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Spenser and Utopia 
 
 BY 
 
 MEEEITT Y. HUGHES 
 
 [Keprinted from Studies in Philology, xvii, 2, April, 1920.] 
 
SPENSEK AND UTOPIA 
 BY MEERITT Y. HUGHES 
 
 The search for democratic foregleams in the Elizabethan poets 
 has its allurements for those whose confidence in contemporary 
 socialism and whose pleasure in the classics need mutual support. 
 Mr. Albert H. Tolman studied Shakspere from this angle in an 
 article published just before the War and found that the author of 
 Coriolanus, " If not the John the Baptist of democracy, was at 
 least one of its prophets." x More recently Mr. Herbert Cory, in 
 Edmund Spenser, a Critical Study, has pointed to the poet's use of 
 St. George, a son of the soil or " male Cinderella/' as evidence that 
 he shared the English love for champions sprung of the people 
 and belonged to the line of story-tellers who have given us Beo- 
 wulf, Gareth, and Tom Jones. There are several ways in which a 
 literature can be democratic. In bringing stalwarts like Sir Sa- 
 tyrane and Falconbridge onto their pages Spenser and Shakspere 
 were democrats, just as Ascham and Sir Thomas Elyot were demo- 
 crats in enjoining archery as the most "commodious" exercise 
 for young noblemen, but the poets would be surprised to find them- 
 selves classed in a line of prophets of which, presumably, Walt 
 Whitman is the John Baptist if not the Messias. The Eed Cross 
 Knight, as Mr. Cory tells us, relates the Faerie Queene to one of 
 the enduringly popular elements in English poetry, but he also 
 relates it to the spirit of a class not yet extinct in England which 
 finds its play in riding to hounds and its earnest in voting the 
 Conservative ticket. St. George's kinship with those jolly hunts- 
 men is much less shadowy than his relation to the masses who are 
 putting their sport into jeopardy in England. 
 
 Wiser and manlier than these efforts to find crumbs of the leaven 
 of twentieth-century democracy in the Elizabethans is the revolt of 
 Walt Whitman against the feudalism of Shakspere, and of Keats 
 against Spenser's uncompromising contempt for the mob in the 
 passage of Book V in which the present article is interested. Whit- 
 
 1 Publications of the Modern Language Association, xxix, pp. 277 sq. 
 132 
 
Merritt Y. Hughes 133 
 
 man knows how irreconcilable is the war between him and his 
 great predecessors, both in politics and art, and he declares it: 
 
 The great poems, Shakspere included, are poisonous to the idea of the 
 pride and dignity of the common people, the life-blood of democracy. 
 Shakspere seems to me of astral genius, first-class, entirely fit for feudal- 
 ism there is much in him ever offensive to democracy. He is not only the 
 tally of feudalism, but I should say that Shakspere is incarnated, uncom- 
 promising feudalism in Literature, the democratic requirements are not 
 only not fulfilled in the Shaksperian productions, but are insulted on every 
 page. 3 
 
 Keats, in a moment when his loyalty to Spenser wavered, threw in 
 his lot with the wordy giant whom Talus overturned and rejoiced in 
 the day when he had clothed himself in the name and power of 
 Topography and could defy his enemies. Hazlitt threw down the 
 gauntlet to Shakspere's aristocratic prejudices and in doing so he 
 pointed out a cleft between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth 
 which it is probably more useful to explore than to cover over. 
 
 The sixteenth century had its democracy, but it was not of our 
 kind. It was more thoroughgoing than ours. It recognized that 
 men are all subject to the law of their nature and consequently owe 
 each other a certain mutual respect which transcends all differences 
 of rank. Spenser has plenty of glimpses of the humor and wisdom 
 of this kind of democracy even in his aristocratic Faerie Queene. 
 In Book III, Canto xi, 
 
 Kings, queenes, lords, ladies, knights, and damsels gent 
 
 Are heaped together with the vulgar sort 
 
 And mingled with the raskall rabblement, 
 
 Without respect of person or of port, 
 
 To show Dan Cupid's power and great effort. 
 
 The sixteenth century never lost sight of the common destiny of 
 men, nor failed to recognize the obligation 
 
 ... to love our brethren that were made 
 
 Of that selfe mould and that selfe Maker's hand, 
 
 That we, and to that same again shall fade, 
 
 Where they shall have like heritage of land, 
 
 However here on higher steps we stand, 
 
 Which also were with selfe same price redeemed 
 
 That we, however of us light esteemed. 8 
 
 a Quoted by Mr. Tolman, ibid., pp. 280-281. 
 8 Hymne of Heavenly Love, 11. 198-204. 
 
 676495 
 
134 Spenser and Utopia 
 
 The political and religious ideas of the Eenaissance fixed a gulf 
 between gentlemen and commons and denied the latter a share in 
 the management of the society of which they were a part and for- 
 bade them to try or even to wish to better their state. Over against 
 these restrictions it put a code of corresponding obligations upon 
 the rulers. There was one law for people and another for king and 
 nobles, but both were brought under the higher laws, political and 
 religious, which were embodied in the ideas of the Commonwealth 
 and the Church. To those laws all were alike slaves. "And say 
 not you Princes," says North in his translation of Guevara, echoing 
 the opinion of all Europe, " for that you are puyssant Princes, that 
 you are excepted of servitude of menne. For without doubt it is 
 a thynge more untollerable, to have their hearts burdened with 
 thoughts than their necks with yrons." * The noblesse were no less 
 servants to the Commonwealth than the tradesmen whom the 24th 
 Chapter of the laws of Henry VIII condemned " as more regarding 
 their own singular lucre and profit than the commonweal of the 
 realm," or than the " sturdy vagabonds " condemned to " suffer 
 pains and execution of death, as a felon and as an enemy of the 
 commonwealth." 5 In the conception of the Commonwealth and 
 of the Church, while they were living realities, there was a level- 
 ling principle more profound and quite as strong in its appeal to 
 the popular imagination as there is in the Marxian creed. It is to 
 these elements in Spenser and his contemporaries that we should 
 turn for evidence of a democratic spirit rather than to passages 
 where there is a fancied Tolstoian sympathy for laborers and 
 simple men. 
 
 In the scene between Artegall, Talus, and the Giant in Book V 
 of the Faerie Queene (Canto ii, stanzas 29-54), Spenser expressed 
 the sixteenth century's sense of the separation of the classes and 
 summed up the bitterness of the more than fifty years of struggle 
 into which the religious and industrial changes of the time had 
 thrown them, both in England and on the Continent. The poetry 
 reaches one of its lowest levels in this passage and Spenser's opinions 
 are nowhere more disappointing. Consequently most critics pass it 
 hastily with a murmured apology. Miss Lillian Winstanley is 
 almost alone in pausing over the passage, and she does so to excuse 
 
 4 North's Diall of Princes, Bk. I, Cap. 29, Fol. 44. 
 B 24 of Henry VIII, re-enacted under Elizabeth. 
 
Merritt Y. Hughes 135 
 
 or explain Spenser in the light of his Calvinistic theology. She 
 writes : 
 
 This same kind of (Calvinistic) fatalism is the argument which Spenser 
 brings against communism. Artegall meets a giant who wishes to level 
 all things, and to distribute the goods of rich men among the poor. The 
 knight . . . argues, not that such a course of procedure would be bad, but 
 that the existing state of things is ordained and must not be tampered 
 with. All things live and die as God has willed. He sets kings in 
 sovereignty and he makes their subjects obey them; whatever is done is 
 done by him; no one can withstand his will; what seems unjust cannot be 
 called to account, for his counsel is past understanding. 6 
 
 Spenser's Calvinism alone is but a fragment of the explanation for 
 the stanza which Miss Winstanley paraphrases and for the arch 
 of ideas of which it is the keystone. Spenser's Calvinism is no 
 more responsible for this canto than it is for the pageant of the 
 Seven Deadly sins. Both passages were written consciously in the 
 light of a host of earlier treatments of the same subject and in 
 both Spenser spoke as the mouthpiece rather than the critic of 
 the past. Catholic literature is as full of the divine right and 
 necessity of the political order as the works of the reformers, and 
 North's translation of the Bishop of Guevara's handbook of politics 
 (translated from the French and published first in London in 
 1557) furnished later writers not only with much of their thought 
 but with the conventional language and illustrations in which to 
 clothe it. The Diall of Princes probably contributed as much or 
 more than any other single source to the canto in which we are 
 interested. North wrote: 
 
 When the Creator created the whole world, he gave to eche thing imme- 
 diately his place; that is to wete, he placed intelligence, in the uppermost 
 heaven; he placed the starres, in the firmament; the pianettes, in the 
 orbes; the byrdes, in the ayre; the erthe, on the center; the fyshes, in the 
 water ; the serpentes, in the holes : the beastes, in the mountaines : and al 
 in generality he gave place to rest themselves in. 
 
 The passage suggests interesting neo-Platonic fictions woven into 
 the traditional theological argument, and perhaps suggests why 
 Spenser gives so much space in the context to his fine-spun reason- 
 ing, borrowed seemingly from "The Statesman," to prove that 
 physical and human standards cannot be applied to the ordering 
 of the commonwealth. If Nbrth was not responsible for Spenser's 
 
 Modern Language Quarterly, m (1900), p. 11. 
 
136 Spenser and Utopia 
 
 marriage of Heathen philosophy and Christian theology in this 
 canto, his connection with the language and thought of the passage 
 is indisputable, and the connection is much readier than that with 
 the Calvinistic dogmas learned in Cambridge days. 
 
 They live, they die, like as he doth ordaine, 
 
 Ne ever any asketh reason why. 
 
 The hils doe not the lowly dales disdaine; 
 
 The dales doe not the lofty hills envy. 
 
 He maketh kings to sit in sovereignty; 
 
 He maketh subjects to their power obey; 
 
 He pulleth downe, he setteth up on hy; 
 
 He gives to this, from that he takes away: 
 
 For all we have is his : what he list doe, he may. 
 
 For the true Calvinistic ring in this argument we must turn to 
 old Sir John Cheke, who echoed it in his pamphlet against Kefs 
 rebellion, written about 1550 and preserved in Holinshed (Vol. 
 m, p. 1043) . Here we meet not the submission to God's will of the 
 Catholic Church of the Middle Ages, but the Protestant zeal for 
 the glory of God. Cheke's most significant sentence is this : 
 
 God hath made the poore, and he hath made him to be poore that he 
 might show his might: and set them aloft when he listeth, for such cause 
 as to him seemeth, and pluck downe the rich to this state of povertie, as he 
 disposeth to order them. 
 
 In writing so, Edward VI's tutor was, like Spenser, expressing 
 ideas inherited from the past and embodying the conviction of the 
 time, but, unlike Spenser, he was warping them into a narrow theo- 
 logical form. Behind both men was a long series of writers, both 
 Catholic and Protestant, who had built up the conception of the 
 state consisting of divinely sanctioned degrees shading from mon- 
 arch to churl which was the political faith of the century. Elyot's 
 Booke of the Governour is founded on the idea, and every poli- 
 tical writer of the century expresses it. John Tyndall's Boole of 
 the Obedience of a Christian Man enunciated it in the first quarter 
 of the century, and, if the chronicler is to be believed, won thereby 
 the consent of Henry VIII that it should be taken off the index 
 of heretical works. Even the leaders of the rebels in the Peasants' 
 War did not dream of challenging the charmed principle of degree 
 and authority, 7 and it was only the most extreme of the dema- 
 
 7 " The Peasants' War," Belfort Bax, London, 1899, p. 65, sg. 
 
Merritt Y. Hughes 137 
 
 gogues who appeared in England under the Protector Somerset 
 who dared defy it, and they were always careful to " save the 
 King's Majesty." It was never quite lost sight of in the social 
 upheavals of the Keformation, either in Germany or England. 
 
 Perhaps the most typical form of the argument for the divine 
 order of society reflected in the Faerie Queene is that found casu- 
 ally in the historians, in passages where they are not concerned 
 with its proof but refer to it to illustrate or stress something else. 
 So Holinshed uses it (Vol. in, p. 1570) to blacken the wickedness 
 of the priests, and it is significant that it falls in his hands into the 
 same mould that it takes in Spenser's stanza. 
 
 Wherein it is to be wondered at, what legion of devils possessed them 
 that professing the name of Christians, and linked with the society of 
 Jesus, they should be so degenerate as to kicke against the rule of Chris- 
 tianity, which teacheth that princes and potentates are to be obeied, 
 speciallie sovereigns and monarchs, who in their severall territories and 
 dominions are like the sun, which is as king among the starres, the moone 
 as queene, the egles among birds, the lion among beasts, the whale in the 
 sea, the pike in pooles among fishes; finallie, as the heart in a living 
 creature, which giveth life to the whole bodie, because it is the fountain of 
 bloud and vitall spirits. 
 
 Of course, in this passage, the writer was interested in defending 
 the Eoyal Supremacy, and he altered the traditional idea to suit 
 his purpose, but he proves it by the traditional appeal to the order 
 of the creation. 
 
 Spenser's views about " Justice distributive," as Elyot would call 
 it, were a synthesis of the ideas of a host of writers, Catholic and 
 Protestant, English and Continental. His introduction of them 
 into the Faerie Queene is explained by the fact that they were 
 challenged, both in books and action, in England and on the Con- 
 tinent, many times during the sixteenth century. Sir Thomas 
 More was the first to challenge them in a book, the first of a series 
 of socialist dreams clothed in a moral dignity and sublimated by a 
 religious sanction which are strange to twentieth-century socialism, 
 and which unveiled Utopia, where "all thynges being common," 
 wonderful to relate, " everye man hath abundance of everye 
 thinge." Englishmen before More had asked: 
 
 Is not this an unjust and unkinde publique weale, whych giveth great 
 fees and rewardes to gentlemen, as they call them, and to goldsmythes, and 
 to such other, whych be either ydle persones or else flatterers and devysers 
 
 2 
 
138 Spenser and Utopia 
 
 of vayne pleasures: And of the contrarie part maketh no gentle provision 
 for poore plowmen, collars, labourers, carters, yron-smythes, and carpen- 
 ters: without whom no common wealths can continue. 8 
 
 Many Englishmen of his time were agreed with More that it was 
 impossible to " perceive aught but a certein conspiracy of riche men 
 procuring their owne commodities under the name and title of the 
 commen wealth," but he was the first seriously to suggest 
 
 ... all things would reduce unto equality. 
 
 Communism was a more vivid and tempting idea to the sixteenth 
 century than we can well understand in the twentieth. To us, if 
 it is desirable at all, it is a far-off, divine event, the goal of an 
 evolution of which our vacillating belief in progress is hardly 
 strong enough to assure us. For us it has all the terrors of an 
 experiment untried and lacking the sanction of authority. To the 
 sixteenth century it was the acknowledged natural state of man, 
 from which he had fallen after having once proved it, and to which 
 it was God's will that he should strive, individually at least, to be 
 worthy to return. The newly explored mythology confirmed the 
 Christian belief in a past age of gold. You might read of it 
 authentically in any author. North gave a chapter to " the golden 
 age in times past and the worldly miseries which we have at this 
 present" (Diall of Princes, Bk. i, Cap. xxi), and he developed 
 the idea in a fashion which recalls the Renaissance treatment of 
 classical Arcadian material on one hand, and on the other, the 
 hard-headed British socialism of the men who had preached reform 
 in England since the days when John Ball went about demanding, 
 
 W]hen Adam delved and Eve span, 
 Who was then the gentleman? 
 
 North opens his chapter with a confident picture of primitive 
 happiness : 
 
 In the first age and golden world, al lived in peace, eche man toke care 
 for his owne landes, every one planted and sowed their trees and corne, and 
 every one gathered his frutes, and cut his vynes, kned their bred, and 
 brought up their children, and finally all lived by their owne proper swette 
 and travaile, so that all lived without the prejudice and hurt of any other. 
 
 Spenser looked back to the golden age with the spirit both of an 
 
 8 More, Utopia, p. 159. 
 
Merritt Y. Hughes 139 
 
 unquestioning Christian and a Renaissance scholar, and it served 
 him as the architectonic idea of Book Five. Artegall is Astraea's 
 emissary to restore the age of Saturn, from which the Book takes 
 its departure: 
 
 For during Saturnes ancient raigne it's sayd 
 
 That all the world with goodnesse did abound: 
 
 All loved vertue, no man was afrayd 
 
 Of force, ne fraud in wight was to be found: 
 
 No warre was knowne, no dreadfull trompet's sound, 
 
 Peace universall rayn'd mongst men and beasts, 
 
 And all things freely grew out of the ground : 
 
 Justice sat high ador'd with solemne feasts, 
 
 And to all people did divide her dread beheasts. 
 
 From this happy state men were believed to have declined because 
 of their wickedness and its primal curse, and it was natural that 
 the great religious excitement of the century should give many a 
 hope that the gate into that lost Eden was about to reopen. 9 
 
 The hope of regaining the Eden of equality of goods and privi- 
 leges was certain to become a revolutionary force in society if there 
 were proper economic provocation united with a high degree of 
 religious fanaticism. The conditions were fulfilled in south Ger- 
 many and Tyrol in 1525 when the Peasants' War began. The 
 direct effects of that tragic outbreak cannot have been very great 
 in England, although Elizabeth's anxiety to keep the realm clear 
 of Anabaptists throughout her reign leaves no doubt that fear of 
 them and their ideas was a bete noir of the governing classes. 
 They were the Bolshevists of their time. The chroniclers, Camden 
 and Holinshed, mention their doings in Amsterdam and in the 
 German cities with a morbid interest contrasting sharply with their 
 usual indifference to events abroad, and they mention the series 
 of severe edicts of expulsion against them which began in 1560 as 
 the most salutary and timely of the Queen's laws. The bands of 
 
 9 The Diall of Princes is full of speculations on the loss of man's natural 
 state of communism. Bk. I, Cap. 30, explains property and " lordship " as 
 results of Noah's tyranny over his sons, or of the revolt of the five kings 
 against Chedor Laomer. This seems to represent a general idea that the 
 cause was an event subsequent to the original "Fall," and that the mis- 
 fortune might therefore be repaired and that men might return to the state 
 in which " all were equal in commaunding, and none greater than other in 
 possessions." (Cap. 28.) 
 
140 Spenser and Utopia 
 
 German peasants who were disappointed in Luther's pure evangely 
 of faith, and who threw in their lot with the newer gospel of love 
 and brotherly equality which found expresion in the famous 
 Twelve Articles, were one of the most amiable and dreadful swarms 
 of ignorant idealists who have threatened society. Their excesses 
 in Miinster and their bloody punishment made an impression on 
 the imagination of Europe which was not forgotten for a century. 
 While the obloquy of their destruction in the Peasants' War 
 branded their simple faith in community of goods and a world 
 where there would be neither usury nor taxation as a vulgar soph- 
 istry, their martyrdom did not fail entirely to make an impression. 
 International movements of the proletariat were slower and more 
 difficult in the sixteenth century than they are today, and it is hard 
 to tell how far the communistic ideas of the English rebels of the 
 middle of that century in England were inspired by the memory of 
 the Peasants' War. The recurrence of a similar outbreak in Eng- 
 land was averted probably only because the religious instincts of 
 the mob were not seriously stirred in its sporadic attempts at social 
 revolution. It was the misfortune of most of the risings in Eng- 
 land under Henry VIII and Edward VI to be related to the wan- 
 ing forces of religious reaction. From Catholicism, as well as 
 from the Queen's via media in religion, the spirit of revolution 
 could get no support, and the political overturn following the 
 Eeformation in England was postponed for a hundred years. When 
 the English revolution came the discontent and "class-conscious- 
 ness " of the lower classes, which had been so strong in Spenser's 
 boyhood, had faded, and the changes wrought by the Common- 
 wealth had very little social significance. If the storm had broken 
 when the memory of the Peasants' War was fresh the result would 
 have been different. From the suppresion of the Family of Love 
 in Miinster until after the publication of the Faerie Queene men 
 shuddered at the thought of communism. The mind of Europe 
 was caught on a dilemma. It must be either the preservation of 
 the existing order of society sanctioned by history and by the 
 authority of the Bible, or the levelling down of all distinctions of 
 rank and property; either " degree " or " equality." The imagina- 
 tion of the time could discover no third course. 
 
 At the time of Spenser's birth this dilemma had been for three 
 years the most pressing public question in England. Under Henry 
 VIII the objects of the scattered revolts had always professed to 
 
Merritt Y. Hughes 141 
 
 be "onelie the defence and maintenaunce of the faith of Christ, 
 and deliverance of holie Church, sore decaied and oppressed," and 
 little had been said of the " furtherance of private as well as pub- 
 like matters in the realme, touching the wealth of the king's poore 
 subjects." 10 Under Edward VI the series of disturbances which 
 reached their climax in Ket's revolt in 1549 lost their conservative 
 religious cast and became social-revolutionary. They were the 
 protest of the poor against the " Enclosures " of the farms and 
 commons by the landed gentry who found sheep-raising more pro- 
 fitable than the feudal dues paid by their tenants. The enclosures 
 were a betrayal of the duties owed to the common-wealth, as the 
 sixteenth century understood it, and they were a declaration of war 
 on the commons by the gentles. The preambles to the laws against 
 enclosures beginning in Henry's reign recognized the justice of the 
 complaint of the villeins against their lords, and the language of 
 the statutes made by the Protector Somerset almost excuses the 
 worst violence of the peasants' efforts to redress themselves. The 
 pulpit was on the side of the poor tenants, and Latimer led the way 
 in sermons which must have aroused the bitterest class-feeling. 
 Strype preserves some fragments of them in a passage where he 
 describes with his usual warmth the decay of the towns, the expul- 
 sion of the abbey-tenantry, and the misery of the poor at whose 
 expense the clergy and nobles wantoned in luxury. An extract 
 like the following is an interesting light on the state of England's 
 social conscience in 1548. 
 
 Kich men were never so much estranged from Pity and Compassion 
 towards the poor People, as they be at this present Time. They devour 
 the People as it were a Morsel of Bread. ... If the poor Man will not 
 satisfy their covetous Desires, he is sure to be molested, troubled, and 
 disquieted in such Sort, that whether he will or not, he shall forego (his 
 land), or else it were as good for him to live among the Furies of Hell as 
 to dwell by those rich Carles and covertous Churles.^ 1 
 
 After this it was natural that Ket's followers in 1549 should 
 
 chieflie declare a spitefull rancour and hatred conceived against all gentle- 
 men, whom they maliciouslie accused of inordinat covetousness, pride, 
 rapine, extortion, oppression, practiced against their tenants and other, 
 for which they accounted them, worthie of all punishment." 
 
 10 Holinshed, Vol. in, p. 942. 
 
 "Quoted by Strype, Memorials Ecclesiastical, Vol. n, p. 150. 
 
 " Holinshed, Vol. m, p. 1028. 
 
142 Spenser and Utopia 
 
 Ket sat under the Eeformation Tree on Household Heath with a 
 swarming army of 20,000 countrymen around him and tried the 
 captive gentlemen by scores. The peasants cried out for " their 
 hanging, although they could yeeld no reason, but that they were 
 gentlemen and therefore not worthie to live/' 13 It was the dawn 
 of a new social justice, and the mob around Ket grew every hour 
 in the expectation that he would fulfill the promise of Spenser's 
 Giant: 
 
 Tyrants that make men subject to their law, 
 
 I will suppress, that they no more may raine: 
 
 And lordings curbe, that commons over-aw: 
 
 And all the wealth of rich men to the poore will draw. 14 
 
 Blind hatred of "gentlemen" and radical doctrinaire socialism 
 marked the disturbances which were still fresh in men's memories 
 when Spenser was a child. Of the class-hatred the illustrative 
 passages which have been given might be multiplied a hundred 
 times. There is less direct evidence of the communism of these 
 movements for they did not leave a manifesto like the Twelve 
 Articles of the Bauernkrieg, and indeed, the surviving proclama- 
 tions issued by the rebels in 1549 recognize the authority of the 
 King and say nothing about a socialist commonwealth, although 
 they are very clear on the score of the gentlemen. For evidence 
 that the peasants had a communistic object we must turn to con- 
 temporary historians and to the pamphlets which their rebellion 
 called forth. These leave no doubt that the obvious solution of 
 economic injustices which communism seems to offer made as 
 strong an appeal to the revolutionists of the sixteenth century as 
 it does in Eussia at present. The dry pages of Cheke and Holin- 
 shed arouse themselves to righteous indignation against a social 
 sophistry which Spenser satirized in one of the first of his poems, 
 Mother Hubberds Tale. The Foxe is reasoning with the Ape : 
 
 Sithe then we are free borne, 
 Let us all servile base subjection scorne: 
 And as we bee sonnes of the world so wide, 
 Let us our fathers heritage divide, 
 And chalenge to ourselves our portions dew 
 Of all the patrimonie, which a few 
 Now hold in hugger mugger in their hand, 
 
 Holinshed, Vol. m, p. 1031. "Faerie Queene, Bk. v, ii, 38. 
 
Merritt Y. Hughes 143 
 
 And all the rest doo rob of good and land. 
 
 For now a few have all, and all have nought, 
 
 Yet all be brethren ylike dearly bought. 
 
 There is no right in this partition, 
 
 Ne was it so by institution 
 
 Ordained first, ne by the law of Nature, 
 
 But that she gave like blessing to each creature, 
 
 As well of worldly livelode as of life, 
 
 That there might be no difference nor strife, 
 
 Nor aught called mine or thine: thrice happie then 
 
 Was the condition of mortall men 
 
 That was the golden age of Saturne old. 
 
 Mother Hubberds Tale and the second canto of Book Five of the 
 Faerie Queene are at the hither end of a line of political tracts 
 issued against the seditionists of Edward VFs reign and their 
 doctrines. The most important of these was Sir John Cheke's 
 " The Hurt of Sedition, how grievous it is to a Commonwealth " 
 or " The True Subject to the Kebel," which appeared about 1550 
 and is preserved entire on the pages of Holinshed and in part in 
 Strype's Memorials. The disturbances died down with Elizabeth's 
 accession and the subject passed from pamphlets into literature. 
 Sidney introduces us to it in the fifth chapter of the Arcadia, when 
 Kalendar hears that his son has been captured in battle by the 
 Helots and 
 
 that the hate of those paysaunts conceaved against all Gentlemen was 
 suche, that everye houre hee was to looke for nothing but some cruell 
 death: which hetherunto had onely beene delayed by the Captaines vehe- 
 ment dealing for him. 
 
 Presently the rebels make their captive, Pyrochles, their captain, 
 " God wott, little prowde of that dignitie," for noble blood and 
 noble rank cannot remain long separated with Sidney. In Book II 
 of the Arcadia he resumes the subject of the peasant revolt and 
 tells a story which resembles Spenser's account in the Fifth Book 
 of the Faerie Queene in the contempt he shows for the common 
 people, and in their easy defeat by Zelmane, Basilius, and Dorus, 
 who makes a great slaughter among them with a sheep-hook, as 
 Talus does with his flail in the later version of the story. There 
 is more realism in Sidney's fight than there is in Spenser's, and 
 the savage joke of the painter who lost his hands in the fray is 
 unlike the spirit of Spenser in the Faerie Queene although it has 
 parallels enough in the " Present State of Ireland." 
 
144 Spenser and Utopia 
 
 Sidney's cynical account of the confused objects of his rebel 
 peasants shows that he was thinking of recent events in England 
 and on the Continent, and also that his mind was full of classical 
 treatments of such scenes as he was painting. Homer's mobs like 
 swarms of bees and Agrippa's Fable were in his thoughts. He 
 wrote: 
 
 . . . when they began to talke of their grieves, never Bees made such a 
 confused humming: the towne dwellers demanding putting downe of 
 imposts: the country felowes laying out of common . . . Al cried out to 
 have new councellors: but when they should think of any new, they liked 
 them as well as any other, that they could remember, especially they would 
 have the treasure so looked unto, as that he should never neede to take 
 any more subsudies. At length they fell to direct contrarieties. For the 
 Artisans, they would have Corne and Wine set at a lower price, and bound 
 to be kept so still: the plowmen, vine-laborers, and farmers would none of 
 that. The countrimen demanded that every man might be free in the chief 
 townes: that could not the Burgesses like of. The peasants would have 
 the Gentlemen destroied, the Citizens (especially such as Cookes, Barbers, 
 and those that lived most on Gentlemen) would but have them reformed. 15 
 
 Spenser was only following suit when he wrote: 
 
 Therefore the vulgar did about him flocke, 
 And cluster thicke unto his leasing vaine, 
 Like foolish flies about an hony crocke, 
 In hope by him great benefite to gaine, 
 And uncontrolled freedome to obtaine. 
 
 The relation between Spenser's ideas in Book Five of the Faerie 
 Queene and the mass of floating conservative opinion about the 
 social order which is reflected in the books of Elyot, Tyndall, 
 North, Cheke, and Sidney which have been mentioned illustrates 
 the extent to which he was indebted in this passage, as he was in 
 all that he wrote, to the spirit of his time and to literary traditions 
 of the past. He was not speaking merely as a Calvinist, although 
 it happened that Calvin, and, for that matter, Luther too, professed 
 the same political principles and exerted themselves in their de- 
 fence. At heart in this, as in some other passages, Spenser was 
 really closer to the Eoman faith which he abhorred than he was to 
 the Protestantism which he professed. 
 
 The second canto of Book Mve is a partisan pamphlet. It tells 
 only one side of the dispute between gentles and commons. For 
 
 15 Arcadia, p. 217. 
 
Merritt Y. Hughes 145 
 
 the other side we must turn to the old historians and divines. 
 Spenser's choice of sides, and his introduction of this material into 
 the poem, leave no doubt of his feeling toward democracy as we 
 understand it today. Whitman's " dignity of the common people " 
 would have been unthinkable to him. The modern conception of 
 the betterment and self-expression of the people collectively would 
 have aroused his scorn and the idea that they should participate in 
 government would have stirred his laughter. His mind was, as 
 Mr. Cory has put it, conservative and " institutional." He was an 
 aristocrat, and he reserved the worst vials of his wrath, as Shak- 
 spere did for the demagogues, Brutus and Sicinius, in Coriolanus, 
 for Utopian ideals and idealists. Spenser showed himself demo- 
 cratic in recognizing that gentle virtues sometimes spring in vul- 
 gar soil; and in keeping his eye steadily upon the essential human 
 equality from which differences in blood and rank cannot emanci- 
 pate; but for democracy and for socialism in any of its varieties 
 he took more particular pains than any other Elizabethan writer to 
 let us know that he entertained no sympathy at all. 
 
 With this conclusion the paper properly ends, but it may be of 
 interest to suggest a possible definite historical allegory in the story 
 of the Giant whom Artegall overthrows. It lies in the rebellion 
 already mentioned which had its centre in Norwich in 1549. The 
 parallel between the events at Norwich and those at Miinster, 
 which have been pointed to as likely to have been in Spenser's eye, 
 is close enough in a general way to let either serve as inspiration 
 for the passage. Probably Spenser was writing without a very 
 definite slant on history. The rebels in 1549, like those in the 
 Faerie Queene, were led by a specious man of straw, John Ket, who 
 promised a Utopian reformation. Ket, like the Giant, was over- 
 thrown at the very beginning of the armed struggle, but only after 
 a long and formal debate with the representative of authority, and 
 his people were cut to pieces in a terrible slaughter by a large force 
 of Swiss and Italians. Holinshed writes that " Norreie, king at 
 armes," offered the Marquis of Northampton's pardon to the rebels 
 in the city and pleaded with them to adopt sane counsels. A man 
 named Flotman came forward as their herald and 
 
 utterlie refused the kings pardon, and told Norreie certeinely that they 
 would either restore the Common-wealth from decaie, into which it was 
 fallen, being oppressed through the covetousnesse and tyrannic of the 
 gentlemen: either else would they like men die in the quarrell. 
 
146 Spenser and Utopia 
 
 Then the mercenaries were set upon them and they died, but hardly 
 like men, if the chronicler is to be trusted. 
 
 The parallel between the foreign troops and Talus is on the 
 surface. The Iron Man embodied Spenser's memories of the little 
 bands of English men-at-arms in Ireland but he also represented 
 the avengers of lawlessness universally. Ultimately, perhaps, he 
 typifies the violence with which nature rights the gross wrongs of 
 history. In a passage discussing the fancy and the imagination 
 Coleridge mentions Talus as an example of Spenser's poetic powers 
 at their best. He writes : 
 
 He has an imaginative fancy, but he has not imagination, in kind or 
 degree, as Shakspere or Marlowe have; the boldest effort of his powers in 
 this way is the character of Talus. 
 
 De Vere and DeSelincourt have written of Talus in a similar spirit 
 of praise. DeSelincourt says: 
 
 By his (ArtegalFs) side he sets Talus, the iron man, the most powerful 
 embodiment of Justice in the abstract. In Sir Artegall and his remorseless 
 squire the different types of allegory are seen at once in their best contrast 
 and in perfect harmony. 
 
 Talus is undoubtedly one of the most satisfactory inventions in the 
 whole allegory. He is more convincing and significant than any 
 of the other companions of the Knights errant except Una, and he 
 probably stood very definitely for the iron soldiers who avenged the 
 cause of Justice in Spenser's time and for the principle which lay 
 behind their existence in society. He answered also to a sense of 
 fitness which we still feel in these matters and which North phrased 
 definitely for his age in a passage in the " Diall " : 
 
 We ordeine and commaund, that the prince do not onely not kill with his 
 hands, but also that he doo not see them do justice with his eyes. For 
 how muche noble and worthie a thing it is, before the presence of a prince, 
 that all should receive honour: so sclaunderous a thing it is that any in 
 his presence should loose their lyves. 
 
 Boston University. 
 
" 
 
 LOAN OEPT 
 
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