But by the scorched bank-sides i’ thy footsteps still I go plodding:
Hedge-rows hot do resound with grasshops mournfully squeaking.
Number of poets in this age. 76. It was said by Ellis, that nearly one hundred names of poets belonging to the reign of Elizabeth might be enumerated, besides many that have left no memorial except their songs. This however was but a moderate computation. Drake has made a list of more than two hundred, some few of whom, perhaps, do not strictly belong to the Elizabethan period.[1224] But many of these are only known by short pieces in such miscellaneous collections as have been mentioned. Yet in the entire bulk of poetry, England could not, perhaps, bear comparison with Spain or France, to say nothing of Italy. She had come in fact much later to cultivate poetry as a general accomplishment. And, consequently, we find much less of the mechanism of style, than in the contemporaneous verse of other languages. The English sonnetteers deal less in customary epithets and conventional modes of expression. Every thought was to be worked out in new terms, since the scanty precedents of earlier versifiers did not supply them. This was evidently the cause of many blemishes in the Elizabethan poetry; of much that was false in taste, much that was either too harsh and extravagant, or too humble, and of more that was so obscure as to defy all interpretation. But it saved also that monotonous equability that often wearies us in more polished poetry. There is more pleasure, more sense of sympathy with another mind, in the perusal even of Gascoyne or Edwards, than in that of many French and Italian versifiers whom their contemporaries extolled. This is all that we can justly say in their favour; for any comparison of the Elizabethan poetry, save Spenser’s alone, with that of the nineteenth century would show an extravagant predilection for the mere name or dress of antiquity.
[1224] Shakspeare and his Times, i. 674. Even this catalogue is probably incomplete; it includes, of course, translators.
Scots and English ballads. 77. It would be a great omission to neglect in any review of the Elizabethan poetry, that extensive, though anonymous class, the Scots and English ballads. The very earliest of these have been adverted to in our account of the fifteenth century. They became much more numerous in the present. The age of many may be determined by historical or other allusions; and from these, availing ourselves of similarity of style, we may fix, with some probability, the date of such as furnish no distinct evidence. This however is precarious, because the language has often been modernised, and passing for some time by oral tradition, they are frequently not exempt from marks of interpolation. But, upon the whole, the reigns of Mary and James VI., from the middle to the close of the sixteenth century, must be reckoned the golden age of the Scottish ballad; and there are many of the corresponding period in England.
78. There can be, I conceive, no question as to the superiority of Scotland in her ballads. Those of an historic or legendary character, especially the former, are ardently poetical; the nameless minstrel is often inspired with an Homeric power of rapid narration, bold description, lively or pathetic touches of sentiment. They are familiar to us through several publications, and chiefly through the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, by one whose genius these indigenous lays had first excited, and whose own writings, when the whole civilised world did homage to his name, never ceased to bear the indelible impress of the associations that had thus been generated. The English ballads of the northern border, or perhaps, of the northern counties, come near in their general character and cast of manners to the Scottish, but, as far as I have seen, with a manifest inferiority. Those again which belong to the south, and bear no trace either of the rude manners, or of the wild superstitions which the bards of Ettrick and Cheviot display, fall generally into a creeping style, which has exposed the common ballad to contempt. They are sometimes, nevertheless, not devoid of elegance, and often pathetic. The best are known through Percy’s Reliques of Ancient Poetry; a collection singularly heterogeneous, and very unequal in merit, but from the publication of which in 1774, some of high name have dated the revival of a genuine feeling for true poetry in the public mind.
The Faery Queen. 79. We have reserved to the last the chief boast of this period, the Faery Queen. Spenser, as is well known, composed the greater part of his poem in Ireland, on the banks of his favourite Mulla. The first three books were published in 1590; the last three did not appear till 1596. It is a perfectly improbable supposition, that the remaining part, or six books required for the completion of his design, have been lost. The short interval before the death of this great poet was filled up by calamities sufficient to wither the fertility of any mind.
Superiority of the first book. 80. The first book of the Faery Queen is a complete poem, and far from requiring any continuation, is rather injured by the useless reappearance of its hero in the second. It is generally admitted to be the finest of the six. In no other is the allegory so clearly conceived by the poet, or so steadily preserved, yet with a disguise so delicate, that no one is offended by that servile setting forth of a moral meaning we frequently meet with in allegorical poems; and the reader has the gratification that good writing in works of fiction always produces, that of exercising his own ingenuity without perplexing it. That the red cross knight designates the militant Christian, whom Una, the true church, loves, whom Duessa, the type of popery, seduces, who is reduced almost to despair, but rescued by the intervention of Una, and the assistance of Faith, Hope, and Charity, is what no one feels any difficulty in acknowledging, but what every one may easily read the poem without perceiving or remembering. In an allegory conducted with such propriety, and concealed or revealed with so much art, there can surely be nothing to repel our taste; and those who read the first book of the Faery Queen without pleasure, must seek (what others perhaps will be at no loss to discover for them), a different cause for their indifference, than the tediousness or insipidity of allegorical poetry. Every canto of this book teems with the choicest beauties of imagination; he came to it in the freshness of his genius, which shines throughout with an uniformity it does not always afterwards maintain, unsullied by flattery, unobstructed by pedantry, and unquenched by languor.
The succeeding books. 81. In the following books, we have much less allegory; for the personification of abstract qualities, though often confounded with it, does not properly belong to that class of composition: it requires a covert sense beneath an apparent fable, such as the first book contains. But of this I do not discover many proofs in the second or third, the legends of Temperance and Chastity; they are contrived to exhibit these virtues and their opposite vices, but with little that is not obvious upon the surface. In the fourth and sixth books, there is still less; but a different species of allegory, the historical, which the commentators have, with more or less success, endeavoured to trace in other portions of the poem, breaks out unequivocally in the legend of Justice, which occupies the fifth. The friend and patron of Spenser, Sir Arthur Grey, Lord Deputy of Ireland, is evidently portrayed in Arthegal; and the latter cantos of this book represent, not always with great felicity, much of the foreign and domestic history of the times. It is sufficiently intimated by the poet himself, that his Gloriana, or Faery Queen, is the type of Elizabeth; and he has given her another representative in the fair huntress Belphœbe. Spenser’s adulation of her beauty (at some fifty or sixty years of age), may be extenuated, we can say no more, by the practice of wise and great men, and by his natural tendency to clothe the objects of his admiration in the hues of fancy; but its exaggeration leaves the servility of the Italians far behind.
Spenser’s sense of beauty. 82. It has been justly observed by a living writer of the most ardent and enthusiastic genius, whose eloquence is as the rush of mighty waters, and has left it for others almost as invidious to praise in terms of less rapture, as to censure what he has borne along in the stream of unhesitating eulogy, that “no poet has ever had a more exquisite sense of the beautiful than Spenser.”[1225] In Virgil and Tasso this was not less powerful; but even they, even the latter himself, do not hang with such a tenderness of delight, with such a forgetful delay, over the fair creations of their fancy. Spenser is not averse to images that jar on the mind by exciting horror or disgust, and sometimes his touches are rather too strong; but it is on love and beauty, on holiness and virtue, that he reposes with all the sympathy of his soul. The slowly sliding motion of his stanza, “with many a bout of linked sweetness long drawn out,” beautifully corresponds to the dreamy enchantment of his description, when Una, or Belphœbe, or Florimel, or Amoret, are present to his mind. In this varied delineation of female perfectness, no earlier poet had equalled him; nor, excepting Shakspeare, has he had, perhaps, any later rival.
[1225] I allude here to a very brilliant series of papers on the Faery Queen, published in Blackwood’s Magazine during the years 1834 and 1835.