No More Learning

R. , writing in commendation of the author of The Steele Glas,
after running over a list of the great poets of antiquity, says:
Thus divers men, with divers vaines did write,
But Gascoigne doth, in every vaine indite.
This dissipation of his energies over different fields of literature
prevented him from attaining excellence in any one kind, for he
had only moderate ability: the surprising thing is that he was
able to do many things well—most of them better than they
had been done by his predecessors, though in all he was easily
outstripped by the writers of the age that followed. His prose
style is easy and generally free from affectation, though he
indulges now and again in the curious similes and balanced allite-
ration which, later, became characteristic of euphuism. As a metrist,
he has a facility which extends over a wide range, but his fluency is
mechanical, the regular beat of his verse often giving the effect of
water coming out of a bottle. His long poems, whether in blank
verse or rimed measures, soon become monotonous and tedious,
The caesura in The Steele Glas occurs almost invariably after the
14
R. L. III.
CH. X.


## p. 210 (#232) ############################################

210
George Gascoigne
fourth syllable, and is regularly marked by Gascoigne with a
comma :
When vintners mix, no water with their wine,
When printers passe, none errours in their bookes,
When hatters use, to bye none olde cast robes? ,
and so on. In Dan Bartholmew of Bathe, in spite of a variety of
stanza forms, some of them elaborate enough, the general effect is
still monotonous. Gascoigne is seen at his best in trifles-short
poems which do not call for great depth of thought or sustained
interest, and in which his excessive fluency is kept within bounds.
Even in these he rarely hit upon a pregnant thought or striking
phrase"; but he succeeded in introducing into English poetry from
the Italian models whom he studied (Ariosto seems to have been his
especial favourite) a greater ease and smoothness than had been
attained by Wyatt and Surrey. The following sonnet is a good
example of his characteristic virtues :
That selfe same tonge which first did thee entreat
To linke thy liking with my lucky love:
That trustie tonge must nowe these wordes repeate,
I love thee still, my fancie cannot move.
That dreadlesse hart which durst attempt the thought
To win thy will with mine for to consent,
Maintaines that vow which love in me first wrought,
I love thee still, and never shall repent.
That happie hande which hardely did touch,
Thy tender body to my deepe delight:
Shall serve with sword to prove my passion such
As loves thee still, much more than it can write.
Thus love I still with tongue, hand, hart and all,
And when I chaunge, let vengeance on me falla.
Next to his love poetry, his verses in compliment to the queen
are perhaps most worthy of attention, especially those which he
wrote for the princely pleasures at Kenelworth Castle. ' He
directed his muse, with amazing ingenuousness, to the goal of
professional advancement, and this combined with other reasons
to prevent any lofty flight or permanent achievement; but, as the
first of the Elizabethan court poets, he is notable as the precursor of
an important movement.
i Cambridge edition, vol. II, p. 171.
· Ibid. , vol. I, p. 92.


## p. 211 (#233) ############################################

CHAPTER XI
THE POETRY OF SPENSER
The life of Spenser extended from the years 1552 to 1599, a
period which experienced a conflict of elementary intellectual
forces more stimulating to the emotions and imagination than,
perhaps, any other in the history of England. Throughout Europe,
the time-honoured system of society which had endured since the
age of Charles the Great was undergoing a complete transforma-
tion. In Christendom, so far as it was still Catholic, the ancient
doctrines of the church and the scholastic methods of interpreting
them held their ground in general education; but the weakening
of the central basis of authority caused them everywhere to be
applied in different ethical senses. A change of equal importance
had been wrought in the feudal order of which the emperor was
the recognised, but now only nominal, chief, since this universal
constitution of things had long been reduced to insignificance by
the rise of great independent nations, and the consequent begin-
ning of wars occasioned by the necessities of the balance of power.
Feudalism, undermined partly by the decay in its own spirit,
partly by its anarchical tendencies, was giving way before the
advancing tide of commercial intercourse, and, in every kingdom
of western Europe, the central authority of the monarch had
suppressed, in different degrees, the action of local liberty. In a
larger measure, perhaps, than any country, English society was the
stage of religious and political conflict. As the leader of the pro-
testant nations, England was surrounded by dangers that presently
culminated in the sending of the Spanish armada. Her ancient
nobility, almost destroyed by the wars of the Roses, had been sup-
planted by a race of statesmen and courtiers called into existence
by the crown, and, though the continuity of Catholic tradition was
still preserved, the sovereign, as head of the church, exerted almost
absolute power in the regulation of public worship. The conscience
of the nation wavered in this struggle between old ecclesiastico-
14-2


## p. 212 (#234) ############################################

2 12
The Poetry of Spenser
feudal forms and the infant ideas of civil life; and confusion was
itself confounded by the influence of art and letters imported from
the more advanced, but corrupt, culture of modern Italy. To the
difficulty of forming a reasonable view of life out of these chaotic
conditions was added the problem of expressing it in a language
as yet hardly mature enough to be the vehicle of philosophical
thought Wyatt and Surrey had, indeed, accomplished a remark-
able feat in adapting to Italian models the metrical inheritance
transmitted to them by Chaucer; but a loftier and larger imagina-
tion than theirs was required to create poetic forms for national
aspirations which had so little in common as those of England with
the spirit of Italy in the sixteenth century.
The poet whose name is rightly taken as representative of the
general movement of literature in the first half of Elizabeth's
reign was well fitted by nature to reflect the character of this
spiritual conflict. A modest and sympathetic disposition, an in-
telligence philosophic and acute, learned industry, a brilliant
fancy, an exquisite ear, enabled Spenser's genius to respond like
a musical instrument to each of the separate influences by which
it was stirred. His mind was rather receptive than creative. All
the great movements of the time are mirrored in his work. In
it is to be found a reverence for Catholic tradition modified by
the moral earnestness of the reforming protestant. His imagina-
tion is full of feudal ideas, warmed into life by his association with
men of action like Sidney, Grey, Ralegh and Essex, but coloured
by a contrary stream of thought derived from the philosophers of
the Italian renascence. Theological conceptions, originating with
the Christian Fathers, lie side by side in his poetry with images
drawn from pagan mythology, and with incidents of magic copied
from the medieval chroniclers. These imaginative materials are,
with him, not fused and assimilated in a form of direct poetic
action, as is the case in the poetry of Chaucer, Shakespeare and
Milton ; but, rather, are given an appearance of unity by an
allegory, proceeding from the mind of the poet himself, in a
mould of metrical language which combines native words, fallen
out of common use, with a syntax imitated from the great authors
of Greece and Rome. An attempt will be made in the following
pages to trace the correspondence in the work of Spenser be-
tween this conflict of external elements and his own poetic
genius, reflecting the spirit of his age.
In respect of what was contributed to the art of Spenser by
his personal life and character, it is often difficult to penetrate to


## p. 213 (#235) ############################################

213
Spenser's Family. Gabriel Harvey
the reality of things beneath the veil of allegory with which he
chooses to conceal his thoughts. We know that he was born in
London in (probably) 1552, the son of a clothier whose descent
was derived from the same stock as the Spencers of Althorp. To
this connection the poet alludes in his pastoral poem Colin Clout's
Come Home Again, when, praising the three daughters of Sir John
Spencer, he speaks of
1
The honor of the noble familie:
Of which I meanest boast my selfe to be.
We know, also, that he was one of the first scholars of the recently
founded Merchant Taylors' school, from which he passed as a sizar
to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, on 20 May 1569. Furthermore,
it is evident, from the sonnets contributed, in 1569, to A Theatre
for Worldlings? , that he must have begun early to write poetry.
At Cambridge, he came under three influences, each of which
powerfully affected his opinions and imagination. The first was
his friendship with Gabriel Harvey. This man, the son of a rope-
maker at Saffron Walden, was a person of considerable intellectual
force, but intolerably arrogant and conceited, and with a taste
vitiated by all the affectations of the decadent Italian humanism.
He entered Pembroke Hall as Fellow the year after Spenser
matriculated, and soon secured a strong hold over the modest and
diffident mind of the young undergraduate. His tone in the
published correspondence with Spenser is that of an intellectual
bully; and so much did the poet defer to the elder man's judg-
ment, that, at one time, he not only attempted to follow Harvey's
foolish experiment of anglicising the hexameter, but was in danger
of being discouraged by him from proceeding with The Faerie
Queene.
Again, Spenser was strongly influenced by the religious atmos-
phere of his college. Cambridge protestantism was, at this time,
sharply divided by the dispute between the strict disciplinarians in
the matter of church ritual, headed by Whitgift, master of Trinity,
afterwards archbishop of Canterbury, and those followers of Cart-
wright, Lady Margaret professor of Divinity, from whom, in course
of time, came forth the Martin Marprelate faction. Pembroke
Hall seems to have occupied a middle position in this conflict.
Its traditions were emphatically Calvinistic. Ridley, bishop of
London, one of the most conspicuous of the Marian martyrs, had
been master of the college; he was succeeded by his pupil Grindal,
1 Soe post, chap. XII.
7


## p. 214 (#236) ############################################

214
The Poetry of Spenser
afterwards archbishop of Canterbury; and the headship, when
Spenser matriculated, had passed to Young, at a later date bishop
of Rochester, whose Calvinism was no less marked than that of
his predecessors. Spenser, moved by the esprit de corps of his
college, eulogised both his old master and Grindal, when their
mild treatment of the nonconformists brought them into discredit
with the queen. It may, perhaps, be inferred from a letter of
Gabriel Harvey to Spenser, that the college did not side with
Cartwright in opposing the prescribed ritual; but many allusions in
The Shepheards Calender show that Spenser himself disapproved
of the relics of the Roman system that disguised themselves under
the garb of conformity.
But, however staunchly he held to the principles of the reformed
faith, his protestantism was modified and softened by anot
powerful movement of the time, namely, the study of Platonic
philosophy. The revival of Platonism which began with the
renascence was, of course, the natural antithesis to the system
of Aristotelian logic, as caricatured by the late schoolmen; but
it was also distinct from the Christianised Neo-Platonism which
culminated in the ninth century, when Joannes Scotus (Erigena)
popularised the doctrines of the so-called Dionysius the Areopagite,
embodied in his book The Celestial Hierarchy. Modern
Platonism implied an interpretation of the Scriptures in the
light of Plato's philosophy studied, generally, at the fountain head,
and particularly in the dialogues of The Republic, Timaeus
and the Symposium. Originated in the Platonic academy at
Florence by Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, it was taken up
by the reforming party throughout Europe, and was especially
favoured in the universities of Paris and Cambridge. To the
imagination of Spenser, it proved exceedingly congenial, and con-
firmed him in that allegorical habit of conception and expression
which characterises alike his love poems, his pastoral poems and
his romance.
Among these, Platonism, as was natural, shows itself most
crudely in his youthful love poetry. After taking his B. A.
degree in 1573, and proceeding to his M. A. degree in 1576,
he seems to have left the university, and to have paid a visit of
some length to his relatives in Lancashire. There, he probably
made the acquaintance of the unknown lady who, in his cor-
respondence with Gabriel Harvey, in The Shepheards Calender
and in Colin Clout's Come Home Again, is celebrated under the
name of Rosalind. There is nothing in the pastoral allusions to


## p. 215 (#237) ############################################

Platonism in Spenser's Love Poems 215
6
her indicating that Spenser's attachment involved feelings deeper
than were required for literary panegyric. Since the time of
Petrarch, every woman commemorated by Italian or English poets
had been of one type, beautiful as Laura, and 'cruel enough to
satisfy the standing regulations prescribed by the old courts of
love. In the lyrics of the troubadours, and even in the sonnets
of Petrarch, there is genuine ardour, but these were the fruit of
days when it was still possible to breathe in society the chivalrous
atmosphere of the crusades. The fall in the temperature of love
poetry in the sixteenth century reveals itself unmistakably in
the art of Spenser. His Amoretti or sonnets, written in praise of
the lady whom he married towards the close of his life, are no
better than the average compositions of the class then fashionable?
The 'cruelty' of Rosalind, probably not much more really painful
to the poet than that caused in his later years by 'Elisabeth,
was recorded in a more original form, in so far as it gave him
an opportunity of turning his training in Platonic philosophy
to the purposes of poetical composition. His two Hymnes in
honour of Love and Beautie, though not published till 1596, were,
he tells us, the product of his green youth,' and it may reasonably
be concluded that they were among the earliest of his surviving
works. They show no novelty of invention, being, from first to
last, merely the versification of ideas taken from Plato's Sym-
posium, read in the light of Ficino's commentary. The poet,
however, by showing how truly he himself comprehended the
philosophy of Love and felt his power, conveyed an ingenious
compliment to his mistress :
Love, that long since hast to thy mighty powre
Perforce subdude my poor captivëd hart,
And, raging now therein with restlesse stowre,
Doest tyrannize in everie weaker part;
Faine would I seeke to ease my bitter smart
By any service I might do to thee,
Or ought that else might to thee pleasing bee.
Love, he thinks, would doubtless be best pleased with an exposition
of the doctrines of true love: hence his elaborate analysis of the
passion, in which he follows, step by step, the Symposium of Plato,
or, rather, Ficino's commentary on that dialogue. Ficino himself
had not sought originality any more than Spenser. Like all the
men of the early renascence, he submitted his own opinions to those
of the authors of antiquity as if these were inspired. Whatever
See post, chap. XII.


## p. 216 (#238) ############################################

216
The Poetry of Spenser
was written in the Symposium he accepted as revealed truth;
and, since the views of Plato's imaginary speakers were often at
variance with each other, he took pains to reconcile them. He
had studied Plato in the light of ideas propagated through the
teaching of the Neo-Platonists, who had absorbed into their philo-
sophy many elements of oriental magic: accordingly, the process
of reconciliation ended in a new development of Plato's original
theory by Ficino, whom Spenser followed, with as little desire
to question his authority as the Italian philosopher had shown
in his interpretation of the Greek text. In the Symposium,
for example, where the whole texture of the dialogue is
humorous and dramatic, Phaedrus, whose theory is, of course,
quite opposed to that of Socrates, speaks of Love as the eldest
of the gods, and is contradicted by Agathon, who calls Love the
youngest god. Ficino tries to harmonise these two ideas by in-
troducing into the theory a Christian element derived from the
Neo-Platonism of the pseudo-Dionysius. He says that the Love,
guiding the Creator, was, indeed, older than the creation of the
universe; but that God afterwards created the order of angels,
and that Love turned the angelic intelligences towards God; so
that Love may be called at once the youngest, and the eldest, of
the divine powers? . Spenser, taking up Ficino's reasoning about
the two ages of Love, combines it with the mythological account
of Love's birth reported by Socrates from Diotima in the Sym-
posium.
Great God of Might, that reignest in the mynd,
And all the bodie to thy hest doest frame,
Victor of gods, subduer of mankynd,
That doest the Lions and fell Tigers tame,
Making their cruell rage thy scornefull ganie,
And in their roring taking great delight;
Who can express the glorie of thy might?
Or who alive can perfectly declare
The wondrous cradle of thine infancie,
When thy great inother Venus first thee bare,
Begot of Plentie and of Penurie,
Though elder then thine owne nativitie,
And yet a chyld, renewing still thy yeares,
And yet the eldest of the heavenly Peares ?
Ficino is followed with equal closeness in the Hymne in honour
of Beautie. Like him, Spenser describes the blending of the soul with
corporeal matter, and, like him, refutes the doctrine that beauty is
1 Ficino, In Platonis Libros Argumenta et Commentaria. Symposium. Oratio
Quinta, 10.


## p. 217 (#239) ############################################

Spenser and Ficino
217
merely proportion of parts and harmony of colour! ; he imitates the
Italian in describing the descent of the soul from heaven to form
the body, and the correspondence between the beautiful soul and
the beautiful body’; the reason why a beautiful soul sometimes
forms only an ugly bodys; the attraction of one beautiful soul to
another by means of celestial influences*; the mode in which the
passion of love begins. To show that the whole is intended as
a compliment to Rosalind, he breathes the hope:
It may so please, that she at length will streame
Some deaw of grace into my withered hart,
After long sorrow and consuming smart.
As the foundations of Spenser's imaginative thought were thus
laid in Platonic philosophy, it was almost inevitable that, when
his genius expanded, he should also look to Plato for his instrument
of poetic expression, and should illustrate his abstract doctrine by
the aid of concrete myths.
After spending some time in Lancashire, he was brought
south, through the influence of his friend Harvey, and employed in
the service of the earl of Leicester. In this capacity, he made
the acquaintance of Leicester's nephew, Philip Sidney, whose
ardent imagination and lofty spirit greatly stimulated him in the
prosecution of his poetical designs. The poet's correspondence
with Gabriel Harvey, at this period, throws much light on the
ambiguities and fluctuations of his literary motives. He tells
Harvey, whom he knew to be likely to sympathise with him, how
he has become one of an 'Areopagus,' in which Sidney and Dyer
were the leading spirits, and the prime object of which was to
naturalise in the language a system of versification based on
quantity. He himself ventures on some experiments in this
direction, so wretched in execution as to remove all grounds for
wonder at the poor quality of his compositions in Latin verse.
At the same time, his letters make it evident that he was engaged
in writing, in metres constructed with accent and rime, on subjects
much better suited to the turn of his genius. Feeling that the
power of poetry lay chiefly in imagery, he began, after his philo-
sophical exposition of Platonic doctrine in the Hymnes in honour
of Love and Beautie, to consider under what artistic forms he
might make his thought more intelligible to the general reader.
1 Ficino, Symposium, Argumenta. Oratio Quinta, 3. 6; Hymne in Honour of Beautie,
67–73.
? Ficino, ibid. 6; Hymne, 109—136. 3 Ficino, ibid. 5; Hymine, 144-150.
4 Ficino, Oratio Sexta, 6; Hymne, 200-213.
5 Ficino, ibid. 6; Hymne, 214-234


## p. 218 (#240) ############################################

218
The Poetry of Spenser
Two images were at once ready to his hand in the shepherd and
the knight-the heroes, so to speak, of two widely popular forms
of poetry, pastoralism and romance. Both of these seem to have
suggested themselves to him about the same time as fitting subjects
for poetical allegory, for, before the publication of The Shepheards
Calender, he had forwarded to Harvey specimens of his work-
manship in The Faerie Queene. The pastoral, however, as a
style more easy of execution for a poet wanting in experience,
attracted him first, as may be inferred from the quaintly conceited
account of his motives prefixed by his commentator E. K. to The
Shepheards Calender:
And also appeareth by the basenesse of the name, wherein it semeth he
chose rat to unfold great matter of argument covertly then, professing it,
not suffice thereto accordingly. Which moved him rather in Æglogues
then other wise to write, doubting perhaps his habilitie, which he little
needed, or mynding to furnish our tongue with this kinde, wherein it faulteth;
or following the example of the best and most auncient Poetes, which devised
this kind of wryting, being both so base for the matter, and homely for the
manner, at the first to trye theyr habilities; and as young birdes, that be newly
crept out of the nest, by little first to prove theyr tender wyngs, before they
make a greater flyght.
Whatever were the precise reasons that determined Spenser
to make his first poetical venture in the region of pastoral poetry,
there can be no doubt that he must have perceived the op-
portunities afforded to invention by the practice of his literary
predecessors. In the first place, the eclogue gave great scope for
allegory. Even in Theocritus, the poet is presented under the
guise of a shepherd, and in Moschus's lament for Bion this dress takes
a distinctly personal character. From such a beginning it was but
a step for Vergil to make the shepherd a mouthpiece for compli-
ments addressed to statesmen in the city; and, with equal readiness,
the eclogue, in the Middle Ages, passed from civil into ecclesiastical
allegory for the purposes of flattery or satire. A certain con-
venient obscurity thus began to cover all pastoral utterances, so
that, to quote the words of Petrarch, 'it is the nature of this class
of literature that, if the author does not provide a commentary,
its meaning may, perhaps, be guessed, but can never be fully
understood. '
The eclogue, again, recommended itself to Spenser on account
of the great variety of matter that had come to be treated in it.
In its most elementary conditions, it was used to represent either
a contest in singing between two shepherds, a lover's complaint,
or a dirge for some dead acquaintance. Transported into the


## p. 219 (#241) ############################################

The Shepheards Calender
219
region of allegory, the singing dialogue might be turned into a
channel for discoursing on the contemporary state of poetry; love
might be treated in its Platonic character; the dirge might be
developed into a court panegyric. All these modes of application
.
were of use to a poet in Spenser's position. He also saw that it
was possible for him to invest the eclogue with a certain novelty
of appearance. Till the dawn of the renascence, all pastoral poetry
had been written in Latin, the last author of this kind being
Baptista Mantuanus, a Carmelite friar (1448—1516); but Jacopo
Sanazzaro, of Naples, in 1490, broke new ground in his Arcadia,
a kind of romance, interspersed with eclogues, written in Italian.
Clément Marot, in France, before the middle of the sixteenth
century, naturalised the form of the Latin eclogue in the French
vernacular. His Complaincte d'un Pastoureau Chrestien, his
Eglogue au Roy and his Elegie sur Mme Loise de Savoye,
furnished models of which Spenser freely availed himself. In
England, Barnabe Googe moved along the same protestant
and humanist lines as Marot, importing, also, into his pastoral
dialogues, romantic elements borrowed from Diana, which he had
probably read during his travels in Spain. Traces of acquaintance
with all these compositions are visible in The Shepheards Calender,
lightly imprinted on a form of the eclogue which is the invention
of Spenser himself.
The Shepheards Calender was published in 1579. It was
dedicated to The Noble and Vertuous Gentleman, worthy of all
titles both of Learning and Chevalrie, M. Philip Sidney. ' With
characteristic diffidence, the poet hesitated in giving his work to
the world, partly from the fear, as he confesses in a letter to
Harvey, of 'cloying the noble ears' of his patron, and thus
ing his contempt, partly because the poem itself was written
in honour of a private person, and so might be thought too base
for his excellent Lordship. ' Sidney hastened to show that these
apprehensions were groundless, by bestowing high praise on The
Shepheards Calender, in his Defence of Poesie, qualified, indeed,
by one important censure: "That same framing of his style to
an olde rusticke language, I dare not allow : since neither
Theocritus in Greeke, Virgill in Latine, nor Sanazara in Italian, did
affect it. ' The objection is of historical interest, as illustrating
the extent to which the men of the early renascence in England
submitted themselves to the authority of the ancients, and to the
Aristotelian criticism of the Italian academies : the remark itself
touches merely the superficial question of style, and does not
6
>


## p. 220 (#242) ############################################

220
The Poetry of Spenser
attempt to penetrate the deeper question how far the traditional
form of the pastoral can be taken as a proper vehicle for modern
thought and feeling. For the age of Elizabeth it bore immediate
fruit. On the one hand, Sidney's praise gave a vogue to the
pastoral style; on the other, his censure of rusticity in language
warned those who attempted the pastoral manner off Spenser's
example. Drayton, in his Eclogues, while preserving the clownish
nomenclature of The Shepheards Calender, takes care to make
his speakers discourse in the language of polished literature.
The Shepheards Calender was introduced to the notice of
the public by a commentator signing himself E. K. , who is
conjectured, with every probability, to have been Spenser's
fellow-collegian and contemporary, Edward Kirke. E. K. 's preface,
addressed to Gabriel Harvey, and written in the contorted style
approved by him, was divided into two portions, one being a
defence of Spenser's practice in respect of diction, the other a
description of his design. Of the latter, E. K. says:
Now, as touching the generall dryft and purpose of his glogues, I mind
not to say much, him selfe labouring to conceale it. Onely this appeareth, that.
his unstayed yougth had long wandred in the common Labyrinth of Love, in
which time to mitigate and allay the heate of his passion, or els to warne (as
he sayth) the young shepheards, his equalls and companions, of his unfor.
tunate folly, he compiled these xii Æglogues, which, for that they be propor-
tioned to the state of the xii monethes, he termeth the Shepheards Calendar,
applying an olde name to a new worke.
Had the design of The Shepheards Calender been so simple
as E. K. suggests, the work would have had unity, but little
variety. Spenser would have confined himself to a rendering of
the traditional idea of pastoral love adapted to the changes of
the different seasons; but, as a matter of fact, the unity of the
design lies solely in an allegorical calendar, treated ethically, in
agreement with the physical characteristics of the different months.
The idea of love is presented prominently only in four of the
eclogues, viz. those for January, March, June and December: of
the rest, four, those for February, May, July and September, deal
with matters relating to morality or religion; two are compli-
mentary or elegiac; those for April and November; one, that for
August, describes a singing match pure and simple ; and one, that
for October, is devoted to a lament for the neglect of poetry.
Hence, it appears that Spenser, without making much account of
the singleness of purpose ascribed to him by his commentator,
contrives to include within the plan of the pastoral calendar a


## p. 221 (#243) ############################################

Allegory in The Shepheards Calender 221
large number of those traditional motives which had been employed
by his predecessors in this class of poetry. And, from this fact,
we may safely make two inferences, which apply to all Spenser's
allegories, philosophical, pastoral, or romantic. In the first place,
it is misleading to gather the sense of the allegory from the
apparent nature of his theme. His mind did not energise within
its professed subject, like that of Bunyan in The Pilgrim's Pro-
gress, where the plan, action and characters of the story are
plainly evolved directly from the inherent spiritual thought. In
the second place, the true significance of Spenser's allegorical
matter can only be discovered by tracking the sources of his
allegorical forms. His motives are artistic rather than ethical,
and he is concerned less with matter of thought than manner
of expression. This is the case even with those classes of
his compositions in which his motive appears to be primarily
philosophical. If, for example, the Platonism in his Hymnes be
compared with that of Wordsworth in the Ode on the Intimations
of Immortality, a striking difference of conception is at once
observable Wordsworth's poetical inspiration comes immediately
from within: the speculations of Plato, no doubt, set his imagina-
tion to work, but his imaginative reasoning is his own; whereas,
in the Hymnes, as has been already shown, Spenser merely ex-
pounds, without alteration, the theory of beauty which he has
derived from the commentary of Ficino on Plato's Symposium;
his sole original contribution to the poetry is the beautiful and
harmonious form of English verse which he makes the vehicle of
the thought.
If we look away from the authorised account of Spenser's
design in The Shepheards Calender to the actual gestation of
the poem in his imagination, it is plain that, before constructing
his general idea, he had carefully studied the pastoral practice of
Theocritus, Bion, Vergil, Mantuan and Marot. His sympathetic
intelligence had been impressed by many imaginative passages in
these authors, and he desired to reproduce them in a novel form.
For this purpose, he chose, as the basis of his entire work, an
allegory founded on the widely popular Kalendrier des Bergers
-an almanac describing the tasks of shepherds in the different
months of the year—and resolved to include within his poetical
edifice the various subjects hitherto handled in the eclogue.
In
dealing with the subject of love, he naturally took as his models
the Greek and Latin idyllists, who had preceded him with
many complaints of shepherds unfortunate in their wooing. But


## p. 222 (#244) ############################################

2 22
The Poetry of Spenser
6
the direct expression of passion by these pagan poets had to be
harmonised with the sub-tone of Platonism imported into amorous
verse by the troubadours and Petrarch. Colin Clout, the love-lorn
shepherd, whose lamentations run, more or less, through all seasons
of the year, has been treated by Rosalind, the widowe's daughter
,
of the glenne,' with the 'cruelty' prescribed to ladies in the
conventional rules of the courts of love and utters his despair in
the winter months of January and December. His feelings are
much more complex than those ascribed, for example, by Theocritus
to the lover of Amaryllis, and, in the following stanza, it is plain
that the pastoral sentiment has been transferred from the fields
to the artificial atmosphere of court life:
A thousand sithes I curse that carefull hower
Wherein I longd the neighbour towne to see,
And eke tenne thousand sithes I blesse the stoure
Wherein I sawe so fayre a sight as shee:
Yet all for naught: such sight hath bred my bane.
Ah, God! that love should breede both joy and payne!
Again, in the complaint of Colin in December, the essential
motive is distinctly literary: it lies much less in the lover's pain
than in the recollections of his untroubled youth, that is to say,
in a passage of this character in Marot’s Eglogue au Roy, which
Spenser has very closely imitated. So, also, in the March eclogue,
where the dialogue is carried on between two shepherds called
Thomalin and Willie, the real motive is to imitate Bion's second
idyll-containing a purely pagan conception of love in the rustic
style specially devised by Spenser for his speakers. The result is
not very happy. Bion's idyll is, really, an epigram. It describes
how a boy fowler spied Love sitting like a bird on a tree, and how
a
he vainly endeavoured to ensnare him with all the arts he had
lately learned. The boy relates his want of success to an old
bird-catcher who had taught him, and is bidden to give over the
chase, since, when he attains to man's estate, instead of trying
to catch Love, he will regret being caught by him. Spenser's
imitation of this is comparatively clumsy. He represents two
young shepherds talking together in a manner befitting the spring
season. Thomalin tells his friend how he recently startled from
the bushes a ‘naked swayne' (so Moschus describes Love) and
how he shot at him with his arrows till he had emptied his quiver,
when he ran away in a fright, and the creature shot at him and
hit him in the heel. Willie explains to his friend that the swain
was Love, a fact with which he is acquainted because his father


## p. 223 (#245) ############################################

Spenser's Literary Obligations
223
had once caught him in a fowling net, fortunately without his
bow and arrows. The eclogue concludes, as usual, with 'emblems'
chosen by the two speakers. The epigrammatic terseness of Bion,
whose idyll is contained in sixteen lines, is lost in Spenser's diffuse
description, which runs to one hundred and seventeen.
In the eclogues of a religious turn, the primary inspiration is
seen to be no less traditional and literary. Here, the main sug-
gestion is, generally, furnished by Mantuan. Mantuan, in his
eighth eclogue, introduces two shepherds, Candidus and Alphus,
discussing the respective advantages of life in the mountains and
on the plains. The treatment is simple enough. Candidus, who
represents the former, praises the mountains, chiefly on account
of the monasteries built in them. He also mentions the earthly
paradise and the fall of man, at once with the naïveté character-
istic of a rustic mind and with the pagan imagery proper to Latin
verse:
Esse locum memorant, ubi surgit ab aequore Titan,
Qui, nisi dedidici, contingit vertice Lunam,
Et vixisse illic hominem, sed postea abactum
Improbitate gulae, quod scilicet omnia poma
Manderet, et magno servasset nulla Tonanti.
Spenser, in his eclogue for July, imitates this passage in imagery
scarcely less formally pagan:
Besyde, as holy fathers sayne,
There is a hyllye place,
Where Titan ryseth from the mayne
To renne hys dayly race,
Upon whose toppe the starres bene stayed,
And all the skie doth leane;
There is the cave where Phoebe layed
The shepheard long to dreame.
Whilome there used shepheards all
To feede theyr flocks at will,
Till by his foly one did fall,
That all the rest did spill.
Mantuan contents himself with clothing theological allusions in
classical imagery; his mountains and plains are really mountains
and plains; Spenser, in his eclogue, extends his allegory to all
the images suggested to him by Mantuan : his mountains become
types of ecclesiastical pride and luxury, his plains, of the humility
required by true religion.
In the eclogue for September, he follows more closely Mantuan's
steps in the pastoral called Religio. Mantuan himself had built
his poem allegorically on Vergil's first eclogue, in which Tityrus


## p. 224 (#246) ############################################

224
The Poetry of Spenser
describes to his friend Meliboeus—, shepherd driven from his
farm-the glories of the city of Rome, whither he had gone, when
his lands were lost to him by his ruinous love for Galatea, and
had had them restored by the bounty of a divine youth, who now
enabled him to live with comfort in the country. The medieval
poet, satirically inverting the idea, represents Candidus, a shepherd
from the north of Italy, arriving in the neighbourhood of Rome,
where he hopes to find rich pasture for his flock. Bitterly dis-
appointed with the climate of that barren place, he bewails his
lot to his friend Faustulus, who explains to him all the evils that
arise from the character of the shepherds of the neighbourhood and
the dogs that devour the sheep. Here, the sense is, of course,
allegorical. Spenser takes up Mantuan's idea, with certain modifi-
cations, making Diggon Davie, his chief speaker, return to his native
district, after wandering abroad with his flock, and relate to
Hobbinol his sad experiences. The satire, which reflects on the
worldliness of the Anglican clergy, is more particular than that
of Mantuan, and contains many personal allusions.
Two eclogues, those for April and November, are devoted,
respectively, to courtly compliment and courtly elegy. Here,
Spenser found his models both in Vergil and Marot. The first
eclogue of Vergil is intended to convey a compliment to Octavianus:
his last is an imaginary elegy in honour of his friend Gallus. Marot,
in his Eglogue au Roy, under cover of pastoral imagery, returns
thanks to his sovereign, Francis I, for the relief given him in his old
age; while, in his Elegie sur Mme Loise de Savoye, he adapts the
traditional manner to courtly purposes on the principle applied by
Vergil in his tenth eclogue. Spenser, following closely in the track
of Marot, nevertheless diverges, as usual, slightly from his model,
partly for the sake of being original, partly to preserve the air of
greater rusticity affected in his own eclogues. In April, the praises
of Elizabeth are recited by Hobbinol from a lay made by Colin,
who has left his daily work for love of Rosalind : in November,
Dido, 'the great shepherd's daughter,' is lamented by Colin him-
self, in lyrical strophes which replace the uniform stanza employed
by Marot throughout his elegy on Loise de Savoye.
Finally, Spenser uses the eclogue for the allegorical purpose
of discoursing on the contemporary state of poetry. Here, again,
a lead had been given him by Mantuan in his fifth eclogue, De
Consuetudine Divitum erga Poetas; but Mantuan himself had
an original in the sixteenth idyll of Theocritus, in which the poet,
addressing Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse, complains of the meagre
1


## p. 225 (#247) ############################################

Spenser and Mantuan
225
patronage extended to the poets of the time, and claims generous
assistance. Spenser, in his October eclogue, adheres closely to the
framework of Mantuan's poem. Like Candidus, in that composition,
Cuddie, the poet, appealed to by his companion Piers, maintains
that his
poore Muse hath spent her spared store,
Yet little good hath got, and much lesse gayne;
like Sylvanus, Piers exhorts his friend to sing to the country
folk, for glory, if not for gain; and, if he will not do this, to try
his fortune at court. But, when Cuddie still resists his friend's
appeal, Piers, who is of a more exalted spirit than Sylvanus, cries :
Then make thee winges of thine aspyring wit,
And, whence thou camst, flye backe to heaven apace.
Cuddie, however, is dejected by unsuccessful love, and, though
Piers maintains that love (in Plato's sense) should lift him 'above
the starry skie,' Cuddie persists in declaring that
All otherwise the state of Poet stands;
For lordly love is such a Tyranne fell,
That where he rules all power he doth expell;
The vaunted verse a vacant head demaundes.
If he is to sing of lofty themes, his imagination must be heated
to them by the material goods of life:
For Bacchus fruite is frend to Phoebus wise;
And, when with Wine the braine begins to sweate,
The nombers flowe as fast as spring doth ryse.
The characteristics of Spenser's pastoral style, then, make it
plain that, if we would estimate aright the value of his allegory,
we must consider the form of his eclogues apart from their matter.
As regards the latter, the eclectic treatment which he bestowed
upon his materials is a sign-as eclecticism is in all the arts-
of exhaustion in the natural sources of inspiration. Spenser
may be regarded as, in one sense, the last master in a cosmo-
politan style of poetical composition, and, in another, as the
pioneer of a new departure in the art of English poetry. The
atmosphere of The Shepheards Calender is thoroughly artificial.
As treated by its inventor, Theocritus, the essence of the idyll
was truth to nature. His beautiful and lucid rendering of the
pains and pleasures of shepherd life, the musical simplicity of the
verse, in which he calls up images of whispering pine-trees, falling
15
E. L. III.
cH. XI.


## p. 226 (#248) ############################################

226 The Poetry of Spenser
waters, climbing flocks and flowering hills, are as charming to
the English mind to-day as they were to his Greek audience more
than two thousand years ago. But, when Spenser took up the
eclogue, it was as heir to a long line of ancestors, each of whom
had added to it some imaginative element disguising the simplicity
of the fundamental style; pastoral poetry, in fact, had now reached
a stage where allegory was believed to be essential to it, and when
Petrarch could say of it that, if the author does not provide
a commentary, its meaning may, perhaps, be guessed, but can
never be fully understood. Every one can fully understand the
'
naïve and passionate despair of Theocritus's goatherd after his
vain appeal to Amaryllis in the third idyll; but there is
little appearance of genuine emotion in the allegorical grief of
Colin Clout, timed to suit the wintry season. Nature, again,
speaks in each line of the idyll called The Adoniazusae, where
Gorgo and Praxinoe chatter to each other precisely after the
fashion of Englishwomen going to look on at a public spectacle.
But, in Spenser's eclogues for May, July and September, we have
to accustom ourselves to an exotic atmosphere before we realise
the propriety of transferring the pastoral image from the rural
to the ecclesiastical flock; nor can we at all reconcile the theo-
logical refinements in the discourse of Piers and Palinode to the
actual simplicity of the bucolic mind. Whatever authority Spenser
could have cited from Vergil and Marot for the compliment he
paid to Elizabeth, as 'queene of shepheardes all,' it is surely an
anomaly in nature to associate the pastoral image with one that
inevitably calls up a vision of 'ruffs, and cuffs, and farthingales,
and things. '
If, however, Spenser's practice in bucolic poetry be viewed
mainly on the technical side, The Shepheards Calender appears
as a most important monument in the history of English poetry.
Every reader must admire the skill displayed by the poet in
providing a suitable form for the great variety of his matter. His
selection of the Kalendrier des Bergers, as the foundation of his
allegory, is an excellent piece of invention, and the judgment
with which he distributes his materials over the various seasons,
the consistency with which he preserves the characters of his
shepherds, the propriety of the rural images employed for the
ornament of discourse, all show the hand of a great poetical
artist. His achievements in the sphere of verbal harmony are
the more admirable when the immature state of the language
before the publication of this poem is taken into account.


## p. 227 (#249) ############################################

Vocabulary of The Shepheards Calender 227
E. K. devotes the larger part of his prolegomena to defending
the mode of diction afterwards blamed by Sir Philip Sidney :
And firste of the wordes to speake, I graunt they be something hard,
and of most men unused, yet both English, and also used of most excellent
Authors, and most famous Poetes. whom, wheneas this our Poet hath
bene much traveiled and throughly redd, how could it be, (as that worthy
Oratour sayde) but that walking in the sonne, although for other cause he
walked, yet needes he mought be sunburnt; and, having the sound of those
auncient Poetes still ringing in his eares, he mought needes, in singing, hit out
some of theyr tunes. But whether he useth them by such casualtye and
custome, or of set purpose and choyse, as thinking them fittest for such
rusticall rudenesse of shepheards, eyther for that theyr rude sounde would
make his rymes more ragged and rustical, or els because such olde and
obsolete wordes are most used of country folke, sure I think, and think I think
not amisse, that they bring great grace, and, as one would say, auctoritie to the
verse. . . . For, if my memory faile not, Tullie, in that booke wherein he en-
devoureth to set forth the paterne of a perfect Oratour, sayth that ofttimes
an auncient worde maketh the style seeme grave, and as it were reverend,
no otherwise then we honour and reverence gray heares, for a certein
religious regard, which we have of old age.
Spenser may very well have meant to emulate the neologising
tendency of the almost contemporary Pléiade; in which case, it is
interesting to observe the opposite principle on which he pro-
ceeded; for, while the French reformers aimed mainly at coining
new words from Latin and Greek, the English poet sought, in the
first place, to revive old standard words which had fallen out of
colloquial use. But, on the whole, it seems probable that, above
all things, he was anxious to treat language as entering into his
allegory, and to frame a mode of diction which should appear
to be in keeping with his pastoral characters. For this purpose,
he, in the first place, turned, as E. K. says, to the monuments of
ruder antiquity, and revived obsolete words from the writings of
Chaucer and Lydgate. Wyatt and Surrey had also founded
themselves on Chaucer, but with a different motive, their aim
being, rather, to make a selection of such old literary words as
should seem to be not uncongenial to courtly speech; Spenser,
on the contrary, was deliberately archaic. With his literary
archaisms he blended many peculiarities of dialect, turning from
the southern dialect, which had become the basis of literary
composition and polite conversation, to the midland or northern
varieties of the tongue, which were held to be rustic and un-
courtly. And, besides these two recognised sources of vocabulary,
he drew considerably on his own invention, from which he often
coined a word conformable to the style of his verse, but un-
authorised by precedent in speech or writing. The result of
15—2


## p. 228 (#250) ############################################

228
The Poetry of Spenser
this procedure was, on the one hand, as Ben Jonson says, that
'Spenser, in affecting the obsolete, writ no language'; on the
other, that he constructed a style singularly appropriate to the
multiform character of his pastoral allegory. When he thought
that the situation demanded it, he could be clownish to the point
of doggerel, as in September, where two shepherds, Hobbinol
and Diggon Davie, discourse about religion. But in many
other eclogues the rustic dialect is thrown aside, and it is
evident that the poet means to make use of his pastoral subject
mainly for the purpose of metrical experiment. In this sphere,
he displays the genius of a great poet-musician. We have
only to compare the rhythms of The Shepheards Calender with
those of A Mirror for Magistrates in general, and even with
that of Sackville's Induction in particular, to see that a metrical
writer had arisen who excelled all his predecessors in his
sense of the capacity of the English language for harmonious
combinations of sound: whether he takes an irregular lyrical
flight, or employs the iambic rhythm in uniform stanzas, he shows
that he can use the courtly style of diction to the utmost ad-
vantage. Nothing can be more beautiful, for example, than the
versification of the two following stanzas :
Colin, to heare thy rymes and roundelayes,
Which thou wert wont on wastfull hylls to singe,
I more delight then larke in Sommer dayes;
Whose Echo made the neyghbour groves to ring,
And taught the byrds, which in the lower spring
Did shroude in shady leaves from sonny rayes,
Frame to thy songe their chereful cheriping,
Or hold theyr peace, for shame of thy swete layes
I sawe Calliope wyth Muses moe,
Soone as thy oaten pype began to sound,
Theyr yvory Luyts and Tamburins forgoe,
And from the fountaine, where they sat around,
Renne after hastely thy silver sound;
But, when they came where thou thy skill didst showe,
They drewe abacke, as halfe with shame confoand
Shepheard to see them in theyr art outgoe.
No less melodious are the lyrical songs which, in the eclogues for
April and November, he turns to the purposes of compliment or
elegy, and which anticipate the still more exquisite music of the
Prothalamion and Epithalamion, the work of his later years.
In The Faerie Queene, Spenser applies the allegorical method
of composition on the same principle as in The Shepheards
Calender, but, owing to the nature of the theme, with great
difference in the character of the results. He had taken up the


## p. 229 (#251) ############################################

The Faerie Queene
229
idea of allegorising romance almost at the same time as he con-
templated the pastoral, and had submitted specimens of his work
on it to the pedantic judgment of Harvey, who thought little of
the performance in comparison with other poems by his friend,
written, probably, more in accordance with his own affected taste.
These latter, as Spenser informed Harvey, comprised Dreames,
Stemmata Dudleiana, The Dying Pelican and Nine Comedies
in imitation of Ariosto; none of them survive. He may have
been discouraged by Harvey's want of appreciation of The Faerie
Queene; but, at any rate, he was soon called away to more practical
work by accepting, in 1580, the position of secretary to lord Grey,
who had been appointed lord deputy in Ireland. Public duties
and the turbulent state of the country, doubtless, only allowed
him intervals of leisure for excursions into the 'delightful land of
Faerie,' but we know that he continued to develop his design-of
which he had completed the first, and a portion of the second, book
before leaving England for the work is mentioned by his friend
Lodowick Bryskett as being in progress in 1583. Spenser's name
appears as one of the undertakers' for the colonisation of Munster,
in 1586, when he obtained possession of Kilcolman castle, the
scenery in the neighbourhood of which he often mentions in
The Faerie Queene. Here, in 1589, he was visited by Ralegh and
read to him the three books of the poem which were all that he
had then completed. Ralegh, delighted with what he heard, per-
suaded Spenser to accompany him to England, no doubt holding
out to him prospects of preferment at court, whither the two
friends proceeded in the winter of 1589. The first portion 'of
The Faerie Queene was published in 1590.
In estimating the artistic value of this poem, we ought to
consider not only what the poet himself tells us about the design,
but the motives actually in his mind, so far as these discover
themselves in the execution of the work. Allegory, no doubt, is its
leading feature. The book, says Spenser, is 'a continued allegory
or darke conceit. ' But he goes on to explain the manner in which
his main intention is to be carried out:
The generall end therefore of all the booke (he says in his letter to
Balegh) is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle
discipline: Which for that I conceived shoulde be most plausible and pleasing,
being coloured with an historicall fiction, the which the most part of men
delight to read, rather for variety of matter then for profite of the
ensample, I chose the historye of King Arthure, as most fitte for the excel-
lenoy of his person, being made famous by many mens former workes, and
also furthest from the daunger of envy, and suspition of present time. In
which I have followed all the antique Poets historicall; first Homere, who in


## p. 230 (#252) ############################################

230
The Poetry of Spenser
the Persons of Agamemnon and Ulysses hath ensampled a good governour
and a vertuous man, the one in his Ilias, the other in his Odysseis: then
Virgil, whose like intention was to doe in the person of Aeneas: after him
Ariosto comprised them both in his Orlando: and lately Tasso dissevered them
againe, and formed both parts in two persons, namely that part which they in
Philosophy call Ethice, or vertues of a private man, coloured in his Rinaldo;
the other named Politice in his Godfredo.
a
A certain ambiguity and confusion is here visible, showing that
Spenser had not clearly thought out his design according to the
fundamental principles of his art. It is possible to please, as
well as teach, by an allegory of action, if the conduct of the story
be kept as clear and consistent as it is in The Pilgrim's Progress.
It is possible to teach, as well as please, by epic example, because
the imagination may be lifted into a heroic atmosphere of valour
and virtue; but, in order to achieve such a result, the poet
must charm the reader, as Homer does, into a belief in the reality
of his narrative. A history like that in The Faerie Queene, which,
ex hypothesi, is allegorical, and, therefore, cannot be real, destroys
the possibility of illusion. Spenser was confronted by a difficulty
which, in a less formidable shape, had presented itself even to
Tasso, when devising the structure of Gerusalemme Liberata,
one of the poems which Spenser selects as a proof that it is
possible to teach in poetry by means of the historical ‘ensample. '
The Italian poet sought to solve the problem by combining with
the real action of history the marvellous machinery of romance,
which Ariosto had employed in Orlando Furioso, and which
was demanded, as an indispensable element in medieval epic
poetry, by the public taste. It cannot be said that his solution
was entirely successful. It is impossible to persuade the average
reader of the reality of an action in which the historical personages
of Godfrey and Bohemund are blended with the romantic figures
of Herminia and Clorinda, and in which we have to travel in
fancy from actual battles under the walls of Jerusalem to the
fabulous gardens of the enchantress Armida. Professed history
and obvious fiction cannot be harmonised so as to produce a
completely credible effect; and credibility is out of the question
when romance itself is proclaimed, as it is by Spenser, to be only
symbolical. How, for example, can we believe that the historical
prince Arthur ever came to the allegorical house of Pride, or
really fought with the abstract personage, Disdain?
When we turn from the poet's description of his design to the
method of his execution, we see that this exactly resembled his
procedure in The Shepheards Calender. As, in that work, he


## p. 231 (#253) ############################################

Design of The Faerie Queene 231
consulted the practice of all his pastoral predecessors, so, in the
structure of The Faerie Queene, he followed the lines of the
great romantic poets of Italy, and particularly those of the author
of Orlando Furioso. At an early date after taking his degree,
he had confided to his correspondent Gabriel Harvey his hope of
being able to emulate or even 'overgo’ Ariosto, and the whole
of The Faerie Queene-particularly the first three books—bears
witness to the frequency with which Spenser props his invention
on that of his great Italian model. Not only did he transform
many characters in Orlando Furioso, such as Atlante, Alcina,
Bradamante, into his own Archimago, Duessa and Britomart, but
he borrowed whole episodes from Ariosto's poem for the purposes
of his story. To mention only a few, the search of Britomart for
Artegall is imitated from the search of Bradamante for Ruggiero;
as the latter heroine comes to the cave of the fairy Melissa to be
informed of her destiny, so does Britomart to the dungeon of
Merlin; the courtship of Britomart by Artegall exactly resembles
the love-making between Ruggiero and Bradamante; Britomart's
male attire occasions the same mistake about her sex to Malecasta,
as in the parallel case of Bradamante and Fiordespina; the same
relations exist between Britomart and Radigund as between
Bradamante and Marfisa; while the transformation of the witch
Duessa is directly copied from that of the Fay Alcina. Added to
all this, Spenser imitates the narrative of Ariosto in the constant
change of person, scene and action. He evidently hoped that
while thus 'emulating' Ariosto in variety of matter' he might
'overgo' him in 'profite of ensample'; nor does his expectation
seem unnatural, when we remember that Harington, the first
translator of Orlando Furioso, was obliged to disguise the want
of moral purpose in his original by insisting—it can hardly
be supposed with much sincerity—that all Ariosto’s marvellous
fictions are to be construed allegorically. To Spenser, it seemed
possible, by blending with the romantic manner of Ariosto the
varied religious, philosophical and patriotic materials of which
he could avail himself, to produce a finer poem in the romantic
class than any that had yet appeared. But he did not reckon with
all the difficulties in his way.
Orlando Furioso embodies the quintessence of knight erran-
try. Its virtue lies entirely in its spirit of action. Without
any well defined subject, like the consequences of the wrath of
Achilles or the loss of Eden, without any single hero on whose
fortunes the conduct of the poem turns, Ariosto contrived to include


## p. 232 (#254) ############################################

232
The Poetry of Spenser
>
in a connected work an infinity of persons, incidents, marvels,
descriptions and emotions, which sustains without weariness the
interest of any reader who chooses to surrender his imagination
entirely to the poet's guidance. In Orlando Furioso, there is no
progress from point to point towards a well discerned end; the
character of the poem is proclaimed in the two opening lines,
Le donne, i cavalier, l arme, gli amori,
Le cortesie, P audaci impresi, io canto,
which form the prelude to a varied spectacle of human action and
passion. The sole unity in this ever changing scene lies in the
imagination of the poet himself, who acts as the interpreter of his
puppet show, and enlists our interest on behalf of his fictitious
creatures by the lively sympathy with which he accompanies
them in every marvellous, humorous, or pathetic adventure.
Numerous as are his personages, he never loses sight of one of
them, and will break off, at the climax of a thrilling situation, to
transport the reader into a different quarter of the globe, where,
a few cantos back, a valorous knight or hapless lover has been
left in circumstances of seemingly irremediable misfortune. His
effects are produced entirely by the realistic power of his fancy;
and perhaps no poet in the world has ever approached, in this
respect, so nearly as Ariosto to the standard of Horace:
Ille per extentum funem mihi posse videtur
Ire poeta, meum qui pectus inaniter angit,
Irritat, mulcet, falsis terroribus implet,
Ut magus, et modo me Thebis, modo ponit Athenis.
The feat is accomplished simply and solely by the vivid repre-
sentation of action and character. The images are complete in
themselves; and to attempt to add anything to them, in the
shape of reason or moral, would destroy the reality of their airy
being. Ariosto, as Aristotle says of Homer, 'tells lies as he
ought'; he cheats the imagination into a belief in what would be
probable in a really impossible situation.
While adopting the form of the romantic epic as the basis of
allegory throughout his entire poem, Spenser seems soon to have
discovered that he could only travel easily by this path for a short
distance. In his first two books, indeed, it was open to him to
represent chivalrous action of an allegorical character, which
might be readily understood as a probation undergone by the hero,
prince Arthur, in the moral virtues of holiness and temperance. The
first book shows the militant Christian, in the person of the Red
Cross Knight, travelling in company with Una, the lady of his
.


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Allegory in The Faerie Queene
233
love, personifying wisdom or the highest form of beauty, on an
enterprise, of which the end is to free the kingdom of Una's parents
from the ravages of a great dragon, the evil one. The various
adventures in which the actors in the story are involved are well
conceived, as setting forth the different temptations to which the
Christian character is exposed; and this idea is still more forcibly
worked out in the second book, which illustrates the exercise of
temperance; for, here, the poet can appropriately ally the treat-
ment of this virtue in Greek philosophy with the many allusions
to it in the New Testament. In the allegories of the house of
Mammon, the house of Alma and the bower of Bliss, the beauty
of the imagery is equalled by the propriety with which treasures
of learning are employed to bring the moral into due relief. At
this point, however, the capacities of the moral design, as an-
nounced by the poet, were exhausted. “To fashion a gentleman
or noble person’ in the discipline of chastity, the subject of the
third book, would have involved an allegory too closely resembling
the one already completed; and it is significant that a female
knight is now brought upon the scene; while, both in the third
and in the fourth book, the moral is scarcely at all enforced by
allegory, but almost always by 'ensample,' or adventure. Justice,
the virtue exemplified in the fifth book, is not, as would be anti-
cipated from the preface, an inward disposition of the knightly
soul, but an external condition of things, produced by the course
of politics-scarcely allegorised at all-in real countries such as
Ireland, France and the Netherlands; on the other hand, the
peculiarly knightly virtue of courtesy is, in the sixth book,
illustrated, also with very little attempt at allegory, by means
of episodes of adventure borrowed, almost directly, from the
romantic narrative of the Morte d'Arthur.
The absence of depth in Spenser's moral allegory is further
shown by the multiplicity of his aims. He explains in his letter
to Ralegh why his poem is called The Faerie Queene.
In that Faery Queene I meane glory in my generall intention, but in my
particular I conceive the most excellent and glorious person of our soveraine
the Queene, and her kingdome in Faery land. And yet, in some places els, I doe
otherwise shadow her. For considering she beareth two persons, the one of a
most royall Queene or Empresse, the other of a most vertuous and beautifull
Lady, this latter part in some places I do expresse in Belphæbe, fashioning
her name according to your owne excellent conceipt of Cynthia, (Phoebe and
Cynthia being both names of Diana. ) So in the person of Prince Arthure
I sette forth magnificence in particular; which vertue, for that (according to
Aristotle and the rest) it is the perfection of all the rest, and conteineth in it
them all, therefore in the whole course I mention the deedes of Arthure


## p. 234 (#256) ############################################

234
The Poetry of Spenser
applyable to that vertue, which I write of in that booke. But of the XII. other
vertues I make xii. other knights the patrones, for the more variety of the
history: Of which these three bookes contayn three.
The attention of the reader is thus withdrawn from the purely
ideal figure of the perfect knight, to unriddle, sometimes compli-
ments addressed to great persons at court (e. g. queen Elizabeth,
who, as occasion requires, is Gloriana, or Belphoebe, or Britomart;
lord Grey, who is Artegall; Sir Walter Ralegh who is Timias),
and sometimes invectives against the queen's enemies, in the
person of Duessa, who, when she is not Theological Falsehood, is
Mary, queen of Scots.
This ambiguity of meaning is intensified by the mixture of
Christian with pagan imagery, and by the blending of classical
mythology, both with local antiquarian learning and with the
fictions of romance. In the fifth canto of the first book, for
example, Duessa, or Papal Falsehood, goes down to hell, under
the guidance of Night, to procure aid from Aesculapius for the
wounded paynim Sansfoy, or Infidelity; and her mission gives an
opening for a description of many of the torments mentioned in
Vergil's 'Inferno. ' On her return to the upper air, she goes to the
stately pallace of Dame Pryde,' in whose dungeons are confined
many of the proud men mentioned in the Old Testament, or in
Greek and Roman history. Shortly afterwards, prince Arthur
relates to Una his nurture by the supposed historic Merlin; and
the latter, in the third book, discloses to Britomart the line of
British kings, as recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and pro-
phesies the reign of Elizabeth.
Such profusion of material and multiplicity of motive, while it
gives to The Faerie Queene an unequalled appearance of richness
and splendour, invalidates the profession of Spenser that the
poem is a continued allegory. ' Allegory cannot be here inter-
'
preted as it may be, for example, in Plato's Phaedrus, where the
myth is avowedly used to relieve and illuminate the obscurities of
abstract thought. It cannot be interpreted in Dante's meaning,
when he makes Beatrice say: 'thus it is fitting to speak to your
mind, seeing it is only from an object of sense that it apprehends
what it afterwards makes worthy of the understanding. ' Nor
does it approach in moral depth the simple allegory of The
Pilgrim's Progress, in which the author evidently employs the
form of a story merely as the vehicle for the truth of Christian
doctrine. In other words, the sense of Spenser's allegory does
not lie in its external truth: its value is to be found in its relation
1


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The Knight in the Social Organism
235
to the beauty of his own thought, and in the fidelity with which
it reflects the intellectual temper of his time.
The main difficulty that Spenser had to encounter in treating
the subject of The Faerie Queene lay in the conduct of the action.
His design was at once ethical and practical, namely 'to fashion
a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline’;
and this he proposed to do by portraying 'in Arthure, before he
was King, the image of a brave Knight, perfected in the twelve
private Morall Vertues, as Aristotle hath devised. ' But the
knight, as such, no longer, in any real sense, formed part of the
social organism. He had been rapidly vanishing from it since
the epoch of the crusades, and almost the last glimpse of him in
English poetry is in the fine and dignified person of the Canter-
bury pilgrim, the 'verray parfit, gentil knyght,' who is represented
as having warred against the infidel on behalf of Christendom in
Prussia and Lithuania. So long as it was possible to believe in
his existence, men pleased their imaginations with reading of the
knight's ideal deeds in the romances; but the time was close at
hand when the romances themselves were, necessarily, to be made
the subject of just satire. Absolutism had everywhere crushed the
energies of feudalism; the knight had been transformed into the
courtier; and the 'vertuous and gentle discipline,' deemed requi-
site for him in his new sphere, was, for the most part, to be found
in such regulations for external behaviour as are laid down in
Castiglione's Il Cortegiano. Long before the close of the
eighteenth century, it would have been possible to write, mutatis
mutandis, the epitaph of feudalism in the glowing words of Burke:
The age of Chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calon-
lators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.
Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that
proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart,
which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom.
The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of
manly sentiment and heroick enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibility
of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which
inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it
touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.
Spenser himself felt that he was dealing with a vanished state
of things:
So oft as I with state of present time
The image of the antique world compare,
When as mans age was in his freshest primo,
And the first blossome of faire vertue bare;


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236
The Poetry of Spenser
Such oddes I finde twixt those, and these which are,
As that, through long continuance of his course,
Me seemes the world is runne quite out of square
From the first point of his appointed sourse;
And being once amisse growes daily wourse and wourse.
Under these altered conditions, it would be unreasonable to
look in The Faerie Queene for a 'continued allegory' of action.
What we do find there is the chivalrous spirit, such as still sur-
vived in the soul of Sidney and a few others, uttering itself, when
opportunity offers, in short bursts of enthusiastic and sublime
sentiment, as in the following stanza on Honour:
In woods, in waves, in warres, she wonts to dwell,
And wil be found with perill and with paine;
Ne can the man that moulds in ydle cell
Unto her bappy mansion attaine :
Before her gate high God did Sweate ordaine,
And wakefull watches ever to abide;
But easy is the way and passage plaine
To pleasures pallace: it may soon be spide,
And day and night her dores to all stand open widel,
There is nothing in Orlando Furioso so lofty as this ; nor
can the great poet of Italian romance for a moment compare with
Spenser in 'that generous loyalty to rank and sex . . . that sub-
ordination of the heart,' which, as Burke observes, is one of the
noblest characteristics of chivalry. Not only does the ancient
tendency to woman-worship, common to the Teutonic race, survive
in the figure of Gloriana, The Faerie Queene, but in all Spenser's
treatment of female character there is a purity and elevation
worthy of his chivalrous subject. His Una and Amoret are figures
of singular beauty, and his handling of delicate situations, in-
volving mistakes about sex or descriptions of female jealousy,
contrasts finely with that of Ariosto. The gross realism in the
painting of Bradamante's feelings, when suspicious of Ruggiero's
relations with Marfisa, set side by side with the imitation of that
passage in the episode of Britomart, Radigund and Artegall,
shows how wide a gulf of sentiment separated the still knightly
spirit of England from the materialism of the Italian renascence.
Finally, the genius of heroic action which, in the romances
of chivalry—as became the decentralised character of feudal
institutions—is diffused over a great variety of actors, places and
situations, tends, in The Faerie Queene, to concentrate itself in
the person of the sovereign, as representing the greatness of the
English nation. The patriotic spirit of the times constantly breaks
Book a, canto III, stanza 41.