Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

Art. 10.-THE PERSONALITY OF EDMUND SPENSER

1. The Works of Edmund Spenser (The Globe Edition). Edited by R. Morris. Ninth Impression. Macmillan, 1893.

2. Spenser. By Emile Legouis. Dent, 1926.

[ocr errors]

Or the great English poets Edmund Spenser is the least known as writer and as man. Chaucer, in spite of his having preceded the dawn-star of the Elizabethan glory by two hundred years, is far the better known of the two; his personal appearance and the character of his genius are as familar to the multitude as are those of Shakespeare who, with all the strictures and fanciful objections of certain obstinate theorists, is easily seen -through his bust in Stratford church, the tributes paid to him by contemporaries, such as Ben Jonson in his prefatory poem to the First Folio, and the accidental revelations of his own writings. And so it was with Milton, Swift, Goldsmith, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, and others whose literary remains and life-careers, the biographers, critics, and commentators have ransacked to feed the natural, insatiable curiosity of the crowd.

Edmund Spenser, on the other hand, remains generally unknown. Even his appearance is doubtfully recalled to the mind's eye. Every one of the afore-named men of inspiration has been portrayed definitely and repeatedly, so that the lineaments of his face, his bearing and individuality, are realised by all; but it is not so with Spenser. He has been excellently portrayed; but such portraits as are generally available to the everyday reader seem to to show him as merely conventional; whereas certainly Spenser was not conventional. His thoughts and ideals, as disclosed in his verse and prose, show him to have been less like the ordinary man of his time or any time in outlook and circumstance than any of the poets named, with the exceptions of Shelley and Blake. Again with him, as with others, the poet's works reveal the man more than his portraits or the records do. They are the only true mirror which reflects his personality.

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

That he was born in London; that he studied at 'Pembroke-hall in Cambridge'; that his mother and wife bore the queenly name of Elizabeth; that he was distantly allied with the Spencers, 'the noble family of which I meanly boast myself to be'; that before his marriage he was greatly enamoured of a country-lass called Rosalind'; that he was the personal friend of Raleigh, Sidney, and Shakespeare, the Aetion' of 'Colin Clouts Come Home Again'; that he was helped by the Earl of Leicester, a nobleman misunderstood, mainly through the arts of the novelists who embroidered with a brilliant misleading the death of his wife, Amy Robsart; that he served in Ireland as a secretary under Lord Grey of Wilton, the 'Artegall' of the Faerie Queene'; that after the profuse generosities of Fortune, through which he won fame, he fell to disappointment, failure, disaster, mortal disease, and death-all these facts we know, and all but the last are recorded in his works; but what do they tell of Spenser himself? Next to nothing. If it were not for his own generally unconscious self-revelations in the large body of his works, his personality would be no clearer to the mental eye or the vision of the heart than, say, Lodowicke Muggleton, or Praisegod Barebones, or any other shadow of flesh who long ago crossed the stage of life and, after the usual agitations, passed beyond the ultimate threshold.

[ocr errors]

In ways other than the order of time, Spenser was the forerunner and earliest true representative of the outburst of genius which came with the splendid adventurousness of the Elizabethans. More truly, because more immediately, than Dan Chaucer, he preluded the spacious times with their melodious bursts of imaginative song. He was the first to express the great spirit of his age. He possessed more than his share of its idealism and matchless confidence in the peculiar generosity of Providence to Englishmen ; who, it appeared, had only to choose and take whatever they wanted of the treasures of the Earth, no matter to whom they might belong, and they could feel that it was done with the divine approval. Even their religion was a material opportunity. The Protestant devotion of the buccaneers who flew the St George at their mast-heads was strengthened by the knowledge that Philip of Spain, whose possessions they

joyfully seized, was the narrowest and cruellest of persecutors; and that his Invincible Armada launched against them was scattered by the considerate winds of God, and their own good bangings, in spite of its having been blessed by Master Pope.

Beside the visionary uplift of the age, inspired by the boundless new lands recently discovered-' Indian Peru' and fruitfullest Virginia'-with a golden El Dorado for ever beckoning to the worthy and the bold, Spenser had the political ruthlessness of his age, as his prose 'View of the Present State of Ireland' discloses. The dreamy romanticist who recorded with a continuous zest and melody the adventures of the Red Cross Knight and his companions could express the truth about the Irish and the invading English, describing the pityfull woundes of that commonwealth,' with a frankness which evaded no touch of cruelty or treachery on either side. But with Spenser, as with others, the politician and the poet did not coalesce. They were diverse beings occupying one body; less closely even than Mrs. Malaprop's two gentlemen rolled into one. These diversities, however, brought out the brilliance and the shadows of the personality of a remarkable man.

6

Spenser was a passionate idealist. In his younger days, especially, he saw most things as belonging to the best in the best of all possible worlds; and although later there was a change, he never quite lost his faith in the goodness of most things. To idealise was natural to him, and he lived at a time when men did not mince or grudge the expression of their adorations, especially in the realms of love and patriotism; a truth which explains the extraordinary influence of Elizabeth over her people. The noblest dreams and deeds of the manhood of the race were given to their 'great and most glorious Virgin Queen alive.'

'She is the flowre of grace and chastity

Throughout the world, renowned far and near,
My liefe, my liege, my Soveraine, my deare,
Whose glory shineth as a morning-star.'

Naturally, a good deal of the assurances of that worship was lip-service; but Spenser was no lip-servant. His faith in the Queen was sincere. Even under the harsh

and

d

disappointments at the end, when he had paid the price seemingly exacted of all who dabble in Irish politics, she remained to him a morning-star, and he sang her praises where easily he might have remained silent.

After Elizabeth, that other Majesty-Nature. Spenser was in love with loveliness, and realised the fullness and richness of the beauty of Nature, the colours and grace of the flowers, the songs of the birds, the majesty of trees; but yet his appreciation of natural things has not the simple exultancy shown by Chaucer or Shakespeare. To him the flowers were rather ornaments decking his pageantry than living things. He has glowing passages, as in 'The Shepheards Calendar,'

'Strowe me the grounde with Daffadowndillies,
And Cowslips, and Kingcups, and loved Lillies:
The pretty Pawnce,

And the Chevisaunce,

Shall match with the fayre flowre Delice';

he can utter the usual phrases of the merry Cuckoo, messenger of Spring,' and admire the way in which the 'swallow sheres the liquid sky'; but the thought comes inevitably that his delight in the wonders of the painted, windy world was rather intellectual and artistic than wrought by the emotions and through love for them. He was so dreamy of temperament, so easily lost in visionary light, that stationary objects tended to cease for him to pulse with vitality, and became not so much entities as the beautiful shadows of things.

In large measure it was so, too, with love. In the beginning, as every maker of romantic verse is bound to be, he was in love with the idea of love. Nobody reading that greatest of marriage-songs, his 'Epithalamion,' can fail to realise that, when the hour called, Spenser proved a supreme lover; for to sing of a mistress's eyebrow, of Julia's lips all cherry-ripe, and such sweetly amorous raptures as were indulged by the fanciful shepherds who kept their sheep with Colin Clout, is of the common stockpot; but there is a truth and confidence, a freshness and originality, in his 'Epithalamion' which mark it as unequalled. His 'Amoretti' sonnets, also, have in them the ease and gladness of true love. Yet in his early ventures he was Vol. 249.-No. 493.

L

P

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

only intellectually the lover. His passion then was imaginative and make-believe. His harp-or the oaten pipe of his convention-had little feeling in its utterance. Women were distant deities to him, or accursed hags,' as bloodless as the creatures of enchanted dream. When, however, the country-lass to whom he gave the name of Rosalind entered his life, the force of his love was quickened, and his customary song found strength. In his last years, however, he went to the other extreme, for his ideals then were broken through disappointment, and in the 'Fowre Hymnes' he wrote with a disillusioned pen. It would be cruel to suggest that poverty and anxieties had spoilt the full-hearted raptures which went to his marriage-song; but in the 'Hymne of Heavenly Love' he made a bitter confession which cannot be ignored.

'Many lewd layes (ah! woe is me the more!)

In praise of that mad fit which fools call love,
I have in th' heat of youth made heretofore,
That in light wits did loose affection move;
But all those follies now I do reprove.'

The assertion is not to be taken too seriously; for cares and disappointments may bring measures to bear as false as youth at its wildest could manage, and on the moving theme of love Crabbéd Age is often curmudgeon, an impossible judge, especially when its own old amorous flames are not forgotten.

[ocr errors]

Much the same, as with Spenser's early love, it was with the abstractions out of which he built his allegory in the Faerie Queene.' Queene.' Generally, so long as his creatures represented virtues or otherwise-Holiness and Temperance, or Envy and Slander-he saw them only indifferently. They were phantoms or grotesques that fitted insufficiently the march of his pageantry; his but as soon as he had forgotten the allegory (as his readers should do before they begin to read) he saw characters not as abstractions but as breathing people, and forthwith his poetry and its persons took on new life. Compare Britomart with Una, and see how actual she is in her courage, eagerness, and tumbling golden hair; while Una remains persistently Tennysonian.'"

6

To Spenser, Beauty was more worshipful than religion

« VorigeDoorgaan »