the practical-eager for fame, and inclined to value poetry at its market price, as a means to further his worldly ambitions-and the ideal, expressed in a passion for an art which, as he had learned from his master Plato, was a divine gift and heavenly instinct not to bee gotten by labour and learning, but adorned with both; and poured into the witte by a certain 'Evbovoiaσpós and celestiall inspiration.' Incidentally, too, the eclogue reviews the different themes of poetry, and suggests the development of Spenser's own genius, its response to the call of the heroic Muse, and its passage from the sphere of courtly panegyric to that lofty idealism in which the poet finds his truer home. It is the youthfully ardent expression of the conflict of mind, the questionings and the aspiration, which were to find fuller and freer utterance in the Faerie Queene.

But, as E. K. realizes, even more important than the contents of the Shepheardes Calender is the style in which it is composed, and the poet's attitude towards his predecessors. Spenser shows a full acquaintance with the pastorals of Greece, Italy, and France; but it is significant that though he imitates Bion and Virgil, even adapts and translates from Mantuan and Marot, he will acknowledge a debt to Chaucer alone. At a time when his contemporaries were running after foreign models, it is his ambition to be English. This reversion to Chaucer is the boldest sign of his independence. In weak imitation of Chaucer the poetry of the fifteenth century had wellnigh expired; and the reformers of versification, whilst they showed some knowledge and admiration of Chaucer, never dreamt that they could learn of him. At Cambridge, indeed, Chaucer was widely read, but Harvey, at least, would not have regarded him as a fit poetic model. In the June eclogue Spenser represents Harvey as summoning Colin to the study of more stately masters; but the

1 It is worth noting that Francis Beaumont, in a letter to Speght, published in Speght's edition of Chaucer (1598), writes: 'And here I cannot forget to remember unto you those auncient learned men of our time at Cambridge, whose diligence in reading of his (Chaucer's) works themselves and commending them to others of the younger sort, did first bring you and me in love with him and one of them at that time was and now is (as you know) one of the rarest schollers in the world.' Speght was at Peterhouse, Cambridge, from 1566 to 1573, thus overlapping with Spenser four years. Did Spenser also come under the influence of this rare scholler'? Who was he? Miss Spurgeon, Chaucer devant la critique (1911), suggests that it might well be Whitgift, who was Fellow of Peterhouse, Master of Pembroke for three months in 1567, then Master of Trinity Hall, and Regius Professor of Divinity. He was ViceChancellor in 1579. Stowe, in dedicating to him his Annals (1600), speaks of his great affection towards studies in general and to antiquities in particular. Miss Spurgeon also quotes some manuscript notes, written in books in the possession of Harvey, in which he insists on Chaucer's learning, writing in one place, ' Other commend Chaucer and Lidgate for their witt, pleasant veine, varietie of poetical discourse, and all humanitie. I specially note their Astronomie, philosophie and other parts of profound or cunning art. Wherein few of their time were more exactly learned. It is not sufficient for poets to be superficial humanists: but they must be exquisite artists and curious universal scholars.' Spenser may thus have owed some of his knowledge of Chaucer to intercourse with Harvey, though his own poetic instinct would lead him to appreciate Chaucer on truer lines than Harvey.

modesty of Colin's reply barely conceals his deliberate conviction that his native poetry can gain little inspiration from the rhetoric of classical and Italian imitation.

Of Muses Hobbinol, I conne no skill,

For they bene daughters of the hyghest Jove.
I never lyst presume to Parnasse hyll,
But pyping low in shade of lowly grove
I play to plese myself, al be it ill.1

His master is Tityrus alone; and if only 'some little drops' from 'his learned hedde' may fall upon him, he need seek no foreign spring. That by Tityrus he meaneth Chaucer,' remarks E. K., hath been sufficiently said.' The account given by Colin of Chaucer's achievement is in part fanciful, adapted to the pastoral vein; and at first sight the relation of the Shepheardes Calender to Chaucer seems remote enough. But Chaucer did not appear to the Elizabethan in the light of modern scholarship. Several of the portraits in the Canterbury Tales were interpreted as the work of an earnest religious reformer, and the attribution to his authorship of the Plowman's Tale, with its allegory of the Pelican and the Gryphon, would lead Spenser to regard as Chaucerian a use of the beast fable very different from that suggested by the Nonne Prestes Tale. It is evident, moreover, from the traces in his Hymnes to Love and Beauty, already written, of Chaucer's Compleynte to Pity, that he saw in Chaucer also the poet of unhappy love. But more than all was he drawn to him as the chief of those, who, in the words of Thynne's Preface, which Spenser must have read,2 have right well employed themselves to the beautifying and bettering of the English tongue.' For this was his own ambition. Chaucer he saw the well of English undefyled', in his contemporaries 'a gallimaufry and hodge podge of al other speeches'; and he set himself to form a poetic diction on the model of his great master, and so to recover a beauty which, as it seemed to him, his time had lost. The pastoral precedent for rustic speech allowed him to introduce dialect words which were commonly felt to be nearer to the purely native language than the vocabulary of the cultured, and with these he combined modern colloquialisms appealing to his ear by their native ring, and archaisms both genuine and spurious. It may fairly be urged against him that the result is itself a gallimaufry, though of a different kind from that which he attacked; it affects the ancients', and bears the same relation to the language of Chaucer that his conception of the 'goodly usage of those antique times' bears to their reality. But for all its remoteness in certain respects from the language of real life, suggestive of the ideality of the poetic mood, it is a genuine attempt at a diction not more elaborate, but

1 Shepheardes Calender June, 65 f.

In

2 William Thynne's Folio Chaucer was published in 1532, reprinted with additions in 1542 and 1550, and with large additions by Stowe in 1561. One of these editions must have been used by Spenser.

purer, simpler, more English than the literary language current in his day. Spenser was fully conscious that his work was tentative, and in the eclogues of satiric rather than purely poetic intention, he pressed his experiments to bolder lengths; but though in his later work he framed his style with a more careful art, he never departed from the principle which had inspired the diction of the Shepheardes Calender.

In metre the Shepheardes Calender is no less experimental. Spenser had no precedent in pastoral tradition for such metrical variety; in this he was inspired solely by his own eagerness to explore the native capabilities of the language. Here, too, though he owes something to his immediate predecessors both in England and France, he goes back for his models to an earlier age. He tries his hand at forms suggested by the ballad, at the irregular four-stressed lines, at the regular line of five feet, all traditional in English poetry, and again finds the fullest and most natural expression in the metre of Chaucer. For the ballad metre, which he only employs where he is definitely aiming at a rough effect, he found that he had no taste; in the line of four beats, popular in the fifteenth century, he wrote with facility, giving it a variety unknown to earlier employers of it, and in particular, making delicate use of its opportunities for a triple rhythm. But he is not sure of its music, and it has been suggested that some of his metrical irregularities, where his line seems to hover between the irregular four-stressed line, and the line of five feet, but can in fact be read as neither, are due to his misreading, through the loss of the pronunciation of the unaccented e, of some of Chaucer's decasyllabics. This is likely enough, and is made more likely by his use of the measure in February and May, where in other respects his debt to Chaucer is obvious. But those who hold that the true rhythm of the Chaucerian decasyllabic was lost to him press their point too far. For with every allowance for change in pronunciation, much of Chaucer would retain its melody unspoiled.2 This line had degenerated in the hands of feeble artists, and it had been somewhat stiffly reinstated by Surrey and Wyatt after a study of foreign models. Since their time Sackville had given some indication of its solemn dignity and strength, but it was left for Spenser to recapture the variety, the delicacy which it had lost.

In its exquisite and varied melody lies, doubtless, the greatest charm of the Shepheardes Calender, but it makes a further appeal to the lover

1 That interlacing sequence of rhymes (a ba bbc bc) found in April and November, as well as in the Spenserian sonnet and the Spenserian stanza, is commonly ascribed to the influence of Marot. But it is found also in the ABC, and Monkes Tale, and other poems of Chaucer's.

2 It would be difficult to convince me that Spenser's line 'And mány mínstrals máken mélody' was not consciously or unconsciously reminiscent of Chaucer's And smále foules máken mélodie', and if that is so Spenser could hardly have read it as ' And small fowls máken mélodý. It should also be remembered that Spenser makes frequent use himself of plurals and possessives in -es to give his lines a lighter rhythm. His love of archaism was in part melodic.

of Spenser. For this strange pastoral country, with its ideal atmosphere that gives to intimate personal allusion the remoteness of romance; with its unique blending of artifice and simplicity, of nature and convention, of deep moral earnestness and tender delicacy of feeling, is, in spite of all that it has borrowed, a world of Spenser's own. It lies along the high-road that leads him to Faery land.

1

Though the Shepheardes Calender was the only work published by Spenser at this period, he was already known in his own circle as a prolific writer. E. K. speaks of his Dreames, his Legendes, his Court of Cupid, and sondry others', and alludes in the Gloss to Pageants, a translation of Moschus' Idyllion of Wandering Love, and a 'sonett'; in the Harvey correspondence of 1579-80 there is reference again to the Dreames, and to a Dying Pellicane, an Epithalamion Thamesis, My Slomber, Stemmata Dudleiana, to 'Nine Comedies named after the nine Muses', and to parcels of the Faerie Queene. We may also safely conjecture that at least the first draft of several of the poems published in 1591 was written by 1580, as well as the bulk of those mentioned in Ponsonby's preface to the volume. It is a formidable list; and even if it contains much that was in part at least composed at an earlier date, in Cambridge or the North, it is proof enough that Spenser was busily occupied. Some of this work is irrecoverably lost, but not a little seems to have been revised and adapted for incorporation into later poems. The Dreames, of which Spenser speaks as 'presently to be imprinted, and growen by meanes of a Gloss full as great as my Calendar', may have found a place among the Visions of the Complaints; the Latin Stemmata Dudleiana may well have been utilized in The Ruines of Time; and other poems adapted to embellish the decorative episodes of the Faerie Queene-the Court of Cupid, for the Masque of Cupid in the third book and the Court in the sixth, the Epithalamion Thamesis for the marriage of the Thames and the Medway in the fourth, and the Legendes and Pageants, for some of the incidental and masque-like allegories, such as the seven deadly sins, or the procession of the months and seasons. But this is mere conjecture, however probable; and in adapting his early poetry to its new surroundings Spenser must often have practically rewritten it. A good deal of it was certainly tentative and experimental, both in form and language. The elaborate artificiality of style which delighted Harvey in the Dreames must have afforded a bold contrast with the Shepheardes Calender, and though it is probable that Spenser wrote chiefly in those different decasyllabic stanza forms of which he was already a master, his metrical range was from the homely 'sonett' in verse of six accents 2 to the classical experiments exploited by Sidney and the Areopagus. Of that' unhappie verse, the witnesse of his unhappie state,' 3 it is safe to surmise that little

1 Vide p. 470.

2 Vide Gloss to October: as soote as Swanne', &c., p. 459.
3 Vide Iambicum Trimetrum, p. 636.

has been lost. For of all the poems mentioned to Harvey, Epithalamion Thamesis alone is spoken of as an attempt at the new 'English versifying', and had others been written in this manner they would surely have been the subject of Harvey's enthusiastic comment. Spenser's interest in the movement did not check his more natural poetic utterance, and while he acted as arbiter between the theories of Harvey and the London Areopagus, and threw off a few verses as absurdly unmusical as theirs, he only accepted their main contentions against his better judgment, not deceiv'd'. His interjected query, why, a God's name may we not have the kingdom of our language ?1 expressed for Spenser the vital truth upon the whole matter.

But full as the time was of strenuous and varied poetic activity, the more worldly and practical side of Spenser had now the upper hand. Poetry was a noble pastime, even a vocation, but for a gentleman it was not a profession. All it could do for him would be to bring his talents to the notice of those who were in the position to better his fortunes. In the service of the great Leicester, on terms of easy intercourse with Sidney and Dyer, received in audience of the queen, and enjoying some at least of the pleasures of court life, he seemed to be on the threshold of a brilliant public career. He was under no delusions as to the sordid aspects of the world in which he found himself, he saw much about him that was degenerate, and even now he contrasted it with that nobler society which he imagined in the past. But he was ready enough to make the best of things as he found them, and with all the energy of his ardent nature he threw himself into the new life that was opening out before him. The success he had already won seemed to justify his ambitions, and to urge him on to bolder action. Whiles the iron is hote, it is good striking, and mindes of Nobles varie as their Estates,' he writes to Harvey (October 1579), and the whole tone of his letter expresses the mood of one who thinks less of poetry for its own sake than for the effect it is calculated to produce upon his fortunes. He hesitates about the publication of the Shepheardes Calender then ready to appear, and withholds other poems, least by over-much cloying their noble eares, I should gather a contempt of myself, or else seeme rather for gaine and commoditie to doe it, for some sweetenesse that I have already tasted.' He is about to go overseas for his

2

1 Vide Letter to Harvey, p. 612.

Spenser's belief in a golden age need not be taken literally, but there can be no doubt that his criticisms of the shortcomings of his own time were intensely sincere. He was always acutely sensitive to the unlovely, both in things external and things of the spirit; and they often weighed heavy upon his mind and found forcible utterance both in his letters and poems. The more practical Harvey continually criticized his friend's uncompromising idealism. A long letter from Harvey about this time (quoted Grosart, Life of Spenser, pp. 74-5), in answer to one from Spenser that is lost, rates him for it. Cf. also Harvey's criticism of Mother Hubberds Tale (quoted p. xxiii), and the words put into the mouth of Hobbinol in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (11. 731-48).