Spendius

“ Spenser, the courtly spectator of the tilt, the pageant, and the masque—musing over the tome of old Gothic romances, and striking into the vein of fabling of Italian poesy, whose novelty had nearly supplanted the ancient classics—was at once Ariosto and Tasso and Ovid.
Spenser composed with great facility; incessant production seems to have been his true existence. His was one of those minds whose labour diffuses their delight, and whose delight provokes to labour. He seems always to be in earnest, and sometimes in haste, for he had much to work. ”

“ He here set forth special teachings of his great master Plato, and abandoned himself to the high spiritual contemplations he loved. But perhaps the finest of these four hymns is the second—that in honour of Beauty. Beauty was indeed the one worship of Spenser's life—not mere material beauty—not 'the goodly hew of white and red with which the cheekes are sprinkled,' or 'the sweete rosy leaves so fairly spred upon the lips,' or 'that golden wyre,' or 'those sparckling stars so bright,' but that inner spiritual beauty, of which fair hair and bright eyes are but external expressions. ”

“ And the gods who had given him understanding sent light into his heart, and boldly he answered,
"What can this creature be but man, O Sphinx? For, a helpless babe at the dawn of life, he crawls on his hands and feet; at noontide he walks erect in the strength of his manhood; and at evening he supports his tottering limbs with a staff, the prop and stay of old age. Have I not answered aright and guessed thy famous riddle?" ”

“ I may here observe that the stanza commonly called “Spenserian” is by no means so purely an original invention of that most imaginative poet as is usually represented. The Alexandrine at the close is the only part that is original. I find the germ of Spenser’s stanza very palpably in the old ballet-staves and in the works of two poets who lived fully a century before him, Skelton who styled himself [22] Poet Laureate to Henry VII. and Stephen Hawes who was Gentleman of the Bedchamber to the same monarch. ”

“ The spectacle, though consisting only of knights, ladies, dwarfs, pagans, "salvage men," enchanters, and monsters, and other well-worn machinery of the books of chivalry, is ever new, full of vigour and fresh images, even if, as sometimes happens, it repeats itself. There is a majestic unconsciousness of all violations of probability, and of the strangeness of the combinations which it unrolls before us.
2. But there is not only stateliness: there is sweetness [145] and beauty. Spenser's perception of beauty of all kinds was singularly and characteristically quick and sympathetic. ”

“ But Ralegh now appeared before Spenser in all the glory of a brilliant favourite, the soldier, the explorer, the daring sea-captain, the founder of plantations across the ocean, and withal, the poet, the ready and eloquent discourser, the true judge and measurer of what was great or beautiful.
The time, too, was one at once of excitement and repose. Men felt as they feel after a great peril, a great effort, a great relief ”

“ Although we have mentioned no previous publication, yet it must not be concluded that this was the first poem with which Spenser delighted his contemporaries. Our author was one of those extraordinary men who appear occasionally to prove the marvellous fecundity of the human mind. With him incessant production seemed a law of nature; composition was but the spontaneous and unlaboured flow of his ever teeming fancy; an exercise necessary to his healthy existence, and an ever originating source of solace. ”

“ Whatever were the misfortunes of Spenser’s life, whatever neglect he might have experienced at the hands of a statesman grown old in cares, which render a man insensible to song, his spirit might be consoled by the prodigious reputation of the Faëry Queen. He was placed at once by his country above all the great Italian names, and next to Virgil among the ancients; it was a natural consequence that some should imitate what they so deeply reverenced. An ardent admiration for Spenser inspired the genius of two young brothers, Phineas and Giles Fletcher. ”

“ Professor Corson remarks: "Probably no English poet who has used the Spenserian stanza, first assimilated so fully the spirit of Spenser, ... as did Keats; and to this fact may be partly attributed his effective use of it as an organ for his imagination in its 'lingering, loving, particularizing mood.'" (Primer of English Verse, p. 124.)
[Pg 106]
The splendors of the firmament of time
May be eclips'd, but are extinguish'd not;
Like stars to their appointed height they climb,
And death is a low mist which cannot blot
The brightness it may veil. ”

“ In my choice of a metre I have been led by the following considerations. The beauty and completeness of the stanza of Spenser appear now to be generally acknowledged. But it certainly presents great difficulties in a language so unvocal compared with those of Southern Europe, and so little abounding in rhymes as the English. It is more difficult in a narrative and consecutive poem than in one of a descriptive and reflective character, like Childe Harold, where the topics and the order in which they shall be discussed are both at the discretion of the poet. ”

“ In his “Phædrus” he had stated that “sight is the most piercing of our bodily senses; though not by that is wisdom seen; her loveliness would have been transporting if there had been a visible image of her.” (250.) Convinced, as Spenser was, of the spiritual nature of the beauty of wisdom, he carefully avoids dwelling upon any detail of Una’s physical beauty. The poetic form of allegory, through which his ideas were to be conveyed, required the personification of truth, and the romantic character of chivalry demanded that his Knight should have a lady to protect. ”

“ She had a great success. Spens colored.
"Well," he said, "I don't pretend to be a musician, but it has always been agreed that I had an excellent ear."
"In Green Springs, Connecticut?"
He did not answer, but moved gloomily away. Two or three times she heard him start an air and cut it short. A smile flickered across her face. So sweet to her was it to be the aggressor that she did not return behind the white stones, but remained, like a cat at a rat-hole, waiting beside the fire to which Spens would have to return eventually. ”

“ At her abhorred face, so filthy and so fowle.
XXXI
Thence turning backe in silence soft they stole,
And brought the heavie corse with easie pace
To yawning gulfe of deepe Avernus hole.°
By that same hole an entrance darke and bace
275 With smoake and sulphure hiding all the place,
Descends to hell: there creature never past,
That backe returned without heavenly grace;
But dreadfull Furies which their chaines have brast,
And damned sprights sent forth to make ill men aghast. ”

“ There is a richness and variety in his allegorical personages and fictions, which almost vies with the splendour of the ancient mythology. If Ariosto transports us into the regions of romance, Spenser’s poetry is all fairy-land. In Ariosto, we walk upon the ground, in a company, gay, fantastic, and adventurous enough; in Spenser, we wander in another world among ideal beings. ”

“ The first eight lines are iambic pentameters, and the ninth a hexameter, the stanza thus closing with a lingering cadence which adds greatly to the melody of the verse. This is the "Spenserian stanza," a form of versification very popular with many of our later poets.
"If you love poetry well enough to enjoy it for its own sake," says Leigh Hunt, "let no evil reports of his allegory deter you from an [233] acquaintance with Spenser, for great will be your loss. His allegory itself is but one part allegory and nine parts beauty and enjoyment; sometimes an excess of flesh and blood. ”

“ As Lowell says, 'The true use of Spenser is as a gallery of pictures which we visit as the mood takes us, and where we spend an hour or two, long enough to sweeten our perceptions, not so long as to cloy them.' His landscapes, to speak of one particular feature, are usually of a rather vague, often of a vast nature, as suits the unreality of his poetic world, and usually, since Spenser was not a minute observer, follow the conventions of Renaissance literature. ”

“ Spenser is so essentially a picturesque poet, he depends for his rich effects so much on the combination of colour and imagery, and multiplied accessories, that one feels—at least I feel, on laying down a volume of the “Fairie Queene” dazzled as if I had been walking in a gallery of pictures. His “Masque of Cupid,” for instance, although a procession of poetical creations, could not be transferred to a bas-relief without completely losing its Spenserian character—its wondrous glow of colour. Thus Cupid “uprears himself exulting from the back of the ravenous lion;” ”

“ Spenser accepted from his age the quaint stateliness which is characteristic of his poem. His poetry is not simple and direct like that of the Greeks. It has not the exquisite finish and felicity of the best of the Latins. It has not the massive grandeur, the depth, the freedom, the shades and subtle complexities of feeling and motive, which the English dramatists found by going straight to nature. ”

“ How many men have called you Sphinx in your exotic career?”
“All, except one or two. It’s very popular. So is Serpent of the Nile and Cleopatra and little Princess of Egypt. When I am moved to cry ‘Yah, chestnut!’ to these endearments, they offer to strangle me in my own hair.” ”

“ His every attitude was a symbol, and all his features became in quick succession types of thought and exponents of hidden feelings, while his inquisitive nose stood forth in the midst of their ceaseless play like a perpetual interrogation point that would have electrified the Sphinx into life, and set its stone lips gabbling answers and explanations. ”

“ But on the appearance {162} of the luminary a strange transformation had slowly overtaken her spouse. At first he attempted to keep in the shade, to avoid the golden beams that he knew meant death to him, but all to no purpose. The air became gradually warmer, and slowly he dissolved and fell to pieces, so that his frenzied wife now only beheld his garments, the bones that had composed his framework, and the gaudy plumes and beads with which he had been bedecked. Long she sought his real self, thinking that some trick had been played upon her ”

“ Nilus. Pliny believed that the mud of the Nile had the power of breeding living creatures like mice. Hist. Nat. ix, 84. So Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, II, vii, 29.
199. gentle shepheard. In this pastoral simile, Spenser imitates Homer's Iliad, ii, 469, and xvii, 641, and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, xiv, 109.
208. Thus ill bestedd. There is a similar combat in the old romance Guy of Warwick, ix, between the hero and a man-eating dragon.
217. Her scattred brood. The poet here follows a belief as old as Pliny that the young of serpents fed on their mother's blood. ”

“ His pathos is exquisitely tender, and his numerous similes have Spenser's pictorial amplitude. Some of them have become commonplaces for admiration, notably his description of the flight of the skylark, and the sentence in which he compares the gradual awakening of the human faculties to the sunrise, which "first opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls up the lark to matins, and by and by gilds the fringes of a cloud, and peeps over the eastern hills." ”

“ The case of Spenser in this respect—which does not stand alone in ancient English literature—has a curious parallel in art, where people are positively found to go into ecstasies over a distorted limb or a ludicrous inversion of perspective, simply because it is the work of an old master, who knew no better, or followed the fashion of his time. ”

“ One of Tennyson's earlier poems, The Sea-Fairies, deals with the same theme, and indeed it has appeared constantly in the literature of the world.... The Sphinx, a familiar subject in Egyptian art, had a lion's body, the head of some other animal (sometimes man) and wings. It was a symbolical figure. The most famous example is of course the gigantic Sphinx near the Pyramids in Egypt, which has proved to be an inexhaustible theme for speculation and for poetry.... The theatrically tragic mood of Byron is contrasted with the easy-going, somewhat cynical epicureanism of Horace.... ”

“ A large crowd of guides sat around this strange lady who proposed to spend the day in front of the Sphinx. Clad in long white robes, with white turbans crowning their dark faces, they gazed into her eyes with something of the questioning expression with which she herself was looking into the eyes of the Sphinx.
There were other travellers wandering about. Just now her own party had collected to eat their lunch together; but they were scattered again, and she sat with a circle of Arabs about her, the watchful dragoman lingering near. ”

“ Our earliest pastoral poet of any name is Spenser; and a great name he is, though he was not a great pastoral poet. He was deeply intimate both with Greek and Italian pastoral; but in admiring Theocritus, and hoping to rival his natural language, he unwisely attempted to engraft the sweet fruit of the south on the rudest crab-apple of northern rusticity. Hence, in his only pastoral professing to be such, entitled the Shepherd’s Calendar, he has almost entirely failed. ”