The Faerie queene

Contents

PAGE

Introduction , , . ix

Verses addressed to the Author 7

Canto XII 521

Two Cantos of Mutabilitie : which, both for forme and matter, appeare to be parcell of some following Booke of The Faerie Queene, under the

Legend of Constancie 527

Canto VI 527

Canto VII 535

Canto VIII . .^ . . 643

Introduction

Of Spenser, more than of most other famous writers, it may be plausibly said that he needs no introduction. Not only has a great mass of criticism been heaped upon his works — although he has apparently fared better in this respect than his three compeers, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton — but it is entirely ^'iperfluous to say a word in his favor to his admirers, and almost a forlorn idertaking to try to win over to him unappreciative or totally indifferent and 3glectful readers. Like his greater disciple, Milton, Spenser suffers from the defects of his qualities ; and, perhaps even more than in the case of Paradise Lost, the reading public, so far as his greatest work. The Faerie Qiieene, is concerned, contents itself with that method of sampling which is to a poet -'most as much an insult as an involuntary tribute. His Epithalamioyi and his 'rothalamion are familiar to lovers of poetry, but nothing that he wrote has Lie currency of Milton's so-called Minor Poems. Hence, in the popular mind, Spenser is less near in order of eminence to Shakespeare's throne than Milton is, perhaps less near than Chiucer — although, more probably, through his archaic diction, he is usually grouped with Chaucer in a relationship of vague and antiquated greatness.

When a truly great poet is placed in such a position, his upholders become as a rule all the more intense in their devotion and, in proportion, scornful of the taste and critical capacity of the large world of readers. And nearly always neither party is wholly wrong or wholly right ; indeed, it is fairer to say, each party has a good deal of right and truth on its side. • In the case of Spenser, no idealist, no sensitive lover of ethereal beauty, no reader endowed with an ear trained to delight in the subtlest melodies and most exquisite harmonies, no dreamer enamored of the stately and romantic past, no willing prober of alleg)ries and symbols, and, above all, no soul in love with essential purity can possibly remain indifferent to the appeal made by the poet and, to a considerable degree, by the man. For any reader, falling to a fair extent under these categories, to know Spenser at all thoroughly is to love him deeply.

But idealists, symbolists, ethereal natures, and readers trained to enjoy the subtlest poetic harmonies are, and have always been, rare. This is a work-a- 4Ciiy world actuated by a rather overpowering sense of the real. The Middle

ix

INTRODUCTION.

Ages developed in what was after all a very limited class of men and women, a taste for allegory ; but the great national dramas killed allegory, and this beneficent result was really involved in the invention of printing and the consequent widening of the reading public, as well as in the recovery from classical times of better literary models. When Spenser decided, against Gabriel Harvey's advice, to abandon the writing of comedies and to continue the composition of The Faerie Queene, he probably made no mistake, so far as concerned his own genius and the world's profit ; but he unwittingly took his hand from the latch of the gate opening into the future. The gate he opened and entered admitted him into the past; but his good genius led him along a path that speedily emerged into the enchanted meads and vales of Faery land. Shakespeare, on the other hand, without Spenser's advantages of training and connections, but perhaps profiting from his predecessor's choice, opened the gate of the future. He too at times strayed into Faeryland, but never for long. Hence it is that Shakespeare continues to make an increasingly triumphant progress down the highway of time, while Spenser pursues his enchanted wanderings. It would be rash to undertake to determine which fate is the more enviable.

It is just as easy to account for the interest taken in Spenser by scholars as to account for the devotion of his admirers and the comparative neglect of the large public. He was the first poet of sustained eminence produced in England for nearly two centuries after Chaucer's death. He was the first poet to profit in full measure from the Renaissance, from the great Italian masters and from their less successful but still important French followers, from the labors of Wyatt and Surrey, and from the admirable but not sufficiently esteemed beginnings made by Sackville. He added to the rich color and melody of Southern poetry not merely the "high seriousness" and philosophic depth of the best Greek classics, but the profound spiritual sincerity and the sense for the mysterious and the symbolic characteristic of the Teutonic genius. He was in many respects a marvellously full and ripe product of the Renaissance, but he was also a product of the Protestant Reformation, yet at the same time an exponent of many of the finest ideals of the Middle Ages. In him^ cohere to a remarkable degree the interest attaching to the survivor and that attaching to the pioneer. When in addition to these facts we remember that Spenser was an important figure in the most brilliant and picturesque age of English history and literature, that he was the contemporary of Sidney and the predecessor of Marlowe and Shakespeare, that he was as clearly, although not so eminently, supreme in narrative, idyllic, philosophical, and loftily lyrical poetry as Shakespeare was in the drama, and that he was the master of an important group of seventeenth-century poets, including the brothers Fletcher and William Browne and culminating in Milton, we should be prepared to wonder not that so much scholarly study has been devoted to Spenser and his works, but that he has not attracted an even larger number of editors and critics. Nor do these considerations take into account the interest Spenser's language, affectedly and factitiously archaic though it often is, must possess for philologians, or that far less commendable interest that attaches to the endeavor to solve such problems as who the Rosalynd of

INTRODUCTION.

wo Cantos of Mutabilitie " were discovered and given to the world in the

> 1609 ; yet few critics, with the exception of Aubrey De Vere, have done

noble cantos justice. 1

But our question has not been altogether answered. The Faerie Queene

probably not interesting throughout to any one, — what long poem is ? many

l\ ask, — but at least one reader has found himself confessing at the end that

^ '* iS: enough sheer interest in the poem to make him wonder at Spenser's

less of invention. Passages that drag do occur with some frequency,

equires all the beauty of the marriage of the Thames and the Medway to

ne hope for the triumphs of art one finds in the fifth and sixth books that

Nor is flagging of invention the only drawback. Confusion worse con-

3i results not merely from the fact that the central conception of the poem

understood only from Spenser's letter to Kaleigh, but also from his having

/ed from Ariosto the trick of taking up and dropping his threads of narra-

lis separate adventures, in order, apparently, to pique a reader's curiosity.

confusion is enhanced by mistakes made by the poet in consequence, it

lid appear, of lapses of memory. Worse still at times seems the mixture of

I and of realistic elements — of allegory intended to elevate the souls of men

if allegory devised to flatter Elizabeth, Leicester, and Lord Grey of Wilton.

ats of knightly heroes with dragons and proud Paynim foes do not har-

'hilip II., much less with a partisan impeachment of Mary Queen of Scots and

tesquely falsified version of Leicester's campaign in the Low Countries. Yet

n all deductions have been made, it seems not impossible to forget that one is

iing an allegory, and to interest one's self in the fortunes of nearly all Spenser's

■haracters, even if one does not quite hold one's breath when a dragon or some

^: Yet, why dwell on this matter of interest when The Faerie Queene has so

mufh that is higher and better to yield us ? Is it not, with the possible excep-

1 In Macmillan's Magazine, Vol. XLII., Mr. Sebastian Evans argued that by 1596,

*he da^tp of the collected " Sixe Bookes," Spenser had changed his mind as to the

pe of his poem, and that the " Two Cantos of Mutabilitie" and the two stanzas

ve not intended to be incorporated in The Faerie Queene. The first contention

i-ompletely disposed of by Dr. Grosart (Vol. I., Appendix U), but the second point

y fl open for argument. Certainly it is hard to see how Spenser could have worked

(ivo cantos into the scheme of his poem, and it is clear that in no other cantos

jg e so completely separated from human actors — from the brilliant knights and

" .n ' ^" whom Spenser's imagination took such delight. Practically the best way

_ .. jat the Cantos is to regard them, in Mr. Evans's words, " as one of the noblest

ndependent poems of the noblest age of English poetry." But do not the lines that

>pen the thirty-seventh stanza of the first canto almost settle it that Spenser intended

o join these cantos to the main poem ? —

" And were it not ill fitting for this file To sing of hilles and woods niongst warres and knights.'' it^sides, each canto is provided with the slightly doggerel epitome that is found before '^ canto of The Faerie Queene. Yet, after all. it is perhaps more important to 'le plain ■• ■«" ^"'^ of the " Two Cantos 't on Keats's Hyperion.

INTRODUCTION.

The Shepherd^s Calendar was, or what obscure court intrigue glancing at in this or that canto of The Faerie Queene. y^--' But while it is not necessary to commend Spenser's poetry eith or to select readers, and while it would be futile to commend it in it will ever be truly popular, it does seem worth while to combat ti when read in any quantity his verse is necessarily tedious. This lent notion, combined with the idea that Spenser's archaisms m difficult to understand, doubtless renders the naturally contracted great poet's admirers still more contracted. The doubt is periodic; whether any one can read all that we have of The Faerie Q^uei the sake of being able to say one has read it, or for some other absu reason. People quote Macaulay's phrases about being in at the Blatant Beast without being aware, any more than he seemingly •< formidable monster made his escape, and is, for aught we know, the world. Lovers of Spenser, of course, reply by enlarging up fortunate experiences among the enchanted if tangled thickets allegory, but they generally encounter a polite scepticism.

Tlie chief cause of this divergence of opinions seems to lie ir detractors of The Faerie Queene demand that it should interest its lovers are satisfied with being charmed and ennobled by it. Ttt may trust Schopenhauer, are the more philosophical, since it is ithan interest that we should demand of a true work of art. But difficult to read a comparatively short poem like the Prothalamio only, it is difficult to set aside the demand for interest in the case ( poem consisting of one or more narratives, whether or not these allegorical in character. In other words, Spenser was unwittingly h when he began his poem with the line : —

" A gentle knight was pricking o'er the plain."

Another sort of pricking immediately became inevitable — that is, o ears. A narrative, "whether in prose or verse, at once suggests a story suggests the craving for interest.

Is The Faerie Queene interesting ? As a whole, it appar( Some readers cannot follow the wanderings of Una and the Red < to their successful issue. Others can do this and can even manage t Guyon until he overthrows the Bower of Bliss, although it may whether many of these, in gratitude for the great seventh canto d Cave of Mammon, are able to finish the tenth canto with its '• Chron; Kings, From Brute to Uthers rayne." Those who finish the seco probably trust themselves to embark upon the third — "The Lege martis, or of Chastity " ; and there seems to be no special reasc should not survive the uneven fourth book, and the better-knit fif books containing, as the latter do, respectively the lofty .legend of his Iron Man, Talus, and^thejovely cantos describing the passion of the fair Pastorella. Readers who leave the Blatant Beast ranging " world againe " ought to be sufficier ly initiated Spenspri^nc +- ^ j,

INTRODUCnON. xill tion of Comus, the purest of English poems ? Is it not the most continuous stream of fluic melody ever poured into the ears of men ? Is there in English a poem fuller of descriptive power, varied, copious, and charming ? Is there a poem more truly philosophical, yet at the same time more completely the product of a sustained poetic imagination ? Finally, is there any other long poem in English that comes nearer than The Faerie Queene to the consummate art of Paradise Lost ?

The answers to most of these questions are scarcely matters of debate.^/ The exquisite purity of Spenser's entire poetical work and of his own character has long been admitted. Una is the quintessence of purity, but she has many almost equally spotless rivals. Spenser's knights are not suffered to escape the temptations of lust, nor is their creator insensible to fleshly charms ; but it may be safely said that there is only x)ne stanza in the long poem to which even the most prurient prude would be likely to raise objections. Whether the poem is not almost too pure, just as it is almost too sweet in its melodies and too uniformly fair and romantic in its coloring, is another matter. Perhaps the atmosphere of The Faerie Queene is too rarefied for many people, and perhaps this is the reason why Spenser has long appealed especially to poets and been known as "the poet's poet."

To enlarge upon the philosophical depth of Spenser's poetry, particularly of The Faerie Q'leene and of the four Hymns, would require both an entire essay and the assuiance that one could add something to Mr. De Vere's excellent treatment of the subject. It nuist suffice to say that Spenser's poetry is as steeped in Platonism as it is in the more specifically literary spirit of the classics and the Renaissance. Here again may be found a reason for his failure to appeal to more or less realistic and positivistic readers like Byron, but surely the catholic mind should be receptive to his lofty idealism. The "sage and serious" teacher whom Milton set above professed philosophers has a message for this and for every generation, although he has not the power of the Ancient Mariner to compel attention. Nor is his teaching by any means always veiled in allegory. It is often brought out by his characters and by their actions as effectively as though he were really a dramatist or a novelist, and there is scarcely a canto that does not open with a stanza weighted with noble thought.

As for the sustained perfection of Spenser's poetic art in the broadest sense of the term, it is obvious that dogmatic assertions should be avoided ; yet it is equally obvious that, on the whole, critical opinion has placed him among the major poets of our tongue, and that this is never done save in the case of poets who are also sustained artists. It is Spenser's sustained art that places him with Shakespeare and Milton and Chaucer and separates him from Wordsworth and Byron and Shelley. That he is inferior in the totality of his powers to Shakepeare no one doubts. That he is inferior to Milton no one will doubt who gives due weight to the verdict of time or to the claims of sublime and succinct as compared with exquisite and diffuse art. For that Spenser is diffuse and often lacking in finish and, on the whole, gentle, pure, lovely, rather than sublime, in spite of the power displayed in the description of the Cave of Mammon, seems indisputable. That the deficiencies of his work from the point of view of humor,

XIV INTRODUCTION.

archness, and vivid realistic power of characterization and description have tended to place him below Chaucer in poetic rank seems equally indisputable. Yet one may well refuse to institute invidious comparisons between such great masters, or may hold that neither Chaucer nor^ Shakespeare is Spenser's equal as a ^uniform, sustained, conscious artist. '~""'

^ But the far from inconsiderable body of Spenser's lesser writings demands attention. His prose tract on Ireland and his letters may be dismissed, not because they are not valuable or interesting, but because Spenser is for readers of to-day primarily a poet. Of his minor poems, if the phrase be applicable, doubtless the most important to the student is The Shepherd's Calendar. This was not the first English pastoral in point of time, but it was the first that made Englishmen feel that they possessed something in this once popular form not only equal or superior to anything of the kind that Italy or France could boast of, but actually worthy of comparison with the similar work of Virgil. Besides, it was the first English poem since the days of Chaucer, with the possible exception of Sackville's Induction, that indicated poetic mastery, especially in rhythm, on the part of its writer. It was at once and long popular, and exercised considerable influence upon the Spenserians of the seventeenth century. Take it all in all, it is still probably the best collection of pastorals in our literature, and retains not a little of its charm, although those modern readers who fail to take deep interest in discussions as to the state of the church carried on in rustic language by clerics disguised as shepherds are not very greatly to blame. It is even conceivable that some persons may find the chief interest of the poem, outside the fables of the Oak and the Briar and the Fox and the Kid, to lie in the proofs it gives of Spenser's varied and admirable power as a metrist, and that others may prefer to study it in connection with the work of Spenser's predecessors, especially of Marot, who may not, after all, be so completely our poet's inferior as some have thought,

A nobler and a wider appeal is made by those two supreme lyrics of their elaborate kind, the Epithalamion and the Prothalamion. The rapture of approaching fruition and the awe that accompanies the contemplation of idealized perfection have apparently never been so perfectly blended by any other English poet as they have been by Spenser in his psean for his own wedding. In outward form his poem was Italian, in substance and spirit it was the expression of his own loyal and ecstatic soul. Less of compelling rapture but more of artistically presented objective beauty is probably to be found in the Prothalamion which gains upon its companion poem in succinctness and perhaps in certain peculiar triumphs of cadence. Yet, after all, to prefer the Prothalamion to the Epithalamion is much like preferring the moon to the sun.

As compared with these two splendid luminaries, Spenser's Amoretti seem to constitute a sort of Milky Way. There is no time to compare his peculiarly constructed sonnets with the numerous rival sonnet-sequences of the epoch. They are obviously inferior to Shakespeare's, and just as obviously they yield no such impressive single poems as every admirer of Sidney can recall. They are excellent and sometimes more than excellent, but, as a whole, they scarcely seem to form a constellation of lyric stars. Whether as a sequence they

II

INTRODUCTION. XV rank above or below Sidney's may be a matter of doubt ; it is scarcely doubtful that both Drayton and Joshua Sylvester have single sonnets to their credit, neither of which v^^ould be exchanged by some readers for any of Spenser's sonnets. As an elegist Spenser is not eminently successful, as readers of Daphnaida and Astrophel will probably admit. It is hard to see why in the latter poem he did not succeed better, in view of the fact that he had Sidney for a subject. It should be remembered, however, that this Elizabethan paragon is the subject of two exquisite lines : —

*' Most gentle spirite, breathed from above Out of the bosome of the makers blis "

in The Buines of Time^ a poem that contains some noble stanzas on the power of poetry to immortalize, and helps to convince the capable reader that nothing of Spenser's can safely be slighted.

Of the poems that remain briefly to be noticed that excellent combination of a satire and a beast fable, Mother Hubberd's Tale, has perhaps received most commendation from the critics. It undoubtedly deserves high praise, and may be profitably compared with certain eclogues in The Shepherd^s Calendar. Its excellence should not, however, make us forget the descriptive power' displayed in VirgiVs Gnat and in that remarkable creation of pure fancy, Muiopotmos, which suggests comparison with Shelley's Witch of Atlas. But better than these and fuller of true poetry than Mother Hubberd's Tale is Colin ClouVs Come Home Againe, perhaps the most remarkable example in English of the blending, upon an extensive scale, of occasional and familiar wi'th' essential poetry. If it were only a tribute of friendship from Edmund Spenser to Sir Walter Raleigh, it would be notable ; we should be glad to possess it if it gave us only the brilliant and interesting picture of Elizabeth's court ; but in addition it is full of pastoral beauty, and it contains a fairly superb picture of a gallant ship breasting the waves. It is a poem that no lover of poetry can afford to neglect, and one of its lines,

" Is Triton blowing loud his wreathed home,"

suggests the thought that Wordsworth, who loved Una and The Faerie Qzieene, must have read other poems of Spenser's with delight and profit.

Only one group of important lyrics remains to be mentioned — the four Hymns in honor of Love, of Beauty, of Heavenly Love, and of Heavenly Beauty. These for some reason, while dear to a few readers of Spenser, have never seemed to take the rank among his writings that appears to be their due. Perhaps their Platonism is too pronounced, perhaps they are too subtly ethereal, too little appealingly human. Yet it might be plausibly argued that they present the philosophical mind and the equably soaring imagination of Spenser more completely than anything else he ever wrote save only the "Two Cantos of Mutabilitie." However this may be, no student of Spenser can afford to leave the Hymns unread, and no lover of literature should with complacency admit the fact that he is not a student of Spenser. For not to study and love such a poet is a misfortune, although only a partisan would proclaim it to be a fault.

W. P. TRENT.

Nbw York, April 22, 1903.

XVI INTRODUCTION.

NOTE ON SPENSER'S LANGUAGE AND METRES.

To the student of Chaucer the language of Spenser presents few difficulties, and even the student of Shakespeare is not greatly baffled by it. The general reader is sometimes puzzled, but perhaps more often offended by the curious spelling, and of course has to use a glossary oftener than is consistent with thorough enjoyment of the poetry. But these drawbacks diminish the more one reads, and are, after all, not very serious.

As a matter of fact, Spenser's contemporaries and immediate successors found his language archaic, and doubtless got less pleasure out of his old forms than some of us moderns do, time not having then imparted to them so great an element of quaint charm. He wrote at a period when the language was still in a state of flux, but he fixed his eyes steadily upon Chaucer and the other older writers. He may have saved for us words that would otherwise have been lost, but he did not save himself from the charge of affectation, since in some particulars his contemporaries found him more obscure than he is to us who have profited by some of his archaisms. Daniel hinted at his "aged accents and untimely words," and Ben Jonson charged him with writing "no language." His eighteenth-century readers were outraged by his uncouthness and modernized him ; in fact, he had not been dead a hundred years before his ghost appeared as " ancient" to Oldham as Gower's ghost had to Shakespeare. The nineteenth century was more hospitable to his mannerisms, but even so sympathetic a student as Dean Church was forced to declare, " It is not to enrich a language, but to confuse and spoil it, when a writer forces on it words which are not in keeping with its existing usages and spirit, and much more when he arbitrarily deals with words to make them suit the necessities of metre and rime." " He not only revives old words," continues Church, "but he is licentious — as far as we are able to trace the usages of the time — in inventing new ones. He is unscrupulous in using inferior forms for better and more natural ones, not for the sake of the word, but for the convenience of the verse. The transfer of words — adjectives and verbs — from their strict use to a looser one, the passage from an active to a neuter sense, the investing a word with new associations, . . . are, within limits, part of the recognized means by which language, and especially poetical language, extends its range. But Spenser was inclined to make all limits give way to his convenience and the rapidity of his work."

The faults of affectation and haste just charged are serious ones and cannot be refuted. They may be easily illustrated. Spenser uses quite freely the past participle with ij- as a prefix, e.g. y-paynted ; he has present participles in the Northern and form, e.g. glitterand ; his infinitives often end in en, e.g. could tellen ; his plural verbs may end in the same way, e.g. they marchen ; he omits it with an impersonal verb, e.g. seemed for it seemed ; he has antiquated auxiliaries, e.g. mote for might; should for would have; and he uses such old plurals of nouns as /one, foes, eyne., eyes. It has been shown that many of Spenser's forms, words, and phrases are from the dialect of Lancashire, but while the employment of these might easily be defended so far as The Shepherd's Cal-

INTRODUCTION. xvii endar is concerned, it is difficult to see how their frequent use in^ Spenser's other works can be viewed in any other light than that of affectation./ Too great rusticity is as much a fault as excessive archaism. It may be noted finally that Spenser indulges frequently in Latinisms, in undigested French forms, e.g. liiteresse, in accentuation nearer to that of the French and the older English than to that of his own day, e.g. parent, and in almost overabundant alliteration. With regard to Spenser's metres, full information must, of course, be sought in some treatise on English metrics. Here it must be sufficient to point out the fact that the famous Spenserian stanza used in The Faerie Queene is probably the most important metrical invention due to any English poet. For general narrative and idyllic purposes when fluidity, copiousness, picturesqueness — in short, blended effects of charm and power — are required, it is practically without a rival. Exactly how it came to be formed is not clear. If derived from the Italian ottava rima by the addition of an alexandrine, as is often suggested, it must Tfave dispTeased Spenser's ear at first, and caused him to introduce changes in his rhyme-scheme. The rhyme royal so much used by Chaucer is still less likely to have furnished a basis. An eight-lined stanza used by Chaucer with rhymes corresponding to the first eight lines of the Spenserian stanza may have been transformed by the addition of an alexandrine. Spenser had used this very combination of eight rhymes at the beginning of the eleventh eclogue of The ShephercVs Calendar., and curiously enough had rhymed the nine following lines in such a way as to form a perfect Spenserian stanza, lacking only the extra foot in the ninth line.

But perhaps, after all, the famous stanza was the result of adding an alexandrine to the octave of one of his peculiarly constructed sonnets. However it came into existence, it was a remarkable discovery for English poetry ; but it would not be fair to Spenser not to observe that in addition to the great metrical variety and skill displayed in The Shepherd's Calendar he must be credited with admirable mastery of the rhyme royal (the Hymns), the ottava rima (VirgiVs Gnat), the heroic couplet (Mother HubbenVs Tale), as well as of complicated rhyme arrangements based upon Italian models and of sundry peculiarly lyrical stanzas. The original though not altogether satisfactory structure of his sonnets has been already noticed ; his Epithnlamion is almost a strict example of the difficult Italian canzone. A negative proof of his metrical superiority to his contemporaries is to be seen in his disdain of the popular and doggerel " poulter's measure." In short, it is only in blank verse and truly singing stanzas that Spenser yields to any of his great rivals, and he cannot be absolutely proved to have attempted the former. But on6 could fill a long chapter with a discussion of Spenser's metrical and rhythmical achievements, just as one could with a discussion of the fortunes of his famous stanza — its enlargement and spoiling at the hands of Prior, its revival by Thomson, its culmination in the hands of Keats.