It is in justice due to Barclay to say that the fact of his composing this eclogue in the vernacular should possibly be counted to him as an original step. The step had, indeed, been taken in Italy before he was born, but of this he may, in spite of his travels, have been ignorant. Such credit as attaches to the innovation should be allowed him.
A somewhat more independent writer is Barnabe Googe--writer, indeed, as original, may be, as the lesser Latin pastoralists of the renaissance. The fact of his altering the conventional forms to fit the mood of a sturdy protestantism, of a protestantism still bitter from the Marian persecutions, is scarcely to be regarded so much as evidence of his invention as of the stability of literary tradition under the varying forms imposed by external circumstances. The collection of his poems, 'imprinted at London' in 1563,[[89]] includes eight eclogues written in fourteeners, the majority of which may fairly be said to represent Mantuan adjusted to the conditions of contemporary life in reformation England. Others show the influence of the author's visit to Spain in 1561-3. The best that can be said for the verse and style is that they pursue their 'middle flight' on the whole modestly, and that the diction is at times not without a touch of simple dignity. There are, moreover, moments of genuine feeling when the author recalls the fires of Smithfield, and of generous if naïve appreciation when he speaks of his predecessors in English song. A brief summary of contents will give some idea of the nature of these poems. The first recounts the pains of love; in the second Dametas rails on the blind boy and ends his song by dying. The third treats of the vices of the city, not the least of them being religious persecution. In the next Melibeus relates how Dametas, having as we now learn killed himself for love, appeared to him amid hell-fire. Eclogue V contains the pitiful tale of Faustus who courted Claudia through the agency of Valerius. Claudia unfortunately fell in love with the messenger, and finding him faithful to his master slew herself. This is imitated, in part closely, from the tale of the shepherdess Felismena in the second book of Montemayor's Diana, the identical story upon which Shakespeare is supposed ultimately to have founded his Two Gentlemen of Verona, though it is difficult at first sight to trace much resemblance between the play and Googe's poem. In the sixth eclogue Faustus--the Don Felix of the Spanish and the Proteus of Shakespeare--himself appears, for no better reason it would seem than to give his interlocutor an opportunity of enlarging on the delights of country life and introducing the remarks on fowling borrowed from Sannazzaro by way of Garcilaso's second eclogue. The next is a discussion somewhat after the manner of the Nut-Brown Maid, again paraphrased from the Diana (Book I); while the eighth, lastly, is a homily on the superiority of Christianity over Roman polytheism, in which under obsolete forms the author no doubt intended an allusion to contemporary controversies. Thus it will be seen that Googe follows Latin and Spanish traditions almost exclusively: the only point in which it is possible to see any native inspiration is in his partiality for some sort of narrative ballad motive as the subject of his poems.
So far the literary quality to be registered has not been high among those owing allegiance to the regular pastoral tradition. The next step to be taken is a long one. The pastoral writings of Spenser not only themselves belong to a very different order of work, but likewise brings us face to face with literary problems of a most complex and interesting kind.
II
In the Shepherd's Calender we have the one pastoral composition in English literature which can boast first-rate historical importance. There are not a few later productions in the kind which may be reasonably held to surpass it in poetic merit, but all alike sink into insignificance by the side of Spenser's eclogues when the influence they exercised on the history of English verse is taken into account. The present is not of course the place to discuss this wider influence of Spenser's work: it is with its relation to pastoral tradition and its influence upon subsequent pastoral work that we are immediately concerned. This is an aspect of the Shepherd's Calender to which literary historians have naturally devoted less attention. These two reasons--namely, the intrinsic importance of the work and the neglect of its pastoral bearing--must excuse a somewhat lengthy treatment of a theme that may possibly be regarded as already sufficiently familiar.
The Shepherd's Calender[[90]], which first appeared in 1579, was published without author's name, but with an envoy signed 'Immerito.' It was dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, and contained a commentary by one E. K., who also signed an epistle to Master Gabriel Harvey, fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. 'Immerito' was a name used by Spenser in his familiar correspondence with Harvey, and can in any case have presented no mystery to his Cambridge friends. Among these must clearly be reckoned the commentator E. K., who may be identified with one Edward Kirke with all but absolute certainty.[[91]] Within certain well defined limits we may also accept E. K. as a competent exponent of his friend's work, and his identity, together with that of Rosalind and Menalcas, being matters of but indirect literary interest, may be left to Spenser's editors and biographers to fight over. It will be sufficient to add in this place that however 'literary' may have been Spenser's attachment to Rosalind there is no reason to suppose that she was not a real person, while however little response his advances may have met with there is reason to suppose that his sorrow at their rejection was not wholly conventional.
Spenser's design in turning his attention to the pastoral form would not seem hard to apprehend. Less readily may we suppose that any deep philosophical impulse directed his mind towards certain modes of expression, than that in an age of catholic experiment he turned from the penning of impossible iambic trimeters, 'minding,' as E. K. directly informs us, 'to furnish our tongue with this kind, wherein it faulteth.' He was qualified for the task by a wide knowledge of previous pastoral writers from Theocritus and Bion down to Marot, and deliberately ranged himself in line with the previous poets of the regular pastoral tradition. Yet we find side by side in his work two distinct and apparently antagonistic though equally conscious tendencies; the one towards authority, leading him to borrow motives freely and even to resort to direct paraphrase; the other towards individuality, nationality, freedom, informing his general scheme and regulating the language of his imaginary swains. It is this double nature of his pastoral work that justifies us as regarding him, in spite of his alleged orthodoxy, as in reality the first of a series of English writers who combined the traditions of regular pastoral with the wayward graces of native inspiration. It is true that in Spenser the natural pastoral impulse has lost the spontaneity of the earlier examples, and has passed into the realm of conscious and deliberate art; but it is none the less there, modifying the conventional form. The individual debts owed by Spenser to earlier writers have been collected with admirable learning and industry by scholars such as Kluge and Reissert[[92]], but the investigation of his originality presents at once a more interesting and more important field of inquiry. So, indeed, Spenser himself appears to have thought, for the only direct acknowledgement he makes in the work is to Chaucer, although, as a writer to whom the humours of criticism are ever present has remarked, 'it might almost seem that Spenser borrowed from Chaucer nothing but his sly way of acknowledging indebtedness chiefly where it was not due.'
The chief point of originality in the Calender is the attempt at linking the separate eclogues into a connected series. We have already seen how with Googe the same characters recur in a sort of shadowy story; but what was in his case vague and almost unintentional becomes with Spenser a central artistic motive of the piece. The eclogues are arranged with no small skill and care on somewhat of an architectural design, or perhaps we should rather say with somewhat of the symmetry of a geometrical pattern. This will best be seen in a brief analysis of the several eclogues, 'proportionable,' as the title is careful to inform us, 'to the twelve monethes.'
In the 'January,' a monologue, Spenser, under the disguise of Colin Clout, laments the ill-success of his love for Rosalind, who meets his advances with scorn. He also alludes to his friendship with Harvey, who is introduced throughout under the name of Hobbinol. The 'February' is a disputation between youth and age in the persons of Cuddie and Thenot. It introduces the fable of the oak and the briar, in which, since he ascribes it to Tityrus, a name he transferred from Vergil to Chaucer, Spenser presumably imagined he was imitating that poet, though it is really no more in the style of Chaucer than is the roughly accentual measure in which the eclogue is composed. For the 'March' Spenser recasts in English surroundings Bion's fantasy of the fight with Cupid, without however achieving any conspicuous success. In the April eclogue Hobbinol recites to the admiring Thenot Colin's lay
Of fayre Eliza, Queene of shepheardes all,
Which once he made as by a spring he laye,
And tuned it unto the Waters fall.