Volume Ii Part 14 (1/2)
”Their trunks like aged folk now bare and naked stand, As for revenge to heaven each held a withered hand”;
and there is a pa.s.sage about the sea in the twentieth book that comes near being fine; but the far greater part is mere joiner-work. Consider the life of man, that we flee away as a shadow, that our days are as a post, and then think whether we can afford to honor such a draft upon our time as is implied in these thirty books all in alexandrines! Even the laborious Selden, who wrote annotations on it, sometimes more entertaining than the text, gave out at the end of the eighteenth book.
Yet Drayton could write well, and had an agreeable lightsomeness of fancy, as his ”Nymphidia” proves. His poem ”To the Cambro-Britons on their Harp” is full of vigor; it runs, it leaps, clas.h.i.+ng its verses like swords upon bucklers, and moves the pulse to a charge.
Daniel was in all respects a man of finer mould. He did indeed refine our tongue, and deserved the praise his contemporaries concur in giving him of being ”well-languaged.”[267] Writing two hundred and fifty years ago, he stands in no need of a glossary, and I have noted scarce a dozen words, and not more turns of phrase, in his works, that have become obsolete. This certainly indicates both remarkable taste and equally remarkable judgment. There is an equable dignity in his thought and sentiment such as we rarely meet. His best poems always remind me of a table-land, where, because all is so level, we are apt to forget on how lofty a plane we are standing. I think his ”Musophilus” the best poem of its kind in the language. The reflections are natural, the expression condensed, the thought weighty, and the language worthy of it. But he also wasted himself on an historical poem, in which the characters were incapable of that remoteness from ordinary a.s.sociations which is essential to the ideal. Not that we can escape into the ideal by _merely_ emigrating into the past or the unfamiliar. As in the German legend the little black Kobold of prose that haunts us in the present will seat himself on the first load of furniture when we undertake our flitting, if the magician be not there to exorcise him. No man can jump off his own shadow, nor, for that matter, off his own age, and it is very likely that Daniel had only the thinking and languaging parts of a poet's outfit, without the higher creative gift which alone can endow his conceptions with enduring life and with an interest which transcends the parish limits of his generation. In the prologue to his ”Masque at Court” he has unconsciously defined his own poetry:--
”Wherein no wild, no rude, no antic sport, But tender pa.s.sions, motions soft and grave, The still spectator must expect to have.”
And indeed his verse does not s.n.a.t.c.h you away from ordinary a.s.sociations and hurry you along with it as is the wont of the higher kinds of poetry, but leaves you, as it were, upon the bank watching the peaceful current and lulled by its somewhat monotonous murmur. His best-known poem, blunderingly misprinted in all the collections, is that addressed to the Countess of c.u.mberland. It is an amplification of Horace's _Integer Vitae_, and when we compare it with the original we miss the point, the compactness, and above all the urbane tone of the original. It is very fine English, but it is the English of diplomacy somehow, and is never downright this or that, but always has the honor to be so or so, with sentiments of the highest consideration. Yet the praise of _well-languaged_, since it implies that good writing then as now demanded choice and forethought, is not without interest for those who would cla.s.sify the elements of a style that will wear and hold its colors well.
His diction, if wanting in the more hardy evidences of muscle, has a suppleness and spring that give proof of training and endurance. His ”Defence of Rhyme,” written in prose (a more difficult test than verse), has a pa.s.sionate eloquence that reminds one of Burke, and is more light-armed and modern than the prose of Milton fifty years later. For us Occidentals he has a kindly prophetic word:--
”And who in time knows whither we may vent The treasure of our tongue? to what strange sh.o.r.es The gain of our best glory may be sent To enrich unknowing nations with our stores?
What worlds in the yet unformed Occident May come refined with accents that are ours?”
During the period when Spenser was getting his artistic training a great change was going on in our mother-tongue, and the language of literature was disengaging itself more and more from that of ordinary talk. The poets of Italy, Spain, and France began to rain influence and to modify and refine not only style but vocabulary. Men were discovering new worlds in more senses than one, and the visionary finger of expectation still pointed forward. There was, as we learn from contemporary pamphlets, very much the same demand for a national literature that we have heard in America. This demand was n.o.bly answered in the next generation. But no man contributed so much to the transformation of style and language as Spenser; for not only did he deliberately endeavor at reform, but by the charm of his diction, the novel harmonies of his verse, his ideal method of treatment, and the splendor of his fancy, he made the new manner popular and fruitful. We can trace in Spenser's poems the gradual growth of his taste through experiment and failure to that a.s.sured self-confidence which indicates that he had at length found out the true bent of his genius,--that happiest of discoveries (and not so easy as it might seem) which puts a man in undisturbed possession of his own individuality. Before his time the boundary between poetry and prose had not been clearly defined. His great merit lies not only in the ideal treatment with which he glorified common things and gilded them with a ray of enthusiasm, but far more in the ideal point of view which he first revealed to his countrymen. He at first sought for that remoteness, which is implied in an escape from the realism of daily life, in the pastoral,--a kind of writing which, oddly enough, from its original intention as a protest in favor of naturalness, and of human as opposed to heroic sentiments, had degenerated into the most artificial of abstractions. But he was soon convinced of his error, and was not long in choosing between an unreality which pretended to be real and those everlasting realities of the mind which seem unreal only because they lie beyond the horizon of the every-day world and become visible only when the mirage of fantasy lifts them up and hangs them in an ideal atmosphere. As in the old fairy-tales, the task which the age imposes on its poet is to weave its straw into a golden tissue; and when every device has failed, in comes the witch Imagination, and with a touch the miracle is achieved, simple as miracles always are after they are wrought.
Spenser, like Chaucer a Londoner, was born in 1553.[268] Nothing is known of his parents, except that the name of his mother was Elizabeth; but he was of gentle birth, as he more than once informs us, with the natural satisfaction of a poor man of genius at a time when the business talent of the middle cla.s.s was opening to it the door of prosperous preferment.
In 1569 he was entered as a sizar at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, and in due course took his bachelor's degree in 1573, and his master's in 1576. He is supposed, on insufficient grounds, as it appears to me, to have met with some disgust or disappointment during his residence at the University.[269] Between 1576 and 1578 Spenser seems to have been with some of his kinsfolk ”in the North” It was during this interval that he conceived his fruitless pa.s.sion for the Rosalinde, whose jilting him for another shepherd, whom he calls Menalcas, is somewhat perfunctorily bemoaned in his pastorals[270] Before the publication of his ”Shepherd's Calendar” in 1579, he had made the acquaintance of Sir Philip Sidney, and was domiciled with him for a time at Penshurst, whether as guest or literary dependant is uncertain. In October, 1579, he is in the household of the Earl of Leicester. In July, 1580 he accompanied Lord Grey de Wilton to Ireland as Secretary, and in that country he spent the rest of his life, with occasional flying visits to England to publish poems or in search of preferment. His residence in that country has been compared to that of Ovid in Pontus. And, no doubt, there were certain outward points of likeness. The Irishry by whom he was surrounded were to the full as savage, as hostile, and as tenacious of their ancestral habitudes as the Scythians[271] who made Tomi a prison, and the descendants of the earlier English settlers had degenerated as much as the Mix-h.e.l.lenes who disgusted the Latin poet. Spenser himself looked on his life in Ireland as a banishment. In his ”Colm Clout's come Home again” he tells us that Sir Walter Raleigh, who visited him in 1589, and heard what was then finished of the ”Faery Queen,”--
”'Gan to cast great liking to my lore And great disliking to my luckless lot, That banisht had myself, like wight forlore, Into that waste, where I was quite forgot The which to leave thenceforth he counselled me, Unmeet for man in whom was aught regardful, And wend with him his Cynthia to see, Whose grace was great and bounty most rewardful.”
But Spenser was already living at Kilcolman Castle (which, with 3,028 acres of land from the forfeited estates of the Earl of Desmond, was confirmed to him by grant two years later), amid scenery at once placid and n.o.ble, whose varied charm he felt profoundly. He could not complain, with Ovid,--
”Non liber hie ullus, non qui mihi commodet aurem,”
for he was within reach of a cultivated society, which gave him the stimulus of hearty admiration both as poet and scholar. Above all, he was fortunate in a seclusion that prompted study and deepened meditation, while it enabled him to converse with his genius disengaged from those worldly influences which would have disenchanted it of its mystic enthusiasm, if they did not muddle it ingloriously away. Surely this sequestered nest was more congenial to the brooding of those ethereal visions of the ”Faery Queen” and to giving his ”soul a loose” than
”The smoke, the wealth, and noise of Rome, And all the busy pageantry That wise men scorn and fools adore.”
Yet he longed for London, if not with the homesickness of Bussy-Rabutin in exile from the Parisian sun, yet enough to make him joyfully accompany Raleigh thither in the early winter of 1589, carrying with him the first three books of the great poem begun ten years before. Horace's _nonum prematur in annum_ had been more than complied with, and the success was answerable to the well-seasoned material and conscientious faithfulness of the work. But Spenser did not stay long in London to enjoy his fame.
Seen close at hand, with its jealousies, intrigues, and selfish basenesses, the court had lost the enchantment lent by the distance of Kilcolman. A nature so p.r.o.ne to ideal contemplation as Spenser's would be profoundly shocked by seeing too closely the ign.o.ble springs of contemporaneous policy, and learning by what paltry personal motives the n.o.ble opportunities of the world are at any given moment endangered. It is a sad discovery that history is so mainly made by ign.o.ble men.
”Vide questo globo Tal ch'ei sorrise del suo vil sembiante.”
In his ”Colin Clout,” written just after his return to Ireland, he speaks of the Court in a tone of contemptuous bitterness, in which, as it seems to me, there is more of the sorrow of disillusion than of the gall of personal disappointment. He speaks, so he tells us,--
”To warn young shepherds' wandering wit Which, through report of that life's painted bliss, Abandon quiet home to seek for it And leave their lambs to loss misled amiss; For, sooth to say, it is no sort of life For shepherd fit to live in that same place, Where each one seeks with malice and with strife To thrust down other into foul disgrace Himself to raise; and he doth soonest rise That best can handle his deceitful wit In subtle s.h.i.+fts....
To which him needs a guileful hollow heart Masked with fair dissembling courtesy, A filed tongue furnisht with terms of art, No art of school, but courtiers' schoolery.
For arts of school have there small countenance, Counted but toys to busy idle brains, And there professors find small maintenance, But to be instruments of others' gains, Nor is there place for any gentle wit Unless to please it can itself apply.
”Even such is all their vaunted vanity, Naught else but smoke that pa.s.seth soon away.
”So they themselves for praise of fools do sell, And all their wealth for painting on a wall.
”Whiles single Truth and simple Honesty Do wander up and down despised of all.”[272]
And again in his ”Mother Hubberd's Tale,” in the most pithy and masculine verses he ever wrote:--
”Most miserable man, whom wicked Fate Hath brought to Court to sue for _Had-I-wist_ That few have found and many one hath mist!