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. While composing the “Faery Queen,” he had that concurrent poem of the regal Arthur, of no inferior calibre, ever in his mind. The “Faery Queen” would have contained, had it been completed, not much under a hundred thousand verses. The “Iliad” does not exceed fifteen. He seems to have been satisfied with his first unblotted thoughts. He has defects which might have proved fatal to an ordinary versifier; but his voluminous vein lies protected by his genius.
The artificial complexity of his nine-lined stanza put him to many shifts; he exercised arbitrary power in shortening words or lengthening syllables, and hardily invented novel terminations to common words, to provide his multiplicity of rhymes; he falsified accentuation, to adapt it to his metre, and violated the orthography, to adjust the rhyme. He dilated his thoughts to fill up the measure of his stanza; and we are too often reminded of the hammering of the chain. The first book of the “Faery Queen,” when the difficulties of this novel stanza must have been most arduous, is necessarily composed with most care, and, both for subject and execution, is of itself a complete poem. As Spenser acquired facility and dexterity, his pen winged its flight through the prescribed labyrinth of sweet sounds.
His exquisite ear had felt the melody of the vowelly and voluble stanza of Italy, and to which he even added a grace of his own by a new measure, in the Alexandrine close. This verse had been introduced by Sir Thomas Wyatt with no great effect; it was adroitly adopted by Spenser to give a full cadence to his stanza. Dryden, in its occasional use, professedly derived it from Spenser, and seems to have carried away the honour, when Pope in exemplifying its solemn effect ascribes it to the latter poet, who he tells us had taught—
| ——————The full-resounding line, The long majestic march and energy divine. |
The inanity of that race—
Of gentlemen who wrote with ease,
and made such free use of “the full-resounding line,” void of all thought, only betrayed their barrenness by this additional extension of their weakness. Hence it incurred the partial censure of our great poetical critic, as “a needless Alexandrine,”
That like a wounded snake drags its slow length along.
But the soul of melody lies hidden in the musician’s instrument; and the Spenserian stanza, to be felt, must find its echo in the ear of the reader. A master in the art of versification was struck by our poet’s modulation, so musical was his ear in the rhythm of his verse. He remarked this in those two delicious pieces, “The Prothalamion,” a spousal hymn on the double marriage of two ladies, personated as two swans in these harmonious lines—