Progress, where the characters are real persons with nicknames. Perhaps one of the most curious warnings against another attempt at narrative allegory on a great scale, may be found in Tasso's account of what he himself intended in and by his Jerusalem Delivered. As characteristic of Spenser, I would call your particular attention in the first place to the indescribable sweetness and fluent projection of his verse, very clearly distinguishable from the deeper and more interwoven harmonies of Shakspeare and Milton. This stanza is a good instance of what I mean:— Yet she, most faithfull ladie, all this while Far from all peoples preace, as in exile, In wildernesse and wastfull deserts strayd To seeke her knight; who, subtily betrayd Through that late vision which th' enchaunter wrought, Through woods and wastnes wide him daily sought, F. Qu. B. i. c. 3, st. 3. 2. Combined with this sweetness and fluency, the scientific construction of the metre of the Faery Queene is very noticeable. One of Spenser's arts is that of alliteration, and he uses it with great effect in doubling the impression of an image:— In wildernesse and wastful deserts- Whereas the damned ghosts in torments fry, And with sharp shrilling shrieks doth bootlesse cry,-&c. He is particularly given to an alternate alliteration, which is, perhaps, when well used, a great secret in melody : A ramping lyon rushed suddenly,— And sad to see her sorrowful constraint, And on the grasse her daintie limbes did lay,-&c. You can not read a page of the Faery Queene, if you read for that purpose, without perceiving the intentional alliterativeness of the words; and yet so skilfully is this managed, that it never strikes any unwarned ear as artificial, or other than the result of the necessary movement of the verse.. 3. Spenser displays great skill in harmonizing his descriptions of external nature and actual incidents with the allegorical character and epic activity of the poem. Take these two beautiful passages as illustrations of what I mean: By this the northerne wagoner had set His sevenfol teme behind the stedfast starre In hast was climbing up the easterne hill, Full envious that Night so long his roome did fill; When those accursed messengers of hell, That feigning dreame, and that faire-forged spright At last, the golden orientall gate Of greatest Heaven gan to open fayre; And Phoebus, fresh as brydegrome to his mate, In sunbright armes and battailons array; For with that Pagan proud he combat will that day. Ib. c. 5, st. 2. Observe also the exceeding vividness of Spenser's descriptions. They are not, in the true sense of the word, picturesque; but are composed of a wondrous series of images, as in our dreams. Compare the following passage with any thing you may remember in pari materia in Milton or Shakspeare: His haughtie helmet, horrid all with gold, Both glorious brightnesse and great terrour bredd; For all the crest a dragon did enfold With greedie pawes, and over all did spredd Close couched on the bever, seemd to throw L* Upon the top of all his loftie crest A bounch of haires discolourd diversly, With sprinkled pearle and gold full richly drest, Like to an almond tree ymounted hye On top of greene Selinis all alone, With blossoms brave bedecked daintily, At everie little breath that under heaven is blowne. Ib. c. 7, st. 31-2. 4. You will take especial note of the marvellous independence and true imaginative absence of all particular space or time in the Faery Queene. It is in the domains neither of history or geography; it is ignorant of all artificial boundary, all material obstacles; it is truly in land of Faery, that is, of mental space. The poet has placed you in a dream, a charmed sleep, and you neither wish, nor have the power, to inquire where you are, or how you got there. It reminds me of some lines of my own : Oh! would to Alla! The raven or the sea-mew were appointed Remorse, Act iv. sc. 3. Indeed Spenser himself, in the conduct of his great poem, may be represented under the same image, his symbolizing purpose being his mariner's compass : As pilot well expert in perilous wave, That to a stedfast starre his course hath bent, So the poet through the realms of allegory. B. ii. c. 7, st. 1. 5. You should note the quintessential character of Christian chivalry in all his characters, but more especially in his women. The Greeks, except, perhaps, in Homer, seem to have had no way of making their women interesting, but by unsexing them, as in the instances of the tragic Medea, Electra, &c. Contrast such characters with Spenser's Una, who exhibits no prominent feature, has no particularization, but produces the same feeling that a statue does, when contemplated at a distance : From her fayre head her fillet she undight, Did never mortal eye behold such heavenly grace. B. i. c. 3, st. 4. 6. In Spenser we see the brightest and purest form of that nationality which was so common a characteristic of our elder poets. There is nothing unamiable, nothing contemptuous of others, in it. To glorify their country-to elevate England into a queen, an empress of the heart-this was their passion and object; and how dear and important an object it was or may be, let Spain, in the recollection of her Cid, declare! There is a great magic in national names. What a damper to all interest is a list of native East Indian merchants! Unknown names are non-conductors; they stop all sympathy. No one of our poets has touched this string more exquisitely than Spenser; especially in his chronicle of the British Kings (B. ii. c. 10), and the marriage of the Thames with the Medway (B. iv. c. 11), in both which passages the mere names constitute half the pleasure we receive. To the same feeling we must in particular attribute Spenser's sweet reference to Ireland : Ne thence the Irishe rivers absent were; Sith no lesse famous than the rest they be, &c. Ib. And Mulla mine, whose waves I whilom taught to weep. Ib. And there is a beautiful passage of the same sort in the Colin Clout's Come Home Again : "One day,” quoth he, “I sat, as was my trade, Under the foot of Mole," &c. Lastly, the great and prevailing character of Spenser's mind is fancy under the conditions of imagination, as an ever-present but not always active power. He has an imaginative fancy, but he has not imagination, in kind or degree, as Shakspeare and Milton have; the boldest effort of his powers in this way is the character of Talus.* Add to this a feminine tenderness and almost maidenly purity of feeling, and above all, a deep moral earnestness which produces a believing sympathy and acquiescence in the reader, and you have a tolerably adequate view of Spenser's intellectual being. LECTURE VII. BEN JONSON, BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, AND MASSINGER A CONTEMPORARY is rather an ambiguous term, when applied to authors. It may simply mean that one man lived and wrote while another was yet alive, however deeply the former may have been indebted to the latter as his model. There have been instances in the literary world that might remind a botanist of a singular sort of parasite plant, which rises above ground, independent and unsupported, an apparent original; but trace its roots, and you will find the fibres all terminating in the root of another plant at an unsuspected distance, which, perhaps, from want of sun and genial soil, and the loss of sap, has scarcely been able to peep above the ground. Or the word may mean those whose compositions were contemporaneous in such a sense as to preclude all likelihood of the one having borrowed from the other. In the latter sense, I should call Ben Jonson a contemporary of Shakspeare, though he long survived him; while I should prefer the phrase of immediate successors for Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger, though they too were Shakspeare's contemporaries in the former sense. * B. 5. Legend of Artegall.—Ed. |