But the most remarkable of these pieces is a satirical fable, _Mother Hubberd"s Tale of the Ape and Fox_, which may take rank with the satirical writings of Chaucer and Dryden for keenness of touch, for breadth of treatment, for swing and fiery scorn, and sustained strength of sarcasm. By his visit to the Court, Spenser had increased his knowledge of the realities of life. That brilliant Court, with a G.o.ddess at its head, and full of charming swains and divine nymphs, had also another side. It was still his poetical heaven. But with that odd insensibility to anomaly and glaring contrasts, which is seen in his time, and perhaps exists at all times, he pa.s.sed from the celebration of the dazzling glories of Cynthia"s Court, into a fierce vein of invective against its treacheries, its vain shows, its unceasing and mean intrigues, its savage jealousies, its fatal rivalries, the scramble there for preferment in Church and State. When it is considered what great persons might easily and naturally have been identified at the time with the _Ape and the Fox_, the confederate impostors, charlatans, and bullying swindlers, who had stolen the lion"s skin, and by it mounted to the high places of the State, it seems to be a proof of the indifference of the Court to the power of mere literature, that it should have been safe to write and publish so freely, and so cleverly.
Dull Catholic lampoons and Puritan scurrilities did not pa.s.s thus unnoticed. They were viewed as dangerous to the State, and dealt with accordingly. The fable contains what we can scarcely doubt to be some of that wisdom which Spenser learnt by his experience of the Court.
So pitifull a thing is Suters state!
Most miserable man, whom wicked fate Hath brought to Court, to sue for _had-ywist_, That few have found, and manie one hath mist!
Full little knowest thou, that hast not tride, What h.e.l.l it is in suing long to bide: To loose good dayes, that might be better spent; To wast long nights in pensive discontent; To speed to day, to be put back to morrow; To feed on hope, to pine with feare and sorrow; To have thy Princes grace, yet want her Peeres; To have thy asking, yet waite manie yeeres; To fret thy soule with crosses and with cares; To eate thy heart through comfortlesse dispaires; To fawne, to crowche, to waite, to ride, to ronne, To spend, to give, to want, to be undonne.
Unhappie wight, borne to disastrous end, That doth his life in so long tendance spend!
Who ever leaves sweete home, where meane estate In safe a.s.surance, without strife or hate, Findes all things needfull for contentment meeke, And will to Court for shadowes vaine to seeke, Or hope to gaine, himselfe will a daw trie: That curse G.o.d send unto mine enemie!
Spenser probably did not mean his characters to fit too closely to living persons. That might have been dangerous. But it is difficult to believe that he had not distinctly in his eye a very great personage, the greatest in England next to the Queen, in the following picture of the doings of the Fox installed at Court.
But the false Foxe most kindly plaid his part; For whatsoever mother-wit or arte Could worke, he put in proofe: no practise slie, No counterpoint of cunning policie, No reach, no breach, that might him profit bring, But he the same did to his purpose wring.
Nought suffered he the Ape to give or graunt, But through his hand must pa.s.se the Fiaunt.
He chaffred Chayres in which Churchmen were set, And breach of lawes to privie ferme did let: No statute so established might bee, Nor ordinaunce so needfull, but that hee Would violate, though not with violence, Yet under colour of the confidence The which the Ape repos"d in him alone, And reckned him the kingdomes corner stone.
And ever, when he ought would bring to pas, His long experience the platforme was: And, when he ought not pleasing would put by The cloke was care of thrift, and husbandry, For to encrease the common treasures store; But his owne treasure he encreased more, And lifted up his loftie towres thereby, That they began to threat the neighbour sky; The whiles the Princes pallaces fell fast To ruine (for what thing can ever last?) And whilest the other Peeres, for povertie, Were forst their auncient houses to let lie, And their olde Castles to the ground to fall, Which their forefathers, famous over-all, Had founded for the Kingdome"s ornament, And for their memories long moniment: But he no count made of n.o.bilitie, Nor the wilde beasts whom armes did glorifie, The Realmes chiefe strength and girlond of the crowne.
All these through fained crimes he thrust adowne, Or made them dwell in darknes of disgrace; For none, but whom he list, might come in place.
Of men of armes he had but small regard, But kept them lowe, and streigned verie hard.
For men of learning little he esteemed; His wisdome he above their learning deemed.
As for the rascall Commons, least he cared, For not so common was his bountie shared.
Let G.o.d, (said he) if please, care for the manie, I for my selfe must care before els anie.
So did he good to none, to manie ill, So did he all the kingdome rob and pill; Yet none durst speake, ne none durst of him plaine, So groat he was in grace, and rich through gaine.
Ne would he anie let to have accesse Unto the Prince, but by his owne addresse, For all that els did come were sure to faile.
Even at Court, however, the poet finds a contrast to all this: he had known Philip Sidney, and Ralegh was his friend.
Yet the brave Courtier, in whose beauteous thought Regard of honour harbours more than ought, Doth loath such base condition, to backbite Anies good name for envie or despite: He stands on tearmes of honourable minde, Ne will be carried with the common winde Of Courts inconstant mutabilitie, Ne after everie tattling fable flie; But heares and sees the follies of the rest, And thereof gathers for himselfe the best.
He will not creepe, nor crouche with fained face, But walkes upright with comely stedfast pace, And unto all doth yeeld due curtesie; But not with kissed hand belowe the knee, As that same Apish crue is wont to doo: For he disdaines himselfe t" embase theretoo.
He hates fowle leasings, and vile flatterie, Two filthie blots in n.o.ble gentrie; And lothefull idlenes he doth detest, The canker worme of everie gentle brest.
Or lastly, when the bodie list to pause, His minde unto the Muses he withdrawes: Sweete Ladie Muses, Ladies of delight, Delights of life, and ornaments of light!
With whom he close confers with wise discourse, Of Natures workes, of heavens continuall course, Of forreine lands, of people different, Of kingdomes change, of divers gouvernment, Of dreadfull battailes of renowned Knights; With which he kindleth his ambitious sprights To like desire and praise of n.o.ble fame, The onely upshot whereto he doth ayme: For all his minde on honour fixed is, To which he levels all his purposis, And in his Princes service spends his dayes, Not so much for to gaine, or for to raise Himselfe to high degree, as for his grace, And in his liking to winne worthie place, Through due deserts and comely carriage.
The fable also throws light on the way in which Spenser regarded the religious parties, whose strife was becoming loud and threatening.
Spenser is often spoken of as a Puritan. He certainly had the Puritan hatred of Rome; and in the Church system as it existed in England he saw many instances of ignorance, laziness, and corruption; and he agreed with the Puritans in denouncing them. His pictures of the "formal priest," with his excuses for doing nothing, his new-fashioned and improved subst.i.tutes for the ornate and also too lengthy ancient service, and his general ideas of self-complacent comfort, has in it an odd mixture of Roman Catholic irony with Puritan censure. Indeed, though Spenser hated with an Englishman"s hatred all that he considered Roman superst.i.tion and tyranny, he had a sense of the poetical impressiveness of the old ceremonial, and the ideas which clung to it, its pomp, its beauty, its suggestiveness, very far removed from the iconoclastic temper of the Puritans. In his _View of the State of Ireland_, he notes as a sign of its evil condition the state of the churches, "most of them ruined and even with the ground," and the rest "so unhandsomely patched and thatched, that men do even shun the places, for the uncomeliness thereof." "The outward form (a.s.sure yourself)," he adds, "doth greatly draw the rude people to the reverencing and frequenting thereof, _whatever some of our late too nice fools may say_, that there is nothing in the seemly form and comely order of the church."
"Ah! but (said th" Ape) the charge is wondrous great, To feede mens soules, and hath an heavie threat."
"To feed mens soules (quoth he) is not in man; For they must feed themselves, doo what we can.
We are but charged to lay the meate before: Eate they that list, we need to doo no more.
But G.o.d it is that feeds them with his grace, The bread of life powr"d downe from heavenly place.
Therefore said he, that with the budding rod Did rule the Jewes, _All shalbe taught of G.o.d_.
That same hath Jesus Christ now to him raught, By whom the flock is rightly fed, and taught: He is the Shepheard, and the Priest is hee; We but his shepheard swaines ordain"d to bee.
Therefore herewith doo not your selfe dismay; Ne is the paines so great, but beare ye may, For not so great, as it was wont of yore, It"s now a dayes, ne halfe so streight and sore.
They whilome used duly everie day Their service and their holie things to say, At morne and even, besides their Anthemes sweete, Their penie Ma.s.ses, and their Complynes meete, Their Diriges, their Trentals, and their shrifts, Their memories, their singings, and their gifts.
Now all those needlesse works are laid away; Now once a weeke, upon the Sabbath day, It is enough to doo our small devotion, And then to follow any merrie motion.
Ne are we tyde to fast, but when we list; Ne to weare garments base of wollen twist, But with the finest silkes us to aray, That before G.o.d we may appeare more gay, Resembling Aarons glorie in his place: For farre unfit it is, that person bace Should with vile cloaths approach G.o.ds majestie, Whom no uncleannes may approachen nie; Or that all men, which anie master serve, Good garments for their service should deserve; But he that serves the Lord of hoasts most high, And that in highest place, t" approach him nigh, And all the peoples prayers to present Before his throne, as on amba.s.sage sent Both too and fro, should not deserve to weare A garment better than of wooll or heare.
Beside, we may have lying by our sides Our lovely La.s.ses, or bright shining Brides: We be not tyde to wilfull chast.i.tie, But have the Gospell of free libertie."
But his weapon is double-edged, and he had not much more love for
That ungracious crew which feigns demurest grace.
The first prescription which the Priest gives to the Fox who desires to rise to preferment in the Church is to win the favour of some great Puritan n.o.ble.
First, therefore, when ye have in handsome wise Your selfe attyred, as you can devise, Then to some n.o.ble-man your selfe applye, Or other great one in the worldes eye, That hath a zealous disposition To G.o.d, and so to his religion.
There must thou fashion eke a G.o.dly zeale, Such as no carpers may contrayre reveale; For each thing fained ought more warie bee.
There thou must walke in sober gravitee, And seeme as Saintlike as Sainte Radegund: Fast much, pray oft, looke lowly on the ground, And unto everie one doo curtesie meeke: These lookes (nought saying) doo a benefice seeke, And be thou sure one not to lack or long.
But he is impartial, and points out that there are other ways of rising--by adopting the fashions of the Court, "facing, and forging, and scoffing, and crouching to please," and so to "mock out a benefice;" or else, by compounding with a patron to give him half the profits, and in the case of a bishopric, to submit to the alienation of its manors to some powerful favourite, as the Bishop of Salisbury had to surrender Sherborn to Sir Walter Ralegh. Spenser, in his dedication of _Mother Hubberd"s Tale_ to one of the daughters of Sir John Spencer, Lady Compton and Monteagle, speaks of it as "long sithence composed in the raw conceit of youth." But, whatever this may mean, and it was his way thus to deprecate severe judgments, his allowing the publication of it at this time, shows, if the work itself did not show it, that he was in very serious earnest in his bitter sarcasms on the base and evil arts which brought success at the Court.
He stayed in England about a year and a half [1590-91], long enough apparently to make up his mind that he had not much to hope for from his great friends, Ralegh and perhaps Ess.e.x, who were busy on their own schemes. Ralegh, from whom Spenser might hope most, was just beginning to plunge into that extraordinary career, in the thread of which, glory and disgrace, far-sighted and princely public spirit and insatiate private greed, were to be so strangely intertwined. In 1592 he planned the great adventure which astonished London by the fabulous plunder of the Spanish treasure-ships; in the same year he was in the Tower, under the Queen"s displeasure for his secret marriage, affecting the most ridiculous despair at her going away from the neighbourhood, and pouring forth his flatteries on this old woman of sixty as if he had no bride of his own to love:--"I that was wont to behold her riding like Alexander, hunting like Diana, walking like Venus; the gentle wind blowing her fair hair about her pure cheeks like a nymph; sometimes, sitting in the shade like a G.o.ddess; sometimes, singing like an angel; sometimes, playing like Orpheus--behold the sorrow of this world--once amiss, hath bereaved me of all." Then came the exploration of Guiana, the expedition to Cadiz, the Island voyage [1595-1597]. Ralegh had something else to do than to think of Spenser"s fortunes.
Spenser turned back once more to Ireland, to his clerkship of the Council of Munster, which he soon resigned; to be worried with law-suits about "lands in Shanballymore and Ballingrath," by his time-serving and oppressive Irish neighbour, Maurice Roche, Lord Fermoy; to brood still over his lost ideal and hero, Sidney; to write the story of his visit in the pastoral supplement to the _Shepherd"s Calendar_, _Colin Clout"s come home again_; to pursue the story of Gloriana"s knights; and to find among the Irish maidens another Elizabeth, a wife instead of a queen, whose wooing and winning were to give new themes to his imagination.
FOOTNOTES:
[107:1] _v. Colin Clout_, l. 31. _Astrophel_, l. 175.
CHAPTER V.
THE FAERY QUEEN.
"_Uncouth_ [= unknown], _unkist_," are the words from Chaucer,[118:1]
with which the friend, who introduced Spenser"s earliest poetry to the world, bespeaks forbearance, and promises matter for admiration and delight in the _Shepherd"s Calendar_. "You have to know my new poet, he says in effect: and when you have learned his ways, you will find how much you have to honour and love him." "I doubt not," he says, with a boldness of prediction, manifestly sincere, which is remarkable about an unknown man, "that so soon as his name shall come into the knowledge of men, and his worthiness be sounded in the trump of fame, but that he shall be not only kissed, but also beloved of all, embraced of the most, and wondered at of the best." Never was prophecy more rapidly and more signally verified, probably beyond the prophet"s largest expectation.
But he goes on to explain and indeed apologize for certain features of the new poet"s work, which even to readers of that day might seem open to exception. And to readers of to-day, the phrase, _uncouth, unkist_, certainly expresses what many have to confess, if they are honest, as to their first acquaintance with the _Faery Queen_. Its place in literature is established beyond controversy. Yet its first and unfamiliar aspect inspires respect, perhaps interest, rather than attracts and satisfies. It is not the remoteness of the subject alone, nor the distance of three centuries which raises a bar between it and those to whom it is new. Shakespere becomes familiar to us from the first moment. The impossible legends of Arthur have been made in the language of to-day once more to touch our sympathies, and have lent themselves to express our thoughts. But at first acquaintance the _Faery Queen_ to many of us has been disappointing. It has seemed not only antique, but artificial. It has seemed fantastic. It has seemed, we cannot help avowing, tiresome. It is not till the early appearances have worn off, and we have learned to make many allowances and to surrender ourselves to the feelings and the standards by which it claims to affect and govern us, that we really find under what n.o.ble guidance we are proceeding, and what subtle and varied spells are ever round us.
I. The _Faery Queen_ is the work of an unformed literature, the product of an unperfected art. English poetry, English language, in Spenser"s, nay in Shakespere"s day, had much to learn, much to unlearn. They never, perhaps, have been stronger or richer, than in that marvellous burst of youth, with all its freedom of invention, of observation, of reflection.
But they had not that which only the experience and practice of eventful centuries could give them. Even genius must wait for the gifts of time.
It cannot forerun the limitations of its day, nor antic.i.p.ate the conquests and common possessions of the future. Things are impossible to the first great masters of art which are easy to their second-rate successors. The possibility, or the necessity of breaking through some convention, of attempting some unattempted effort, had not, among other great enterprises, occurred to them. They were laying the steps in a magnificent fashion on which those after them were to rise. But we ought not to shut our eyes to mistakes or faults to which attention had not yet been awakened, or for avoiding which no reasonable means had been found. To learn from genius, we must try to recognize, both what is still imperfect, and what is grandly and unwontedly successful. There is no great work of art, not excepting even the Iliad or the Parthenon, which is not open, especially in point of ornament, to the scoff of the scoffer, or to the injustice of those who do not mind being unjust. But all art belongs to man; and man, even when he is greatest, is always limited and imperfect.
The _Faery Queen_, as a whole, bears on its face a great fault of construction. It carries with it no adequate account of its own story; it does not explain itself, or contain in its own structure what would enable a reader to understand how it arose. It has to be accounted for by a prose explanation and key outside of itself. The poet intended to reserve the central event, which was the occasion of all the adventures of the poem, till they had all been related, leaving them as it were in the air, till at the end of twelve long books the reader should at last be told how the whole thing had originated, and what it was all about.
He made the mistake of confounding the answer to a riddle with the crisis which unties the tangle of a plot and satisfies the suspended interest of a tale. None of the great model poems before him, however full of digression and episode, had failed to arrange their story with clearness. They needed no commentary outside themselves to say why they began as they did, and out of what antecedents they arose. If they started at once from the middle of things, they made their story, as it unfolded itself, explain, by more or less skilful devices, all that needed to be known about their beginnings. They did not think of rules of art. They did of themselves naturally what a good story-teller does, to make himself intelligible and interesting; and it is not easy to be interesting, unless the parts of the story are in their place.
The defect seems to have come upon Spenser when it was too late to remedy it in the construction of his poem; and he adopted the somewhat clumsy expedient of telling us what the poem itself ought to have told us of its general story, in a letter to Sir Walter Ralegh. Ralegh himself, indeed, suggested the letter: apparently (from the date, Jan.
23, 1590), after the first part had gone through the press. And without this after-thought, as the twelfth book was never reached, we should have been left to gather the outline and plan of the story, from imperfect glimpses and allusions, as we have to fill up from hints and a.s.sumptions the gaps of an unskilful narrator, who leaves out what is essential to the understanding of his tale.
Incidentally, however, this letter is an advantage: for we have in it the poet"s own statement of his purpose in writing, as well as a necessary sketch of his story. His allegory, as he had explained to Bryskett and his friends, had a moral purpose. He meant to shadow forth, under the figures of twelve knights, and in their various exploits, the characteristics of "a gentleman or n.o.ble person," "fashioned in virtuous and gentle discipline." He took his machinery from the popular legends about King Arthur, and his heads of moral philosophy from the current Aristotelian catalogue of the Schools.
Sir, knowing how doubtfully all Allegories may be construed, and this booke of mine, which I have ent.i.tuled the Faery Queene, being a continued Allegory, or darke conceit, I haue thought good, as well for avoyding of gealous opinions and misconstructions, as also for your better light in reading thereof, (being so by you commanded,) to discover unto you the general intention and meaning, which in the whole course thereof I have fashioned, without expressing of any particular purposes, or by accidents, therein occasioned. The generall end therefore of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or n.o.ble person in vertuous and gentle discipline: Which for that I conceived shoulde be most plausible and pleasing, being coloured with an historicall fiction, the which the most part of men delight to read, rather for variety of matter then for profite of the ensample, I chose the historye of King Arthure, as most fitte for the excellency of his person, being made famous by many mens former workes, and also furthest from the daunger of envy, and suspition of present time. In which I have followed all the antique Poets historicall; first Homere, who in the Persons of Agamemnon and Ulysses hath ensampled a good governour and a vertuous man, the one in his Ilias, the other in his Odysseis: then Virgil, whose like intention was to doe in the person of Aeneas: after him Ariosto comprised them both in his Orlando: and lately Ta.s.so dissevered them againe, and formed both parts in two persons, namely that part which they in Philosophy call Ethice, or vertues of a private man, coloured in his Rinaldo; the other named Politice in his G.o.dfredo. By ensample of which excellente Poets, I labour to pourtraict in Arthure, before he was king, the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve private morall vertues, as Aristotle hath devised; the which is the purpose of these first twelve bookes: which if I finde to be well accepted, I may be perhaps encoraged to frame the other part of polliticke vertues in his person, after that hee came to be king.
Then, after explaining that he meant the _Faery Queen_ "for glory in general intention, but in particular" for Elizabeth, and his Faery Land for her kingdom, he proceeds to explain, what the first three books hardly explain, what the Faery Queen had to do with the structure of the poem.