by C. S. Lewis
3
When Spenser and Sidney began writing, English poetry was in a deplorable condition. Short histories of literature sometimes give the impression that the ‘Revival of Learning’ began from the first to exercise a quickening influence upon our literature. I find no evidence that this was so. Nearly all the good poetry of the sixteenth century is crowded into its last twenty years (except in Scotland, where it comes at the beginning of the century and is overwhelmingly medieval in character). In England, until Sidney and Spenser arose, the last poet of real importance had been Sir Thomas Wyatt, who died in 1542: and his poetry, at its best, owes at least as much to the Middle Ages as the Revival of Learning. Between Wyatt and Spenser there extends a period in which it looks as though English poetry were never going to rise again even half so high as it had already risen in the Middle Ages. The best product of this dull period had been the Songs and Sonnets (1557), usually called Tottel’s Miscellany from the name of its publisher, which had contained, along with a very large body of wooden and clumsy verse, Wyatt’s lyrics and some graceful (though rather tame) pieces by Surrey and others. Far worse and more characteristic was the huge Mirror for Magistrates which came out, repeatedly added to, at various dates from 1555 to 1587. In it the ghosts of various historical characters appeared to tell their stories or, as the Mirror calls them, their ‘tragedies’. Apart from a good ‘induction’ by Thomas Sackville and one goodish ‘tragedie’ by John Dolman, the Mirror is about as bad as it could be. But it was fatally popular and thus important for its bad influence on later poets and as an index of the depths to which taste had sunk. In it, as in the work of Googe, Brooke, Turberville, or the truly appalling translators of Seneca, we see a total loss of that feeling for style which seems to have come so easily to most medieval poets. It is against this background that we can best understand the value, for their own age, of Spenser’s minor works and most easily pardon the fact that even in his greatest poetry he was seldom safe from a relapse into the bad manner of his predecessors. He was not a man laying the coping stone on an edifice of good poetry already half-built; he was a man struggling by his own exertions out of a horrible swamp of dull verbiage, ruthlessly over-emphatic metre, and screaming rhetoric.
Thus The Shepheards Calendar is not, at this distance of time, a very attractive work. Even if we can re-acquire (and if we are to study English literature, we must try) a taste for the pastoral, we shall still find that Spenser’s shepherds fall between two stools. They are not realistic enough to give us the pleasure we get from the rustics of Hardy or of Huckleberry Finn: yet they are far too realistic to waft us away into the purely poetic pastoral world of Drayton’s Muses Elizium or Milton’s Lycidas. This happened, I believe, because Spenser was hesitating between two incompatible models: the wholly idealized Arcadia of Sannazaro and the more realistic (but poetically negligible) Eclogues (1515 and 1521) of Alexander Barclay. But if we had come to the Calendar, as its first readers did, from verse like that of the Mirror, we should feel as if we were passing from winter to spring. We should read
The simple ayre, the gentle warbling wynde,
So calme, so coole, as no where else I fynde:
The grassye ground with daintye Daysiès dight,
The Bramble bush, where Byrds of every kynde
To the waters fall their tunes attemper right,
(Calendar, ‘June’, 4–8)
and we should perceive that poetry, which for nearly forty years had been able only to shout or mumble, was now once more beginning to sing. There are moments in literary history at which to achieve a manner and a music is more important than to deliver any ‘message’, however profound or prophetic. The message can wait; it will have to wait forever unless the manner and music are found. It is idle to talk about a great ballet until people have, in the crudest and simplest sense, learned to dance, learned the steps. In the Calendar Spenser is learning—in its best passages has already learned—the steps.
Three poems which were not printed till they appeared in the Complaints of 1591 may have been written shortly after the Calendar. One of them is merely a translation from the difficult and very minor poem of Virgil’s called the ‘Culex’, or ‘Gnat’, but the other two are interesting because they are so different from each other and from The Faerie Queene, thus warning us not to suppose that a great poet can write only the sort of poetry which he chooses to write chiefly. Muiopotmos is about the adventures of a butterfly, a poem full of flowers and sunshine written with great enjoyment in a lighter and swifter stanza than the famous ‘Spenserian’. In it, as nowhere else, we see Spenser at play. Many critics believe that it is a veiled account of some affair at court, but I do not think this is certain. The third poem is Mother Hubberds Tale, a satire, modelled not (as Spenser’s humanist friends would doubtless have wished) on the formal satire of the Romans but on the great medieval beast fable Reynard the Fox. The Ape and the Fox go into partnership and play all manner of tricks on the other beasts, even stealing the Lion’s crown and sceptre. The tale is, of course, full of allusions to contemporary politics which cannot be discussed here. In this poem we find none of the slow, stately pace which is characteristic of The Faerie Queene. Spenser writes in couplets, uses a homely style, and gets over the ground briskly.
Colin Clouts Come Home Againe has already been mentioned; the ‘ambivalence’ which makes it so interesting as a personal document spoils its unity of effect as a poem. Daphnaida (1591), an elegy on the death of a noble lady, is perhaps the worst poem Spenser ever wrote. It is modelled on Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess but entirely loses the charm of its original by exaggeration and straining after effect. The Elizabethans, even at their best, seem to lack that effortless good taste—one might almost say, that good breeding—which we nearly always find in the work of the Middle Ages. The Renaissance did not make men, in all senses, more civilized.
In the years ’95 and ’96 Spenser published a body of poetry about love which perhaps marks the summit of his achievement outside The Faerie Queene. The sonnets, or Amoretti (1595), are not among our greatest sonnets. We shall not find in them the almost divine selflessness and evocative power of Shakespeare’s sonnets nor the immediacy of Drayton’s ‘Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part’. Yet if we go to them for what they have to give, for grace and harmony, we can read them with enjoyment. But the Epithalamion which was added to them belongs to a different world, and indeed there is no poem in English at all like it. It traces the whole bridal day and night from the moment at which the bride is awaked to the moment at which the tired lovers fall asleep and the stars pour down good influences on the child they have engendered and on all their descendants yet to be. Into this buoyant poem Spenser has worked all the diverse associations of marriage, actual and poetic, Pagan and Christian: summer, landscape, neighbours, pageantry, religion, riotous eating and drinking, sensuality, moonlight—are all harmonized. The metre is a very long stanza with varying line lengths and a refrain, modelled, in fact, on the Italian canzone but filled with such festal pomp and jollity, such sustained exuberance of the whole man (spiritual, imaginative, and animal), that the effect is much closer to that of some great ode by Pindar than to any Italian poem. Those who have attempted to write poetry will know how very much easier it is to express sorrow than joy. That is what makes the Epithalamion matchless. Music has often reached that jocundity; poetry, seldom.
The Foure Hymnes (of Love and Beauty) which followed in 1596 are not on the same level. It would be hopeless, in the space at my disposal, to attempt to unravel their very learned and curious blend of scriptural, Platonic, and medieval ideas. They contain good poetry, but poetry hardly great enough for the arduous, and indeed overwhelming, themse that Spenser has chosen. The same year saw the publication of the Prothalamion in which Spenser, now writing on someone else’s marriage, tries to repeat the splendours of his own marriage song: I think, with very imperfect success.
But it is high time that we turned to the life work by whi
ch Spenser’s name really lives.
Like most of his contemporaries Spenser believed that English literature could never hold up its head in the world until it had produced a great epic, and that a poet ought to be a moral teacher; unlike some of his contemporaries, he also felt a strong impulse to continue and develop the medieval tradition of chivalrous romance. He did not in fact know very much medieval literature. Much of it was inaccessible in his time and, anyway, too hard for him in language: he makes little use of Malory; what he called ‘Chaucer’ included many un-Chaucerian works and was so textually corrupt that Spenser could not have read it metrically even if he had understood Middle English metre (which he did not). The English poem which probably influenced him most was the late, allegorical romance The Pastime of Pleasure by Stephen Hawes, who wrote in the reign of Henry VII. This lack of medieval scholarship in Spenser was, however, far from being such a disadvantage as we might suppose. In the first place it set him free to embody, almost unconsciously, those elements of the Middle Ages which were still alive all around him in tournament and heraldry, pageant and symbolical pictures, whereas accurate knowledge might have made him merely a pedant and an antiquarian. In the second place, he could find a great deal of the method and temper of medieval romance, already refashioned, already, as it were, predigested and made more available for his purpose, in three great Italian poems: the Orlando Innamorato of Boiardo, the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto, and the Gerusalemme Liberata of Tasso. The first two of these deal with the adventures of Charlemagne and his paladins at war with the Saracens, and admit large comic elements; they are sometimes laughing at the marvels and high-flown sentiments of romance, but then at other times seriously enjoying these very same things. It is not absolutely certain that, in their comic passages, Spenser always saw the joke. The third is about the capture of Jerusalem by Godfrey of Bouillon and his crusaders: it is as serious and religious a poem as Spenser’s own. All three together constitute such a varied, vigorous, unflagging body of poetical storytelling as is hardly equalled anywhere in European literature. They are Spenser’s chief models.
By turning to them he turned his back on the strict humanists, who would have wished him to write a pseudo-classical epic, closely modelled on Virgil, like Ronsard’s Franciade. By making Arthur the hero, or at least the nominal hero, of his poem he nevertheless attempted to gratify the humanists’ wish, and his own, that the great poem should be, in some sort, a national epic. But in order to fulfil the demand that the poet should be a moral teacher he decided that he would follow Hawes as well as the Italians. His poem was to be a romance of chivalry, but it was also to have a secondary meaning throughout: to be, as he said, ‘a continued allegory’. He decided, further, to introduce a new metre. All the Italians had used what is called ottava rima, the stanza which rhymes abababcc, best known to English readers in Byron’s Don Juan or Shelley’s Witch of Atlas. It is a beautifully light, rapid medium, excellently adapted for describing a breathless chase on horseback or telling an amusing anecdote with a dash of impropriety in it. Spenser himself had used it very well in Muiopotmos. But for The Faerie Queene he invented his new nine-line stanza which has wholly different qualities. The more complex interlacing of the rhymes and, still more, the concluding alexandrine, which gives to each stanza the effect of a wave falling on a beach, combine to make it slower, weightier, more stately. Of all Spenser’s innovations his stanza is perhaps the most important. It makes all his resemblances to the Italians merely superficial. It dictates the peculiar tone of The Faerie Queene. Milton, who knew and loved both Spenser and Spenser’s models, described it as ‘sage and solemn tunes’. A brooding solemnity—now deeply joyful, now sensuous, now melancholy, now loaded with dread—is characteristic of the poem at its best.
This brief account of the genesis of The Faerie Queene is needed in order to explain some features of it which may deter modern readers. The necessity is, of course, to be deplored; and it is of very recent growth. From the time of its publication down to about 1914 it was everyone’s poem—the book in which many and many a boy first discovered that he liked poetry; a book which spoke at once, like Homer or Shakespeare or Dickens, to every reader’s imagination. Spenser did not rank as a hard poet like Pindar, Donne, or Browning. How we have lost that approach I do not know. And unfortunately The Faerie Queene suffers even more than most great works from being approached through the medium of commentaries and ‘literary history’. These all demand from us a sophisticated, self-conscious frame of mind. But then, when we have used all these aids, we discover that the poem itself demands exactly the opposite response. Its primary appeal is to the most naïve and innocent tastes: to that level of our consciousness which is divided only by the thinnest veil from the immemorial lights and glooms of the collective Unconscious itself. It demands of us a child’s love of marvels and dread of bogies, a boy’s thirst for adventures, a young man’s passion for physical beauty. If you have lost or cannot re-arouse these attitudes, all the commentaries, all your scholarship about ‘the Renaissance’ or ‘Platonism’ or Elizabeth’s Irish policy, will not avail. The poem is a great palace, but the door into it is so low that you must stoop to go in. No prig can be a Spenserian. It is of course much more than a fairy-tale, but unless we can enjoy it as a fairy-tale first of all, we shall not really care for it.
Those features in the poem which might deter a reader are: (1) its narrative technique; (2) its allegory; and (3) the texture of its language.
(1) The narrative technique, especially after the first two Books, consists in constantly shifting from one story and one set of characters to another, but with a ‘dovetail’ or liaison at the point where we change. Thus in Book III, canto i, we start out on a journey with Sir Guyon, Prince Arthur, and Prince Arthur’s squire, Timias. Presently a strange knight appears riding towards them and tries a course of the lance with Guyon, who is unhorsed. Guyon’s annoyance at this reverse is soothed down by the others, and the strange knight now joins the party. They are all proceeding quietly together when suddenly an unknown lady on a milk-white horse flashes past, obviously in flight. A moment later her pursuer, a forester, is seen galloping after her. Arthur, Guyon, and Timias give chase, but the strange knight does not. And Spenser, instead of telling us what happened to the lady and the forester and Arthur and Guyon and Timias, now proceeds to relate the further adventures of the strange knight, which are quite irrelevant to the story we began with. We have thus got rid of all the characters we started with (not to meet Arthur again till canto iv, or Timias till v) and, in effect, changed trains.
The uninstructed reader would get the impression that Spenser was merely rambling, drifting at the mercy of his own imagination, as a man does in a dream. But the reader who knows a little more would remember that he had met exactly the same technique in Malory; and that it is also the technique of Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso. It is, I think, ultimately derived from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and may be called the ‘interwoven’ or ‘polyphonic’ narrative. Spenser is obeying a method as well established as the fugue. To what I have previously said about the naïve or childlike appeal of the stories he tells, we must now add the opposite truth that his method of disposing them is highly formal and sophisticated. (This contrast of naïve matter and sophisticated arrangement will seem less paradoxical if we remember how a composer can weave into a most learned symphonic whole the materials which he has derived from simple folk songs.) Now of course to explain that a certain method had a long history behind it does not, of itself, prove that it is a good one. Polyphonic narrative might be a vicious form, however many people had used it. But when we know that this technique dominated European fiction both in prose and verse from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, that civilized audiences in so many different countries went on demanding it, and that Tasso’s father (also a poet) lost all his popularity when he wrote a narrative poem without it, common sense will surely make us pause before we assume that it was simply wrong and that the technique of modern fictio
n is simply right. The old polyphonic story, after all, enjoyed a longer success than the modern novel has enjoyed yet. We do not know which will seem the more considerable literary phenomenon to a critic looking back from the year 2500. Such reflexions should induce us to give the old technique, at least, a fair trial. Perhaps, if we have patience, it will begin to charm us as it charmed our ancestors.
Obviously, it produces great variety. In a polyphonic narrative the weird, the voluptuous, the exciting, the melancholy scenes can succeed one another not where the exigencies of a single rigid ‘plot’ permit but wherever artistic fitness demands them. To that extent it is more like the technique of music than like that of modern literature. Obviously, too, the interruption of one story by another, often at a critical moment, has something in common with the technique of the serial story: the adventures of Arthur in pursuit of the fugitive lady are left ‘to be continued in our next’. If we reply that this kind of suspense is lost on us because our bad memories frustrate it and when we get back to Arthur we have forgotten all about him, then, since our ancestors made no such objection, it would seem that we differ from them by an inferiority, not by a superiority. And no doubt we do. Cheap paper, typewriters, notebooks, and indexes have impaired our memories just as automobiles have made some people almost incapable of walking. (One of the great uses of literary history is to keep on reminding us that while man is constantly acquiring new powers he is also constantly losing old ones.) It behoves us therefore to be humble and do our best. The obstacle is not, in fact, insurmountable: growing familiarity with this kind of poetry will presently enable us to hold the different, and constantly suspended, stories in our heads, just as growing familiarity enables us to follow complex music. And even if we sometimes lose our way, I think we shall find, as we go on reading, that the polyphonic technique has a far more important effect than those two which I have already mentioned, although it is one very difficult to describe. It is an effect particularly suitable to a tale of strange adventures.