by C. S. Lewis
Poetically the chief contrast between Spenser and Tasso at this point is one of complexity. Tasso does a very simple thing and does it extremely well. Spenser builds up a contrast which will be lost unless the reader can carry it in his head for six cantos—that is, for thousands of lines. I don’t think that means that Spenser is more modern; I think it means that he is more medieval. For surely intricacy is a mark of the medieval mind: intricacy in scholastic philosophy, in Gothic architecture, in dress, in the rhyme schemes of poetry, and (what here concerns us most) the intricacy of allegory. It is not fanciful to see an analogy between the superior intricacy of Spenser’s fable over Tasso’s and the difference between his stanza and the ottava rima. Both are things of untiring beauty, but how different they are. The Italian stanza is all clear bell-like music; it carries you on with untroubled speed through the whole length of some of the longest poems in the world. The Spenserian is labyrinthine and meditative, turning back upon itself in the centre where the two rhymes meet and then pausing again, either for recapitulation or thundering defiance, or for a dying fall in the final alexandrine.
Professor Mario Praz has justly pointed out how Milton’s abstinence from the particular, his lunghezza de’ membri e de’ periodi, and his verses entering l’uno nell’altro, conform to Tasso’s precepts.* Yet it is extraordinary how little recognizable Tasso we find in Milton. The councils in Heaven and Hell, the descent of Gabriel and Michael, and other such ‘machines’ (as the old critics would have called them) are part of the Homeric and Virgilian tradition as Christianized by Vida amidst the tasteless absurdities of the Christiad. There is possibly a closer connexion in these two pictures:
Quando dall’alto soglio il Padre Eterno,
Ch’è nella parte più del Ciel sincera,
E quanto è dalle stelle al basso inferno,
Tanto è più in su della stellata spera,
Gli occhi in giù volse, e in un sol punto, e in una
Vista mirò ciò, ch’in se il mondo aduna—
(Gerusalemme Liberata, I, vii, 3–8)
and
Now had the Almighty Father from above,
From the pure empyrean where he sits
High throned above all highth, bent down his eye,
His own works and their works at once to view.
(P.L. III, 56–9)
But even here the similarity is not of the closest. Where Milton explicitly recalls the Italian epics it is usually Tasso’s predecessors he thinks of. Thus at the very outset he challenges comparison with Ariosto by promising
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,*
a direct translation of
Cosa non detta in prosa mai né in rima.*
And in the severest of all his poems he turns aside to remember, of all people, Boiardo:
Such forces met not, nor so wide a camp
When Agrican with all his Northern powers
Beseig’d Albracca, as Romances tell,
The City of Gallaphrone, from thence to win
The fairest of her Sex, Angelica,
His daughter, sought by many prowest Knights,
Both Paynim and the peers of Charlemagne.
(P.R. III, 337–43)
How closely he had read the Innamorato may be seen from a passage in Paradise Lost where he reproduces a passage from it, I suppose unconsciously. Boiardo has said (II, xxx, 44–8)
Da l’altra parte anchora i Saracini
Facean tremar di stridi tutto il loco,
Correndo l’un ver l’altro, son vicini,
Scema il campo in mezzo a poco a poco;
Fossa non v’è, nè fiume, che confini. . . .
Part of this comes in P.L. VI at line 68
On they move
Indissolubly firm; nor obvious Hill
Nor straitening Vale, nor Wood, nor Stream, divides
Their perfect ranks.
The other part comes about thirty lines later in the form
for now
’Twixt Host and Host but narrow space was left.
This is not conscious imitation: it is the involuntary reminiscence of a man steeped in another author. Yet who would have thought a priori that Milton delighted in the winning absurdities of Boiardo? It raises our opinion of both poets.
But it is time to draw to a close an inquiry which is already proving itself so negative. Of Tasso’s minor works we find traces in English, but usually so much of a piece with the general Italian influence as to be hardly worth picking out. Of his great poem we find much praise and constant enjoyment and one translation which is very well worth reading on its own merits. Perhaps the truth is that what is best in the Gerusalemme is not very imitable. Its conceits, those conceits which led Speroni to call it an epic in madrigals, could be copied; we may be thankful they were not. But its virtues do not easily flow over into other men’s work. No poem is more completely, and in a sense severely, the poem it set out to be and no other. And that, I suggest, is its abiding merit. A certain kind and degree of artificiality, a certain very skilful balance of unity and variety, a certain tone of disciplined ardour—these prevail from the first line to those wholly satisfactory last words e scioglie il voto which Tasso had in mind before he put pen to paper. Those words may be applied to the poet as well as to the hero. Scioglie il voto: he did what he meant, he made good his promise. The actions and the characters are far removed from reality as a modern critic understands it. But then they are all at exactly the same distance from it and thus all real in relation to one another—the shepherds who entertain Erminia being neither nearer to nor further from actual rusticity than the great deeds of Argante and Rinaldo are from actual war or Clorinda herself from the Countess in Froissart at the siege of Hennebont who ‘had a glaive in her hand and was that day as good as a man’. In this perfect keeping, which enables us to accept Tasso’s world as real while we are reading, lies the great charm of the poem; in that and in something better. I mean that quite unforced and quite sincere elevation of sentiment which makes us feel that Tasso is, in a very serious and even reverent sense of the word, the most boyish of the poets.
CHAPTER 9
EDMUND SPENSER, 1552–99
1
Edmund Spenser, born in 1552, was (like most great English writers) a member of the middle class, the son of a Londoner. He was sent to the Merchant Taylors’ School, where he learned, and doubtless suffered, under the famous Richard Mulcaster. There is some evidence that Mulcaster, even by the ferocious standards of that age, was a cruel teacher, but he was an interesting man whose views on education can still be studied in his Positions (1581) and Elementary (1582). Though long and very serious, they hardly go further than the theory of spelling, and if Mulcaster had completed a system of education on the same scale it would have been about as long as the Bible; a fact which might possibly have some bearing on the gigantic project (only a quarter of it was carried out) of The Faerie Queene. In 1569 Spenser entered Pembroke Hall at Cambridge. The most interesting thing about his university career is that he passed through it without becoming attached to either of the two intellectual movements by which Cambridge was then agitated.
We can hardly help calling them ‘Puritanism’ and ‘humanism’, but neither word meant the same as it does in modern America. By purity the Elizabethan Puritan meant not chastity but ‘pure’ theology and, still more, ‘pure’ church discipline. That is, he wanted an all-powerful Presbyterian Church, a church stronger than the state, set up in England, on the model of Calvin’s church at Geneva. Knox in Scotland loudly demanded, and at least one English Puritan hinted, that this should be done by armed revolution. Calvin, the great successful doctrinaire who had actually set up the ‘new order’, was the man who had dazzled them all. We must picture these Puritans as the very opposite of those who bear that name today: as young, fierce, progressive intellectuals, very fashionable and up-to-date. They were not teetotallers; bishops, not beer, were their special aversion. And humanists in this context means simply ‘cl
assicists’—men very interested in Greek, but more interested in Latin, and far more interested in the ‘correct’ or ‘classical’ style of Latin than in what the Latin authors said. They wanted English drama to observe the (supposedly) Aristotelian ‘unities’, and some of them wanted English poets to abandon rhyme—a nasty, ‘barbarous’ or ‘Gothic’ affair—and use classical metres in English. There was no necessary enmity between Puritans and humanists. They were often the same people, and nearly always the same sort of people: the young men ‘in the Movement’, the impatient progressives demanding a ‘clean sweep’. And they were united by a common (and usually ignorant) hatred for everything medieval: for scholastic philosophy, medieval Latin, romance, fairies, and chivalry.
There are some possible signs (but all ambiguous) in Spenser’s Shepheards Calendar (1579) that he was once or twice nearly captured by the Puritans, but it certainly did not last long. What is more remarkable is that he never surrendered to humanism, though he clearly lived in a humanistic circle of the narrowest sort. His friend Gabriel Harvey—a very grotesque creature and, to judge from his surviving records, a textbook case of the Inferiority Complex—disapproved of the whole design of The Faerie Queene. He complained that in it ‘Hobgoblin’ was stealing the garland from ‘Apollo’: in other words, that medieval romance was winning the day against classicism. Another member of the circle, the rather fatuous young man who contributed a commentary to The Shepheards Calendar over the signature E.K., could not let Spenser’s references to fairies pass without adding ‘To roote that rancke opinion of Elfes out of mens hearts, the truth is, that there be no such thinges’. Nothing is more impressive about Spenser than his reaction to these humanist friends. He did neither of the two things we should expect. He never quarrelled with them; and he never took the slightest notice of their advice. He remained a faithful friend to Harvey (who had few friends); and he devoted his whole poetical career to a revival, or prolongation, of those medieval motifs which humanism wished to abolish.
Spenser had taken his M.A. in 1576, and in 1578 had found temporary employment as secretary to the Bishop of Rochester. In 1579 he had been at Leicester House and enjoyed the very exciting experience of being noticed (and even used with some ‘familiarity’) by Philip Sidney himself. It must have seemed to the young poet that the world was opening to him. There was of course no question of living by his pen. In the 90’s it was possible to live (precariously) by pamphleteering or (rather better) by writing and acting for the new companies of players, but this was hardly so in the 70’s; nor would such a Bohemian and ‘rake-helly’ career have been at all to Spenser’s mind. On the other hand, we must not picture him choosing a profession or looking for a business opening as a young man might do today. Literary distinction could still lead to employment in the service of one of those great nobles who carried on the work of government. Such a reward fell to Spenser when he became secretary to Lord Grey of Wilton in 1580. Doubtless, it was not the kind of post Spenser had hoped for. It meant ‘foreign service’, for Lord Grey had just been appointed Deputy of Ireland, and Spenser arrived in Dublin in August 1580. He thus became (for life, had he known it) an instrument of the English domination in a hostile and incompletely conquered country. He had already begun The Faerie Queene.
Conquest is an evil productive of almost every other evil both to those who commit and to those who suffer it, and we should look in vain for any fruitful or pleasant relations between Spenser and the Irish. Nothing of that sort was possible. They were to him merely ‘natives’, rebels, and Papists; he to them, a vile heretic and alien Sassenach. The plans which he propounded for their subjugation in his View of the Present State of Ireland (never printed in his lifetime, but written in 1596) are harsh and even cynical; and if some scholars have pleaded, not without success, that they are excusable, this of itself admits that they require excuse. But that, as we shall presently see, is not the whole story about Spenser’s relations to Ireland.
In 1589, after receiving a visit from Raleigh, Spenser returned to England, bringing with him the manuscript of the first three Books of The Faerie Queene, which were published in the following year. They brought him fame, but not the post in England for which, no doubt, he had been hoping, and he returned to his house at Kilcolman in the county Cork. In 1594 he married Elizabeth Boyle: the sonnets (Amoretti) and the Epithalamion, both published in 1595, poetize his courtship and its conclusion. Epithalamion is his happiest poem. But happiness did not last long. There was another visit to England in 1595, and the second instalment of The Faerie Queene was printed in 1596. Then came his doom. In 1598 the Irish rose under the Earl of Tyrone, defeated the English near Armagh, and flung a force into Munster. What they would do when they reached Kilcolman, every reader of Irish history knows in advance. It was, after all, the old seat of the Desmonds: the heretic, foreigner, and upstart had usurped it long enough. It is said (by Ben Jonson) that Spenser’s third child, a baby, died in the flames. By December Spenser had contrived to reach London, carrying dispatches about the late rising. He died, certainly in poverty, as some say actually of hunger, in January 1599.
2
Though Spenser seldom made poetry out of his own life in the direct fashion of Wordsworth’s Prelude, the pattern of his biography and that of his poetical output are nevertheless interlocked in an interesting way. On the biographical side we have the long years of residence in Ireland punctuated by brief visits to England: that is, to civilization, safety, the court, patrons, and the hope of social success. On the poetical side, we have the single great work, certainly begun very early and perhaps begun even before the appearance of The Shepheards Calendar, obstinately adhered to in the teeth of criticism, worked at all his life and left unfinished; its composition punctuated, or interrupted, by the minor poems, all of them (except the Epithalamion) inferior to it. They usually came out just after a visit to England. It is not hard to guess what was happening. Whenever Spenser can reach England—whenever, in our language, he ‘goes on leave’—he brings with him some more Faerie Queene to be published. That is what he cares about. But of course the publisher urges him to ‘follow it up’. Spenser gets together a volume of odds and ends, some of them not very recent work. Thus we get the Complaints volume of 1591 and the Colin Clouts Come Home Againe volume of ’95. However their contents were written, they were published, we feel, less by Spenser the poet than by Spenser the man; Spenser the man, seizing an opportunity of reminding the patrons and the public that he was still in existence. For of course a great work slowly growing, stanza by stanza, through a lifetime, is a thing that people easily overlook. It thus comes about that the many years in Ireland lie behind Spenser’s greatest poetry, and the few years in England behind his minor poetry. It is hard to resist the conviction that his prolonged exile was a great gain to English literature. It removed him perforce from the rapid changes of fashion, the ephemeral hopes and fears, the petty intrigues, and the time-wasting attendance upon great persons, which would almost certainly have been the portion of a literary man hanging upon the fringes of the court: it forced him to sink deeper and deeper into the world he was creating. To that extent, we can call The Faerie Queene an Irish product.
We can perhaps say a little more. Spenser could not love the people, but, surprisingly, he loved the country. He chose an Irish hill, Arlo, for his assembly of gods (Book VII, the ‘Mutability’ cantos, vi and vii). He introduced a poetic catalogue of Irish rivers (Book IV, canto xi) into one of his most highly wrought passages. In prose (View of the Present State) he pronounced Ulster ‘a most beautifull and sweete countrie as any is under heaven’. He delighted in Irish history and antiquities and hoped to write a book about them. What is even stranger (and helps to show his freedom from the narrowness of humanistic taste), he had listened to Irish poetry in translation and thought that it ‘savored of sweete witt and good invencion’. Most interesting from this point of view is the poem Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, not published until 1595 but written to celebrat
e Colin Clout’s (that is, Spenser’s) return from his first English visit in 1590—his return to an Ireland which, as the title shows, has now become ‘home’. It is a curiously broken-backed poem. It starts out with the view that we should expect. The visit to England has been wonderful because there Colin Clout saw the ‘blessed eye’ of ‘that Angel’ Queen Elizabeth, because her realm is all ‘fruitful corne, faire trees, fresh herbage’, because (unlike Ireland) it has no ‘raging sword’, no ‘ravenous wolves’ nor ‘outlawes’, and because the court is full of exquisite ladies and admirable poets. This, I say, is what we should expect: a compliment to the queen and the possible patrons and an appeal for an English job. But then Colin goes on in the latter part of the poem to paint a wholly different picture. His Anglo-Irish friends ask him why he ever returned from such a delightful country to ‘this barren soil’ of Ireland ‘where cold and care and penury do dwell’. Colin replies: one glance at the ‘enormities’ of the English court convinced him that it would be a great mistake to ‘abandon quiet home’ for court life and far wiser ‘back to his sheep to turne’. For now it appears that court is full of ‘malice and strife’, lying, backbiting, treachery, and dissimulation, no place ‘for any gentle wit’, and that the love which courtiers incessantly talk of is a lewd, faithless affair quite unlike the high mystery of love as ‘we poore shepheards’ know it. All this rings true. Spenser’s visit to England had been a disappointment. He was not made for the fashionable world. This contrast between the ‘vain shows’ of court and the simplicities of rustic life recurs increasingly in the later parts of The Faerie Queene. Shepherds, hermits, satyrs, even the Savage, become types to which he turns with love. It is difficult not to conclude that this represents his growing (though perhaps unadmitted) reconciliation to what had once been his place of exile but had now become home. He was coming to need that Irish life: the freedom, the informality, the old clothes, the hunting, farming, and fishing (he was proud of the super-excellent trout in his own river at Kilcolman). He may, as a poet, have needed the very country. There is a real affinity between his Faerie Queene, a poem of quests and wanderings and inextinguishable desires, and Ireland itself—the soft, wet air, the loneliness, the muffled shapes of the hills, the heart-rending sunsets. It was of course a different Ireland from ours, an Ireland without potatoes, whitewashed cottages, or bottled stout: but it must already have been ‘the land of longing’. The Faerie Queene should perhaps be regarded as the work of one who is turning into an Irishman. For Ireland shares with China the power of assimilating all her invaders. It is an old complaint that all who go there—Danes, Normans, English, Scotch, very Firbolgs—rapidly become ‘more Irish than the Irish themselves’. With Spenser the process was perhaps beginning. It is true he hated the Irish and they him: but, as an Irishman myself, I take leave to doubt whether that is a very un-Irish trait. (‘The Irish, sir,’ said Dr Johnson, ‘are an honest people. They never speak well of one another.’)