THE POETS^ POET
HERE is a poet who is just poetry, and the stuff of poetry; whose narrative — a mere vehicle for his ideas — is a tissue of romantic fancy, careless of manners or chara6ler, of interest epic or dramatic. He has been much beloved of poets, and little of that vague entity, the * general reader.' Shakespeare had read him much: Milton called him master; he made Cowley a poet two hundred years ago, Keats a poet the other day, and who shall say how manv in the illustrious line between? Raleigh and Sidney were his lovers in life; for they also were poets. Raleigh might hail in him a double Idnship, as poet and explorer. Was not Spenser indeed a great explorer, among the greatest in that age of adventure, when a man got up in the morning and said, ' I have an idea. If you have nothing better to do, let us go continenthunting.' And he that had not found an island or so was accounted a fellow of no spirit.
Well, Spenser for his share rediscovered Poetry; or, at least, made Poetry possible. It is among the strangest of strange things that the early sixteenth century should have lisped and stammered where the fourteenth had sung with full mouth; that where the middle ages had led with Chaucer, it should follow with Skelton; that Surrey, Wyatt, and Spenser's immediate forerunners should doubtfully experiment in an art of which Chaucer had been consummate master. The tongue of Chaucer was changed j the methods of Chaucer held good. Yet the poets were a people of a stammering tongue; their art had gone back to infancy; and things were at such a pass that the egregious Harvey was for setting the English Muses to their gracilis ad Parnassum and the penning (singing were a misnomer) of obscene horrors styled hexameters, elegiacs, and the like. Then came Spenser, and found again that land of Poetry, more golden than any El Dorado towards which Raleigh ever set his bold-questing keel. He joined hands with Chaucer across the years: even the metre of his earher poems is Chaucer's. A swarm of adventurers followed their Columbus; and English Poetry was.
For all which, outside the poets, he got Httle more recognition than he gets now. To a cultured Queen and her Court he cried, in new and unmatched verse, that:
Fame with golden wings aloft doth fly Above the reach of ruinous decay, And with brave plumes doth beat the azure sky Admirdd of base-born men from far away: Then whoso will with virtuous deeds essay To mount to heaven, on Pegasus must ride. And with sweet poets' verse be glorified.
For not to have been dipt in Lethe lake Could save the son of Thetis from to die; But that bhnd bard did him immortal make With verses dipt in dew of Castaly: '
Which made the Eastern Conqueror to cry — * O fortunate young man, whose virtue found So brave a trump, thy noble ads to sound 1 *,
What deaf adder could withstand such charming? ' With verses dipt in dew of Castaly ' — can you not hear the dcHcate dewy drip of that exquisitely musical line?
Provide, therefore, ye Princes, while ye may, That of the Muses ye may honoured be,
exhorted the poet in logical conclusion: and the Princes ' provided ' — on the cheap. The Cecils and Elizabeths rated their ' immortaUty ' a good deal below the pay of a foreign spy.
* Greatest Gloriane,' like a many be-rhymed ladies, probably yawned over her Faery Queen and one may be sure never got to the end of it. It would be curious to inquire how many lovers of poetry have read through it or T^he Excursion. The Faery Queen is in truth a poem that no man can read through save as a duty, and in a series of arduous campaigns (so to speak). The later books of it steadily fail in power; but that is not all. The Spenserian stanza, beautiful for a time, in the course of four hundred or so pages becomes a very wearisome and cumbrous narrative form. The repetition of it grows monotonous; it fatigues by the perpetual discontinuity. Spenser himself seems to find it sometimes cumbrous, in the end. You have occasional lines like —
Until they both do hear what she to them will say.
No, the Faery Queen must not be read on end; it is a poem to linger over and dip into. It
18, indeed, as much a series of poems as the Idylls of the King. It is not a great poem as its model, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, is a great poem; for Spenser has planned on a scale beyond his ph}"sical power of endurance, and its completion would have been only so much superfluous evidence of the fa6l. Its waning power was not caused by waning genius; for in the same year with the latest books he published his magnificent lyrical poems. But if not a great poem it is great poetry; nay, we might say it contains great poems.
The obvious qualities of it and its author are grown mere truisms. He is princely in fancy rather than imagination. His gift of vision (in a specialized sense of the word) is unapproached. Every one has remarked upon that faculty of seeing visions, and presenting them as before the bodily eye: the Faery Queen is a gallery hung with the rarest tapestries, an endless procession of dream-pi6Vures. There is no emotion, save the emotion of beauty. Yet incidentally, like the exclamations of a dreaming man, he will utter brief passages of tenderest pathos, or exultant joy:
Nought is there under heaven's wide hollowness That moves more dear compassion of mind, Than beauty brought to unworthy wretchedness.
The mournful sweetness of those lines is insurpassable; and they are quintessential Spenser. Yet it is unluckily charadlcristic of him, too, that he mars half the effeft of this perfect passage by not stopping with its completion, but following it with a hne which makes an anti-climax, and is too manifestly inserted for rhyme's sake:
One might almost take that little passage as a text for one's whole disquisition on Spenser. For, after all, it is not in the richly luxuriant descriptive embroidery, or the piftures brushed in with words as with line and colour, which are traditionally quoted by this poet's critics, that the highest Spenser lies. The secret of him is shut in those three hues.
Wherein lies their power? The language is so utterly plain that an uninspired poet would have fallen upon baldness. Yet Spenser is a mine of diftion (as was remarked to us by a poet who had worked in that mine). But here he had no need for his gorgeous opulence of didion: a few commonest words, and the spell was worked. It is all a matter of relation: the words take life from each other, and become an organism, as with Coleridge. And it is a matter of music; an integral element in the magic of the passage is its sound. In this necromancy, by which the most elementary words, entering into a secret relation of sense and sound, acquire occult property, Spenser is a master. And that which gives eleftric hfe to their relation is the Spenserian subtlety of fcmotlon. Here it is specifically pathos, at aApthcr time it is joyous exultation, or again the pleasure of beauty. But behind and underneath all these emotional forms, the central and abiding quality, the essence of his emotion, is peace, and the radiance of peace. The final eflcd of all, in this and kindred passages, is lyrical.
Yes, lyrical. We are well-nigh minded to write ourselves down arch-heretics, and say that the Faery Queen is a superb error. Spenser, it almost seems to us, was a supreme lyric poet who, by the influence of tradition and example, was allured to spend his strength in narrative poetry, and found his true path only at the close of his literary career. Throughout the Faery Queen he is happy when he drops narration to dream dreams, and touches his serenest height in some brief, casual access of lyric feeling such as we have quoted. And in his last years, before misfortune silenced him, he wrote an all-too-small, precious handful of lyrics, which cover but a few pages, yet are greater than all his ' great ' poem together, flowing with milk and honey of poetry though it be.
In those grand Platonic Hymns to Beauty^ in the Protkalamion and Epithalamton, all his finest qualities are gathered into organic wholes, sublimated by a lyric ardour which is the radiant eflluence of central peace. Joy never had such expression as in the Efithalamion^ so serenely noble that its intensity of joy mayalmost be missed, as the swift interflux of the blue heaven cheats us with the asped: of perfcft calm. To express supreme joy is the most difficult of tasks (as a critic has remarked), far more difficult than to express intense sadness, which is the chosen aim of most modern poetry. Here it is supremely expressed, in connexion with the culminating point of natural joy; and is ennobled by the interfused presence of something loftier and more perfeft than joy — that static joy which is peace. How well could we have forgone the full latter half of the Fairy Queen for some twenty more of such consummate lyrics! But Spenser found his greatest gift, his truest line of work, all too late, when the night was closing on him wherein no man can work — the night of poverty, ruin, and sorrow-hastened age.
SIDNEY'S PROSE
AMONG prose-writers a peculiar interest /\ attaches to the poets who have written ^ *-prose, who can both soar and walk. For to this case the image will not apply of the eagle overbalanced in walking bv the weight of his great wings. Nay, far from the poets' being astray in prose-writing, it might plausibly be contended that EngHsh prose, as an art, is but a secondary stream of the Pierian fount, and owes its very origin to the poets. The first writer one remembers with whom prose became an art was Sir Phihp Sidney. And Sidney was a poet.
If Chaucer, as has been said, is Spring, it is modern, premature Spring, followed by an interval of doubtful weather. Sidney is the very Spring — the later May. And in prose he is the authentic, only Spring. It is a prose full of young joy, and young power, and young inexperience, and young melancholy, which is the wilfulness of joy; full of young fertiHty, wantoning in its own excess. Every nerve of it is steeped in deliciousness, which one might confuse with the softness of a decadent and effeminate age like our own, so much do the extremes of the literary cycle meet. But there is all the difference between the pliancy of youthful growth and the languor of decay. This martial and fiery progeny of a martial and fiery age is merely relaxing himself to tKe full in the interval of his strenuoaS life's campaign, indulging the blissful dreams of budding manhood — a virile Keats, one might say. You feel these martial spirits reveUing in the whole fibre of his style. It is, indeed, the writing of a child; or, perhaps, of an exceptional boy, who still retains the roaming, luxuriant sweetness of a child's fancy; who has broken into the store-closet of literary conserves, and cloyed himself in dehcious contempt of law and ignorance of satiety, tasting aU capricious dainties as they come. The Arcadia runs honev; with a leisurely deliberation of relish, epicureanly savoured to the full, all alien to our hurried and tormented age.
Sidney's prose is treasurable, not only for its absolute merits, but as the bud from whichEnglish prose, that gorgeous and varied flower, has unfolded. It is in every way the reverse of modern prose. Our conditions of hurry carry to excess the abrupt style, resolved into its ultimate elements of short and single sentences. Sidney revels in the periodic style — long sentences, holding in suspension many clauses, which are shepherded to a full and sonorous close. But with him this style is inchoate: it is not yet logically compacted, the clauses do not follow inevitably, are not gradually evolved and expanded like the blossom from the seed. The sentences are loose, often inartificial and tyro-like, tacked together by a profuse employment of relatives and present participles. At times the grammar becomes confused, and falls to pieces. But this looseness has a characteristic effect: it conduces to the general quality of Sidney's style. Here, truly, the style is the man. The long, fluctuant sentences, impetuously agglomerated rather than organically grown, have a copious and dissolving melody, quite harmonious with the subject-matter and the nature of the man. Jeremy Taylor, too, mounds his magnificent sentences rather than construes them: but the etfed is different and more masculine; nay, they are stru6f ural compared with Sidney's — so far had prose travelled during the interim. The Arcadia is tedious to us in its unvarying chivalrous fantasy and unremittent lusciousness long drawn-out. Yet it has at moments a certain primitive tenderness, natural and captivating in no slight degree. No modern romancer could show us a passage like this, so palpitating in its poured-out feminine compassion. The hero has attempted suicide by his mistress's couch:
Therefore, getting with speed her weak, though well-accorded, limbs out of her sweetened bed, as when jewels are hastily pulled out of some rich coffer, she spared not the nakedness of her tender feet, but, I think, borne as fast with desire as fear carried Daphne, she came running to Fyrocles, and finding his spirits something troubled with the fall, she put by the bar that lay close to him, and straining him in her wellbeloved embracements; * My comfort, my joy, my life,' said she, ' what haste have you to kill your Philoclea with the most cruel torment that ever lady suffered i '
What a delightful chivalry of heart there Is in it all! How exquisitely felt that phrase, ' her sweetened bed '! How charmingly fancied the image which follows it; and how beautiful— ' she spared not the nakedness of her tender feet '! How womanly Philoclea's outburst, and the tender eagerness of the whole pidure! In other passages Sidney shows his powder over that pastoral depidion dear to the EHzabethans — artificial, if you will, refined and courtly, yet simple as the lisp of babes:
There were hills which garnished their proud heights with trees; humble valleys, whose bare estate seemed comforted with the refreshing of silver rivers; meadows, enamelled with all sorts of eye-pleasing flowers; thickets, which, being Hned with most pleasant shade, were witnessed so, too, by a cheerful disposition of many well-tuned birds; each pasture stored with sheep, feeding with sober security; while the lambs, with bleating oratory, craved the dam's comfort. Here a shepherd's boy piping, as though he should never be old; there a young shepherdess knitting, and withal singing; and it seemed that her voice comforted her hands to work and her hands kept time to her voice-music.
Sidney is not without that artificial balance and antithesis which, in its most excessive form, we know as euphuism. This, and the other features of his style, appear where we should least exped them; for his style has not the flexibility which can adjust itself to varying themes. How shall an age accustomed to the dired battle-music of Kipling and Steevens admit such tortuous narratives of confli6l as his? Assuredly he might have learned much from the forthright old Northern sagas, if he had known them, in the art of warlike narrative. But his best prose is, after all, to be found, not in the romantic Arcadia^ but in the Defence of Poesy. There he has had a set purpose of conviftion, of attack and defence before him, and is not constantly concerned with artistic writing. The result is more truly artistic for having less explicit design of art. We get not only melodiously-woven sentences, but also touches of true fire and vigour: he is even homely on occasion. It is from the D fence of Poesy that critics mostly choose their ' Sidneian showers of sweet discourse.'
Very plainly Sidney was no believer in that modern fanaticism — art for art's sake. But from his own standpoint, which is the eternal standpoint, no liner apology for poetry has ever been penned. The constru6lion has not the perfe6lion of subsequent prose — of Raleigh at his best, or Browne. The sentences do not always stop at their climax, but are weakened by a tagged-on continuation. But, for all the partial inexpertncss, it is splendid writing, with already the suggestion of the arresting phrase and stately cadences presently to be iu English prose. He is specially felicitous in those sayings of dire6l and homely phrase which have become household words: ' A tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney-corner,' or that other wellknown saying that Chevy-Chase moved him * like the sound of a trumpet.' It was a great and original genius, perhaps in prose (where he had no models) even more than in poetry, which was cut short on the field of Zutphen; even as the Spanish Garcilaso, also young, noble, and a pastoral poet, fell in the breach of a northern town.