Volume Ii Part 14 (2/2)
Full httle knowest thou that hast not tried What h.e.l.l it is in suing long to bide; To lose good days that might be better spent, To waste long nights in pensive discontent, To speed to day, to be put back to-morrow, To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow, To have thy prince's grace yet want her Peers', To have thy asking yet wait many years, To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares, To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs, To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run, To spend, to give, to want, to be undone.
”Whoever leaves sweet home, where mean estate In safe a.s.surance, without strife or hate, Finds all things needful for contentment meek, And will to court for shadows vain to seek, * * * * *
”That curse G.o.d send unto mine enemy!”[273]
When Spenser had once got safely back to the secure retreat and serene companions.h.i.+p of his great poem, with what profound and pathetic exultation must he have recalled the verses of Dante!--
”Chi dietro a jura, e chi ad aforismi Sen giva, e chi seguendo sacerdozio, E chi regnar per forza e per sofismi, E chi rubare, e chi civil negozio, Chi nei diletti della carne involto S' affaticava, e chi si dava all' ozio, Quando da tutte queste cose sciolto, Con Beatrice m' era suso in cielo Cotanto gloriosamente accolto.”[274]
What Spenser says of the indifference of the court to learning and literature is the more remarkable because he himself was by no means an unsuccessful suitor. Queen Elizabeth bestowed on him a pension of fifty pounds, and shortly after he received the grant of lands already mentioned. It is said, indeed, that Lord Burleigh in some way hindered the advancement of the poet, who more than once directly alludes to him either in reproach or remonstrance. In ”The Ruins of Time,” after speaking of the death of Walsingham,
”Since whose decease learning lies unregarded, And men of armes do wander unrewarded,”
he gives the following reason for their neglect.--
”For he that now wields all things at his will, Scorns th' one and th' other in his deeper skill.
O grief of griefs! O gall of all good hearts, To see that virtue should despised be Of him that first was raised for virtuous parts, And now, broad spreading like an aged tree, Lets none shoot up that nigh him planted be: O let the man of whom the Muse is scorned Nor live nor dead be of the Muse adorned!”
And in the introduction to the fourth book of the ”Faery Queen,” he says again:--
”The rugged forehead that with grave foresight Wields kingdoms' causes and affairs of state, My looser rhymes, I wot, doth sharply wite For praising Love, as I have done of late,-- * * * * *
”By which frail youth is oft to folly led Through false allurement of that pleasing bait, That better were in virtues discipled Than with vain poems' weeds to have their fancies fed.
”Such ones ill judge of love that cannot love Nor in their frozen hearts feel kindly flame; Forthy they ought not thing unknown reprove, Ne natural affection faultless blame For fault of few that have abused the same: For it of honor and all virtue is The root, and brings forth glorious flowers of fame That crown true lovers with immortal bliss, The meed of them that love and do not live amiss.”
If Lord Burleigh could not relish such a dish of nightingales' tongues as the ”Faery Queen,” he is very much more to be pitied than Spenser. The sensitive purity of the poet might indeed well be wounded when a poem in which he proposed to himself ”to discourse at large” of ”the ethick part of Moral Philosophy”[275] could be so misinterpreted. But Spenser speaks in the same strain and without any other than a general application in his ”Tears of the Muses,” and his friend Sidney undertakes the defence of poesy because it was undervalued. But undervalued by whom? By the only persons about whom he knew or cared anything, those whom we should now call Society and who were then called the Court. The inference I would draw is that, among the causes which contributed to the marvellous efflorescence of genius in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, the influence of direct patronage from above is to be reckoned at almost nothing.[276] Then, as when the same phenomenon has happened elsewhere, there must have been a sympathetic public. Literature, properly so called, draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature's common and everlasting sympathies, the gathered leaf-mould of countless generations ([Greek: oiae per phullon geneae]), and not from any top-dressing capriciously scattered over the surface at some master's bidding.[277]
England had long been growing more truly insular in language and political ideas when the Reformation came to precipitate her national consciousness by secluding her more completely from the rest of Europe.
Hitherto there had been Englishmen of a distinct type enough, honestly hating foreigners, and reigned over by kings of whom they were proud or not as the case might be, but there was no England as a separate ent.i.ty from the sovereign who embodied it for the time being.[278] But now an English people began to be dimly aware of itself. Their having got a religion to themselves must have intensified them much as the having a G.o.d of their own did the Jews. The exhilaration of relief after the long tension of anxiety, when the Spanish Armada was overwhelmed like the hosts of Pharaoh, while it confirmed their a.s.surance of a provincial deity, must also have been like suns.h.i.+ne to bring into flower all that there was of imaginative or sentimental in the English nature, already just in the first flush of its spring.
(”The yonge sonne Had in _the Bull_ half of his course yronne.”)
And just at this moment of blossoming every breeze was dusty with the golden pollen of Greece, Rome, and Italy. If Keats could say, when he first opened Chapman's Homer,--
”Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific, and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise,”
if Keats could say this, whose mind had been unconsciously fed with the results of this culture,--results that permeated all thought, all literature, and all talk,--fancy what must have been the awakening shock and impulse communicated to men's brains by the revelation of this new world of thought and fancy, an unveiling gradual yet sudden, like that of a great organ, which discovered to them what a wondrous instrument was in the soul of man with its epic and lyric stops, its deep thunders of tragedy, and its pa.s.sionate _vox humana!_ It might almost seem as if Shakespeare had typified all this in Miranda, when she cries out at first sight of the king and his courtiers,
”O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O, brave new world That hath such people in't!”
The civil wars of the Roses had been a barren period in English literature, because they had been merely dynastic squabbles, in which no great principles were involved which could shake all minds with controversy and heat them to intense conviction. A conflict of opposing ambitions wears out the moral no less than the material forces of a people, but the ferment of hostile ideas and convictions may realize resources of character which before were only potential, may transform a merely gregarious mult.i.tude into a nation proud in its strength, sensible of the dignity and duty which strength involves, and groping after a common ideal. Some such transformation had been wrought or was going on in England. For the first time a distinct image of her was disengaging itself from the tangled blur of tradition and a.s.sociation in the minds of her children, and it was now only that her great poet could speak exultingly to an audience that would understand him with a pa.s.sionate sympathy, of
”This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in a silver sea, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land, England, bound in with the triumphant sea!”
Such a period can hardly recur again, but something like it, something pointing back to similar producing causes, is observable in the revival of English imaginative literature at the close of the last and in the early years of the present century. Again, after long fermentation, there was a war of principles, again the national consciousness was heightened and stung by a danger to the national existence, and again there was a crop of great poets and heroic men.
Spenser once more visited England, bringing with him three more books of the ”Faery Queen,” in 1595. He is supposed to have remained there during the two following years.[279]
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