat with Error or with the Old Dragon does not necessarily symbolize the active life. St. George’s return from the mountain of Contemplation is quite as close to the return of Plato’s ‘guardians’ (Republic, 519 d et seq.) as to anything in Protestant theology. And in any case, St. George in the poem must return because the story must go on. It is equally true that Spenser asserts total depravity (‘If any strength we have, it is to ill’, I. X. I) and ‘loathes’ this world ‘this state of life so tickle’ (Mut. viii. I), and that this fits well enough with Calvinist theology. But hardly less well with Lutheran. Indeed expressions very similar can be found in nearly all Christian writers. And something not unlike them can be found even in Platonism. When scholars claim that there is a profound difference of temper between Platonism and these world-renouncing attitudes, I do not know what they mean. There is difference of course; but few pagan systems adapt themselves so nearly to total depravity and contemptus mundi as the Platonic. The emotional overtones of the words ‘Renaissance Platonism’ perhaps help us to forget that Plato’s thought is at bottom otherworldly, pessimistic, and ascetic; far more ascetic than Protestantism. The natural universe is for Plato, a world of shadows, of Helens false as Spenser’s false Florimell (Rep. 586 A-C); the soul has come into it at all only because she lost her wings in a better place (Phaedr. 246 D-248 E); and the life of wisdom, while we are here, is a practice or exercise of death (Phaed. 80 D-81 A).
I am not arguing that Spenser was not a Calvinist. A priori it is very likely that he was. But his poetry is not so written as to enable us to pick out his own beliefs in distinct separation from kindred beliefs. When a modern writer is didactic he endeavours, like Shaw or M. Sartre, to throw his own ‘ideas’ into sharp relief, distinguishing them from the orthodoxy which he wants to attack. Spenser is not at all like that. Political circumstances lead him at times to stress his opposition to Roman Christianity; and if pressed, he would no doubt admit that where the pagan doctors differed from the Christian, the pagan doctors were wrong. But in general he is concerned with agreements, not differences. He is, like nearly all his contemporaries, a syncretist. He never dreamed of expounding something he could call ‘his philosophy’. His business was to embody in moving images the common wisdom. It is this that may easily arouse distrust of him in a modern reader. We feel that the man who could weld together, or think that he had welded together, so many diverse elements, Protestant, chivalric, Platonic, Ovidian, Lucretian, and pastoral, must have been very vague and shallow in each. But here we need to remember the difference between his basic assumption and ours. It is skepticism, despair of objective truth, which has trained us to regard diverse philosophies as historical phenomena, ‘period pieces’, not to be pitted against one another but each to be taken in its purest form and savoured on the historical palate. Thinking thus, we despise syncretism as we despise Victorian Gothic. Spenser could not feel thus, because he assumed from the outset that the truth about the universe was knowable and in fact known. If that were so, then of course you would expect agreements between the great teachers of all ages just as you expect agreements between the reports of different explorers. The agreements are the important thing, the useful and interesting thing. Differences, far from delighting us as precious manifestations of some unique temper or culture, are mere errors which can be neglected. Such intellectual optimism may be mistaken; but granted the mistake, a sincere and serious poet is bound to be, from our point of view, a syncretist. I believe that Sidney and Shakespeare are in this respect like Spenser, and to grasp this is one of the first duties of their critics. I do not think Shakespeare wrote a single line to express ‘his’ ideas. What some call his philosophy, he would have called common knowledge.
It is this that makes the thought of the Faerie Queene, as Professor Osgood says, ‘somehow unmeasurable’. Spenser expected his readers to find in it not his philosophy but their own experience—everyone’s experience—loosened from its particular contexts by the universalizing power of allegory. It is, no doubt, true that Spenser was far from being an exact thinker or a precise scholar in any department of human knowledge. Whatever he had tried to write would have had a certain vagueness about it. But most poetry is vague about something. In Milton the theology is clear, the images vague. In Racine the passions and the logic of events are clear, but the ‘manners’ vague and generalized. What is clear in Spenser is the image; Pyrochles beating the water while he cries ‘I burne, I burne, I burne’, or Disdain strutting, crane-like, on tiptoes, with legs that break but do not bleed, and as good as new, still glaring and still tiptoed, when he has been set up again. That is why it is at once so true and so misleading to call his poetry dreamlike; its images have the violent clarity and precision which we often find in actual dreams, but not the dimness and evasiveness which the overtones of the word dream-like (based more on waking reverie than real dreaming) usually call up. These images are not founded on, but merely festooned with, philosophical conceptions. In IV. X we can find, if that is our interest, the following: (1) Love as friendship; (2) Venus distinct from Love (or Cupid) as mother from son; (3) Love (Eros) as the brother of Hate (Eris) derived ultimately from Empedocles (32); (4) the hermaphroditic Venus whose obscure origins have been studied by Miss J. W. Bennett (41); (5) Love naturalistically conceived in lines adapted from Lucretius (44 et seq.). But Spenser did not set out by collecting these concepts, still less by attempting a philosophical synthesis of them. His theme is courtship and his model is medieval erotic allegory. How a gentle knight found the island fortress of true love and overcame its defenders and won meek Amoret—that is the substance. And that is all clear and vivid—the bridge with its corbes and pendants, the door where the porter Doubt peeps ‘through a crevis small’, the ubiquitous sound of running water, the inner paradise, the Loves fluttering round the statue, and the capture of the beloved. The philosophical matter merely adds a suggestion of depth, as if shadows of old thought played about the temple: just as fugitive memories of Donne or Dante or Patmore or Meredith might play about our own minds during a real love affair. I do not mean that Spenser thought of it quite in that way. He was too serious and too syncretistic. Everything that the wise had said about Love was worth attending to. He would not have said ‘Let us shade in here a little Platonism and there a little Epicureanism’. He would have said ‘Proclus in Timaeum doth report . . . Orpheus hath it thus . . . read the like in that place of Ficinus’. But the result is much the same. It produces that depth or thickness which is one of the excellences of the Faerie Queene.
This is why work on Spenser’s philosophical and iconographical background seems to me so much more rewarding than work on his historical allegory. But though such studies are enrichments they are not necessary for all readers. For those who can surrender themselves simply to the story Spenser himself will provide guidance enough. The allegory that really matters is usually unmistakable. Hazlitt can hardly have meant what he said on that subject. Few poets are so radically allegorical as Spenser: it is significant that one of the few words he has given to our language, Braggadocchio, though intended by him as the name of a man, has become the name of a quality. But it is not impossible that many who thought they were obeying Hazlitt have read the poetry aright. They receive the allegory so easily that they forget they have done so, as a man in health is unaware of breathing.
It has been the fate of the Faerie Queene to be attacked where strongest. The plan, the story, the invention are triumphant. If they have faults, they are such faults as never deterred any reader except those who dislike romance and would not be allured to read it by any perfections.
In his own day Spenser’s narrative technique was highly individual; it has proved so widely serviceable in later fiction that we ignore this. The opening (‘A gentle knight was pricking on the playne’) seems to us the most ordinary thing in the world. We have seen a hundred novels begun in the same way; ‘Dombey sat in the corner of the darkened room in the great armchair by the bedside’, or ‘It was early on a fine summer’s day near the end of the eighteenth century when a young man of genteel appearance’, &c. This method—the immediate presentation of a figure already in action—was not, however, the method of Spenser’s predecessors and contemporaries. He had perhaps no perfect model of it except in Heliodorus; and Shakespeare, in his two narrative pieces, is almost his only follower within the sixteenth century. Homer is not quite so direct. Chaucer’s Troilus does not show us Criseyde kneeling to Hector until line 105. The Canterbury Tales do not reach concrete particulars till line 20. Sackville’s Induction begins with eleven stanzas of description and reflection. In the Barons Wars we wade through pages of political prolegomena to reach anything like a scene. Hero and Leander hardly becomes a story before line 156. Ariosto does not rise from synopsis to real presentation till his tenth stanza. And the promise of Spenser’s opening line is kept in the canto that follows. Nineteenth-century critics, bred on Marmion and The Bride of Abydos, might think it leisurely; to an Elizabethan, reading it for the first time, the businesslike progression, the absence of what schoolboys call ‘gas’, must have appeared almost startling. Every line adds. We feel at once that the author has a tale to tell. The businesslike progression creates faith. Hence, as Hazlitt (with my italics) says, ‘In reading the Faery Queen, you see a little withered old man by a wood-side opening a wicket, a giant, and a dwarf’, &c.
No critics seem to me farther astray than those who deny that Spenser is an essentially narrative poet. No one loves him who does not love his story; outside the proems to the books and cantos he scarcely writes a line that is not for the story’s sake. His style is to be judged as the style of a story-teller. This is one reason why, though eminently a poet of Golden matter, he does not at all continuously exemplify the Golden manner. There is unfortunately another reason: Spenser at times relapses into the vices of the Drab Age.
We therefore have to distinguish three conditions of his style, two good, and one bad. Here is a specimen of the bad:
Tho when they had long time there taken rest,
Sir Arthegall, who all this while was bound
Upon an hard adventure yet in quest,
Fit time for him thence to depart it found (IV. vi. 42).
It might come from the Mirror for Magistrates. Not one word in it speaks to the senses or to the emotions. It is dry information, far worse than prose because the language has been cruelly racked to fit it into metre. That is Spenser in his Drab condition. Here is Spenser in his Golden condition:
By this the Northerne wagoner had set
His sevenfold teme behind the stedfast starre
That was in Ocean waves yet never wet
But firme is fixed and sendeth light from farre
To all that in the wide deep wandring are . . . (I. ii. I).
That is plain gold; the unsubtle yet delicious flow, the frank (yet here not excessive) alliteration, the frequent images, the Homeric echoes. The last line here, like the last line of the previous example, has an inversion. Yet the effect is quite different. The one, with its clustered consonants and emotional flatness, is felt as mere clumsiness; the other, coming in a line full of melody and calling up great distances, adds a chant-like solemnity. But thirdly, there is Spenser not Golden, not sugared at all (in his manner) but thoroughly good, pressing his tale:
And there beside of marble stone was built
An Altare carv’d with cunning ymagery,
On which trew Christians blood was often spilt . . . (I. viii. 36).
Or again:
He durst not enter into th’ open greene
For dread of them unawares to be descryde,
For breaking of their daunce if he were scene;
But in the covert of the wood did byde,
Beholding all. . . . (VI. X. 11).
It is as direct as good medieval verse: not to be lingered over, carrying us equably forward. Much of the Faerie Queene is like that; a ‘poetry of statement’. The typical Spenserian line tells you what somebody did or wore or where he went. Thus Spenser both falls beneath the Golden norm by defect and is also free to go outside for his own good purposes. We class him among Golden poets for his matter—the whole story is a Golden invention—and because he can often command the Golden style. His lapses into the Drab cannot be palliated in the poem, however we may excuse them historically in the man. But his successful departures from the Golden manner are an added excellence. In an age when poetry was soon to be almost too poetical, he kept open the great thoroughfare of verse for long-distance travelers in workday clothes. Thus, while he touches hands with the pure Golden poets, he also touches hands with Chaucer, Byron, and Crabbe. Wordsworth acknowledged him as a model.
It will be noticed that speeches in the Faerie Queene are usually bad if they are meant to express personal passion, and good if they are essentially chants or meditations. The more nearly Spenser approaches to drama the less he succeeds. He does not know the rhetoric of the passions and substitutes that of the schools. This is because he is not the poet of passions but of moods. I use that word to mean those prolonged states of the ‘inner weather’ which may colour our world for a week or even a month. That is what Spenser does best. In reading him we are reminded not of falling in love but of being in love; not of the moment which brought despair but of the despair which followed it; not of our sudden surrenders to temptation but of our habitual vices; not of religious conversion but of the religious life. Despite the apparent remoteness of his scenes, he is, far more than the dramatists, the poet of ordinary life, of the thing that goes on. Few of us have been in Lear’s situation or Hamlet’s: the houses and bowers and gardens of the Faerie Queene, both good and evil, are always at hand.
From what has been said it follows that those who wish to attack Spenser will be wise to concentrate on his style. There alone he is seriously vulnerable. I have made no attempt to conceal or defend those places where, on any view, he must be admitted to write dully, shrilly, or clumsily. But we come to something more controversial when we consider that quality which, in his best passages no less than in his worst, will alienate many modern readers—the absence of pressure or tension. There are, indeed, metrical variations, more numerous than we always remember. But the general effect is tranquil; line by line, unremarkable. His voice never breaks, he does not pluck you by the elbow, unexpected collocations of ideas do not pour out red hot. There is no irony or ambiguity. Some now would deny the name of poetry to writing of which this must be admitted. Let us not dispute about the name. It is more important to realize that this style (when it is true to itself) is suitable for Spenser’s purpose. He needs to create a certain quiet in our minds. The great images, the embodiments, as I have said, of moods or whole phases of experience, rise best if we are not flurried. A still, brooding attention, not a perpetual excitement, is what he demands. It is also probably true that the lack of tension in his verse reflects the lack of tension in his mind. His poetry does not express (though of course it often presents) discord and struggle: it expresses harmony. No poet, I think, was ever less like an Existentialist. He discovered early what things he valued, and there is no sign that his allegiance ever wavered. He was of course often, perhaps usually, disappointed. The actual court did not conform to his standard of courtesy: mutability, if philosophically accepted from the outset, might yet prove unexpectedly bitter to the taste. But disappointment is not necessarily conflict. It did not for Spenser discredit the things of which he was disappointed. It might breed melancholy or indignation, but not doubt. Why, after all, should it? Spenser inherited the Platonic and Christian dualism: heaven was set over against earth, being against becoming, eternity against time. He knew from the outset that the lower, half-unreal world must always fail to copy its archetype exactly. The worst that experience could do was to show that the degree of failure was greater than one had anticipated. If he had thought that the objects of his desire were merely ‘ideals’, private, subjective, constructions of his own mind, then the actual world might have thrown doubt on those ideals. But he thought no such thing. The Existentialist feels Angst because he thinks that man’s nature (and therefore his relation to all things) has to be created or invented, without guidance, at each moment of decision. Spenser thought that man’s nature was given, discoverable, and discovered; he did not feel Angst. He was often sad: but not, at bottom, worried. To many of my readers such a state of mind must appear a total illusion. If they cannot suspend their disbelief, they should leave Spenser alone; there are plenty of other authors to read. They must not, however, suppose that he was under an illusion about the historical world. That is not where he differs from them. He differs from them in thinking that it is not the whole story. His tranquility is a robust tranquility that ‘tolerates the indignities of time’, refusing (if we may put the matter in his terms) to be deceived by them, recognizing them as truths, indeed, but only the truths of ‘a foolish world’. He would not have called himself ‘the poet of our waking dreams’: rather the poet of our waking.
What, then, should be our final judgement of Spenser? That question is, in one sense, unanswerable; in another, almost too easy to be worth asking. Among those who shared, or still share, the culture for which he wrote, and which he helped to create, there is no dispute about his greatness. He never, while that culture lasted, suffered any eclipse comparable to that which Donne suffered in the eighteenth century, or Pope in the nineteenth. There are only minor fluctuations in his fame. Even for Rymer he is among the men ‘whose intellectuals were of so great a making’ that they may outlast ‘founders of empires’. Even Dryden acknowledges that ‘no man was ever born with so great a genius’. Pope imitated him as if he were an ancient. Within the older English tradition he is only less secure and central than Shakespeare and Milton. But of course this gives us no assurance that he will be mentioned a hundred years hence. His world has ended and his fame may end with it. To attempt an agreed estimate across the chasms that have now opened would be futile. There may—or may not—come a time when the culture for which Spenser wrote and the culture which is now replacing it can be compared, by men to whom English is a dead language, as coolly as we now compare two periods of ancient Egyptian history. At present it is not possible. We can only say that those who in any degree belong to the old culture still find in the ordered exuberance of the Faerie Queene an invigorating refreshment which no other book can supply. Doctor I. A. Richards’s conception of a poem as a health-giving adjustment of impulses may not cover all poetry—I am not sure. But it certainly covers the Faerie Queene. Perhaps that is why, though it may fail to gain some readers, it seldom loses those it has once gained. I never meet a man who says that he used to like the Faerie Queene.