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 THE SPRINGS OF HELICON 
 
 A STUDY IN THE PROGRESS OF ENGLISH 
 POETRY FROM CHAUCER TO MILTON 
 
 BY 
 
 J. W. MACKAIL 
 
 M.A., LL.D., SOMETIME FELLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE 
 PROFESSOR OF POETRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 
 
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 NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 
 
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 All rights reserved
 
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 Uteur 
 
 ?R 
 
 SO 3 
 
 FROM HELICON'S HARMONIOUS SPRINGS 
 
 A THOUSAND RILLS THEIR MAZY PROGRESS TAKE
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 CHAUCER l 
 
 SPENSER 71 
 
 MILTON '35
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 THE substance of this volume consists of lectures 
 given from the Chair of Poetry at Oxford in the 
 autumn terms of the years 1906 to 1908. They 
 have been revised and slightly expanded for the 
 purposes of publication. 
 
 The volume is, as its title states, a study in the 
 progress of English poetry. It forms one chapter 
 in the subject with which the author proposed to 
 deal during his tenure of the Chair ; that subject 
 being the Progress of Poetry, or in other words, 
 the consideration of poetry as a progressive func- 
 tion and continuous interpretation of life. Poetry 
 may be thus regarded, and it is thus that Gray 
 regards it in his great Ode, whether in relation 
 to the life of the individual from youth to age, 
 to the life of a single nation or language, or to the 
 larger movement and progress of the life of man- 
 kind as it successively embodies itself in different 
 ages and countries, and is there re-embodied and 
 reinterpreted by art. The progress of our own 
 poetry between Chaucer and Milton is a single cycle,
 
 x INTRODUCTION 
 
 but to the English-speaking nations one of cardinal 
 importance, in the vast endless movement which is 
 co-extensive with history. 
 
 There are three principal ways of studying that 
 cycle, according to the object which is primarily in 
 view. For the historian of poetry, it is necessary 
 to deal with the subject in detail, to consider both 
 the greater and the lesser poets, and to give a 
 systematic account of the whole poetic production 
 of the period with which he deals. For the philo- 
 sophical investigator, to whom the value of poetry 
 lies mainly in the ideas which it embodies, in the 
 criticism of life (to use Arnold's famous phrase) 
 which it offers, the historical aspect of its progress 
 is of secondary importance, and the main body of 
 its product attracts only a cursory regard. But to 
 that more inclusive view which the progress of 
 criticism is always striving to attain, both the accu- 
 mulation of material and the refinement of analysis 
 are but means, not ends. The life in poetry, the 
 appreciation of poetry in its vital quality, is the 
 object of study. The record or classification of 
 actual works of art, the determination of the ideas 
 or impulses which art expresses, are alike subor- 
 dinate to the appreciation of art itself as a vital 
 energy. The office of criticism, thus regarded, is 
 to interpret art in something of the same way as art 
 interprets life. 
 
 From this point of view, as for other reasons also,
 
 INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 it is desirable to concentrate attention upon the great 
 poets, those in whom the vital progress of poetry 
 has realised itself most fully. They give the master- 
 words to the whole language of creative imagination. 
 In our own literature, Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton 
 have been the subject of so much long and minute 
 study, that for criticism to return to them now 
 might seem like labouring in a thrice- ploughed field. 
 But in truth not only is that field inexhaustible, but 
 each generation must work it anew to gain its own 
 food. "Likewise Earth, the Most High of Gods, 
 the unwasting, the unweariable, he grinds down as 
 the ploughs go backward and forward, year upon 
 year : " this is the central note in the miraculousness 
 of human life as it receives expression from Sophocles 
 in the Antigone. The most high poets, unwasting 
 also and unweariable, not only repay, but require, 
 perpetual reinterpretation. To each age, to each 
 reader, they come in a new light and bear a fresh 
 significance : the progress of critical appreciation 
 follows the progress of poetry ; and the whole inter- 
 pretation of the past becomes, in its turn, a part 
 of the thing to be interpreted. 
 
 Gray's Ode is not only a lyric poem of me first 
 order : it is also a distilled and concentrated body 
 of criticism by the most accomplished scholar and 
 finest critic of his time. Every word in it is weighed 
 and measured, and it only yields its full meaning to 
 exact and minute study. When he speaks of the
 
 xii INTRODUCTION 
 
 springs of Helicon as the source of poetry, he is not 
 merely using a traditional metaphor ; he also lays 
 stress on the organic connection of the whole of 
 Western poetry with Hellenic origins. The move- 
 ment of poetry, as he says elsewhere, was from 
 Greece to Italy, and from Italy to England. In the 
 three representative poets of whose work this volume 
 is a study, we see English poetry filled at successive 
 levels from those foreign yet kindred springs. The 
 achievement of Chaucer was the absorption of the 
 earlier Renaissance, as it is represented in poetry by 
 Dante and by his two chief successors, Petrarch and 
 Boccaccio. That of Spenser was the absorption of 
 the fully-developed Renaissance, the art of redis- 
 covered Greece and reconquered Rome as it took 
 shape in the European poetry of the sixteenth 
 century. Milton retraced the stream to the heights 
 where it was born ; with a fuller training and a more 
 disciplined scholarship he passed beyond those inter- 
 mediate sources to the fountain-heads ; he won his 
 way to the springs of Helicon, and gave to England 
 a poetry which was for the first time fully classical, 
 which stands as art on the same level with the Greek 
 classics. In the progress made through the work 
 of the three poets we see English poetry entering 
 into its full inheritance. 
 
 It may be desirable to add a word with regard to 
 the form in which quotations appear in this volume, 
 as regards modernisation or standardisation of spell-
 
 INTRODUCTION xiii 
 
 ing. Our older poetry loses something by departure 
 from the exact form in which it originally appeared ; 
 but it gains more by such modification as lets it be 
 read without needless difficulty. English spelling 
 has materially altered since the end of the sixteenth 
 century, but in the great English classics, the works 
 which are always being read, the modification which 
 has gone on in the living language has been naturally 
 and rightly followed in the works of those who have 
 continued to be living authors. This is notably so with 
 Shakespeare ; exact reprints of the original quartos 
 and folios are made for professional students or for 
 curious amateurs, but the world reads Shakespeare 
 in the spelling of its own time. The Authorised 
 Version of the Bible has followed the same process, 
 and indeed a reprint of the original volume of 1 6 1 1 
 has only once been made in modern times, and is 
 practically inaccessible. In this respect Milton may 
 claim a footing alongside of those others as being, 
 like them, a living classic who has never suffered 
 eclipse or submergence. A good case might no 
 doubt be made for retaining a few spellings which 
 are peculiar to Milton, or at least characteristic of 
 him : it may be urged that where he deliberately 
 used words like higth and sovran, it is a corruption 
 of the text to replace these by height and sovereign. 
 But this principle would in logic carry us further 
 than the common sense of readers might be inclined 
 to go ; it would oblige us to do as we are directed
 
 xiv INTRODUCTION 
 
 in the curious list of errata added to the later issue 
 of the first edition of Paradise Lost, and print hunderd 
 instead of hundred. For those and they are not 
 after all very many who wish to read Milton in the 
 exact form of the original editions, Canon Beeching's 
 text is available ; the rest of the world will be con- 
 tent to read Milton as they read Shakespeare and 
 the English Bible. 
 
 With Spenser the problem is different. Not only 
 was Elizabethan spelling in any case erratic, but 
 Spenser's own spelling was deliberately eccentric; it 
 was one which he adopted, or rather invented, in 
 order to give an archaistic colour to his poetry. 
 This eccentricity, while it is interesting from the 
 light it throws upon his relation to earlier English 
 poets, and in particular upon his attitude towards 
 Chaucer, has nothing to do with the poetical quality, 
 or in the main with the rhythmical and metrical 
 quality of his own work. Where it affects rhyme 
 or cadence materially it has to be retained ; else- 
 where it seems better ignored. Had the Faerie 
 Queene entered into the life of the English people 
 in the same way as the Paradise Lost, the spelling of 
 the former poem would also have been gradually 
 and instinctively modernised; and this process would 
 undoubtedly have meant not merely that the Faerie 
 Queene was more read than it has been, but also that 
 it was more readable than it actually is. 
 
 How far a similar process of modernisation is
 
 INTRODUCTION xv 
 
 legitimate or practicable with Chaucer is a more 
 difficult question. The fountain - head of the 
 streams of our modern Helicon, he is at the same 
 time the last and greatest of the Middle-English 
 poets. His language is not modern English, much 
 as the language of the Iliad and the Odyssey is not 
 classic Greek. We do not know how far the 
 spelling of the Homeric poems was modernised in 
 the process traditionally known under the name 
 of the Pisistratean recension, which launched them 
 afresh upon the main current of Greek life. But 
 whatever that may have been, the text of Chaucer 
 has never gone through any analogous modernisa- 
 tion ; and the result is that to the ordinary reader 
 at the present day his text, if printed in accordance 
 with the best MS. authority, presents a difficulty 
 which is really great even though it may be super- 
 ficial, while, if modernised, it has to be modernised 
 variously by individual judgment. But Chaucer 
 himself has said pretty well all that can be said on 
 the matter : 
 
 And for there is so great diversity 
 In English and in writing of our tongue, 
 So pray I God that none miswrite thee 
 Ne thee mismetre for defaut of tongue ; 
 And read whereso thou be, or elles sung, 
 That thou be understonde I God beseech ! 
 But yet to purpose of my rather speech. 
 
 The principle followed in this volume, with what 
 success must be left to be judged by the reader, is to
 
 xvi INTRODUCTION 
 
 keep strictly by the authentic text so far as that it 
 is a matter of language rather than of spelling, but 
 to modernise or standardise the spelling to the 
 utmost extent consistent with that general verbal 
 fidelity, wherever the meaning can be thus made 
 more easily and immediately intelligible. For the 
 want of logical system and the necessary incon- 
 sistencies which the adoption of this method in- 
 volves, no further apology will be necessary for 
 those who have faced the problem themselves and 
 know its difficulties.
 
 CHAUCER
 
 ONLY a poet who possessed something of Chaucer's 
 own genius could speak adequately of Chaucer as a 
 poet ; and when William Morris, now thirty years 
 ago, declined the invitation to let himself be nomi- 
 nated for the Oxford Chair of Poetry, that chance 
 was lost. Chaucer's work has since then been fully 
 and ably handled by professed students of our earlier 
 literature. Of Professor Skeat's great edition, of the 
 knowledge and insight with which Professor Ker has 
 written on Chaucer, with regard both to his indi- 
 vidual genius and to his place in the field of mediaeval 
 letters, it would be superfluous to speak. But the 
 appreciation of Chaucer in relation to the vital pro- 
 gress of poetry may be, and indeed must be, kept 
 apart from the special provinces of historical and 
 linguistic study. Into the controversy, begun in the 
 sixteenth century and carried on intermittently since, 
 whether Chaucer is to be regarded as the fountain- 
 head or the great corrupter of English, it is not neces- 
 sary to enter. Nor is it necessary, though it would 
 not be irrelevant, to trace the fluctuations of his in- 
 fluence or popularity. These belong to a period in
 
 4 CHAUCER 
 
 which the progress of poetry had lost touch of him, 
 to an age when his work had not yet won its place. 
 After the century of his immediate influence and un- 
 questioned primacy, a long time follows in which we 
 may discern, even among his chief admirers, an accent 
 of doubt or apology. " Mr. Cowley himself," says 
 Dryden how odd the words sound now! "declared 
 he had no taste of him." Dryden goes on to say, " No 
 man ever had, or can have, a greater veneration for 
 Chaucer than myself;" and Wordsworth, a century 
 and a half later, said, " I reverence and admire him 
 above measure." Yet Wordsworth thought it not 
 unbecoming to rewrite the Prioress' Tale, and spoil 
 it in the process, as Dryden had rewritten and spoiled 
 the Knight's Tale before him. We do not rewrite 
 the great classics ; and Chaucer is now a classic. 
 As we recede further from him, he rises above the 
 intervening obstacles, and stands clearly revealed, 
 not merely as one who (in his own words) made 
 English sweet upon his tongue ; not merely as a 
 determining force in the evolution of our poetry, as 
 the inventor of the heroic couplet, or the writer 
 who decided the contest between two schools of 
 versification ; not merely as a mirror of his own age, 
 an observer and recorder of human life, a master 
 of description, pathos, humour, a story-teller of un- 
 surpassed skill ; but, beyond all this, as a great poet 
 and creator, an artist of the first rank. 
 
 As in dealing with the progress of poetry it is
 
 THE GENIUS OF CHAUCER 5 
 
 well to concentrate upon the great poets, so in deal- 
 ing with a poet so copious and various as Chaucer 
 it is well to concentrate upon his great poetry. 
 Beyond his strictly prose work, there is much of his 
 verse which scarcely professes to be poetry at all, or 
 at all events poetry of a high order. One of his 
 special qualities, indeed, is the amazing ease, the 
 unconscious grace, with which he passes from light 
 facile verse to poetry of noble sweetness, lovely 
 melody, high imagination. He does not, as some 
 poets do, give the impression of being subject to 
 waves of inspiration which now raise his poetry 
 to a high tension, and now fall away and leave it 
 mechanical or uninspired. It rather seems as if he 
 used, varyingly and capriciously, a poetical gift that 
 always came when he chose to call for it, and of 
 which he never lost control. One reason why he 
 is always interesting is that the moment anything 
 ceases to interest him he drops it. He leaves the 
 Squire's Tale half told, and breaks off the House of 
 Fame and the Legend of Good Women in the middle 
 of a sentence. He begins a letter from Dido to 
 Aeneas, and after a dozen lines gets tired of it, and 
 calmly proceeds 
 
 But who will all this letter have in mind 
 Read Ovid, and in him he shall it find. 
 
 Yet this easy nonchalance goes together with an in- 
 stinctive felicity which might make poets of greater
 
 6 CHAUCER 
 
 effort and more laborious art say despairingly as they 
 regard his work 
 
 We blundren ever and poren in the fire, 
 And for all that we fail of our desire. 
 
 He has much of the spirit of the child, easily pleased 
 and easily fatigued, prone to follow the suggestions 
 of an alert but vagrant fancy. 
 
 Love is too young to know what conscience is ; 
 Yet who knows not conscience is born of love ? 
 
 And so we may see Chaucer writing sometimes 
 with a grace and charm that are quite idle and irre- 
 sponsible, and then kindling to some piteous or 
 tragic motive, some beauty of situation or splen- 
 dour of passion, until the bird-note thrills us by 
 turning into the song of an angel. 
 
 Hence, in a world which always tends to be obtuse 
 towards poetry, to feel safe with dulness and to take 
 kindly to the second-best, it is not surprising that 
 Chaucer's fame as a poet has been much confused 
 with false issues. It rests, or has rested, in great 
 part on work which is not his best, or which is not 
 his at all. To the normal modern reader he is 
 known mainly through extracts; and it is singular 
 how often these extracts seem chosen to miss his 
 highest poetry, his specific greatness as a poet. We 
 may be pretty sure to find among them the descrip- 
 tion of the Squire or the Miller, the Clerk of Oxford 
 or the Parson admirable sketches of character,
 
 THE GENIUS OF CHAUCER 7 
 
 terse, lifelike, humorous, executed in quite fluent 
 and workmanlike verse, but not exactly poetry, or if 
 so, only poetry with a difference. We may very 
 probably find the Prioress' Tale, a legend gracefully 
 told, with a sort of thin elegance, suited admirably 
 and with perfect dramatic instinct to the person of 
 its narrator, but not poetry of the first excellence. 
 We may find a few vignettes of landscape, or highly 
 wrought descriptive passages like that of the temple 
 of Mars in the Knight's Tale. But we shall seldom 
 find anything that really shows to what a height 
 Chaucer's poetry can rise. We shall not find the 
 Complaint of Queen Anelida, nor the exquisite nar- 
 ratives in the Legend of Good Women, nor anything 
 to give a notion of the sustained magnificence and 
 mastery of the Book of Troilus and Greseide. Even 
 for those who know their Chaucer more fully, em- 
 phasis has to be laid on the first-rate work to dis- 
 engage it from the work that is short of first-rate, 
 from the work that is the poetry of his time and 
 surroundings rather than of his own essential genius. 
 With Chaucer, too, as with some few others among 
 the great poets, it is necessary to draw a distinction 
 between the poet and the story-teller. His narrative 
 gift is probably unsurpassed ; it has not been equalled 
 except by one or two in England, by a very small 
 number anywhere. It is a gift of immense value to 
 a poet, but it is not the gift of poetry. It rises to 
 meet us in its full perfection in the author of the
 
 8 CHAUCER 
 
 Odyssey at the very beginning of our extant docu- 
 ments in European poetry. Among the Greek poets 
 subsequent to Homer, or such of them as have sur- 
 vived, it hardly reappears, or at least reappears no- 
 where in any eminent degree. In Latin poetry it 
 culminates in Ovid. He became the story-teller as 
 well as the civiliser of Western Europe. It is his 
 narrative gift which, even more than his gaiety and 
 wit, his mastery of verbal and metrical technique, or 
 his air and tone of the accomplished man of the 
 world, explains the immense influence he had on 
 European letters. It was this, above all else, which 
 made him both to the Middle Ages and to the Re- 
 naissance even to the grave regard of Dante and 
 the austere judgment of Milton rank as a poet 
 alongside of Homer and Virgil. In England, Chaucer 
 was not only the first great poet for that title 
 can hardly be given by any sane criticism, in its 
 full sense, to any of his predecessors but the first 
 consummate story-teller, as he still remains the 
 best. . Few of his successors inherited that rare gift. 
 It is conspicuously absent from the poetry of the 
 Chaucerians. Spenser, with a strong narrative taste 
 (which is a different thing from a high narrative 
 gift), took great pains in manipulating a very com- 
 plicated framework of narrative in the Faerie Queene ; 
 but he had no idea of telling a story so as to make 
 it either clearly intelligible or continuously interest- 
 ing. Milton's epic does not depend for its quality
 
 THE NARRATIVE GIFT 9 
 
 upon the story. The story, if one can call it so, is 
 indeed set forth with great lucidity and ordered 
 skill ; but its planetary wheelings (for that phrase 
 aptly describes the constructional evolution as well as 
 the metrical movement of the Paradise Lost) belong 
 to a wholly different order of art. Pope's great 
 narrative poem was never written, and Shelley's is 
 almost unreadable. Byron possessed the power 
 as what power did he not possess ? but squandered 
 it. Keats was on the road towards mastering it 
 when he wrote Lamia. Among the poets of that 
 age it is most marked in two who belong at best 
 to the second rank, Scott and Crabbe. Among the 
 great Victorian poets one only, Morris, who was a 
 Chaucerian born, possessed it. A faculty which is 
 more apparent in the Odyssey than in the Iliad, which 
 is higher in Ovid than in Virgil, which is totally or 
 all but totally absent in some of the greatest poets, 
 cannot be taken as a criterion of poetic quality, or as 
 part of the essence of poetry. 
 
 Mr. Swinburne divides the work of Shakespeare 
 into three periods, the lyric and fantastic, the comic 
 and historic, and the tragic and romantic. Such 
 divisions are highly artificial, and must be used with 
 caution. But in Chaucer's poetry we may likewise 
 distinguish three periods, each marked by the pre- 
 ponderance of a special quality, and each associated 
 with a characteristic metrical form. There is an 
 early period, in which the external influence on him
 
 io CHAUCER 
 
 was almost purely French ; a central period, when he 
 came under the classic or Italian influence ; and a 
 third, in which his movement of evolution returns 
 upon itself, and comedy has in a sense absorbed 
 tragedy by bringing the whole of life into open day- 
 light. The terms lyric and fantastic apply with 
 much fitness to his earlier poetry. Of his lyrics 
 proper those " balades, rondels, virelaies " of which 
 he speaks in the Legend of Good Women , but a few 
 survive. They include, together with two or three 
 fine balades, two pieces which touch the high-water 
 mark of the lyric : the triple roundel of Merciless 
 Beauty, and the Complaint of Anelida^ a lyric of ela- 
 borate structure, exquisite alike in workmanship 
 and feeling. But in these, as in the longer poems 
 of the same period, the fantastic quality is as marked 
 as the lyric beauty. This period of his work would 
 set him high, probably highest, among ]the English 
 poets of his age ; it would not place him among the 
 classics or make him a capital figure in our literature. 
 He was assiduously and delightedly practising his 
 art so far as it had then been revealed to him. The 
 development it took when he had finished his appren- 
 ticeship and when his genius passed from flowering 
 into fruitage was determined from Italy. 
 
 The specific greatness of Chaucer as a poet lies in 
 a poetic quality neither inherited nor acquired, but 
 personal and incommunicable. His specific import- 
 ance in the history of literature, which is a different
 
 THE ITALIAN INFLUENCE n 
 
 matter, lies in his having, alone in his age, absorbed 
 this Italian influence, and thus created for English 
 poetry a wholly new type and aim. He brought it 
 whether with or without some loss of its own 
 native qualities into relation with the main stream 
 of the world's art. This achievement of his was 
 what was in Gray's mind, when in that allusive ellip- 
 tical manner, which sometimes makes his criticism as 
 difficult to follow as Aristotle's, he said that "Chaucer 
 first introduced the manner of the Provengaux, im- 
 proved by the Italians, into our country." Until he 
 did this, the foreign element in the fertilisation of 
 our literature had been French. English poetry had 
 two main currents, sometimes intermingling, some- 
 times in sharp opposition. One was the development 
 of its native instrument, the northern unrhymed 
 verse. The other was the adaptation to English 
 use of the metrical structure, and, together with that 
 metrical structure, the poetical forms and methods, 
 of the earlier or contemporary art of France. The 
 decisive predominance which Chaucer gave to the 
 latter may have been in any case inevitable. But 
 French influence was not sufficient it never has 
 been to create for England a great type of poetry. 
 Two countries alone have done this, Hellas and 
 Italy. 
 
 In the fourteenth century, the mediaeval world, 
 while it still appeared full of life, was really 
 coming to an end. The epic age of Western
 
 12 CHAUCER 
 
 Europe the age of the Chansons de Gestes, of the 
 Nibelungenlied and the verse Edda, of the archi- 
 tecture of the plein cintre had long passed away. 
 It was succeeded by the epoch of the perfected 
 Gothic, the age of magnificent expansion and bril- 
 liant construction. The thirteenth century produced 
 the Summa Theologiae, the churches of Chartres and 
 Westminster, constitutional government, and that 
 body of romance the splendour and copiousness of 
 which is still the admiration of the world. Then 
 came a thing new and unexampled, at once the con- 
 summation and the epitaph of the Middle Ages, 
 Dante and the Divine Comedy. That majestic 
 genius stands apart and alone. His two chief suc- 
 cessors, Petrarch and Boccaccio, are the founders of 
 modern poetry. 
 
 They were a generation older than Chaucer ; and 
 they represent in letters the change that passes over 
 the world in the fourteenth century. The one 
 founded modern literature ; the other determined 
 the revival of learning. With them we are launched 
 on the full current of the Renaissance ; we can fore- 
 see Ariosto and Tasso, we can foresee our own 
 Elizabethans. The critical influence on Chaucer 
 himself was that of Boccaccio. It is worth remark- 
 ing, in a matter where substance is vitally connected 
 with form, that while Chaucer's seven-line stanza is 
 materially changed, both in length and cadence, from 
 the classic Italian ottava rima, and while his rhymed
 
 THE ITALIAN INFLUENCE 13 
 
 decasyllabic couplet is to all intents and purposes 
 an invention of his own, both these principal metres 
 of his have, as he uses them, a closer affinity to 
 Italian than to French. But he never, so far as 
 appears, tried to write in the forms of the Petrarcan 
 Sonnet or Ode, and a scrap of thirty lines is all 
 that we know of any attempt made by him to write 
 in the Dantesque terza rlma. He of course knew, 
 admired, and copied from both Dante and Petrarch ; 
 but with one remarkable exception to be noticed 
 later, there is little to show that they influenced 
 him deeply. When he cites Dante, it is for 
 some proverbial sentence or for some celebrated 
 incident. " Envy parteth neither night nor day 
 out of the house of Cassar ; thus saith Dant : " 
 so runs a passage in the Legend of Good Women. 
 In the Monk's Tale he recounts the story of 
 "Erl Ugelin of Pise," following the text of the 
 Inferno pretty closely, and winding up with the 
 words 
 
 Whoso will hear it in a longer wise 
 Readeth the greate poet of Itaile 
 That highte Dante : 
 
 and in the preface to the Legend, of Saint Cecilia he 
 translates the famous hymn to the Virgin in the last 
 canto of the Paradiso. But these are mere detached 
 passages. A more striking instance is where he 
 seems to have assimilated and reproduced a char-
 
 i 4 CHAUCER 
 
 acteristically Dantesque simile. In the second book 
 of Troilus and Creseide come these lines 
 
 But right as floures, through the cold of night 
 Yclosed stoopen on their stalkes low, 
 Redressen them again the sunne bright, 
 And spreaden on their kinde course by row. 
 
 This is a translation of a passage in the second 
 canto of the Inferno 
 
 Quale i fioretti dal notturno gelo 
 
 Chinati e chiusi, poi che il sol gl'imbianca, 
 
 Si drizzan tutti aperti in loro stelo ; 
 
 or as it is rendered in Gary's fine translation 
 
 As florets, by the frosty air of night 
 
 Bent down and closed, when day has blanched their 
 
 leaves, 
 Rise all unfolded on their spiry stems. 
 
 The lines in Troilus have an unusual accent in them 
 at the first approach, even before one has realised 
 where they come from. But Chaucer did not take 
 them from Dante at all : he took them from Boc- 
 caccio. Boccaccio had calmly stolen the three lines 
 as they stood to open a stanza of the Filostrato. And 
 in Boccaccio no less than in Chaucer they give the 
 shock of strangeness, the accent of a more classic 
 and statelier verse. 
 
 Another passage in Troilus and Creseide which has
 
 THE ITALIAN INFLUENCE 15 
 
 the same effect of strangeness is the song of Troilus 
 in the first book 
 
 If no love is, O God, what feel I so ? 
 
 And if love is, what thing and which is he ? 
 
 If love be good, from whennes cometh my wo ? 
 
 If it be wicke, a wonder thinketh me, 
 
 When every torment and adversity, 
 
 That cometh of him, may to me savory think ; 
 
 For ay thirst I the more that I it drink. 
 
 And if that at mine owen lust I brenne, 
 
 From whennes cometh my wailing and my pleynt ? 
 
 If harm agree me, whereto pleyne I then ? 
 
 I noot ne why unweary that I feynt. 
 
 O quicke death ! O sweete harm so queynt ! 
 
 How may of thee in me swich quantity, 
 
 But if that I consente that it be ? 
 
 And if that I consent, I wrongfully 
 Compleyne iwis : thus possed to and fro, 
 All steereless within a boat am I 
 Amid the sea, betwixen windes two, 
 That in contrary standen evermo. 
 Alas, what is this wonder malady ? 
 For heat of cold, for cold of heat I die. 
 
 So strange is the accent, that one's first instinct is 
 to think that Chaucer is at his favourite game of 
 parody, as he parodies the contemporary lyric in 
 Absolon's song in the Miller's Tale. But the note of 
 the stanzas is Elizabethan ; and whatever Chaucer's 
 genius as a poet, he could hardly parody the style 
 which English poetry was to adopt a hundred and fifty 
 years later. The matter is explained when we realise 
 that these verses are translated from a sonnet by
 
 1 6 CHAUCER 
 
 Petrarch. Chaucer himself felt the difference in tone 
 and the necessity of accounting for it ; he met it with 
 most characteristic and impudent humour, by in- 
 venting on the spot an ancient author of the name 
 of Lollius and saying that the verses are taken from 
 him. 
 
 It is then to Boccaccio, but to Boccaccio as him- 
 self profoundly influenced or even in a sense created 
 by the two elder poets, that we have to assign the 
 decisive impulse which made Chaucer the founder of 
 classical English poetry. The contest between French 
 and native English forms was decided by being lifted 
 on to a higher plane. Hitherto any attempt at recon- 
 ciliation had not been based on any larger synthesis. 
 Queer attempts had been made, as in Sir Gawain and 
 the Green Knight^ or with greater success in the Tale of 
 Gamefyn, to tack one on to the other. Popular taste 
 was large enough or vague enough to accept both. 
 The peasantry of Southern England, on the unim- 
 peachable evidence of Langland, used both indif- 
 ferently. The ploughmen, the hedgers and ditchers, 
 of the fourteenth century not only " holpen erie his 
 half acre" with the purely English songs lumped 
 under the generic title of How trolli lolli, but " dryven 
 forth the longe day " with the French ditty of Dieu 
 vous save, dame Emme. The immense volume of 
 metrical romances had developed, in rhyming sys- 
 tems of French origin, forms of stanza specifically 
 English, and had transferred to them much of the
 
 THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE 17 
 
 alliteration and cadence of native poetry. Lang- 
 land's own poem (we may call it Langland's for 
 brevity, without being committed to any view as to 
 the authorship of its successive forms), the only 
 work of Chaucer's contemporaries that shows sus- 
 tained power combined with high imagination, ap- 
 pears to be intentionally archaistic, to represent the 
 last effort of purely English poetry to assert itself 
 against a culture which was no longer self-contained 
 and insular. But whatever might have happened 
 without Chaucer, what Chaucer did was decisive. 
 
 It was even too decisive. He brought the Re- 
 naissance into England before the time., We have 
 to wait a hundred and fifty years for the English 
 Petrarch. The welter into which English poetry 
 fell for more than a century after Chaucer's death 
 is not to be accounted for by civil wars and religi- 
 ous controversies. The soil was not ready for the 
 Italian influence to strike root. The earlier Eliza- 
 bethans had to learn all the lesson over again, and 
 to learn it in an age when the Renaissance had 
 outlived its morning glory, had become overbur- 
 dened and sophisticated. Even the language had in 
 their time, though it had gained immensely in power 
 and range, lost something of its early freshness, its 
 flexibility and fluency. Its province I speak of the 
 language of poetry was already encroached upon ; 
 it held a divided empire with prose. The science 
 of poetry, if we may use that term to express 
 
 B
 
 1 8 CHAUCER 
 
 the side of poetry that can be studied, taught, 
 and transmitted, had to be refounded. Marlowe 
 had to rediscover and remould that heroic couplet 
 which had already reached perfection before it left 
 its first creator's hands. Something of the same 
 sort had to be done again in the latter part of the 
 seventeenth century by Waller and Dryden. The 
 history of the forms of poetry, as of its substance, 
 is one of progress ; there is no finality. 
 
 For the earlier Renaissance, the period, neither 
 mediaeval nor modern, which elapsed between the 
 rediscovery of ancient Rome and the rediscovery 
 of ancient Greece, the three great Italians of the 
 fourteenth century are the classics ; they represent 
 the central movement, the authentic line of pro- 
 gress and achievement. A genius like that of 
 Chaucer facile, emotional, somewhat easy-going 
 required the full impact of a classic to raise him 
 beyond the sphere of his contemporaries. Of the 
 three, it was natural that Boccaccio, whose tempera- 
 ment bore the greatest affinity to his own, should give 
 him that impact most fully. The classical tone as 
 Boccaccio represented it was capable of solution and 
 incorporation with inherited mediaeval methods ; it 
 was less tense than in the two others, less learned, 
 less difficult. Chaucer was not, like his Italian masters, 
 a trained scholar according to the scholarship of the 
 time. What he thought of academic learning we may 
 judge (to adapt Swift's famous saying) by regarding
 
 CHAUCER'S CENTRAL PERIOD 19 
 
 those upon whom he has thought fit to bestow it. 
 He lavishes it most freely on that highly cultured 
 woman, Alison of Bath, who makes citations from 
 Seneca and Juvenal, from Valerius Maximus and 
 Boethius, and whose reading ranged from Ovid's 
 Art of Love to Ptolemy's Almagest. 
 
 The scholarship of Dante or of Petrarch was some- 
 thing quite beyond Chaucer's scope. Even in the 
 easier form in which it reached him, the classical 
 influence only took effect upon a comparatively brief 
 central period of his work. As with many artists 
 who have lived long enough to complete their orbit, 
 his latest work shows a reversion to the ideals and 
 methods of his earliest, only in an enlarged and 
 matured manner. Their culminating point has been 
 reached at the cost of great effort at high tension. 
 As that tension relaxes, the earlier influences resume 
 something of their old potency. In the romances 
 which represent Shakespeare's latest work we find, 
 mellowed to a new loveliness of tone, that lyric and 
 fantastic quality which is the note of his first period. 
 The sustained tension of his great central group of 
 tragedies, the almost equally high tension of his 
 central comedies (for peace hath her victories no 
 less renowned than war, and no less laboriously 
 won) has given way to a freer, looser, more fanciful 
 handling, to which is added the careless ease, the 
 effortless power, of a dramatist who has long ago 
 mastered his art, and can play with it lightly. So it
 
 20 CHAUCER 
 
 is with Chaucer ; and with him also, as with Shake- 
 speare, there comes in towards the end the note of 
 simple seriousness, the spirit of piety, which others 
 besides Burke have remarked as deeply ingrained in 
 the English nature. 
 
 Those years of tense concentration under the in- 
 fluence of the central movement of European poetry 
 left Chaucer master of his art. Good workmanship 
 was not rare in the English poetry of the fourteenth 
 century ; it could hardly be that where the other 
 arts had reached such high perfection, this one, as 
 assiduously studied as any, should fail to reach a 
 high level. But the step from good workmanship 
 to consummate art was taken by Chaucer alone. 
 Gower shows how far poetry can go without that 
 step. He was a good scholar according to the cri- 
 terion of his time, and a poet of high technical skill; 
 but when all has been said in his praise that can be 
 said, it remains true that he is a dead author. An- 
 other instance is the unknown author of the Flower 
 and the Leaf, the attribution of which to Chaucer 
 was long accepted without question. It stands to 
 him in much the same relation as the Ciris does to 
 the authentic work of Virgil. The authorship of 
 that piece was until lately a point on which scholars 
 suspended their judgment between two theories, both 
 of which presented serious difficulties, that it was by 
 Virgil, and that it was by a later poet imitating Virgil. 
 It has now been established, with a degree of proba-
 
 THE CHAUCERIANS 21 
 
 bility that approaches certainty, that it is neither, but 
 is by a slightly older poet belonging to the Virgilian 
 circle, and one whose influence over Virgil's develop- 
 ment was very great. Coincidences of phrase be- 
 tween the work of a great and that of a lesser poet 
 do not necessarily mean that the inferior artist copied 
 from the master; it is quite as likely to be the other 
 way, and this is so more especially where the great 
 poet has a passion for style and is sensitive to effects 
 of language down to his finger-tips. It was thus 
 that Virgil stole from Varro Atacinus and Cornelius 
 Gallus as freely as he did from Naevius or Ennius. 
 It may very well have been thus with the Flower and 
 the Leaf ; and the passage in the Legend of Good 
 Women, which is generally regarded as having sug- 
 gested that poem, may be in fact suggested by it. 
 
 For what he borrowed without acknowledgment, 
 Chaucer had to pay a heavy penalty in the inclusion 
 among his own work of many pieces by his imitators. 
 Except for the Cuckow and the Nightingale, that sweet 
 innocent poem to which, alone out of the work of 
 all his pupils, Chaucer might gladly have set his 
 name, the record of the Chaucerians is one of de- 
 cadence and incompetence. After Gower, the descent 
 is swift. Only the Scottish school preserve what life 
 was left in that tradition, and even in them it is but 
 feeble. The King's Quhair, with all its sincerity and 
 simplicity, is after all no more than the imitative work 
 of an amateur. Henryson has but a derivative and
 
 22 CHAUCER 
 
 reflected poetic gift ; the Testament of Creseid, with 
 its cheap sentiment, its awkward movement and 
 staggering metre, falls as far below the Book of 
 Troilus and Creseide in technical workmanship as it 
 does in imaginative insight. Dunbar and his con- 
 temporaries, a hundred years after Chaucer, belong 
 to a new epoch. In them there is a new quality of 
 high interest and value ; but the mediaeval tradition 
 has ceased to exist as completely as it had ceased to 
 exist in the debased English work of the same period. 
 In the Court of Love, which till recently was still 
 allowed to stand among and to contaminate the 
 poems of Chaucer, the Chaucerian manner in poetry 
 undergoes its last degradation before being finally 
 swept away. 
 
 In the case of Shakespeare, also, the attribution is 
 uncertain of much work that does, and of some that 
 does not, currently pass under his name. In any 
 period of really living art, the individual artist is as 
 it were the nucleus of a productive activity that 
 extends beyond him, and of which he is himself 
 partly the origin and partly the focus. It is perhaps 
 only an apparent paradox to say that the greatest 
 poetry may bear the least mark of a personality 
 behind it. But the whole of Chaucer's work, if we 
 exclude mere translations, carries on it the signature 
 not only of a certain technical quality, but of his 
 own personality. This is so, likewise, with a few 
 poets of the highest rank ; it is so with Dante ; it is
 
 CHAUCER AND BOCCACCIO 23 
 
 so with Milton. But in them the absence of a 
 certain breadth and universality has its compensa- 
 tion in an imaginative ardour and moral passion so 
 intense that the personal quality of the poetry be- 
 comes almost like a great natural force. Chaucer 
 had not this ardour and intensity. In the largeness 
 of his range, in his breadth of sympathetic portraiture, 
 he is next among our poets to Shakespeare. Like 
 Shakespeare he portrayed the whole surface and aspect 
 of life ; omnem vitae imaginem expressit^ we may say of 
 him in the phrase of Quintilian. But Shakespeare 
 also saw and felt deep down into its inner springs. 
 Chaucer's insight is more external and superficial. 
 Like a child in his clear-eyed receptiveness, his quick 
 responsiveness to outward influences, he is like a 
 child also in bearing no grudge against things. " I 
 am so weary for to speak of sorwe," he says, and 
 passes on, where another where Shakespeare even 
 would have grown embittered and angry. He 
 never frets. What he has instead of high moral 
 passion is another quality as rare and as precious, 
 that of mercy. This is what separates him sharply 
 from the type of artistic intelligence clear, masterly, 
 a little pitiless represented by Boccaccio and fully 
 developed by the Italian Renaissance. 
 
 The heartlessness of the Decameron is a common- 
 place of criticism. But criticism, as so often happens, 
 has gone right by a sort of sound instinct where its 
 reasoned grounds were wrong, or at least inadequate.
 
 24 CHAUCER 
 
 It has fastened on a mere accident, though a significant 
 one, the way in which the great plague at Florence 
 is made the background for the tales. Yet to a 
 serious view of life the incidents of the plague are 
 not more piteous or more tragic than what passes 
 before our eyes every day : if this does not stir us, 
 we shall not be stirred vitally by anything. The 
 quality of heartlessness affects the whole book, and 
 the whole of Boccaccio's work. He shares it with 
 or inherits it from Ovid. It is consistent with the 
 highest gifts of the story-teller, but not with the 
 highest gifts of the poet. Chaucer, working with 
 a less highly educated intellect in more difficult 
 material, brought into his work that quality of heart 
 which not only vitalised its spirit, but reacted on its 
 artistic structure. 
 
 " Chaucer," says Mr. Ker, to whose critical ap- 
 preciation of the two writers I cannot express my 
 obligation too fully, " learned from Boccaccio the 
 intuition of the right lines of a story." So far as 
 intuition can be learned, this was so. But it was 
 from his own instinct that he learned to modify or 
 transgress these lines, ad maiorem poesis gloriam. The 
 instinct which led him to compress the leseide from 
 an epic into an epic idyl, and to expand the Filostrato 
 from a "libro" into an "opera," was an instinct of 
 sympathy as well as intelligence, as rare an instinct 
 as the other, and a subtler one. It is one not only 
 of right lines but of right values. In the result, the
 
 CHAUCER AND BOCCACCIO 25 
 
 Knight's Tale and the Book of Troilus and Creseide 
 are, each in its own kind, perfect. But if we look 
 for the reason, we shall see that the artistic difference 
 is based on one which is profoundly moral. It is a 
 matter of heart as well as of head. 
 
 The Teseide was the first Italian epic ; and if we 
 set aside the one fault in its design, that the subject 
 does not bear large epic treatment, Boccaccio's hand- 
 ling of it compels our respect and our admiration. 
 Only, that fault refuses to be set aside. In this in- 
 stance Chaucer's instinct is surer than Boccaccio's ; 
 surer even than Shakespeare's always was, if the 
 scenes in the Two Noble Kinsmen which come from 
 Shakespeare's hand were meant for the substance 
 not of a masque but of a drama. For the play as 
 it stands Shakespeare of course cannot be held re- 
 sponsible ; and what he might have done with it we 
 cannot dream. What Boccaccio in fact did, shows 
 that failure of perception which comes of the brain 
 working without the heart. His ambition, no un- 
 worthy one, was to elevate narrative poetry from the 
 scope of the conte and fabliau. But the story which 
 he would have told enchantingly as a fabulist had 
 to be expanded beyond what it would bear to pass 
 as an epic ; it has not the epic life-blood. The 
 Teseide is loaded with machinery, partly because the 
 dignity of the epic was supposed to require that, 
 partly for a simpler reason, to fill it out to the 
 proper epic size. Not only has it the orthodox
 
 26 CHAUCER 
 
 twelve books prescribed by the example of Virgil 
 and Statius, but it contains I do not know whether 
 this has been noticed before or not exactly the 
 same number of lines as the Aeneid, 9896 lines in 
 each case. This may be merely a very remarkable 
 coincidence ; it is perhaps more likely that it is one 
 of those elaborate arithmetical artifices which were 
 dear to the mediaeval mind, and particularly, as all 
 students of Dante know, to the great Florentine 
 who was Boccaccio's master in the art of poetry. In 
 any case, given the subject, this one fact is the con- 
 demnation of the poem. Chaucer, when he cut it 
 down to a fourth of the length and reduced it to 
 its proper scope of a tale, left it still dangerously 
 long, and only kept together by great brilliance of 
 execution and richness of workmanship. Palamon 
 and Arcite is written in a more full and heightened 
 style than any other of his narrative poems. The 
 ornament is so rich that it requires all the speed and 
 elasticity of his verse to keep it from the effect of 
 overloading. It was a dangerous experiment, which 
 he just succeeded in bringing to a triumphant con- 
 clusion. But he saw, with the instinct of a great 
 poet, that the epic treatment required a larger scope, 
 a more dramatic movement, a profounder human 
 interest. 
 
 These things he found in the subject of Boc- 
 caccio's other poem ; and into it he put his full 
 powers. The Filostrato is lucidly told, gracefully
 
 TROILUS AND CRESEIDE 27 
 
 constructed, charmingly written ; but the poem that 
 Chaucer made out of it is a consummate master- 
 piece. The Book of Troilus and Creseide is one of the 
 few large perfect things in our literature. This does 
 not mean that it is a greater poem, or even a greater 
 work of art, than others which have not this quality. 
 It is a character it shares with Romeo and Juliet or 
 Much Ado, and not with Cymbeline or Lear. 
 
 Not only so, but with the epic largeness Chaucer 
 has reached in it the epic truth to life. Palamon 
 and Arcite is like a rich tapestry ; the figures in it 
 are part of the decoration. They seem to move 
 and speak faintly, as if through a veil where 
 
 in a cool green room all day 
 I gazed upon the arras giddily 
 
 Where the wind set the silken kings asway. 
 
 In Troilus they breathe and live. This is true not 
 only of the two principal characters, but of all ; 
 of Pandarus, Deiphobus, Diomede, Helen, even the 
 slight figure of Antigone. Nothing in modern crea- 
 tive work is more subtly delicate in its psychology. 
 
 For out of olde fieldes, as men saith, 
 Cometh all this new corn fro year to year. 
 
 Of Cressida, alone among the women of English 
 poetry before Shakespeare, it may be said in the 
 full sense without reservation that she is like one 
 of Shakespeare's women. And even among Shake- 
 speare's women it would be hard to name one
 
 28 CHAUCER 
 
 whom, like Chaucer's Cressida, we understand and 
 love through her very weakness and inconstancy ; 
 so that the heart-broken and heart-breaking words 
 of Troilus, when the end has come, do not sound 
 enfeebled or anything but inevitable 
 
 Clean out of your mind 
 Ye han me cast, and I ne can nor may 
 For all this world within mine herte find 
 To unloven you a quarter of a day. 
 
 The type was one which Shakespeare, whether by 
 choice or chance, never treated. There are hints 
 of it in Ophelia, who might have developed into 
 something like Cressida had she lived longer. It 
 is curious to note that it is not from Chaucer's 
 Cressida, but from Chaucer's Cleopatra that Shake- 
 speare took that single phrase " O rose of May ! " 
 which is the real epitaph on Ophelia. Of Shake- 
 speare's own Cressida one can only say that, like 
 the whole drama to which she gives her name, she 
 is profoundly disagreeable, and that she is presented 
 with frightful insight, but (except for one single 
 phrase put in the soiled lips of Pandarus) without a 
 touch of sympathy or mercy. Perhaps the nearest 
 likeness to Chaucer's Cressida is to be found in some 
 of Mr. Hardy's frail, passive, wild-rose-blossom 
 women, who, like her, without passion or strength 
 or constancy, have but one power, to hold and 
 break the hearts of men. 
 
 To compare, point by point, Boccaccio's original
 
 TROILUS AND CRESEIDE 29 
 
 with Chaucer's copy so far as it is a copy would 
 be a lesson in the art of poetry. The changes are 
 not uniformly for the better ; but they are seldom 
 without good poetical reason. There are some 
 touches in the Filostrato that we might think 
 specifically Chaucerian which Chaucer has passed 
 by. The gathering of the Trojan princesses to 
 comfort Troilus, given by Boccaccio in two stanzas 
 of extreme beauty (vii. 84 and 85) makes a pic- 
 ture just such as Chaucer loves, executed in what 
 is just his manner. 
 
 In poca d'ora la camera piena 
 Di donne fu, e di suoni e di canti ; 
 Dall'una parte gli era Polissena 
 Ch'un'angela pareva ne'sembianti ; 
 Dall'altra gli sedea la bella Elena, 
 Cassandra ancora gli stava davanti ; 
 Ecuba v'era, e Andromaca, e molte 
 Di lui cognate e parenti raccolte. 
 
 Ciascuna a suo potere il confortava, 
 E tale il domandava che sentia. 
 Esso non rispondea, ma riguardava 
 Or 1'una or 1'altra, e nella mente pia 
 Di Griseida sua si ricordava, 
 Ne piu che con sospir cio discopria ; 
 E pur sentiva alquanto di dolcezza 
 E per li suoni e per la lor bellezza. 
 
 Yet Chaucer leaves out the episode altogether ; and 
 he is right ; the tragedy has by this time gone 
 beyond the sphere of romantic sensibility, and 
 Chaucer's Muse, rising to the amplitude of the sub-
 
 30 CHAUCER 
 
 ject, has passed beyond the " camera plena di donne 
 e di suoni e di canti " in which it loved to dwell. 
 On the other hand Chaucer puts in, of his own in- 
 vention, the whole of that splendidly handled scene of 
 Helen and Cressida dining in the house of Deipho- 
 bus, and their visit to Troilus. It is here that we 
 have one of the most wonderful of Chaucer's crea- 
 tions his Helen. She is the Helen of the Odyssey 
 reincarnate, " once and only once and for one only " : 
 one out of whom came a fire to devour many, 
 yet on whom the fire could not take hold even to 
 scorch her raiment. She moves through the poem 
 with placid sweetness, in a strange radiance. She 
 lifts the story into a new beauty when she appears ; 
 as she sits at the table of Deiphobus holding Cres- 
 sida's hand in hers, or as she goes to visit Troilus on 
 his sick-bed and to comfort him, " in all her goodly 
 softe wise," laying her arm over his shoulder like a 
 kind sister. When she kisses him and leaves him 
 quietly to go to sleep, she has her Odyssean charm 
 of affectionate tact and exquisite manners. Yet, 
 like the Helen of the Iliad ^ she is doomed to bring 
 unhappiness where she goes. It is a subtle imagi- 
 native touch that the ill-starred love of Troilus is 
 helped on by her kindly, well-meant intervention. 
 
 Good thrift have ye, quod Eleyne the queen. 
 
 The words, and the feeling behind them, are those, 
 as Troilus says, of a " sister lief and dear," but a 
 fate for which she is not responsible reverses them.
 
 TROILUS AND CRESEIDE 31 
 
 Of Chaucer's own invention too is the scene, 
 which is perhaps the climax of the whole achieve- 
 ment, the riding of the knights up the street of Troy 
 before Cressida's window. This has been praised 
 once, and so that it need not be praised a second 
 time. 
 
 O Master, pardon me if yet in vain 
 Thou art my Master, and I fail to bring 
 Before men's eyes the image of the thing 
 My heart is filled with : thou whose dreamy eyes 
 Beheld the flush to Cressid's cheeks arise 
 When Troilus rode up the praising street, 
 As clearly as they saw thy townsmen meet 
 Those who in vineyards of Poictou withstood 
 The glittering horror of the steel-topped wood. 
 
 The scene is indeed suggested by a few casual lines 
 which the curious may find in the seventy-second and 
 seventy-third stanzas of the second part of the Filo- 
 strato; but seldom has so magnificent a flower sprung 
 out of so slight a bud. Seldom, one may add, has 
 one of the supreme scenes of poetry been so strangely 
 and so cruelly trailed through the mire as this was 
 by Shakespeare when he wrote the second scene of 
 the first act of Troilus and Cressida. 
 
 In smaller points there are similar discrepancies 
 often illuminating, sometimes perplexing. Why, in 
 the first description of Cressida, did Chaucer ignore 
 the beautiful phrase of the Italian 
 
 La qual, quanto la rosa la viola 
 Di belta vince, cotanto era questa 
 Piil ch'altra donna bella
 
 32 CHAUCER 
 
 to substitute a piece of what looks at first sight 
 either childish quaintness or malicious humour 
 
 Right as our firste letter is now an A 
 In beauty first so stood she makeless 
 
 lines which would not surprise one in his own 
 juvenile work, but which rather suggest the scholar- 
 ship and taste of the Wife of Bath ? The explana- 
 tion seems to be that here, as again and more 
 legitimately in his description of the jewel worn by 
 the Prioress of the Canterbury Tales, he went out of 
 his way to pay a compliment to Queen Anne. The 
 adroit courtliness of the touch may excuse its irrele- 
 vance. Why, again, in the speech where Cressida, 
 with a faint effort at constancy, puts by the first 
 overtures of Diomede, did he omit the most subtly 
 dramatic touch in his original 
 
 a te Elena bella 
 Si converria ? 
 
 Why, except in order to annoy, or to throw a tinge 
 of comedy over the whole situation which he felt 
 and imagined with such tragic intensity, does he say 
 of Cressida 
 
 But whether that she children had or none 
 I read it nought 
 
 when he did read it, in so many words, that she 
 had none ? 
 
 A hundred instances might be given of the way 
 in which Chaucer remodels the story, most often by
 
 TROILUS AND CRESE1DE 33 
 
 thinking intensely over it and re-embodying it in his 
 own imagination. But it is at the end that the 
 essential difference between the two poets and the 
 two poems comes out. Boccaccio treats the tragedy 
 as lightly and as carelessly as Ovid might have done. 
 With Chaucer all other feelings are swallowed up in 
 a passion of pity. Of that miraculous ending one 
 can hardly trust oneself to speak. The thrill of 
 tears is in the verses. Yet through his passion of 
 pity the poet keeps a certain and mastering hand. 
 I need hardly quote the splendid apostrophe of 
 Troilus to the empty house of Cressida as he rides 
 by it once more and for the last time, the famous 
 verses beginning " O palace desolate, O house of 
 houses." But even beyond its stately beauty is the 
 piteous simplicity of his words as he broods over 
 his wrecked life 
 
 Men might a book make of it like a story ; 
 
 and, as the seawind comes up to Troy in the moonlit 
 night from the Greek camp on the shore, 
 
 Feel I no wind that souneth so like pain : 
 It saith, Alas, why twined be we twain ? 
 
 and when 
 
 Another time imaginen he wold 
 That every wight that wente by the way 
 Had of him ruth, and that they sayen shold, 
 1 am right sorry Troi/us will die.
 
 34 CHAUCER 
 
 The grief is so poignant that it ceases to care for 
 expression ; it becomes hushed and almost inarticu- 
 late. O vos omnes qui transitis -per viam, attendite et 
 videte si est dolor sicut dolor meus ! 
 
 At the end of the poem the poetry has reached 
 such a height and tension that the whole action is 
 transfigured. Even Diomede and Pandarus speak 
 with a new accent : the one, to give, in four lines, 
 the feeling of a vast background, that of the tragedy 
 of Troy itself, against which the tragedy of the lovers 
 stands out in fire 
 
 The folk of Troy, as who saith all and some, 
 In prison been, as ye yourselven see ; 
 For thennes shall not one on live come 
 For all the gold betwixen sun and sea : 
 
 the other, awed for once into seriousness, to " think 
 in his heart " and " say to himself full soberly," 
 " Yea, farewell all the snow of feme year." The 
 words on the lips of a later poet became the burden 
 of the world-famous Ballad of Dead Ladies ; but they 
 were Chaucer's first. 
 
 But the last note of all is not that of sorrow ; still 
 less, as in Shakespeare's play, of gloom, a horror of 
 darkness, a cry of disillusion and disbelief. It is an 
 uplifting of the heart in a strange exaltation. 
 
 And when that he was slain in this manere 
 
 His lighte ghost full blissfully is went 
 
 Up to the hollowness of the seventh sphere . . .
 
 TROILUS AND CRESEIDE 35 
 
 And down from thennes fast he gan avise 
 
 This little spot of earth, that with the sea 
 
 Embraced i, and fully gan despise 
 
 This wretched world, and held all vanity 
 
 To respect of the plem felicity 
 
 That is in heaven above ; and at the last, 
 
 There he was slain, his looking down he cast : 
 
 And in himself he lough, right at the woe 
 Of them that wepten for his death so fast. 
 
 That inward laughter had no bitterness. And it is 
 with no bitterness that Chaucer parts from Cressida. 
 
 Such fine hath, lo ! this Troilus for love, 
 Such fine hath all his greate worthiness j 
 Such fine hath his estate royal above ; 
 Such fine his lust, such fine hath his nobless ; 
 Such fine hath false worldes brittleness : 
 And thus began his loving of Creseide 
 As I have told, and in this wise he died. 
 
 The lovely stanza follows Boccaccio's Italian closely ; 
 but its grave sweetness is all Chaucer's own : and at 
 the end there is a significant variation from the 
 original. 
 
 Cotal fine ebbe il mal concetto amore 
 Di Troilo in Griseida, e cotale 
 Fin'ebbe il miserabile dolore 
 Di lui, al qual non fu mai altro eguale ; 
 Cotal fin'ebbe il lucido splendore 
 Che lui servava al solio reale : 
 Cotal fin'ebbe la speranza vana 
 Di Troilo in Griseida villana. 
 
 Villana is an ugly word ; one cannot call it unde- 
 served, and it is not cruel and shocking like the
 
 36 CHAUCER 
 
 terms that Shakespeare allows himself to utter 
 through the mouth of Thersites. But it was a 
 word that Chaucer could not bring himself to say 
 or even to think. To him Cressida was not a "ria 
 donna," a bad woman. His epithet is different. 
 
 Ne me ne list this silly woman chide 
 Further than the story will devise. 
 Her name, alas, is published so wide 
 That for her guilt it ought enow suffise. 
 And if I might excuse her any wise, 
 For she so sorry was for her untruth, 
 Ywis, I wold excuse her yet for ruth. 
 
 The difference is as great in the lines that follow. 
 In the Filostrato they are an exhortation, such as a 
 man of the world would give, to young men not to 
 trust women. 
 
 giovanetti, ne'quai coll'etate 
 Surgendo vien I'amoroso disio, 
 
 Per Dio vi prego che voi raffreniate 
 
 1 pronti passi all' appetito rio 
 
 E nell' amor di Troilo vi specchiate 
 II qual dimostra suso il verso mio, 
 Perche se ben col cuor gli leggerete, 
 Non di leggieri a tutte crederete. 
 
 Giovane donna e mobile, e vogliosa 
 negli amanti molti, e sua bellezza 
 Estima piu ch 1 allo specchio, e pomposa 
 Ha vanagloria di sua giovinezza, 
 La qual, quanto piacevole e vezzosa 
 E piu, cotanto piu seco 1' apprezza ; 
 Virtu non sente ne conoscimento, 
 Volubil sempre come foglia al vento.
 
 TROILUS AND CRESEIDE 37 
 
 La donna e mobile : it is the well-worn refrain of a 
 thousand verse-writers. Chaucer's sweet grave pity 
 lifts him into a wholly different sphere. 
 
 O younge freshe folkes, he or she, 
 
 In which that love upgroweth with your age 
 
 the criticism of life given by this alteration is as 
 much higher than Boccaccio's as the liquid beauty 
 of the verse excels the smooth glitter of the Italian. 
 While he still lingers over Cressida, his heart turns 
 to Alcestis; and not to her only, but to women 
 who were as unhappy as Cressida, and more sinned 
 against. 
 
 Ne I say not this all only for these men, 
 But most for women that betrayed be. 
 
 To parallel this passion of pity one has to turn 
 to the Francesca episode in Dante. That is even 
 greater, more concentrated, more astounding. But 
 the pity that wrung iron tears from Dante, and 
 made Hell grant what love did seek, wells out of 
 Chaucer spontaneously : it is the climax of that 
 tenderness and sweetness that make him, not indeed 
 greatest in the kingdom of our poetry, but best 
 loved, because most loving.
 
 II 
 
 WE have seen how at the end of the Book of 
 Troilus the poem which sets him definitely among 
 the classics Chaucer's genius so kindles and con- 
 centrates as to bring him into touch with Dante. 
 It is a singular confirmation of this, that we find 
 him almost immediately afterwards, for the first 
 and last time, studying Dante with great care and 
 obviously coming under the influence of his poetical 
 style and manner. In one of the concluding stanzas 
 of Troilus y he prays that he may have might given 
 him of God his Maker, before he dies, " to make 
 some comedy." The sense in which he uses the 
 term is not certain ; but it is clear from his words 
 that he meant something of ampler scope as well 
 as happier import. He must have known perfectly 
 well, for all his deprecatory phrases about his " little 
 book," that in Troilus he had written a poem that 
 went far beyond Boccaccio's range ; and one can 
 fancy him thinking almost in Browning's exact 
 words 
 
 Still, what if I approach the august sphere 
 Named now with only one name, disentwine 
 That under-current soft and argentine 
 From its fierce mate in the majestic mass 
 
 38
 
 THE HOUSE OF FAME 39 
 
 Leavened as the sea whose fire was mixed with glass 
 
 In John's transcendent vision, launch once more 
 
 That lustre ? Dante, pacer of the shore 
 
 Where glutted hell disgorgeth filthiest gloom, 
 
 Unbitten by its whirring sulphur-spume 
 
 Or whence the grieved and obscure waters slope 
 
 Into a darkness quieted by hope ; 
 
 Plucker of amaranths grown beneath God's eye 
 
 In gracious twilights where his chosen lie 
 
 I would do this ! If I should falter now ! 
 
 Dante's poem was a Divine Comedy. It was the 
 human comedy to which Chaucer turned later, and 
 in which he produced his final masterpiece. But 
 the first result of his new impulse took shape in the 
 House of Fame. 
 
 It is generally recognised that the House of Fame 
 represents a reaction from high tension, that we see 
 in it the artist amusing himself after his day's work. 
 What has not been so much emphasised is that 
 we have in it the reaction not only from Iroilus 
 and Creseide, but from an attempt, or at least an 
 impulse and intention, to continue and heighten 
 his work on the great classic lines. When he felt 
 this beyond him, or at all events not in the direc- 
 tion of his proper genius, he poured the accumu- 
 lated result of his study and effort into a poem 
 filled with his brightest humour and his most 
 sensitive feeling for style. In the House of Fame 
 he is making fun of himself and his poetic aspira- 
 tions with a brilliance that shows what progress he 
 had made towards realising them. His conversa-
 
 40 CHAUCER 
 
 tion with the eagle is on one side pure farce, so 
 exquisitely done that it becomes high art ; but it 
 has its serious side, and anticipates all that can be 
 said of his own serious poetry in the way of adverse 
 criticism. It is not possible to confuse it with his 
 earlier work, the poetry he wrote before he had 
 come under the classic influence. The difference 
 is even emphasised by his reversion in the House 
 of Fame to the French octosyllabic couplet. The 
 metre is the same, but the rhythm and tone are 
 new. The most striking single instance is in the 
 lines which conclude the first book 
 
 It was of gold, and shone so bright 
 
 That never saw men such a sight 
 
 But if the heaven had ywon 
 
 All new of gold another sun ; 
 
 So shone the eagle's feathers bright : 
 
 And somewhat downward gan it light. 
 
 They have outgrown the old sweet fluidity ; they 
 have a new accent, a weight and sharpness like that 
 of forged metal. In this, and in a certain quality 
 of rhythm, as well as in the more obvious similarity 
 of the incident, we may see clear traces of Chaucer's 
 having read, not long before that midwinter night, 
 as only one poet reads another, the ninth canto of 
 the Pur gator io. 
 
 The commentators have noted that there is more 
 of direct reference to or imitation of Dante in the 
 House of Fame than in all the rest of Chaucer's
 
 THE HOUSE OF FAME 41 
 
 work put together. But in enumerating the coin- 
 cidences of language (some of them either trifling 
 or unconvincing) they have perhaps neglected those 
 subtler affinities of rhythm and style which are of 
 the inner essence of poetry. There is a notable one 
 in this very passage. The detached last line, like 
 a single stroke upon a bell, " and somewhat down- 
 ward gan it light," following on a completed period 
 and beginning with the word and^ is a peculiar 
 feature of Dante's style. No less than twelve 
 cantos of the Inferno end thus. Final lines like 
 
 E caddi come corpo morto cade, 
 or 
 
 E vengo in parte ove non e che luca, 
 
 might readily be cited in large numbers ; but it is 
 needless to multiply instances. 
 
 The House of Fame is unique among Chaucer's 
 poems in being a winter's tale yeii*.epivo<; oveipos ore 
 iJLYiKKTTai at vvKres while elsewhere he sets his fan- 
 tasies in the surroundings of full spring or summer, 
 in sweet-showered April or on a " freshe morwe 
 of May." This touch is calculated. In that poem, 
 more perhaps than in any other work of Chaucer's, 
 one feels that (like Shakespeare when he wrote that 
 endless and miraculously charming fourth scene of 
 the fourth act of his Winter's T'ale) he is writing 
 entirely to please himself, without any regard for 
 consequence or for constructional fitness. But in
 
 42 CHAUCER 
 
 it more than in any other work one feels also the 
 grasp and power of the trained artist ; and just 
 because he was a trained artist, he broke off the 
 House of Fame before the workmanship over- 
 weighted the material. 
 
 In the Legend of Good Women the specific Italian 
 influence is passing away. It is only felt in the 
 persistence of a larger, freer movement, combined 
 with a firmer control over the structure of the 
 narratives. They contain some of his finest work ; 
 the scale is justly chosen and carefully adhered to, 
 and he keeps clear of his besetting weakness of 
 digression. We may also notice that he is ceasing 
 to make those elaborate lists and minute descrip- 
 tions which are a regular feature of his early 
 manner. The handling is broader, the touch more 
 rapid. He has fully mastered the narrative art 
 of which he was yet to make such splendid use. 
 But he never completed this series of tales as it 
 was planned. He may have felt that, with what- 
 ever dexterity of treatment, it would result in some 
 effect of monotony. But apart from any such 
 reasons, the larger sphere of the human comedy was 
 opening itself out before him. 
 
 At what period the scheme of the Canterbury 
 Tales began to take shape in Chaucer's mind we 
 have no means of deciding. The Decameron must 
 have been known to him at least as early as the 
 Teseide and the Filostrato ; what some editors mean
 
 CHAUCER'S COUPLET-VERSE 43 
 
 by saying that he had never read the Decameron 
 it is difficult to guess, unless they are drawing a 
 flagrantly illogical inference from the fact that he 
 follows, in certain stories told by both, a different 
 version from that of Boccaccio. But it did not 
 require any such particular example to suggest the 
 notion of a collection of tales in verse, of very 
 various subject and treatment, dealing with the 
 whole tragedy and comedy (in Plato's phrase) of 
 human life. Chaucer had already proved his own 
 narrative gift and his mastery over the manipula- 
 tion of verse for the purpose of narration. He 
 had invented in the decasyllabic couplet a metre 
 of complete fitness for this purpose. It had doubled 
 the effectiveness of the means at his disposal. It 
 gave to verse composition a flexibility and range 
 comparable to that gained for architecture by the 
 introduction of the pointed arch. The French 
 octosyllabic couplet, his own earlier favourite, was 
 much inferior to it in both respects. The seven- 
 line stanza so exquisitely used in Troilus was best 
 suited for work involving no great or sudden 
 variation of key work that was large, sustained, 
 and deliberate. It was not well suited for familiar 
 narrative nor for quick transitions. But the new 
 verse was capable of answering any demand made 
 on it ; once its capacities had been ascertained, the 
 poets who had worked without it were like that 
 people in the Odyssey who did not know the use
 
 44 CHAUCER 
 
 of oars ovtf evr'jpe eper/xa, TO. re Trrepct vrjv(r\ 
 " that are to ships as wings are to a bird." 
 
 In his earlier period Chaucer had used many 
 other metres than the eight-syllabled couplet ; he 
 used several stanza-forms for continuous poetry, 
 besides a profusion of lyric measures. To his 
 central period, associated mainly with the rhyme- 
 royal, belongs the invention and conquest of the 
 heroic couplet. Palamon and Arcite may indeed 
 have been remodelled later from an earlier version 
 in stanzas, though to say that it was so remodelled 
 is a mere assumption, but the Legend of Good Women 
 shows the new metre in its perfection. In the 
 Canterbury Tales, while the new verse is immensely 
 preponderant, six stories are in other metres. It 
 will be worth while going into this point a little 
 more closely, both on its own account, and because 
 it leads up to the larger question how far the 
 whole body of writing included in the Canterbury 
 Tales is poetry, and what place that poetry holds in 
 Chaucer's total poetic achievement. 
 
 It is clear that the framework of the Canterbury 
 Tales was planned out on a scale which allowed the 
 inclusion of an enormous mass of material, and that 
 its contents would be gradually filled up, in part by 
 including or adapting tales already written, in part 
 by writing fresh ones. In the Decameron there are 
 a hundred novelle ; and according to a passage in 
 Chaucer's prologue, if the words are taken in their
 
 THE CANTERBURY TALES 45 
 
 obvious meaning, the scheme of the Canterbury Tales 
 would have included when complete no less than 
 a hundred and sixteen. The original scheme was 
 perhaps for tales not exceeding in length those in the 
 Legend of Good Women, an average of rather under 
 two hundred and fifty lines apiece. That, in fact, is 
 just the length of the Prioress' and the Manciple's 
 Tales, while five others of the Canterbury Tales do 
 not exceed the length of the Legend of Dido. To 
 write a hundred or more stories on this scale would 
 be no impossible task ; it would have meant from 
 twenty-five thousand to thirty thousand lines. The 
 actual number of lines in the Canterbury Tales, ex- 
 cluding the prose, is over seventeen thousand. But 
 at a very early stage the scheme began to grow 
 and alter its whole features ; and there is perhaps 
 as much difference between the original design and 
 the actual work produced as was the case later with 
 Pickwick. The little world of people whom Chaucer 
 created took the matter into their own hands. Dry- 
 den's famous words, " Here is God's plenty," though 
 they are generally (in the careless way that the world 
 has with famous phrases) applied to the whole body 
 of work in the Canterbury Tales y were applied by 
 him not to this, but to the group of pilgrims them- 
 selves. They develop and interact in a way which 
 makes their talk and doings on the road into a story 
 by itself a story much longer than any one, or even 
 any two, of the stories they tell, and as various, as
 
 46 CHAUCER 
 
 dramatic, as interesting. Meanwhile these stories 
 themselves, or some of them, were undergoing a 
 similar expansion. The Knight's Tale alone exceeds 
 in length the whole nine stories in the Legend of Good 
 Women. The scheme had to be completely re- 
 modelled. The introduction of the Canon and his 
 yeoman marks a point at which it had, on its original 
 lines, been quite given up. 
 
 I have, God wot, a large field to ere, 
 And weake been the oxen in my plough. 
 
 These words of the Knight's Tale apply with even 
 greater force to the whole design of the Canterbury 
 Tales. Chaucer's own working-day was past noon. 
 Splendid as was the instrument he had forged in the 
 rhymed couplet, great as were his mastery and facility 
 in its use, the sun, in the Homeric phrase, was de- 
 scending towards the hour of unyoking before the 
 field was half covered. 
 
 Even as a man to supper longs to go 
 
 Whose wine-red oxen all day long have drawn 
 
 Across the tilth the plough-frame to and fro ; 
 
 And welcome to him is the dusking grey 
 At sundown, when to supper go he may, 
 And his knees ache in going. 
 
 The number of stories told is in fact only twenty- 
 four, and these include two which are stopped before
 
 THE CANTERBURY TALES 47 
 
 they have well begun, and another which is inter- 
 rupted at an early stage and never resumed. Two 
 of them are in prose. Of the remaining twenty-two, 
 sixteen, containing about ten thousand lines, are in 
 the couplet-verse, as are the three thousand five 
 hundred lines of the prologue and interstitial narra- 
 tive (with one curious exception, the brief prologue to 
 the Rime of Sir Thopas, which is in stanzas). It is not 
 impossible that the six tales in other metres are pieces 
 not originally within the scheme of the work at all. 
 If so, they may have been introduced into it, partly 
 perhaps from a feeling that the couplet-verse if not 
 varied might at last become monotonous, but partly 
 also because they were already written, and the idea 
 of letting them be wasted, or of rewriting them in 
 another metre, seemed one to be deprecated. That 
 neither idea was out of the question is shown by a 
 modern case where we know the facts. The scheme 
 of the Earthly Paradise was planned by William 
 Morris with great care. But it outgrew the original 
 plan ; and while he, approaching it as he did in the 
 full vigour of early manhood, and free from those 
 financial and domestic embarrassments which seem 
 to have pursued Chaucer in his later years, brought 
 the altered design to accomplishment, a number of 
 tales which he had planned and actually written never 
 found their place in it. The Story of the Golden Fleece 
 grew into a separate epic : other tales remain still un- 
 published ; while the Story of the Wanderers, which
 
 48 CHAUCER 
 
 forms a prologue to the rest, was, as Professor Skeat 
 believes to have been the case with Palamon and 
 Arcite^ completely rewritten in a different form, the 
 change here also being, curiously enough, from a 
 stanza into rhymed couplets. It is another interest- 
 ing analogy, that in the Earthly Paradise the story 
 of the Lovers of Gudrun occupies a place as unique 
 as that of Palamon and Arcite in the Canterbury 
 Tales. Like the Knight's Tale, it is more than twice 
 the length of any of the others, and it is also in a 
 different, and in some respects a larger and statelier 
 manner, midway between the straightforward fluency 
 of the fabliau and the full proud sail of the epic. It 
 is likewise noteworthy that, whatever Chaucer may 
 have done, Morris deliberately varied the versifica- 
 tion of his tales by including all of the three great 
 Chaucerian metres. To these three he confined 
 himself, except that he followed Chaucer in the 
 use of inserted lyrics. 
 
 Chaucer's scheme was more elastic, more compre- 
 hensive, in treatment as well as in substance. While 
 there is no reason to assume that he would have 
 written many more tales had he lived longer, it 
 would have been easy to add others when and as he 
 chose. But of course the primary difference is one 
 of substance. The subject-matter of the Canterbury 
 Tales is the whole of human life ; it is a human 
 comedy that includes tragedy, but that passes lightly 
 from pathos to humour, and is fuller of the laughter
 
 THE CANTERBURY TALES 49 
 
 than of the tears of things. To the whole work in 
 its mass his own words apply 
 
 This is the way to all good aventure ; 
 
 Be glad then, reader, and thy sorrow off cast : 
 
 All open am I : pass in and speed thee fast. 
 
 The narrators are a mixed company of men and 
 women, mostly belonging to the bourgeoisie, and not 
 conversant with high thoughts or profound emotions. 
 Throughout we must always remember who it is that 
 is telling the story. While the accent of Chaucer 
 himself is clear through all the tales, while they are 
 all informed by his sweetness of temper, his humour, 
 his keen observation and quick sympathy, each of 
 them bears also the personality of the narrator in 
 whose mouth it is placed. No greater triumph of 
 dramatic art has been achieved, so far as dramatic 
 art consists in creating people and making them live 
 and act from within. 
 
 Without at present raising the whole formidable 
 question of what poetry is, we may say that in any 
 case it must fulfil two conditions ; that it was worth 
 writing in verse, and that it could not have been 
 written but in verse. The first condition would 
 exclude a great deal of the metrical output of 
 Chaucer's contemporaries, and perhaps some of his 
 own. The second excludes almost nothing that 
 ranks as literature during times earlier than the 
 period at which a language has developed the art of 
 prose composition. This in Chaucer's England was 
 
 D
 
 50 CHAUCER 
 
 just beginning to be the case, but only just be- 
 ginning. Wiclif was founding English prose ; but 
 it is a long step from Wiclif to Coverdale, or from 
 the so-called Mandevile to Malory. Such prose as 
 had been created for Italy by Boccaccio, supple, 
 succinct, lucid, was not yet available in English. 
 
 It would be very odd, if we were not so much 
 accustomed to it, that a volume or volumes entitled 
 The Poetical Works of Chaucer should include 
 Melibeus and the Parson's Tale. In the latter, 
 Chaucer has carried his dramatic sympathy to the 
 point where poetry is rejected as a sort of invention 
 of the devil. In the former (" a little thing in 
 prose," as he calls it in one of those delicious touches 
 of his that often lie too deep for laughter it is 
 enormously long besides being portentously dull, 
 and would take about two hours and a half in the 
 telling) he is making fun of the contention of the 
 romantic school that their poetry is the only genuine 
 thing, and that if we will not have Sir Tbopas, we 
 shall have Melibeus certainly an awful alternative 
 either way. We may be thankful to Chaucer for 
 this among his many mercies, that his humour took 
 this particular line, and that he did not waste his 
 time, and probably mislead many generations of 
 critics, by going through the more elaborate jest of 
 giving us the whole of Melibeus in verse, even had the 
 verse been as smooth and as workmanlike as that 
 of the Confessio Amantis.
 
 THE CANTERBURY TALES 51 
 
 If we set aside the little thing in prose, the wild 
 burlesque of Sir Tkopas, and the Parson's sermon, 
 twenty- one tales in verse are left. In estimating the 
 effective poetical value of the whole work, we have 
 to consider partly what I have already hinted at, the 
 entire construction in which the tales are set, and 
 the dramatic fitness of each story to the occasion 
 of the telling and the person of the teller ; and 
 partly, the poetic quality and excellence of the 
 stories themselves. The former criterion is strictly 
 relevant to our judgment of Chaucer as a creative 
 artist. But this kind of creative art may exist in 
 its highest perfection as it does in Scott for in- 
 stance, or in Dickens without entering the sphere 
 of poetry at all. In David Copperfield or the Anti- 
 quary we have a little world of people as living, as 
 interesting, as distinct and various as the God's 
 plenty of the Canterbury Pilgrims. In the main 
 framework of the Canterbury Tales the prologues 
 and interstitial verse there is little that could not 
 be done in prose, at all events in the prose of a more 
 mature accomplishment. For poetry, in the sense 
 of high poetry, we must look mainly to the tales 
 themselves. 
 
 The twenty-one which we have to consider fall 
 naturally into three divisions. Seven are serious 
 in subject and treatment ; those of Palamon and 
 Arcite, of Custance, of Griselda, of Cambuscan, of 
 Dorigen, of Appius and Virginia, and of the little
 
 52 CHAUCER 
 
 Christian boy in Asia. Seven are what Chaucer 
 himself very aptly calls harlotry ; those told by the 
 Miller and Reeve, the Friar and Sompnour, the 
 Merchant and Shipman, and the fragment which 
 is all we are allowed to hear though it has perhaps 
 already gone quite far enough of the life of Perkin 
 Reveller, the Idle Apprentice. Seven are in an inter- 
 mediate or mixed manner. Of these last, two are 
 hardly poems at all, so much as versified material 
 for sermons, tales told for edification, not for de- 
 light. The Legend of Saint Cecilia puts into verse, 
 with considerable dexterity but with little beauty or 
 imagination, the prose of the Golden Legend with all 
 its prosaic details even down to the absurd etymo- 
 logies. The Monk's Tale, while it contains passages 
 of fine rhetoric, has no unity of construction, no 
 organic quality. A string of instances chosen out 
 of a stock such as, ever since Lactantius wrote the 
 De Mortibus Persecutorum, formed a regular part of 
 every churchman's library, is sufficient material for a 
 sermon, but hardly for a poem. Both of these pieces 
 seem clearly to be early work, retouched and inserted 
 here. The other five differ from these two in con- 
 structive quality ; but they also differ from the first 
 group of seven in not treating the story with high 
 poetic seriousness. They do not stand out against 
 the general narrative framework of the tales as 
 against a background of lower tone ; in some cases 
 they rise out of it, or fade into it, almost insensibly.
 
 THE CANTERBURY TALES 53 
 
 As stories indeed, while the Canon's Yeoman's Tale 
 and the Manciple's Tale are trivial, and the Wife of 
 Bath's Tale a slight thing pleasantly told, it would 
 be difficult to beat the Pardoner's Tale of the three 
 thieves for grim strength, or the Nun's Priest's 
 Tale of the cock and fox for humour and light 
 grace. But one does not look in them for really 
 great poetry. 
 
 Even in the seven serious tales, the poetry seldom 
 rises to a high tension. To the Knight's Tale I will 
 return in a moment. In the rest we may notice the 
 relaxation of a genius which had ascended in its 
 central period to poetry, not of greater or sunnier 
 charm, but of more ardent imagination, of a loftier 
 purpose and movement. The Clerk's Tale of Gri- 
 selda is interesting as showing a wavering between 
 romantic and humanistic treatment. It is because 
 the difference is never adjusted that, with all its 
 many beauties, it is on the whole a failure as a poem. 
 When he wrote it, Chaucer was clearly not at the 
 stage, or in the mood, where he could treat it in the 
 spirit of the fabliau. He had passed out of the 
 romantic atmosphere into the open air. But in cool 
 daylight the whole story of Griselda is either pre- 
 posterous or shocking ; in either case not fit material 
 for high art. That it made a great impression on 
 Petrarch, from whom Chaucer took it, is matter of 
 known fact. But Petrarch in his whole life seems 
 never once to have come into contact with real things.
 
 54 CHAUCER 
 
 This relaxation has its degree of seriousness. In 
 the stories of Custance and of Dorigen Chaucer finds 
 ample scope for beauty, imagination, pity, as well as 
 for the special graces of romance. The former rises 
 more than once to a splendid eloquence. 
 
 Paraventure in thilke large book 
 
 Which that men clepe the heaven, ywritten was 
 
 With sterres, when that he his birthe took, 
 
 That he for love should han his death, alas ! 
 
 For in the sterres, clearer than in glass, 
 
 Is written, God wot, whoso could it read, 
 
 The death of every man, withouten dread. 
 
 This is noble poetry at high tension ; and as noble, 
 and more piercingly vivid, is another famous stanza : 
 
 Have ye nat seen sometime a pale face 
 Among a press, of him that hath be lad 
 Toward his death, whereas him gat no grace, 
 And such a colour in his face hath had, 
 Men mighte know his face that was bestad, 
 Amonges all the faces in that rout ? 
 So stant Custance, and looketh her about. 
 
 But the essential difference between the tale of Cus- 
 tance and the Book of Troilus and Creseide is that the 
 one is but a tale, told gracefully and movingly to 
 pass the time away, and the other a creative master- 
 piece going to the heart of life. 
 
 Even the Knight's Tale, with its stately move- 
 ment and lavish richness of ornament, does not 
 bring us into the heart of things. It is no deroga- 
 tion from a poem which is one of the chief splen-
 
 PALAMON AND ARCITE 55 
 
 dours of our literature to say this. The same might 
 be said of another poem which on its smaller scale 
 much resembles it, Keats' Lamia. It is arguable 
 that Lamia is Keats' finest poem ; and the Knight's 
 Tale is, I suppose, the single poem which represents 
 Chaucer most fully. In it the pictorial or decorative 
 value of his poetry is at its maximum. It is all beauti- 
 ful, all dexterous and masterly, all Chaucer at a high 
 level that only comes short of his highest. It has 
 more range than any other single poem of his ; it 
 supplies more memorable phrases and lovely lines. 
 It ranges from the sweet garrulous manner of the 
 romance-writer, to a loftiness and incisiveness that 
 are almost Homeric, almost Virgilian. 
 
 Alas, why pleynen folk so in commune 
 Of purveyance of God, or of fortune, 
 That giveth them full oft in many a guise 
 Well better than they can themself devise ? 
 
 These lines recall the great words of Zeus at the 
 opening of the Odyssey 
 
 Alas, how idly do these mortals blame 
 The Gods, as though by our devising came 
 The evil that in spite of ordinance 
 By their own folly for themselves they frame ! 
 
 The words of Arcite 
 
 So stood the heaven when that we were born : 
 We must endure : this is the short and plain 
 
 seem to echo some stately cadence of the Aeneid like 
 the Stat sua cuique dies or the su-peranda omnisfortuna
 
 56 CHAUCER 
 
 ferendo est. Now we come on a fully elaborated epic 
 simile 
 
 Right as the hunter in the regne of Thrace 
 
 That standeth at the gappe with a spear, 
 
 Whan hunted is the lion or the bear, 
 
 And heareth him come rushing in the greaves 
 
 And breaketh both the boughes and the leaves, 
 
 And thinketh, Here cometh my mortal enemy, 
 
 IVithoute fail he mote be dead, or I : 
 
 For either I mote slay him at the gap, 
 
 Or he mote slain me, if that me mishap : 
 
 So fareden they : 
 
 and again, on a line of Greek simplicity like that 
 of Palamon's 
 
 For since the day is come that I shall die 
 
 the sort of line in which the art is so consummate 
 that it looks like accident. We have passages of light 
 speed, those lovely lines for instance beginning 
 The busy lark, the messenger of day, 
 
 that read like a piece of early Shakespeare ; and con- 
 centrated couplets, now smooth and weighty like the 
 comment of Theseus, 
 
 Then is it wisdom, as it thinketh me, 
 To make a virtue of necessity ; 
 
 now filled with lyric air and fire, as in the lamenta- 
 tion of the Athenian women over Arcite's body (like 
 the weeping in Troy over Hector, Chaucer is bold 
 enough to say) 
 
 Why woldestow be dead, these women cry, 
 And haddest gold enough, and Emily ?
 
 PALAMON AND ARCITE 57 
 
 In the Knight's Tale Chaucer (again like Keats in 
 Lamia] was trying to write as well as he could. If 
 a fault in it is to be hinted at, it is that now and then 
 (but here again we must remember that the tale is 
 told not in his own person, but in the Knight's) he 
 seems to pay a little too much attention to the 
 writing, and does not give quite free play to his 
 humour or to his power of dramatic imagination. 
 With Chaucer, indeed, as with that college friend of 
 Johnson's who has made himself immortal by a 
 single thoughtless phrase, "I don't know how, cheer- 
 fulness was always breaking in." When he says 
 of the portraits in the temple of Mars 
 
 All be that thilkc time they were unborn, 
 Yet was their death depeinted therebeforne : 
 
 when, in the highly wrought and noble description 
 of Arcite's death, he says 
 
 His spirit changed house, and wente there, 
 As I came never, I cannot tellen where : 
 
 it is with the flicker of a smile, checked as soon as 
 it appears. The two passages are in singular like- 
 ness and contrast to two others of the same purport 
 in Shakespeare, where the lightning of a grimmer 
 laughter flashes across a situation of tragic horror. 
 " This prophecy Merlin shall make ; for I live before 
 his time," says the Fool in Lear, in a passage which 
 is vainly rejected as an interpolation by some editors. 
 " In heaven ; send thither to see : if your messenger
 
 58 CHAUCER 
 
 find him not there, seek him i' the other place your- 
 self," is the sinister sarcasm of Hamlet. But here, 
 as even in the dying words of Arcite with all their 
 unsurpassable grace and tenderness, the strange sob 
 of their cadences 
 
 What is this world ? what asketh men to have ? 
 Now with his love, now in his colde grave 
 Alone, withouten any company 
 
 we are in the faint world of romance, among dreams 
 that linger a moment, retreating in the dawn. 
 
 But in their main structure and substance, even 
 where they deal with romantic stories and episodes, 
 the Canterbury Tales represent the reaction from 
 romance. Chaucer brought poetry into the open 
 air, just when the romantic atmosphere was begin- 
 ning to be oppressive. It was not before this, it was 
 more likely a little later, that the English metrical 
 romance reached its last and perhaps its greatest 
 success in Sir Degrevaunt. But over Degrevaunt 
 and all his kin rests henceforth the mocking note of 
 Sir Tho-pas. Their feet move in an elderly morning 
 dew ; their sentiment begins to look tawdry under 
 the daylight. Yet on the other hand in contrast 
 with the author of Piers Ploughman Chaucer is the 
 head of the romantic school, as Homer is romantic 
 in contrast with Hesiod. He carries romance even 
 into his comedy, as he carries his comedy even into 
 romance. This is what gives his work so com-
 
 REACTION FROM ROMANCE 59 
 
 plex and intricate a fascination. I have already 
 spoken of the Nun's Priest's Tale as a masterpiece 
 in his lighter style of poetry ; airy, delicate, exqui- 
 sitely humorous, with a light silvery grace about 
 it, although it is only silver and not gold. It is in 
 this poem that he makes his most direct attack on 
 the romances 
 
 This story is all so true, I undertake, 
 As is the book of Lancelot de Lake. 
 
 In a way too, it is all so poetical, all so romantic. 
 He is a poet making fun of poetry, just as, being an 
 accomplished and sensitive stylist, he is so fond of 
 parodying style, even his own. Unless we realise 
 how continually he is doing this, we miss half his 
 meaning. Sometimes it is done quite broadly, oftener 
 with so demure an air as almost to escape notice. 
 
 For the orizont had reft the sunne's light 
 (This is as much to sayn as it was night) : 
 
 it may be suspected that here he is making fun of 
 Dante. 
 
 And in his ire he hath his wife yslayn : 
 This is th 1 effect, there is no more to sayn : 
 
 this is a parody of his own epic manner. May's 
 visit to the sick-bed of Damian in the Merchant's 
 Tale is a conscious parody of Cressida's visit to the 
 sick-bed of Troilus. It is audaciously introduced by
 
 60 CHAUCER 
 
 the very phrase, " pity runneth soon in gentle heart," 
 used with such serious beauty in Palamon and Arcite 
 and used again with a slighter and subtler touch of 
 comedy in the proem of the falcon's speech to 
 Canace ; that speech itself being a parody from be- 
 ginning to end of Chaucer's own seriously romantic 
 manner as we see it in the Legend, of Good, Women. 
 Indeed, except where Chaucer is at his very highest 
 elevation, or where, as in the Prioress' Tale, he sup- 
 presses it for dramatic purposes, the suspicion of 
 parody, the lurking instinct of making fun, is never 
 far round the corner. It glances and sparkles 
 through the Knight's Tale ; it gives added breadth 
 and charm to the earlier books of Troilus and Cre- 
 seide. It keeps his tenderness from becoming senti- 
 mental, as his sentiment keeps it in turn from 
 becoming heartless. 
 
 This comes out most vividly in his treatment of 
 the feathered things, the " smale foules," of which 
 he was so loving and so keen an observer. With 
 his romantic passion for birds, he is full of their 
 comic aspect. He is alike responsive to the magic 
 of the nightingale and to the absurdity of the 
 dove sitting upon a barn-roof. The Parliament 
 of Fowls is a sort of epitome of his own poetical 
 genius on all its sides : the romantic sensibility of 
 the turtle 
 
 For though she died, I would none other make ; 
 I will be hers till that the death me take :
 
 REACTION FROM ROMANCE 61 
 
 the reaction from romance in the duck 
 
 Who can a reason find or wit in that ? 
 
 Yea, quek ! yit quod the duck : full well and fair ! 
 
 There be mo sterres, God wot, than a pair : 
 
 the high seriousness with which that Canterbury 
 pilgrim is checked by the tercelet 
 
 Thy kind is of so low a wretchedness 
 
 That what love is thou canst not see ne guess. 
 
 And so also with his loving and humorous view 
 of other animals, like cats and dogs, as in the 
 lines 
 
 And if the cattes skin be sleek and gay, 
 She wol nat dwell in house half a day ; 
 But forth she wol, ere any day be dawed, 
 To show her skin, and gone a-caterwawed : 
 
 or in a passage about dogs' manners in the Parson's 
 Tale which can hardly be quoted with decorum, but 
 which is even more intensely funny and true to life 
 than Launce's lecture to Crab in the Two Gentlemen 
 of Verona. 
 
 Seldom for very long together does Chaucer keep 
 perfectly serious. But the world itself is not con- 
 stantly serious ; and when it is, it is often with the 
 seriousness, not of a great art that sweeps by with 
 sceptred pall, but of a Puritanism that renounces art 
 altogether. Of Chaucer's Muse, both in her more
 
 62 CHAUCER 
 
 impassioned and in her lighter vein, it may well 
 be said 
 
 By her attire so bright and shene, 
 Men might perceive well and seen 
 She was not of religioun. 
 
 Yet in this bright secular world we may see, towards 
 the end, the spirit of Puritanism rising and casting 
 a shadow over his work ; not merely in the recanta- 
 tion at the conclusion of the Canterbury Tales, but 
 in the grave impressive moralisations with which the 
 Doctor's and the Manciple's Tales end though 
 here, once more, we must not forget the dramatic 
 element. Even the light - hearted Paganism of 
 Boccaccio had ended thus ; as did, a century later, 
 the splendid humanistic art of Botticelli ; as did the 
 whole Renaissance movement by the end of the six- 
 teenth century. In Chaucer's own age and country, 
 which were also the age and country of Wiclif and 
 of John Ball, Langland gives us a criticism of life 
 deeper than Chaucer's, though narrower. As re- 
 sponsive to the wretchedness of this world as 
 Chaucer was to its variety and beauty, he dreams, not 
 of a House of Fame, not of ladies dead and lovely 
 knights, but of heaven opened, of Mercy and Truth 
 meeting, of Righteousness and Peace kissing one 
 another. When the vision comes on him 
 
 Into the land of longing alone she me brought, 
 
 And in a mirror that hight middle-earth she made to 
 
 behold. 
 Son, she said to me here might thou see -wonders.
 
 SERIOUSNESS IN ART 63 
 
 But they are not the wonders of Chaucer ; and in 
 that mirror the world is seen, full indeed of sharp 
 colour and life, but without romance, without joy, 
 without pity. 
 
 This seriousness is quite a different thing from 
 the high seriousness of art. In its eyes, Troilus and 
 Creseide falls under the same condemnation with 
 the Miller's Tale ; both are mere worldly vanity. 
 But as poetry, the distinction between the two is 
 evidently profound. We can hardly ignore, or leave 
 unanswered, the question whether the Miller's Tale, 
 and that whole body of brilliant work to which it 
 belongs, be poetry at all, and if so, in what sense. 
 To reduce the matter to a concrete instance, let me 
 take two passages which are closely alike in sub- 
 stance and handling. In the Sompnour's Tale the 
 friar responds to the invitation to order his own 
 dinner as follows : 
 
 Now dame, quod he, je vous dy sanz doute, 
 
 Have I not of a capon but the liver, 
 
 And of your softe bread not but a shiver, 
 
 And after that a roasted pigges head 
 
 (But that I wold no beast for me were dead) 
 
 Than had I with you homely suffisance. 
 
 I am a man of little sustenance. 
 
 My spirit hath his fostering in the Bible ; 
 
 The body is aye so ready and penible 
 
 To wake, that my stomach is destroyed. 
 
 The other passage is from an author who is like 
 Chaucer in many qualities, in a combination of
 
 64 CHAUCER 
 
 humour and sentiment, in creative fertility, and in 
 the breadth of his outlook on human life. 
 
 "I think, young woman," said Mrs. Gamp, in a tone 
 expressive of weakness, " that I could pick a little bit 
 of pickled salmon, with a nice little sprig of fennel 
 and a sprinkling of white pepper. I takes new bread, 
 my dear, with jest a little pat of fresh butter, and a 
 mossel of cheese. In case there should be such a thing 
 as a cowcumber in the 'ouse, will you be so kind as 
 bring it, for I'm rather partial to 'em, and they does a 
 world of good in a sickroom. If they draws the 
 Brighton Tipper here, I takes that ale at night, my 
 love : it bein' considered wakeful by the doctors. And 
 whatever you do, young woman, don't bring more 
 than a shilling's worth of gin and water when I rings 
 the bell a second time ; for that is always my allow- 
 ance, and I never takes a drop beyond." 
 
 This last passage is of course not poetry ; what 
 is it, if anything, beyond the mere absence of metrical 
 form, in which it differs from the other? There 
 are two things to say about this : first, that the 
 matter of metrical form is not accidental but essen- 
 tial ; secondly, that a poet working in a medium 
 which is the medium of poetry is producing poten- 
 tial poetry, and that this potential poetry is to some 
 extent, which may be greater or less, converted into 
 actual poetry in the process of production. He may 
 let it run at low pressure ; he may reduce the ele- 
 ments of beauty, of construction and imagination ; 
 but the interaction of the mind of a poet and the 
 forms of poetry is so close that he cannot, nor would
 
 SERIOUSNESS IN ART 65 
 
 he if he could, wholly shut these elements off. Even 
 where the verse seems to run automatically off the 
 machine, to be at low pressure or at none, the artist's 
 hand is on the lever, and able at any moment to fill 
 and flood the verse with the quality of essential 
 poetry. The Pardoner's Tale is a fabliau which is 
 entirely suited to prose treatment, and has in fact 
 made its impression on Europe through prose 
 versions, from the Gesta Romanorum to the Jungle 
 Book. But it rises without effort in Chaucer's hands 
 to such grave rhythmic rhetoric as this : 
 
 And on the ground, which is my mother's gate, 
 I knocke with my staff both early and late 
 And saye : Leve mother, let me in ! 
 Lo how I vanish, flesh and blood and skin ! 
 Alas, when shall my bones been at rest ? 
 
 And in the opening lines of the Wife of Bath's Tale 
 
 In the olde dayes of the King Arthour 
 Of which that Britons speaken great honour, 
 All was this land fulfilled of fayerie : 
 The Elf-Queen, with her jolly company, 
 Danced full oft in many a greene mead 
 
 we have the note that, at a higher imaginative pres- 
 sure, but hardly with more melodious grace, comes 
 back in the splendid prologue to Lamia : 
 
 Upon a time, before the faery broods 
 Drove Nymph and Satyr from the prosperous woods, 
 Before King Oberon's bright diadem, 
 Sceptre, and mantle clasp'd with dewy gem, 
 Frighted away the Dryads and the Fauns 
 From rushes green, and brakes, and cowslipp'd lawns. 
 
 E
 
 66 CHAUCER 
 
 The difficulty disappears if we take larger views. 
 For poetry, like all real art, is a function of life, and 
 its province is as wide as that of life itself. The 
 harlotries of the Canterbury Tales have qualities 
 other than those of poetry ; but even of them it may 
 be said that the thing could not be done in prose, 
 or at least that in prose it would lose a specific charm, 
 a definite artistic quality. It comes of his width of 
 outlook, his large sane handling of life, that Chaucer, 
 while at his slackest he never loses touch of beauty, 
 at his highest never loses his sunlit charm and 
 brilliant speed. He says of the Duchess Blanch : 
 
 Her list so well to live 
 That dulness was of her adrad. 
 
 Chaucer is never dull ; except where he means to be 
 dull, and is so dramatically. It is far otherwise 
 with his successors. " Chaucer fain would have me 
 taught, but I was dull," says Occleve ; and all his 
 readers they are not many answer fervently, 
 " Indeed you were." The Chaucerians are always 
 being dull. Even their best work lacks the ripple 
 and sparkle that never deserts that of their master. 
 It is for this that even the high Muse is indulgent to 
 him when, in the not unkindly phrase of Dryden, he 
 mingles trivial things with those of deeper moment, 
 and forgets that an author is not to write all he can, 
 but only all he ought. 
 
 But Chaucer's supreme work is neither his earliest
 
 THE CENTRAL PERFECTION 67 
 
 nor his latest ; it is the work of that central period 
 where his field first broadens, and the enchanted 
 atmosphere of romance begins to melt into the open 
 day. Such is the law of progress in poetry. We 
 may long to fix that brief perfection ; but we might 
 as well attempt to stay the sun. It is there that 
 we find his largest and firmest handling of beauty. 
 In his earlier and wholly romantic work we 
 
 may on these branches hear 
 The smale birdes singen clear 
 Their blissful sweete song pitous, 
 
 in a world of garden-closes where the grass is 
 powdered with daisies, where the railed alleys are 
 " shadowed well with blosmy boughes green, and 
 benched new and sanded all the ways"; the beauty 
 is small and intricate, like that of pictures in a 
 painted book. From that lovely babble of birds 
 
 Layes of love full well souning 
 They sungen in their jargoning 
 
 he rises to a freer handling, at once more natural and 
 more impassioned : 
 
 A nightingale upon a cedar green 
 Under the chamber wall thereas she lay, 
 Full loude sang again the moone sheen, 
 Paraunture in his birdes wise a lay 
 Of love. 
 
 Just so likewise from his romantic descriptions of
 
 68 CHAUCER 
 
 summer dawns he rises to this picture in the large 
 epic manner: 
 
 On heaven yet the sterres weren seen 
 Although full pale ywaxen was the moon, 
 And whiten gan the orizonte sheen 
 All eastward. 
 
 In both of these passages we hear the great note of 
 classical romance which is poetry consummate. 
 
 It is by virtue of his high poetry that Chaucer 
 takes his rank as a poet. 
 
 Sometimes a-dropping from the sky 
 I heard the skylark sing ; 
 Sometimes all little birds that are, 
 How they seemed to fill the sea and air 
 With their sweet jargoning ! 
 
 (with what a beautiful instinct Coleridge uses the 
 Chaucerian word !) 
 
 And now 'twas like all instruments ; 
 Now like a lonely flute ; 
 And now it is an angel's song 
 That makes the heavens be mute. 
 
 To this angel's song he rises. It ceased ; and it is 
 elsewhere, in a later day, that Chapman heard, and 
 we hear now 
 
 the music of the spheres 
 And all the angels singing out of heaven. 
 
 As the daylight broadens, the enchantment slowly 
 fades away. Once the sun has climbed high, we 
 must needs look back wistfully, not only to that
 
 RETURN TO ROMANCE 69 
 
 magnificence of the splendori antelucani, but even 
 beyond it to the magic of dusk, to the world of en- 
 closed gardens, of cool green rooms, of lit chapels 
 and shadowy halls. For poetry must perpetually 
 return to the romance that again and again she seems 
 to have outgrown. " He seeth well," says the author 
 of the High History of the Holy Grail, " that albeit 
 the night were dark, within was so great brightness 
 of light without candles that it was marvel ; and it 
 seemed him the sun shone there. With that he 
 issueth forth and betaketh him to the way he had 
 abandoned, and prayeth God grant he may find 
 Lancelot of the Lake."
 
 SPENSER
 
 THE Middle Ages died hard ; and nowhere harder 
 than in this island of the West, which was already 
 marked among other nations by two specific quali- 
 ties a tenacious conservatism, and an instinct for 
 adapting rather than replacing old institutions, for 
 making changes and even revolutions under accus- 
 tomed names and inherited forms. The coming of 
 the Renaissance into England was strange, troubled, 
 irregular. In some ways one might say it never 
 came at all, or came in so imperfect a shape, with 
 such transformed features, that it seems to demand 
 another name. This was so over the whole field of 
 civilisation, in religion and politics as well as in art. 
 But in poetry the process of change was especially 
 intricate: the threads of influence, the lines of 
 growth, are complex and not easy to disentangle. 
 The fifteenth century was emphatically, not only 
 in this country but throughout Europe, not an age of 
 great poetry. In England the Chaucerians continued, 
 with ever-dwindling inspiration, with growing loss 
 of imaginative hold on life and power of interpret- 
 ing it, the tradition created and fixed by Chaucer 
 himself. Beyond the Chaucerians we have the 
 
 73
 
 74 SPENSER 
 
 mystery plays, the ballads, a small supply of scat- 
 tered lyrics : a heap of confused scraps, among 
 which the vital process most visible is rather the 
 decay which precedes germination than germination 
 itself. The earlier Italian Renaissance had in poetry 
 been succeeded by a long period of stagnation. 
 Petrarch and Boccaccio died in 1374 and 1375; 
 for a full century afterwards there is no Italian poet 
 of the first or second rank, no outstanding mark in 
 the progress of poetry. The quattrocentisti are the 
 painters. In literature it was the age not of the 
 poets but of the scholars. Just at the end of the 
 fifteenth century comes Boiardo's Orlando. Boiardo 
 died in 1494, the year of the French invasion of 
 Italy. In France there had been the same lull and 
 pause ; Fra^ois Villon is there the chief poet of a 
 century which was in the main occupied with other 
 things than poetry. 
 
 Early in the sixteenth century there was a great 
 revival of poetry in Italy, and, a little later, in 
 France, under an impulse partly native, partly com- 
 municated from Italy. The impact of this move- 
 ment reached England just at a time when, even 
 apart from it, there were signs of a poetic revival. 
 The joy of life had come back to letters ; and the 
 joy of letters once more flooded over life. When 
 the head of the English Petrarch fell on the scaffold 
 in 1547, the new movement had been fully launched 
 on its course.
 
 ELIZABETH ANISM 75 
 
 In the age which followed Spenser's age, though 
 it was too various and too splendid in its poetical 
 progress and achievement to be described adequately 
 as the age of Spenser we may then trace and mark 
 at least four intertwined motive forces or impulses ; 
 the native, the classical, the French, and the Italian. 
 The interaction of these impulses was in the highest 
 degree complex and subtle. We need not be too 
 curious in attempting to assign to each a separate 
 and proper force ; still less can we assign to any one 
 such exclusive preponderance as would allow us to 
 regard the others as relatively unimportant. But 
 we shall never properly appreciate Spenser and 
 Spenser's age unless we realise vividly in him, and 
 in it, the presence of all four in mutual interaction. 
 
 First then and it is proper to place it first, 
 because the poetry of every country must be con- 
 sidered as what it is, a function of the national life 
 we see in the English poetry of this age an authen- 
 tic revival of the native lyrical impulse. In this, 
 English poetry holds of none and borrows of none. 
 It is apart from scholarship, apart from any effect of 
 foreign models, apart from the Renaissance itself, 
 regarded as a European movement which overflowed 
 into England. The English lyric poetry of the 
 sixteenth century is as self-originating, as inde- 
 pendent of external influences, as the Greek lyric 
 poetry of the seventh and sixth centuries before 
 Christ. Secondly, we have the classical impulse ;
 
 76 SPENSER 
 
 the effect on poetry of the revival of learning in 
 the previous generation, that golden age of the 
 scholars, of Greece rediscovered and Rome re- 
 vitalised ; and, together with this, the revived and 
 enlarged appreciation of the earlier Italian classics, 
 of Petrarch and to a less extent of Dante. Thirdly, 
 we have the continuous impulse of the immense 
 and splendid body of contemporary Italian poetry, 
 right through the sixteenth century, from Sanna- 
 zaro and Ariosto at its beginning to Guarini and 
 Tasso towards its end. This impulse came in part 
 directly ; in part as transmitted through the French 
 Renaissance, and thus inextricably interwoven with 
 the fourth and last influence, that of France. The 
 French Pleiade, just in the middle of the century, 
 had an immediate and long-continued effect on the 
 development of poetry in England which can 
 scarcely be over-estimated. Spenser's own earlier 
 poetry is modelled more immediately and obvi- 
 ously on that of Clement Marot than on the Italian 
 poets from whom Marot drew ; and the French 
 influence continued to grow more and more im- 
 portant in English poetry for upwards of a century, 
 through the successive stages of its history in Du 
 Bellay and Ronsard, in Du Bartas, in Corneille and 
 the classicists. But, as had been the case already in 
 the age of Chaucer, while the influence of French 
 form and structure was more immediate, more ex- 
 tensive, and more patent, we must look beyond
 
 ELIZABETHANISM 77 
 
 these for the deeper inspiration. The progress of 
 poetry (that I may quote Gray's brief and pregnant 
 words) was from Greece to Italy, and from Italy to 
 England. 
 
 All these influences, native, classical, French 
 Renaissance, and Italian, mingle and accumulate in 
 Spenser. It is thus as well as from his own genius 
 and from the imposing mass and brilliance of his 
 production that he is the central figure in the 
 English poetry of the sixteenth century. 
 
 With Spenser we are at the full centre of the 
 English Renaissance. For all his Chaucerianism, he 
 is, as Chaucer in his time had been, a modern of 
 the moderns. The change in the sky from evening 
 to morning had passed a generation earlier. Surrey 
 and Wyatt, slender as is the volume of their work, 
 had quietly made ancient literature of the whole of 
 earlier English poetry. They changed an epoch, or 
 at least unmistakeably marked its change. Gawain 
 Douglas's translation of Virgil and Surrey's are only 
 thirty years apart in time : but they belong to two 
 different worlds. The change was just consum- 
 mated when Spenser was born. Six years later, the 
 Elizabethan age began. Six years more bring us 
 to the birth of Shakespeare. 
 
 Thus in Spenser we see the full tide of the 
 Renaissance surging up through many channels 
 round the stranded ship of English poetry, floating 
 her, and bearing her off by confused currents upon
 
 y8 SPENSER 
 
 a new and adventurous voyage. That age, like our 
 own, went almost mad over education ; and Spenser 
 represents not only the enlarged outlook and 
 heightened ambitions of the new world, but also its 
 rich scholarship. He went to Cambridge at seven- 
 teen, and studied there for seven years ; it was an 
 education almost as full and elaborate as Milton's 
 or Virgil's. There he lived among a circle of 
 ardent scholars, and received that bent towards 
 classicism, as classicism was then understood, which 
 is one of the main threads of influence that run 
 through the whole of his poetry. 
 
 That classicism of the sixteenth century was a 
 very mixed and intricate thing. On one side, fol- 
 lowing the great Italian humanists, it plunged deeply 
 into Plato and the Platonic school. On another, 
 Ovid was its master, and it sought to reinstate the 
 brilliance, the dexterity, the accomplishment, which 
 the Graeco-Roman civilisation had reached before it 
 fell into decay. On yet another, it read largely and 
 deeply in ancient history, to gain knowledge of the 
 past which might be applied to actual life, and to 
 recover what it described in a compendious phrase 
 as the wisdom of the ancients. On literature it had 
 an influence for both good and evil. The fatal 
 tendency of classicism is to see life through books, 
 and to take it at second hand. Its natural instinct 
 is to copy, and in doing so, to copy the inferior 
 classics, who are more copiable, and then to go on
 
 ELIZABETHANISM 79 
 
 copying itself. Its scholarship tends towards ped- 
 antry ; its poets tend to become rhetoricians. The 
 influence of Ovid colours the whole mass of Eliza- 
 bethan poetry ; that of Seneca greatly hampered the 
 growth of the English drama. Bembo and Politian 
 were ranked as masters alongside of Virgil. " The 
 tragedies of Buchanan do justly bring forth a divine 
 admiration," says Sidney in his Apology for Poetry. 
 Bembo himself was urgent on Ariosto to write 
 Latin poetry only, as bringing greater fame and 
 more assured permanence. There was a similar 
 delusion among the circle of scholars with whom 
 Spenser lived and studied at Cambridge. They held 
 one or both of two positions. Latin was the com- 
 mon international language of educated Europe, and 
 therefore all poetry that should make a universal 
 appeal must be written in Latin ; or at least, the 
 Latin poets were the classics, and therefore any 
 English poetry which meant to take rank as classical 
 must be written as nearly as possible in the Latin 
 manner. If only the former of these doctrines 
 had been held, no great harm would have been 
 done. The native instinct for poetry might 
 have been trusted to take care of itself. But 
 it was different with the latter. A serious and 
 what might have been a disastrous attempt was 
 made to guide the stream of poetry into artificial 
 channels ; to copy the conventions of Latin poetry ; 
 even to transplant its metrical forms, as those of
 
 8o SPENSER 
 
 i 
 
 Greece had been transplanted into Latin poetry 
 itself. 
 
 But this is a sort of thing that cannot be done 
 in the same language twice ; and in English poetry 
 it had already been done once. The conquest and 
 almost complete submergence of the native English 
 metrical forms, under the influence of the first Re- 
 naissance and the decisive effect of Chaucer's genius, 
 had fixed the lines of English poetry once for all. 
 In his furnace the two metals had run into an alloy 
 which was finer, harder, and more ductile than either 
 of its two constituents. Something of loss there had 
 been, but a greater gain. The Chaucerian metal 
 became the basis of a standard currency, capable 
 indeed of modification, enrichment, refinement, but 
 in its main substance national and permanent. It 
 was fine enough to be run into the most delicate 
 moulds, flexible enough to meet, age after age, the 
 ever-shifting and moving requirements of poetry. 
 If Spenser had at any time been in danger of being 
 carried away by the new ideas, he was saved from 
 this by two things ; his own admiration and almost 
 worship of Chaucer on the one hand, and, on the 
 other hand, the education which had made him 
 familiar not only with the Latin and with some of 
 the Greek classics, but with the consummate achieve- 
 ments already made by French and Italian poets in 
 their own languages in the age just preceding his 
 own, and those still being made by their successors.
 
 SPENSER AND SIDNEY 81 
 
 The goal of his poetical ambition lay clear before 
 him ; it was to be the English Ariosto, the English 
 Ronsard ; perhaps to be even more, but this was 
 denied to him, the English Virgil. 
 
 When Spenser left Cambridge in 1576, he was 
 the chief figure among a closely associated circle of 
 poets and scholars which may remind us in many 
 ways of the circle of Virgil during the years previous 
 to the appearance of the Eclogues. They were full 
 of the enthusiasm of youth. In other European 
 countries the poetry of the late Renaissance was at 
 its greatest visible splendour ; it had reached the 
 full maturity which is recognised afterwards not 
 at the time as presaging the decline. The Lusiads 
 had appeared in 1572; the Aminta in 1573; the 
 Sepmaine followed in 1579; and the Giermalemme 
 Liberata in 1581. English poetry was still on its 
 full curve of ascent. It felt itself at the beginning 
 of a new age. 
 
 Just then Spenser, returning to London after two 
 years of further study and practice in the north of 
 England, made that acquaintance with Philip Sidney 
 which disengaged the movement of English poetry 
 in its complete force. The new Virgil had found his 
 Gallus. Sidney was two years younger than Spenser, 
 but he was one of those in whom natural precocity 
 has been stimulated yet further by circumstance and 
 education. The eldest son of the Lord President 
 of Wales, he had been marked out from birth for
 
 82 SPENSER 
 
 great things, and his education had been, even for 
 that age, elaborate almost beyond example. He 
 came to Oxford at thirteen. Four years there were 
 followed by three more spent in travelling all over 
 the Continent, making the Grand Tour on a scale 
 and with advantages which sent him back with 
 a European reputation and conversant with the 
 whole civilised life of Europe. He returned to 
 England a finished soldier, courtier, patriot, and 
 poet. When he met Spenser he was only four-and- 
 twenty ; but he had already been English ambassa- 
 dor to the Emperor, and was already hailed in the 
 ecstatic language of that age as the Messiah of 
 poetry. His death at thirty-two was said to have 
 plunged all England into mourning : both during 
 his life and afterwards he was idolised by almost 
 every one who had known him. Not himself by 
 the amount or quality of his poetry rising into the 
 rank of the great poets, " having slipt into the title 
 of a poet," as he says of himself, he yet still im- 
 presses us, as he impressed them, with a sense of 
 poetical distinction and even genius. Not only so, 
 but he had a native critical faculty which was de- 
 veloped by study, by wide and varied reading, and by 
 acquaintance with the whole movement of contem- 
 porary culture, into an instrument of exquisite fine- 
 ness, to which his serious Puritan temper lent a yet 
 keener edge. Of the function of poetry he says, in 
 a few simple words that are startling in their clear
 
 THE SHEPHERDS CALENDAR 83 
 
 insight and exactness, that it is " to make the too 
 much loved earth more lovely." 
 
 On Spenser at all events (as through Spenser on 
 the whole subsequent course of English poetry) the 
 influence of Sidney was momentous. Its first result 
 was the publication, in the year after they became 
 acquainted, of the Shepherds Calendar. This was 
 the manifesto of the new poetry. It was dedicated 
 to Sidney as Virgil's Eclogues were to Gallus ; and 
 like them, it not only placed its author at the head 
 of contemporary poets, but was the symbol and 
 keynote of a new world in poetry. 
 
 Its importance in this respect was at once recog- 
 nised by the world, as it had been by Spenser him- 
 self and by the whole circle to which he belonged. 
 Perhaps no work in poetry has ever been launched 
 on its course more elaborately, with such an arma- 
 ment of defence, explanation, and apology. The 
 twelve poems of which it consists were embedded in 
 a mass of prefaces, introductions, and commentaries. 
 How far these were the work of E. K. (if E. K. be 
 a real person, Edward Kirke or another), how far of 
 Spenser himself, or of others, is not clear : what is 
 certain is that they represent the views and en- 
 thusiasm of the whole school, and that in speaking 
 of Spenser as they do, under the title of " our new 
 poet," they meant to enforce, with all the emphasis 
 in their power, their confidence that this was the 
 new poetry. The curious verses, and these are
 
 84 SPENSER 
 
 Spenser's own, attached as an envoi to the end of 
 the volume, while for form's sake they disclaim 
 rivalry with the great poets of an earlier age, Chaucer 
 and Langland, yet make the claim formally and 
 expressly for the new poetry that it shall outwear 
 time and continue till the world's dissolution. The 
 claim was really made not for these twelve poems, 
 but for the new poetry, for the English poetry of the 
 Elizabethan age. It was a great claim ; and it was 
 fully justified. 
 
 Of the twelve eclogues themselves there is no 
 particular occasion to speak here in detail. They 
 are a strange, almost chaotic, mixture of styles and 
 manners, ranging in metre from the elaborate arti- 
 ficiality of the sestine in the eighth to the jigging 
 couplets of the second and fifth, and in subject from 
 the exquisite pastoral lyric of the fourth to the eccle- 
 siastical polemics of the ninth. All, and more than 
 all, of the adverse criticism that may be made against 
 Virgil's Eclogues may be made against these. Of 
 them, as of their Virgilian prototypes, it may be 
 said, " They have all the vices and weaknesses of 
 imitative poetry. Nor are these failings redeemed 
 by any brilliant finish of workmanship. The exe- 
 cution is uncertain, hesitating, sometimes extra- 
 ordinarily feeble. Even the versification is curiously 
 unequal and imperfect." Yet of these Spenserian 
 eclogues also one may go on to say, as of Virgil's, 
 that granted all this, it does not touch the specific
 
 THE SHEPHERDS CALENDAR 85 
 
 charm of which these poems first disclosed the 
 secret. The Shepherds Calendar has no distinct 
 style, but it has the germination of many. It is 
 full of metrical device and experiment. It con- 
 tains, in the tenth eclogue, preludings of large-scale 
 work in chivalrous romance. Finally, here and 
 there, and especially in the first and twelfth, which 
 are really a single poem cut into two in order to 
 open and close the collection, may be distinctly 
 heard the new note that is personal to Spenser, his 
 unmatched fluency of melody. 
 
 From the moment of the appearance of this 
 volume Spenser became not only the leading re- 
 presentative of the new poetry, but the recognised 
 head of living English poets. This position he 
 retained until his death. In the twenty years be- 
 tween, the mass of his production was enormous. 
 The three volumes of 1590, 1591, and 1596 con- 
 tain between forty and fifty thousand lines. Much 
 more, according both to probability and to direct 
 evidence, was written by him, and either suppressed 
 or lost. The Faerie Queene alone, as we possess it, 
 extends to close on thirty-five thousand lines ; and 
 we have little more than half of it as it was planned. 
 An allegorical romance of seventy thousand lines in 
 length is a thing that imagination almost boggles at 
 or would do so at least in any age less adven- 
 turous, less confident, and less profuse than that of 
 the matured Renaissance.
 
 86 SPENSER 
 
 Throughout the whole sphere of life, in its 
 crimes and virtues, in its attempts and achievements, 
 that age was possessed by a spirit of excess, an in- 
 toxication of greatness. It set itself deliberately to 
 outdo all that had hitherto been done. It built and 
 voyaged and discovered and conquered colossally. 
 In our own National Gallery, where it is one of 
 the splendours of the great Venetian Room, is a 
 portrait, by the Brescian painter Moretto, of Count 
 Martinengo-Cesaresco, killed young in the French 
 wars of religion. He is richly dressed in silk and 
 furs, a gilded sword-hilt showing from under the 
 heavy cloak. On a table by him are an antique 
 lamp and some coins. His elbow rests on a pile 
 of silken cushions, and his head leans, with a sort of 
 intensity of languor, on his open palm. The face 
 is that of one in the full prime of life and of great 
 physical strength ; very handsome, heavy and yet 
 tremulously sensitive, the large eyes gazing at some- 
 thing unseen, and seeming to dream of vastness. 
 On his bonnet is a golden plaque, with three words 
 of Greek inscribed on it, tov Ami/ iroQu), " Oh, I desire 
 too much." Who the Giulia was whom he desired 
 is among the things that have gone to oblivion ; but 
 the longing which the portrait has immortalised is 
 not for one woman, were she like Beatrice or Helen, 
 but for the whole world. These ambiguous words 
 are a cloudy symbol ; and that picture is a portrait 
 of the spirit of the Renaissance.
 
 POETIC REDUNDANCE 87 
 
 As regards poetry in particular, that age ran to 
 length, to extravagance, to redundance. This is 
 true of almost all the Elizabethan poetry except 
 in what is perhaps its finest flower, its lyrics ; and 
 even in these, taken collectively and not singly, 
 the same quality is found in their superabundant 
 profusion. The tradition of endlessness in poems 
 was indeed not new ; it was an inheritance from 
 the Middle Ages. The romances of the thirteenth 
 and fourteenth centuries handed on the quality of 
 exorbitant length to the romantic epics of the six- 
 teenth. But the new age bettered the example, and 
 in this one point unhappily learned no lesson from 
 its classical models. With regard to no time are 
 the lines addressed by Tennyson to the ancient 
 poets more appropriate : 
 
 You should be jubilant that you flourished here 
 
 Before the love of letters, overdone, 
 
 Had swampt the sacred poets with themselves. 
 
 The Roman de la Rose is often quoted as an instance 
 of the mediaeval extravagance. But its twenty-two 
 thousand lines are a modest figure compared with 
 the thirty-five thousand of the Orlando Innamorato 
 and the forty thousand of the Orlando Furioso. The 
 earlier Italian Renaissance, with its slenderer re- 
 sources and its purer taste, had kept within the 
 bounds of the ancient precedent. The Divina 
 Commedia is shorter than the Iliad y the Teseide is
 
 88 SPENSER 
 
 the same length as the Aeneid. Spenser in the 
 Faerie Queene proposed to himself to outdo Ariosto, 
 as much as Ariosto had outdone all his predecessors. 
 For this intention of his we have express evidence. 
 Harvey, who from his narrow classical prejudices, 
 as well as from his severer taste, disliked the whole 
 scheme of the poem, and would have recalled poetry 
 from the extravagances of chivalrous romance to a 
 more antique or more modern concentration, wrote 
 to Spenser in 1580 in these words: "The Orlando 
 Furioso you will needs seem to emulate and hope to 
 overgo, as you flatly professed yourself in one of 
 your last letters." But apart from any particular 
 ambition to produce a larger poem than had hitherto 
 been known, Spenser possessed the terrible Eliza- 
 bethan fluency to a degree beyond all his contem- 
 poraries. Under the stimulus of his example, 
 reinforcing the instinct for profusion which is the 
 note of the whole period, this torrent of poetic 
 fluency poured on until the language sank exhausted 
 under it. Then, and not till then, the inevitable 
 and wholesome reaction came towards precision and 
 succinctness. That reaction was powerfully aided 
 by the strenuous scholarship of the seventeenth 
 century, and by the impression made throughout 
 the whole republic of letters by the French classical 
 school. Moderation, sobriety, clarity became the 
 aim of poets ; and limits were set to the length 
 as well as to the scope of poems which the general
 
 POETIC REDUNDANCE 89 
 
 sense of later times has accepted as proper. The 
 Paradise Lost reverts to the scale of the Aeneid. 
 Even in the nineteenth century the most fluent 
 and melodious of modern English poets kept, by 
 instinct or judgment, within the same limits. The 
 Life and Death of Jason and the Story of Sigurd the 
 Volsung are, for all their copiousness and even 
 diffuseness, each a little shorter than Milton's 
 epic. 
 
 Yet Spenser's instinct, like that of all great artists 
 as regards their own art, was in the main sound ; for 
 it is the mass and volume of his poetry, not less than 
 its lavish and intricate beauty, that gives him his 
 place and importance among the poets. He has 
 been a vast quarry and playground for generation 
 after generation of poets : like the Precious Strand 
 in his own poem, a land 
 
 Bestrewed all with rich array 
 Of pearls and precious stones of great assay, 
 And all the gravel mixed with golden ore. 
 
 He is the most inexhaustible and, in a way, the most 
 various of the English poets. All his successors 
 have loved, admired, plundered, imitated him ; Mil- 
 ton and Pope, Wordsworth and Keats, a hundred 
 others ; not one but has dug in that gravel and 
 brought away golden ore from it for his own use. 
 In him they found that " enormous bliss " which
 
 90 SPENSER 
 
 Milton, in a phrase of daring felicity, ascribes to 
 his Earthly Paradise : 
 
 A wilderness with thicket overgrown 
 
 Grotesque and wild : and overhead upgrew 
 
 Insuperable height of loftiest shade, 
 
 Cedar and pine and fir and branching palm, 
 
 A silvan scene, and as the ranks ascend 
 
 Shade above shade, a woody theatre 
 
 Of stateliest view. Yet higher than their tops 
 
 The verdurous wall of Paradise upsprung, 
 
 And higher than that wall a circling row 
 
 Of goodliest trees loaden with fairest fruit, 
 
 Blossoms and fruits at once of golden hue, 
 
 Appeared, with gay enamell'd colours mixt 
 
 On which the sun more glad impressed his beams 
 
 Than in fair evening cloud, or humid bow 
 
 When God hath showered the earth : so lovely seemed 
 
 That landscape. 
 
 Over and over again, as one plunges through the 
 depths of that wilderness 
 
 A wilderness of sweets, for nature here 
 Wantoned as in her prime and played at will 
 Her virgin fancies 
 
 one comes, scarcely with surprise, on phrases and 
 passages that might be those of our greatest poets 
 in their most superb and characteristic manner. It 
 is impossible here, though it would be fascinating, 
 to pursue this into detail ; but two or three in- 
 stances will show what I mean. 
 
 Scarcely had Phoebus in the glooming East 
 Yet harnessed his fiery-footed team :
 
 POETIC FLEXIBILITY 91 
 
 that is Shakespeare, the Shakespeare of Romeo and 
 Juliet. 
 
 And taking usury of time forepast 
 
 Fit for such ladies and such lovely knights : 
 
 that is Shakespeare again, the Shakespeare of the 
 Sonnets. 
 
 Many an Angel's voice 
 Singing before the eternal Majesty 
 In their trinal triplicities on high : 
 
 that is the younger voice of Milton. 
 
 And ever and anon the rosy red 
 Flasht thro' her face : 
 
 one might fancy that the unmistakeable note and 
 accent of Tennyson. 
 
 This immense poetic flexibility, this amazing pro- 
 fusion and variety in style as well as in language 
 for in his vocabulary, too, Spenser is copious beyond 
 the common copiousness of the Elizabethans is a 
 poetical quality of rare value ; it is not of the 
 essence, and does not imply the quality, of a supreme 
 poet. As poetry produces its greatest effects through 
 few and simple words, so some of the greatest poets 
 have been scrupulously frugal in their language, and 
 their style has been simple to austerity. Higher 
 than the verdurous wall of Paradise, higher than the 
 encircling fruit-laden trees, is the secret hill-top 
 where the Muse sits among her chosen, and gives
 
 92 SPENSER 
 
 them, as Milton says, large prospect into the nether 
 empire. 
 
 As some rich tropic mountain, that infolds 
 All change, from flats of scattered palms 
 Sloping thro' five great zones of climate, holds 
 His head in snows and calms. 
 
 The image of perfection which art condenses out of 
 the flying vapours of the world may be only blurred 
 and dispersed by copiousness of invention and splen- 
 dour of ornament : so hard is it for a rich man to 
 enter into the kingdom. 
 
 To compare one great artist with another is often 
 futile, and not seldom misleading ; but such com- 
 parison may be more suggestive, and is less dan- 
 gerous, when there can be no question of setting 
 the two against one another. So far as there can 
 be any analogy between arts so wholly different as 
 those of poetry and history, Spenser might be called 
 the English Livy. In both you have the same 
 fluency and melodiousness, the same power of hand- 
 ling language on an immense scale with unexhausted 
 elasticity. Both deliberately set themselves to outdo, 
 in scale and volume, what had hitherto been done 
 in a special field of literature, and succeeded in 
 achieving their purpose. Both chose a subject- 
 matter of great intricacy, involving many tedious 
 passages and much repetition ; neither ever tires of 
 repeating himself, or seems to lose interest in what 
 he is doing. Doubt has been expressed whether, if
 
 SPENSER AND LIVY 93 
 
 the Faerie Queene had been completed, any reader 
 would ever have got to the end of it ; the same 
 apprehension may be, and indeed has been, hinted 
 at as regards the one hundred and seven lost books 
 of the Historiae ab Urbe Condita. Both authors 
 were possessed by the greatness of a floating and 
 imperfectly grasped ideal ; Rome to Livy, chivalry 
 to Spenser, mean all that is noble and glorious, 
 but their power of hard thought is not great, and 
 they are often found draping in their stately and 
 musical rhetoric not only commonplaces, but ab- 
 surdities. Innovators and conquerors in the field 
 of letters, they were at the same time impassioned 
 though not profound or accurate lovers and students 
 of the earlier and purer national literature. They 
 gave a new copiousness, a new range and flexibility 
 to their language ; but to the eyes of scholars and 
 critics they often made wild work of it. The 
 Patavinity which was reproached in Livy has its 
 analogy in Spenser, whose use of the Chaucerian 
 language and idiom is extraordinarily erratic, and 
 whose archaism, while, according to the testimony 
 of Fuller, it impaired his popularity and even dimin- 
 ished his sales, is so inaccurate as to fill scientific 
 students of language with a feeling little short of 
 horror. Both he and Livy were borne on through 
 their immense task not merely by fluency and 
 enthusiasm, but by a love of commonplace moralis- 
 ing which was inexhaustible, and by an almost
 
 94 SPENSER 
 
 complete absence of humour. Livy never felt that 
 his story was flat ; Spenser never felt that his 
 romanticism was absurd. No one who had the 
 gift of laughter, who felt the comedy of life, could 
 have gone gravely on through the third book of 
 the Faerie Queene. Over and over again it moves 
 a smile in the reader, but never once in the writer. 
 In this book, it is true, there occur the only two 
 passages in the whole poem which it is possible to 
 regard as intentionally humorous. There is some- 
 thing like a flicker of amusement in the description 
 of Britomartis and her nurse at church in the second 
 canto ; but such humour as there is in the stanza is 
 more probably unconscious : 
 
 Early the morrow next, before that day 
 
 His joyous face did to the world reveal, 
 
 They both uprose and took their ready way 
 
 Unto the Church, their prayers to appeal 
 
 With great devotion, and with little zeal : 
 
 For the fair Damsel from the holy herse 
 
 Her love-sick heart to other thoughts did steal ; 
 
 And that old Dame said many an idle verse 
 
 Out of her daughter's heart fond fancies to reverse. 
 
 One can fancy with what an exquisite blending of 
 fun and tenderness Chaucer would have treated the 
 scene. The other passage is where the Squire of 
 Dames, in the seventh canto, tells the story of the 
 three women who had repelled his advances. In 
 it Spenser a-pprend d'etre fif with rather calamitous 
 results. The story itself is a traditional fabliau^ a
 
 THE ANTIQUE WORLD 95 
 
 piece of ponderous mediaeval wit. It is incorporated 
 rather than assimilated by Spenser : its proper place 
 is in the Moyen de Parvenir, not in the Faerie 
 Queene, where it is strikingly out of tone with 
 its surroundings. " Thereat full heartily laughed 
 Satyrane," we are told : he may have done so, but 
 probably no reader of the poem has ever felt inclined 
 to follow his example. 
 
 So too, with his feeling about the past and his 
 attitude towards his own age. Following the 
 common fashion of his period, which was indeed 
 more or less the common fashion of human nature, 
 he is perpetually, even to weariness, insisting on the 
 degeneracy of modern times, on the vices of civilisa- 
 tion, the decay of chivalry, the treachery and in- 
 gratitude of courts. " O goodly usage of these 
 antique times, in which the sword was servant unto 
 right : " this is a theme on which he is perpetually 
 embroidering, much as Orlando (not Ariosto's 
 Orlando, Shakespeare's) eulogises "the constant 
 service of the antique world, when service sweat for 
 duty, not for meed." He is fond of thinking of his 
 romantic imaginary world, " this delightful land of 
 faerie," as he truly calls it, as though it were some 
 golden age that had actually existed in the past, when 
 
 Antique age, yet in the infancy 
 Of time, did live then like an innocent. 
 
 He was not only a romantic dreamer and student,
 
 96 SPENSER 
 
 but a man of large and disappointed ambitions. In 
 a famous passage in his Mother HubbercTs Tale he 
 draws, with mordant truth, and in swift brilliant 
 couplets worthy of Pope himself, the wretchedness 
 of a courtier's life : 
 
 So pitiful a thing is suitor's state ! 
 Most miserable man, whom wicked fate 
 Hath brought to court, to sue for had-ywist, 
 That few have found, and many one hath missed ! 
 Full little knowest thou that hast not tried 
 What hell it is in suing long to bide : 
 To lose good days that might be better spent, 
 To waste long nights in pensive discontent, 
 To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow, 
 To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow, 
 To have thy prince's grace, yet want her peers', 
 To have thy asking, yet wait many years, 
 To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares, 
 To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs, 
 To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run, 
 To spend, to give, to want, to be undone. 
 
 His View of the Present State of Ireland shows 
 him on this side of his nature, the keen, hard, not 
 over-scrupulous Puritan politician. In the prologue 
 to the fifth book of the Faerie Queene he sets forth 
 a sort of philosophy of history, in which the gor- 
 geous language and versification give an imposing 
 semblance of coherence to what is in effect a com- 
 bination of the romantic cry, that glory and loveli- 
 ness have passed away, with an ecstatic eulogy of 
 Tudor absolutism. The Platonic doctrine of the 
 Great Year is there used with extraordinary effect to
 
 SPENSER AND PLATONISM 97 
 
 enforce the progressive degeneracy of the world ; 
 but he does not, like Virgil in the fourth Eclogue, 
 regard the vast cycle as nearing its close, and a new 
 golden age in prospect ; the movement is still on its 
 downward arc : and poetry itself is the anodyne 
 rather than the vital function of life. It is just this 
 want of touch between art and life that prevents 
 Spenser, with all his poetical gift and accomplish- 
 ment, from taking a place in the first rank of poets. 
 " This," he says himself in another of these pro- 
 logues into which he put his deepest thought, or 
 what he took for thought, 
 
 Of some the abundance of an idle brain 
 Will judged be, and painted forgery : 
 
 and such indeed is the matured judgment of pos- 
 terity. But abundance has never been more inex- 
 haustible, or forgery more magnificently painted. 
 Like his own magic crystal devised by Merlin, 
 
 It round and hollow-shaped was 
 Like to the world itself, and seemed a world of glass. 
 
 Into that crystal we may still plunge our eyes 
 with ever renewed fascination. 
 
 The Platonism which is expressly set forth in 
 many passages like that which I have cited, and in 
 whole poems like the Hymns to Heavenly Love and 
 Heavenly Beauty, was the side of Greek literature 
 which appealed most strongly to the Renaissance. 
 It satisfied, and fed to a greater intensity, their sense 
 
 G
 
 98 SPENSER 
 
 of vastness, their intoxication with language, their 
 longing to transcend all limits. It is the only side 
 of Greece which had a visible influence on Spenser 
 himself. He was, according to contemporary testi- 
 mony which may be taken for what it is worth, " per- 
 fect in the Greek tongue " ; an accomplished scholar, 
 that is to say, according to the standard of what was 
 in England not an age of high or severe scholarship. 
 But the distinctively Greek quality is wholly absent 
 from his poetry ; he is, in that sense of the terms, 
 a romantic and not a classic. This is patent as 
 regards the whole tone and colour of his poetry ; 
 and even for traces of any influence on him from 
 Homer, from the Greek lyrists, or from the Attic 
 tragedians we may search through him in vain. The 
 only specific translations or adaptations from the 
 Greek that are to be noted throughout the Faerie 
 Queene are from Grseco-Roman epigrams in the 
 Anthology, and these he very likely knew only in 
 Latin versions. Among the Greek poets proper, he 
 seems scarcely to have gone back beyond Theocritus. 
 The Greek clarity, the Greek purity, were alien 
 from his luxurious romantic temperament. This is 
 not said in disparagement ; for he too had heard 
 the Muses singing, though not on the mountain or 
 in seven-gated Thebes ; and we can hardly wish 
 him to have been other than he was. 
 
 A great deal of well-meant nonsense has been 
 talked about Spenser's purity, in the other sense of
 
 SPENSER AND ARIOSTO 99 
 
 that ambiguous word. He was a poet of high if 
 rather vague and sentimental idealisms. The scope 
 of the Faerie Queene is expressly stated by him to 
 be the fashioning twelve moral virtues. But its end, 
 he says, in words which are more significant, is to 
 fashion a gentleman. There is a profound difference 
 between a gentleman and a saint ; and the gentleman 
 of that age, in Tennyson's phrase, hovered between 
 war and wantonness ; he inherited the corruption of 
 the age of chivalry as well as the rich sensuousness 
 of the Renaissance. It has been a fashion to extol 
 Spenser at the expense of Ariosto. But the light- 
 heartedness, the gay inconsequence, of the Italian 
 poet is combined with a natural goodness quite as 
 great as that underlying Spenser's rather heavy and 
 forced morality. Ariosto had no consciousness of a 
 mission, beyond that of producing an endless stream 
 of melodious and brilliant poetry. He belongs to a 
 time before the Renaissance had sickened of its own 
 Palace of Art ; he accepted life in a large way, he 
 saw all the humour and beauty and brightness of it. 
 The beauty of goodness always appeals to him. His 
 Bradamante is as pure as Britomartis, and ten times 
 more loveable. He has no sentimental illusions 
 about his world of knights and ladies ; but he 
 frankly thinks it a very good and beautiful world. 
 The gran bonth di cavalieri antichi is a thing about 
 which he is quite in earnest. It is not without sig- 
 nificance that his greatest enthusiasm is for Vittoria
 
 ioo SPENSER 
 
 Colonna ; a very different kind of patroness and 
 heroine from Queen Elizabeth. He certainly makes 
 no parade of morals. But with one or two excep- 
 tions, there is hardly anything in the Orlando Furioso 
 that is not suitable to be read aloud, even according 
 to the taste of the present day ; the same cannot 
 be said of the Faerie Queene. And when Spenser 
 lapses into sensuousness, it is with a certain clumsi- 
 ness from which Ariosto was saved, not by a higher 
 ideal, but by a more refined and educated taste. In 
 Spenser, as in so much English art as in so much 
 English work beyond the sphere of art there is a 
 trace left of the insular grossness, a strain of some- 
 thing a little forced and exaggerated. He is hardly 
 of the centre. 
 
 But the centre had for the time been lost. An 
 iron age had displaced the golden time of Raphael 
 and Ariosto and Erasmus. The brave attempt of 
 Humanism to breathe fresh life into the Middle 
 Ages, and carry the old world alive and unbroken 
 into the new age, had been made and had failed. 
 The religious wars broke out before the middle 
 of the sixteenth century. Thenceforth the whole 
 of life became one vast field of battle between 
 the revolutionary Reformation and the Catholic re- 
 action. These bitter enemies had one, and but one, 
 disastrous feature in common, a fanatical hatred 
 of great and humane art. In Italy the sunset of 
 the Renaissance lingered; but the shadow of the
 
 THE TEARS OF THE MUSES 101 
 
 Catholic reaction is already visible in Tasso's 
 romantic epic. In England the revolution which, in 
 the historian's striking words, laid its foundations 
 in the murder of the English Erasmus, and set up its 
 gates in the blood of the English Petrarch, left a long 
 heritage of sombre restlessness, of doubt and gloom. 
 It has often been remarked as strange, even as unac- 
 countable, that throughout the earlier years of the 
 Elizabethan age there is an all but universal cry 
 that poetry is dead or dying, that barbarism and 
 ignorance have flooded in. The Tears of the Muses, 
 published by Spenser in 1591, and written not long 
 before, is one prolonged complaint of this. 
 
 Heaps of huge words uphoarded hideously 
 With horrid sound though having little sense, 
 
 are all, he says, that is left of the palace of poetry. 
 The truth was that, in her secular movement, poetry 
 was breaking up and transforming herself. A new 
 generation was already at the doors, one which was 
 in turn to sweep up and put away the Renaissance, 
 as the Renaissance had swept up and put away the 
 Middle Ages. 
 
 It was not only at the doors, but within them. 
 Night's candles were burnt out, and jocund day 
 stood tiptoe on the misty mountain tops. The 
 world was moving at a prodigious speed, and poetry 
 had to quit her ancient seats, to whirl and follow 
 the sun. The year 1591 is remarkable in letters,
 
 102 SPENSER 
 
 not only for the Tears of the Muses volume, but for 
 another work in which there is a satirical allusion to 
 the Tears of the Muses. That work was the Mid- 
 summer Nighfs Dream. Of the life of Nicholas 
 Bottom (who has been called, not without some 
 colour of reason, the hero of that play) we un- 
 happily know as little as we do of the lives of 
 Autolycus' aunts. But if he did not marry till 
 middle life, his son might very well have handled a 
 pike at Naseby. 
 
 Thus Spenser, like so many other great poets, re- 
 presents the late splendour of a descending and fast 
 disappearing tradition. The realm in which he was 
 so great an innovator, so wide an explorer and con- 
 queror, was even before his death passing into other 
 hands. Much of his work has faded away and 
 become obsolete ; but his great argosy came into 
 harbour. He lives effectively in a few sonnets, in 
 one superb ode, and in the Faerie Queene. 
 
 The Epithalamion, in Johnson's stately phrase of 
 compliment, " it were vain to blame, and useless to 
 praise." For sustained beauty of execution, for 
 melodiousness in which the most melodious of 
 English poets excels even his own standard, for 
 richness of ornament that stops just short of ex- 
 cess, and does not either blur the outline or clog 
 the movement, it easily takes the first place, not 
 only among Spenser's own lyrics, but among all 
 English odes. The mechanism of the verse is
 
 THE EPITHALAMION 103 
 
 a marvel of delicate intricacy. The twenty-three 
 long undulating stanzas into which it is divided 
 by the recurrent but perpetually varying refrain are 
 all based on the same general rhythmical scheme of 
 subdivision, but with variations of internal structure 
 devised with extreme skill to prevent monotony, to 
 give the play and freedom of a live organism. It is 
 possible to read the poem, even to be familiar with 
 it, and not to recognise until after more minute 
 inspection that the normal nineteen-line stanza is 
 varied with three other forms of stanza, two 
 of eighteen and one of seventeen lines, and that 
 the arrangement of the rhymes has further 
 delicate variations. The Ode was Spenser's latest 
 lyric, written after his hand had for years been 
 occupied on the large decorative canvas of the 
 allegorical epic. It was written for a personal 
 occasion : 
 
 Take these lines, look lovingly and nearly, 
 Lines I write the first time and the last time. 
 He who works in fresco steals a hair-brush, 
 Makes a strange art of an art familiar, 
 Fills his lady's missal-marge with flowerets. 
 
 From it he returned to his main work, to the Faerie 
 Oueene; and to his main work we may now turn. 
 Edward Phillips, nearly a century afterwards, 
 speaks of it as " being for great invention and poetic 
 height judged little inferior, if not equal, to the
 
 io 4 SPENSER 
 
 chief of the ancient Greeks and Latins, or the 
 modern Italians." What Phillips said or thought 
 would itself be of little importance ; but there is 
 reason to believe that the judgment he speaks of is 
 that of Milton.
 
 II 
 
 IN reading the Faerie Queene, as in reading all 
 poetry, we cannot appreciate it duly without the 
 study and the effort requisite to let us place our- 
 selves more or less at the poet's point of view, to let 
 us understand, or not wholly misunderstand, what 
 he meant by poetry and what poetry meant to him. 
 But we cannot appreciate it, in its essential quality 
 as poetry, at all, unless we approach it with an un- 
 clouded mind, and disengage ourselves from com- 
 mentaries and theories. The child's vision must, 
 if it were possible, be combined with the scholar's 
 understanding. This is a hard saying, but the thing 
 itself is hard. The course lies straight and narrow 
 between the rock and the whirlpool. Appreciation 
 only comes of study ; study too often dims and 
 sophisticates appreciation. The attempt to be made 
 here must be not to lose ourselves either in a mist 
 of theories, or in a quicksand of facts ; but to dis- 
 engage, as far as may be, the poetical quality of the 
 poem in form and substance ; to estimate, as far as 
 may be, the degree to which it actually condenses, 
 from the flying vapour of language and life, an
 
 io6 SPENSER 
 
 image of perfection. For while the value of a poem 
 is manifold, its value as poetry is just this. 
 
 Spenser has left us in no doubt as to what he 
 meant by poetry and what he meant to do in his 
 great poem. It is a subject on which he is never 
 tired of discoursing. He recurs to it over and over 
 again, both in his elaborate prefaces and introduc- 
 tions, and more incidentally in many passages of the 
 Faerie Queene itself. The loose construction and 
 leisurely movement of the poem give him full oppor- 
 tunity for personal digressions and passages of homi- 
 letic or imaginative exposition. In these expositions 
 of his doctrine and practice there is the same melo- 
 dious fluency which is the primary quality of his 
 poetry itself ; the same fecundity of illustration and 
 ornament, the same lofty if somewhat vague and 
 inconsequent idealism. The image of perfection 
 which he set himself to embody was, in his own 
 words, that of a noble person fashioned in virtuous 
 and gentle discipline. It was life at its utmost 
 height and richness. Before it lay the whole pageant 
 of the world, the kingdom and the power and the 
 glory of it. " In that Faery Queen," he says, in 
 words which for him are unusually precise, " I mean 
 glory." This word of glory is the keynote of the 
 whole Renaissance ; the glory of discovery, of con- 
 quest, of possession, of mastery. The achievement 
 of this glory was " virtue " ; the virtue of the states- 
 man, the ruler, and the soldier, enlarged by liberal
 
 THE FAERIE QUEENE 107 
 
 studies and bathed in the splendours of romance. 
 The twelve moral virtues, to the glorification of 
 which the twelve books of the Faerie Queene were 
 to be devoted, were all summed up in the crowning 
 virtue of magnificence ; and this " magnificence " 
 is almost the same thing as "courtesy," courtiership, 
 the conduct of life by the masters of the world, lords 
 over the five senses and the visible earth. Such 
 glory was transitory, like this world itself; but it 
 was the nearest approach which this world gave to 
 immortality. 
 
 The vehicle chosen by Spenser to set forth his 
 vision of the world's glory was that of the chivalrous 
 romance. The Faerie Queene is not an epic ; both 
 in its author's genius and in its own purpose it is 
 alien from the epic tension and concentration. He 
 speaks of following Homer and Virgil ; but this is 
 because the Iliad and the Aeneid were read by him, 
 and affected him, as romances. The romantic epic, 
 as it had been lately attempted by Tasso, was a 
 hybrid product, destined to be sterile. Spenser 
 does not seem himself to notice any distinction of 
 kind between Tasso and Ariosto. But his own 
 poem is a still more complex hybridisation ; it is the 
 spirit of Tasso working on the method of Ariosto. 
 The Faerie Queene has not, and was not meant to 
 have, the epic unity, the epic structural and organic 
 composition. It has no story, or if it has, the story 
 has neither beginning nor end, and does not really
 
 io8 SPENSER 
 
 matter. It has no dramatic life, no tragical inter- 
 play of human will and passion. It has no hero, for 
 its hero is an abstraction, or rather a shifting series 
 of abstractions. It is a romance wrapped in the 
 imperial robes of the epic, but lacking her sceptre 
 and crown. It is a pageant and allegory of life, 
 while the epic is the imaginative embodiment of life 
 itself. 
 
 All poetry is an allegory, in the sense that it 
 embodies, in concrete symbols, a meaning larger and 
 nobler than that which its literal words convey. In 
 this sense, the amount of allegory in a poem depends 
 not so much on the poet as on the reader. Homer 
 and Virgil were allegorised, both in ancient and in 
 modern times, to such an extent that their true 
 outlines were lost, their true quality as poetry 
 obscured, though it was still instinctively felt. But 
 in Spenser the allegory is throughout conscious 
 and purposed ; it is of the structure and essence of 
 the poem. In his prefatory letter prefixed to the 
 Faerie Queene, he describes it in set terms as a con- 
 tinued allegory ; and this is the case. But his specific 
 use of allegory, and with it the specific quality of 
 the poem, was determined by the fact that, with 
 immense imagination and endless fertility of inven- 
 tion and language, he had neither the narrative nor 
 the dramatic gift. He has little power one might 
 say he has little wish of telling a story or realising 
 a situation. The Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory
 
 THE FAERIE QUEENE 109 
 
 more expressly and closely than the Faerie Queene. 
 But Bunyan's narrative gift is so certain, his dramatic 
 instinct is so fine, that the allegorical abstractions 
 with which he purports to be dealing take flesh and 
 blood on them almost without his will, and become 
 real human beings. There are no real human beings 
 in the Faerie Queene. 
 
 The amount of allegory in it of course varies very 
 much, as does its quality and complexity. In its 
 large lines the poem is an allegorising of abstrac- 
 tions, of virtues or vices, of physical or mental 
 functions, of philosophical or theological ideas, even 
 of political situations. Each book allegorises one 
 of the virtues. Many of the episodes are elaborate 
 and detailed allegories on their own account : such 
 as the long and tedious description of the human 
 body as the Castle of Alma in the ninth canto of the 
 second book, or the siege of that same castle at the 
 wards of the five senses in the eleventh canto. Others 
 follow the mediaeval manner more closely. An im- 
 personation like Lady Praise-Desire in the House of 
 Temperance, with the poplar-branch in her hand, or 
 the description of the entrance to the temple of 
 Venus, with its porters Doubt and Delay, and its 
 gate of Good Desert guarded by the giant Danger, 
 might come straight from the Romaunt of the Rose, 
 and belongs to a tradition which never had been very 
 happy, and from which Chaucer himself had long 
 ago decisively broken away. This is hardly allegory
 
 no SPENSER 
 
 at all ; still less so are those parts of the poem which 
 deal with contemporary history after the fashion of 
 the roman h clef. It is in these that the poetry is at 
 its lowest temperature ; they are not so much poetry 
 as versified politics. Much of the fifth book is of 
 this kind. The trial of Duessa before Mercilla is 
 mere pamphleteering. All that is needed to con- 
 vert it into a political tract is to replace the names ; 
 to speak plainly of Mary and Elizabeth instead of 
 calling them Duessa and Mercilla, and to substitute 
 for the names of Care and Zeal those of Cecil and 
 Walsingham. In the three cantos which follow, 
 even this slight veil is dropped, because it was not 
 really worth while keeping it up. Belgium, Spain, 
 Henry of Bourbon, are introduced openly under 
 their own names. The poetic imagination ebbs away, 
 leaving only a sort of bleached rhetorical framework. 
 Even the language becomes little removed from that 
 of prose. Except for a few inversions of order 
 brought about by the necessities of rhyme, there is 
 stanza after stanza that has nothing, either in imagi- 
 nation or in style, to distinguish it from the florid 
 heavy prose of that period. It is Spenser become 
 mechanical, the Spenserian manner become a trick. 
 How nobly he recovered himself later, those will 
 not need to be reminded who have followed the 
 poem to the end or not to the end, for there is 
 none, but to the point where it was broken off by 
 the poet's death.
 
 THE FAERIE QUEENE in 
 
 There is a natural tendency in the human mind 
 to confuse imagination with imagery. The difference 
 between them is that between creation on the one 
 hand and invention on the other, and it is vital. 
 Spenser thought (so far as he did think) in images. 
 His inventiveness, his faculty for pouring forth an 
 endless stream of imagery, is unsurpassed, just as is 
 his faculty for conveying this imagery in unfailingly 
 fluent and melodious language. He is a complete 
 master of decorative art, so far as this very fertility 
 and fluency do not, as we may think, lead him to 
 make his decoration too intricate, to overload his 
 ornament. But while all art is decoration, it is not 
 in its merely decorative quality that art can be great 
 art, can fully realise its function. To do this, it 
 must rise from invention to creation. Its imagery 
 must be transmuted by imagination; it must not 
 only adorn, but interpret and, in a sense, make life. 
 
 If Spenser is not, in the full sense of the term, 
 one of the first order of poets, it is because, while he 
 does possess this higher gift of creative and inter- 
 pretative imagination, he possesses it intermittently, 
 capriciously, and imperfectly. The Faerie Queene 
 does not move. It lives, but hardly with full life. 
 It is not that his poetry does not represent the actual 
 world. No poetry does. It is that it does not 
 create a world more real than the actual world. 
 It drifts, at the suggestion of complex influences, 
 through a sea of dreams. It fluctuates between
 
 ii2 SPENSER 
 
 moral allegory and unmoralised romance, now swerv- 
 ing into passages of crude realism, and again soaring 
 to ideal heights of imagination. But the poet's 
 genius is so great, his resources are so vast, and his 
 handling of them so easy and adroit, that he absorbs 
 the reader into his own dream. His fabric rises 
 into the air like an exhalation ; as the gleaming 
 pageant floats and passes before us, we are hardly 
 conscious, any more than we are conscious in actual 
 dreaming, of its inconsequence and unsubstantiality. 
 Scenes melt into one another ; nothing is surprising. 
 It is all iridescent, magnified, wrapped and floating 
 in a luminous mist. 
 
 In the last canto of the last completed book of 
 the Faerie Queene, Spenser himself makes a claim 
 for the poem which is of a different nature. The 
 image of the epic, with its high imaginative tension 
 and concentrated creative energy, hung before him 
 as a poetic ideal; but it became in his hands, like 
 his ideal figures and scenes, something filmy, elusive, 
 and unsubstantial. In this passage he lays claim to 
 unity and purpose in his long train of romantic 
 imagery ; and does so, very characteristically, by 
 means of a new piece of romantic imagery of just 
 the same texture as the rest. 
 
 Like as a ship, that through the ocean wide 
 Directs her course unto one certain coast, 
 Is met of many a counter wind and tide 
 With which her winged speed is let and crost, 
 And she herself in stormy surges tost,
 
 THE FAERIE QUEENE 113 
 
 Yet, making many a board and many a bay, 
 Still winneth way, ne hath her compass lost ; 
 Right so it fares with me in this long way 
 Whose course is often stayed, yet never is astray. 
 
 Right so it does nothing of the sort. Even had he 
 lived to catch up all the interlaced or floating threads 
 of the poem, and to bring them out to a conclusion, 
 it would not have made any material difference. 
 We are not in the least interested in the progress of 
 the action in the Faerie Queene ; or rather, there is 
 no progress of the action for us to be interested in. 
 It is difficult to remember, as we read it, whom we 
 are reading about, or how they came there. They 
 drop out and reappear capriciously ; we are pleased 
 to meet them, we half think we have seen them 
 before, and it does not matter when they are 
 gone. They move among one another, weaving 
 intricate and lovely patterns, and as the pattern still 
 flows out of the loom, " his web, reeled off, curls 
 and goes out like steam." Into these chambers of 
 imagery the breath of fresh outer air hardly enters ; 
 it would blow the whole fabric away. 
 
 This enchanted atmosphere, this luminous mist of 
 romantic feeling and glittering imagery, pervades 
 the whole poem. But it varies from point to point, 
 like some actual vapour that collects or clears, lifts 
 or drops, under light variable airs. 
 
 Far off they saw the silver-misty morn, 
 Rolling her smoke about the royal mount, 
 
 H
 
 n 4 SPENSER 
 
 That rose between the forest and the field. 
 At times the summit of the high city flashed : 
 At times the spires and turrets half-way down 
 Pricked thro' the mist ; at times the great gate shone 
 Only, that opened on the field below; 
 Anon, the whole fair city had disappeared. 
 
 Sometimes it condenses into a cloud through which 
 we move heavily, and the figures loom indistinct 
 and spectral. Sometimes a rift of sky blows open, 
 and a corner of the landscape is seen in clear day- 
 light. In these little clear islets we may find what 
 is perhaps Spenser at his best, though not at his most 
 characteristic : in those rare and pleasant simpler 
 touches where the poetry becomes lucid and close 
 to life, or in those passages, not rare, where it rises 
 to some great nobleness of expression, some great 
 elevation of sentiment. Spenser's Chaucerianism 
 was no mere muddle of antiquarian pedantry ; it 
 was a real love and admiration, a poetical sympathy 
 that makes him write now and then, for a few lines 
 together, with the freshness and charm of Chaucer. 
 If I may venture to put it so, he sometimes drops 
 into poetry. When he has almost wearied us with 
 Britomartis, he suddenly writes of her thus : 
 
 One day, whenas she long had sought for ease 
 In every place, and every place thought best, 
 Yet found no place that could her liking please, 
 She to a window came that opened west, 
 Towards which coast her love his way addrest : 
 There, looking forth, she in her heart did find 
 Many vain fancies working her unrest,
 
 THE FAERIE QUEENE 115 
 
 And sent her winged thoughts more swift than wind 
 To bear unto her love the message of her mind. 
 
 It is like cool water. The same clear simplicity 
 comes with the same lovely effect in many single 
 lines. Calepine, when he is recovered of his wounds, 
 goes out, as Palamon or Arcite might go, " to take 
 the air and hear the thrushes' song." " What May- 
 game hath misfortune made of you ? " the Amazon 
 asks Artegall when she finds him in prison, touched 
 by surprise to forget all her rhetoric. In the beauti- 
 ful pastoral incident which fills several cantos of the 
 sixth book, Spenser reverts not only to the free 
 romantic manner of the Arcadia, but to a simpler, 
 fresher style and language than that to which he had 
 wrought himself when he planned to make his poem 
 not only a romance but an epic and an allegory of 
 life. 
 
 One day, as they all three together went 
 To the green wood to gather strawberries 
 
 how unlike this is to the highly-charged, slowly- 
 wheeling, rich verse that we think of as Spenserian ! 
 
 It is old and plain : 
 
 The spinsters and the knitters in the sun 
 Do use to chant it : it is silly sooth 
 And dallies with the innocence of love 
 Like the old age. 
 
 Of course he cannot keep it up ; the traditions of 
 high romance must be observed ; and the first thing 
 that happens in the wood is that a tiger comes out
 
 n6 SPENSER 
 
 of it, "with fell claws full of fierce gormandise, 
 and greedy mouth wide -gaping like hell -gate." 
 The hero, who has " no weapon but his shepherd's 
 hook to serve the vengeance of his wrathful will," 
 at once fells the tiger to the earth with it, and 
 before the formidable beast can recover, hews off 
 its head whether with the shepherd's hook or not, 
 the chivalrous spirit of romance does not pause to 
 inquire. 
 
 And just as Spenser's genuine love and admiration 
 of Chaucer combine with the instinctive resurgence 
 in him, as in all the poetry of his age, of the native 
 lyrical impulse, to make him write now and then 
 with Chaucerian freshness and simplicity, so his 
 genuine love and admiration of the classics make 
 the Faerie Queene in many passages rise to an almost 
 classic height. In the flowing loosely-woven texture 
 of the poem there are many lines and stanzas, and 
 even whole passages, which stand out from the rest 
 in virtue of a concentration, a precision, a dignity 
 which are the qualities of the classics. It would be 
 tedious to develop this point by large illustration ; 
 and in any case the search and the selection must 
 be made by each reader for himself; and the search 
 is delightful, even apart from the added delight of 
 recognition or discovery. It would be easy to 
 collect and dwell upon many single lines that 
 have this quality of exalted beauty, lines like the 
 famous
 
 THE FAERIE QUEENE 117 
 
 Glistering in arms and battailous array ; 
 or 
 
 Wasting the strength of her immortal age ; 
 or 
 
 Spreading pavilions for the birds to bower. 
 
 It is curious to notice how all these lines, though 
 they were not chosen in order to bring out the 
 point, but simply for their own sake, are parti- 
 cipial ; they convey an image incidentally in the 
 course of the main movement of the passages in 
 which they are set. This is true of the poem gene- 
 rally. It is like the English architecture of the 
 same period, still Gothic in main substance and 
 structure, but enriched by classic detail. Its classi- 
 cism is decorative, not constructional. This is the 
 case likewise with the longer passages or whole 
 stanzas which reach, or suggest, the classic manner. 
 
 Both roof and floor and walls were all of gold, 
 
 But overgrown with dust and old decay, 
 
 And hid in darkness, that none could behold 
 
 The hue thereof; for view of cheerful day 
 
 Did never in that house itself display, 
 
 But a faint shadow of uncertain light : 
 
 Such as a lamp whose life does fade away, 
 
 Or as the moon, clothed with cloudy night, 
 
 Does shew to him that walks in fear and sad affright. 
 
 That is the classical manner ; not that of the great 
 classics, it is true, not like the aXX' enl vv dXo/ of 
 Homer or the ibant obscuri of Virgil ; it is a diluted 
 secondary classicism more like that of Apollonius or 
 Statius. But the stanza is only one out of three
 
 n8 SPENSER 
 
 in which the House of Riches is described ; the other 
 two, which precede and follow it, are in the loaded 
 intricate manner which is normal to Spenser, and 
 which is in direct antithesis to the classical. Nor 
 would it be possible, even if the poet had wished to 
 do so, to adapt the classical manner to the imagina- 
 tive substance of the poem (if substance it might be 
 called that substance had none), which is that of a 
 vast pageant moving through a dream. 
 
 This pageant-like or dream-like quality makes 
 the Faerie Queene approximate to a masque or 
 interlaced series of masques rather than to an epic. 
 There is no difference of plane between the figures 
 and the ornament ; for the figures are the orna- 
 ment. " You shamefast are, but shamefastness itself 
 is she," says Alma to Guyon ; she might equally 
 well have put it the other way. The episodes nearly 
 always break off in the middle, or rather, do not so 
 much break off as melt away. It is singular how 
 many of the cantos end on this note of vanishing : 
 
 Eftsoons he fled away and might nowhere be seen 
 or 
 
 The while false Archimage and Atin fled apace 
 or 
 
 And from Prince Arthur fled with wings of idle fear 
 
 or most strikingly, and with most studied and splen- 
 did effect, in the wonderful line which closes the 
 Mutability cantos, 
 
 And Nature's self did vanish, whither no man wist.
 
 THE FAERIE QUEENE 119 
 
 It is a piece of deliberate art with Spenser that he 
 hardly ever finishes a story. He does finish the story 
 of Cambell and Canace in the fourth book, and makes 
 a sad bungle of it. The variations in the texture of 
 the poem are given, the stages in its movement are 
 marked, chiefly by points at which the continuous 
 pageantry, like a stream spreading into pools, ex- 
 pands, rather than concentrates, into set pageants of 
 unusual elaboration and magnificence. The Masque 
 of Cupid, at the end of the third book, is the best 
 known of these, as it is perhaps the greatest. 
 Almost as well known is the pageant of the Months 
 in the seventh book. Of the same type, though 
 with a difference of subject and treatment, is the 
 chronicle of the kings of Britain, a sort of masque 
 of British history, towards the end of the second 
 book, and the marriage procession of the rivers 
 towards the end of the fourth. To the ninth, 
 tenth, and eleventh cantos of the sixth book, which 
 stand quite by themselves, some further reference 
 will be made. 
 
 So much it is indispensable to keep in view with re- 
 gard to the quality and substance of the F aerie Queene 
 as poetry. We may now go on to consider with a 
 fuller appreciation the metrical vehicle which Spenser 
 chose for it, the famous Spenserian stanza. It is one 
 of the four great English metrical forms for poetry 
 written on a large scale ; and it is rightly and indis- 
 solubly connected with the name of Spenser ; for he
 
 120 SPENSER 
 
 both introduced it and perfected it. No one of the 
 other three metres is called after the name of a 
 single poet. Chaucer invented (or to all intents 
 and purposes invented) two of them, the rhyme- 
 royal and the heroic couplet. The former of the 
 two he also carried to perfection. But for various 
 reasons, it has not been so continuously and habitu- 
 ally used by later poets as the other three ; and to 
 call it the Chaucerian verse would do injustice to 
 Chaucer's other and greater invention : for though 
 Chaucer's crowning masterpiece is in the former 
 metre, the larger part of his mature work, and that 
 by which he is most universally known, is in the 
 latter. The heroic couplet itself was used by 
 Chaucer with consummate skill, and established by 
 him as a standard form of English verse. But it 
 afterwards underwent great changes and develop- 
 ments. It cannot be associated exclusively with any 
 poet's name, but it is perhaps associated most closely 
 in common usage with a later age and with the shape 
 it took in the hands of Dryden and Pope. The last 
 of the four dominant forms of English verse, the 
 unrhymed decasyllabic, has also passed through 
 many phases and received new qualities from more 
 than one great poet. But the Spenserian verse was 
 not only created and established by Spenser, but left 
 by him in its final form. It has never gone out of 
 use. It was written freely through both the seven- 
 teenth and the eighteenth centuries. In the great
 
 THE SPENSERIAN STANZA 121 
 
 renascence of English poetry a hundred years ago it 
 occupied a leading position. Shelley, Byron, Scott, 
 Keats, all used it largely. None of them gave it 
 any new quality : and it still remains exactly what 
 Spenser left it. 
 
 Technically the Spenserian stanza consists of the 
 interlaced double quatrain (what metrical treatises 
 call the eight-line ballad-stave) which was introduced 
 into England by Chaucer, with the addition of a 
 twelve-syllabled ninth line rhyming with the eighth. 
 But this addition completely changes its character ; 
 it gives it a new rhythm and a new balance, and one 
 totally unlike that of any form of verse previously 
 used. Spenser's stanza is, in the full sense of the 
 words, a fresh creation. Careful scrutiny may indeed 
 pick out, here and there in the earlier part of the 
 Faerie Queene, a stanza in which the ninth line 
 comes as a sort of afterthought, and the other eight 
 preserve something of the ballad-stave cadence ; but 
 these are few, and only recognisable when one looks 
 for them. Normally and habitually the ninth line 
 is felt coming through the whole stanza, which im- 
 plies it and converges upon it. 
 
 Spenser was no doubt led to the invention of his 
 stanza by the desire to find an English form of verse 
 which should be the equivalent, and a little more 
 than the equivalent, of the Italian rhymed octave. 
 From Boccaccio to Tasso, the ottava rima had 
 reigned undisputed in Italy as the vehicle for the
 
 122 SPENSER 
 
 heroic romance and for the regular epic. It was 
 one admirably -suited to the genius and structure of 
 the Italian language. But it did not accommodate 
 itself well to English, nor to French, in which the 
 English metricists sought their models. Chaucer 
 instinctively passed by the metre of Boccaccio ; 
 Spenser, as instinctively, passed by the metre of 
 Ariosto and Tasso. Chaucer syncopated the octave 
 stanza into the rhyme-royal, Spenser expanded it 
 into the Spenserian. In both cases the effect was to 
 produce a vehicle that was more romantic and com- 
 plex ; that fell short possibly of the serenity and 
 balance of the Italian octave, but gained in richness 
 and harmony. The long swaying rhythms of the 
 new stanza were exactly suited to a style like 
 Spenser's, loaded with ornament and almost sta- 
 tionary in movement. It allowed him full ampli- 
 tude ; it held, it even invited and reinforced, the 
 quality of boundlessness in his genius, the immense 
 superflux of language and fancy. It is worth noting 
 that the rhyme-royal where Spenser uses it, in the 
 four Hymns, gives something of the effect of a cur- 
 tailed Spenserian ; it has not the authentic cadence. 
 But these poems were written after he had invented 
 and begun to use his proper medium. 
 
 Like most metrical forms, the Spenserian stanza 
 has its excellences and its defects. For poetry 
 which consists of a stream of pageants it is exactly 
 suited. It is no less apt as a vehicle of imaginative
 
 THE SPENSERIAN STANZA 123 
 
 reflection, for thought translating itself in images. 
 It lends itself to rich effects produced by accumu- 
 lated touches. When, as it often does, it swells up 
 to the very end ; or when, to produce a different 
 effect, it slowly ebbs off"; or when, as is equally 
 characteristic with Spenser, it slides forward with 
 equable rhythms till near the end, and then, in the 
 eighth and ninth lines, rises into a great crescendo 
 and storm of sound, it is little short of miraculous. 
 To embark on quotations is a formidable matter, 
 but just one instance of each kind of effect may be 
 given. An instance of the first, almost too well 
 known, but still endlessly delightful to repeat, is 
 from the description of the Garden of Acrasia (II. 
 xii. 71) : 
 
 The joyous birds, shrouded in cheerful shade, 
 Their notes unto the voice attempered sweet : 
 The angelical soft trembling voices made 
 To the instruments divine respondence meet : 
 The silver-sounding instruments did meet 
 With the base murmur of the water's fall : 
 The water's fall, with difference discreet, 
 Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call : 
 The gentle warbling wind low answered to all. 
 
 As an instance of the second may be taken a 
 stanza of equal beauty and celebrity, the famous 
 invocation to Chaucer (IV. ii. 34), with its singular 
 likeness, in phrasing and rhythm as well as in sub- 
 stance, to those exquisite verses of William Morris 
 which come as the envoi to the Earthly Paradise :
 
 i2 4 SPENSER 
 
 Then pardon, O most sacred happy spirit, 
 
 That I thy labours lost may thus revive 
 
 And steal from thee the meed of thy due merit 
 
 That none durst ever whilst thou wast alive : 
 
 And being dead, in vain yet many strive : 
 
 Ne dare I like ; but thro' infusion sweet 
 
 Of thine own spirit which doth in me survive 
 
 I follow here the footing of thy feet 
 
 That with thy meaning so I may the rather meet. 
 
 For an instance, finally, of the third kind, we may 
 go to one of the innumerable combats between a 
 knight and two Paynims mostly in common form 
 and a little tedious, but in this case lifted to a new 
 splendour by the blaze and crash of the final line 
 (II. viii. 37): 
 
 Horribly then he gan to rage and rail 
 Cursing his gods and himself damning deep. 
 But when his brother saw the red blood rail 
 Adown so fast, and all his armour steep, 
 For very fellness loud he gan to weep, 
 And said : Caitiff, curse on thy cruel hand 
 That twice hath sped ; yet shall it not thee keep 
 From the third brunt of this my fatal brand : 
 Lo ! where the dreadful Death behind thy back doth 
 stand. 
 
 Such are some, and only some, of the effects of 
 which the stanza is capable. On the other hand, 
 it often drags and becomes languid. The last line 
 sometimes seems pure surplusage ; sometimes one 
 may say the same of more than the last line. The 
 thought, and even the imagery, become exhausted 
 before the end of the stanza is reached. Spenser's
 
 THE SPENSERIAN STANZA 125 
 
 fluency is unfailing ; but there are many places 
 where the fluency becomes mere verbosity, many 
 where the stanza seems stuffed out with anything 
 that comes first to hand. It is this that lies at 
 the root of Spenser's strange lapses into bald prose. 
 He recovers from them swiftly, but there they are : 
 in single lines like 
 
 Though otherwise it did him little harm ; 
 
 or 
 
 Then very doubtful was the war's event ; 
 or 
 
 But the rude porter, that no manners had ; 
 
 and even more markedly in some longer passages 
 that are mere untransmuted lumps from the debased 
 prose romances of the period, such as, 
 
 But turn we now back to that lady free 
 Whom late we left riding upon an ass ; 
 
 or the amazing account of her adventures given by 
 Priscilla to Calidore in the second canto of Book VI. 
 It fills eight stanzas, and is all as bad as can be ; I 
 will only give one gem out of the heap : 
 
 Then, as it were to avenge his wrath on me, 
 When forward we should fare he flat refused 
 To take me up (as this young man did see) 
 But forced to trot on foot, and foul misused, 
 Punching me with the butt-end of his spear.
 
 126 SPENSER 
 
 Doll Tearsheet might talk so : did talk so in fact, the 
 very next year, in the squalid but powerful scene 
 where she makes her last appearance on Shakespeare's 
 stage. 
 
 Finally, as a vehicle for narrative poetry, the 
 Spenserian verse is inherently faulty, because it lacks 
 speed. Its movement is not progressive ; it is like 
 that of spreading and interlacing circles. Spenser 
 was no doubt naturally without that rare quality, 
 the narrative gift ; but he deliberately (and very 
 likely rightly) chose a metrical form for the Faerie 
 Queens which emphasised this deficiency. The 
 same thing is true of the stanza as used by other 
 poets. Compare Keats's two masterpieces ; how 
 heavy, how struggling, is the narrative movement 
 in the Eve of S*. Agnes when set beside the swift, 
 clear brightness of Lamia / or compare the endless 
 circumvolutions of Shelley in the Revolt of Islam 
 with the sense of life and movement in the Witch 
 of Atlas. Even Byron, the swiftest of English 
 poets, becomes slow and almost languid in Childe 
 Harold. In his Don Juan, where rapidity was essen- 
 tial, he abandoned the Spenserian verse, and boldly 
 launched into the Italian rhymed octave, though 
 he did not succeed in naturalising it, and Don Juan 
 remains a long metrical tour de force. And if we 
 take Byron where he is swiftest and most himself 
 the Byron of the Giaour the difference is almost 
 incredible.
 
 THE SPENSERIAN STANZA 127 
 
 The foremost Tartar's in the gap 
 Conspicuous by his yellow cap 
 
 it is safe to say that Spenser, or any one writing in 
 the Spenserian manner, would have spent a whole 
 stanza in getting over the ground that this fierce 
 swift couplet covers in a single stride. Byron 
 himself could hardly have done otherwise ; for so 
 essentially is the Spenserian stanza Spenser's creation, 
 that it cannot be written at all except in a manner 
 nearly akin to his. 
 
 This perilous fluency, this unbounded melodious- 
 ness, is at once Spenser's strength and his weakness 
 as an artist. It displeased the classicists of his own 
 time. His friend Harvey honestly disliked the 
 Faerie Queene, and said so roundly to Spenser him- 
 self. " Hobgoblin running away with the garland 
 from Apollo " he calls it, in a phrase which one 
 can hardly fancy Spenser would either forgive or 
 forget. He sets the whole thing down, rather 
 petulantly, to some foolish ambition in Spenser to 
 outdo Ariosto on his own lines. Harvey's opinions 
 on poetry were not those of a poet, and are 
 perhaps not of special value. But in this instance 
 he expresses the feeling not merely of classicist 
 pedantry, but of classical judgment. Every one 
 knows that we have only half of the Faerie Queene 
 as planned ; that it was to have extended to twelve 
 books, and something like sixty thousand or seventy 
 thousand lines. What is not so widely known, or
 
 128 SPENSER 
 
 at least so clearly remembered, is that these twelve 
 books were only the first part of a still more gigantic 
 scheme. If that scheme had been carried out, we 
 should have had a poem, or a mass of poetry, of 
 something more like one hundred and fifty thou- 
 sand lines. This would substantially exceed even the 
 sixty thousand couplets into which the Shah Nameh, 
 through successive accretions, became swollen in the 
 hands of Firdausi and his pupils or continuators. 
 It would have been a poem which, in Lord Cock- 
 burn's celebrated phrase, would have exhausted Time 
 and encroached on Eternity. 
 
 But towards the end of the sixth book of the 
 Faerie Queene we become conscious of a great and 
 significant change of tone. It occurs subtly and 
 silently, like dawn overspreading the sky. But it 
 means that the spirit of the poet, and of his art, 
 has changed. The Renaissance is tiring of itself; 
 poetry is returning to life : and with the same 
 movement life is returning to poetry. 
 
 The note of change comes with the reversion to 
 pastoral at the opening of the ninth canto. 
 
 Now turn again my team, thou jolly swain, 
 Back to the furrow which I lately left. 
 
 The note here is very different from that of the 
 elaborate high-flown introductions to which we have 
 been accustomed hitherto. The immediate reference 
 is merely to his customary process of taking up the
 
 THE NEW WORLD 129 
 
 dropped thread of his romance. But it suggests 
 more : it suggests a return to the furrow in another 
 sense, a return to the pleasant villages and farms, 
 to the opener air, from the enchanted atmosphere, 
 heavy and luminous, of courtly romance. 
 
 A soft air fans the cloud apart ; there comes 
 A glimpse of that dark world where I was born. 
 
 The Faerie Queene becomes a Winter's Tale in the 
 beautiful episode which follows. The 
 
 shepherd grooms 
 
 Playing on pipes and carolling apace, 
 The whiles their beasts there in the budded brooms 
 Beside them fed, and nipt the tender blooms, 
 
 are those of the Shepherds Calendar back again, but 
 softened, etherealised, lit by romance. Pastorella, 
 the one figure in the whole of the Faerie Queene 
 who is all but human, reminds one of Shakespeare's 
 Perdita. Like Perdita she needs must turn in the 
 story into a king's daughter lost and hidden among 
 shepherds ; such was the tradition of romance, that 
 might not lightly be broken. But, king's daughter 
 or not, she brings with her the breath and beauty of 
 common life. The vanity of ambition is a theme 
 on which throughout the poem Spenser has been 
 perpetually discoursing ; but here, for the first time, 
 it brings with it the vanity of courtliness, the 
 evanescence of the Renaissance ideal. Meliboeus the 
 shepherd, Pastorella's reputed father, has been a 
 
 I
 
 130 SPENSER 
 
 courtier himself in his youth, has sold himself for 
 hire and spent his youth in vain ; now, in one of 
 Spenser's most exquisite stanzas, he tells how he 
 has gone back to sweet peace, and " this lovely 
 quiet life which I inherit here." His sermon on 
 content and simplicity is Spenser speaking in his 
 own voice, sincerely, without either self-conscious- 
 ness or strain. Pastorella-Perdita " had ever learned 
 to love the lowly things." With the reversion 
 towards simplicity is mingled a strain of grave re- 
 ligion. It is not only that " happy peace " and " the 
 perfect pleasures " grow in common life, and all the 
 rest is but a "painted shadow of false bliss": it is 
 that the whole gorgeous fabric of romantic chivalry 
 is a lure, " set to entrap unwary fools in their 
 eternal bales." And so, when the shepherds are 
 " met to make their sports and merry glee, as they 
 are wont in fair sunshiny weather," we are reminded 
 not only of the Winter's Tale but of the Pilgrim's 
 Progress. "If a man was to come here in the 
 summer time, and if he also delighted himself in the 
 sight of his eyes, he might see that that would be 
 delightful to him. Some have wished that the next 
 way to their Father's house were here, that they 
 might be troubled no more with either hills or moun- 
 tains to go over ; but the way is the way, and there's 
 an end." 
 
 This new land is as yet but dimly seen : it is 
 coloured and half concealed by the iridescent vapour.
 
 THE NEW WORLD 131 
 
 While still among the shepherds, Calidore strays 
 back into fairyland, to the Acidalian hill where he 
 sees the Graces dancing, not to the lyre of Apollo, 
 but to the pipe of Colin Clout. But when he moves 
 towards them, they all vanish out of his sight, " and 
 are clean gone, which way he never knew," and 
 Colin Clout is left piping on the hillside alone. 
 The candles of the mediaeval world are burned out ; 
 but the eyes of those who issue from the brilliantly lit 
 palace are still dazzled and cannot see things clearly. 
 In the uncertain light, that pleasant simple countryside 
 seems one in which tigers attack strawberry-gatherers, 
 and are decapitated with sheephooks. " Exit pur- 
 sued by a bear," is the famous stage-direction at the 
 end of the first part of the Winter's Tale : sixteen 
 years pass, and then " enter Autolycus, singing." 
 
 So Spenser pulls himself back, at the opening 
 doorway into daylight and the new world. Calidore's 
 life among the shepherds was making him unmind- 
 ful of his vow and of the queen's commands. He 
 leaves Pastorella-Perdita and goes on the quest of 
 the Blatant Beast. We are back in the full current 
 of allegorical romance. But the spell, once snapped, 
 cannot be quite rewoven ; the poem flutters for a 
 little on a broken wing, and stops. 
 
 It stops, or the poet's death stopped it. The 
 story of the last three months of his life is one of 
 confused horror. Fire and sword of an Irish rising ; 
 his home sacked and burned, and his newborn child
 
 132 SPENSER 
 
 perishing in the flames ; a wretched winter-flight 
 to England ; a stony welcome there, a month or 
 two of misery and illness, and death " for lack of 
 bread" they said, if it be not incredible : such was 
 the tragic end. Twelve years later was published 
 the magnificent fragment, " two Cantos of Muta- 
 bility, which, both for form and matter, appear to 
 be the parcel of some following book of the Faerie 
 Queene, under the legend of Constancy." They 
 may be conjectured to have been written in the 
 last year of his life, and perhaps with some pre- 
 monition of its approaching end. They renew the 
 earlier splendours of the poem, but with a deeper 
 and graver music. In single lines and phrases there 
 is an organ-tone that can scarcely be matched else- 
 where in Spenser ; and the Titaness, proud and fair, 
 
 Being of stature tall as any there 
 Of all the Gods, and beautiful of face 
 As any of the Goddesses in place, 
 
 stands out among the swaying tapestry-figures of 
 Spenser's pageantries like some colossal sculpture of 
 Michelangelo's. He lapses into his old decorative 
 manner in the episode of Arlo-hill ; in the simile of 
 the cat in the dairy (the forty-seventh stanza of the 
 first of the two cantos) it almost looks as if he were 
 parodying himself. But from that he rises again to 
 the great speech of Mutability ; to the summoning 
 and appearing before the throne of Nature of the
 
 THE NEW WORLD 133 
 
 procession of the Seasons and the Months, Day and 
 Night, the Hours, Life and Death ; and to the final 
 doom pronounced by Nature, which sums up, in a 
 few majestic words, the whole system and govern- 
 ment of the Universe. Then Nature herself vanishes : 
 the lights go out ; silence falls ; and through the 
 silence comes one last echo and cadence of sound, a 
 prayer to be granted the Eternal Peace. 
 
 Thus Spenser, in the old Northern phrase, 
 " changed his life," and was laid beside Chaucer 
 in the Abbey Church at Westminster. His life, 
 his vision of poetry as a pageant of life, his con- 
 ception of poetry as a function of life, were splendid 
 and transitory. They ceased ; while life, and with 
 it poetry, moved on.
 
 MILTON
 
 THE death of Spenser, in the penultimate year of 
 the sixteenth century, really marks the end of the 
 Elizabethan age, the age of the Tudor monarchy 
 and the full impact on English poetry of the Italian 
 Renaissance. That Renaissance had itself originated 
 in the rediscovery of ancient Greece and Rome ; its 
 communication to England was partly direct, partly 
 and more largely through the intervening medium 
 of France. The progress of English poetry had 
 now passed through two of the capital stages in 
 its course. To the age of Chaucer, the final 
 flowering of mediaeval England under the foreign 
 impulse of the first Renaissance, had succeeded the 
 age of Spenser and of the second Renaissance. Eng- 
 lish poetry had enlarged its scope and modernised 
 its methods : but it was still national and insular ; it 
 still awaited a further transformation through full 
 contact with the classics, full interfusion with the 
 central current of European poetry. 
 
 Much had to be done before this happened ; and 
 the poetical movement in England after Spenser is 
 intricate and confused. To the age of Spenser 
 immediately succeeds the age of Shakespeare. The
 
 138 MILTON 
 
 volume and energy of that single genius gave a 
 new meaning, one might almost say, to poetry ; and 
 if Milton was, by direct and immediate inheritance, 
 the successor of Spenser, if, as was the case, he 
 was himself but little affected by Shakespeare's 
 influence, it is nevertheless true that all English 
 poetry after Shakespeare moves in a deepened and 
 enlarged world. 
 
 The greater part of the seventeenth century is occu- 
 pied by the epoch of the transition. Between Shake- 
 speare's death and the completion of the Paradise 
 Lost there are just fifty years. It was a half-century 
 of profuse and multiform poetical production. It 
 was the period of the great Jacobean dramatists, 
 Fletcher and Massinger, Ford and Webster ; of 
 Donne and Vaughan and Herbert and Crashaw ; of 
 the Caroline lyrists, Wither, Herrick, Lovelace ; 
 of Fanshawe, the last of the Elizabethans, and 
 Waller, the first of the moderns. Its most popular 
 and most widely read poet was Cowley : its later 
 years saw the growing fame and influence of Dryden. 
 Before its conclusion, Addison was born. In such 
 a list of names there is no easily traceable thread 
 of connexion, no regular line of development and 
 advance. The confusion of English politics in the 
 seventeenth century seems reflected in the confusion 
 of English poetry. We cannot bring its progress 
 under any single formula. It is difficult to dis- 
 criminate between the poetry which represents the
 
 PERIOD OF THE TRANSITION 139 
 
 continuance of an earlier impulse and that which is 
 a new beginning, a separate movement. We seem 
 to wander in a dimly lighted undergrowth, in a close 
 dungeon of innumerous boughs. When we emerge 
 into daylight, it is to find ourselves in another world. 
 Darkness had slowly fallen on the Elizabethan after- 
 glow ; from out of a sky spangled with a confused 
 multitude of stars which succeeded it, there comes 
 breaking and flooding in, slowly and inevitably, the 
 Aufklarung, the blanched clearness of a new and 
 modern day. 
 
 From the movement of the age in which he is the 
 central and supreme figure in English poetry, Milton 
 stands from first to last apart, in a magnificent isola- 
 tion. Before we attempt to consider his poetry and 
 appreciate his achievement, it will not be irrelevant 
 to consider, and to indicate in a brief summary 
 or suggestion, what it was that his contemporaries 
 meant to do, or did by instinct without meaning 
 it ; for only thus shall we be in a position to estimate 
 his relation to them, and to judge how his work in 
 poetry was akin to or alien from theirs. 
 
 The movement of the seventeenth century in 
 English poetry was both an expansion and a con- 
 traction. It is on the latter side that it chiefly 
 strikes the modern imagination and the modern 
 critical sense. By comparison with the opulence 
 of Elizabethan poetry, the poetry of Dryden and 
 the Augustans seems narrow and thin. But it had
 
 i 4 o MILTON 
 
 acquired a quality which the other had not, and 
 for the sake of which prodigious sacrifices had been 
 made ; it had ceased to be insular and become Euro- 
 pean. It had gone to school and civilised itself. It 
 had submitted itself to laws of taste and a standard 
 of manners. To the new generation, the poetry of 
 the Elizabethan and Jacobean age, with its exuber- 
 ance, its superabundance, its unrestraint, had become 
 an unweeded garden. Men were tired of it ; their 
 minds were set in a different direction. Elizabethan 
 poetry had abolished the mediaeval tradition, and 
 reared upon its ruins a fabric of wonderful beauty 
 and magnificence ; now its own turn had come to 
 be replaced, to succumb to new ideas, to give way 
 before a new manner. Its beauties had for the time 
 being ceased to attract ; its defects, the defects of 
 slovenliness and quaintness, were what criticism 
 fastened upon, and what not only criticism but 
 living poetical instinct set itself to overcome. To 
 get rid of these the spirit of the new age was ready 
 to sacrifice anything. That new movement was the 
 legacy of the dead Renaissance. It had the defects 
 of its virtues. A classical ideal had been established : 
 but in the effort to attain it, poetry side-slipped into 
 classicism. 
 
 In the labyrinth of seventeenth-century poetry, the 
 criticism of the eighteenth fastened, instinctively and 
 rightly, on Waller, as the clue guiding past divergent 
 paths and blind alleys to the actual passage out of
 
 PERIOD OF THE TRANSITION 141 
 
 which poetry finally emerged. Waller was, but for 
 this, a poet of but small account either for the 
 quantity or the quality of his writing. It would be 
 difficult, but for this, to understand how he got his 
 great and long-lasting reputation. He was smooth, 
 Pope tells us, and we are apt to ask what there is so 
 very remarkable in being smooth. But this smooth- 
 ness, this clean polish, was just then the quality 
 towards the attainment of which the effort of litera- 
 ture in England was converging and concentrating. 
 In the critical essay at the end of the Life, Johnson 
 weighs Waller piece by piece and finds him light 
 currency. " But it cannot be denied," he ends, 
 " that he added something to our elegance of dic- 
 tion, and something to our propriety of thought." 
 The conclusion is fine and just. Elegance and pro- 
 priety are secondary, not essential, qualities in poetry. 
 But they are included, together with other qualities 
 far nobler and larger, in the content of poetry which 
 is classic, as they are qualities which assume an 
 exaggerated importance in the poetry which founds 
 itself upon the classics, but is itself only classicist. 
 To the inaugurators of a new reaction a century 
 later it seemed that nearly all had been lost which 
 was worth saving. But in looking at what was lost 
 they disregarded, or too lightly took for granted, 
 what had been won ; for all such losses are but 
 transformations of energy. What had been won 
 was this ; that English literature had been brought
 
 142 MILTON 
 
 into the main stream of European art and thought, 
 had equipped itself with modern arms to meet the 
 conditions of the actual world, and was prepared to 
 take its place in the great intellectual movement 
 of the eighteenth century. Poetry had shifted its 
 axis. The movement was hardly one either of 
 advance or of regression ; it was rather what is 
 called in the mechanical sciences a movement of 
 translation. 
 
 Such was the large and strenuous task partly set 
 before itself of set purpose, partly followed by a 
 half-unconscious instinct, by the poetry of the latter 
 half of the seventeenth century. It is worth noting 
 that in what I have called a movement of transla- 
 tion, translation in the other sense of that word took 
 a very important part. It was the age of transla- 
 tions, in a somewhat different sense and with a 
 somewhat different purpose from the ages which 
 preceded and followed it, though both of these 
 were equally abundant in the number of trans- 
 lations they produced. At an earlier period, 
 the classic poets, whether those of ancient Greece 
 or Rome or those of a more modern foreign 
 civilisation in Italy or France, had been trans- 
 lated primarily for the sake of their contents, 
 in order to give access to an otherwise unknown 
 world that held in it the secrets of knowledge. 
 At a later period they came to be translated for 
 the sake of translating, in the exercise of the
 
 PERIOD OF THE TRANSITION 143 
 
 secondary but not despicable art of the copyist. 
 In the seventeenth century, from Fairfax's Tasso 
 just at its beginning to Dryden's Virgil just at its 
 end, we can see the one object fading out and the 
 other growing ; and between them, connecting the 
 one with the other, a third object predominant. 
 That object was to make the English language 
 into a completed vehicle of poetical expression ; to 
 make England into an organic member of the Re- 
 public of Letters, and to fuse the life and progress 
 of English poetry with those of the poetry of the 
 civilised world. A similar object, or at least a 
 similar instinct, was at the basis of another notice- 
 able feature in the latter half of the century. 
 This was the fashion of laborious, and as it 
 seems now little more than pedantic, translations 
 of English poetical masterpieces into Latin : that 
 of Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida by Kynaston, 
 that of Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess by Fan- 
 shawe, that made of the Paradise Lost itself, but 
 a few years after its publication, by Henry Bold. 
 This was not only pedantry ; still less was it only 
 undertaken on such grounds as those on which 
 the practice of Latin verse-making is continued 
 and defended to-day. It was another movement of 
 the same general impulse ; it meant the testing of 
 these English poems by a certain classical standard, 
 and the vindication for them of a certain classical or 
 universal quality. It was a recognition, in a queer
 
 144 MILTON 
 
 distorted fashion doubtless, of the unity and soli- 
 darity of poetry. The European nations still held 
 by a Latin standard. We find Milton in his youth 
 still weighing, as Dante had done more than three 
 centuries, as Ariosto had done more than a century 
 earlier, the question of writing his great poem in 
 Latin. After Milton the question had no longer to 
 be considered. Gray's fragment De Princi-piis Cogi- 
 tandi, Lander's first Latin draft of Gebir, are isolated 
 anachronisms. The beginnings of the modern world 
 coincide with the disuse of Latin as a universal 
 language. In politics and diplomacy it slowly gave 
 way to French. In science, Newton's Principia, 
 published thirteen years after Milton's death, was 
 the last work of first-rate importance written in 
 Latin to appear in England. Locke, about the same 
 time, elected for English in the work which laid the 
 foundations of analytic philosophy. The English 
 language had entered into its full inheritance. 
 
 But from the general poetic movement of the 
 age, Milton from first to last stands apart. In the 
 period between his earlier and his later poems, Eng- 
 lish poetry had not only altered its accent ; it had 
 changed its language. At neither point (if we ex- 
 clude a few slight juvenile pieces of his boyhood and 
 those metrical versions of the Psalms in which he 
 elected not to be a poet) are his accent and speech 
 those of his age. He moved in a world of his own : 
 on a different plane, in a different atmosphere. In
 
 MILTON AND HIS AGE 145 
 
 the Comus there are passages in the later Elizabethan 
 or Jacobean manner. In the Samson there are pas- 
 sages approximating to the manner of the Restora- 
 tion. In both cases, such passages stand out from 
 the rest of his work with an air of strangeness. He 
 remains himself even in these ; there is not a square 
 inch of his poetry from first to last of which one 
 could not confidently say, This is Milton and no one 
 else. But he is least Milton where he writes, rarely 
 and for a few lines together, in a manner approximat- 
 ing to the characteristic manner of the age in which 
 he wrote. 
 
 These lines, for instance, from the Comus come 
 very near the Elizabethan manner ; it may be 
 doubted whether one's admiration for them would 
 be mingled with any shade of surprise if one came 
 on them in reading a play of Massinger's : 
 
 Why should you be so cruel to yourself 
 
 And to those dainty limbs, which Nature lent 
 
 For gentle usage and soft delicacy ? 
 
 But you invert the covenants of her trust 
 
 And harshly deal, like an ill borrower, 
 
 With that which you receiv'd on other terms. 
 
 They are the Elizabethan style at its finest and 
 purest ; but it is only perhaps in the reflected light 
 of the lines which precede and follow them, and 
 which are unmistakeable Milton, that these six lines 
 are anything beyond Elizabethanism grown trans- 
 lucent. Certainly one would not single them out 
 as characteristically Miltonic.
 
 146 MILTON 
 
 Similarly in his latest work may be found, but 
 very rarely, two or three lines together that, if de- 
 tached from their context, come very close to the 
 post-Restoration manner in poetry, the manner 
 handed down to the eighteenth century by Dryden 
 and Otway. 
 
 Spare that proposal, father, spare the trouble 
 Of that solicitation ; let me here, 
 As I deserve, pay on my punishment 
 And expiate, if possible, my crime. 
 
 By stopping here in the middle of a sentence, we 
 get four lines which in rhythm and diction might 
 belong to some contemporary play, such as the 
 Maiden Queen or Venice Preserved. But even to 
 get anything as like as this we have to juggle a 
 little with the text. 
 
 Between the poetical manner of the Comus and 
 the poetical manner of the Samson Agonistes there 
 is a vast interval ; but the interval is intra-Miltonic ; 
 the orbit lies from first to last in a plane of its 
 own ; and from the general poetical movement of 
 his age Milton, as I said, stands wholly apart. He 
 founded no school ; he exercised no effect upon 
 contemporary poets. It may be doubted whether if 
 he had never been born the development of English 
 poetry up to the end of the seventeenth century 
 would have been sensibly different from what it was. 
 Yet he is of the centre, as none of his contemporaries 
 are. He did for English poetry a work higher
 
 THE SEARCH FOR PERFECTION 147 
 
 than theirs, overmastering and including theirs, a 
 work that has to be done once and once only, and 
 beyond which there is nothing more to do. They 
 made our poetry civilised : he made it classic. With 
 one magnificent movement of ascension and concen- 
 tration he lifted it onto the heights that signal to 
 one another across the world. He struck for one 
 object, hitherto unsought and undreamed of by 
 English poetry ; he sacrificed everything for it, and 
 achieved it. That object was perfection. 
 
 Where perfection is the object seen and aimed at, 
 it will allow of no rival, and exacts prodigious pay- 
 ment. All other objects must be discarded, or go 
 for fuel into the furnace. Thus it is only momen- 
 tarily attainable ; it feeds its life's flame with self- 
 substantial fuel, which at the best just lasts out 
 until the moment of projection. It cannot be con- 
 tinued or transmitted. It can be attained perhaps 
 only once in the progress of any single art within 
 the bounds of any single civilisation ; behind follows 
 exhaustion and relapse, in so far as the art does not 
 break away and begin afresh upon other lines and 
 with other motives. It is as though Nature herself 
 had in this particular direction done her utmost, 
 and fell away from her achievement exhausted. 
 
 From his boyhood onwards, Milton felt in himself 
 this absorbing and controlling impulse. He took 
 no pains to conceal it ; rather he emphasised it from 
 the first with deliberate gravity. He was to do in
 
 148 MILTON 
 
 English poetry what no one hitherto had done, what 
 no one hitherto had even tried to do ; for its attain- 
 ment, no training was too severe, no education too 
 prolonged, no delay worth considering twice. What- 
 ever happened, he was not going to be hurried. 
 He deliberately took the risk of total failure rather 
 than be content to fall back on any imperfect suc- 
 cess. He laid out his task as though he had 
 eternity before him. Like the merchantman of the 
 parable, he sold all he had to buy that one pearl. 
 Even in the sphere of poetry itself, he gravely put 
 away from him the other things which are its life 
 and which make it precious ; he put away tears and 
 laughter, the common sweetness of earth, the power 
 to move the hearts and bring loveliness into the 
 lives of men. 
 
 In the Vacation Exercise, written in his nineteenth 
 year at Cambridge, this note is struck with complete 
 certainty. Still little more in mind than a boy, as 
 the other extant pieces belonging to that period of 
 his life show, he had already cut himself adrift from 
 his age ; already he saw clear and high before him 
 the path that led up to the summit where the Muses 
 sit crowned. The celebrated Nuneham portrait, 
 though it was not painted till a year or two later, 
 shows him as he was then. With the severe beauti- 
 ful face of which we possess this record, Milton at 
 the age of nineteen had scanned the whole poetical 
 movement going on among his contemporaries and
 
 THE SEARCH FOR PERFECTION 149 
 
 dismissed it as slight, fantastic, not worthy of him 
 and of what he conceived as the actual dignity and 
 potential capabilities of his art. The earlier part of 
 the Exercise had been in Latin. Then he turns 
 and invokes his native language. 
 
 Here I salute thee, and thy pardon ask 
 
 That now I use thee in my latter task. 
 
 I pray thee then, deny me not thine aid 
 
 For this same small neglect that I have made, 
 
 But haste thee straight and do me once a pleasure 
 
 And from thy wardrobe bring thy chiefest treasure ; 
 
 Not those newfangled toys, and trimming slight 
 
 Which takes our late fantastics with delight; 
 
 But cull those richest robes and gay'st attire 
 
 Which deepest spirits and choicest wits desire. 
 
 Yet I had rather, if I were to chuse, 
 
 Thy service in some graver subject use 
 
 Such as may make thee search thy coffers round 
 
 Before thou clothe my fancy in fit sound : 
 
 Such, where the deep transported mind may soar 
 
 Above the wheeling poles, and at heaven's door 
 
 Look in, and see each blissful deity 
 
 How he before the thunderous throne doth lie, 
 
 Listening to what unshorn Apollo sings 
 
 To the touch of golden wires, while Hebe brings 
 
 Immortal nectar to her kingly sire. 
 
 " If I were to choose," he says : but he had already 
 chosen. He realised fully what the choice meant. 
 At the point where others ended their education, he 
 began his. He studied silently and intensely for the 
 next ten years, writing little and publishing less until 
 an age at which many poets have done their finest 
 work. At the age of twenty-three, just before
 
 150 MILTON 
 
 leaving Cambridge, he gravely records that, in aa 
 age of precocious maturities, his own late spring 
 showed no bud or blossom. The full meaning of 
 this can only be realised when we remember that he 
 had already written the Nativity Ode, and either 
 had written or was just about to write the Allegro 
 and Penseroso. These pieces, in which he refused to 
 recognise even the blossom of what he meant to do 
 in poetry, sound a note hitherto unknown in this 
 island. Between two and three years later he was 
 induced by Henry Lawes to write the Ludlow 
 Masque. It was still with the same strange deli- 
 berate sense of immaturity. He would not publicly 
 acknowledge its authorship ; for long he would not 
 allow it to be printed. When Lawes at last suc- 
 ceeded in his insistence that there was a limit to the 
 number of manuscript copies which he could make 
 to satisfy the enthusiasm of those who had seen it 
 or heard of it, and that it must be produced to 
 public view, Milton would not let his name appear 
 on it. Instead of an author's name on the title- 
 page there was a motto which is a sharp cry of 
 annoyance and pain. 
 
 Eheu, quid volui misero mihi ! floribus austrum 
 Perditus 
 
 The blossom of that hesitating spring must be 
 guarded jealously till it matured into fruitage : ut 
 flos in septis secretum nascitur hortis, ignotus pecori,
 
 THE SEARCH FOR PERFECTION 151 
 
 nullo contusus aratro. A few months later he allowed 
 another flower to stray out of that secret garden. 
 Lycidas, with his initials only to give any public clue 
 to its authorship, appeared at the end of a little 
 collection entitled Obsequies to the Memorie of Mr. 
 Edward King, printed at the Cambridge University 
 Press, and not, we may reasonably suppose, circulated 
 or read outside of Cambridge to any appreciable 
 extent. 
 
 In effect, then, it may be said that Milton pub- 
 lished no poetry until the volume of 1645. He 
 was then thirty-seven ; he had recently turned to 
 another field of labour, and as he regarded it, of 
 duty ; he had come down from the hill of the 
 Muses to become a publicist and controversial 
 writer ; he was known, not as a poet, but as the 
 author of pamphlets on episcopacy, divorce, and 
 liberty of unlicensed printing. He saw another 
 long delay before him, another laborious stage in 
 the long process of self-education and self-develop- 
 ment, which could take no short cuts, and would be 
 ruined by any neglect of duty, however laborious or 
 distasteful duty might be. His determination to 
 publish then was no doubt made on mixed motives. 
 In the curious preface prefixed by the publisher we 
 can certainly hear an echo of Milton's own voice and 
 judgment. 
 
 " It's the worth of these Poems," he writes, " not 
 the flourish of any prefixed encomions that can invite
 
 152 MILTON 
 
 thee to buy them, though these are not without 
 the highest Commendations and Applause of the 
 learned'st Academicks. ... I know not . . . how 
 harmonious thy soul is ; perhaps more trivial Airs 
 may please thee better. But ... let the event guide 
 it self which way it will, I shall deserve of the age, 
 by bringing into the Light as true a Birth, as the 
 Muses have brought forth since our famous Spencer 
 wrote ; whose Poems in these . . . are as rarely 
 imitated, as sweetly excell'd. Reader, if thou art 
 Eagle-eied to censure their worth, I am not fearful 
 to expose them to thy exactest perusal." 
 
 In this last sentence especially it is Milton's very 
 self who speaks. Self-depreciation was never a 
 weakness of his ; he will have no indulgence ; he 
 will not be tried by any standard but the highest. 
 How far he still fell short of that perfection on 
 which he had set his eyes was a matter between him- 
 self and his Maker, in which he would not have 
 allowed that any one else had any concern. In 
 this, no less than in his politics and his theology, he 
 was Puritanism incarnate. In the sphere of art, as 
 in the sphere of civic and religious life, he represents 
 individualism carried to its highest point. To that 
 spirit the pride of life, the glory of this world, was 
 as nothing : it was fused and vaporised in the higher 
 spiritual pride, a pride so intense that it took upon 
 itself the likeness of a strange and sublime humility. 
 In the noble sonnet of Wordsworth's, written by a
 
 THE SEARCH FOR PERFECTION 153 
 
 poet who in this respect as in others had much in 
 common with Milton, there is one flaw. " Thy soul 
 was like a star and dwelt apart," he says, and says 
 truly : but then he goes on to say " and yet thy heart 
 the lowliest duties on itself did lay." No, it was 
 not his heart ; it was his soul still, the same austere 
 lonely soul that would call no man master, that 
 claimed, or assumed without claiming, freedom from 
 all restraint but that of the inward law. The essence 
 of Puritanism, what was at once its tremendous 
 strength and its fatal weakness, was just this, that 
 it was the merciless requirement of perfection. This 
 is the spirit which shows itself in the famous passage 
 of Lycidas, where the desire of fame is spoken of as 
 being, however noble in its kind and however en- 
 nobling in its effect, a last infirmity which has to be 
 overcome. It is the spirit of the concluding phrase 
 of the Comus, the words which Milton himself, five 
 years after they were written, set down again as the 
 motto of his life, If virtue feeble were, Heaven itself 
 would, stoop to her. It is the spirit of Milton, and, 
 among the poets, of Milton only : for Puritanism 
 only flowers once. 
 
 It is only by close attention to this attitude of 
 mind that we can understand and appreciate the 
 unique character of the contents of this volume of 
 1645. Into it he put, seemingly without selection, 
 practically all that he had written. Alongside of 
 masterpieces unequalled in English there are scraps
 
 154 MILTON 
 
 of mere occasional verse, there are things begun and 
 then left off because he recognised that they were in 
 a false manner and not worth going on with, there 
 are even school exercises composed when he was a 
 boy at St. Paul's. Nearly thirty years later, when 
 revising the volume, he added to it, in the same 
 strange, dispassionate, almost impersonal way of re- 
 garding his own work, another juvenile set of verses, 
 the stanzas On the Death of a Fair Infant, which he 
 seems to have forgotten, or been unable to lay his 
 hands upon, when he was collecting material for the 
 earlier volume. " From a boy of seventeen," says 
 Warton of this piece generously and quite justly, 
 " this Ode is an extraordinary effort of fancy, ex- 
 pression, and versification " ; but this is the utmost 
 that can be said of it. It is imitative, laboured, full 
 of boyish conceits. He cannot have attached any 
 value to it except from the haughty feeling, trace- 
 able all throughout his life, that it was enough to 
 give any verses value that they bore the signature 
 of John Milton. But this was only the other side 
 of a feeling as deep and showing an even more superb 
 pride, that up to the age of forty, all that he had 
 written stood finally on the same level, because none 
 of it was good enough to stand above that signature. 
 The fact then that Milton did not suppress, but 
 on the contrary deliberately perpetuated, his earliest, 
 slightest, and most immature essays in poetry, is not 
 to be taken as indicating any failure in his judgment,
 
 THE HESPERIAN GARDENS 155 
 
 any flaw in his fastidiousness, any wavering in his 
 merciless and unwavering requirement of perfection. 
 From the first, or almost from the first, he is as 
 rigorous with his own poetry as with the conduct of 
 his own life. The most striking single instance of 
 this is to be found in the autograph manuscript of 
 the Comus. A passage of sixteen lines is crossed out 
 in the prologue, which no one but Milton could ever 
 have written, and no one but Milton ever have struck 
 out. Though this passage is of course familiar to 
 all students of Milton's poetry, it is and always has 
 been unknown to many of his most constant readers 
 and most ardent lovers. This fact, together with 
 another to which I will come presently, is sufficient 
 excuse for quoting the whole of the opening para- 
 graph of the prologue as it originally stood. 
 
 Before the starry threshold of Jove's court 
 My mansion is, where those immortal shapes 
 Of bright aerial spirits live inspher'd 
 In regions mild of calm and serene air 
 Amidst the Hesperian gardens, on whose banks 
 Bedew'd with nectar and celestial songs 
 Eternal roses grow and hyacinth 
 And fruits of golden rind, on whose fair tree 
 The scaly-harness'd dragon ever keeps 
 His unenchanted eye ; around the verge 
 And sacred limits of this blissful isle 
 The jealous ocean, that old river, winds 
 His far extended arms, till with steep fall 
 Half his waste flood the wild Atlantic fills 
 And half the slow unfathom'd Stygian pool. 
 I doubt me, gentle mortals, these may seem
 
 156 MILTON 
 
 Strange distances to hear, and unknown climes. 
 
 But soft, I was not sent to court your wonder 
 
 With distant worlds and strange removed climes. 
 
 Yet thence I come, and oft from thence behold 
 
 The smoke and stir of this dim narrow spot 
 
 Which men call earth ; and with low-thoughted care 
 
 Confin'd and pester'd in this pinfold here 
 
 Strive to keep up a frail and feverish being 
 
 Beyond the written date of mortal change, 
 
 Unmindful of the crown that Virtue gives 
 
 After this mortal change to her true servants 
 
 Amongst the enthron'd Gods on sainted seats. 
 
 Yet some there be that by due steps aspire 
 
 To lay their just hands on that golden key 
 
 That opes the palace of Eternity. 
 
 To such my errand is, and but for such 
 
 I would not soil these pure ambrosial weeds 
 
 With the rank vapours of this sin-worn mould. 
 
 In this magnificent passage we have the potential 
 Milton of the Paradise Lost : we have at their full 
 power the consummate finish of diction and phras- 
 ing, the smooth irresistible movement, the planetary 
 wheeling of the long period. But in its place, and 
 for its object, Milton felt it to be overloaded ; and 
 with a single stroke of the pen, half of it, and that 
 in itself the most splendid half, disappeared. But 
 for the chance preservation of the autograph manu- 
 script, we should know nothing of a passage which 
 perhaps as much as any single one in Milton's whole 
 work combines the perfection of the classical with 
 the perfection of the romantic manner. 
 
 In his fully mature poetry his manner becomes, of
 
 THE HESPERIAN GARDENS 157 
 
 course, more exclusively classic. Passages conceived 
 and executed in the distinctively romantic manner, 
 though incorporated with exquisite skill, show a 
 different texture and tone from their surroundings, 
 and are to that extent at least theoretically detach- 
 able. Bentley, in his celebrated edition of the Para- 
 dise Lost, actually proposed to detach them, and 
 while he did this in a rash and rather absurd way, 
 he was on the track of a real and even a profound 
 critical principle. But in this suppressed passage of 
 the Comus the classical and romantic elements are 
 in perfect fusion, and for a moment no more is 
 possible in exact counterpoise. It is likewise an 
 education in criticism to compare this passage with 
 the others in which Milton handles the same motive. 
 Two of them are in this same poem ; one in the 
 Younger Brother's speech : 
 
 But Beauty, like the fair Hesperian tree 
 Laden with blooming gold, had need the guard 
 Of dragon watch with unenchanted eye 
 To save her blossoms and defend her fruit 
 From the rash hand of bold Incontinence. 
 
 The central line here (one of those miraculously 
 melodious lines of which Milton and Keats alone 
 had the secret) gives the concentrated essence of 
 the suppressed passage ; it is once more an instance 
 of the perfect fusion of the classical and romantic 
 tones : the rest is hardening into classicism. The
 
 158 MILTON 
 
 other is the lyrical epilogue to the Masque ; the 
 single magical phrase of 
 
 Hesperus and his daughters three 
 That sing about the golden tree. 
 
 That is neither classical nor romantic ; for both those 
 terms involve a choice of manner, a deliberate style. 
 To use a phrase which I borrow from another con- 
 text, " it is neither classical nor romantic ; it is 
 simply right." 
 
 Here once more it is not merely a lesson in criti- 
 cism, but a glimpse into the process of creation, to 
 turn to the Milton manuscript and see how Milton 
 tried the phrase over and over and made three suc- 
 cessive alterations in it before it took its final shape 
 of simple and seemingly unconscious or inspired 
 perfection. There are but few instances in which 
 one is let so intimately into the inner laboratory 
 of the artist. Mr. de Selincourt in his admirable 
 edition of Keats (and Keats, I may say in passing, is 
 the English poet who in method and workmanship 
 offers the nearest analogy to Milton) has shown how 
 through a similar process, involving four successive 
 alterations, the lines in Hyperion., 
 
 Not so much life as on a summer's day 
 
 Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass, 
 
 took their perfect phrasing and melody. It is not 
 so generally known that a similar alteration one 
 only, but one that makes all the difference was
 
 THE HESPERIAN GARDENS 159 
 
 made by Keats in the first line of Endymion, but 
 made before the line was committed to paper. 
 
 There are three passages introducing the same 
 motive in the Paradise Lost, and one, in some ways 
 the most interesting of all, in the Paradise Regained. 
 Those in the Paradise Lost are in the fully developed 
 classical manner ; we can see in them how in the 
 hands of any poet of inferior genius to Milton's that 
 manner becomes classicist ; even with him it is on the 
 point of stiffening. They occur in the third, fourth, 
 and eighth books. On Satan's first entrance into the 
 newly created system, he passes 
 
 Amongst innumerable stars, that shone 
 Stars distant, but nigh hand seemed other worlds, 
 Like those Hesperian gardens fam'd of old, 
 Fortunate fields and groves and flowery vales. 
 
 When he makes his way into the Earthly Paradise, 
 he sees in it 
 
 Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balm, 
 Others, whose fruit burnisht with golden rind 
 Hung amiable, Hesperian fables true, 
 If true, here only. 
 
 And Raphael when leaving the garden says to 
 
 Adam, 
 
 The parting sun 
 
 Beyond the earth's green cape and verdant isles 
 Hesperian sets, my signal to depart. 
 
 It is curious to see how, in these three recurrences, 
 the imaginative or musical motive passes through
 
 160 MILTON 
 
 successive contractions, shrinking in the last to a 
 mere verbal or musical suggestion, an intangible 
 colour on the language. It recurs once more, as 
 though in an echo, in the Paradise Regained. This 
 is in the very remarkable passage describing the 
 visionary banquet set before Our Saviour by the 
 Tempter. There Milton, with his last backward 
 look on the realms of romance, sets the " Ladies of 
 the Hesperides " beside the later enchantment 
 
 Of fairy damsels met in forest wide 
 By knights of Logres or of Lyones. 
 
 I said that there was another reason for laying 
 special stress on the suppressed passage in the 
 prologue of the Comus. It is this; that it pre- 
 sents a most curious and fertile analogy with one 
 of Tennyson's most splendid early poems, which 
 he also suppressed after it had appeared in the 
 volume of 1832, and which was never allowed 
 to reappear until after his death. Even now the 
 Hesperides is perhaps not very widely known. But 
 to those who do know it, it will seem nearly cer- 
 tain that besides the two lines from the Comus 
 which Tennyson prefixed to it, he had read the 
 Milton manuscript at Trinity, and been profoundly 
 influenced by the suppressed passage. 
 
 Wandering waters unto wandering waters call ; 
 Let them clash together, foam and fall. 
 Out of watchings, out of wiles 
 Comes the bliss of secret smiles.
 
 THE HESPERIAN GARDENS 161 
 
 All things are not told to all. 
 
 Half round the mantling night is drawn, 
 
 Purple-fringed with even and dawn . . . 
 
 Till mid-noon the cool east light 
 
 Is shut out by the round of the tall hill-brow ; 
 
 But when the full-faced sunset yellowly 
 
 Stays on the flowering arch of the bough, 
 
 The luscious fruitage clustereth mellowly, 
 
 Golden-kernelled, golden-cored, 
 
 Sunset-ripened above on the tree : 
 
 The world is wasted with fire and sword, 
 
 But the apple of gold hangs over the sea.] 
 
 It has not the weight and poise of the other ; it 
 is looser-textured and more diaphanous ; but the 
 two have the same essential quality of romance and 
 magic. This also Milton knew ; this also he dis- 
 carded in his ascent to the summit. 
 
 These solemn heights but to the stars are known, 
 But to the stars and the cold lunar beams : 
 
 Alone the sun arises, and alone 
 Spring the great streams. 
 
 It is a curious question, and one which hardly 
 arises in any other case, what position Milton would 
 have held among English poets if he had died at 
 fifty. He would have been represented then by the 
 volume of 1645 and by about a dozen sonnets. We 
 inevitably read all that earlier poetry by the reflected 
 light of the Paradise Lost. We have here been 
 engaged, in effect, in an attempt to regard it apart 
 from that reflected light and by itself. It is easy 
 to see now to what it all tended, how it represents 
 
 L
 
 1 62 MILTON 
 
 successive layers of poetry, as one might say, shed, 
 stripped off, outgrown, in the process of Milton's 
 colossal self-imposed task of concentration. It is easy 
 to see now that in these earlier poems he never fully 
 expressed himself, never put out his full strength. 
 They were exercises in his art : exercises of varying 
 intricacy, adjusted to the particular point in each case 
 that his long, patient self -education had reached. 
 The volume in which he collected them was a 
 record of progress up till then. In such a record 
 all the entries were in a sense of equal value ; for if 
 the record was to be complete, it must show the 
 whole process point by point. It must have been for 
 some such reason, more or less consciously influenc- 
 ng his mind, that he gravely set down the laboured 
 and frigid fragment on the Passion, or the quite 
 worthless set of commendatory verses that he had 
 contributed anonymously to the second folio Shake- 
 speare, side by side with the Nativity Hymn, with 
 the Ode at a Solemn Music, with Comus and Lycidas. 
 However this may be, the great difference in our 
 view of Milton if he had not lived to write the 
 Paradise Lost would be that we should regard him 
 principally, perhaps almost wholly, as a lyric poet. 
 Even those pieces which are not, in any proper or 
 exact use of the term, lyrical, have a more or less 
 close affinity to the lyric. The sonnet is only sepa- 
 rated from the lyric by narrow and rather elusive 
 boundaries ; and there is an equally close though a
 
 MILTON AND VIRGIL 163 
 
 different sort of affinity between the lyric and the 
 pastoral. The masque likewise, as a specific form 
 of art differing from the drama proper, is the drama 
 pushed as far towards lyrical treatment as it will bear 
 consistently with the retention of dramatic form. 
 With regard to the Ludlow Masque, this point is 
 acutely seized and finely brought out in Sir Henry 
 Wotton's celebrated criticism : " I should much com- 
 mend the Tragical part, if the lyrical did not ravish 
 me with a certain Dorique delicacy in your Songs and 
 Odes, whereunto I must plainly confess to have seen 
 yet nothing parallel in our Language: I-psa mollities" 
 As a drama, as a representation of action, the Comus 
 is slight and unconvincing. But this is not the scope 
 or object of the masque ; action in it is merely used 
 as a slight framework for giving coherent form to a 
 pictorial, reflective, and emotional content which is 
 in its essence lyrical. 
 
 The mollifies, the delicacy, which the Provost of 
 Eton singled out as the distinctive quality of Milton's 
 work, had also been named by Horace as the dis- 
 tinctive quality of Virgil's early poetry. It conveys, 
 in both cases, the sense of an exquisite and fastidious 
 refinement ; and in neither case is its justice impaired 
 by the fact that the poetry in question bears on it 
 the stamp of immaturity. In that very immaturity 
 lay the promise of the future. Both poets had set 
 before themselves an ideal in poetry towards which 
 the labour of a whole lifetime was essential ; neither
 
 164 MILTON 
 
 of them would be hurried ; they would not forestall 
 the slow process through which art, no less than 
 nature, grows into perfection. 
 
 Lo, sweeten'd by the summer light 
 
 The full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow, 
 
 Drops in the silent autumn night. 
 
 Between the Eclogues and the Aeneid, between the 
 Comus and the Paradise Lost, the interval is long. 
 Much was dropped on the difficult ascent. But the 
 ascent was made at last ; and we have now among 
 the immortals, not the author of the Eclogues and 
 the author of Comus and Lycidas, but Virgil and 
 Milton. 
 
 Between Lycidas and the publication of the Para- 
 dise Lost there are just thirty years. They were, as 
 regards poetry, years of silence ; the silence, after 
 the burst of spring flowerage, of the long brooding 
 heats of summer, during which the year comes slowly 
 to its maturity. But for a few casual scraps of trans- 
 lation, Milton's only poetical product throughout 
 them was a very few sonnets ; solemn and rare 
 indeed, in the words of the great English sonnet- 
 writer, 
 
 Since, seldom coming, in the long year set, 
 Like stones of worth they thinly placed are, 
 Or captain jewels in the carcanet 
 
 but only giving the faintest hint of the immense 
 power in reserve behind them, like the flickers that 
 run across the darkness of massed clouds behind
 
 SILENCE IN HEAVEN 165 
 
 which is gathered the whole armoury of heaven, 
 nubila sol imbres nix venti fulmina grando. 
 
 Earth turned in her sleep with pain, 
 
 Sultrily suspired for proof: 
 In at heaven and out again 
 
 Lightning ! where it broke the roof, 
 Bloodlike, some few drops of rain. 
 
 No parallel to this long silence between the prelude 
 and the performance, dead silence but for those few 
 low trumpet-notes, is to be found, I think, in the 
 history of poetry. It was the final test to which 
 Milton put his powers. 
 
 Sometimes as we pass along the streets of a modern 
 city, we come at nightfall on a dark mass of building, 
 with hardly a sign of life about it except a light 
 feather of steam that curls from a huge ventilating 
 shaft. As we come nearer we can catch through a 
 crevice in furnace doors a glimpse of some great in- 
 candescence, we can hear the steady purring of vast 
 dynamos, and see a silent-footed engineer moving 
 within among valves and pressure-gauges. When 
 the hour is come, it is but the pulling across of a 
 lever, and a whole region glitters with light and 
 thrills with power. Some such feeling we have about 
 Milton in that long central period. But his con- 
 trolling motive after all was not perfection in his art 
 in which there are many kinds of perfection nor 
 was it perfection in the science of his art, in which 
 among English poets he still stands, as he stood then,
 
 1 66 MILTON 
 
 alone. It was perfection in the eye of his great Task- 
 master. For this we shall find no adequate symbolism 
 in the arts or the applied sciences; we must turn from 
 these to the first and greatest messengers of Puri- 
 tanism. That long silence was unaffected by what 
 went on in the outworks of his life ; by all the angry 
 controversies and wasted energies and household un- 
 happinesses which make up the apparent substance 
 of those years. All the while, drop by drop, con- 
 tinually, the reservoir of poetry was filling up in 
 him till it stood abrim. We seem to be in a vision 
 such as rose before the prophet when he saw by 
 night. "And I answered again, What be those two 
 olive branches which through the two golden pipes 
 empty the golden oil out of themselves ? And he 
 answered me and said, Knowest thou not what these 
 be ? and I said, No, my lord. Then said he, These 
 are the two Anointed Ones that stand by the Lord 
 of the whole earth."
 
 II 
 
 IN 1642, Milton, then in his thirty-fourth year, writes 
 of himself as " not having yet completed to my mind 
 the full circle of my private studies." That circle 
 he was already doomed never to complete. His 
 eyesight, overtaxed from early youth, was failing. 
 When he accepted the post of Latin Secretary to the 
 Commonwealth in the spring of 1649, it was with 
 the distinct knowledge that the work it involved 
 meant early blindness. A year afterwards the sight 
 of the left eye was gone ; in two years more he was 
 totally blind. 
 
 To any ordinary man this would have meant the 
 end. He had built great bases for eternity, and was 
 struck down while the masses of material and of 
 acquirement that he had spent his life in collecting 
 were still only a potential structure. He had staked 
 all on the one throw and seemed to have lost it. 
 Like the builders on the plain of Sennaar, he had 
 " cast to build a city and tower whose top may reach 
 to heaven." Dis aliter vimm : and all that was left 
 of that vast project seemed to be the grim epitaph, 
 
 Thus was the building left 
 
 Ridiculous, and the work Confusion named. 
 
 167
 
 1 68 MILTON 
 
 Even Milton's own haughty courage nearly gave 
 way under that crushing blow. Tears, like laughter, 
 were among the things that he had put away from 
 him. But there breaks from him one low piercing 
 cry of pain. 
 
 My light is spent 
 
 Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, 
 And that one talent which is death to hide 
 Lodg'd with me useless. 
 
 For a while he sought refuge in a cold and profound 
 thought, like that of the Stoic Emperor : " God doth 
 not need either man's work, or his own gifts " ; or, 
 with a transcendental and inverted humility, strove to 
 accept the service of those who only stand and wait. 
 He plunged deeper than ever into angry political 
 controversy, striking fiercely right and left in a mood 
 careless alike of his own self-respect or of effective 
 results. He sought narcotics in mechanical tasks of 
 compilation. His first unhappy marriage had come 
 to an end with the death of Mary Powell, just about 
 the time when his blindness became total. He mar- 
 ried again. Some gleam of happiness that came into 
 his life then was quenched fifteen months later when 
 the " espoused saint " whom, in the most touching of 
 all his poems, he calls " love, sweetness, goodness," 
 died in childbed. But in that brief interval he had 
 summoned back his full courage, and set steadily to 
 work on the composition of the Paradise Lost. 
 The scheme of the great epic had, as is well
 
 THE PARADISE LOST 169 
 
 known, been taking shape in his mind for many 
 years. It was practically settled in its main outline 
 when he returned from abroad in 1639. The definite 
 adoption of the epic and not the dramatic form, after 
 long balancing between the two, was only made some 
 years later. According to the well-attested story 
 about the lines which open Satan's monologue at the 
 beginning of the fourth book, that passage, and some 
 others, had been actually written as early as 1642. 
 The substance and even the very wording of the poem 
 had been slowly distilling in his mind long before 
 he set himself to continuous composition. Some five 
 years or more passed in this task. According to 
 Aubrey, the poem was substantially complete by the 
 summer of 1663. It was two years later that Ell- 
 wood read it in manuscript. It was no doubt sub- 
 jected to much further detailed revision before it 
 passed the licenser and went to press in the spring of 
 1667. All that revision had to be conducted under 
 the same overwhelming difficulties as had to be con- 
 quered before it could take written shape at all. 
 For those who have themselves practised the refine- 
 ments of written composition, who know how the 
 judgment is dependent on the eye, and what per- 
 petual reference back and forward a finished revision 
 involves, the achievement of the double task will be 
 recognised as implying a grasp and power that are 
 almost superhuman. In the fine and just words of 
 De Quincey, the Paradise Lost is not a book among
 
 MILTON 
 
 books, not a poem among poems, but a central force 
 among forces. That amazing power had to work 
 through a machinery as cumbrous as it was imperfect. 
 It had to hold in place, and record through casual 
 hands as opportunity was given, the vast scheme of 
 the poem and the minutest adjustments of diction, 
 rhythm, and period. It had to carry the whole 
 substance of the epic in solution, and deposit it, cell 
 by cell, exactly at the right place, and exactly in the 
 right order. Composed in darkness, brooded over 
 in memory, dictated in fragments, it all fell into 
 place. We can hardly imagine any material altera- 
 tion if, like Virgil, he had been able to keep the 
 manuscript beside him and give to it at will, day 
 by day, the final touches of a patient and fastidious 
 hand. Blind Masonides is but a shadowy tradition, 
 even if we do not, with some modern critics, first 
 deny the existence of Homer and then, logically 
 enough, and inevitably, deny the existence of the 
 Iliad. Among the great artists of the modern world 
 Beethoven alone presents even a remote parallel to 
 Milton's achievement. Viewed thus, the Paradise Lost 
 may well seem to us the most astonishing of all the 
 products of high genius guided by unconquerable will. 
 For what is most remarkable about the Paradise 
 Lost is not so much the greatness of its conception, 
 though that is wonderful ; it is not so much the 
 height and amplitude of imagination through which 
 the conception is embodied, though these are splen-
 
 THE PARADISE LOST 171 
 
 did : it is the sustained and all but faultless perfec- 
 tion of the execution. Here and there we may see, 
 or think we see, a slip or a flaw. In different parts 
 of the poem there are distinct differences of work- 
 manship ; there are even differences, less distinct 
 but still traceable, of what is another thing, quality 
 of workmanship. The fine close-woven texture 
 shows, on minute inspection, not only the variation 
 which all the products of really great art show by 
 virtue of their being organic and not machine-made 
 products, but places where the mind has wandered, 
 or the hand flagged, or the tool slipped. When we 
 have taken full account of these, it remains true that 
 here we have a poem of over ten thousand lines in 
 which the workmanship throughout is such as had 
 been in English poetry previously undreamed of, 
 such as has never been since equalled, such as we 
 cannot imagine ever being surpassed by any human 
 skill. In the science of his art Milton is our one 
 absolute master. Of him in poetry as of Bach in 
 music it may be said that they fix a limit. Other 
 kinds of perfection there may be ; but beyond their 
 perfection no one may go. Either of them might have 
 adopted as his the superb claim made for his own 
 achievement in art by the Greek painter Parrhasius : 
 
 Et KOI airta-TO, K\VOVCTI Xe-yco raSe' <pt]/uu yap ^tj 
 evpqcrQai Te^vr^ Tep/naTa TtjcrSe (rcuptj 
 
 X|009 v<p' 
 oupo$'
 
 172 MILTON 
 
 " This I say, even though they that hear believe 
 not : I declare that the clear limits of this art have 
 been found under my hand, and the goal is set that 
 may not be overpassed, though there is no human 
 work with which fault may not be found." 
 
 In the main we are justified in believing that the 
 Paradise Lost, as it at last appeared, satisfied Milton's 
 own impeccable ear and merciless judgment. So 
 much may be gathered, though doubtfully, from the 
 fact that he published it with no word of depreca- 
 tion, and that his prefatory note explaining his 
 choice of unrhymed verse has the tone of a workman 
 who is well content with his own work. But there 
 is further confirmation in the fact that he left it mate- 
 rially unaltered when he republished it seven years 
 later. That second edition is described as " revised 
 and augmented by the author." But the revision, 
 though evidently careful and even minute, resulted 
 in few changes and next to no augmentations. 
 Apart from alterations of single words and there 
 are not many even of these there are only seven 
 instances in which a passage is reworded or an addi- 
 tion made. Two of these are the exquisite passages, 
 of four lines in one case and five in the other, inserted 
 at what became the beginnings of the eighth and 
 twelfth books when he redivided the original ten 
 books into twelve. Three new lines were inserted 
 in the description of the lazar-house in the eleventh 
 book ; in no one of the other four instances does the
 
 THE PARADISE LOST 173 
 
 alteration made affect a passage of more than four 
 lines. 
 
 If we read the Paradise Lost through with a 
 careful eye on the diction and versification, we can 
 distinguish in it, as we can distinguish in the Aeneid, 
 strata of earlier and later work. The differences 
 are very subtle ; they do not affect the general unity 
 of style and texture. To appreciate them is perhaps 
 the last reward given to the trained student in lan- 
 guage and the expert in prosody. Thus the seventh 
 book shows a marked predilection for lines with a 
 pause at the end of the first or fourth foot, and the 
 eleventh for lines made up of monosyllabic words. 
 Three speeches in Books IX. and X. are respec- 
 tively in what, within the bounds of his fully de- 
 veloped and as yet unimpaired mastery of style, may 
 be called Milton's early, middle, and late manner. 
 The speech of Satan to Eve in Book IX., beginning 
 " Empress of this fair world," is in a manner not 
 far removed from the poetical manner of the Comus, 
 simpler and more fluid, less fully charged and less 
 closely woven than the characteristic manner of 
 Milton's maturity. 
 
 Till on a day roving the field, I chanced 
 A goodly tree far distant to behold, 
 Loaden with fruit of fairest colours mixt, 
 Ruddy and gold : I nearer drew to gaze : 
 When from the boughs a savoury odour blown, 
 Grateful to appetite, more pleased my sense 
 Than smell of sweetest fennel, or the teats
 
 174 MILTON 
 
 Of ewe or goat dropping with milk at even, 
 Unsucked of lamb or kid that tend their play. 
 
 These lines might be put into the part of the Atten- 
 dant Spirit in the Comus without seeming strange or 
 out of place. Satan's monologue, earlier in the same 
 book, beginning, " O earth how like to heaven ! " 
 is in Milton's culminating manner, the manner 
 which is kept up without a single swerve through 
 the first four books, and which is the reason why 
 those four books are generally, and not unjustly, 
 held to be the crown of Milton's whole work in 
 poetry. This speech is equal to anything in the 
 first half of the poem, and to a certain extent, though 
 not to such an extent as causes any jar, stands out 
 in virtue of that quality from its surroundings. A 
 little further on, Adam's soliloquy in the tenth book, 
 beginning, " O miserable of happy ! is this the end ? " 
 anticipates the manner of the Paradise Regained. 
 The structure is less periodic, the rhythm more 
 broken ; the evolution of thought often proceeds, 
 one might almost say, by jerks, not under a single 
 controlling movement. The whole speech bears dis- 
 tinct traces of rhetoric ; it is the single speech in the 
 whole poem of which one would be inclined to say 
 that it was too long; parts of it are even curiously 
 unpoetical. 
 
 Yet it does not follow necessarily, nor even pro- 
 bably, that these three passages were written at long 
 successive intervals, and are early, middle, and late
 
 THE PARADISE LOST 175 
 
 in their origin as they are in the colour of their 
 style. For if we regard them in their whole context, 
 we shall see that their variation is almost scientifi- 
 cally adjusted, and is evidence not only of Milton's 
 certainty of hand, but of a quality for which he 
 seldom or never gets the full credit due to him, a 
 dramatic sense of extreme delicacy. With him, as 
 with Sophocles, this quality is so fine that it may 
 easily elude observation. Like the best Greek sculp- 
 ture, it works of set purpose within narrow limits, 
 and to the ordinary eye the surface seems flat which 
 is really alive with subtle modelling, and, in Milton's 
 own apt words, is 
 
 inimitable on earth 
 By model or by shading pencil drawn. 
 
 The construction is at every point organic ; in 
 the phrase of architects, elle ne dort jamais. The 
 manner, diction, and metrical quality of these three 
 passages which I have cited are in each case adapted 
 with precise fitness to the circumstances. Those 
 of Satan's speech to Eve, with their relaxed fluency 
 and calculated simplicity, are in the character which 
 he has assumed, for the purpose of skilful decep- 
 tion, of the brute who has just found human sense 
 and language, and still uses both with an accent of 
 strangeness, of imperfect concentration, of incom- 
 plete mastery. They are completely different from 
 those of the ruined archangel uttering his own
 
 176 MILTON 
 
 thought and speaking in his own person. Those of 
 Adam's long soliloquy are adapted with equal nicety 
 to the person of one whose mind and senses are reel- 
 ing under the first shock of his fall. The founda- 
 tions of his life are crumbling beneath him. He has 
 lost, with his innocence, not only his self-confidence, 
 but his lucidity of intelligence, his power of sustained 
 reasoning, his control of language, and even his sense 
 of truth. His life has ceased to be a poem, and his 
 words reflect the change. He can conclude no- 
 thing ; he can fix his mind nowhere. His turmoil of 
 thought issues in confused and broken language. 
 He can follow out no train of reasoning ; he circles 
 round in a maze, trying ineffectually to find refuge 
 in rhetorical sophistries. His very language, parti- 
 cipating in the intellectual and moral abasement, be- 
 comes harsh and all but prosaic. The way in which 
 Milton manages this without letting go his hold over 
 the sustained workmanship of the whole poem is no 
 sign of late composition or lessening power ; it is 
 one of the highest proofs which the poem shows of 
 combined skill and daring, of the complete control 
 which its author had over the science and mechanism 
 of his art. 
 
 It is true that in this and the two following books 
 (the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth) there are other 
 traces, if not of diminishing power, yet of a certain 
 lessening of concentration and tension. The texture 
 of the poetry in places becomes sensibly looser; there
 
 THE PARADISE LOST 177 
 
 are passages where the material has not been perfectly 
 fused. We can note instances, here and there, of a 
 reversion to Elizabethanism. We can note others in 
 a harder and drier manner, such as was coming over 
 Milton when he wrote the Paradise Regained. There 
 are one or two instances in which classical ornament, 
 as though he felt this harder manner growing on him 
 and wished to give it some artificial counterpoise, is 
 attached rather than organically incorporated. 
 
 Nor important less 
 
 Seemed their petition, than when the ancient pair, 
 In fables old, less ancient yet than these, 
 Deucalion and chaste Pyrrha, to restore 
 The race of mankind drown'd, before the shrine 
 Of Themis stood devout. 
 
 The rhythm and phrasing have all the old skill ; but 
 the way in which the comparison is introduced and 
 expanded seems now something like artifice. Or 
 again, later in the same book, in the description of 
 the descent of the cherubim : 
 
 Four faces each 
 
 Had, like a double Janus ; all their shape 
 Spangled with eyes more numerous than those 
 Of Argus, and more wakeful than to drowse, 
 Charmed with Arcadian pipe, the pastoral reed 
 Of Hermes, or his opiate rod. Meanwhile, 
 To resalute the world with sacred light 
 Leucothea waked. 
 
 It is exquisitely beautiful ; but it is on the point of 
 becoming ornament for ornament's sake : it trembles 
 on the verge of classicism. 
 
 M
 
 178 MILTON 
 
 In the eleventh book, again, alongside of passages 
 where a harsh inversion or an elliptic syntax is in 
 Milton's latest manner : 
 
 But longer in that paradise to dwell 
 The law I gave to nature him forbids, 
 
 or 
 
 But who was that just man, whom had not heaven 
 Rescued, had in his righteousness been lost ? 
 
 we find phrases which are almost purely Shake- 
 spearian ; and others where an unaccustomed gentle- 
 ness of thought seems to reflect itself in a new and 
 exquisite delicacy of rhythm ; as in 
 
 One short sigh of human breath, upborne 
 Even to the seat of God, 
 
 and once more a little further on, 
 
 For see ! the morn, 
 
 All unconcern'd with our unrest, begins 
 Her rosy progress, smiling. 
 
 It is worth noting that these last two phrases, with 
 their tender and luminous beauty, both occur in 
 the scene of reconciliation between Adam and Eve : 
 they are another instance of that subtle dramatic 
 instinct in Milton which discloses itself to more re- 
 fined analysis or rather, for this is the real truth, 
 to sufficiently careful reading. 
 
 Only in the twelfth book, where Michael sum- 
 marises the history of the world from the Flood to 
 the Second Coming, can we say definitely that the
 
 THE PARADISE LOST 179 
 
 style here and there does flag, the theological hand- 
 ling is not wholly fused into poetry. The speech of 
 Michael (11. 386-465) is a sermon forged into verse, 
 with immense skill, but not with complete success ; 
 for complete success was here in the nature of things 
 impossible. It is a majestic homily, but Milton has 
 deliberately chosen that it shall be this, and not 
 poetry. It was the last sacrifice he made in the 
 ascent towards perfection ; for the perfection now 
 before him was a spiritual perfection where, as at the 
 conclusion of Dante's Paradiso, desire and will still 
 ascend, but imagination succumbs : aW aha fantasia 
 qui mancb possa. In the furnace-heat of that perfec- 
 tion art itself sublimates and disappears. 
 
 It is this sustained, all but flawless excellence of 
 workmanship throughout the whole poem which, 
 beyond all else, gives the Paradise Lost its enduring 
 value. It is independent of any view which later 
 generations have taken, or may take, of the quality 
 of its subject or of the theological system on which 
 the poem is founded. No doubt Milton was deter- 
 mined in his own choice by the belief which he shared 
 with the whole of Christendom, that the Bible narra- 
 tive of the Fall was historically true, and of the most 
 momentous truth. But what matters is not the 
 subject chosen, or the reasons for choosing it : what 
 matters is the use made of it. If the human mind 
 came to the conclusion, not merely that the narrative 
 was untrue in fact, but that it was false in essence,
 
 i8o MILTON 
 
 the poem would as a work of art be left intact. To 
 Milton himself on his own system of belief the 
 ancient mythology and the systems based on it had 
 this very quality of essential falsehood ; but they 
 meant none the less to him. He did not assert- for 
 his own work any other renown, any other immor- 
 tality, than the renown and the immortality of Homer. 
 It is true, no doubt, that he claims, in the majestic 
 prologue to the seventh book of the Paradise Lost, 
 that the Urania whom he invokes is not one of the 
 nine Muses, but sister of the Eternal Wisdom ; that 
 she is heavenly, the others an empty dream. So he 
 says ; but in the very act of saying it he has himself 
 returned into that world of dreams, and confessed 
 that he too is an artist, and that his own work is art. 
 The workmanship, the science and skill of that 
 art, not only gives the Paradise Lost enduring value ; 
 it also gives it endless interest. Milton's technical 
 skill is only now receiving full recognition. This is 
 not an occasion to enter on a study of his use of lan- 
 guage and metre. Such a study, to be useful, must 
 needs be both minute and detailed. Mr. Robert 
 Bridges, in his Essay on Milton's Prosody, has dealt 
 with one aspect of it in this way, bringing to the 
 task the qualifications of a trained student of lan- 
 guage and a skilled musician. There are few, he 
 says at the end of his analysis of the verse of the 
 Paradise Lost, who will pursue this path any further. 
 I do not here attempt to pursue it so far. But I
 
 MILTON'S VERSE 181 
 
 may just indicate a direction for its pursuit from the 
 point where Mr. Bridges' more severely technical 
 method stops. Analysis of the Miltonic metre takes 
 us but part of the way unless it is continued into 
 analysis of the rhythmic or prosodic structure into 
 which that metre is built up or rather we should 
 say, into which that metre grows through processes 
 which are vital, organic, and creative. A study of 
 Milton's line is but the prelude to a study of 
 Milton's period. 
 
 On its formal side, what makes Milton's versifica- 
 tion as unique as it is admirable, is the instinctive 
 and yet prescient skill with which the pause is con- 
 tinuously varied so as to keep the whole metrical 
 structure in movement. There are no dead lines. 
 There are no jerks or stoppages. His movement 
 may best be described by quoting a passage which, 
 like many others, is at once a description and an 
 instance. It is a 
 
 Mystical dance, which yonder starry sphere 
 Of planets and of fixt in all her wheels 
 Resembles nearest, mazes intricate, 
 Eccentric, intervolv'd, yet regular 
 Then most, when most irregular they seem, 
 And in their motions harmony divine. 
 
 I ask the reader most particularly to notice that these 
 six lines, like almost any short quotation that can be 
 made from the poem, are broken from their context. 
 They begin in the middle of a sentence, and end in
 
 1 82 MILTON 
 
 the middle of a clause. The continuous periodic 
 movement cannot be really shown by examples, just 
 because it is continuous and periodic. If we except 
 the speeches, each of which by the necessity of the 
 case is more or less a definite and detachable unit, 
 the periods flow into one another. Like the orbit 
 of a planet, the movement of the verse never closes 
 its ellipse and begins again. Each of the twelve 
 books is a single organic rhythmical structure. But 
 one cannot very well quote a whole book. 
 
 Within that structure, the variation of pause and 
 stress is similarly in continuous movement. As a 
 general fact this is instinctively felt in reading the 
 poem ; how rigorously the law of freedom is observed 
 comes out even more surprisingly when brought 
 to the test of figures. For movement of stress 
 one instance may serve as a typical example. In 
 Michael's description of the plagues of Egypt in the 
 twelfth book, beginning 
 
 But first the lawless tyrant, who denies 
 
 To know their God, or message to regard, 
 
 Must be compelled by signs and judgments dire 
 
 the detailed roll of the plagues is all threaded on the 
 word must. It recurs nine times, with studied and 
 intricate variation of its place in the line : this is, 
 taken by order, in the first, eighth, fifth, fourth, fifth, 
 fifth, first, third, and fourth syllable. Again, as 
 regards variation of pause, in the whole ten thousand
 
 MILTON'S VERSE 183 
 
 lines of the Paradise Lost there are less than fi ve-and- 
 twenty instances of the pause coming at the same 
 point in the line for more than two lines consecu- 
 tively. Facts like these are the formal index of what 
 is the great organic principle of Milton's verse. That 
 is, that like all organic structures, it is incalculable ; 
 it cannot be reduced to a formula. It has in it that 
 clinamen principiorum which the Epicurean philo- 
 sophy put forward as the explanation of freewill, and 
 which, or something in effect equivalent to which, 
 the most recent science suggests as the explanation, 
 or at least the formula, of life itself. His rhythm 
 is perpetually integrating as it advances ; and not 
 only so, but at no point can its next movement 
 be predicted, although tracing it backwards we 
 can see how each phrase rises out of and carries 
 on the rhythm of what was before it, how each 
 comes in not only rightly, but as it seems inevi- 
 tably. This secret he inherited from no English 
 predecessor and transmitted to no follower. The 
 two poets who showed him the way were Virgil and 
 Sophocles. For while in his poetical manner, in the 
 evolution of his thought and what may be called the 
 rhetorical structure of the poetry, he is more akin 
 to Ovid and Euripides, it is the elder and greater 
 poets whom he recalls in the essential quality of his 
 art. Of the .two, his art is more akin to that of 
 Sophocles in virtue of the apparent ease with which 
 he wields it, of its complete scientific mastery, and of
 
 1 84 MILTON 
 
 a severe self-restraint that may easily be mistaken 
 for frigidity ; the exact opposite of the nether con- 
 tinent described in the Paradise Lost as beyond the 
 stream of Lethe, where 
 
 the parching air 
 Burns frore, and cold performs the effect of fire. 
 
 But with Virgil's art also Milton's has some points 
 of striking analogy, particularly in the structure of 
 his periods. Both habitually practise an artifice 
 almost peculiar to them, that of carrying on the 
 period for another line after it seems to have ended. 
 This hardly comes out clearly in any single in- 
 stance, and therefore I do not offer one ; it is a 
 quality that must be appreciated in its cumulative 
 effect. The effect is neither that of a final clenching 
 stroke, as it is very remarkably in Dante, nor that 
 of a dying cadence or echo, in the way in which it 
 is often very beautifully employed by Spenser ; it is 
 rather that of an enrichment, a superflux, as of water 
 that arches itself in a full glass above the level of 
 the brim. It is analogous, in its structural and 
 harmonic value, to an overbrimming quality which 
 Milton and Virgil both share with Sophocles in their 
 use of words. Language as they use it is many- 
 faceted, full of harmonic undertones, of allusion 
 and suggestion. It unfolds and changes colour as 
 we look on it. The effect is more easily felt than 
 described or analysed ; it lies so much at the heart
 
 MILTON'S PHRASING 185 
 
 of the poetry that it is only through the medium of 
 poetry that it can be at all adequately expressed. 
 We may be reminded of Tennyson's lines about the 
 soul passing through her palace of art 
 
 And all things that she saw she multiplied, 
 A many-faced glass ; 
 
 And being both the sower and the seed, 
 
 Remaining in herself, became 
 All that she saw, Madonna, Ganymede, 
 
 Or the Asiatic dame ; 
 
 Still changing, as a lighthouse in the night 
 
 Changeth athwart the gleaming main 
 From red to yellow, yellow to pale white, 
 
 Then back to red again. 
 
 This overbrimming quality of language is at once 
 the cause and the effect of the concentration of phrase 
 in Milton's mature work. We have already seen 
 how in the act of writing the Comus he struck out a 
 whole passage, and at a later point in the poem 
 gave its whole imaginative essence in a single line. 
 Similar instances may be found in the Paradise Lost. 
 Sometimes the concentration is so great that it defeats 
 its own purpose ; the overbrimmed glass is shaken 
 and spilt. One instance may be propounded for 
 consideration. Here is a famous passage in the 
 Comus, written under the impulse of Milton's early 
 romanticism and with Elizabethan richness. 
 
 Till an unusual stop of sudden silence
 
 1 86 MILTON 
 
 (even so early as this the periodic structure of 
 Milton's verse is so fully developed that one is 
 obliged to begin the quotation in the middle of a 
 sentence) 
 
 Till an unusual stop of sudden silence 
 Gave respite to the drowsy frighted steeds 
 That draw the litter of close-curtain'd Sleep ; 
 At last a soft and solemn-breathing sound 
 Rose like a steam of rich distill'd perfumes, 
 And stole upon the air, that even Silence 
 Was took ere she was ware, and wish'd she might 
 Deny her nature, and be never more, 
 Still to be so displac'd. 
 
 Now turn to the fourth book of the Paradise Lost : 
 Silence was -pleased. How much of the imaginative 
 value, how much of the poetical quality of the earlier 
 passage has Milton carried into these three bare 
 words, into this needle-point of concentration ? how 
 much has he abandoned, deliberately and counting 
 the cost ? The merchantman who sold all he had 
 to buy the one pearl must have been gravely em- 
 barrassed if he found himself penniless and his pearl 
 unmarketable. But Milton at least did not falter in 
 his choice. 
 
 In his later work this concentration in the use of 
 language goes so far that he begins to write, one 
 might say, in a sort of shorthand. There are whole 
 passages in the Paradise Regained which give the 
 effect of a piece of empty honeycomb ; the delicate, 
 scientifically adjusted, faultless structure has been
 
 MILTON'S PHRASING 187 
 
 set in its place, but is waiting still for the liquid 
 gold to be poured into it and fill it to the brim. 
 
 So spake the Eternal Father, and all heaven 
 Admiring stood a space, then into hymns 
 Burst forth, and in celestial measures moved, 
 Circling the throne and singing, while the hand 
 Sung with the voice, and this the argument. 
 
 This should be the prelude to some great choral 
 symphony such as those of the Paradise Lost. But 
 instead of that, what follows is what it would not 
 be unfair to call an abstract or precis of the un- 
 written ode. It is executed with Milton's unfailing 
 metrical skill, but, except for that, little removed in 
 its quality from prose. 
 
 Victory and triumph to the Son of God, 
 
 Now entering his great duel, not of arms, 
 
 But to vanquish by wisdom hellish wiles ! 
 
 The Father knows the Son ; therefore secure 
 
 Ventures his filial virtue, though untried, 
 
 Against whate'er may tempt, whate'er seduce, 
 
 Allure, or terrify, or undermine. 
 
 Be frustrate, all ye stratagems of hell, 
 
 And, devilish machinations, come to nought ! 
 
 This is not the organ-music that we knew. What's 
 become of all the gold ? Has the golden oil ceased 
 to flow into the lamp now that night is so deep ? 
 
 This condensation rather than concentration 
 what I have ventured to call a kind of poetical 
 shorthand is strongly marked in many passages 
 of the Paradise Regained. Sometimes it takes the
 
 1 88 MILTON 
 
 form of a string of clauses in apposition, sometimes 
 of a highly elliptical construction, which in either 
 case amounts to a deliberate neglect of constructive 
 quality. 
 
 Expert in amorous arts, enchanting tongues 
 Persuasive, virgin majesty with mild 
 And sweet allay 'd, yet terrible to approach, 
 SkilPd to retire, and in retiring draw 
 Hearts after them tangled in amorous nets. 
 
 In these lines the periodic structure, the smooth, 
 strong, upward-circling movement of the Miltonic 
 verse is broken up. Or again, 
 
 They praise and they admire they know not what, 
 And know not whom, but as one leads the other. 
 And what delight to be by such extoll'd, 
 To live upon their tongues and be their talk ? 
 Of whom to be dispraised were no small praise : 
 His lot who dares be singularly good. 
 
 It is Milton still ; but Milton walking where once 
 he had flown. 
 
 This contraction and condensation is equally 
 marked in the transitions of the Paradise Regained. 
 The speeches are introduced in formulary lines of an 
 almost archaistic stiffness, a hieratic austerity. 
 
 To whom our Saviour sternly thus replied 
 To whom our Saviour with unalter'd brow 
 To whom quick answer Satan thus return 'd 
 To whom thus answer'd Satan malcontent
 
 MILTON'S PHRASING 189 
 
 There are more than twenty such lines in the poem, 
 the whole length of which is only that of about two 
 books of the Paradise Lost. The effect of this and 
 similar reiterations is to give the modelling of the 
 whole work a fine but almost metallic hardness ; it 
 is poetry still exquisite in quality, but stripped to 
 the last thread, trained down to the last ounce. 
 
 There are one or two passages in the Paradise 
 Lost itself which have anticipatory traces of this 
 curious hard stenographic expression. One is worth 
 citing. It occurs in the episode in the tenth book of 
 the transformation of Satan and his crew into serpents 
 an episode which has been very generally con- 
 demned, and in which it may be fairly said that Milton 
 gives way to the strong attraction he had always felt 
 for the peculiar poetical genius of Ovid, and forgets 
 himself so far as to be clever. This is the passage 
 in question. 
 
 However, some tradition they dispers'd 
 Among the heathen of their purchase got, 
 And fabled how the Serpent, whom they call'd 
 Ophion, with Eurynome, the wide- 
 Encroaching Eve perhaps, had first the rule 
 Of high Olympus, thence by Saturn driven 
 And Ops, ere yet Dictaean Jove was born. 
 
 The whole seven lines were summarily rejected by 
 Bentley, with his usual desperate hardihood and with 
 something more than his usual reason. " Let any 
 man believe, if he can," says he, " that Milton gave 
 such wretched nonsense." That Milton gave it,
 
 190 MILTON 
 
 nonsense or not, is what no one but Bentley ever 
 doubted. But, in the first place, it is to be remarked 
 that the seven lines are in fact detachable, both in 
 rhythm and substance : though they compose per- 
 fectly with the rest, though they even add a fresh 
 beauty of enrichment, they could be removed with- 
 out leaving any gap. In this respect the passage is 
 almost unique in the poem. In the second place 
 and this is still more interesting we can in these 
 lines listen to Milton's mind working, to his thought 
 forming itself. " The serpent, whom they called 
 Ophion with Eurynome ' the wide-encroaching ' 
 Eve, perhaps ? " It is Milton thinking aloud, 
 and his thought, as it moves from point to point, 
 noting itself down in words which almost auto- 
 matically, as it would seem, run into the familiar 
 mould of his august rhythm. But there is this 
 singular result, that a word is actually run over 
 from one line into the next : for " wide-encroach- 
 ing " is in effect one word ; it is hyphened in the 
 very carefully printed first edition. It is as though 
 Milton had lifted off his hand for a minute and 
 let the loom go on working of itself, with the result 
 that the shuttle swerved and made this curious 
 little variation of pattern. It is a unique variation. 
 The nearest approach made to it elsewhere is in the 
 four or five instances in which the division of lines 
 comes between an adjective and its noun as, for 
 instance,
 
 THE LATER EPIC 191 
 
 A sapphire throne inlaid with pure 
 Amber, and colours of the showery arch, 
 
 or 
 
 Which nightly as a circling zone thou seest 
 Powder'd with stars. And now on earth the seventh 
 Evening arose in Eden. 
 
 But these are not really parallel. 
 
 The limits of this study do not allow me to proceed 
 to any further consideration of the Paradise Regained, 
 or of the Samson Agonistes. Each requires, as each 
 more than repays, minute and close treatment. But 
 before returning to Milton's central achievement, one 
 thing must not be omitted, and that is to traverse, 
 briefly but explicitly, the strange and obstinate mis- 
 apprehension, which nothing seems to eradicate, that 
 Milton himself thought the Paradise Regained the 
 greater of the two epics. That it possesses certain 
 unique poetical qualities of its own is undeniable. 
 Wordsworth declared it " the most perfect in exe- 
 cution of anything written by Milton," and Cole- 
 ridge, with a more careful qualification, called it 
 " in its kind the most perfect poem extant." But 
 what Milton said was something quite different. The 
 words of Edward Phillips upon which the miscon- 
 ception rests are these: " It is generally censured to 
 be much inferior to the other, though he could not 
 hear with patience any such thing when related to 
 him." Of course he could not. He could only have 
 heard it with patience if he had known it to be untrue.
 
 192 MILTON 
 
 The aloofness of Milton, as he moved in his high 
 and solitary orbit, is equally marked with regard to 
 the influence exercised on him by his immediate 
 predecessors, and with regard to the influence which 
 he in turn exercised on his contemporaries and on 
 the course of English literature. He takes up the 
 torch where Spenser had laid it down, almost as if 
 there had been no intervening period. On Spenser 
 also the spirit of Puritanism had grown in his last 
 years. The latest extant fragment of the Faerie 
 Queene is* much in the Miltonic spirit and manner; 
 it even anticipates some qualities of Milton's rhythm 
 and diction. In passing from the one poet to the 
 other, we have the feeling that the whole Shake- 
 spearian age has been but an interlude. There are 
 a few lines in the Paradise Lost in which we can 
 trace Shakespeare's influence, in which we can catch 
 an echo of Shakespeare's phrasing. 
 
 For solitude sometimes is best society, 
 And short retirement urges sweet return 
 
 that is in Shakespeare's earlier, fluent and melodious 
 manner. 
 
 Thy message which might else in telling wound, 
 And in performing end us 
 
 that is in the later Shakespearian manner, the manner 
 of the tragedies. In the lines, 
 
 To be no more ; sad cure ; for who would lose, 
 Though full of pain, this intellectual being, 
 Those thoughts that wander through eternity ?
 
 MILTON'S BORROWINGS 193 
 
 the accent is that of Measure for Measure. The 
 line, 
 
 When I behold this goodly frame, this world, 
 
 sounds as though it came straight from Hamlet. 
 And in a very remarkable passage 
 
 If I could hope to change the will 
 Of him who all things can, I would not cease 
 To weary him with my assiduous cries 
 
 a phrase taken directly from Dante is followed 
 strangely by one which is almost verbally transferred 
 from the Sonnets. But these, with one or two other 
 instances, are so exceptional that they only emphasise 
 the general rule. No more inference is to be drawn 
 from them than from the fact that one of the love- 
 liest lines in Lycidas is borrowed from Middleton, 
 and not only so, but was deliberately altered by 
 Milton himself from his first draft into a more exact 
 reproduction of Middleton's wording. 
 
 This line is worth pausing over, because it shows 
 in a very interesting way with what fastidious judg- 
 ment Milton stole a phrase, how he weighed and 
 tested it, and how he gave it, by a new setting, a 
 colour and value that were of his own choosing. 
 The Game of 'Chess ', a play of Middleton's, was pro- 
 duced in 1624, the year before Milton went to Cam- 
 bridge. Apart from its poetical merit, which is 
 great, it had a success of scandal from its political 
 bearing, and led to strong representations from the 
 
 N
 
 194 MILTON 
 
 Spanish Ambassador. Milton in all probability saw 
 it represented before it was withdrawn ; and there 
 was much in it which accorded with his own temper. 
 In that play the passage occurs 
 
 Upon those lips 
 
 The holy dew of prayer lies, like pearl 
 Dropt from the opening eyelids of the morn 
 Upon a bashful rose. 
 
 " Here for once," says Mr. Swinburne, " even that 
 celestial thief John Milton has impaired rather than 
 improved the effect of the beautiful phrase borrowed 
 from an earlier and inferior poet." On such a ques- 
 tion one can only differ from Mr. Swinburne's judg- 
 ment with diffidence. But it is open to argument 
 whether the metaphor of tears dropping from eye- 
 lids is not too much in the Elizabethan fashion to 
 satisfy a purer taste. Certainly the phrase clung to 
 Milton's memory : and when he was revising Lycidas, 
 he altered the line as he had first written it- 
 Together both, ere the high lawns appeared, 
 Under the glimmering eyelids of the morn 
 We drove afield 
 
 to the form in which it is universally known. What 
 is however most interesting, and what throws a light 
 on the whole question of Milton's borrowings, and 
 of poetical borrowings generally in the hands of 
 great poets, is that the phrase, lying in his mind for 
 years, had there taken a new value and meaning. 
 It had taken that " Doric delicacy " which is peculiar
 
 MILTON'S BORROWINGS 195 
 
 to Milton. Instead of the conventional image, it had 
 re-embodied itself in a new visual image of wonderful 
 truth and unexpected beauty. It is one which, like 
 so many of Milton's phrases, shows his extraordinary 
 sensitiveness to effects of light. The opening eye- 
 lids of the morn have become, not the fanciful source 
 of dewdrops, but the widening and brightening 
 streaks of light through bands of cloud on the morn- 
 ing horizon. It is a new image, comparable in deli- 
 cate accuracy to the dawn-pictures of Shakespeare 
 himself, to Friar Laurence's 
 
 Chequering the eastern clouds with streaks of light, 
 or to Don Pedro's 
 
 Dapples the drowsy east with spots of grey. 
 
 When we realise its full beauty, we may not be in- 
 clined to think with Mr. Swinburne that his use of 
 Middleton's image "is not quite so apt so perfectly 
 picturesque and harmonious as the use to which it 
 was put by its inventor." 
 
 In the whole range of Jacobean poetry, the work 
 to which Milton has most recourse is a second-rate 
 translation of a second-rate original, Sylvester's ver- 
 sion of the Sepmaine of Du Bartas. He borrowed 
 much from it in substance. He borrowed, or at 
 least did not disdain to use, a few of Sylvester's 
 happier phrases : a word like " smooth-sliding," a 
 phrase like " the winding rivers border'd all their
 
 196 MILTON 
 
 banks," a collocation of names like " Cincinnatus, 
 Fabricius, Serranus, Curius." But no contrast could 
 be more striking than that between Milton's unde- 
 viating magnificence and what a French critic well 
 describes in his appreciation of Du Bartas as " efforts 
 constants, quoique scuvent malheureux, vers la gran- 
 deur " ; and the dismal versified school-divinity of 
 the Gascon poet sets in higher relief the height of 
 Milton's achievement in fusing those lumps of shape- 
 less lustreless dross and refining them into sombre 
 gold. When a style was current nay more, where 
 a style was almost universally admired in which 
 the Creator rates Adam like a fishwife and addresses 
 him as " apostate Pagan ! " we may excuse the one 
 or two slips of the same sort which Milton made 
 and left unblotted the "O hell!" of Satan in 
 Paradise, the " O Eve, in evil hour " of Adam, 
 for which it is hardly sufficient excuse that it is the 
 language of Adam speaking after the Fall. These 
 are lapses as rare as they are superficial and trivial. 
 
 That sustained perfection of workmanship, that 
 continuous planetary movement " on the highest arc," 
 to use Milton's own noble expression, " that con- 
 templation circling upwards can make from the glassy 
 sea whereon she stands," is one of the reasons why 
 the Paradise Lost supplies but few of those single 
 jewel-phrases which enter into the language, and 
 become part of the common thought of the world. 
 It is but an extension of the statement that the poem
 
 MILTON'S LANGUAGE 197 
 
 loses in detached quotation. The whole poem is a 
 quotation ; it has sunk into the national thought 
 and permanently raised the national power of ex- 
 pression, but it operates thus over its whole extent 
 rather than at detached points. The Allegro and 
 Penseroso alone have given as many phrases of uni- 
 versal currency to the English language as the whole 
 of the Paradise Lost. There are some half-dozen 
 such in the Paradise Lost some half-dozen of those 
 phrases which have become so universally familiar 
 that they are hardly recognised as literature : " con- 
 fusion worse confounded," the " human face divine," 
 " hell broke loose," " on hospitable thoughts intent," 
 " to save appearances." The Serbonian bog, like the 
 Cynosure of neighbouring eyes, has long become a 
 phrase of journalism and lost all its meaning. There 
 are single lines also, lines like 
 
 If shape it might be call'd that shape had none, 
 or 
 
 Not to know me argues yourselves unknown, 
 
 which have similarly passed into the common stock. 
 But it remains true in the main that Milton's language, 
 whether it be severe or enriched, is not the language of 
 mankind. It is a dialect spoken only by him and a 
 few of his peers ; they speak to one another from the 
 heights, nee vox hominem sonat ; except for that lofty 
 and distant fellowship, he moves alone. 
 
 N 2
 
 198 MILTON 
 
 The solitariness of his genius is reflected in the 
 striking absence throughout the Paradise Lost (except 
 in those fine passages where he speaks of himself) of 
 any personal or contemporary allusions. Of these 
 he had always been sparing, except in occasional 
 pieces like Lycidas and the Sonnets. Even in the 
 Comus the exquisite reference to Diodati, his closest 
 friend, is brought in so impersonally as almost to 
 escape notice : 
 
 A certain shepherd lad, 
 
 Of small regard to see to, yet well skill'd 
 
 In every virtuous plant and healing herb 
 
 That spreads her verdant leaf to the morning ray. 
 
 He lov'd me well, and oft would bid me sing, 
 
 Which when I did, he on the tender grass 
 
 Would sit and hearken even to ecstasy. 
 
 But in his later years he had few friends, and none 
 with whom he fully shared his soul. In the Paradise 
 Lost the rarity of particular allusions makes them the 
 more impressive, as in the celebrated descriptions of 
 the riotous streets of London after the Restoration, 
 and that of the summer morning's excursion from 
 London to the pleasant countryside and the suburban 
 villages that lay all about what was even then an 
 overgrown city. Even these allusions are generalised, 
 although the reference is obvious. One and one only 
 of his contemporaries is mentioned by name : and the 
 choice of that one name, thus singled out for im- 
 mortality, is highly significant. It is not that of a 
 countryman of his own ; it is not that of a soldier or
 
 THE NEW LEARNING 199 
 
 statesman, nor of a man of letters, a poet or scholar or 
 theologian. It is that of the most eminent man of 
 science of that age, Galileo, the great Italian physicist 
 and astronomer. And the title by which Milton 
 speaks of him is no less remarkable. The Tuscan 
 artist, he calls him ; as if to indicate that science and 
 art are in vital conjunction, as they were in his own 
 person and in his own poetry. Scientific theology, as 
 it was then understood, is of course of the main sub- 
 stance of the Paradise Lost. Scientific astronomy is 
 almost equally so. Of the science of music, which 
 during Milton's lifetime was taking one of its greatest 
 advances, the many passages in his poetry which deal 
 with music would alone prove that he was an ac- 
 complished master. More generally we may say 
 that Milton was in full touch and full intellectual 
 sympathy with the New Learning, with the ex- 
 panding movement of the human intelligence which 
 was absorbing and annulling the Renaissance. It 
 was the age not only of culminating Puritanism and 
 of rising classicism, but of a prodigious movement of 
 advance in physical science. It was the age of the 
 foundation of the Royal Society : it was the age of 
 Harvey and Boyle, of Torricelli and Pascal. Before 
 Milton's death, Newton had founded the science of 
 optics, had invented the refracting telescope, had 
 discovered though not yet published the law of 
 gravitation. Throughout the Paradise Lost we feel 
 the pressure and impulse of the great movement which
 
 200 MILTON 
 
 was on foot to comprehend the physical universe, 
 and which since then has by its progress and con- 
 quests created the modern world. 
 
 But in the poetry itself likewise the science is 
 as wonderful as the art. The art is science applied 
 to thought and language, and transfigured by that 
 creative imagination on which the discoveries of 
 science, like the fabric of art, are ultimately based. 
 In the science of his art Milton stands alone among 
 the English poets, without equal or second. It is 
 this beyond all else which makes him, in the full 
 sense of the word, a classic. 
 
 As a study of the scientific quality of Milton's 
 art, no exercise is more useful than to go carefully 
 through Bentley's famous edition of 1732. It is 
 seldom mentioned except in derision. But Bentley 
 was no fool ; and he was the first scholar of his 
 age. What he did in that work was to go through 
 the Paradise Lost with absolute fearlessness, testing 
 it, line by line and word by word, by the standards 
 of scientific scholarship. Twice he inserts a line 
 of his own once between lines 810 and 811 of 
 Book IV., and again between lines 114 and 115 of 
 Book VII. In both cases the line is explanatory, 
 is meant to complete the full logic of what Milton 
 had put elliptically, or had left to be understood. 
 If a sufficient induction may be drawn from two 
 instances, we may judge from these that Bentley's 
 mind worked very much as Milton's might have
 
 BENTLEY'S CRITICISM 201 
 
 done had Milton not been a poet. In the apprecia- 
 tion of other and more highly esteemed critics we 
 are apt to find the converse defect, and of the two 
 it is probably the more dangerous : that their mind 
 works very much as a poet's might have done if that 
 poet had been other than Milton. Some of Bentley's 
 critical strictures are just, and even where they are 
 unjust, they are always on the point. Some of his 
 emendations have been silently accepted and passed 
 into the received text : two instances may be found 
 by the curious in lines 321 and 451 of the seventh 
 book. Some others ought very likely to be adopted. 
 In VI. 55, 
 
 Into their place of punishment, the gulf 
 Of Tartarus, which ready opens wide 
 His fiery Chaos to receive their fall, 
 
 he makes an unconvincing alteration, but he points 
 out rightly that the word Chaos in this context is far 
 from satisfactory. In X. 329, 
 
 Satan in likeness of an angel bright 
 
 Betwixt the Centaur and the Scorpion steering 
 
 His zenith, while the sun in Aries rose, 
 
 Bentley is almost unquestionably right in altering rose 
 into rode. He gives us no reasons, and only cites a 
 parallel phrase : but no doubt he saw and grasped 
 the point, that rose is astronomically inaccurate, and 
 that Milton's astronomy is always scrupulously cor- 
 rect. In another astronomical or quasi-astronomical
 
 202 MILTON 
 
 passage he proposes an emendation equally ingenious 
 but more uncertain. When Satan has been expelled 
 from the Earthly Paradise for the first time (IX. 62), 
 
 Thence full of anguish driven 
 The space of seven continued nights he rode 
 With darkness ; thrice the equinoctial line 
 He circled, four times crossed the car of night 
 From pole to pole traversing each colure. 
 
 " Cone of night, not car of night," says Bentley : 
 " car must have been a mistake of the printer's." 
 The matter is not so easy to decide, especially if we 
 consider that Milton may have had somewhere in 
 his mind an echo of the last line of the second Idyl 
 of Theocritus. 
 
 But as a rule Bentley's criticisms fall short or 
 go aside because, with all his great powers, he was 
 here beyond his depth. The science of Milton's 
 art, alike in structural quality and in the handling 
 of language and metre, was more delicate and 
 profound than that which Bentley brought to bear 
 on its criticism. Even in the few lines which we 
 may feel inclined to agree with him in obelising, 
 even in the few words which we may feel inclined to 
 agree with him in emending, we shall do well to 
 hesitate before thinking that we have mastered Mil- 
 ton's science, or followed out the subtlety of his art. 
 The same caution applies to the study of classics 
 other than Milton, and to the criticism of scholars 
 inferior to Bentley.
 
 MILTON'S ACHIEVEMENT 203 
 
 Milton founded no school. He gave no impulse 
 to letters, except that impulse received by all true 
 artists when they see and recognise consummate art. 
 He stands now, as he stood in his own time, alone. 
 The only later English poet who has approached 
 him in aim and method, though not in poetical power 
 or in effective achievement, has drawn what might 
 be a picture of him in lines that have something of 
 Milton's own haughty majesty : 
 
 No airy and light passion stirs abroad 
 To ruffle or to soothe him ; all are quell'd 
 Beneath a mightier, sterner stress of mind. 
 Wakeful he sits, and lonely, and unmov'd, 
 As oftentimes an eagle, ere the sun 
 Throws o'er the varying earth his early ray, 
 Stands solitary, stands immoveable 
 Upon some highest cliff, and rolls his eye, 
 Clear, constant, unobservant, unabased, 
 In the cold light above the dews of morn. 
 
 Below and behind lay the warm earth : the green 
 woodland full of singing voices, the pleasant vil- 
 lages and farms, the cleared spaces where his pre- 
 decessors had found full scope for English poetry, 
 among " the fields and the turreted cities," the con- 
 tinuous life of nature and the splendid and transitory 
 pageant of the lives of men, their tears and laughter, 
 their loves and passions, struggles and achievements 
 and failures. He passed above and beyond these 
 
 et extra 
 
 Processit longe flammantia moenia mundi 
 Atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoque.
 
 204 MILTON 
 
 From those supernal heights poetry descended again 
 to earth, to become a function of life on its daily 
 level, an interpretation of life to the analytic intelli- 
 gence, a pattern of life as a rational and bounded 
 process. It left the starry threshold, the golden 
 pavement of heaven's immeasurable floor, to pass 
 into and mingle with the social movement, to bear 
 its part in the progress of civilisation. From that 
 lower plane, from that more contracted sphere, it 
 rose slowly again after a long interval. It succes- 
 sively reattached itself to nature, to romance, to his- 
 tory. By the end of the eighteenth century, when 
 Milton had in his turn become one of the ancient 
 classics, English poetry had rekindled itself, had re- 
 newed its progress, and was launched once more on 
 a new way. 
 
 THE END 
 
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