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:—