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Introduction

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Since every piece of literature is in a way the product of the age in which it is written, we must, if we would rightly estimate the poetry of Spenser, consider the circumstances amid which the poet lived and the events and movements that left their irqpress upon his character. And since Spenser's poetry has an important — though not the most important — place in the literature of the i6th century in England, it is well, before studying his works, to seek to know the causes that led to the unparalleled literary activity of the Elizabethan Age.

During the century that preceded the birth of Spenser, great events followed one another in quick succession : in 1453 Constantinople was taken by the Turks, and through the Greek scholars that fled to Italy the culture of Greece was carried into Western Europe ; about 1475 Caxton set up his printing-press in England ; Columbus discovered the New World in 1492 ; in 1 5 17 Luther attacked the doctrine of indulgences ; in 1534 Henry VIII declared himself head of the English church. However, not until the reign of Elizabeth, with its long years of internal peace, did the conditions resulting from these events find adequate expression in English literature. Caxton fortunately set up his

VI INTRODUCTION.

printing-press just as the New Learning was making its way, bringing from Italy an enthusiasm for the classics and awakening among English scholars an interest in the study of the Bible in the original tongues. In the religious disturbances that darkened the reigns of Edward VI and Mary, the light of the New Learning seemed in danger of being quenched ; but, with the coming of Elizabeth, herself a lover of Greek and Latin literature, the classics regained their supremacy, and the grammar schools, recently established, spread the love of learning among the people.

A spirit of inquiry in regard to natural phenomena was abroad in Elizabeth's time. The Copernican system was revolutionizing men's ideas in regard to the relations of the heavenly bodies, and, before many years, Francis Bacon was to give to the study of natural science an impulse such as it had never before received in England.

In the province of religion old barriers were swept aside and new forces were given full play. When Henry VIII threw off his allegiance to Rome and declared himself head of the English church, the national consciousness was no doubt quickened ; but the event that did most during his reign toward developing the moral and religious sentiment of the nation was the translation of the Bible into English. In a few years the Bible, known already through the teachings of the clergy, became the one book of the mass of the people ; the images of the Hebrew writers were in every mind, their phrases on every tongue. More than Homer to the Greek was the Bible to the Englishman;

INTRODUCTION. vii

for from it he gained that moral strength, that realization of his individual worth as the child of God, which made him battle with a stout heart against the dreaded power of Catholic Spain, and which, later, enabled him to resist successfully the tyranny of his own rulers. The translation of the Bible exercised an influence upon the development of English literature ; and the influence was in part owing to the time at which the translation was made ; that is, it was made just when the language was ripe for it. Not until the i6th century were the various elements that go to make up the English tongue thoroughly assimilated. While to-day the language of Chaucer needs to be studied, the speech of the i6th century, freed from its peculiarities in spelling, may easily be read by a person of ordinary intelligence ; in fact, it is practically modern English. By the wide and rapid diffusion of the Bible, the people as a whole, even those speaking peculiar dialects, became familiar with a body of writings expressed in the literary medium of the period. Consequently the 16th-century writers when employing the current tongue could appeal to persons of various social conditions. This is one reason why the literature of the Elizabethan Age is the literature, not of a class, but of a nation.

While the influences just mentioned quickened the moral perceptions and refined the literary instincts of the people, the discovery of the New World awoke in them a sudden consciousness of their own force, and led them to realize in a slight degree the part they were destined to play on the great stage of the world. Up to the viii INTRODUCTIOAL

beginning of the i6th century Englishmen had been obhged to acknowledge that their small island had little weight in the affairs of Europe. She had heretofore looked to Rome for spiritual guidance and to Italy and France for inspiration and teaching in literary matters. Now at last she was to take her true place in the onward march of the nations. The discovery of America and the subsequent explorations of daring navigators sailing under English colors had given to England even more truly than to Castile and Leon a " New World." The spirit of the Vikings that had slumbered for centuries in their descendants awoke, and England felt her real power — the power of the conqueror and the colonizer; the power which was to make that " little body with a mighty heart" the greatest civilizing force of modern times.

As we consider these facts we begin to see why the man of the Elizabethan Age differed in many respects both from his predecessors and from his descendants. We can now account for his unruly passions, his lively imagination, his religious intolerance, and his love of adventure. We do not wonder that the finer spirits of the time were inspired by lofty and generous ideals. Fortunate, indeed, was the genius whose lot was cast in this remarkable century; if not heir of all the ages that have stored up their wealth for the 19th-century man, he was the possessor of a rich inheritance. If the genius were a Spenser, he looked beyond the material universe, out upon vast realms of the imagination peopled with those airy nothings to which the poet alone can give a local habitation and a name.

INTR on UC TIOiV. ix

And yet, the poet is, after all, born into the hard,

actual world, —

. . . the world

Of all of us, — the place where in the end,

We find our happiness, or not at all ;

and he, like the commonest mortal, must grapple with facts, and gain strength and insight through experience. Edmund Spenser was born in London near the Tower, sometime between 1549 and 1554. 1552 is the date usually fixed upon, and this makes him six years old when Elizabeth came to the throne. He was evidently of good family, though his parents must have been in moderate circumstances. He was a pupil in the grammar school established by the Merchant Taylors' Company, and when sixteen or seventeen left school for the university of Cambridge. In 1573 he became B.A., and in 1576 left the university with the degree of M.A. His friendship with Gabriel Harvey, a fellow-student, had an important influence upon his future life, since Harvey introduced him to Sir Philip Sidney, who made him known to his uncle, the Earl of Leicester. After a short stay in the north of England, where he is supposed to have wooed unsuccessfully a certain fair Rosalind, the poet settled in London. In I 579 his first printed book, the " Shepherd's Calendar," was published. This production was dedicated to Sidney. In 1580 Spenser went to Ireland as secretary to Arthur, Lord Grey de Wilton. Since he was staying at Lord Leicester's house just before this event, it is probable that he obtained the position through Leicester's influence. After Lord Grey was recalled, in 1582,

X INTR on UC TION.

Spenser remained in Ireland as a state official. In 1586 a large estate at Kilcolman, not far from Cork, was granted him by the queen ; and it was in his new home that he composed the first three books of the Faery Qiiecne. Sir Walter Raleigh, whose friendship he had gained during his former visit to Ireland, thought so highly of the work that he persuaded Spenser to accompany him to England that he might present him to the queen. Pllizabeth received the poet with marked favor, and granted him a pension of fifty pounds a year. The three books were published in 1590 with an explanatory letter addressed to Raleigh. In 1591 a collection of Spenser's shorter poems appeared. In 1594 the poet married a lady named Elizabeth, and in honor of the occasion wrote his celebrated Epithalamion. A second edition of the first three books of the Faery Qiicene was printed in 1596, together with the next three books. Spenser was in London at this time. After his return to Ireland, in 1598, the Tyrone Rebellion broke out, the castle of Kilcolman was sacked and burnt, and the poet and his family barely escaped with their lives. Some authorities declare that one of the children perished in the flames. Spenser managed to reach England, but died three months later, in January, 1599. His body lies beside that of Chaucer in Westminster Abbey.

In the Prothalarnion, written when he was a little over forty, the poet speaks of his birthplace as

. . . merry London, my most kindly nurse, That to me gave this life's first native source ;

and in the same poem he alludes to

INTRODUCriOX. xi

. . . the shore of silver-streaming Thames ; Whose rutty bank, the which his river hems,

Was painted all with variable flowers, And all the meads adorned with dainty gems

Fit to deck maidens' bowers.

It is interesting to picture Spenser as a boy in London — that strange London of the i6th century, with its filth and its splendor, its Puritanism and its license, its hatred of popery and its stanch loyalty to the queen, — above all, with its daring hopes and its worldwide interests. We see the schoolboy playing on the " rutty " banks of the river, or dodging as he runs from school to avoid the frequent holes and the heaps of filth that make the streets anything but ways of pleasantness. Now he gazes at the stuffed monkeys and parrots, the tomahawks and the Indian ornaments exposed to view in some shop. A live red man even may meet his gaze, for Indians were occasionally brought to London in those days. We see him listening breathless as some returned mariner tells the knot of boys gathered about him of Eldorados more wonderful than Mexico and Peru, of lands where the rivers run gold and the rocks are full of diamonds. At another time we see the future poet of fairy-land cheering on a street fight or following with the crowd that escorts an unfortunate victim to the stocks or to the gallows. Perhaps the boy's attention is arrested by a passing courtier, the willing cynosure of admiring eyes, fantastically arrayed as a Spanish grandee or as a French beau of the period. The plays given in the court-yards of the inns are sure to have aroused Spenser's enthusiasm ; and tucked in

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INTRODUCTION.

among his burly elders he doubtless watched with keen delight the crude performances of the early Elizabethan stage. After the play would come the walk home in the quick coming darkness of the winter afternoon, the flaring light of the linkboy's torch making well-known objects strangely unfamiliar. But, above all, the shows! — processions, pageants, masks, mummeries, morality plays ; every kind of spectacle that could delight the eyes of man might be seen in or near the London of Spenser's day. The queen never moved but in a show. The most trifling occasion was celebrated by allegorical representations. The vices and virtues became as familiar to the sight as they are in all ages to the inner consciousness of the people. The Mask of Ciipid that Britomart witnesses in Busirane's castle is only a court mask of Spenser's time that has found its way into fairy-land.

If the imagination of the future poet was fed by the sights and sounds of the city, it must have been nourished by books as well. Stories from every land and every age found their way to the printing-presses of London: Italian poems, French romances, Spanish tales, and classical mythologies. Spenser read of the gods of Greece ; and in the early red of the morning he saw Aurora coming to rejoice the slumbering world. He pored over Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Morte d' ArtJinr till in the clouds of sunset he could distinguish the shining spears and the crimson banners of the knights of the Round Table. With these romantic tales were mingled Scripture narratives ; and back of all, — a dark, deep undercurrent, — whispers

INTR OD UC TIOiV. xiii

of popish plots and stories of Spanish cruelty. It is no wonder that the Faery Queene is at the first glance a strange medley ; that Christian knights and fair ladies as they wander in Spenser's fairy-land meet with sorcerers and dragons, with Saracens and Amazons; while the vices and virtues personified live on terms of intimacy with the thinly disguised characters of the poet's own time.

Little is known of Spenser's life at Cambridge. It is known, however, that the university was at that time represented to the authorities in London as being in a state of dangerous excitement. Religious controversies were rife, and the more subtle doctrines of the various Puritanical sects were eagerly discussed. Gabriel Harvey, Spenser's college friend, in a letter written to the poet a short time after the latter had left Cambridge, says : " Every day spawns new opinions : heresy in divinity, in philosophy, in humanity, in manners, grounded upon hearsay ; doctors contemn'd ; the devil not so hated as t\\Q pope ; many invectives but no amendment." However, in spite of the prevailing interest in religious controversies, the poet must have found at the university much that would tend to develop the intellectual side of his nature ; and if he was, as some maintain, the most learned of the English poets after Milton (Gray should come first, probably), he owed much of his knowledge to the opportunities enjoyed at Cambridge. Certainly he possessed more than a cursory knowledge of Plato and Aristotle, and his acquaintance with the literatures of Greece, Rome, and Italy was wide if not accurate. In the poets and chroniclers of his own tongue

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he was deeply read, and Chaucer was his master, beloved and imitated. In addition to his intellectual gains, Spenser, while at the university, made friends whose sympathy and interest were a constant encouragement and stimulus.

A few years after leaving Cambridge the poet counted among his friends not only Edward Kirk and Gabriel Harvey, university men, but also Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Lord Grey; while Lord Leicester and Queen Elizabeth herself were among his patrons. It is important to consider his relations with the aristocracy, since these relations must have broadened his outlook and have added to his knowledge of men and of affairs; while the atmosphere of the court which surrounded him for short intervals several times during the course of his life doubtless quickened his perceptions and refined his tastes. In Sidney, Raleigh, and Grey he saw living examples of the knightly heroes whose valor and generosity had filled his boyish soul with admiration ; and in the brilliant spectacles at court and at Lord Leicester's house he witnessed scenes that needed only the transmuting touch of genius to become worthy of fairy-land itself. The rapid development of his powers was doubtless due in part to his association with these cultivated men of the court and to the knowledge that their warm appreciation was sure to greet his best efforts. But if Spenser saw and profited by the better side of court life, he was not blind to the baser elements that went to make up that brilliant society. The following lines are from his poem, Colm Clout's Come Home Again :

INTR OD UC TION. XV

For, sooth to say, it is no sort of life,

For shepherd fit to lead 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 shifts, and finest sleights devise.

In his satire, Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubbard's Tale, Spenser makes us aware that his experience at court was not altogether a happy one :

Most miserable man, whom wicked fate Hath brought to Court, to sue for had ywist,^

That few have found, and many one hath missed !

Full little knowest thou, that hast not tried.

What hell 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 Princes' 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.

Unhappy wight, born to disastrous end.

That doth his life in so long tendance spend.

The years spent in Ireland — except for short visits to London, the last eighteen years of his life — must have seemed to the poet a period of exile. Taking into consideration the difificulty of communication in his time, he was doubtless farther from London, for him the cen-

1 Had ywist, had I known ; that is, vain regret.

xvi iNTR on uc riON.

tre of the social and intellectual world, than is to-day the Englishman living in New Zealand. Ireland in the 1 6th century was peopled by barbarous, turbulent people — Catholics for the most part — who were, for sufficiently good reasons, bitterly opposed to English rule. Spenser speaks of the " good Lord Grey," whom he portrays in the Faery Qiieene as Artegall, the knight of Justice, as " most gentle, affable, loving, and temperate ; always known to be a most just, sincere, godly, and right noble man, far from sternness, far from unrighteousness"; and yet, he admits that the Lord- Deputy left a terrible name behind him in Ireland. Church ^ says of Spenser's patron : " He was certainly a man of severe and unshrinking sense of duty, and like many great Englishmen of the time, so resolute in carrying it out to the end, that it reached, when he thought it necessary, to the point of ferocity." Were Spenser merely the gentle dreamer that some critics conceive him to be, he would, while with Lord Grey, have shut his eyes so far as he could to the barbarous scenes of English rule (or misrule), and have taken refuge in the more attractive world of the imagination. Instead of this, we find him some years later writing his " View of the Present State of Ireland," in which he proposes a plan for the reformation of the rebellious island. Like our greatest English writers, — Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer, — Spenser was, notwithstanding his poetic genius, a practical, clear-headed Englishman, with enough of hardness to enable him to hold his own among the ruling spirits of a turbulent age.

1 Spenser, by R. W. Church, in the English Men of Letters Series.

INTRODUCTION. xvii

Kilcolman, Spenser's home, was near the hill of Aharlo, a great fastness in the Desmond Rebellion, and to the north stretched a wild country, half forest, half bog. Here, except for short visits to London, the poet lived in retirement. He did, it is true, make occasional trips to Dublin, where he had a small circle of English friends who sympathized to a certain degree with his literary tastes. Painful as this banishment may have been for the man Spenser, the poet could hardly have found a place better calculated to develop his peculiar genius. A painter of contemporary manners like Pope would have suffered intellectual starvation amid these hills and bogs ; but the man who was to create the fairy-land of Gloriana and then lose himself in its interminable mazes needed to be where outward things would not distract his mind. Bunyan wrote his allegory in Bedford jail; Milton saw the wonders of heaven and hell after his eyes were closed to the actual world; and Spenser, forgetting the loneliness of his position, could transform the scenes of violence and disorder, whose echoes reached him, into glorious knightly achievements, and could people the wild solitudes of Kilcolman with the varied creations of his fertile imagination. Speaking of the Faeiy Qtieene, Church says : " The realities of the Irish wars and of Irish social and political life gave a real subject, gave body and form to the allegory. . . . There in visible fact were the vices and falsehoods which Arthur and his companions were to quell and punish. . . . The allegory bodies forth the life of man in all conditions and at all times. But Spenser could never have seen in England such a strong xviii INTRODUCTION.

and perfect image of the allegory itself — with the wild wanderings of its personages, its daily chances of battle and danger, its hairbreadth escapes, its strange encounters, its prevailing anarchy and violence, its normal absence of law and order — as he had continually and customarily before him in Ireland."

While we learn from the biographies of Spenser a good deal about the circumstances of the poet's life, we find in them little regarding his personal character. We know that he had the artist's feeling for beauty and that he was a seeker after the ideal. We know, too, that he loved his country and admired his queen, — for we cannot consider his extravagant expressions in regard to Elizabeth as mere adulation, — and that he felt the most cordial hatred for the pope, the Spaniard, and all whom he looked upon as England's enemies. From the Epithalamion we infer that he was able to invest those dearest to him with something of that ideal beauty which was always seeking expression in his writings. Perhaps, however, the most admirable trait that has been preserved for us is his chivalric constancy in friendship. Living as he did in an age of patronage, an age in which the struggling genius must look to those high in rank for the means that should enable him to prosecute his work, Spenser might easily, in the struggle for existence, have forgotten to be grateful. Eager for his own advancement, he might have sought always the favor of those whose smiles would insure success. This was not the case with the poet. Although his friend and patron, Lord Grey de Wilton, was recalled from Ireland to England and censured by the home gov-

INTRODUCTION. xix ernment for his unsuccessful though strenuous efforts at ruHng the turbulent island that had been placed under his control, Spenser, in his Vieiv of the Present State of Ireland, heartily commended the administration of the Lord-Deputy. Besides, he introduced him into the Faery Qiieene as Artegall, the knight of Justice. Earlier in his career, when writing the Shepherd's Calendar, the poet chose as the pattern of a true Christian pastor his former patron, Archbishop Grindal, — whom he denominated Algrind, — although at that very time the bishop was suffering under the displeasure of the court. One familiar with the jealousies and intrigues of Elizabeth's court will realize that the course pursued by Spenser in the instances referred to gives evidence not only of constancy in friendship but of high moral courage as well.

Besides the Faery Queene, Spenser wrote : the Shepherd's Calejtdar, a collection of pastoral poems, one for each month in the year; Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubbai'd's Tale, a satirical fable; Coli7i Clout's Come Home Again, a fanciful account of the poet's trip to England with Raleigh and of his presentation to the queen ; AstropJiel, a Pastoral Elegy npon the Death of the most Noble and Valorous KnigJit, Sir Philip Sidney ; Prothalamion, or a Spoiisal Verse ; EpitJialamion, a poem celebrating the poet's own marriage ; four Hymns in honor of Love, Beanty, Heavenly Love, and Heavenly Beauty ; and numerous other poems, among them a large number of sonnets. In addition to these poetical works, he left behind him the prose treatise, Vieiv of the Present State of Ireland ^ and several letters.

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The poet who can write interesting narratives, keen satires, fanciful allegories, and lyrics of marvellous beauty is certainly not a one-sided genius. At the same time Spenser has, with the exception of Britomart, created no living character; and on occasions Britomart, even, becomes shadowy, unsubstantial. The author of the Faery Qtieene lacks dramatic power and is wanting also in the constructive ability that goes to the making of great epics. He is, too, devoid of passion, unless an absorbing love for the good and the beautiful may be counted as passion. Not once in all his poems does he, like Shakespeare, touch those chords that awaken an echo in the deepest recesses of the human heart ; nor does he, like Wordsworth, find a new and hidden beauty in the " meanest flower that blows." And yet Milton calls him "a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas," and Wordsworth in his Prelude says :

And that gentle Bard, Chosen by the muses for their page of State, Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace, I called him Brother, Englishman, and Friend.

Brother and friend he has in truth been to his fellowcraftsmen from his own time to ours, — and master as well. His title, "the poets' poet," is no empty phrase. When he began to write England had for a hundred and fifty years been without a great poet. Chaucer with his archaic forms could no longer serve as teacher and inspirer, and the verse-makers, lacking an English model, looked to Italy for instruction in

INTRODUCTION. xxi

their art. Spenser revealed to his contemporaries the capacities of the English tongue. A master of poetic form, and sensitive to the subtlest harmonies of language, he taught the writers of the i6th century how to use the resources at their command ; and echoes of his melodious phrases may be detected in some of the latest productions of English literature. (The Spenserian stanza — the stanza of the Faery Queene — still remains one of the chief forms of English verserx However, it is not simply because of his artistic qualities that Spenser has exercised an important influence upon the development of English poetry. His characteristic charm lies in the fact that better than any other poet of his nation he knows how to communicate to his readers the joy that comes from the contemplation of ideal beauty. His poetry, it is true, does not cause that ecstatic thrill which is akin to pain; rather it gives a calm and serene happiness, the result of long companionship with what is pure and high. "The noblest mind the best contentment has," Spenser tells us. In the Faery Qiieene life is represented as a conflict in which the good are often hard pressed. Still, we are not troubled; for the eternal forces are at work and the victory is sure. As we read, the sense of earthly limitations passes away, and we find ourselves in a new world where we gladly linger, charmed and detained by the long swell of the Spenserian stanza. Lowell has called this world, "the land of pure heart's ease, where no ache or sorrow of spirit can enter."

Spenser is, as we have seen, peculiarly the representative of his own age in its higher aspects. As in the xxii INTR on UC TION.

more realistic of the Elizabethan dramatists we see pictured the actual life of the time, so in Spenser we find the beliefs, the dreams, the ideals of his contemporaries. The cultivated men of his day read Plato and Aristotle, and enjoyed Homer, Virgil, Boccaccio, and Ariosto ; and we find reproduced in Spenser's poems the thoughts and images of these writers. Their own past had likewise its charm for the men of Elizabeth's court ; and Spenser, an avowed disciple of Chaucer, steeped himself in old chronicles and romances, and found an irresistible attraction in the forms of a rapidly decaying feudalism. Spenser is the poet of the Renaissance with its love of learning, its feeling for the artistic in form and color, its new delight in life, its faith in the possibilities of human achievement. At the same time he never forgets that life is a struggle ; and underneath his most glowing pictures may be found the noble aims and the high ideals of the Puritan. As we read his poetry, the past, touched with a glory not its own, lives once more in our imagination ; and we gain the culture that comes through sympathy with interests remote from those of to-day. Our ears, trained by a skilled musician, learn to trace with delight the hitherto unsuspected harmonies of the great masters of verse. But more than this is won if the poet accomplishes his purpose ; for in his letter to Raleigh he says, speaking of the Faery Qiieene : " The generall end, therefore, of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline"; and surely we must gain in virtue and in magnanimity if we associate with the generous and noble spirit of Spenser.