In the poet spent the next nine years of his life, sometimes following the fortunes of the Lord-Deputy in the field, sometimes engaged in official work at Dublin, where, in March 1581, he was made Clerk of Decrees and Recognisances, a post which is said by Fuller to have been lucrative. the same year he received the lease of the Abbey and Manor of Enniscorthy. He also acted as the deputy of his friend, Lodovick Briskett, who, in 1583, obtained the office of clerk to the Irish Council, but apparently relinquished it in Spenser's favour. When Munster was planted Spenser received the grant of the Castle of Kilcolman, a house formerly belonging to the Desmonds, with about 3000 acres, under the Galtee Hills, on the stream now called Awbeg, and so often celebrated in Spenser's poems under the name of the Mulla. Here, in 1589, he was visited by Raleigh-also an "Undertaker for the planting of Munster"-to whom he read those books of the Faery Queen which he had found time to compose in his intervals of leisure. Raleigh, delighted with the poem, carried Spenser with him to the Court of Elizabeth, where the Queen listened with complacency to the flattery lavished upon her by the poet in a thousand dexterous allusions. As a reward for his labour and loyalty she awarded him a pension of £50; but it is said that, through the reluctance of Burleigh, Spenser found great difficulty in obtaining any payment. The first three books of the Faery Queen were entered in the Stationers' Register on 1st December 1589. After staying in England for about a year and a half, Spenser returned to Ireland, and amused himself and his friends with a pastoral and poetical account of his experiences at Court in Colin Clout's Come Home Again. In 1591 he published a volume of "Complaints," containing The Visions of Bellay and Petrarch, The Ruins of Rome, Mother Hubberd's Tale, The Ruins of Time, Muiopotmos, The Tears of the Muses. In 1594 he married a lady whom, in one of the most beautiful of his poems, his Epithalamion, he calls "a country lass," but who appears to have been in fact a kinswoman of the Earl of Cork, Elizabeth Boyle. By her, the mistress of his Amoretti, he had several children, of whom two sons, called characteristically Peregrine and Sylvanus, survived him. The second portion of the Faery Queen was entered in the Stationers' Register in January 1596; in this year the poet also published Four Hymns on Love and Beauty, Earthly and Heavenly; Daphnaida, a dirge on the death of the wife of his friend, Arthur Gorges; and Prothalamion, a poem on the marriage of the two daughters of the Earl of Worcester. In April 1598, at the instigation of Tyrone, Munster rose in rebellion. Spenser was appointed, in the following September, Sheriff of Cork, being accounted " a man endowed with good knowledge and learning, and not unskilful or without experience in war;" but in October the rebels overwhelmed the settlers, and, among other feats, sacked and burned Kilcolman Castle. Ben Jonson relates that a child of Spenser's perished in the flames. The poet, returning to England, with health and heart broken, only survived his misfortunes for a few months. "He died" (16th January 1599), says Jonson, “for lack of bread in King Street (Westminster), and refused twenty pieces sent to him by my Lord of Essex, saying he had no time to spend them." 1 This is the record of a life full of vicissitude, adventure, and suffering, and such as we might suppose would have drawn from a poet strong and direct utterance of personal feeling. But with the exception of the famous lines in Mother Hubberd's Tale, and a casual mention of his disappointments in the Prothalamion, there is scarcely a passage in Spenser's poetry which can be regarded as an immediate revelation of his inward life. Everything in his poems is concealed under a cloak of allegory. Allegory not only provides the form of his compositions; it is of the very essence of his thought. It is, therefore, mainly by reference to his character as a poetical 1 Whatever is known about Spenser's life has been collected with the most indefatigable and praiseworthy industry by Mr. Grosart in his edition of the poet's works published in 1882-84. He questions the truth of the story about Spenser dying in want; but it does not appear to me that his reasoning, which is of a somewhat abstract nature, invalidates the direct testimony of Spenser's contemporary, Ben Jonson. allegorist that his place in the history of English poetry must be determined. But here a difficulty at once arises. In judging of his poetical qualities are we to look primarily to the matter of his allegory, or to the form of his poetry? To this question two entirely opposite answers have been furnished by two schools of critics. One school, taking him at his own valuation, regards him primarily as a poetical philosopher. Milton, for example, observes that he is a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas.1 Mr. Ruskin has given his own explanation of the moral teaching conveyed in the first book of the Faery Queen; and his example has been followed, though on lines of their own, by Professors Morley, Dowden, and Percival. "A better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas,' says Professor Dowden, referring to Milton's opinion, "he strove in his own way to make the national life of England a great unity-spiritual yet not disdaining earth or the things of earth. He strove as far as in him lay to breed a race of high-souled English gentlemen, who should have none of the meanness of the libertine, none of the meanness of the precisian." On the other hand, Hume and others utterly refuse to attach any value to the spiritual sense of the Faery Queen, and maintain that to apply this method of interpretation not only deprives the poem of its most essential beauties, but the reader of the power of enjoying them. Thus, says Mr. Lowell The true use of Spenser is as a gallery of pictures which we visit as the mood takes us, and where we spend an hour or two at a time, long enough to sweeten our perceptions, not so long as to cloy them. . . . Whenever, in the Fairy Queen, you come suddenly on the moral it gives you a shock of unpleasant surprise, a kind of grit as when one's teeth close on a bit of gravel in a dish of strawberries and cream.4 I cannot agree with either of these extreme opinions. 1 Milton, Areopagitica. 2 Stones of Venice. 3 Professor Dowden, Essay on Spenser in Grosart's edition of Spenser's Works, vol. i. p. 337. 4 J. R. Lowell, cited by Professor Dowden in Grosart's edition of Spenser's Works, vol. i. p. 306. Compare Hume, History of England, chap. xlvii. Appendix iii. کیا It seems to me impossible to hold with Mr. Lowell that the moral of Spenser's poems counts for nothing: the sense, no less than the form of his allegory, is an essential and characteristic part of his work. But I dissent still more decidedly from those who consider that he is to be primarily regarded as a moral teacher. Spenser does not allegorise like Dante, because he believes all sensible objects to be mirrors of hidden truths; nor like Langland, because this method of writing is useful for the moral instruction he wishes to convey: Allegory is to him mainly interesting in so far as it serves the purposes of poetry. From the first glimpse we obtain of him, in his correspondence with Gabriel Harvey, down to his last experiences at Court, recorded in Colin Clout's Come Home Again, the requirements of his art are always in his mind; and the motive of every one of his greater compositions, when detached from the cloudy words with which he chooses to cover it, is found to be primarily poetical. His earliest poems are an attempt to give a metrical form to the philosophical doctrines in which he had been educated. At Cambridge he had moved in an atmosphere of Platonism. Plato's philosophy mixed with the current of theology in the Latin Church through the channel of Boethius, and elements of his doctrine embodied themselves in the poetry of the Troubadours, of Dante, and of Petrarch. In later times opposition to the scholastic interpretation of Aristotle naturally favoured the teaching of his rival, whose system, expounded in Italy by men like Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, was afterwards advocated by the Huguenot Ramus in the University of Paris, and passed into the German Universities; so that a Platonic cult gradually associated itself all over the Continent with the cause of the religious reformers. Cheke and Ascham lectured on the Socratic dialogues in Cambridge in the first half of the sixteenth century; and when Spenser came into residence all that was intellectual in the University was Platonist. The poet imbibed the humanistic teaching, as Sidney imbibed the doctrines of Languet. Writing from Leicester House, in later years, he seems to have confided to Gabriel Harvey his hopes of propagating the Platonic gospel with the help of Sidney's following at Court, an aspiration to which his friend replied somewhat sarcastically by a picture of the actual state of opinion in Cambridge.1 Spenser's two Hymns to Love and Beauty were the poetical fruits of his University education. These contain little that is original, but show a remarkable power of rendering the current philosophical ideas into clear and flowing verse. Visible things, the poet taught, following the main axiom of his master, are patterns of things invisible. What time the world's great workmaster did cast To make all things such as we now behold, It seems that he before his eyes had plast A goodly pattern, to whose perfect mould He fashioned them as comely as he could, Just now so fair and seemly they appear, As nought may be amended anywhere. Beauty is not only an image of the Divine Mind but. an informing power in the soul— Thereof it comes that those fair souls, which have The ideal action of the soul in Love is thus described Love is not so light As straight to burn at first beholder's sight: But they which love indeed look otherwise, In 1596 Spenser, at the instigation of two noble ladies, the Countess of Warwick and the Countess of Cumberland, modified what was held to be the too pagan 1 Gabriel Harvey's Works, vol. i. pp. 146-150. VOL. II R |