From Chaucer to Tennyson Part 3

Hawes's practice is variable in this respect, and so is his contemporary, Skelton's. But in Wiat and Surrey, who wrote only a few years later, the reader first feels sure that he is reading verse p.r.o.nounced quite in the modern fas.h.i.+on.

[Footnote 19: Trisyllable--like creature neighebour, etc., in Chaucer.]

But Chaucer's example still continued potent. Spenser revived many of his obsolete words, both in his pastorals and in his _Faerie Queene_, thereby imparting an antique remoteness to his diction, but incurring Ben Jonson's censure, that he "writ no language." A poem that stands midway between Spenser and the late mediaeval work of Chaucer's school--such as Hawes's _Pa.s.setyme of Pleasure_--was the induction contributed by Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, in 1563 to a collection of narrative poems called the _Mirrour for Magistrates_. The whole series was the work of many hands, modeled upon Lydgate's _Falls of Princes_ (taken from Boccaccio), and was designed as a warning to great men of the fickleness of fortune. The _Induction_ is the only noteworthy part of it. It was an allegory, written in Chaucer's seven-lined stanza, and described, with a somber imaginative power, the figure of Sorrow, her abode in the "griesly lake" of Avernus, and her attendants, Remorse, Dread, Old Age, etc. Sackville was the author of the first regular English tragedy _Gorboduc_; and it was at his request that Ascham wrote the _Schoolmaster_.

Italian poetry also fed the genius of Edmund Spenser (1552-1599). While a student at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, he had translated some of the _Visions of Petrarch_, and the _Visions of Bellay_, a French poet, but it was only in 1579 that the publication of his _Shepheard's Calendar_ announced the coming of a great original poet, the first since Chaucer.

The _Shepheard's Calendar_ was a pastoral in twelve eclogues--one for each month in the year. There had been a revival of pastoral poetry in Italy and France, but, with one or two insignificant exceptions, Spenser's were the first bucolics in English. Two of his eclogues were paraphrases from Clement Marot, a French Protestant poet, whose psalms were greatly in fas.h.i.+on at the court of Francis I. The pastoral machinery had been used by Vergil and by his modern imitators, not merely to portray the loves of Strephon and Chloe, or the idyllic charms of rustic life; but also as a vehicle of compliment, elegy, satire, and personal allusion of many kinds. Spenser, accordingly, alluded to his friends, Sidney and Harvey, as the shepherds Astrophel and Hobbinol; paid court to Queen Elizabeth as Cynthia; and introduced, in the form of anagrams, names of the High-Church Bishop of London, Aylmer, and the Low-Church Archbishop Grindal. The conventional pastoral is a somewhat delicate exotic in English poetry, and represents a very unreal Arcadia.

Before the end of the 17th century the squeak of the oaten pipe had become a burden, and the only poem of the kind which it is easy to read without some impatience is Milton's wonderful _Lycidas_. The _Shepheard's Calendar_, however, though it belonged to an artificial order of literature, had the unmistakable stamp of genius in its style.

There was a broad, easy mastery of the resources of language, a grace, fluency, and music which were new to English poetry. It was written while Spenser was in service with the Earl of Leicester, and enjoying the friends.h.i.+p of his nephew, the all-accomplished Sidney and it was, perhaps, composed at the latter's country seat of Penshurst. In the following year Spenser went to Ireland as private secretary to Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton, who had just been appointed Lord Deputy of that kingdom. After filling several clerks.h.i.+ps in the Irish government, Spenser received a grant of the castle and estate of Kilcolman, a part of the forfeited lands of the rebel Earl of Desmond. Here, among landscapes richly wooded, like the scenery of his own fairy land, "under the cooly shades of the green alders by the Mulla's sh.o.r.e," Sir Walter Raleigh found him, in 1589, busy upon his _Faerie Queene_. In his poem, _Colin Clout's Come Home Again_, Spenser tells, in pastoral language, how "the shepherd of the ocean" persuaded him to go to London, where he presented him to the queen, under whose patronage the first three books of his great poem were printed, in 1590. A volume of minor poems, ent.i.tled _Complaints_, followed in 1591, and the three remaining books of the _Faerie Queene_ in 1596. In 1595-1596 he published also his _Daphnaida, Prothalamion,_ and the four hymns on _Love_ and _Beauty_, and on _Heavenly Love_ and _Heavenly Beauty_. In 1598, in Tyrone's rebellion, Kilcolman Castle was sacked and burned, and Spenser, with his family, fled to London, where he died in January, 1599.

The _Faerie Queene_ reflects, perhaps, more fully than any other English work, the many-sided literary influences of the Renascence. It was the blossom of a richly composite culture. Its immediate models were Ariosto's _Orlando Furioso_, the first forty cantos of which were published in 1515, and Ta.s.so's _Gerusalemme Liberata_, printed in 1581.

Both of these were, in subject, romances of chivalry, the first based upon the old Charlemagne epos--Orlando being identical with the hero of the French _Chanson de Roland_: the second upon the history of the first crusade, and the recovery of the Holy City from the Saracen. But in both of them there was a splendor of diction and a wealth of coloring quite unknown to the rude mediaeval romances. Ariosto and Ta.s.so wrote with the great epics of Homer and Vergil constantly in mind, and all about them was the brilliant light of Italian art, in its early freshness and power. The _Faerie Queene_, too, was a tale of knight-errantry. Its hero was King Arthur, and its pages swarm with the familiar adventures and figures of Gothic romance: distressed ladies and their champions, combats with dragons and giants, enchanted castles, magic rings, charmed wells, forest hermitages, etc. But side by side with these appear the fictions of Greek mythology and the personified abstractions of fas.h.i.+onable allegory. Knights, squires, wizards, hamadryads, satyrs, and river G.o.ds, Idleness, Gluttony, and Superst.i.tion jostle each other in Spenser's fairy land. Descents to the infernal shades, in the manner of Homer and Vergil, alternate with descriptions of the Palace of Pride in the manner of the _Romaunt of the Rose_. But Spenser's imagination was a powerful spirit, and held all these diverse elements in solution. He removed them to an ideal sphere "apart from place, withholding time,"

where they seem all alike equally real, the dateless conceptions of the poet's dream.

The poem was to have been "a continued allegory or dark conceit," in twelve books, the hero of each book representing one of the twelve moral virtues. Only six books and the fragment of a seventh were written. By way of complimenting his patrons and securing contemporary interest, Spenser undertook to make his allegory a double one, personal and historical, as well as moral or abstract. Thus Gloriana, the Queen of Faery, stands not only for Glory but for Elizabeth, to whom the poem was dedicated. Prince Arthur is Leicester, as well as Magnificence. Duessa is Falsehood, but also Mary Queen of Scots. Grantorto is Philip II. of Spain. Sir Artegal is Justice, but likewise he is Arthur Grey de Wilton.

Other characters shadow forth Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Philip Sidney, Henry IV. of France, etc.; and such public events as the revolt of the Spanish Netherlands, the Irish rebellion, the execution of Mary Stuart, and the rising of the northern Catholic houses against Elizabeth are told in parable. In this way the poem reflects the spiritual struggle of the time, the warfare of young England against popery and Spain.

The allegory is not always easy to follow. It is kept up most carefully in the first two books, but it sat rather lightly on Spenser's conscience, and is not of the essence of the poem. It is an ornament put on from the outside and detachable at pleasure. The "Spenserian stanza,"

in which the _Faerie Queene_ was written, was adapted from the _ottava rima_ of Ariosto. Spenser changed somewhat the order of the rimes in the first eight lines and added a ninth line of twelve syllables, thus affording more s.p.a.ce to the copious luxuriance of his style and the long-drawn sweetness of his verse. It was his instinct to dilate and elaborate every image to the utmost, and his similies, especially--each of which usually fills a whole stanza--have the pictorial amplitude of Homer's. Spenser was, in fact, a great painter. His poetry is almost purely sensuous. The personages in the _Faerie Queene_ are not characters, but richly colored figures, moving to the accompaniment of delicious music, in an atmosphere of serene remoteness from the earth.

Charles Lamb said that he was the poet's poet, that is, he appealed wholly to the artistic sense and to the love of beauty. Not until Keats did another English poet appear so filled with the pa.s.sion for outward shapes of beauty, so exquisitively alive to all impressions of the senses. Spenser was, in some respects, more an Italian than an English poet. It is said that the Venetian gondoliers still sing the stanzas of Ta.s.so's _Gerusalemme Liberata_. It is not easy to imagine the Thames bargees chanting pa.s.sages from the _Faerie Queene_. Those English poets who have taken strongest hold upon their public have done so by their profound interpretation of our common life. But Spenser escaped altogether from reality into a region of pure imagination. His aerial creations resemble the blossoms of the epiphytic orchids, which have no root in the soil, but draw their nourishment from the moisture of the air.

_Their_ birth was of the womb of morning dew, And _their_ conception of the glorious prime.

Among the minor poems of Spenser the most delightful were his _Prothalamion_ and _Epithalamion_. The first was a "spousal verse," made for the double wedding of the Ladies Catherine and Elizabeth Somerset, whom the poet figures as two white swans that come swimming down the Thames, the surface of which the nymphs strew with lilies, till it appears "like a bride's chamber-floor."

Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,

is the burden of each stanza. The _Epithalamion_ was Spenser's own marriage song, written to crown his series of _Amoretti_ or love sonnets, and is the most splendid hymn of triumphant love in the language. Hardly less beautiful than these was _Muiopotmos; or, the Fate of the b.u.t.terfly_, an addition to the cla.s.sical myth of Arachne, the spider. The four hymns in praise of _Love_ and _Beauty_, _Heavenly Love_ and _Heavenly Beauty_, are also stately and n.o.ble poems, but by reason of their abstractness and the Platonic mysticism which they express, are less generally pleasing than the others mentioned. Allegory and mysticism had no natural affiliation with Spenser's genius. He was a seer of visions, of _images_ full, brilliant, and distinct; and not, like Bunyan, Dante, or Hawthorne, a projector into bodily shapes of _ideas_, typical and emblematic; the shadows which haunt the conscience and the mind.

1. English Writers. Henry Morley. Ca.s.sell & Co., 1887.

4 vols.

2. Skeat's Specimens of English Literature, 1394-1579 (Clarendon Press Series.) Oxford.

3. Morte Darthur. London: Macmillan & Co., 1868.

(Globe Edition.)

4. English and Scottish Ballads. Edited by Francis J.

Child. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1859. 8 vols.

5. Spenser's Poetical Works. Edited by Richard Morris.

London: Macmillan & Co., 1877. (Globe Edition.)

6. "A Royal Poet." In Was.h.i.+ngton Irving's Sketch Book. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1864.

CHAPTER III.

THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE.

1564-1616.

The great age of English poetry opened with the publication of Spenser's _Shepheard's Calendar_, in 1579, and closed with the printing of Milton's _Samson Agonistes_, in 1671. Within this period of little less than a century English thought pa.s.sed through many changes, and there were several successive phases of style in our imaginative literature.

Milton, who acknowledged Spenser as his master, and who was a boy of eight years at Shakspere's death, lived long enough to witness the establishment of an entirely new school of poets, in the persons of Dryden and his contemporaries. But, roughly speaking, the dates above given mark the limits of one literary epoch, which may not improperly be called the Elizabethan. In strictness the Elizabethan age ended with the queen's death, in 1603. But the poets of the succeeding reigns inherited much of the glow and splendor which marked the diction of their forerunners; and "the s.p.a.cious times of great Elizabeth" have been, by courtesy, prolonged to the year of the Restoration (1660). There is a certain likeness in the intellectual products of the whole period, a largeness of utterance and a high imaginative cast of thought which stamp them all alike with the queen's seal.

Nor is it by any undue stretch of the royal prerogative that the name of the monarch has attached itself to the literature of her reign and of the reigns succeeding hers. The expression "Victorian poetry" has a rather absurd sound when one considers how little Victoria counts for in the literature of her time. But in Elizabethan poetry the maiden queen is really the central figure. She is Cynthia, she is Thetis, great queen of shepherds and of the sea; she is Spenser's Gloriana, and even Shakspere, the most impersonal of poets, paid tribute to her in _Henry VIII._, and, in a more delicate and indirect way, in the little allegory introduced into _Midsummer Night's Dream_.

That very time I saw--but thou could'st not-- Flying between the cold moon and the earth, Cupid all armed. A certain aim he took At a fair vestal throned by the west, And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts.

But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft Quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon, And the imperial votaress pa.s.sed on In maiden meditation, fancy free--

an allusion to Leicester's unsuccessful suit for Elizabeth's hand.

The praises of the queen, which sound through all the poetry of her time, seem somewhat overdone to a modern reader. But they were not merely the insipid language of courtly compliment. England had never before had a female sovereign, except in the instance of the gloomy and bigoted Mary. When she was succeeded by her more brilliant sister the gallantry of a gallant and fantastic age was poured at the latter's feet, the sentiment of chivalry mingling itself with loyalty to the crown. The poets idealized Elizabeth. She was to Spenser, to Sidney, and to Raleigh, not merely a woman and a virgin queen, but the champion of Protestantism, the lady of young England, the heroine of the conflict against popery and Spain. Moreover Elizabeth was a great woman. In spite of the vanity, caprice, and ingrat.i.tude which disfigured her character, and the vacillating, tortuous policy which often distinguished her government, she was at bottom a sovereign of large views, strong will, and dauntless courage. Like her father, she "loved a _man_," and she had the magnificent tastes of the Tudors. She was a patron of the arts, pa.s.sionately fond of shows and spectacles, and sensible to poetic flattery. In her royal progresses through the kingdom, the universities, the n.o.bles, and the cities vied with one another in receiving her with plays, revels, masques, and triumphs, in the mythological taste of the day. "When the queen paraded through a country town," says Warton, the historian of English poetry, "almost every pageant was a pantheon. When she paid a visit at the house of any of her n.o.bility, at entering the hall she was saluted by the _penates_. In the afternoon, when she condescended to walk in the garden, the lake was covered with tritons and nereids; the pages of the family were converted into wood-nymphs, who peeped from every bower; and the footmen gamboled over the lawns in the figure of satyrs. When her majesty hunted in the park she was met by Diana, who, p.r.o.nouncing our royal prude to be the brightest paragon of unspotted chast.i.ty, invited her to groves free from the intrusions of Acteon." The most elaborate of these entertainments of which we have any notice were, perhaps, the games celebrated in her honor by the Earl of Leicester, when she visited him at Kenilworth, in 1575. An account of these was published by a contemporary poet, George Gascoigne, _The Princely Pleasures at the Court of Kenilworth_, and Walter Scott has made them familiar to modern readers in his novel of _Kenilworth_.

Sidney was present on this occasion, and, perhaps, Shakspere, then a boy of eleven, and living at Stratford, not far off, may have been taken to see the spectacle; may have seen Neptune riding on the back of a huge dolphin in the castle lake, speaking the copy of verses in which he offered his trident to the empress of the sea; and may have

heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath That the rude sea grew civil at her song.

But in considering the literature of Elizabeth's reign it will be convenient to speak first of the prose. While following up Spenser's career to its close (1599) we have, for the sake of unity of treatment, antic.i.p.ated somewhat the literary history of the twenty years preceding.

In 1579 appeared a book which had a remarkable influence on English prose. This was John Lyly's _Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit_. It was in form a romance, the history of a young Athenian who went to Naples to see the world and get an education; but it is in substance nothing but a series of dialogues on love, friends.h.i.+p, religion, etc., written in language which, from the t.i.tle of the book, has received the name of _Euphuism_. This new English became very fas.h.i.+onable among the ladies, and "that beauty in court which could not parley Euphuism," says a writer of 1632, "was as little regarded as she which now there speaks not French."

Walter Scott introduced a Euphuist into his novel the _Monastery_, but the peculiar jargon which Sir Piercie Shaft on is made to talk is not at all like the real Euphuism. That consisted of ant.i.thesis, alliteration, and the profuse ill.u.s.tration of every thought by metaphors borrowed from a kind of fabulous natural history. "Descend into thine own conscience and consider with thyself the great difference between staring and stark-blind, wit and wisdom, love and l.u.s.t; be merry, but with modesty; be sober, but not too sullen; be valiant, but not too venturous." "I see now that, as the fish _Scolopidus_ in the flood _Araxes_ at the waxing of the moon is as white as the driven snow, and at the waning as black as the burnt coal; so Euphues, which at the first increasing of our familiarity was very zealous, is now at the last cast become most faithless." Besides the fish _Scolopidus_, the favorite animals of Lyly's menagerie are such as the chameleon, "which though he have most guts draweth least breath;" the bird _Piralis_, "which sitting upon white cloth is white, upon green, green;" and the serpent _Porphirius_, "which, though he be full of poison, yet having no teeth, hurteth none but himself."

Lyly's style was pithy and sententious, and his sentences have the air of proverbs or epigrams. The vice of Euphuism was its monotony. On every page of the book there was something pungent, something quotable; but many pages of such writing became tiresome. Yet it did much to form the hitherto loose structure of English prose, by lending it point and polish. His carefully balanced periods were valuable lessons in rhetoric, and his book became a manual of polite conversation and introduced that fas.h.i.+on of witty repartee, which is evident enough in Shakspere's comic dialogue. In 1580 appeared the second part, _Euphues and his England,_ and six editions of the whole work were printed before 1598. Lyly had many imitators. In Stephen Gosson's _School of Abuse_, a tract directed against the stage and published about four months later than the first part of _Euphues_, the language is directly Euphuistic.

The dramatist, Robert Greene, published, in 1587, his _Menaphon; Camilla's Alarum to Slumbering Euphues_, and his _Euphues's Censure to Philautus_. His brother dramatist, Thomas Lodge, published, in 1590, _Rosalynde: Euphues's Golden Legacy_, from which Shakspere took the plot of _As You Like It_. Shakspere and Ben Jonson both quote from _Euphues_ in their plays, and Shakspere was really writing Euphuism when he wrote such a sentence as "'Tis true, 'tis pity; pity 'tis 'tis true."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Chaucer, Spenser, Bacon, Milton.]

That knightly gentleman, Philip Sidney, was a true type of the lofty aspiration and manifold activity of Elizabethan England. He was scholar, poet, courtier, diplomatist, soldier, all in one. Educated at Oxford and then introduced at court by his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, he had been sent to France when a lad of eighteen, with the emba.s.sy which went to treat of the queen's proposed marriage to the Duke of Alencon, and was in Paris at the time of the Ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew, in 1572.

Afterward he had traveled through Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, had gone as emba.s.sador to the emperor's court, and every-where won golden opinions. In 1580, while visiting his sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, at Wilton, he wrote, for her pleasure, the _Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia_, which remained in ma.n.u.script till 1590. This was a pastoral romance, after the manner of the Italian _Arcadia_ of Sanazzaro, and the _Diana Enamorada_ of Montemayor, a Portuguese author.

It was in prose, but intermixed with songs and sonnets, and Sidney finished only two books and a portion of the third. It describes the adventures of two cousins, Musidorus and Pyrocles, who were wrecked on the coast of Sparta. The plot is very involved and is full of the stock episodes of romance: disguises, surprises, love intrigues, battles, jousts and single combats. Although the insurrection of the Helots against the Spartans forms a part of the story, the Arcadia is not the real Arcadia of the h.e.l.lenic Peloponnesus, but the fanciful country of pastoral romance, an unreal clime, like the fairy land of Spenser.

Sidney was our first writer of poetic prose. The poet Drayton says that he

did first reduce Our tongue from Lyly's writing, then in use, Talking of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flies, Playing with words and idle similes.

Sidney was certainly no Euphuist, but his style was as "Italianated" as Lyly's, though in a different way. His English was too pretty for prose.

His "Sidneian showers of sweet discourse" sowed every page of the _Arcadia_ with those flowers of conceit, those sugared fancies which his contemporaries loved, but which the taste of a severer age finds insipid. This splendid vice of the Elizabethan writers appears in Sidney, chiefly in the form of an excessive personification. If he describes a field full of roses, he makes "the roses add such a ruddy show unto it, as though the field were bashful at his own beauty." If he describes ladies bathing in the stream, he makes the water break into twenty bubbles, as "not content to have the picture of their face in large upon him, but he would in each of those bubbles set forth a miniature of them." And even a pa.s.sage which should be tragic, such as the death of his heroine, Parthenia, he embroiders with conceits like these: "For her exceeding fair eyes having with continued weeping got a little redness about them, her round sweetly swelling lips a little trembling, as though they kissed their neighbor Death; in her cheeks the whiteness striving by little and little to get upon the rosiness of them; her neck, a neck of alabaster, displaying the wound which with most dainty blood labored to drown his own beauties; so as here was a river of purest red, there an island of perfectest white," etc.

The _Arcadia_, like _Euphues_, was a lady's book. It was the favorite court romance of its day, but it surfeits a modern reader with its sweetness, and confuses him with its tangle of adventures. The lady for whom it was written was the mother of that William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, to whom Shakspere's sonnets are thought to have been dedicated. And she was the subject of Ben Jonson's famous epitaph.

Underneath this sable herse Lies the subject of all verse, Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother; Death, ere thou hast slain another Learn'd and fair and good as she, Time shall throw a dart at thee.

Sidney's _Defense of Poesy_ composed in 1581, but not printed till 1595, was written in manlier English than the _Arcadia_, and is one of the very few books of criticism belonging to a creative and uncritical time.

He was also the author of a series of love sonnets, _Astrophel and Stella_, in which he paid Platonic court to the Lady Penelope Rich (with whom he was not in love), according to the conventional usage of the amourists.