Part 8 (1/2)

The whiles so doest faine to see, In springing flowre the iin Rose, hoeetly shee Doth first peepe foorth with bashfull modestee, That fairer seemes the lesse ye see her may

Lo! see soone after how more bold and free Her bared bosome she doth broad display; Lo! see soone after how she fades and falls away

So passeth, in the passing of a day, Of mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flowre; Ne ht to deck both bed and bowre Of many a lady, and many a Paramowre

Gather therefore the Rose whilest yet is prie that will her pride deflowre; Gather the Rose of love whilest yet is ti thou es the power of the will--that power over circumstance and the storms of passion, to co so hter of her Morne, More deare then life she tendered, whose flowre The girlond of her honour did adorne: Ne suffred she the Middayes scorching powre, Ne the sharp Northerne wind thereon to showre; But lapped up her silken leaves an to lowre; But, soone as calmed was the christall ayre, She did it fayre dispred and let to florish fayre

Eternall God, in his alrace, In Paradize whylome did plant this flowre; Whence he it fetcht out of her native place, And did in stocke of earthly flesh enrace, That entle Ladies breste, and bounteous race Of woman kind, it fayrest Flowre doth spyre, And beareth fruit of honour and all chast desyre

Fayre y beaht, And to your willes both royalties and Reaht, With this fayre flowre your goodly girlonds dight Of chastity and vertue virginall, That shall eht, And crowne your heades with heavenly coronall, Such as the Angels weare before Gods tribunall!

This sense of beauty, and command of beautiful expression is not seen only in the sweetness of which both these passages are exae is wide Spenser had in his nature besides sweetness, his full proportion of the stern and high eneration; indeed, he was not without its severity, its hardness, its unconsidering and cruel harshness, its conte side noble and heroic ideals captivate hienuinely at what proves and draws out e, their self-command, their self-sacrifice He syeness of their condition, with the sad surprises in their history and fate, as he gives hi and even intoxicating in it He canexperience He can appreciate the y--of what our own age can see nothing in, but a dry and scholastic dogreat contee, many-sided

He shared their nature; and he used all that he had of sensitiveness and of i out its s and aims Not that beauty, even varied beauty, is the uninterrupted attribute of his work It alternates with ence can call beautiful It passes but too easily into what is coant, or careless and poor, or really coarse and bad He was a negligent corrector He only at tiave himself the trouble to condense and concentrate But for all this, the _Faery Queen_ glows and is ablaze with beauty; and that beauty is so rich, so real, and so uncommon, that for its sake the severest readers of Spenser have pardonedhas wasted their time and disappointed them

There is one portion of the beauty of the _Faery Queen_, which in its perfection and fulness had never yet been reached in English poetry

This was the music andsweetness of nu set the _Faery Queen_ at once above all contee is really a lish ear is very susceptible to the infinite delicacy and suggestiveness of musical rhythm and cadence Spenser found the secret of it The art has had many and consummate hts from Spenser And others at the time, Shakespere pre-erandeur, and the saue, only waiting the artist's skill to be combined and harmonized into strains of mysterious fascination But Spenser was the first to show that he had acquired a cohness and confusion It would be toonever fails, that his ear is never dull or off its guard But when the length and nitude of the composition are considered, with the restraints imposed by the new nine-line stanza, however convenient it our, the invention, the volue, and the keenness and truth of ear amid its diversified tasks are indeed aded and so inal and varied poetical rand monotony of the seashore, where billow follows billow, each swelling diversely, and broken into different curves and waves upon itssurface, till at last it falls over, and spreads and rushes up in a last long line of foam upon the beach

3 But all this is but the outside shell and the fancy framework in which the substance of the poem is enclosed Its substance is the poet's philosophy of life It shadows forth, in type and parable, his ideal of the perfection of the human character, with its special features, its trials, its achievements There were two accepted forms in poetry in which this had been done by poets One was under the ie of a journey or voyage Spenser chose the former, as Dante and Bunyan chose the latter Spenser looks on the scene of the world as a continual battle-field It was such in fact to his experience in Ireland, testing the mettle of character, its loyalty, its sincerity, its endurance His picture of character is by no means painted with sentih work of the struggle and the toil, always hardly tested by trial, often overmatched, deceived, defeated, and even delivered by its own default to disgrace and captivity He had full before his eyes what abounded in the society of his day, often in its noblest representatives--the strange perplexing h-te activity of his tih aims and serious purposes, which was arth, which could recover itself after failure and defeat

The unity of a story, or an allegory--that chain and backbone of continuous interest, iether the great poems of the world, the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, the _aeneid_, the _Commedia_, the _Paradise Lost_, the _Jerusale in the _Faery Queen_ The unity is one of character and its ideal That character of the cooverned by noble tempers and pure principles, has in Spenser two conspicuous elements In the first place, it is based on es which illustrate the different virtues, Holiness, Justice, Courtesy, and the rest, the distinction is not in nicely discriminated features or shades of expression, but in the trials and the occasions which call forth a particular action or effort: yet the ood in them is a universal quality co idea or standard of e, it is not th It is the quality of soul which frankly accepts the conditions in human life, of labour, of obedience, of effort, of unequal success, which does not quarrel with the alacrity that h aile with difficulty, with pain, with evil, and makes it the point of honour not to be dismayed or wearied out by theness for hard work and endurance, as being inevitable and very bearable necessities, together with even a pleasure in encountering trials which put a man on his mettle, an enjoyment of the contest and the risk, even in play It is the quality which seizes on the para which leaves a h the inferior considerations andabout and impede duty; which is impatient with the idleness and childishness of a life ofon, of continued and self-satisfied levity, of vacillation, of clever and ingenious trifling Spenser'spauses of rest, with intervals of change, with great craving for enjoyreat mixtures of selfishness, with coarseness, with licentiousness, with injustice and inhumanity It enerate into a curse and scourge to the world But it stands essentially distinct from the nature which shrinks froht of s around it, which is content with passively receiving influences and distinguishi+ng between enizes no aih to command it In the character of his countryhest and in its worst features, in its noble a enterprise, its self-devotion, as well as in its pride, its intolerance, its fierce self-will, its arrogant claiious, Spenser saw the exa and resolute --neither toil nor disaster nor danger, in their pursuit Naturally and unconsciously, he laid it at the bottom of all his portraitures of noble and virtuous achievement in the _Faery Queen_

All Spenser's ”virtues” spring froth, sie are presupposed as their necessary conditions But they have with hirow and are nourished from the soil of love; the love of beauty, the love and service of fair woes of chivalry, an inheritance bequeathed fro poetry of Europe

Spenser's types ofand over passion of love; without a devotion, as to the principal and most worthy object of life, to the service of a beautiful lady, and to winning her affection and grace The influence of this view of life comes out in numberless ways Love comes on the scene in shapes which are exquisitely beautiful, in all its purity, its tenderness, its unselfishness But the claiht are also only too readily verified in the passions of lements, its mischiefs, its foulness In one shape or another it meets us at every turn; it is never absent; it is the motive and stimulant of the whole activity of the poem The picture of life held up before us is the literal rendering of Coleridge's lines:--

All thoughts, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame, Are all but ministers of Love, And feed his sacred flame

We still think with Spenser about the paramount place of manliness, as the foundation of all worth in huhtful supreinative conception of hunize in it the public claiion, which it has in Spenser Love will ever play a great part in human life to the end of time It will be an ireater one in its sorrows, its disasters, its tragedies It is still an i it, both in fiction and reality; in the family, in the roar fact But the place given to it by Spenser is to our thoughts and feelings even ludicrously extravagant An enore has taken place in the ideas of society on this point: it is one of the things which enerations which yet are of ”the sae, so es of the Courts of Love, whoh hie and abnorh which society has passed, to us beyond understanding and al, as one of the first duties and necessities of a noble life, the space which it h-reaching spirits, the unrestrained language of ad to the ionies of love, the subordination to it of all other pursuits and ai which it involves, all this is so far apart from e know of actual life, the life not merely of work and business, but the life of affection, and even of passion, that it makes the picture of which it is so necessary a part, seerotesquely ridiculous The quaint love so children, so quickly kindled, so superficial, so violent in its language and absurd in its plans, is transferred with the utood In the highest characters it is chastened, refined, purified: it appropriates, indeed, language due only to the divine, it als to the best part of e characters, it is not so respectable; it is apt to pass intopastime and frivolous love of pleasure: it astonishes us often by the readiness hich it displays an affinity for the sensual and i sides of the relations between the sexes But however it appears, it is throughout a very great affair, not merely with certain persons, or under certain circumstances, but with every one: it obtrudes itself in public, as the natural and recognized reat spur of enterprise, and its highest and lorious reward A world of which this is the law, is not even in fiction a world which we can conceive possible, or hich experience enables us to sympathize

It is, of course, a purely artificial and conventional reading of the facts of hus belong in a hest forms they are corrected, interpreted, supplemented by the presence of interspersed realities which every one recognizes But it was one of Spenser's disadvantages, that two strong influences corotesque way of exhibiting the play and action of the e passion of love, at least, this way of talking about it, was the fashi+on of the Court

Further, it was the fashi+on of poetry, which he inherited; and he was not thebands of custom and authority

In very much he was an imitator He took what he found; as his oas his treatment of it He did not trouble hiruities Habit and fae that in the Court of Elizabeth, the h-flown sentiments should be in every one's mouth about the sublimities and refinements of love, while every one was busy with keen a power kept hi the monstrous contrast between the claims of the queen to be the ideal of wonized and echoed in ten thousand extravagant compli her favourites All these strange contradictions, which surprise and shock us, Spenser assumed as natural He built up his fictions on thehto real life, yet differed widely from it in many of its preliminary and collateral suppositions; or as the novelist builds up his on a still closer adherence to facts and experience In this matter Spenser appears with a kind of double self At one tihest and purest ideas of love, and filled with aversion and scorn for the coarser for and treacherous, as well as for what is odious and foul At another, he puts forth all his power to bring out its hly coloured pictures, which none could paint without keen sympathy hat he takes such pains toThe co modern, for both the eleenuine Our modern poets are, with all their variations in this respect, eneous; and where one conception of love and beauty has taken hold of a man, the other does not easily co with zest on visions and iery, on which Spenser has lavished all his riches There can be no doubt of Byron's real habits of thought and feeling on subjects of this kind, even when his language for the occasion is the chastest; we detect in it the mood of the moment, perhaps spontaneous, perhaps put on, but in contradiction to the whole move hollow With a kind of unconsciousness and innocence, whichfind hard to understand, and which perhaps belongs to the early childhood or boyhood of a literature, he passes abruptly fro to another; and is quite asthe pure joys of chastened affections, as he is when he is writing with almost riotous luxuriance e are at this day ashaed the contradiction At the instance of two noble ladies of the Court, he composed two Hymns of Heavenly Love and Heavenly Beauty, to ”retract” and ”reform” two earlier ones composed in praise of earthly love and beauty But, characteristically, he published the two pieces together, side by side in the saht out, not the ireat Gloriana, but in its various aspects, a fore of the world, and which has played a great part in it since As he has told us, he aiest sense of the word, the English gentleman It was as a whole a new character in the world It had not really existed in the days of feudalish features of it had appeared, and its descent was traced from those times: but they were too wild and coarse, too turbulent and disorderly, for a character which, however ready for adventure and battle, looked to peace, refinement, order, and law as the true conditions of its perfection In the days of Elizabeth it was beginning to fill a large place in English life It was for cultivation of the nation, the increasing varieties of public service, the awakening responsibilities to duty and calls to self-coative of noble blood and fa independent of nobility and beyond it

A nobleentleentleh; there must be added a new delicacy of conscience, a new appreciation of what is beautiful and worthy of honour, a new th and nobleness of self-control, of devotion to unselfish interests This idea of e, but on truth, on refinement, on public spirit, on soberness andpossession of the younger generation of Elizabeth's middle years Of course the idea was very imperfectly apprehended, stillwhich on the same scale had not been yet, and which was to be the seed of so, simple, noble characters, pure in aim and devoted to duty, the Falklands, the Hampdens, who amid so much evil form such a remarkable feature in the Civil Wars, both on the Royalist and the Parliah type of cultivated English nature, in the present and the last century, common both to its monarchical and its democratic embodiments, than which, with all its faults and defects, our western civilization has produced few things uished men of that time, who one after another were Spenser's friends and patrons, and ere men in whom he saw realized his conceptions of human excellence and nobleness They were Sir Philip Sidney, Lord Grey of Wilton, and Sir Walter Ralegh: and the _Faery Queen_ reflects, as in a variety of separate mirrors and spiritualized forms, the characteristics of these men and of such as they It reflects their conflicts, their teht with, the superiority hich they towered over meaner and poorer natures Sir Philip Sidney lish society of the true gentleman The charm which attracted men to him in life, the fame which he left behind him, are not to be accounted for simply by his accoallant soldier; above all this there was so or brilliant h qualities differing froave a fire of its own to his literary enthusiasm, and a sweetness of its own to his courtesy Spenser's ad and lasting

Sidney was to hie that he was not dreareatness of soul, the religious chivalry of the Red Cross Knight of Holiness, the manly purity and self-control of Sir Guyon It is too much to say that in Prince Arthur, the hero of the poem, he always intended Sidney In the first place, it is clear that under that character Spenser in places pays coan life, and whose clainized Prince Arthur is certainly Leicester, in the historical passages in the Fifth Book relating to the war in the Low Countries in 1576: and no one can be meant but Leicester in the bold allusion in the First Book (ix 17) to Elizabeth's supposed thoughts of ory, like caricature, is not bound to e always or perfectly coincide; and Spenserthe picture of the Kingly Warrior, in as to be suraces of other men, and as to be ever ready to help and support his fellows in their hour of need, and in their conflict with evil, he certainly had before his enerous nature And he further dedicated a separate book, the last that he completed, to the celebration of Sidney's special ”virtue” of Courtesy The es once more to the pastoral of the _Shepherd's Calendar_ to describe Sidney's wooing of Frances Walsingharace over the churlishness of rivals; and his triunorant and loud-tongued insolence, the ”Blatant Beast” of religious, political, and social slander

Again, in Lord Grey of Wilton, gentle by nature, but so stern in the hour of trial, called reluctantly to cope not only with anarchy, but with intrigue and disloyalty, finding selfishness and thanklessness everywhere, but facing all and doing his best with a heavy heart, and ending his days prerace, Spenser had before hirand and severe ious hatred of disorder, and an unflinching sense of public duty Spenser's adory alal, the Knight of Justice The story touches apparently on soes of his career, when his dislike of the French e placed him in opposition to the Queen, and even for a time threw hial ainst wrong and rebellion in Ireland These exploits are represented in the doings of the ironflail, swift, irresistible, inexorable; a figure, borrowed and altered, after Spenser's wont, froiants, his annihilation of swar policy, of which, though condeland, Spenser continued to be the advocate In the story of Arthegal, long separated by undeserved misfortunes froin chaht, of whom he was so worthy, doomed in spite of his honours to an early death, and assailed on his return from his victorious service by the furious insults of envy and malice, Spenser portrays almost without a veil, the hard fate of the unpopular patron whoh, his last protector, the Shepherd of the Ocean, to whose judguidance he once ed to a different class from Sidney or Lord Grey; but of his own class he was the consummate and matchless example He had not Sidney's fine enthusiasm and nobleness; he had not either Sidney's affectations He had not Lord Grey's single- He was a man to whom his own interests were much; he was unscrupulous; he was ostentatious; he was not above stooping to mean, unmanly compliances with the huher ideal than he atteh the shows and hollowness of the world His intellect was of that clear and unes which other hest form a representative of that spirit of adventure into the unknown and the wonderful of which Drake was the coarser and rougher exa in serious earnest, on the sea and in the New World, the life of knight-errantry feigned in roh, as with Lord Grey, Spenser comes to history; and he even seems to have been moved, as the poem went on, partly by pity, partly by ainary world, not h's brilliant qualities, but also his frequent misadventures and h was the one whoht in torested the scenes describing the utter desolation of Prince Arthur's squire, Tiin Huntress, Belphoebe,--scenes, which extravagant as they are, can hardly be called a caricature of Ralegh's real behaviour in the Tower in 1593 But Spenser is not satisfied with this one picture In the last Book Tie, even after he had recovered Belphoebe's favour; he is baited like a wild bull, by hty powers of malice, falsehood, and calumny; he is wounded by the tooth of the Blatant Beast; and after having been cured, not without difficulty, and not without significant indications on the part of the poet that his friend had need to restrain and chasten his unruly spirit, he is again delivered over to an ignominious captivity, and the insults of Disdain and Scorn

Then up he made him rise, and forward fare, Led in a rope which both his hands did bynd; Ne ought that foole for pity did hi behynd, Hi'd, and forst his feete to fynd: And other-whiles with bitter entle rievous then the others blowes: Words sharpely wound, but greatest griefe of scorning growes