Out upon him, with his vaunting preface, he speaks against my old friend, Edmund Spenser. -Archbishop USHER, according to Aubrey. CHAPTER I THE SHEPHEARDS CALENDER Newer historical perspective has taught us that we have sentimentalized too much about the renaissance, that it was infinitely more conservative and uncreative than the period which followed (the period of Descartes and Hobbes and Locke). But if we consider the renaissance from the restricted point of view of mere artistic achievement, there still remains much truth in Carducci's superb prose elegy on Italy, mother of the most impressive movements of that day. A spectacle which others may call shameful but which to me seems to command sacred pity in full measure, the spectacle of a people of philosophers, of poets, of artists, who, in the midst of the foreign soldiers rushing in from every side, continue sadly and surely their work of civilization. Under the artilleries of all the nations crash down the very walls which saw so many flights of barbarians; the flame quivers around the monuments of antiquity, and the paternal houses are given up to pillage; the solitude of the fields laid waste is full of corpses; and yet the canvasses and the walls never were radiant with more awe-inspiring imaginings and forms more pure, never did more joyous forests of columns arise to shelter hours of leisure and diversions and meditations which were now failing; and the song of the poets dominates the sad blast of the foreign trumpets, and the printing-presses of Venice, of Florence, of Rome creak in the work of illuminating the world. It is not cowardice, for where there was the stock of the common people there was still resistance and glorious fighting. Nor is it careless preoccupation. Oh how much sadness in the sweet face of Raphael, what a wrathful frown in that of Buonarroti, and how much pain in the lineaments of Machiavelli and of Guicciardini! Ariosto smiles, but how sadly! Even Berni grows angry. Why insult those great intellects of the sixteenth century? Do we not all see the mysterious sorrow, the fatal anxiety which assaults them from every side? Ever great is sacrifice; but if it be a nation that sacrifices herself it is a divine thing; and Italy sacrificed herself to the future of the other peoples. Dear and holy native land! She recreated the intellectual world of the ancients, she gave the form of art to the tumultuous and savage world of the Middle Ages, she opened to men's minds a superior world of freedom and of reason; and of all she made a gift to Europe: then, wrapt in her mantle, she endured the blows of Europe with the dignity of Iphigeneia. So ended Italy.1 1 From a translation made by Professor J. A. Child and the present writer for a volume of selections from Carducci and De Sanctis. 1 It was not only the torrents of ruthless invaders, however, that distracted Italy; it was also the blinding splendor of her new emotion. When we think of Ariosto's poetry, a beautiful, mocking Fata Morgana of chivalry, and when we think of Tasso's madness, we must feel that it was well for England that the renaissance came to her slowly through her tough old humanists, rather than triumphant through her poets. It was well, too, that, even in the early years of Elizabeth's reign, there were stubborn souls like Roger Ascham who represented the sturdy English capacity for being shocked. Thus it was, at a momentous and critical period, that England was saved from the dangers that beset all great nations and intellects which are forced to cherish art for art's sake. Roger Ascham's belief in the age of chivalry was no greater than Ariosto's. But he did believe in the age of archery. England's yeoman faiths made her so sluggish in her acceptance of modernity that she was not made mad by the heady wine of the renaissance. Thus it was that when her dramatists read the brilliant non-moral novelle of Italy they were appalled, and introduced into these stories the moral Nemesis that elevated them into plays often crude but generally throbbing with tragic seriousness. Thus it happened that, because the renaissance came to Spenser under the frown of those tough old humanists and because Spenser (like most "creeping Saxons") developed late, he remained, as Lowell calls him, the Don Quixote of poets and wrought heroically to make of England a Utopia. The meager records of Spenser's boyhood give scant promise of the graceful pastoral achievement of the young poet who, in the April of his life, rather abruptly, from our point of view, began to pipe smooth ditties on the delightful miseries of calflove. Some fluent translations of Du Bellay and of Marot's paraphrases from Petrarch, sold for a pittance perhaps by a poor but clever schoolboy to an enterprising and eccentric Dutch refugee who assumed their authorship, then a long silence, 2 There seems to be no necessity for doubting that these translations are Spenser's. Dr. Emil Koeppel (Englische Studien, XV, 53 sq., and XXVII, 4 apparently, then suddenly an elaborate pastoral in which the author, though he assumes from his rough predecessor, Skelton, the homely and humble name of Colin Clout and speaks modestly at times of his oaten stops, is evidently aflame with a realization of genius that is being heartily encouraged by distinguished friends these are the only materials found in the search for the young poet's magic in its early process of distillation. If we may take literally the poet's own allusion to the year of his birth, he was twenty-seven when, in 1579, he ventured to publish this first ambitious poem, a poem on which, we may safely conjecture, he had been at work since 1573, while he was at college. The unwary reader of today who, with some first-hand 100 sq.), has denied them to the poet with some plausible argument. But see Professor J. B. Fletcher, Modern Language Notes, October, 1898; Professor R. E. Neil Dodge, Cambridge Edition of Spenser (Boston and New York, 1908), Appendix I, and Mr. Lois Sigmund Friedland, "Spenser's Earliest Translations," Journal of English and Germanic Philology, XII, 434 sq., for a tempered examination and a refutation of Dr. Koeppel's conclusions. See also Professor Jefferson B. Fletcher, "Spenser's Earliest Translations," Journal of English and Germanic Philology, XIII (1914), 305 sq., for the most recent utterances in support of Mr. Friedland. 3 Two years after the appearance of The Shepheards Calender, Peele introduced the lovelorn Colin Clout as a character into his play, The Arraignment of Paris. Gabriel Harvey's letters, of which more later, are full of praise. William Webbe (Discourse of English Poetrie, 1586), though depreciating English poetry in general, judged Spenser not inferior to Theocritus and Virgil. "But nowe yet at the last hath England hatched uppe one Poet of this sorte, in my conscience comparable with the best in any respect; even Master Spenser. So Puttenham, or the author of The Art of English Poesie (1589), who mentions "that other Gentleman who wrate the late Shepheardes Callender' among the English poets to be commended. So also Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia, 1598, who ranked Spenser with Theocritus, Virgil, Mantuan, and Sannazaro but also, with his characteristically Elizabethan worship of all English poets, with a motley company of his countrymen. Sir Philip Sidney's famous praise in the Apology for Poesie is all the more precious for its careful reserve and for its attitude of grave scepticism towards practically all English poetry. These criticisms have been so often cited that it is hardly necessary to give explicit references here. A few attempts have been made to explode the truism that Spenser's fame was great and almost instantaneous. Such attempts, along with careful examination of the criticisms noted here and many more, will be found treated sensibly by Mr. C. R. Baskerville (The Early Fame of The Shepheards Calender," Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, XXVIII, 291 sq.). Mr. Baskerville has, I hope, silenced permanently those few who are inclined to believe that Spenser remained obscure long after the publication of his pastoral. 4 See Amoretti, LX. |