THEIR LEADING CHARACTERISTICS. 109 an artist's pencil, but all fused together in the harmonising light of a broadly sympathetic intellect. The student will not only be struck by Chaucer's variety, but by his picturesqueness, which is attributable partly to the bright colours and quaint forms of the society he drew, and partly to his own love of light and shade and bold contrasts. There is a clanking of spurs in his verse, a neighing of horses, a jingling of bells, a glittering of gay dresses; banners wave, and music rises merrily into the clear air. How much there is of honest laughter I need not say, nor how much of pitying tears. Again, he is of all our poets the keenest observer, and his portraits are so truly and vividly drawn, that even at this day we recognise them to have been literal likenesses, almost photographic in their fidelity. He saw everything with those keen grey eyes of his, and all he saw he noted down, touch after touch, with astonishing minuteness. The monk's sleeves are "purfled at the hand with fur." The wife of Bath's hat is "broad as a buckler or a targe." Nothing escapes him. What he lacks is, I think, the divine gift of imagination, that gift which in a Shakespeare effervesces in an Ariel and a Titania; in a Spenser, in an Una and a Sir Guyon. And yet when I remember his "Constance" in the Man of Law's Tale, and his gorgeously-coloured phantasy of the "House of Fame," I feel that this judgment is too sweeping. Chaucer," says Taine, "is like a jeweller with his hands full ; pearls and glass beads, sparkling diamonds and common agates, black jet and ruby roses, all that history and imagination had been able to gather and fashion during these centuries in the East, in France, in Wales, in Provence, in Italy, all that had rolled his way, clashed together, broken or polished by the stream of centuries, and by the great jumble of human memory, he holds in his hand, arranges it, composes therefrom a long sparkling ornament with twenty pendants, a thousand facets, which, by its splendid variety of contrasts, may attract and satisfy the eyes of those most greedy for amusement and novelty." Our poet will supply the student with ample material for reflection. His diction, his versification, the chronological sequence of his works, the light he throws on the manners and customs of his age, the skill with which he tells his stories, his power of portraying character, the extent to which he was influenced by the Italian poets, the influence he has himself exerted in English poetry, are all interesting subjects of investigation. Chaucer wrote the "Parson's Tale" in his death-year, 1400; John Tyndall translated the New Testament into English (and "fixed our tongue once for all") in 1525. The interval forms the second and last great blank in the records of our literature. From the Reformation onwards the intellectual activity of our race, in the region of letters at least, may have occasionally run somewhat 1 Taine's "History of English Literature," vol. i. p. 179. thin and shallow, but has never wholly ceased to flow. Even this dreary interval has one or two notable names; such as the constitutional jurist, Sir John Fortescue; the scholarly and genial monk of Bury, John Lydgate; and that accurate but unimaginative versifier, Thomas Occleve. But upon neither of these writers would I advise the student to bestow his leisure. Let him pass on to the era of the English Renascence, the natural complement of that great revival which had already taken place in Italy, and the immediate result of Caxton's introduction of the printingpress. It was facilitated by the general spirit of inquiry and unrest which sprang from religious causes; for the reformation of religion and the revival of letters were two parts of one great movement, each aiding and sustaining and impelling the other. Literary debate and discussion fostered religious controversy; religious controversy promoted literary debate and discussion. In England the first effect of the new impulse was the translation of the old classic writers; and hence it came about that the national taste was refined and the national judgment corrected before original work was attempted on an extensive scale. We may trace, for instance, the distinct influence of the ancient authors in Sir Thomas More's admirable Histories. On the other hand, the Italian Renascence helped to mould and colour the love-poetry of the Earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt. But before these elegant writers came a disciple of Chaucer, John Skelton (1460-1529), to whom reference must be made as a man of vigorous and vehement talent and large scholarship, who wrote satire with much strength and not a little coarseness, and lyrical poetry with considerable grace. There is a good edition of his works by Dyce. Skelton, in English poetry, may be taken as the next successor to Chaucer. I must note also the Scotch poets, who were the first to cultivate the poetry of nature-James I., author of "The King's Quhair" (quire or book); William Dunbar, a fine singer, author of "The Thistle and the Rose," "The Golden Targe," "The Seven Deadly Sins;" and Gawain Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, who interspersed some brilliant "prologues" in his translation of Virgil's "Eneid." Though called "Scotch" poets, it is important to recollect that they were really English poets writing in a northern dialect. There were but two languages in our island-English and Celtic (i.e., Gaelic). In Elizabethan poetry the first name that greets us is Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset and Lord Buckhurst (1527-1608), who wrote the "Induction" to the "Mirror of Magistrates," a poem imitated from Boccaccio's "Falls of Princes," and, along with Thomas Norton, the first regular English drama, the "Tragedy of Gorboduc." Of this Hazlitt says:"As a work of genius it may be set down as nothing, for it contains hardly a memorable line or passage; as a work of art it may be considered as a monument to the 66 EDMUND spenser. III taste and skill of the authors." To George Gascoigne (1530-77) we owe the "Steele Glasse," our first regular English satire. While Sackville and Gascoigne were still young men, Edmund Spenser (1552-99) was spending his boyhood in London. He was seven years old when the "Mirror of Magistrates" appeared. Educated at Cambridge, he left the university at the age of twentyfour; was afterwards in Lancashire; returned to the south after an unhappy love-suit; made the acquaintance of Sir Philip Sidney, and at Sidney's pleasant Kentish home of Penshurst wrote his Shepherd's Calendar" (in 1579, fourteen years before Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis"). There, too, he began his great poem of the "Faery Queen," which he took with him to Ireland in 1580, and upon which he was still at work in 1589, when Sir Walter Raleigh visited him in his castle of Kilcolman, among the alder groves brightened by the river Mulla. The splendour of genius which irradiated it so fascinated Raleigh that he insisted on Spenser's returning with him to London to be presented to the Queen, and Elizabeth's leisure was often charmed by the poet's recital of his glorious verse. The "Faery Queen" (or rather the first three books) saw the light in 1590-the year which witnessed the production of "Love's Labour's Lost;" so that the spring of Shakespeare's genius corresponds with the maturity of Spenser's. Returning to Ireland, he wrote in 1594 his "Colin Clout's Come Home Again ;" married; and published in 1595 three more books of the "Faery Queen," and the "Hymns of Love and Beauty." His later life was darkened by heavy misfortune, and it is said that "he died for lack of bread" in King Street, London, on the 16th January 1599. He was buried in Westminster Abbey by the side of Geoffrey Chaucer, the first-as he was the second-of England's great poets. It is fitting that they should sleep in such close companionship. I need not enumerate Spenser's works, for the student will find numerous convenient editions at his disposal; as, for instance, Todd's in one volume, published by Routledge; Morris's, 1869; and the Globe, published by Macmillan. For criticism, see G. L. Craik's "Spenser and his Poetry," Taine's "English Literature," Henry Morley's "Library of English Literature," Leigh Hunt's "Imagination and Fancy," and Dean Church's monograph in "Men of Letters." A thorough knowledge of Spenser, or at all events of the "Faery Queen," is essential to the student of English poetry, for all our later poetry owns his influence. (a.) In the "Faery Queen" the first point to be noticed is the allegory, which represents the aspiration of the human soul (King Arthur)_towards a complete union with the perfection of divine love (the Faery Queen). Each book of the poem represents a moral virtue in the person of a "fairy knight," who does battle with and conquers the sins and errors that are antagonistic to that virtue. Thus in principle II2 Spenser's GENIUS. Spenser is at one with William Langland; both aim at the attainment of "plain living and high thinking." (B.) Observe, second, the invention; incident following upon incident in exhaustless profusion, each book or canto containing the materials of a dozen romances. And, (v.) note the language, with its colour and its music, its rich imagery, its wonderful cadences, the reflex of an extraordinarily affluent and spontaneous imagination. Of pathos or of humour Spenser was not a master; but in grace, in pictorial power, in inventiveness, in magic charm, he has never been surpassed. (8.) As to the metrical form, the stanza employed, now known as Spenserian, was made by the addition of an Alexandrine to the eight-line used by the French poets in their "Chant Royal," and copied from them by Chaucer in his "Envoye to the Compleynte of the Black Knight." The eight-line stanza consisted of two quatrains of ten-syllabled lines with alternate rhymes. fine pomp and dignity were given to it by the felicitous addition of the Alexandrine. (e.) It may be added that, besides the main allegory, Spenser's poem presents several subordinate allegories of a political character. Moreover, it contains numerous paraphrases and imitations from the ancient poets, and from Ariosto and Tasso, as well as incidents and illustrations borrowed from the old chivalric romances. 66 A He is not so great a poet," says Leigh Hunt, "as Shakespeare or Dante; he has less imagination, though more fancy, than Milton. He does not see things so purely in their elements as Dante, neither can he combine their elements like Shakespeare, nor bring such frequent intensities of words or of wholesale imaginative sympathy to bear upon his subjects as any one of them, though he has given noble diffused instances of the latter in his Una and his Mammon, and his accounts of jealousy and despair. Take him for what he is, whether greater or less than his fellows, the poetical faculty is so abundantly and beautifully predominant in him above every other-though he had passion, and thought, and plenty of ethics, and was as learned a man as Ben Jonson, perhaps as Milton himself that he has always been felt by his countrymen to be what Charles Lamb called him, the 'poet's poet.' He has had more idolatry and imitation from his brethren1 than all the rest put together. The old undramatic poets, Drayton, Browne, Drummond, Giles, and Phineas Fletcher, were as full of him as the dramatic were of Shakespeare. Milton studied and used him, calling him 'sage and serious Spenser;' and adding, that he 1 Compare the fine lines by Keats (in "An Induction to a Poem ") :- "Spenser! thy brows are arched, open, kind, And come like a clear sunrise to my mind; 'dared be known to think him a better teacher than Scotus and Aquinas.' Cowley said he became a poet by reading him. Dryden claimed him for a master. Pope said he read him with as much pleasure when he was old as young. Collins and Gray loved him ; Thomson, Shenstone, and a host of inferior writers, expressly imitated him; Burns, Byron, Shelley, and Keats made use of his stanza; Coleridge eulogised him.” Spenser comes before us as pre-eminently the Elizabethan poet. Of him, as of Chaucer, and perhaps of every great poet, it may be said that he was at once the product and the mirror of his age. We feel in him the swirl and eddy of its master-currents of thought and passion; the thrill and touch of its unresting enterprise and adventure, of its boundless and spontaneous energy. In the "Faery Queen" we come into close contact with that mood of religious meditation and aspiration, of reaction against social corruption and individual depravity, which was to make the strength of Puritanism. From end to end it is a protest against vice and worldliness, a yearning after a purer and higher life. The English love of story-telling was strongly developed in our poet, as was the taste of the time for the gorgeousness of pageant and procession. He was sensible of the revival of the old classic authors, and his imagination responded to the narratives of magic isles and gorgeous lands beyond the seas brought back by the Elizabethan mariners from their daring voyages. The struggle against Rome appealed to his sympathies, and he felt the growing thirst for individual freedom, for the well-ordered liberty of a constitutional state. Thus his genius became what it was by virtue of the conditions under which it grew up and flourished. The first regular English tragedy, "Gorboduc," was put on the stage in 1562; but the first English comedy, "Ralph Roister Doister," by Nicholas Udall, master of Eton, had been acted fully twelve years before. Both comedy and tragedy, however, were simply tentative; and the first really great plays of the English theatre were those of Christopher Marlowe (1564-98), who, in power of expression and audacity of imagination, is inferior only to Shakespeare himself. He perished in a tavern brawl in his thirtieth year, just as his intellect was learning self-control and his work gaining in artistic completeness of structure; but he had lived long enough to secure immortal fame by his "Jew of Malta," "Dr. Faustus," and "Edward II." It is thought that he worked with Shakespeare on some of the earlier plays that bear the great dramatist's name. Hazlitt places him almost first in the list of dramatic worthies. He was a little before Shakespeare's time (that is, before his maturity), and has a marked character from him and the rest. "There is a lust of power in his writings, a hunger and thirst after unrighteousness, a glow of the imagination unhallowed by anything but its own energies." Passion runs riot over his page like a flood of burning lava. H |