of Cork, being described in the royal letters as a gentleman dwelling in the county of Cork, who is so well known unto you for all his good and commendable parts, being a man endowed with good knowledge in learning, and not unskilful or without experience in the wars'. Spenser had now four children, and his home was becoming increasingly dear to him. In his Veue of the Present State of Ireland he had dwelt upon the natural beauty of the country; in the fragment of a seventh book of the Faerie Queene, all that is left us of his composition at this time, his delight in it finds intimate and characteristic expression. For he lays his scene at Arlo Hill, and the 'mountaines and rivers and faire forests' that surround Kilcolman are celebrated in a charming myth as the ancient haunt of Diana and her nymphs. But while he feels its beauty, he is conscious, more than ever before, of the 'heavy hapless curse' that now lies upon the country; and his imagination gains sublimity as it broods over the instability of things on earth. The theme had been recurrent, as a faint undertone, throughout his poetry, in tune to that reflective melancholy which often served to heighten by contrast his keen sense of the joy and the splendour of life; now it became the dominant note of his work. Throughout his life he had escaped from it to the contemplation of an ideal and golden past, now with sure foreboding of the gathering storm that was to overwhelm him he looked forward to the stedfast rest of all things, firmely stayd Upon the pillours of eternity. Munster appeared quiet enough, but the Council at Dublin seems fully to have anticipated a combination of Munster with the insurgent North, such as would lead to an universal Irish war, intended to shake off all English government'; and what was seen by the Dublin Council is not likely to have escaped the acute observation of Spenser. In his Veue he had noted how all have theyr eares upright, wayting when the watchwoord shall come that they should all rise generally into rebellion, and cast away the English subjection. To which there nowe litle wanteth'. And he had commented thus upon the present lull: when they are brought downe to extreme wretchedness, then they creepe a litle perhaps, and sue for grace, till they have gotten some breath and recovered their strength agayne.' In October 1598 these worst fears were realized. Tyrone, who, two months before, had routed the English army near Armagh, sent an expedition into Munster. The whole province rose in insurrection, and in the general destruction Kilcolman was sacked and burnt to the ground. Spenser escaped with his family to Cork, and there was entrusted by Sir John Norreys, the President of the province, with despatches to be delivered to the home government. Hedeft Cork upon the 9th of December, and before the 24th he was in London. With the despatch of Sir John Norreys he presented to the queen a statement drawn up by himself, written mostly before his departure, containing certayne poynts to be considered of in the recovery of the Realme of Ireland'. The policy that he urges and the tone in which he voices it is the same in this, his last work, as in his longer tract. He must have felt that the present outbreak was only another vindication of the policy of Grey against the weaker efforts at conciliation which had merely courted disaster, and he was doubtless chosen as the messenger to the government at home that he might advise them upon immediate and resolute action. But soon after his arrival at Westminster, Spenser was taken ill. He died on January 16, 1599. This sudden and dramatic close to the career of a poet who was associated in the public mind with the visionary and the ideal offered an irresistible temptation to the popular imagination, and the legend grew up that Spenser lost a child in the flames at Kilcolman and died in a garret in Westminster, starving and broken-hearted. Ben Jonson, who loved to dilate upon the hard lot that the world meted out to the artist, and warned Drummond from cultivating Poetrie, for that she had beggared him, when he might have been a rich lawer, physitian, or marchant', gave his support to the story. But it is probably apocryphal. Spenser's calm and reasoned statement to the queen, penned when the first shock of disaster was upon him, shows little sign of a broken spirit. His friend Camden, indeed, speaks of him as 'inops'. He had never been a rich man; and after his hurried departure from Kilcolman and the burning of his real property he may well have been in temporary want of money. But that the bearer of an important state missive, one who, moreover, had a pension to fall back upon, should have died for lack of bread is inconceivable; and the statement, if it be true, that he refused twenty pieces from my lord of Essex, saying that he was sorrie he had no time to spend them', is capable of a very different interpretation. The offer shows clearly that he still had powerful friends able and ready to help him, its refusal that gallant lightness of heart with which an Elizabethan gentleman paid his last debt to nature. His body was laid in Westminster Abbey, near to Chaucer. His funeral, of which Essex defrayed the cost, was attended by many noblemen and poets, who threw into the open grave elegies written to his memory and the pens with which they wrote them. The queen, in a burst of unwonted generosity, ordered him a monument; but either her own financial prudence, or the peculation of a subordinate, stepped in between her intention and its fulfilment. In 1620 Anne, Countess of Dorset, corrected the oversight. But the true memorial to Spenser is to be read in the work of his successors. He is among the very greatest of our poets, but the significance of his poetry in the history of our literature is even greater than its intrinsic value. He recreated English prosody, giving back to our verse the fluidity and the grace that it had lost since the days of Chaucer, and extending the range of its achievement; he created Quoted in full, Grosart, Life, pp. 537-55. 1 English poetic diction, lifting it from anarchy and stiffness, daring greatly, but triumphing whether in the simple or the ornate, widening its scope, but at the same time never failing to give it ease and flexibility so that language became to him a willing servant, and could voice the subtlest shades of mood or fancy. By means of this rich and varied style, fully expressive of his high seriousness, his spirituality, his inexhaustible sense of beauty, he has exercised a spell that has been potent for three centuries, and none has called so many poets to their vocation The greatness of Spenser was fully recognized in his own day, and he was accorded praise from writers widely differing from him in method and ideal. To Shakespeare1 his 'deep conceit' needed ‘no defence'. Even Ben Jonson, who disliked his style, 'would have him read for his matter.' Nashe, the brilliant realist and sworn foe to Gabriel Harvey, could find no frailtie' in the fame of 'immortall Spenser but the imputation of this Idiot's friendship'; eulogized him as the 'sum. tot. of whatsoever can be said of sharpe invention and schollership', and called him the Virgil of England'. 26 But the praise that would most have appealed to Spenser came from honest Dekker. 'The abode of the poets in the Insulae Fortunatae,' he tells us, are full of pleasant bowers and queint Arboures in all their walkes. In one of which old Chaucer is circled around with all the makers or Poets of his time. Grave Spenser was no sooner entered into this chapell of Apollo but these elders, Fathers of the divine Furie, gave him a Laurer and sung his welcome; Chaucer call'de him his Sonne, and placde him at his right hand. All of them, closing up their lippes in silence and turning all their eares for attention, to heare him sing out the rest of his Faerie Queene's praises.' The story of Spenser's life is the key to much in that poem which was his crowning achievement. Written for the most part in the wild and solitary country of Ireland, the Faerie Queene is reminiscent of the world from which he was exiled, and expresses his yearning for a fuller life and for an abundance of all the good things that his spirit and senses lacked. But it is also fully charged with his experience during those years. The charm of the country-side and the desolation of mountain and forest, the difficulties and dangers he had to face, the ruffians and the heroes that he encountered, the friends he made, the woman he loved, all find their place in the intricate structure of his poem. Its idealism, heightened by his instinctive desire to escape from a narrow and sordid reality, is thus combined with a realism that bespeaks his sure sense of the imaginative value of all experience that is intensely lived. 1 If, indeed, the poem in the Passionate Pilgrim,' If music and sweet poetry agree,' is by Shakespeare. And it seems too good for Barnfield, to whom also it is attributed. 2 Dekker: A Knights Conjuring. It is typical of that sacred hunger of ambitious minds', in which Spenser was at one with his age, that at the time when he was pressing his worldly fortunes in the service of Leicester he should have embarked upon the composition of a vast heroic poem, designed, as he 'flatly professed in a letter to Harvey, to emulate', perhaps to overgo' the Orlando Furioso. Such an achievement would not merely place him at the head of English poets, it would rank him as the foremost poet of the modern world. Ariosto was then at the height of his fame, declared by the critics to be a writer after Aristotle's own heart, the inheritor of the epic splendour of Homer and Virgil, and credited, like them, with profound and studied moral import. In the Orlando Furioso Spenser saw a complete romance of chivalry, in which the main plots, setting forth the fates of two pairs of lovers, stood out from a crowded background of minor episode. The very intricacy of the scheme attracted him; and in its combination of graphic incident with reflective comment he recognized an artistic method peculiarly fitted to his own contemplative genius. But just as Milton conceived of Paradise Lost as not less but more heroic than the Iliad or Aeneid, a theme worthier of his austere Muse, so the sage and serious Spenser thought to surpass his model in the dignity both of his subject and of its handling. The Faerie Queene, however much it might draw for incident and detail upon foreign sources, was to be a truly national poem, based on English legend and carrying on the national poetic traditions. Where Ariosto, in Ruggiero and Bradamante, set himself to celebrate the house of Este, Spenser would seek throughout his work to do honour to the English queen and to those of her courtiers who seemed most potent in shaping the destinies of his country. In the Orlando Furioso the allegory was vague and fitful, and the moral purpose, which Spenser had been taught to seek in it, was often abandoned for sheer delight in a baffling irrelevancy. (The Faerie Queene, as Spenser was careful to explain, was to be a 'continued allegory or darke conceit ', and all the elaborate interwindings of its plot were to be directed by his ethical intention.) The world of chivalry, which Ariosto viewed for the most part with a sceptical amusement, was to him a reflection of his own ideal conception of conduct, the means through which he might best attain his end, to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous or gentle discipline.' Weighty critics, amongst whom we must reckon Spence in the eighteenth century and Courthope in our own time, have suggested that Spenser read Ariosto in complete ignorance of his deep vein of irony, and that he took with the utmost gravity those ludicrous situations, and the sly comments upon them, which commend the essentially modern mind of Ariosto to the reader of to-day. To hold this view is to misconceive alike the nature of Spenser's idealism and the range of his artistic powers. The author of Mother Hubberds Tale was himself as subtle a master of irony as Ariosto; and if he wrote little in that vein it was not from a guileless innocence of the satiric point of view, but from his conviction that he had something greater to achieve. His high seriousness of purpose did not make him insensible to the humour of others, least of all when that humour was directed against the object of his instinctive reverence. A man is most sensitive where his love is engaged; and Spenser, in his passion for chivalry, was not likely to confound the accents of somewhat cynical amusement with his own sympathetic idealism. It is significant that he takes from Orlando Furioso passage after passage of purely humorous flavour, and moulds them to serve his deeper purpose. He could appreciate Ariosto's distinctive charm at the same time as he realized its essential divergence from his point of view. O gran bontà de' cavalieri antiqui, laughs Ariosto in good-humoured raillery at a situation which illustrates with more than usual piquancy the unreal aspects of the chivalric ideal. Spenser borrows from the situation all except its absurdity, and breaks forth in accents of genuine enthusiasm. O goodly vsage of those antique times, In which the sword was seruant vnto right; Let later age that noble vse enuie, Vile rancour to auoid, and cruell surquedrie. (111. i. 13.) } He found much in Ariosto which was a mocking challenge to his idealism. He accepted the challenge, and met it by transmuting the mockery into a triumphant expression of his faith. Nowhere is Spenser's independence in spirit and treatment, in all truly poetic qualities, more clearly asserted. than where his matter owes to Ariosto an obvious debt. Here at least he was confident that he would ‘ overgo' the Orlando Furioso.1 6 In 1582, when Spenser was already well entered upon' the Faerie Queene, Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata made its appearance, and threatened to eclipse the fame of Orlando Furioso as the modern rival to the epics of Homer and Virgil. Spenser read it eagerly. Its more rigid construction, which later led Hurd, in his Letters on Chivalry, to regard it as ' trimming between the classic and the Gothic manner', strengthened him in his desire to make his plot closely dependent upon his moral design; whilst its greater dignity of tone, its sincerity of sentiment, its patent seriousness both of style and manner, responded more fully to his own conception of a poet's calling. He found the Gerusalemme Liberata far less suggestive of incident and situation than the Orlando Furioso; but where, as in his description of the Bower of Bliss, he borrowed from 1 Cf. Spenser and Ariosto, by R. E. Neil Dodge (Mod. Lang. Assoc. Am., 1897). |