Amenities of Literature Part 40

What h.e.l.l it is in suing long to bide.

It was in this year that the first three books of the romantic epic were published, which was followed by the grant of a pension in February, 1591. But five years afterwards the poet still remains the same querulous court-suitor; the miserable man wasting his days and his nights; for then he tells us in his "Prothalamion," how on a summer's day he

Walk'd forth to ease his pain, Along the sh.o.r.e of silver-streaming Thames.

------------------I whose sullen care, Through discontent of my long fruitless stay In princes' court, and expectation vain Of idle hopes which still do fly away, Like empty shadows, to afflict my brain.

When this was written Spenser had possessed the lands of Kilcolman more than ten years, and held his pension. Were the lands profitless, and the pension still to be solicited? The poet has only perpetuated his "secret sorrows;" his pride or his delicacy has thrown a veil over them. He has sent down to posterity his disappointments, without alluding to the nature of his claims.

It was in 1597 that Spenser laid before the Queen his memorable "View of the State of Ireland." This state-memorial still makes us regret that our poet only wrote verse; there is a charm in his sweet and voluble prose, a virgin grace which we have long lost in the artificial splendour of English diction. Here is no affectation of Chaucerian words; the gold is not spotted with rust. The vivid pictures of the poet; the curiosity of the antiquary; and above all, a new model of policy of the practical politician, combine in this inestimable tract.

Spenser suggested that the popular hero of that day, his n.o.ble friend the Earl of Ess.e.x, would be more able to conciliate popular favour in Ireland. By an alternate policy, from that day to the present, has our government tried to rule that fair "Land of Ire," either by a Lord Grey's severity of justice--the Arthegal, accompanied by his "iron man,"

with his "iron flail;" or by the generous graciousness of an Earl of Ess.e.x, courting popularity: but neither would serve; the more quiet wisdom lay in colonization, happily begun, and so fatally neglected. The powerful eloquence of the poet and the secretary attracted the Queen's attention. She recommended Spenser to the Irish Council to be Sheriff of Cork; again was "the wight forlore" sent back to his undesired locality; yet now, perhaps, honours and promotion were awaiting the "miserable man." The royal letter was dated in September, and in the following month, suddenly, the Irish insurrection broke out. The flight of Spenser and his family from the Castle of Kilcolman was momentous--perhaps they witnessed the flames annihilating their small wealth. Spenser himself lost more than wealth; for the father beheld the sacrifice of his child, and the author was bereaved of all his ma.n.u.scripts, now lost or scattered--his hopes, his pride, and his fame! He flew to England, not to live, but to experience how this last stroke of fortune went beyond the force of his own pa.s.sionate descriptions, or of his nature to endure. In an obscure lodging, and within three short months, the most sensitive of men, broken-hearted, closed his eyes in mute grief, and in a premature death; Spenser perished at the zenith of human life.

Curiosity has been excited to learn the occasion of the inveterate prejudice of an insensible Lord Treasurer against a tender poet, who had courted his favour. This hostility of "the mighty peer" seems not to have broken forth openly till the publication of the first three books of the "Faery Queen;" for all the poet's personal allusions to Burleigh were written shortly after that event.

Can so small a creature as a poet when it creeps into the sphere of a jealous statesman's policy draw on itself his hateful attention? Are crafty politicians in office like richly-laden travellers who start at a crossing shadow? Burleigh possessed the full confidence of his sovereign from her youth; but she was a woman subject to caprices, and would call her ancient friend and servant "an old fool." Burleigh was fearfully jealous of two potent rivals--the Earl of Leicester and the Earl of Ess.e.x; these "men of arms," the patrons of Spenser, were each subsequently the head of the opposition to the pacific administration of the Lord Treasurer.

"The sage old sire," moreover, well knew the romantic self-idolatry of his royal mistress; her infirmity of poetical susceptibility; her avidity of poignant flatteries on her beauty, her chast.i.ty, and even on her verse. Her Majesty was now in the ascension of that glorified beat.i.tude, the "Faery Queen;" and this transfiguration was the work of him whom he held to be a creature of his great rivals!

We are interested to detect the vacillating conduct of the poet to the implacable statesman. Spenser accompanied his presentation copy of the "Faery Queen" to the Lord-Treasurer with a sonnet, in which he humiliated the muse before his great court-enemy--

On whose mighty shoulders most doth rest The burden of this kingdom's government, Unfitly I these idle rimes present, The labour of lost time and wit unstay'd.

If Spenser had complained of former cold neglect, now he had to endure, what a poet can never forgive, bitter disdain.

Wounded in spirit, the poet composed, immediately after the first appearance of the "Faery Queen," "The Ruins of Time;" there, eulogising the departed Sir Francis Walsingham for his love of learning and care of "men of arms," he launches forth a thunderbolt against the wary and frigid Burleigh--

For he that now wields all things at his will, Scorns one and th' other, in his deeper skill.

And he repeats the accusation in "Mother Hubbard's Tale"--

Oh, grief of griefs! Oh, gall of all good hearts!

To see that virtue should despised be Of him, that first was raised for vertuous parts; And now, broad spreading like an aged tree, Lets none shoot up that nigh him planted be.

Oh, let the man by whom the Muse is scorn'd, Nor alive nor dead be of the Muse adorn'd.

We have, too, a more finished portrait of an evil _minister_ who "lifted up his lofty towers,"

That they begin to threat the neighbour sky;

in which unquestionably we find some of the deformities of Burleigh's political physiognomy.

He no count made of n.o.bility; The realm's chief strength and girlond of the crown-- He made them dwell in darkness of disgrace, For none but whom he list might come in place.

Of men of armes he had but small regard, But kept them low, and strained very hard; For men of learning little he esteem'd, His wisdome he above their learning deem'd.

As for the rascal commons least he cared, For not so common was his bounty shared.

Let G.o.d, said he, if please care for the manie, I for myself most care before else anie.

Yet none durst speak, ne none durst of him plaine, So great he was in grace, and rich through gaine.

The gentle bard of the "Faery Queen" now sate down to continue his great work; but haunted by this spectral and iron-eyed monster of an unpatronising minister, he actually violates the solemnity of his theme by opening with another recollection, so fatal to his own repose:--

The rugged forehead that, with grave foresight, Welds kingdoms, causes, and affairs of state, My looser rimes I wote doth sharply wite, For praising love as I have done of late.

Such ones ill judge of love, that cannot love, Ne in their frozen heart feel kindly flame.

But the minister could not banish him from the sovereign:--

To such therefore I do not sing at all, But to that Sacred Saint, my sovereign Queen; To her I sing of love that loveth best, And best is loved.

About the same time Spenser had written "The Tears of the Muses," where, expressing a poet's wish that the royal palaces of Eliza should be filled with

----------Praises of divinest wits, Who her eternize with their heavenly writs,

I suspect that Burleigh figures again among

-------------The salvage brood, Who, having been with acorns always fed, Can no whit cherish this celestial food; But, with base thoughts, are unto blindness led, And kept from looking on the lightsome day.

After these indignant effusions, Spenser in proceeding with the "Faery Queen" tergiversated in his feelings. The poet had shadowed with some tenderness the calamities of the Scottish Mary, in the gentle characters of Amoret and Florizel. Yielding to political changes, the Queen of Scots is suddenly horribly transformed into the false Duessa. For the honour of the poet we may concede that he partook of those party-pa.s.sions which great statesmen know to raise up at will, and which never fail to influence contemporaries. Burleigh never paused till he laid the head of Mary on the block.[5] In the fifth book of the "Faery Queen" the poet has exhibited the trial of this state victim, and has made her sister-sovereign gracefully conceal tears which possibly were never shed; but who could expect that "the rugged forehead"--him whom he had denounced that "alive or dead" should by "the muse be ever scorned"--should appear with all the dignity of wisdom!

The sage old Sire, that had to name The kingdom's care, with a white silver head, That many high regards and reasons 'gainst her read.

The poet did worse as he advanced in his work, for in the sixth book he absolutely denies that it was his intention in any of his "former writs"

to reflect on "this mighty peer." To what "former writs" Spenser alludes is not clear. The matchless picture of the fruitless days of a court-expectant in "Mother Hubbard's Tale," which many of my readers may have by heart, is supposed to have been represented to Lord Burleigh by "backbiters" as a censure on him; it was an immortal one! and the application was easy.

It was after the appearance of the "Faery Queen" that Elizabeth, economical as were her bounties, sealed her delight by a permanent pension. Was it on this occasion that the remonstrance of the prudential Lord Treasurer diminished by half its amount? "All this for a song!"

exclaimed Burleigh. "Then give him what is reason," rejoined the Queen.

The words were remembered by the bard, but the royal command lay neglected at the exchequer. On a progress Spenser reminded her Majesty, by a pet.i.tion, in the smallest s.p.a.ce that ever suitor presented one, and in a style of which it was not easy to forget a word.[6] The Lord Treasurer got reprimanded, and the poet present payment. We cannot avoid a.s.sociating the anecdote with these lines--

To have thy Prince's grace, yet want her Peer's; To have thy asking, yet wait many years.

We may now close with Burleigh; but much remains to be developed in the fortunes of a court-suitor, as we trace them in the history of our Spenser. The coldness of the Lord Treasurer may not have been the only cause of the poet's deep and constant laments. The sojourner in the circle of a court may be mortified not only by its repulse or its neglect, but also by the capricious favour of his patron. A devotion of service may provoke offence, whether it be from zeal too improvident, from officiousness too busy, or from an ingenuousness too open. He is thrown into a position in which he must preserve silence, and cannot always hope for pardon.

One incident of this nature deeply affected our poet in his intercourse with Lord Leicester. We only discover it by a remarkable dedicatory sonnet to his translation of Virgil's "Gnat." Had the poet not decided that the mysterious tale should reach posterity, he would not have published the sonnet several years after it was composed, for it is dedicated "to the deceased lord!" The poet has energetically described the delicacy and difficulty of the position into which he had been cast.

_Wrong'd, yet not daring to express my pain_ To you, good lord! the causer of my care, In cloudy tears my case _I thus complain Unto yourself, that only privy are_.

But if that any Oedipus, unware, Shall chance, through power of some divining spright, To read _the secret of this riddle rare_, And know the purport of my evil plight; Let him rest pleased with his own insight, Ne further seek to gloze upon the text; _But grief enough it is to grieved wight, To feel hit fault_, and not be further vext.

But what so by myself may not be shown, May by this Gnat's complaint be easily known.

The Gnat of Virgil, observing a serpent in the act of darting on a sleeping swain, stings the eye of the sleeper; starting at the pain, the disturbed man crushes the gnat, but, thus awakened, he saves himself from the crested serpent. The poem turns on the remonstrance of the ghost of the gnat, which had no other means than by inflicting its friendly sting to warn him of his peril who had thus hastily deprived it of its own innocent existence. What was "the serpent," and why the poet was hardly used as "the gnat," and why he was

Wrong'd, yet not daring to express his pain,

and yet "grieved to feel _his fault_," is "a riddle rare," supposed to require some Oedipus of secret history to solve. The moral is obvious.

The character of the royal favourite may give rise to many suggestions; but if I may venture a conjecture on what the parties themselves "were only privy to," Spenser had touched on some high matter, where his affectionate zeal, however sagacious, on this occasion hurt the pride of Leicester--too haughty or too mortified to be lessoned by his familiar dependant, who, like the gnat, found that his timely warning was "his fault."

A sage of the antiquarian school imagined that he could solve the enigma of Spenser's sorrows, by arranging, with dates and accounts of salaries, the official situations which the poet held. To remove the odium attached to Burleigh's prepossessions against the poet, he a.s.sumes that without the Lord Treasurer's consent Spenser could not have received his lands or his pensions. But the royal grant of the forfeited lands was obviously the reward for his conduct, suggested by those under whose eye he had served: the patronage of Sidney and the Lords Leicester and Grey may be imagined to have greatly outweighed any cavils of Burleigh.

George Chalmers infers that all the complaints of the poet are "too highly coloured, _if they really were complaints respecting himself_!"

and concludes that all the poet's querulousness must be ascribed, not to Burleigh, but to the Irish rebellion. But the calamity of the Irish rebellion occasioned no complaints from the poet--only his death! for we have not a line by Spenser during the short interval which elapsed between his flight from Ireland and his decease in London.

It was not by an estimate of salaries and an arrangement of dates, which yield no result, but by a statement of feelings, in which the "secret sorrows" of Spenser lie concealed, that we can decide on the real source of his continued complaints. The poet must be judged by the habits of his mind, and by those interior conflicts which are often unconnected with those external circ.u.mstances open to common observers. Of all the tuneful train Spenser was the most poetical in the gentlest attributes of the poet. That robust force which the enterprise of active life demands was not lodged in that soul of tenderness; and worldly cares, like that cancer in the breast which the sufferer hides from others, dejected the fancy which at all times was working ceaselessly among its bright creations. His vein was inexhaustible, and we have lost perhaps more than we possess of his writings. The author of "The Faery Queen"

required above all things leisure and the muse. His first steppings into life were auspicious. To Sir Philip Sidney he had opened the first cantos of his romantic epic; the catastrophe of that poet-hero made our poet a mourner all his days. There was no subst.i.tute for a congenial patron: all other patrons could be but the very statues of patronage, cold representatives of the departed, but no longer the bosom companion of the poet's thoughts, and the generous arbiter of his fortunes.