LECTURE VISPENSER

LECTURE VISPENSER(Friday Evening, January 26, 1855)VI

(Friday Evening, January 26, 1855)

Chaucer had been in his grave one hundred and fifty years before England had secreted choice material enough to produce another great poet. Or, perhaps, we take it for granted that Nature understands her own business too well to make such productions cheap. Beauty, we know, has no charm like that of its eternal unexpectedness, and the best delight is that which blossoms from a stem of bare and long days.

Or is it that the spirit of man, of every race of men, has its fatal ebbs and floods, its oscillations between the fluid ideal and the solid matter-of-fact, so that the doubtful line of shore between is in one generation a hard sandy actuality, with only such resemblances of beauty as a dead sea-moss here and there, and in the next is whelmed with those graceful curves of ever-gaining, ever-receding foam, and that dance of joyous spray which knows not, so bright is it, whether it be sea or sunshine.

What English Poetry was between Chaucer and Spenser there is no need to say. Scotland had given birth to two or three poets of that kind which is qualified by the epithetnational, which is as much as saying that they took account only of the universe to the north-northeast corner of human nature instead of the whole circumference of it. England in the meanwhile had been enriched with Sternhold and Hopkins, but on the whole, the most important event between the death of Chaucer and the publication of the “Faëry Queene” was the introduction of blank verse. Perhaps the blank poetry suggested it.

Before the “Faëry Queene,” also, two long poems were printed and popular—the “Mirror for Magistrates,” and “Albion’s England.” How the first of these was ever read it is hard to conceive, unless we accept the theory of some theologians that our earth is only a kind of penal colony where men are punished for sins committed in some previous state of existence. The other was the work of one Warner, a conveyancer, and has a certain philological value now from its abounding in the popular phrases of the day. It is worth notice, also, as containing the most perfect example in the English language of what is called a conceit. It occurs in his account of Queen Elinor’s treatment of Fair Rosamond:

With that she dashed her on the lipsSo dyed double red;Hard was the heart that struck the blow,Soft were the lips that bled.

With that she dashed her on the lips

So dyed double red;

Hard was the heart that struck the blow,

Soft were the lips that bled.

Which is nonsense and not poetry, though Dr. Percy admired it. Dr. Donne, and the poets whom Dr. Johnson called metaphysical (as if all poets are not so), is thought to be full of conceits. But the essence of a conceit is not in a comparison being far-fetched,—the imagination can make fire and water friendly when it likes,—but in playing upon the meanings of two words where one is taken in a metaphorical sense. This is a mark of the superficial mind always; whereas Donne’s may be called a subterficial one, which went down to the roots of thought instead of playing with its blossoms.

Not long after the “Faëry Queene” were published the “Polyolbion” of Drayton, and the “Civil Wars” of Daniel. Both of these men were respectable poets (especially Drayton), but neither of them could reconcile poetry with gazetteering or chronicle-making. They are as unlike as a declaration in love and a declaration in law.

This was the period of the Saurians in English Poetry, interminable poems, book after book andcanto after canto, like far-stretchingvertebræ, prodigious creatures that rendered the earth unfit for the dwelling of Man. They are all dead now, the unwieldy monsters—ichthyo-, plesio-, and megalosauri—they all sleep well, and their huge remains are found imbedded in those vast morasses, the “Collections of the Poets.” We wonder at the length of face and general atra-bilious look that mark the portraits of that generation; but it is no marvel when even the poetry was such downright hard work. Poems of this sort might have served to while away the three-centuried evening of antediluvian lives. It is easy to understand how our ancestors could achieve great things when they encountered such hardships for mere amusement. If we agree with Horace in pitying the pre-Homeric heroes because they were without poets, we may sincerely commiserate our forefathers of that generation because they had them. The reading of one of these productions must have been nearly as long a business as the taking of Troy, and deserved a poet to sing it. Perhaps fathers, when their time on earth was up, folded the leaf down and left the task to be finished by their sons—a dreary inheritance.

The popularity of such works shows the insatiable thirst of the human soul for something which at least tried to be beyond mere matter-of-fact. Thisthirst for the ideal transmuted these books into poetry, just as the eternal drought of the desert turns muddy water into nectar, and the famine of the shipwrecked sailor gives a flavor beyond French cookery to a soup made of old shoes (potage aux choux). But meanwhile Nature, who loves surprises, was quietly preparing a noble one. A new poet had been born, and came upon that arid century fresh and dewy as out of the first dawn that waked the birds in Eden. A great poet is always impossible—till he comes, and then he seems the simplest thing in the world to the commentators. He got this notice here and the other there; similar subjects had been treated by such a one, and the metre first used by another. They give us all the terms of the equation; satisfy us thataplusbminuscequalsx, only we are left in the dark as to whatxis. The genius continues to be an unknown quantity. The great poet is as original as to-morrow’s sunrise, which will take the old clouds and vapors, and little household smokes of our poor, worn-out earth to make a miracle out of, and transfigure the old hills and fields and houses with the enchantment of familiar novelty. It is this power of being at once familiar and novel that distinguishes the primary poets. They give us a new heaven and a new earth without the former things havingpassed away,—whose very charm is that they have not,—a new heaven and a new earth that we can possess by the fireside, in the street, and the counting-room.

Edmund Spenser was born, like Chaucer, in London, in 1553, when Cervantes was six years old. That sixteenth century was a miraculous one. Scarce any other can show such a concurrence of great brains. Mothers must have expected an attack of genius among their children, as we look for measles or whooping-cough now. While Spenser was yet delving over thepropria quæ maribus, Shakspeare was stretching out his baby arms and trying to get the moon to play with, and the little Bacon, chewing upon his coral, had already learned the impenetrability of matter. It almost takes one’s breath away to think that at the same time “Hamlet” and the “Novum Organon” were at the mercy of teething and the scarlet fever, unless, indeed, destiny takes care to lock the doors against those child-stealing gypsies when she leaves such precious things about.

Of Spenser’s personal history we know very little. He was educated at Cambridge, where he took the degree of Master of Arts in 1576. He is supposed to have passed the three following years with some relations in the country, where he wrote verses and fell in love with a lady whom he calls Rosalind, andof whom we know nothing further unless we are satisfied to take the portrait which Shakspeare has associated forever with the name which he complimented by adopting. He is said to have been employed to carry a despatch or two, but Lord Burleigh did not fancy him. Poor Lord Burleigh! Sidney and Raleigh, however, were luckier. He was recommended to the great queen, and received at last a grant of Kilcolman Castle and three thousand acres of land in the south of Ireland. Here the “Faëry Queene” was in great part written. At last came a rebellion. The wild kernes and gallow-glasses had not the delicacy of the Emathian conqueror, and they burned the castle, from which Spenser and his wife with two of their children barely escaped, leaving an infant to perish in the flames. Spenser came to London and died broken-hearted three months afterward, on the 16th of January, 1599. That rare nature was like a Venice glass, meant only to mantle with the wine of the sunniest poetry. The first drop of poisonous sorrow shattered it.

In 1579 Spenser published the “Shepherd’s Calendar,” a series of twelve eclogues, one for each month in the year. In these poems he professedly imitated Chaucer, whom he called his master, but without much success. Even with the light reflectedupon them from the lustre of his great poem, one can find but little in them that is not dull. There are indications in these poems, however, here and there, of a nice ear for harmony in verse.

Spenser was the pure sense of the Beautiful put into a human body only that it might have the means of communicating with men. His own description of Clarion, the butterfly in his “Muiopotmos,” gives, perhaps, the best possible idea of his own character.

Over the fields, in his frank lustiness,And all the champaign o’er, he soared lightAnd all the country wide he did possess,Feeding upon their pleasures bounteously,That none gainsay, and none did him envy.The woods, the rivers, and the meadows green,With his air-cutting wings he measured wide,Nor did he leave the mountains bare unseen,Nor the rank grassy fens’ delights untried;But none of these, however sweet they been,Mote please his fancy, or him cause to abide;His choiceful sense with every change doth flit,No common things may please a wavering wit.To the gay gardens his unstaid desireHim wholly carried, to refresh his sprights;There lavish Nature, in her last attire,Pours forth sweet odors and alluring sights;And Art, with her contending, doth aspireTo excel the natural with made delights,And all that fair or pleasant may be found,In riotous excess doth there abound.There he arriving, round about doth flie,From bed to bed, from one to the other border,And takes survey with curious busy eye,Of every flower and herb there set in order;Now this, now that, he tasteth tenderly,Yet none of them he rudely doth disorder;He with his feet their silken leaves displace,But pastures on the pleasures of each place.And evermore with most varietyAnd change of sweetness (for all change is sweet),He casts his glutton sense to satisfy,Now sucking of the sap of herbs most meet,Or of the dew which yet on them doth lie,Now in the same bathing his tender feet;And then he percheth on some branch therebyTo weather him, and his moist wings to dry.And whatsoe’er of virtue good or ill,Grew in his garden fetched from far away,Of every one he takes and tastes at will,And on their pleasures greedily doth prey;Then, when he hath both played and fed his fill,In the warm sun he doth himself embay,And there him rests in riotous suffisanceOf all his gladfulness and kingly joyance.What more felicity can fall a creatureThan to enjoy delight with liberty?And to be lord of all the works of Nature,To reign in the air from earth to highest sky?To feed on flowers and weeds of glorious feature,To take whatever thing doth please the eye?Who rests not pleased with such happinessWell worthy he to taste of wretchedness.

Over the fields, in his frank lustiness,

And all the champaign o’er, he soared light

And all the country wide he did possess,

Feeding upon their pleasures bounteously,

That none gainsay, and none did him envy.

The woods, the rivers, and the meadows green,With his air-cutting wings he measured wide,Nor did he leave the mountains bare unseen,Nor the rank grassy fens’ delights untried;But none of these, however sweet they been,Mote please his fancy, or him cause to abide;His choiceful sense with every change doth flit,No common things may please a wavering wit.

The woods, the rivers, and the meadows green,

With his air-cutting wings he measured wide,

Nor did he leave the mountains bare unseen,

Nor the rank grassy fens’ delights untried;

But none of these, however sweet they been,

Mote please his fancy, or him cause to abide;

His choiceful sense with every change doth flit,

No common things may please a wavering wit.

To the gay gardens his unstaid desireHim wholly carried, to refresh his sprights;There lavish Nature, in her last attire,Pours forth sweet odors and alluring sights;And Art, with her contending, doth aspireTo excel the natural with made delights,And all that fair or pleasant may be found,In riotous excess doth there abound.

To the gay gardens his unstaid desire

Him wholly carried, to refresh his sprights;

There lavish Nature, in her last attire,

Pours forth sweet odors and alluring sights;

And Art, with her contending, doth aspire

To excel the natural with made delights,

And all that fair or pleasant may be found,

In riotous excess doth there abound.

There he arriving, round about doth flie,From bed to bed, from one to the other border,And takes survey with curious busy eye,Of every flower and herb there set in order;Now this, now that, he tasteth tenderly,Yet none of them he rudely doth disorder;He with his feet their silken leaves displace,But pastures on the pleasures of each place.

There he arriving, round about doth flie,

From bed to bed, from one to the other border,

And takes survey with curious busy eye,

Of every flower and herb there set in order;

Now this, now that, he tasteth tenderly,

Yet none of them he rudely doth disorder;

He with his feet their silken leaves displace,

But pastures on the pleasures of each place.

And evermore with most varietyAnd change of sweetness (for all change is sweet),He casts his glutton sense to satisfy,Now sucking of the sap of herbs most meet,Or of the dew which yet on them doth lie,Now in the same bathing his tender feet;And then he percheth on some branch therebyTo weather him, and his moist wings to dry.

And evermore with most variety

And change of sweetness (for all change is sweet),

He casts his glutton sense to satisfy,

Now sucking of the sap of herbs most meet,

Or of the dew which yet on them doth lie,

Now in the same bathing his tender feet;

And then he percheth on some branch thereby

To weather him, and his moist wings to dry.

And whatsoe’er of virtue good or ill,Grew in his garden fetched from far away,Of every one he takes and tastes at will,And on their pleasures greedily doth prey;Then, when he hath both played and fed his fill,In the warm sun he doth himself embay,And there him rests in riotous suffisanceOf all his gladfulness and kingly joyance.

And whatsoe’er of virtue good or ill,

Grew in his garden fetched from far away,

Of every one he takes and tastes at will,

And on their pleasures greedily doth prey;

Then, when he hath both played and fed his fill,

In the warm sun he doth himself embay,

And there him rests in riotous suffisance

Of all his gladfulness and kingly joyance.

What more felicity can fall a creatureThan to enjoy delight with liberty?And to be lord of all the works of Nature,To reign in the air from earth to highest sky?To feed on flowers and weeds of glorious feature,To take whatever thing doth please the eye?Who rests not pleased with such happinessWell worthy he to taste of wretchedness.

What more felicity can fall a creature

Than to enjoy delight with liberty?

And to be lord of all the works of Nature,

To reign in the air from earth to highest sky?

To feed on flowers and weeds of glorious feature,

To take whatever thing doth please the eye?

Who rests not pleased with such happiness

Well worthy he to taste of wretchedness.

What poet has ever left us such a portrait of himself as this? In that butterfly Spenser has symbolized the purely poetical nature. It will be seen that there is no recognition of the moral sense whatever. The poetic nature considered abstractly craves only beauty and delight—without any thought beyond—

And whatsoe’erof virtue good or ill,To feed on flowers andweeds of glorious feature.

And whatsoe’erof virtue good or ill,

To feed on flowers andweeds of glorious feature.

The poetical temperament has nowhere been at once so exquisitely defined and illustrated. Among poets, Spenser stands for the temperament personified.

But how did it happen that this lightsome creature, whose only business was

To reign in the air from earth to highest sky,

should have attempted in his greatest work to mix together two such incoherent things as sermon and poem? In the first place, the age out of which a man is born is the mother of his mind, and imprints her own likeness more or less clearly on the features of her child. There are two destinies from which no one can escape, his own idiosyncrasy, and that of the time in which he lives. Or shall we say that where the brain is in flower of its conceptions, the very air is full of thought-pollen, or some wandering bee will bring it, we know not from what far field, to hybridize the fruit?

In Spenser’s time England was just going through the vinous stage of that Puritanic fermentation which became acetous in Milton, and putrefactive in the Fifth Monarchy men. Here was one motive. But, besides this, it is evident that Spenser’s fancy had been colored by the Romances which were popular in his day; and these had all been allegorized by the monks, who turned them into prose. The adventure of the San Grail in the “Morte d’Arthur” reads almost like an extract from the “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Allegories were the fashion, and Spenser put one on as he did a ruff, not because it was the most convenient or becoming thing in the world, but because other people did.

Another reason is probably to be found in thenature of the man himself. The poetical temperament, when it comes down to earth and mingles with men, is conscious of a certain weakness. On the unsubstantial skyey floors of its own ideal world it walks firmly enough, and speaks the native language of the shadowy population there. But there is a knell at which that beautiful land dissolves like the baseless fabric of a vision—and that is the dinner bell. The poetical temperament becomes keenly conscious that it also has a stomach. It must dine, and commonly it likes rather better dinners than other people. To this end it must carry its wares to market where the understanding is master. Will the understanding pay hard money for the flowers of speech! Only what is practical will do there. “Fine words,” grumbles the Understanding proverbially, “butter no parsnips; and then, to make the matter worse, theparsnipsareideal.” “But, my dear sir,” remonstrates Temperament mildly—“Dear me no dears,” growls Understanding. “Everybody must earn his own salt—I do.” “Let me read you my beautiful poem.” “Can’t comprehend a word of it. The only language I know a word of is my old mother tongue, theuseful. Look at the towns and ships I’ve built. Nothing idealthere, you’ll find. Ideal, I suppose, is a new-fangled way of spelling idle. It won’t gohere.” Suddenly theusefulseems a very solid and powerful thing to our poor friend, the Poetic Temperament. It begins to feel a little absurd in talking enthusiasm to such a matter-of-fact generation. The problem is how to translate the ideal into the useful. How shall Master Edmund Spenser make himself comprehensible to Master John Bull? He will try a picture-book, and a moral one, too—he will write an Allegory.

Allegory is the Imagination of the Understanding, or what it supposes to be, which is the same thing. It is the ideal in words of one syllable, illustrated with cuts, and adapted to the meanest comprehension.

Spenser was a good and pure-minded man, and wished probably to combine the sacred office of Teacher with that of Poet. The preaching part of him came afterwards in Jeremy Taylor, who was Spenser with his singing-robes off.

Spenser’s mind was so thoroughly imbued with the beautiful that he makes even the Cave of Mammon a place one would like to live in.

I think it is the want ofhumaninterest that makes the “Faëry Queene” so little read. Hazlitt has said that nobody need be afraid of the allegory; it will not bite them, nor meddle with them unless they meddle with it. It was the first poemI ever read, and I had no suspicion of any double meaning in it. If we think of the moral as we read it will injure the effect of the poem, because we have an instinctive feeling that Beauty includes its own moral, and does not need to have it stuck on.

Charles Lamb made the most comprehensive criticism upon Spenser when he called him the “poets’ poet.” This was a magic mirror which he held up to life, where only shapes of loveliness are reflected. A joyous feeling of the beautiful thrills through the whole poem.

I think that Spenser has come nearer to expressing the unattainable something than any other poet. He is so purely a poet of beauty that with him the meaning does not modulate the music of the verse, but the music is a great part of the meaning. No poet is so splendidly superfluous as he. He knows too well that in poetryenoughis parsimony. The delight of beauty is that it is like a fountain, forever changing, forever the same, and forever more than full.

Spenser has characterized his own poem in the song which the Sirens sing to Sir Guyon in the twelfth canto of the second book. The whole passage also may be called his musical as distinguished from his picturesque style.

In reading Spenser one may see all the great galleriesof painting without stepping over his threshold. Michael Angelo is the only artist that he will not find there. It may be said of him that he is not a narrative poet at all, that he tells no stories, but paints them.

I have said that among our poets Spenser stands for the personification of the poetic sense and temperament. In him the senses were so sublimed and etherealized, and sympathized so harmoniously with an intellect of the subtlest quality that, with Dr. Donne, we “could almost say his body thought.” This benign introfusion of sense and spirit it is which gives his poetry the charm of crystalline purity without loss of warmth. He is ideal without being merely imaginative; he is sensuous without any suggestion of flesh and blood. He is full of feeling, and yet of such a kind that we can neither call it mere intellectual perception of what is fair and good and touching, nor associate it with that throbbing warmth which leads us to call sensibility by its human name of heart. In the world into which he carries us there is neither space nor time, and so far it is purely intellectual, but then it is full of form and color and all earthly gorgeousness, and so far it is sensual. There are no men and women in it, and yet it throngs with airy and immortal shapes that have the likeness of men and women.

To appreciate fully the sensuous intellectuality of this divine poet, compare him for a moment with Pope, who had an equal subtlety of brain without the joyous poetic sense. Pope’s mind was like a perfectly clear mirror hung in a drawing-room, and reflecting with perfect precision of outline and vividness of coloring, not man, but good society, every grace and every folly that belong not to human nature in its broad meaning, but as it is subordinated by fashion. But Spenser is like a great calm pool that lies brooding in delicious reverie over its golden sands in some enchanted world. If we look into it we know not if we see the shadows of clouds and trees and castles, of bright-armored knights and peerless dames that linger and are gone; or whether those pellucid depths are only a mysterious reservoir, where all the fairest dreams of our youth, dreams that were like hopes, and hopes that were but dreams, are visionarily gathered. Anon a ripple, born of no breeze, but of the poet’s own conscious joy, startles it into a dance of sunshine that fades away around its shores in a lapsing murmur that seems the shadow of music rather than its substance.

So entirely are beauty and delight the element of Spenser, that whenever in the “Faëry Queene” you come upon a thought or moral reflection it givesyou a shock of unpleasant surprise, a kind of grit, as when one’s teeth close upon a bit of gravel in a dish of strawberries and cream. He is the most fluent of our poets. Sensation passing over through emotion into reverie is the characteristic of his manner.

And to read him puts one in the condition of reverie—a state of mind in which one’s thoughts and feelings float motionless as you may see fishes do in a swift brook, only vibrating their fins enough to keep themselves from being swept down the current, while their bodies yield to all its curvings and quiver with the thrills of its fluid and sinuous delight. It is a luxury beyond luxury itself, for it is not only dreaming awake, but dreaming without the trouble of doing it yourself; letting it be done for you, in truth, by the finest dreamer that ever lived, who has the art of giving you all his own visions through the medium of music.

Of the versification of Spenser we need attempt no higher praise than that it belonged to him. If we would feel the infinite variety of the Spenserian stanza, as Spenser uses it, its musical intricacies, its long, sliding cadences, smooth as the green slope on the edge of Niagara, we have only to read verses of the same measure by other poets.

As showing his pathos, Mr. Lowell read Una’s lament on her desertion by the Red Cross Knight, and other pieces, calling attention particularly to the fact that his females were not women, like those of Shakspeare, but ideal beings.

We are accustomed to apologize for the grossness of our favorite old authors by saying that their age was to blame, and not they. Spenser needs no such excuses. He is the most perfect gentleman among poets. Through that unrefined time, when ladies drank a quart of ale for breakfast, and even Hamlet can say a coarse thing to Ophelia, Spenser passes pure and chaste as another Sir Galahad.

Whoever can endure unmixed delight, whoever can tolerate music, and painting, and poetry, all in one, whoever wishes to be rid of thought and to let the busy anvils of the brain be silent for a time, let him read in the “Faëry Queene.” There is a land of pure Heart’s Ease where no ache or sorrow of spirit can enter. If there be any poet whom we can love and feel grateful toward, it is Edmund Spenser.

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