No More Learning

In
which I have followed all the antique Poets historicall; first Homere, who in


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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


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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


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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


## p. 235 (#257) ############################################

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.


## p. 237 (#259) ############################################

Allegory in The Faerie Queene 237
forth in emotional utterance, as in the stanza describing the
enthusiasm with which prince Arthur reads the books of 'Briton
documents. '
At last, quite ravisht with delight to heare
The royall Ofspring of his native land,
Cryde out; Deare countrey! O how dearely deare
Ought thy remembraunce and perpetuall band
Be to thy foster Childe, that from thy hand
Did commun breath and nouriture receave.
How brutish is it not to understand
How much to her we owe, that all us gave;
That gave unto us all what ever good we havel.
With the glorification of a patriot queen, Spenser was able,
appropriately, to link all the legendary lore handed down to him
by Geoffrey of Monmouth, together with the fables of the Morte
d'Arthur, and with that local antiquarianism which, in the
historical researches of men like Camden and Holinshed, had done
much to kindle the English imagination. Contemporary politics
and personal association also furnished him with a large part of
the material in his fifth book.
The medium of allegory through which he viewed the institution
of knighthood, while it deprived The Faerie Queene of human
interest and unity of action, gave fine scope for the exercise of
the imaginative powers peculiar to the poet. As a poetical
painter, using words and rhythms in the place of external form
and colour, he is, perhaps, unrivalled. We pass through his scenes,
laid in the 'delightful land of Faerie,' as through an enchanted
landscape, in which a dream-like succession of pageants, and dis-
solving views of forests, lakes, castles, caves and palaces, each
suggesting some spiritual meaning, and, at the same time, raising
in the fancy a concrete image, relieve the tedium of the journey.
'An ampler ether a diviner air,' diffused by his imagination over
the whole prospect, blends the most dissimilar objects in a general
effect of harmony; and so exquisite is the chiaroscuro of the com-
position that no sense of discord is felt in the transition from the
celestial hierarchy to ‘Cupido on the Idaean hill,' from woodland
satyrs to the mount of heavenly contemplation, from Una, the
abstract symbol of Christian truth, to Belphoebe, the half-pagan
anti-type of the chaste Elizabeth. At the same time, each portion
of the picture is brought into relief by the firmness of the outlines
and the richness of the colouring, fine examples of which are
the cave of Despair and the masque of the Seven Deadly Sins, in
the first book, the house of Mammon and the bower of Bliss in
* Book 11, canto x, stanza 69.


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238
The Poetry of Spenser
the second. In these two books, as the spiritual sense is more
emphatic, the allegorical imagery abounds: with the progress of
the poem, the allegory dwindles, and adventures become propor-
tionately more frequent; but, even in the third and fourth books,
the poet always seems to diverge with pleasure into picturesque
descriptions, such as that of the witch's cottage, in canto Vii of
book III, or the marriage of the Thames and the Medway, in
canto xi of book iv. As a specimen of the mingled propriety
and sublimity of allegorical painting, nothing finer can be found
than the description, in the fragmentary legend of Constancy, of
the Titaness Mutability in the moon an image well fitted to
exhibit the truths of Christian doctrine under the veil of pagan
mythology:
And now, when all the earth she thus had brought
To her behest, and thralled to her might,
She gan to cast in her ambitious thought
T attempt the empire of the heavens hight,
And Jove himselfe to shoulder from his right.
And first, she past the region of the ayre
And of the fire, whose substance thin and slight,
Made no resistance, ne could her contraire,
But ready passage to her pleasure did prepaire.
Thence to the Circle of the Moone she clambe,
Where Cynthia raignes in everlasting glory,
To whose bright shining palace straight she came,
AU fairely deckt with heavens goodly storie;
Whose silver gates (by which there sat an hory
Old aged Sire, with hower-glasse in hand,
Hight Time) she entred, were he liefe or sory;
Ne staide till she the highest stage had scand,
Where Cynthia did sit, that never still did stand.
Her sitting on an Ivory throne shee found,
Drawne of two steeds, th’ one black, the other white,
Environd with tenne thousand starres around
That duly her attended day and night;
And by her side there ran her Page, that hight
Vesper, whom we the Evening-starre intend;
That with his Torche, still twinkling like twylight,
Her lightened all the way where she should wend,
And joy to weary wandring travailers did lend.
Besides the imagination of a great word-painter, Spenser
brought to the expression of his allegory the gifts of a skilful
metrical musician. As in The Shepheards Calender, so in The
Faerie Queene, it was his object to invent a kind of poetical
dialect suitable to the unreal nature of his subject. Effects
of strangeness and antiquity, mingled with modern elegance, are
produced, in the later poem, partly by the revival of old words
and the importation of foreign ones, partly by the musical


## p. 239 (#261) ############################################

Metre of The Faerie Queene
239
disposition of words in the line, partly by combinations of rime,
in a stanza of his own invention, constructed, by the addition of
an alexandrine verse, out of the ten-syllabled eight-lined stanza
used by Chaucer. The character of his vocabulary and of his
syntax may be exemplified in the following stanza :
And therewithall be fiersly at him flew,
And with importune outrage him assayld;
Who, soone prepared to field, his sword forth drew,
And him with equall valew countervayld:
Their mightie strokes their haberjeons dismayld,
And naked made each others manly spalles;
The mortall steele despiteously entayld
Deepe in their flesh, quite through the yron walles,
That a large purple streame adowne their giambeux falles 1.
6
6
The idea of simplicity mingled with archaism here aimed at
is also raised by the avoidance of anything like a precise
search for epithets in those classical combinations of adjective
and substantive which he frequently employs. His epithets are
generally of the conventional kind—busy care,' 'bloody might,
'huge great balance,' etc. He also uses deliberately archaic
forms, such as 'to achieven' for 'to achieve,' 'worldës' for
'world's,' and the like. The frequent use of inversions, such as
‘him assayld,' ‘his sword forth drew,' is, in part, the result of
conscious archaism ; but it is also the natural consequence of the
recurrence of rime. This recurrence, again, suggested to Spenser
many characteristic effects of sound: he saw, for example, that
the immediate sequence of rime in the fourth and fifth lines
provided a natural half-way house for a turn in the rhetoric of the
sentence; so that the fifth line is used, generally, either as the close
of the first stage in the stanza, or the beginning of the second ;
but he is very skilful in avoiding monotony, and will often run
a single sentence through the stanza, or will break up the stanza
into as many parts as there are lines, e. g.
Behinde him was Reproch, Repentaunce, Shame;
Reproch the first, Shame next, Repent behinde:
Repentaunce feeble, sorrowfull, and lame;
Reproch despightfull, carelesse, and unkinde;
Shame most ill-favourd, bestiall, and blinde:
Shame lowrd, Repentaunce sighd, Reproch did scould;
Reproch sharpe stings, Repentaunce whips entwinde,
Shame burning brond-yrons in her hand did hold:
All three to each unlike, yet all made in one mould.
1 Book 11, canto VI, stanza 29.
? Book tri, canto XII, stanza 24.


## p. 240 (#262) ############################################

240
The Poetry of Spenser
These metrical combinations and permutations are often em-
ployed very beautifully in pathetic passages :
Ye Gods of seas, if any Gods at all
Have care of right, or rath of wretches wrong,
By one or other way me, woefull thrall,
Deliver hence out of this dungeon strong,
In which I daily dying am too long:
And if ye deeme me death for loving one
That loves not me, then doe it not prolong,
But let me die and end my days attone,
And let him live unlovd, or love him selfe alone.
But if that life ye unto me decree,
Then let mee live as lovers ought to do,
And of my lifes deare love beloved be:
And if he should through pride your doome undo,
Do you by duresse him compell thereto,
And in this prison put him here with me;
One prison fittest is to hold us two.
So had I rather to be thrall then free;
Such thraldome or such freedome let it surely be.
But O vaine judgement, and conditions vaine,
The which the prisoner points unto the free!
The whiles I him condemne, and deeme his paine,
He where he list goes loose, and laughes at me.
So ever loose, so ever happy be!
But where so loose or happy that thou art,
Know, Marinell, that all this is for theel.
Throughout the various examples here given, it will be noticed
that alliteration plays an important part in the composition of
the general effect. Spenser would not have deigned to include
himself among those whom his commentator E K. calls the
rakehelly rout of our ragged rymers (for so themselves use to
hunt the letter)'; but he knew that alliteration was in the
genius of the English language, and he was the first to show its
capacities for those liquid sequences of labial letters, carried
through a rhythmical sentence, by means of which Milton after-
wards produced his effects of verbal harmony.
As his years advanced, Spenser seems to have felt more and
more that his allegorical conception of court chivalry, founded on
Platonism, protestantism and romance, had little correspondence
with the actual movement of things. First of all, in 1586 died
Philip Sidney, the ‘president of nobleness and chivalrie,' an
irreparable loss to the cause of knighthood in high places, which
is lamented in the pastoral elegy, Astrophel. Besides this, the
poet's expectations of his own preferment at court had been sadly
disappointed: the queen had favoured his suit, but the way was
1 Book rv, canto XII, stanzas 9-11.


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Spenser's Complaints
241
barred by Burghley, who seems to have borne him a grudge,
probably on account of his early connection with Burghley's
rival, Leicester. In 1591, a volume of his collected poems was
published with the significant title Complaints. An air of deep
melancholy runs through most of the contents. In The Ruines
of Time, dedicated to the countess of Pembroke, he makes the
fernale genius of the ruined city Verulam lament, in touching
stanzas, the death of Sidney, from which he passes to indignant
reflections on the neglect of poetry by the great, in evident
allusion to his own treatment by Burghley :
O griefe of griefes! O gall of all good heartes!
To see that vertue should dispised bee
Of him, that first was raisde for vertuous parts,
And now, broad spreading like an aged tree,
Lets none shoot up that nigh him planted bee:
O let the man, of whom the Muse is scorned,
Nor alive nor dead be of the Muse adorned!
The same strain is taken up in The Tears of the Muses, where
the nine sisters are made in turn to bewail the degraded state of the
stage and the different forms of literary poetry. Of their laments,
the most characteristic, as showing Spenser's lack of sympathy
with the development of the English drama, is that of Thalia:
And him beside sits ugly Barbarisme,
And brutish Ignorance, yorept of late
Out of dredd darknes of the deepe Abysme,
Where being bredd, he light and heaven does hate:
They in the mindes of men now tyrannize,
And the faire Scene with rudenes foule disguize.
All places they with follie have possest,
And with vaine toyes the vulgare entertaine ;
But me bave banished, with all the rest
That whilome wont to wait upon my traine,
Fine Counterfesaunce, and unhurtfull Sport,
Delight, and Laughter, deckt in seemly sort.
Here, doubtless, he alludes to the growing popularity of the
plays of Greene and Marlowe, as compared with the classical
'court comedies' of 'pleasant Willy' (Lyly), who ceased to write
for the stage about 1590, and who, therefore, is spoken of as
dead of late. ' But the most direct utterance of Spenser's spleen
against the time is to be found in his Prosopopoia or Mother
Hubberd's Tale, which, in its groundwork, he calls 'the raw
conceipt of my youth, but which, in its existing form, must have
been polished and altered to suit the change of circumstances.
Founded on the precedent of The Nun's Priest's Tale, in the
Canterbury pilgrimage, it contains, in the story of the ape and
16
6
E. L. III.
CH. XI.


## p. 242 (#264) ############################################

242
The Poetry of Spenser
6
the fox, a bitter attack on the customs of the court. Besides the
famous lines, beginning ‘How little knowest thou that has not
tried '—which we may well suppose were added, in 1590, to
the first cast of the poem-we have the picture of the brave
courtier,' evidently intended for a portrait of Philip Sidney, and
its striking contrast in the description of the ape, whose manners
are copied from all the corruptions of Italy. Once more, the poet
employs his invective against the great men (personified by the
ape) who disdain learning.
And whenso love of letters did inspire
Their gentle wits, and kindle wise desire,
That chieflie doth each noble minde adorne,
Then he would scoffe at learning, and eke scorne
The Sectaries thereof, as people base
And simple men, which never came in place
Of worlds affaires, but, in darke corners mewd,
Muttred of matters as their bookes them shewd,
Ne other knowledge ever did attaine,
But with their gownes their gravitie maintaine.
In all this he seems to be aiming at Burghley, the type of
the newly risen courtier, who is unfavourably contrasted with
the older nobility. The latter, he says,
for povertie,
Were forst their atncient houses to let lie,
And their olde Castles to the ground to fall,
Which their forefathers, famous over-all,
Had founded for the Kingdomes ornament,
And for their memories long moniment.
Language of this kind seems to show plainly that the poet's
advancement at court was barred by political obstacles. But he
also had to encounter a certain opposition in the change of taste.
In 1591, after a year spent with the English court, he returned
to what he considered exile in Ireland, and there, in the form of
an allegorical pastoral, called Colin Clout's Come Home Again,
he gave expression to his views about the contemporary state of
manners and poetry. While exalting the person of the queen,
with imagery never surpassed in richness, and paying noble
compliments to those of her courtiers who had duly appreciated
the beauties of The Faerie Queene, he reflects severely, through
the mouth of Colin Clout, on the general state of courtly taste,
especially in respect of love poetry :
Not so, (quoth he) Love most aboundeth there.
For all the walls and windows there are writ,
All full of love, and love, and love my deare,
And all their talke and studie is of it.


## p. 243 (#265) ############################################

The Later Hymnes
243
No any there doth brave or valiant seeme
Unlesse that some gay Mistresse badge he beares:
For with lewd speeches, and licentious deedes,
His mightie mysteries they do prophane,
And use his ydle name to other needs.
But as a complement for courting vaine.
These strokes seem to be aimed partly at the degraded vein
of Petrarchism, manifested abundantly in the sonnets of this
period, and partly at the style of Italian romance, brought into
fashion by Greene and his disciples. Spenser himself yielded not
a jot to the fashion of the times. It is true that his Amoretti,
written in honour of the lady to whom he was married in 1594,
are conceived in the most conventional Petrarchian spirit, as what
we may suppose he thought most likely to please his ‘Elisabeth. '
But the description of 'perfect love,' and the praises of Rosalind
in Colin Clout's Come Home Again, breathe the same heroic
Platonism as his Hymnes to Love and Beautie; while, in his
Prothalamion, and, still more, in his Epithalamion, he carries the
lyrical style, first attempted in The Shepheards Calender, to an
unequalled height of harmony, splendour and enthusiasm.
In
1595, he again came over to England, bringing with him the
second part of The Faerie Queene, which was licensed for publi-
cation in January 1595–6. While at court on this occasion, he
seems to have resolved to oppose his influence, as far as he might,
to the prevailing current of taste in poetry, by publishing his
youthful Hymnes in honour of Love and Beautie. Lofty and
Platonic as these were in their conception, he protests, in his
dedication of them to 'The Right Honorable and Most Vertuous
Ladies, the Ladie Margaret, Countesse of Cumberland, and the
Lad Marie, Countesse of Warwicke,' that he desires, 'by way of
retractation, to reforme them, making, instead of those two Hymnes
of earthly or naturall love and beautie, two others of heavenly
and celestiall. In the later Hymnes, he identifies the doctrine of
Platonic love, in its highest form, with the dogma of Trinity in
Unity:
Before this worlds great frame, in which al things
Are now containd, found any being-place,
Ere flitting Time could wag his eyas wings
About that mightie bound which doth embrace
The rolling Spheres, and parts their houres by space,
That High Eternall Powre, which now doth move
In all these things, mor'd in it selfe by love.
It lord it selfe, because it selfe was faire;
(For faire is lov'd;) and of it self begot,
Like to it selfe his eldest sonne and heire,
16--2


## p. 244 (#266) ############################################

244
The Poetry of Spenser
Eternall, pure, and voide of sinfull blot,
The firstling of his joy, in whom no jot
Of loves dislike or pride was to be found,
Whom he therefore with equall honour crownd.
With him he raignd, before all time prescribed,
In endlesse glorie and immortall might,
Together with that third from them derived,
Most wise, most holy, most almightie Spright!
Whose kingdomes throne no thought of earthly wight
Can comprehend, much lesse my trembling verse
With equall words can hope it to reherse.
Finding still no opening for himself at court, Spenser returned,
once more, to Ireland, in 1597, where, in September 1598, he was
appointed sheriff of Cork, as a man fitted to deal with the rebels
of Munster. These, however, proved too strong for him, and, at
the rising under Hugh O'Neile, earl of Tyrone, his castle of Kil-
colman was taken and burned in October 1598. He himself,
escaping with difficulty, was sent by the lord deputy to London
with despatches about the rebellion. His calamities seem to have
broken his spirit. In spite of the favour extended to him by
influential courtiers like Essex, he is said to have been oppressed
by poverty; and, very soon after his arrival in London, he died
in King street, Westininster, on 16 January 1599.
To sum up the foregoing sketch of the poetry of Spenser, it
will be seen that he differed from the great European poets who
preceded or immediately succeeded him, in that he made no
attempt to represent in his verse the dominant moving spirit in
the world about him. Chaucer and Shakespeare, the one in
the fabliau, the other in the romantic drama, held 'the mirror
up to nature' and showed “the very age and body of the time
his form and pressure. ' Ariosto, by blending the opposite forms
of the fabliau and the roman, reflected the genius of knight
errantry as it appeared to the sceptical onlooker in courts.
Milton succeeded in telling the Christian story of the loss of Eden
in the form of the pagan epic. While Dante, like Spenser, made
allegory the basis of his poetical conception, no more vivid picture
can be found of contemporary life and manners in Italian cities
under the Holy Roman Empire than in The Divine Comedy.
But, in the conduct of his story, Spenser never seems to be in
direct touch with his times: his personages, knights or shepherds,
wear plainly the dress of literary masquerade; and, though the
fifth book of The Faerie Queene, published in 1596, deals allegori-
cally with such matters as the revolt of the Netherlands and the
recantation of protestantism by Henri IV of France, it contains
no allusion to the Spanish armada.


## p. 245 (#267) ############################################

Summary View of Spenser's Genius 245
But the very absence of clear drift and purpose in the allegory
of The Faerie Queene made it a faithful mirror of the spirit of
the age. Through all the early portion of Elizabeth's reign, in
which the poetical genius of Spenser formed itself, the nation, in
its most influential elements, showed the doubt and hesitancy
always characteristic of times of transition. A clergy, halting
between catholic tradition and the doctrines of the reformers ;
a semi-absolute queen, coquetting in her foreign policy between
a rival monarch and his revolted subjects; a court, in which the
chivalrous manners of the old nobility were neutralised by the
Machiavelian statecraft of the new courtiers; a commercial enter-
prise, always tending to break through the limits of ancient and
stable custom : these were the conditions which made it difficult
for an English poet, in the middle of the sixteenth century, to
form a view, at once clear and comprehensive, of life and action.
Spenser himself evidently sympathised strongly with the old
order that was passing away. He loved the time-honoured
institutions of chivalry, closely allied to catholic ritual; he
reverenced its ideals of honour and courtesy, its exalted woman-
worship, its compassion for the poor and suffering. But, at the
same time, he was strongly impelled by two counter-movements
tending to undermine the ancient fabric whose foundations had
been laid by Charles the Great: the zeal of the protestant reformer,
and the enthusiasm for letters of the European humanist. The
poetical problem he had to solve was, how to present the action of
these antagonistic forces in an ideal form, with such an appearance
of unity as should satisfy the primary requirements of his art.
To fuse irreconcilable principles in a directly epic or dramatic
mould was impossible; but it was possible to disguise the essential
oppositions of things by covering them with the veil of allegory.
This was the method that Spenser adopted. The unity of his
poetical creations lies entirely in the imaginative medium through
which he views them. His poetical procedure is closely analogous
to that of the first Neo-Platonists in philosophy. Just as these
sought to evolve out of the decayed forms of polytheism, by means
of Plato's dialectic, a new religious philosophy, so, in the sphere of
poetry, Spenser attempted to create, for the English court and the
circles immediately connected with it, from the perishing institu-
tion of chivalry, an ideal of knightly conduct. Glimpses of real
objects give an air of actuality to his conception; his allegory,
as he himself declares in his preface to The Faerie Queene, has
reference to the most excellent and glorious person of our


## p. 246 (#268) ############################################

246
The Poetry of Spenser
Soveraine the Queen' Viewed in the crude light of fact, the
court of Elizabeth might be, as the poet himself describes it in
Mother Hubberd's Tale, full of petty intrigue, low ambitions,
corrupt dealings, Machiavelian statecraft, shameless licence; but,
exalted into the kingdom of Gloriana, clothed with the purple
atmosphere of romance and the phantasms of the golden age, the
harsh realities of life were veiled in a visionary scene of knights
and shepherds, sylvan nymphs and satyrs, pagan pageants and
Christian symbols; the ruling society of England was transformed
into the 'delightful land of Faerie. '
The diction and the versification of Spenser correspond felici-
tously with the ideal character of his thought. As in the later
case of Paradise Lost, what has been justly called the 'out-of-the-
world' nature of the subject required, in The Faerie Queene,
a peculiar vehicle of expression. Though it be true that, in
affecting the obsolete, Spenser 'writ no language'; though, that
is to say, he did not attempt to amplify and polish the living
language of the court, yet his mixture of Old English words
with classical syntax, in metres adapted from those used by
Chaucer, produces a remarkably beautiful effect. Native oppo-
sitions of style disappear in the harmonising art of the poet.
Though ill-qualified to be the vehicle of epical narrative, the
Spenserian stanza has firmly established itself in the language, as
a metre of admirable capacity for any kind of descriptive or
reflective poetry; and it is a striking illustration of what has
been said in the foregoing pages that it has been the instrument
generally chosen by poets whose genius has approached nearest
to the art of the painter, or who have sought to put forward
ideas opposed to the existing condition of things. It is
employed by Thomson in The Castle of Indolence, by Keats in
The Eve of St Agnes, by Shelley in The Revolt of Islam and by
Byron in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. To have been the poetical
ancestor of the poetry of these illustrious writers shows how
deeply the art of Spenser is rooted in the imaginative genius of
his country, and he needs no better monument than the stanza in
his own Ruines of Time:
For deeds doe die, however noblie donne,
And thoughts of men do as themselves decay;
But wise wordes, taught in numbers for to runne,
Recorded by the Muses, live for ay;
Ne may with storming showers be washt away,
Ne bitter-breathing windes with harmfull blast,
Nor age, nor envie, shall them ever wast.


## p. 247 (#269) ############################################

CHAPTER XII
THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET
THE sonnet, which, for practical purposes, may be regarded
as an invention of thirteenth century Italy, slowly won the favour
of English poets. Neither the word nor the thing reached
England till the third decade of the sixteenth century, when
English sonnets were first written, in imitation of the Italian, by
Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey. But these primary
efforts form an isolated episode in English literary history; they
began no vogue. A whole generation-more than a quarter of a
—
century-separated the final sonneteering efforts of Surrey and
Wyatt from the birth of the Elizabethan sonnet. At first, the
Elizabethan growth was sparse; nor did it acquire luxuriance
until queen Elizabeth's reign was nearing its last decade. Then,
sonneteering became an imperious and universal habit, a con-
ventional recreation, a modish artifice of gallantry and compli-
ment. No poetic aspirant between 1590 and 1600 failed to try
his skill on this poetic instrument. During those ten years, more
sonnets were penned in England than in any other decade.
The harvest of Elizabethan sonneteering is a strange medley
of splendour and dulness. The workers in the field included
Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare, who, in varying degrees, invested
this poetic form with unquestionable beauty. Shakespeare, above
all, breathed into the sonnet a lyric melody and a meditative
energy which no writer of any country has surpassed. It is the
value attaching to the sonneteering efforts of this great trio
of Elizabethan poets, and to some rare and isolated triumphs
of their contemporaries, Daniel, Drayton and Constable, which
lends to the Elizabethan sonnet aesthetic interest. The profuse
experiments of other Elizabethans lack critical importance and
add nothing to the lasting fruits of poetic achievement. Few in
the crowded rank and file of Elizabethan sonneteers reached high
levels of poetic performance. Fewer still were capable of sustained
flight in the loftiest regions of poetry. Most of the fertile producers


## p. 248 (#270) ############################################

248
The Elizabethan Sonnet
betrayed a crudeness and a clumsiness of thought and language
which invited and justified ridicule.
None the less does the average Elizabethan sonnet illustrate
the temper of the time. It bears graphic witness to the Eliza-
bethan tendency to borrow from foreign literary effort. Even
the greatest of Elizabethan sonneteers did not disdain occasional
transcription of the language and sentiment of popular French
or Italian poetry. The rank and file almost entirely depended
for inspiration on their foreign reading. The full story of the
Elizabethan sonnet is, for the most part, a suggestive chapter in
the literary records of plagiarism, a testimony to the frequency
of communication between literary Englishmen and literary
Frenchmen and Italians, an illustration of the community of
literary feeling which linked the three nations to one another.
The influence which Wyatt and Surrey, the English pioneers
of the sonnet, exerted on the Elizabethan sonneteers is shadowy
and indeterminate. Their experiments, as has been seen', were
first published posthumously in 1557 in Tottels Miscellany, which
included verse from many other pens. The sixty sonnets contained
in Tottel's volume—for the most part primitive reflections of Pe-
trarch-represent, so far as is known, all the English sonneteering
work which was in being when queen Elizabeth's reign opened.
George Gascoigne, in his treatise on poetic composition, which
appeared as early as 1575, accurately described the normal
construction of the sonnet in sixteenth century England when
he wrote:
Sonnets are of fouretene lynes, every line conteyning tenne syllables.
The firste twelve do ryme in staves of foure lines by crosse meetre, and the
last two ryming togither do conclude the whole.
Though Tottel's Miscellany was reprinted seven times between
1557 and 1584, and acquired general popularity, little endeavour
was made during those seven and twenty years to emulate its
sonneteering experiments. In the earliest poetic miscellanies
which followed Tottel's Miscellany, sonnets are rare. Only three
quatorzains figure in The Paradyse of Daynty Devises, 1576.
Of these, only one pays any regard to metrical rules.
others are carelessly formed of seven riming couplets, and the
lines are not of ten but of twelve or fourteen syllables. In the
succeeding miscellany, A Gorgious Gallery of Gallant Inventions,
1578, the quatorzains number no more than four.
Despite Wyatt and Surrey's efforts, it was by slow degrees
1 See ante, chap. VIII.


## p. 249 (#271) ############################################

1
6
The Model of Construction 249
that the sonnet came to be recognised in Elizabethan England as
a definite species of verse inviting compliance with fixed metrical
laws. George Gascoigne, although he himself made some fifteen
experiments in the true quatorzain, accurately diagnosed contem-
porary practice when he noted, in 1575, how 'some thinke that all
Poemes (being short) may be called Sonets, as in deede it is
a diminutive worde derived of Sonare. ' This view held its
ground more stubbornly than is often recognised. When Clement
Robinson, in 1584, published his Handefull of pleasant delites,
he described the volume as containing 'sundrie new sonets'
with 'everie sonet orderly pointed to its proper tune,' and he
headed many of his poems with such titles as 'A proper sonet,' or
"A sorrowful sonet. ' Yet Robinson's sonnets are all lyric poems
of varied length, usually in four- or six-lined stanzas. No sonnet
in the technical sense came from his pen. The tradition of this
inaccurate nomenclature survived, indeed, to a far later generation;
and writers like Thomas Lodge and Nicholas Breton, who made many
experiments in the true sonnet form, had no hesitation in applying
the term to lyric efforts of varied metre and in stanzas of varied
length, which bore no relation to the quatorzain. As late as 1604,
Nicholas Breton brought out a miscellany of poetry under the
general title, The Passionate Shepheard; the second part bore
the designation ‘Sundry sweet sonnets and passionated Poems,'
each of which is separately headed 'Sonet I,' and so forth ; but two
only of the poems are quatorzains and those in rambling lines of
fourteen syllables. Breton's 'Sonet l’ is in thirty-four stanzas of
four lines each, with one stanza of six lines. His ‘Sonet II' is in
thirty-two stanzas of six lines each. The long continued misuse
of the word illustrates the reluctance of the Elizabethans to accept
the sonnet's distinctive principles.
It was contemporary French, rather than older Italian, in-
fluences which first stirred in the Elizabethan mind a fruitful
interest in the genuine sonnet. The first inspiration came from
Clément Marot, the protestant French poet of the early years
of the sixteenth century, who was a contemporary of Wyatt
and Surrey. He studied Petrarch with ardour, translated into
French some of his sonnets and odes and made two or three
original experiments in the sonnet-form under the title of 'Epi-
grammes. Although it was only after Marot's death that the
reign of the sonnet was definitely inaugurated in France, his
tentative ventures impressed some of his English readers. But
Marot's influence was fugitive; it was quickly eclipsed. The sonnet
6


## p. 250 (#272) ############################################

250
The Elizabethan Sonnet
was not naturalised in France until Marot's successors, Pierre de
Ronsard and his friends, deliberately resolved to adapt to the
French language the finest fruit of foreign literature. Ronsard
and his companions assumed the corporate title of La Pléiade,
and the sonnet became the rallying flag of their school. In Italy,
Petrarch's sonneteering disciples multiplied greatly at the end
of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century; and
the French innovators detected in the rejuvenated Italian sonnet
a potent influence of domestic regeneration. The manifesto of the
new movement in French poetry was written by Joachim du Bellay,
one of its ablest champions. He solemnly urged Frenchmen to
write sonnets after the manner of Petrarch and the more modern
Italians. While pointing out to the French nation the avenues
to literary culture which the ancient classics offered them,
Du Bellay was especially emphatic in his commendation of the
Italian sonnet as a main source of culture: Sonne-moi ces beaux
sonnets, he adjured his fellow-countrymen, non moins docte que
plaisante invention italienne, pour lesquels tu as Pétrarque et
quelques modernes Italiens,
The primary debt that the Elizabethan sonnet owed to the
French development of literary energy is attested by the first-
fruits of Spenser's muse-first-fruits which constitute him the
virtual father of the Elizabethan sonnet. There seems little
question that Spenser, as early as 1569, when a boy of seventeen,
contributed some twenty-six sonnets, anonymously, to a pious
tract rendered, by another hand, from Flemish into English, under
the title of A Theatre for Worldlings. There, Spenser made his
first entry on the literary stage. With some changes, these youth-
ful poems were reprinted, twenty-two years later, in an acknow-
ledged collection of Spenser's minor verse, called Complaints, for
the whole of which the poet's responsibility goes unquestioned.
Spenser's early ventures in the sonnet form were divided into two
categories, the one entitled The Visions of Bellay, the other The
Visions of Petrarch. The latter title is misleading. Both sets
of sonnets were drawn directly from the French-the first from
Joachim du Bellay and the second from Clément Marot.
Du Bellay's sonnets were rendered by Spenser literally, though
without rime. This embellishment he only added to his revised
version. He also undertook, later, the translation of a longer
series of Du Bellay's sonnets, Les Antiquités de Rome, which the
English poet rechristened The Ruins of Rome. Elsewhere, in his
mature work, a close study of Du Bellay is apparent, and he openly


## p. 251 (#273) ############################################

Spenser and his French Masters
251
6
acknowledged his indebtedness to Du Bellay's delicate muse in
a laudatory sonnet which includes these lines:
Bellay, first garland of free Poësie,
That France brought forth, though fruitfull of brave wits,
Well worthie thou of immortalitie.
The second set of sonnets, which, under the name of The
Visions of Petrarch, Spenser penned in his early days, were
drawn, not from the Italian, but from Marot's French poem, in
twelve-lined stanzas, entitled Les Visions de Petrarque. There,
Marot reproduces canzone XLII in Petrarch's collection of sonnets
to Laura. The French title, which conforms with the subject-matter,
is Marot's invention; Petrarch gave his canzone no specific head-
ing. Spenser's first draft of 1569 (which was largely recast in the
re-issue of 1591) slavishly adhered to the French, as may be
seen from the 'envoy,' which, in Marot's verse, runs thus:
O chanson mienne, en tes conclusions
Dy hardiment: Ces six grand visions,
A mon seigneur donnent un doulx desir
De briefvement soubz la terre gesir.
Spenser first rendered these lines thus:
My song thus now in thy Conclusions,
Say boldly that these same six visions
Do yelde unto thy lorde a sweete request,
Ere it be long within the earth to rest.
The text of the original Italian differs from both the French and
the English, and is of superior point and quality.
These youthful ventures of Spenser herald the French influence
on Elizabethan sonneteering. But, among French sonneteers,
neither the veteran Marot nor his junior Du Bellay, to whom
Spenser offered his boyish homage, was to play the foremost
part in the Elizabethan arena. Du Bellay, though a writer of
sonnets on a very generous scale, fell below his leader Ronsard
alike in productivity and in charm. Some, too, of Ronsard's
humbler followers, notably Philippe Desportes, were as sonneteers
scarcely less voluminous and popular than their master. Ronsard
and Desportes were the chief French tutors of English poets at
the end of the sixteenth century, and Desportes, for a season, took
precedence of Ronsard. Few men,' wrote Lodge of Desportes, in
1590, are able to second the sweet conceits of Philippe Desportes
whose poetical writings are ordinarily in everybody's hand? . '
At the same time, Petrarch and many of his Italian imitators
were rediscovered by the Elizabethans, and Petrarch's sway was
1 Margarite, p. 79.


## p. 252 (#274) ############################################

252
The Elizabethan Sonnet
.
ultimately re-established, so that he and his Italian disciples
exerted, at the close of queen Elizabeth's reign, the most powerful
spell of all on English sonneteers. Elizabethan critics failed to
detect in the Elizabethan sonnet much appreciable deviation from
its Petrarchian archetype. “In his sweete-mourning sonets,' wrote
Sir John Harington, a typical Elizabethan, in 1591, 'the dolefull
Petrarke. . . seemes to have comprehended all the passions that all
men of that humour have felt. ' Gabriel Harvey, in his Pierces
Supererogation (1593, p. 61), after enthusiastic commendation of
Petrarch's sonnets ('Petrarch's invention is pure love itself:
Petrarch’s elocution pure beauty itself'), justifies the common
English practice of imitating them on the ground that
all the noblest Italian, French and Spanish poets have in their several veins
Petrarchized, and it is no dishonour for the daintiest or divinest muse to be
his scholar, whom the amiablest invention and beautifullest elocution acknow.
ledge their master.
Spenser's youthful experiments attracted little attention.
Thomas Watson was the earliest Elizabethan to make a reputation
as a sonneteer. Steevens, the Shakespearean commentator, echo-
ing, with characteristic perversity, the pedantic view of some
Elizabethan scholars, declared Watson to be a much more elegant'
writer of sonnets than Shakespeare. Watson, in truth, was a frigid
scholiast, who was characteristically indifferent to strict metrical
law. Yet his work is historically of great value as marking the
progress and scope of foreign influences. In early life, Watson
translated all Petrarch's sonnets into Latin; but only two speci-
mens of his rendering survive. This laborious undertaking formed
the prelude to his sonneteering efforts in English. In 1582,
he published, at the earnest entreaty of his friends, according to
his own account, one hundred 'passions' or poems of love, which
contemporaries invariably described as sonnets, though, with rare
exceptions, they were each eighteen lines long. The book was
entitled: The EKATOMIAOIA or Passionate Centurie of Love.
Congratulatory quatorzains prefaced the volume. One friend
greeted Watson as the successor of Petrarch, the inheritor of that
vein which glorified Madonna Laura. Another admirer, writing in
Latin, credited Watson with the power of achieving for English
poetry what Ronsard had done for French.
The most curious fact about this first collection of so-called
somets by Watson is the care with which the writer disclaims
originality. To each poem he prefaces a prose introduction, in
which he frankly indicates, usually with ample quotations, the


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Thomas Watson's Sonnets
253
French, Italian or classical poem which was the source of his
inspiration. He aims at little more than paraphrasing sonnets
and lyrics by Petrarch and Ronsard, or by Petrarch’s disciples,
Serafino dell'Aquila (1466—1500), Ercole Strozza (1471–1508) or
Agnolo Firenzuola (1493–1548), together with passages from the
chief writers of Greece and Rome. As a rule, his rendering is quite
literal, though, now and then, he inverts a line or two of his original,
or inserts a new sentence. In the conventional appeals to his way-
ward mistress, and in his expressions of amorous emotions, there
is no pretence of a revelation of personal experience. Watson's
endeavour won almost universal applause from contemporaries,
but it is wholly a literary exercise, which appeals for approval, not
on the ground of sincerity of emotion, but, rather, by reason of its
skill in dovetailing together fragments of foreign poetry.
The welcome offered Watson's first published collection of
sonnet-poems induced him to prepare a second, which, however,
was not issued till 1593, a year after his death. Watson's second
venture bore the title The Tears of Fancie, or Love Disdained;
it differed from the first in respecting the primary law which
confined the sonnet within a limit of fourteen lines. Although no
apparatus criticus was incorporated with it, the influence of France
and Italy was no better concealed from the seeing eye in Watson's
final sonneteering essay than in its predecessor. Watson's Tears
of Fancie were, once more, drops of water from Petrarch's and
Ronsard's fountains.
Watson's example largely encouraged the vogue of the Eliza-
bethan sonnet, and crystallised its imitative temper. The majority
of Elizabethan sonneteers were loyal to his artificial method of
construction. Some of his successors were gifted with poetic
powers to which he was a stranger, and interwove the borrowed
conceits with individual feeling, which, at times, lifted their verse
to the plane of genuine poetry. Yet even from those sonnets
which bear to Watson's tame achievement the relation which
gold bears to lead, signs of his imitative process are rarely
obliterated altogether.
Sidney entered the field very soon after Watson set foot there;
for some years both were at work simultaneously; yet Watson's
influence is discernible in much of Sidney's effort. Sidney, ad-
mittedly, is a prince among Elizabethan lyric poets and sonneteers.
He loiters far behind Shakespeare in either capacity. But Shake-
speare, as a sonneteer, should, of right, be considered apart? . With
2 See the chapter on Shakespeare's poetry, in volume v.


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254
The Elizabethan Sonnet
that reservation, Sidney may fairly be credited as marching at the
head of the contemporary army of sonneteers.
Although the date cannot be stated with certainty, it is prob-
able that Sir Philip Sidney's ample collection of sonnets, which
is known by the general title of Astrophel and Stella, was written
between the years 1580 and 1584. Widely circulated in manuscript
before and after Sidney's death in 1586, they were not printed till
1591, and then surreptitiously by an enterprising publisher, who
had no authority from Sidney's representatives to undertake the
task. It was not until 1598 that a fully authorised version came
from the press.
Sidney's sonnets, like those of Petrarch and Ronsard, form
a more or less connected sequence. The poet, under the name
of Astrophel, professes to narrate the course of his passion for
a lady to whom he gives the name of Stella. The relations
between Astrophel and Stella closely resemble those between
Petrarch and his poetic mistress Laura, in the first series of the
Italian poet's sonnets, which were written in the lifetime of Laura.
There is no question that Sidney, like Petrarch, was, to a certain
extent, inspired by an episode in his own career. Stella was
Penelope, the wayward daughter of Walter Devereux, first earl
of Essex, and sister of Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex,
queen Elizabeth's favourite. When she was about fourteen years
old, her father destined her for Sidney's hand in marriage; but
that project came to nothing. In 1581, when about nineteen,
she married Robert, second lord Rich, and became the mother
of a large family of children. The greater number of Sidney's
sonnets were, doubtless, addressed to her after she had become
lady Rich. In sonnet xxiv, Sidney plays upon her husband's
name of Rich in something of the same artificial way in which
Petrarch, in his sonnet v, plays upon the name of Laura his poetic
mistress, who, also, was another's wife. Sidney himself married on
20 September 1583, and lived on the best terms with his wife,
who long survived him. But Sidney's poetic courtship of lady
Rich was continued till near the end of his days.
Astrophel's sonneteering worship of Stella enjoyed a popularity
only second to that of Petrarch's poetic worship of Laura. It is
the main theme of the collection of elegies which was written
immediately after the tragically premature close of Sidney's life.
The elegiac volume bore the title Astrophel; it was dedicated to
Sidney's widow; his sister, the countess of Pembroke, wrote a
poem for it; Spenser was the chief contributor. Throughout the


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Sidney's Sonnets
255
work, Sidney's lover-like celebration of Stella is accounted his
most glorious achievement in life or literature.
Sidney's sonnets rehearse a poetic passion, to which the verse
of Petrarch and his disciples supplied the leading cue.
The
dedication to Sidney's wife of Astrophel, that tribute of eulogy
which acclaims his mastery of the sonnet, seems to deprive his
sonnet-story of the full assurance of sincerity. Wife and sister
would scarcely avow enthusiastic pride in a husband's and a
brother's poetic declaration of illicit love, were it literally true.
Sidney, as a sonneteer, was an artist rather than an autobiographer.
No mere transcript of personal sensation won him the laurels of
an English Petrarch.
Charles Lamb detected in Sidney's glorious vanities and
graceful hyperboles ‘signs of love in its very heyday,' a 'trans-
cendent passion pervading and illuminating' his life and conduct.
Hazlitt, on the other hand, condemned Sidney's sonnets as jejune,
frigid, stiff and cumbrous. The truth probably lies between
these judgments. Felicitous phrases abound in Sidney's sonnets,
but he never wastes his genius on a mere diet of dainty words.
He was profoundly touched by lyric emotion. He was endowed
with the lyric power of creating at will the illusion of a personal
confession. He is capable of the true poetic effect. None the less,
his poetic story of passion is out of harmony with the facts of his
biography, and it is reminiscent of foreign models. Yet neither
the interval between the fiction and the fact, nor the indebtedness
to French or Italian masters could dull the vivacious strength of
Sidney's poetic power.
None who is widely read in the sonnets of Petrarch or
Ronsard fails to perceive the foreign echoes in Sidney's sonnets.
The appeals to sleep, to the nightingale, to the moon, to his bed,
to his mistress's dog, which form the staple of much of Sidney's
poetry, resemble the apostrophes of the foreign sonneteers far too
closely to entitle them to the unqualified credit of originality.
Both in his Apologie for Poetrie and in his sonnets, Sidney
describes with scorn the lack of sincerity and the borrowed artifices
of diction, which were inherent in the sonneteering habit. He
complained that his English contemporaries sang
poor Petrarch's long deceased woes
With new-born sighs and denizenëd wit. (Sonnet xv. )
Echoing Persius, he professes to follow a different method:
I never drank of Agannipe's well . .
I am no pickpurse of another's wit. (Sonnet Lxxiv. )


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256
The Elizabethan Sonnet
Yet the form, no less than the spirit, of Sidney's sonnets renders
his protest of doubtful significance. Sidney showed a higher
respect than any of his native contemporaries for the metrical
constitution of the Italian and French sonnet. As a rule, he
observed the orthodox Petrarchian scheme of the double quatrain
riming thus: abbaabba. In the first eight lines of Sidney's
sonnets, only two rimes were permitted. In the last six lines, his
practice was less orthodox. Four lines, which were alternately
rimed, were often followed by a couplet. But, in more than
twenty sonnets, he introduced into the concluding sizain such
variations of rime as ccdeed, which brought his work into closer
relation with the continental scheme than that of any other
Elizabethan.
Although Sidney's professions of originality cannot be accepted
quite literally, he may justly be reckoned the first Englishman
to indicate the lyric capacity of the sonnet. His supremacy in
that regard was at once frankly and justly acknowledged by his
contemporaries. On the first appearance of his effort in print, his
admirer, Thomas Nashe, addressed contemporary practitioners
this warning apostrophe: 'Put out your rushlights, you poets and
rhymers! and bequeath your crazed quatorzains to the chandlers!
for lo, here he cometh that hath broken your legs.