It is usually said that Spenser has no humour. His humour, indeed, is of the most quiet and lurking order, and may easily pass unobserved among so many objects of wonder and beauty. But though unobtrusive it is nevertheless there. The drowsy irritability of Morpheus (i. 1), and the idiotic "He could not tell of the grave and reverend Ignaro (i. 8), are in the most delicate vein of humour. Archimago's disguise as a hermit, and his affectation of childish senility and unworldly simplicity, are also very delicately touched off: the enemy of mankind appears as— “An aged sire, in long black weeds y-clad, And often knocked his breast, as one that did repent. He fair the knight saluted, louting low, Of strange adventures, which abroad did pass, Bidding his beads all day for his trespass, Tidings of war and worldly trouble tell? With holy father sits not with such things to mell.'" We may be certain, from Spenser's antipathy to the Roman Catholics, that this was a character in one of the lost nine Comedies the sudden casting off of the disguise, and the flaming out in his true colours as "A bold bad man! that dared to call by name Great Gorgon, prince of darkness and dead night—” would have been a startling effect. The most openly humorous character in the 'Faery Queen' is Braggadocio, whose behaviour is often farcical. See his bold pretences to Archimago, and his abject terror and ignominious skulking, in Book ii. 3. Spenser has been accused of bad taste in mixing up heathen mythology with the narratives of the Bible. In Book ii. Canto 7, he represents Tantalus and Pontius Pilate as suffering in the same place of punishment. The answer that wicked men of all ages and creeds may reasonably be supposed to suffer together, is complete. He has also been accused of interfering with ancient mythology, marrying Clio to Apollo, making Cupid the sister of the Graces, bringing Neptune to the marriage of the Thames and the Medway, and adding without authority to Neptune's retinue. On this great liberty I do not venture to pronounce. He has been accused of extravagant violations of probability. To this it may be answered that, when we consent to be introduced to Faery land, we sign a dispensation from the ordinary conditions of life. These charges are frivolous: much more plausibility attaches to his alleged transgressions of the boundary between pleasure and disgust. The picture of Error is said to be intolerably loathsome— "Therewith she spew'd out of her filthy maw With loathly frogs and toads, which eyes did lack, The picture of Duessa unmasked is still more disgusting. And yet Burke is said to have been fond of quoting the description of Error. To persons of sober refinement, for whom the energy of indignant disgust has no fascination but is merely repulsive, such passages can be justified only as being occasional discords, heightening by contrast the surrounding harmonies, or at the worst, disagreeable episodes tided over by the general sublimity and beauty. Yet the critic should not ignore the fact that great poets of our race have created such passages, and that many readers are drawn to them by irresistible fascination. It is a paradox that descriptions of things so foul and odious should possess any spell: but it is not to be denied that they do possess a strong spell, and that for minds of the most poetical constitution. Spenser's design may have been entirely moral in drawing repulsive pictures of Error and Popery; but there is, whatever may have been his design, a certain intrinsic charm of sublime exaltation in the supreme energy of loathing. 182 CHAPTER V. ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. THE last ten or fifteen years of the sixteenth century was a period of amazing poetic activity: there is nothing like it in the history of our literature. Never in any equal period of our history did so much intellect go to the making of verses. They had not then the same number of distracting claims: literary ambition had fewer outlets. Carlyle, Grote, Mill, Gladstone, Disraeli, had they lived in the age of Elizabeth, would all have had to make their literary reputation in verse, and all might have earned a respectable place among our poets-might, at least, like Francis Bacon, have composed some single piece of sufficient excellence to be thought worthy of the 'Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics.' Amidst a general excitement and ambition of fame the gift of song may be brought to light where in less favourable circumstances it might have been extinguished by other interests. And the rivalry of men endowed with eager and powerful intellects must always act as a stimulus to the genuine poet, although all their efforts come short of the creations of genius. Three fashions of love-poetry may be particularised as flourishing with especial vigour during those ten or fifteen years-pastoral songs and lyrics, sonnets, and tales of the same type as Venus and Adonis. Spenser did much to confirm if not to set the pastoral fashion; but perhaps still more was done by Sir Philip Sidney with his 'Arcadia' and his sonnets of Astrophel to Stella. These two poets leading the way to the sweet pastoral country of craggy mountain, hill and valley, dale and field, the greater portion of the tuneful host crowded after them, transforming themselves into Damons, Dorons, and Coridons, and piping to cruel Phillises, Phillidas, and Carmelas.1 Out of this masquerading grew many 1 The land of ideal shepherds was only one of the ideal countries frequented by the artistic courtiers of Elizabeth. They were as eager to descry new worlds of imagination as her navigators were to discover new regions in the terraqueous globe. In the masques presented at Court we find inhabitants of four great worlds or continents-the country of Shepherds, the country of Faeries, the Mythological world, and the world of Personified Abstractions. L beautiful lyrics. 'England's Helicon,' which was published in 1600, and which gathered the harvest of this pastoral poetry, is by many degrees the finest of the numerous miscellanies of the Elizabethan age. It contained selections from Spenser, Sidney, Greene, Lodge, J. Wootton, Bolton, Barnefield, "Shepherd Tonie," Drayton, Shakespeare, and others of less note. Many of these pastorals took the form of sonnets, but I single out sonnet-writing as a fashion by itself, in order to draw attention to the numerous bodies of sonnets published in the last decade of the century as lasting monuments of sustained passion, real or ideal. The list is very remarkable. It opens with the publication of Sidney's sonnets to Stella in 1591, and includes— Daniel's sonnets to Delia, published in 1592; Constable's sonnets to Diana, 1592; Lodge's sonnets to Phillis, 1593; Watson's Tears of Fancy, or Love Disdained, 1593; Drayton's Idea's Mirror, amours in quatorzains," in 1594; and Spenser's Amoretti or Sonnets in 1596.1 Hardly less notable is the fancy for short mythological or historical love-tales. The way in this form of composition was led by Thomas Lodge, who published in 1589 the poem of 'Glaucus and Scylla,' narrating with many pretty circumstances the cruelty of Scylla to Glaucus, in punishment whereof she was transformed into a dangerous rock on the coasts of Sicily. Marlowe began and Chapman finished the tale of Hero and Leander; Shakespeare sang the love of Venus and Adonis: Drayton the love of Endymion and Phoebe; Chapman (in 'Ovid's Banquet of Sense') the love of Ovid and Julia. The voluptuous descriptions of these tales could not have been expected to go on without sooner or later exciting the spirit of derisive parody: and accordingly, in 1598, Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis" was rudely burlesqued by the satirical Marston in a comical version of the tale of "Pygmalion and Galatea." To prevent any undue indignation at the liberty thus taken with our great dramatist, I may here intimate a suspicion, for which I shall afterwards produce some grounds, that certain of Shakespeare's sonnets-those, namely, from the 127th to the 152d inclusive-were designed to ridicule the effusions of some of his seriously or feignedly love-sick predecessors. Marston's profane parody may thus assume the aspect of a Nemesis. The enthusiasm of beauty was strong in the Elizabethan poets. With many of them it was a fierce and earnest thirst. Their lives were hot, turbulent, precarious: they turned often to the bloom of fair cheeks and the lustre of bright hair as a passionate relief from desperate fortunes. Beauty was pursued by Greene 1 In this chapter I have used the order of the publication of these sonnets as a basis of arrangement for the predecessors of Shakespeare in that form of composition. and Marlowe not as a luxury but as a fierce necessity-as the only thing that could make life tolerable. Such visions as Hero and fair Samela filled them with mad ecstasy in the height of their intemperate orgies, and were called back for soothing worship in their after-fits of exhaustion and savage despondency. In many others of calmer and more temperate lives, beauty excited less ardent transports, and yet was a powerful influence. Beauty was a very prevailing religion; the perfections of woman, excellence of eye, of lip, of brow, were meditated on and adored with devout rapture; and though the votary's enthusiasm in some cases travelled into licentious delirium, in gentler natures it bred soft and delicate fancies, of the most exquisite tenderness. Beauty was part of all their lives, and shaped itself in each mind according to the soil. A very surprising number of different soils it found to grow in, and very remarkable were the products. One meets the same flowers again and again, but always with some individual grace. Even third-rate and fourth-rate poets do not seem to be weaving garlands of flowers plucked from the verses of the masters they develop the common seeds in their own way. Consider, for example, the following madrigal by John Wootton, a name now uttterly forgotten by the generality, and a poet of whose personality nothing survives but his name and his contributions to 'England's Helicon :' "Her eyes like shining lamps in midst of night, Night dark and dead: Or as the stars that give the seamen light, Their wandering ships. Amidst her cheeks the rose and lily strive, When their contend doth make their colour thrive, For shepherd's eyes. Her lips like scarlet of the finest dye, Scarlet blood-red: |