The Faery Queen.
And it is in this easy way he plants the men and women, the hags and demons, the wizards and dragons that figure in the phantasmagoria of the Faery Queen; they come and go like twilight shadows; they have no root of realism.
There is reason to believe that the first cantos of this poem were blocked out in his mind before leaving England; perhaps the scheme had been talked over with his friend Sidney; in any event, it is quite certain that they underwent elaboration at Kilcolman Castle, and some portions doubtless took color from the dreary days of rapine and of war he saw there. I will not ask if you have read the Faery Queen: I fear that a great many dishonest speeches are made on that score; I am afraid that I equivocated myself in youngish days; but now I will be honest in saying—I never read it through continuously and of set purpose; I have tried it—on winter nights, and gone to sleep in my chair: I have tried it, under trees in summer, and have gone to sleep on the turf: I have tried it, in the first blush of a spring morning, and have gone—to breakfast.
Yet there are many who enjoy it intensely and continuously: Mr. Saintsbury says, courageously, that it is the only long poem he honestly wishes were longer. It is certainly full of idealism; it is full of sweet fancies; it is rich in dragonly horrors; it is crammed with exquisite harmonies. But—its tenderer heroines are so shadowy, you cannot bind them to your heart; nay, you can scarce follow them with your eyes: Now, you catch a strain which seems to carry a sweet womanly image of flesh and blood—of heartiness and warmth. But—at the turning of a page—his wealth of words so enwraps her in glowing epithets, that she fades on your vision to a mere iridescence and a creature of Cloud-land.
“Her face so faire, as flesh it seemèd not,
But Heavenly Portrait of bright angels hew,
Clear as the skye, withouten blame or blot
Thro’ goodly mixture of Complexion’s dew!
And in her cheeks, the Vermeil red did shew,
Like Roses in a bed of Lillies shed,
The which ambrosial odors from them threw,
And gazers sense, with double pleasure fed,
Hable to heal the sick, and to revive the dead!
“In her faire eyes two living lamps did flame
Kindled above at the Heavenly Makers Light,
And darted fiery beams out of the same
So passing persant and so wondrous bright,
That quite bereaved the rash beholders sight.
In them the blinded God—his lustful fire
To kindle—oft assay’d, but had no might,
For with dred Majesty, and awful ire
She broke his wanton darts, and quenchèd base desire!
“Upon her eyelids many Graces sate
Under the shadow of her even brows,
Working Belgardes and amorous Retrate,
And everie one her with a grace endows,
And everie one, with meekness to her bowes;
So glorious mirror of Celestial Grace
And soveraigne moniment of mortal vowes,
How shall frail pen describe her Heavenly face
For feare—thro’ want of skill, her beauty to disgrace?
“So faire, and thousand times more faire
She seem’d—when she, presented was, to sight.
And was y-clad, for heat of scorching aire
All in a silken Camus, lilly white,
Purfled upon, with many a folded plight
Which all above besprinkled was throughout
With golden Aygulets, that glistered bright
Like twinckling starres, and all the skirt about
Was hemmed with golden fringe, …”
and so on, by dozens, by scores, by hundreds—delicate, mellifluous stanzas—fair ladies and brazen-scaled dragons, lions and fleecy lambs, sweet purling brooks and horrors of Pandemonium, story grafted upon story, and dreams grafted upon these, and still flowing on—canto after canto—until the worldlings are tempted to exclaim, “When will he stop?” It is an exclamation that a good many lesser men than Spenser have tempted—in class-rooms, in lecture-rooms, and in pulpits. And I am wicked enough to think that if a third had been shorn away by the poet from that over-full and over-epitheted poem of the Faery Queen, it would have reached farther, and come nearer to more minds and hearts. But who—save the master—shall ever put the shears into that dainty broidery where gorgeous flowers lie enmeshed in page-long tangles, and where wanton tendrils of words enlace and tie together whole platoons of verse?
In brief, the Poem is a great, cumbrous, beautiful, bewildering, meandering Allegory, in which he assigns to every Virtue a Knight to be ensampler and defender of the same, and puts these Knights to battle with all the vices represented by elfin hags, or scaled dragons, or beautiful women; and so the battles rage and the storms beat. But we lose sight of his moral in the smoke of the conflict. The skeleton of his ethics is overlaid with the wallets of fair flesh, and with splendid trappings; his abounding figures gallop away with the logic; his roses cumber all his corn-ground. There are no passages of condensed meaning, or of wondrous intuition that give one pause, and that stick by us like a burr. There is a symphonious clatter of hammers upon golden-headed tacks, but no such pounding blow as drives a big nail home.
All this is the criticism of a matter-of-fact man, who perhaps has no right of utterance—as if one without knowledge of music should criticise its cumulated triumphs. Many a man can enjoy a burst of balladry—of little vagrant songs—who is crushed and bored by the pretty tangles and symphonies of an opera. Spenser was poets’ poet—not people’s poet; hardly can be till people are steeped in that refinement, that poetic sensibility, which only poets are supposed to possess. And I am rather unpleasantly conscious that I may offend intense lovers of this great singer by such mention of him: painfully conscious, too, that it may have its source (as Saintsbury assures us must be the case) in a poetic inaptitude to give largest and adequate relish to the tender harmonies and the mythical reaches of his sweetly burdened song. But shall I not be honest?
Yet Spenser is never ribald, never vulgar, rarely indelicate, even measured by modern standards: He always has a welcoming word for honesty, and for bravery, and, I think, the welcomest word of all for Love, which he counts, as so many young people do, the chiefest duty of man.
Once upon a time, there comes to see Spenser in his Kilcolman home—that daring adventurer, that roving knight, Sir Walter Raleigh—who is so well taught, so elegant, so brave that he can make the bright eyes even of Queen Bess twinkle again, with the courtliness of his adulation; he comes, I say, to see Spenser;—for he too has a grant of some forty thousand acres carved out of that ever-wretched and misgoverned Ireland: and Spenser, to entertain his friend, reads somewhat of the Faery Queene (not more than one canto I suspect), and Sir Walter locks arms with the poet, and carries him off to London, and presents him to the Queen; and Spenser weaves subtle, honeyed flattery for this great Gloriana; and his book is printed; and the Queen smiles on him, and gives him her jewelled hand to kiss, and a pension of £50 a year, which the stout old Burleigh thinks too much; and which Spenser, and poets all, think too beggarly small. There are little poems that come after this, commemorating this trip to Court, and Raleigh’s hobnobbing with him—
“Amongst the coolly shade
Of the green alders, by the Mulla’s shore
[Where]—he piped—I sung—
And when he sung, I piped,
By chaunge of tunes, each making other merry.”
Spenser has found, too, a new Rosalind over amid the wilds of Ireland, to whom he addresses a cluster of gushing Amoretti; and she becomes eventually his bride, and calls out what seems to me that charmingest of all his poems—the Epithalamium. You will excuse my reciting a tender little lovely picture from it:—
“Behold, whiles she before the Altar stands
Hearing the Holy Priest that to her speaks,
And blesseth her with his two happy hands.
How the red roses flush up in her cheeks,
And the pure snow, with goodly vermeil stain
Like crimson dyed in grain:
That even the Angels, which continually
About the sacred altar do remain,
Forget the service, and about her fly,
Oft peeping in her face, that seems more fair,
The more they on it stare—
But her sad eyes still fastened on the ground,
Are governèd with goodly modesty,
That suffers not one look to glance awry,
Which may let in a little thought unsound.
Why blush ye, Love, to give to me your hand?
The pledge of all our band?
Sing, ye Sweet Angels, Allelujah sing!
That all the woods may answer, and your echos ring!”
To my mind the gracious humanity—the exquisite naturalness of this is worth an ocean of cloying prettinesses about Gloriana and Britomart. Not very many years after this—just how many we cannot say—comes the great tragedy of his life: A new Irish rebellion (that of Tyrone) sends up its tide of fire and blood around his home of Kilcolman; his crops, his barns, his cattle, his poor babe[92]—the last born—all are smothered, and consumed away in that fiery wrack and ruin. He makes his way broken-hearted to London again; his old welcome as an adulator of the Queen is at an end; Raleigh is not actively helpful; Sidney is dead; he has some cheap lodging almost under the shadow of Westminster: He is sick, maimed in body and in soul; other accounts—not yet wholly discredited—represent him as miserably poor; bread, even, hard to come by; my Lord of Essex—a new patron—sends him a few guineas; and the poor poet murmurs—too late—too late!—and so he dies (1599). How glad we should have been to help him, had we been living in that time, and all this tale of suffering had been true;—so we think: and yet, ten to one we should have said—“Poor fellow, what a pity!”—and buttoned up our pockets, as we do now.