Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/criticsofedmundsOOcoryrich A. OLUTE CRITICISM ^^ The ■'■''" -'r. By -> SPENSEK .^,^^_^, la,meg zas ; ibiicatioi l^Q^gh logy. Berkeley, U.S.A. The University Press. |1.) ticism Mr. Cory, avowedly in quest of the " absolute method of » ,, criticism," provides us with an illuminating experiment. He . , attempts to put before us the true estimate of Spenser by a , ,. -. comparative study of the judgments that literary criticism . , has produced during the three centuries since the poet's , time. He is of course fortunate in his example, for few of ' „,, the great English writers have endured the whole history . of English Literary Criticism, or have weathered the chang- ' .' ing climates of so many eras and thought-movements. We ^ ^ ' stand now at a very convenient remove from Spenser's day, .. ' and it would be a much more difficult, if equally fascinating, ,' task to determine in like manner the quality, say, of Brown- , ing, or even of Shelley. Nevertheless, that the method is , instructive and valuable appears abundantly in the course of ' Mr. Cory's present study. ^ . Criticism is apt to be biassed not only by the individual ^ p ii taste of the critic, but also by that indefinable Zeitgeist which ^ ^^ . works so subtly in all ages. The very qualities which are , the worship of one age are often the execration of the next. ' . Spenser's poetry was born in what the essayist calls the Age ^ ,' of Enthusiasm. It was the dawn of a National Literature, ^^ , when anything English was greeted with whole-hearted' praise. There is scarcely a dissonant note, therefore, in all 7^^ , the chorus of adulation which characterises the period imme- diately succeeding Spenser's own time. It is extravagant with a unanimity that is nowadays rare. One admirer places him forthright with Theocritus and Virgil, while l Spenser another pits him bravely against the world; even shrewd with the Drayton couples him with Homer. link this Then, as a natural reaction, comes an Age of Reason, when ©verse of the real spirit of criticism awakes. Rugged Ben Jonson ^mporary leads the way, and Spenser's archaisms, his disregard of the "*^^y ^^ caesura, his didactic tone, and his allegorical method, all ^^' . ® come in for adverse discussion. The break-up of the old ®P^®^^^^ ideals follows with what Mr. Cory distinguishes as the Age , of Literary Anarchy. He makes the chaos of this period ^■, i^ the subject of a piquant parallel : — rr- g^g^^ It is a breach of decorum now to try to believe less than ^ "educed five conflicting theories at once. . . . Science has'^® admire destroyed religion, we wail. But never was the world so full ^^^^} ^^^" of creeds, innumerable variations of Christianity, the ^iiction of worship of mankind, the worship of the superman, the worship of the Unknown God, neo-paganism, the religion of iricanism, a literary man, the religion of an undergraduate, the reli- are mis- ' gioii of the free-thinking proprietor of a country grocery ga,y hides store. We have a magnificent choice. We preach ^^i flaws demcaracy and practise oligarchy. . . . Never was the [j^terested hun^an mind in a more active and a more healthy state. So return as to deserve a continuance of her kindness, a "* ( is ill health had very much affected hi'? • iig, yet he had still enough to make him i '. /are she had of him, and there is nothing /i^ - . _^i ,j>^e as the parting with an old friend. .. .^^ The book is embellished with many good pox A^aHs. genealogical tree showing the connection between William Temple and Lord Palmerston closes the volui with which one is sincerely sorry to part. A HANDBOOK OF GOTHIC ART Oothic Architecture in England and France. By the R G. H. West. (G. Bell and Sons. 6s. net.) In the preface this book is described as a handbook rat! than an encyclopaedia. Its author is a clergyman, and a an architect. Its essential feature is an appreciation of historic parallelism of Gothic methods in England i France, including a comparison of the divergencies in des and detail of Gothic structures in the allied countries. G introduction contains an interesting discussion of the p blem of church building from the point of view of material locally available. Owing to the difficulties i cost of transport, the early architect was, of coui largely dependent on the district of his labours for the i material to be used in construction. In cases in which th obstacles were overcome, and exotic stone, &c., were employ we have evidence of growing wealth and enterprise. 1 present writer has at the moment to deal with the probl of constructing a railway in close vicinity to a noble Got cathedral. His first glance at Mr. West's book was the fore to see if the word " foundations " occurred in Index. It does not, and the author is silent on t branch of his subject. It may perhaps be argued that design of typical structures does not necessarily involv discussion of the varying conditions of platform on wh such structures are intended to rest. Part I. of the b< consists of four admirable chapters devoted to details design. In Part II. the author attacks his subject from historical side. With great skill he draws the moral of inbred idealism of the Latin race type, as reflected in Fre: Gothic architecture, comparing this with the invetei makeshift of the Teuton, as illustrated by correspond church work on this side of the Channel. The auth< nearest approach to a definition of the principles of Got art is given on page 199, where he states four canons of c atruction, in which he says the race characteristics of Norman builder are enshrined. Few will agree with A. CloucT^ < ome, leave your Gothic worn-out st^^ry, ^■ an Giorgio and the Eedentore, from no building gay or solemn Jan spare the shapely Grecian column. it was at the close of the sevente' lujah ! " shouted the Elizabethaus. ' ;• the rationaUsts. After that the dehige. Many distinct schools began- to form, : een thelfi all Spenser's importance begins to wane ; ^vitts i\\e emergence, of Dry den, however, comes a more distinct note. He blames Spenser's lack of unity, and the ** ill choice of his stanzas ; " but judges him " established in " his " reputation," though here again the queer distortion of contemporary criticism appears in his naming Waller as superior to Spenser. The interest of the subject deepens with the rise of the Neo-Classicism. Mr. Cory claims that Spenser exercised a greater influence on the Augustans than he afterwards did on the Romanticists ; in reality each age took only a partial view of the poet — that, of course, which best suited it — and it is curious to compare the respective judgments. The Neo-Classicists emphasised beauties in Spenser that were lost on the Romanticists, The former loved his fidelity to Virgil, and deplored his " debauchery " by Ariosto ; while the latter, when their day came, praised him for his debt to the Italians, and regretted his Latin " blemishes." His didactic tone and his allegorical method are his chief excellences to the Augustans. But when the Romantic Revival came, the boot was on the other leg. He is now sought " rather as a poet of ardent emotion and sensuous glow than as a poet of vast moral visions " ; his appeal is to the " feelings of the heart rather than the cold approbation of the head." He is even conceived as a true Romanticist blushing for his enthu- siasm, and cloaking his romance in morals to hide his shame. There is no attempt at a conclusive summary or final statement on the part of the essayist ; he leaves the reader to form his own judgment. His own leanings, however, are sufficiently apparent. He has no sympathies with the modern cult of VArt pour VArt : indeed, he often pauses to launch a bolt at the doctrine. Our present-day romanticists sometimes look upon Si)enser askance because of his idealism, and sum it up with the accusation that he has no human interest. They think this because present-day romanticism often means the reverse of idealism. . . . It is certainly true that contemporary romanticists need a revival of sentimentalism as badly as the eighteenth century, though for a different reason. The Augustans were hard because they believed in repression and glittering reason. Present-day romanticists are hard because they are jaded and do not respond to normal emotions. And better for us than sentimentalism would be the beautiful idealism of Edmund Spenser. His sweet leisureliness would cure us of our literary dyspepsia induced by our breathless short- story technique which we admire with such blind exclusiveness. His profound moral con- sciousness would impress us again with the high function of poetry and make us laugh at Art for Art's sake. We are occasionally startled by a queer Americanism, such as " disgruntled " (!) and " nearby." There are mis- prints on pp. 125, 133, and 134 — where Allan Ramsay hides under the alias of " Aamsay ; " but these are small flaws, and the essay is well worth reading to all who are interested in literary criticism. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PUBLICATIONS IN MODERN PHILOLOGY Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 81-t82 June 30, 1911 THE CRITICS OF EDMUND SPENSER BY HERBERT E. CORY BERKELEY THE UNIVERSITY PRESS UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PUBLICATIONS. Note. — The University of California Publications are offered in exchange for the publi- cations of learned societies and institutions, universities, and libraries. Complete lists of all the publications of the University will be sent upon request. For sample copies, lists of publications or other information, address the MANAGER OF THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA, U. S. A. All matter sent in exchange should be addressed to THE EXCHANGE DEPARTMENT, UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA, U. S. A. Cited as Univ. Calif. Publ. Mod. Philol. MODERN PHILOLOGY.— Charles M. Gayley, Lucien Foulet, and Hugo K. Schilling, Edi- tors. Price per volume $2.50. Vol. 1. 1. Der Junge Goethe und das Publikum, by W. B. R. Pinger. Pp. 1-67. May, 1909 , „.. 50 2. Studies in the Marvellous, by Benjamin P. Kurtz. Pp. 69-244. March 17, 1910 _ $2.00 3. Introduction to the Philosophy of Art, by Arthur Weiss. Pp. 245-302. January 12, 1910 „.... 50 4. The Old English Christian Epic, by George A. Smithson. Pp. 303-400. September 30, 1910 .„ „ 1.00 Vol. 2. 1. Wilhelm Busch als Dichter, Kunstler, Psychologe, und Philosoph, von Fritz Winther. Pp. 1-79. September 26, 1910 75 2. The Critics of Edmund Spenser, by Herbert E. Cory. Pp. 81-182. June 30, 1911 1.00 CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY.— Edward B. Clapp, William A. MeiTill, Herbert C. Nutting, Editors. Price per volume $2.50. Vol. 1. 1. Hiatus in Greek Melic Poetry, by Edward Bull Clapp^. Pp. 1-34* June, 1904 $0.60 2. Studies in the Si-Clause. I. Concessive Si-Clauses in Plautus. II. Sub- junctive Protasis and Indicative Apodosis in Plautus. By Herbert O. Nutting. Pp. 35-94. January, 1905 ^ ^ 60 3. The Whence and Whither of the Modem Science of Language, by BenJ. Ide Wheeler. Pp. 95-109. May, 1905 ^ ^ 4. On the Relation of Horace to Lucretius, by William A. Merrill. Pp. 111-129. October, 1905 ...^ ^ 25 5. The Priests of Asklepios, a New Method of Dating Athenian Archons, by William Scott Ferg|uson. Pi^. ;3l-;73. April 14, 1906 (reprinted September, 1907) .....:...:.. :.... :..:...: „.. „ .50 6. Horace's Alcaic Stropho, by LeoE jDsich EicL»ardson. Pp. 175-201, March, 1907 ^. ,..;... :.^-.. ;.!.:, .........: ..,.,^..,l.„-...,.: ...> 25 7. Some Phases of the Relation of Thought to Verse in Plautus, by Henry Washington Prescott. Pp. 205-262. June, 1907 _. JbQ Index, pp. 263-270. Vol. 2. 1. Some Textual Criticisms on the Eighth Book of the De Vita Caesarum of Suetonius, by William Hardy Alexander. Pp. 1-33. November, 1908 ...^ .: .30 2. Cicero's Knowledge of Lucretius 's Poem, by William A. Merrill. Pp. 35-42. September, 1909 .._ 10 3. The Conspiracy at Rome in 66-65 B.C., by H. C. Nutting. January, 1910 10 4. On the Contracted Genitive in I in Latin, by William A. Merrill. Pp. 57-79. February, 1910 ,25 5. Epaphos and the Egyptian Apis, by Ivan M. Linforth. Pp. 81-92. August, 1910 ,10 6. Studies in the Text of Lucretius, by William A. Merrill. Pp. 93-150. June, 1911 : 50 7. The Separation of the Attributive Adjective from its Substantive in Plautus, by Winthrop L. Keep. Pp. 161-164. June, 1911 15 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PUBLICATIONS IN MODERN PHILOLOGY Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 81-182 June 30, 191 1 THE CRITICS OF EDMUND SPENSER BY HEEBEET E. COEY. CONTENTS PAGE I. Absolute Criticism. A Foreword 81 II. The Age of Enthusiasm and Spenser-Worship 89 III. The Age of Eeason and the Eise of Literary Criticism 98 rV. The Age of Literary Anarchy 106 V. The Neo-Classical Despotism 127 VI. The Triumph of Eomanticism 159 ABSOLUTE CRITICISM. A FOREWORD No age, by its own resources alone, can appreciate the many sides of a supreme poet. How can we then escape from the nar- rowness of our times and gain a really large and adequate appre- ciation of our Titans? For some time I have been meditating upon an absolute method in criticism — a scheme by which our own estimate of a poet may be modified and enriched through a study of his critics in the ages previous to our own. We can- not test the poet and our glittering generalities by the superior wisdom of unborn generations. But we can subject our ideas to a most severe examination in the light of the wisdom of a spacious past — a wisdom which I do not think, despite my belief in human progress, will be ever improved in fundamentals as long as 2t(lRao 82 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 mankind has the fundamental habits of loving, hating, and of occasionally enjoying poetry. Spenser, for instance, will be thor- oughly appreciated for the first time when we learn what the men of consequence in his own days and since have thought of him and when we place our own ideas, warped by our times and our personalities, in a proper perspective. But I hear a still, small voice saying that even this cannot be absolute criticism, that my investigations cannot be absolutely exhaustive, that I cannot absolutely escape from my own personality. I recognize the the presence of this voice, but I scorn it. In an age whose chief disease is doubt I will not administer to the widespread evil by apologizing for the grandiloquence of my phrase — absolute criticism. Nor am I tormented by the popular disease of the academic mind, the absurd worry as to whether my idea of abso- lute criticism is old or new. The only thing that disturbs me is that absolute criticism, because it involves some dreary citation, partakes too much of the nature of the catalogue to be as pleas- urable and therefore as profitable as impressionistic criticism. Yet I believe that my method has a right to exist as a sister of the more artistic method. I purpose, therefore, to recount the history of Spenserian criticism and its significance in relation to our opinion of Spenser to-day. Of the Golden Age of English literature, the Age of Enthu- siasm, I will say little, for the moment, because it is well under- stood by all lovers of good English books. Volcanic floods of rhetoric on the subject now harden and glisten in countless volumes. It is enough to remember that in the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth Shakespeare made the splendors of English history move in a vast, heroic pageant across a little wooden stage. It was the age of Spenser-worship because the English worshipped everything English. It has long been a popular superstition among the ignorant and the learned that great poets are not appreciated in their own day. It is true, as I have said, that they are not completely appreciated, but nothing could be more ill-supported by evidence than the notion that they are not appreciated by contemporaries within certain limits. It is. true 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 83 that the world often allows a great poet to go threadbare because the w^orld has a disgusting habit of being loth to pay for what it can get free. But the world is always liberal in the appreciation of great poets, even in their own age. As a matter of fact, poets are generally more heartily if less shrewdly appre- ciated in their own day than later. Shakespeare, for instance, when we make due allowance for the freer intercourse of nations and the increase of cheap editions and text-books was much more widely appreciated in his own day than in this. He is a fairly popular poet now except with certain critics who have grown ashamed of our sturdy English worship and who point out, with breathless pseudo-radicalism, the faults that we all have long known and indulgently loved. For thousands he is a delectable bundle of aphorisms. Whether the words are taken from the mouth of Desdemona or lago, Hamlet or Polonius, they are quoted as Scripture with that damnable label, ** Shakespeare says — '\ But compare with these days when Shakespeare is occas- ionally ' ' revived ' ' on the stage the times when Shakespeare was a living force in the theatres, when he was talked about in the adjoining stews, when his words held fine nobles and dirty apprentices, when, despite the jealousies of the craft, he was loved by many a fellow-writer. Take another example. For a long time the misanthrope could tell us, with cloudy brow, how insignificant was the fame of Milton in his own day. But recent scholarship has dispelled the fantasy. Provided that a poet is supreme, provided that his worth is dazzlingly undeniable, the world has always been ready to nourish a starving poet with appreciation to the choking point. Now Phineas Fletcher wrote a rhetorical alexandrine about Spenser which runs : *' Poorly — poore man — he liv'd; poorly — poore man — he di'd" And Ben Jonson, when he was delightfully sour and fantastical, told Drummond wild tales of Spenser's poverty and misery. Many more spread the myths. Hence some students of English literature have taken it for granted that Spenser was of little consequence to his contemporaries. Whether Spenser could rea- sonably complain to his empty purse is a matter which biogra- 84 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 phers have yet to settle. But I will show presently that it was the age of Spenser-worship as it was the age of worship of all things English. Then came the Age of Reason, and England developed a real literary criticism for the first time. When we find Davenant and others complaining about certain defects in the Faerie Queene we must not say, as some have said, that Spenser had fallen into the hands of the Philistines. We must ask ourselves whether these censors had not just cause for complaint and whether their appre- ciation, if less wildly enthusiastic, was not more true for all time. Of course we cannot date the Age of Reason or any other age. We can only say vaguely that Ben Jonson of the rocky face and mountain belly stood like a rock of reason in the very midst of the turbulent ocean of enthusiasm, scarred, sullen, but immov- able, a prophet of the age at hand. We can only say that by about the middle of the seventeenth century the seas of enthus- iasm were stagnant and the rock of reason stood dominant but not triumphant. For reason has no feelings and therefore never triumphs. England needed an Age of Reason to develop literary criticism as an art. And many of the words written about Spenser in those days will enrich our appreciation of the master. But England had to pay the inevitable penalty for her Age of Reason. When reason comes in at the window faith is rather likely to fly out at the door. I think we may better understand the currents of English literature in the latter half of the seven- teenth century if we call it the Age of Literary Anarchy. We can understand if we think for a moment of our own age. The Romantic Age was a time of great faiths. Now if mankind is to progress all faiths must be tried in the balance. So we had a Victorian Age of reason and doubt. Now we have an age of intellectual anarchy. It is a breach of decorum now to try to believe less than five conflicting theories at once. It is unpardon- able to suppose that theory and practice have the remotest rela- tions. Science has destroyed religion, we wail. But never was the world so full of creeds, innumerable variations of Chris- tianity, the worship of mankind, the worship of the superman, 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 85 the worship of the Unknown God, neo-paganism, the religion of a literary man, the religion of an undergraduate, the religion of the free-thinking proprietor of a country grocery store. We have a magnificent choice. We preach democracy and practice oligarchy. We believe in socialism after a frugal breakfast and after an eight-course dinner we call it twaddle. Never was the human mind in a more active and a more healthy state. So it was at the close of the seventeenth century. ''Hallelujah!" shouted the Elizabethans. **But hold," murmured the ration- alists. After that, the deluge. There was the same confusion in theories of literature that there was in polities. There was the same deafening discord in matters religious. Dry den, as we shall see, epitomizes the age. I should like to cast a vote for Dryden 's much-debated sincerity. Men changed creeds, literary, political, and religious, every day not only for reasons of policy but because they could not honestly cling long to one faith. A man dogmatized on page one and roundly contradicted himself on page two because it was an age of anarchy. There was a score of schools, sometimes sharply separated, sometimes overlapping. We often talk of our Augustan Age as though it was established by Waller or Denham or Dryden. But before the eighteenth cen- tury, classicism in England struggled desperately for a bare existence against a horde of foes. Even in the days of Pope, clas- sicism never attained the splendid perfection and unity that we find in France when Racine and Boileau reigned. And before Pope what a riot there was! Think of Henry More and the Cambridge Platonists losing a noble cause against Hobbes and the materialists. Think of Bunyan, inconsistency incarnate, with his intense hopes and fears, at the beck and call of the least mood of the moment. It was the age when Locke could write that man *'must not be in love with an opinion, or wish it to be true, until he knows it to be so, and then he will not need to wish it." Mil- ton, in his maturest days, kept scornfully aloof from the restless yeas and nays of the age and chose his ideals with calm, sure certainty. Samuel Butler, a child of the age, sought cheap refuge from the bewildering maze of opinions in indiscriminate mockery. Dryden, another child of the age, groped about like all 86 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 the others, hesitated, professed, recanted, dallied with neo-classi- cism, almost returned to Elizabethanism, and at last struggled to a position not as high as Milton's but above his age and the next. Lyric poets like Sedley and Rochester showed the complete Pyrrhonism of the age by their attitude toward love. Love could bring them no Vita Nuova, no white faith to lead them to the fulfillment of vast enterprise. It was their lot to write of false love or love which they knew to be already on the wing. Cowley, Sprat, Waller, Dryden, and others convened to form an Academy that would dispel the murky anarchy in letters. But nothing came of it. Then came the Augustan Despotism. Wise scholars are slowly and painfully teaching us to appreciate how much the neo- classicists did for England when they finally brought a faith to the tortured sceptics and the hundred jarring sects. But it will take time to right the wrongs inflicted by the great Romanticists in their splendid youth. For Keats wrote of the Augustans : "Yes, a seism Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, Made great Apollo blush for this his land. Men were thought men who could not understand His glories: with a puling infant's force They sway'd about upon a rocking horse, And thought it Pegasus. Ah dismal soul'd! The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd Its gathering waves — ye felt it not. The blue Bar'd its eternal bosom, and the dew " ■ Of summer nights collected still to make The morning precious; beauty was awake! Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead To things ye knew not of, — were closely wed To musty laws lined out with wretched rule And compass vile: so that ye taught a school Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit. Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit. Their verses tallied. Easy was the task; A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race! That blasphem 'd the bright Lyrist to his face, And did not know it, — no, they went about. Holding a poor, decrepid standard out Mark'd with most flimsy mottos, and in large The name of one Boileau!" 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 87 Of course there is much truth in this glorious abuse. Neverthe- less we are beginning to see that after all the Augustans were not heavy villains but very useful ancestors. Their apologists, how- ever, still make the mistake of thinking that they are not worth while unless they contain some symptoms of romanticism, real or fancied. Too much current scholarship on eighteenth century England is a mad scramble in search of romanticism. I would try to prove how much the Augustans, with their purely classi- cal ideals, have done for a fuller appreciation of Spenser if we would only listen to them. But the principles of Augustanism, in their turn, served their purpose, were distrusted, and flung aside. Then came the Triumph of Romanticism. I do not need to rhapsodize the great days of the new faith. In spite of the pasteboard dragons, real- ism, science, commercialism, romanticism still flourishes and is, in some aspects, even a menace. Poe, in his sonnet on science, voiced a 'thought still popular when he accused the men of scal- pels and acids of driving the faun from the forest, the light of romance from men's eyes. As a matter of fact the romanticists, whatever they may have said by way of theory, have developed a highly organized method that may be often quite accurately termed Scientiflc Romanticism. Sometimes the romanticist makes of himself a delicately adjusted machine with works of fairy frailty that responds to the least shadow of a sensation and records it with painful accuracy. Hair is no longer merely golden to the eyes of the romanticist. ''A citron colour gloomed in her hair." And man no longer merely rejoices. He is said to suffer in some glorious agony of delight. Like the seismograph which registers to the watching scientist the least tremor of the earth, this sensation-loving Scientific Romanticist, with body and soul magnetized to the point of disease, shudders exquisitely and lux- uriously at the most dim adumbration of a feeling. Sometimes the romanticists have practically taken over the realistic methods of Zola. But instead of examining all human nature in a scientist 's laboratory, as Zola advocates, they have confined them- selves to an elaborate vivisection of the ego. Too often w^e mis- 88 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 use Spenser, who projected vaster, saner things, as a mere picture- gallery, a mere bundle of unregulated emotions, an exotic drug to feed an already over-developed part of our organisms. But we are not as decadent as our Jeremiahs and even some of our poets themselves would have us believe. When our poets are discerning enough to use the materials instead of the methods of science, when they abandon themselves to the magnificent fairy-land of the crowded skies, of a lichen, which the scientists have given us in place of the already outworn fairy-land that they took away, then truly our poets walk erect. Like reckless nature, we indulge in a princely waste of energy and hopes and fears. Something will come of our superb restlessness. How much poorer were the Elizabethans in source of inspiration with only Drake, Frobisher, and the round world to fire their sense of mystery ! By a study of all the critics who have felt these mighty cur- rents of thought which I have sketched with such impertinent brevity we ought to come, for the first time, to a full apprecia- tion of Spenser. 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 89 II THE AGE OF ENTHUSIASM AND SPENSER-WORSHIP I have said that Spenser's day was aglow with ardent faith in everything English and therefore with Spenser-worship. At the very outset, The Shepheards Calender was acclaimed with a full chorus of idolatrous panegyrics. There were those who de- murred at praising The Faerie Queene. Gabriel Harvey was, for the moment, purblind with his plethora of eccentric classi- cism. Poets like Michael Drayton and Phineas Fletcher, to whom The Shepheards Calender was not a cold pastoral but an inti- mate song of youth's joys and sorrows and aspirations, of the delightful miseries of calf-love, preferred their master's maiden effort until maturity taught them to feel the sultry splendour and the more impersonal note of The Faerie Queene. A belated and perhaps solitary relic of this opinion appears in 1679 in Dr. Samuel Woodford's preface to his Legend of Love, a translation of the Canticles. Woodford was no obscure eccentric outside the literary circles of his day. In his Epoda to the Legend of Love, moreover, he used the stanza of The Faerie Queene and borrowed from the allegorical lore of the epic. But in spite of the good divine 's religiosity he could not refrain from expressing a boyish preference for the work of Spenser's dawn, and his devotion to the love of God did not keep him from sharing with Spenser a keen interest in Rosalind, the widow's scornful daughter of the Glen. The Shepheards Calender has been justly classed by Mr. Schelling with the Arcadia and the Euphues as being one of the greatest contemporary influences. It is difficult for us, among whom formal pastorals have fallen into disrepute, to understand how the light of this first great poem of modern England dilated the eyes of those who were hungering for a countryman with a poet 's insight. And those who do realize the immense popularity of the poem are too apt to attribute it merely to the flow of easy 90 University of California Puhlications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 melody, the variety and perfection of form. But to young men, poets and lovers, in the age of Elizabeth, The Shepheards Calen- der, despite its so-called artificiality, was a scripture to meditate upon. Those who were less enthusiastic at first about The Faerie Queene were, in the main, those who wished to hear more about Colin and his fortunes with Rosalind. Even Harvey, lost in learned meditations over the introduction of classical prosody into English, felt the same mood. "CoUyn, I see, by thy new taken taske, Some sacred fury hath enricht thy braynes, That leades thy muse in haughty verse to maske. And loath the layes that longs to lowly swaynes; That lifts thy notes from Shepheardes unto kinges: So like the lively Larke that mounting singes. *'Thy lovely Eosalinde seems now forlorne, And all thy gentle flockes forgotten quight: Thy chaunged hart now holdes thy pypes in scorne, Those prety pypes that did thy mates delight: Those trusty mates, that loved thee so well; Whom thou gav'st mirth, as they gave thee the bell, "i But those whose enthusiasm for Spenser's personal confessions made them at first reluctant to see him retire to the heights of the epic poet, came forward, almost without exception, a little later, with the highest praise. And their hesitant protests had already been lost in a storm of laudation with which others had welcomed the poet 's masterpiece. Even Harvey, though he has been always recorded as a most uncompromising enemy of The Faerie Quellne, appears, on investigation, to have recanted. The relations of Spenser and Harvey have not been carefully stated. It is probable that we have been overestimating the influ- ence of the self-made dictator on the young poet. It is true that Spenser revered Harvey. He did not, however, share unre- servedly his would-be mentor's enthusiasm for classical metres in English ; his own experiments seem to have been few and the product of almost whimsical moments. He made restrictions on 1 Verse by Harvey, To the learned Shepheard, prefixed to the first three books of The Faerie Queene when published in 1590. 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 91 classical metres in a letter to Harvey where he shows one of his few glimmerings of humour. "For the onely or chief est hardness; whyche seemeth, is in the accente; which sometime gapeth, and, as it were yawneth illflavouredly, comming shorte of that it should, and sometimes exceeding the measure of the Number, as in Carpenter the middle sillable, being used shorte in speache, when it shall be read long in Verse, seemeth like a lame Gosling that draweth one legge after her; and Heaven being used shorte as one sillable, when it is in Verse stretched out with a Diastole, is like a lame Dogge that holds up one legge. But it is to be wonne with Custome and rough words must be subdued with use." And it is to be observed that all Spenser 's real efforts were being spent on poems that bristled with rhymes. By 1580, at a time when Harvey's star was still in the ascendant, Spenser had at least begun work on his Faerie Queene. Harvey, to be sure, had mostly golden words for his friend. He liked the Dreams ' ' pass- ingly well ' ' because ' ' they savour of that singular extraordinarie veine and invention which I ever fancied moste, and in a manner admired onely in Lucian, Petrarche, Aretine, Pasquila." He gave his younger brother "a certaine famous Book called the newe Shepheardes Calender" telling him to make Willye's and Thomalin's emblems in March into English verse. Above all, in his address to the reader in The First Booke of the Preservation of King Henry VII, though he is praising classical metres and poets, he adds: "Nevertheless I confesse and acknowledge we have many singular good poets in this our age .... whom I reverence in that kind of prose rhythme [viz. rhyming] ; wherein Spenser (without offense spoken) hath surpassed them all." It is not even safe to follow the beaten path of the historians of English literature and set down Harvey as the enemy of The Faerie Queene. It is true that his first attitude was cold. The strictures in his famous letter to Spenser are a commonplace of quotation. "To be plaine, I am voyde of all judgement if your nine Comoedies .... come not neerer Ariostoes Comoedies eyther for the fineness of plausible elocution or the rareness of Poetical Invention, than that elvish queene doth to his 'Orlando rurioso'."2 2 Harvey 's letter of April 7, 1580. Spenser certainly could not have gone far with The Faerie Queene thus early. 92 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 His commendatory verses, with their grudging praise of the new poem and their regret for the abandoned vein of pastoral poetry, have already been transcribed. On the other hand we find a manuscript note in his own writing in his copy of Gascoigne's Certain Notes of Instruction which shows a clear appreciation of the stanza of The Faerie Queene. To Gascoigne^s advice, *'To hold the just measure wherewith you begin your verse," Harvey added : * * The difference of the last verse from the rest in everie stanza, a grace in the 'Faerie Queene'."^ In the New Letter of notable Contents (1593) there is a more general statement that certainly is not reconcilable with Harvey's earlier animadver- sions: ''Or is not the verse of M. Spencer in his brave Faery Queene the Virginall of the divinest Muses and gentlest Graces ? ' ' Among Spenser's other friends Sidney's generous praise is a matter of both fact and tradition. In his Apology for Poesie he saw in the anonymous author of The Shepheards Calender a great poet in an age of little achievement, although he disapproved of "that same framing of his stile to an old rustick language." Tradition, too, has it that the terrible picture of Despair, in the ninth canto of the first book of The Faerie Queene, opened the floodgates of Sidney's generous praise and loosened the tassels of his purse. Nor were the earlier Elizabethan critics who were less closely connected with the poet less enthusiastic. William Webbe, in his Discourse of English Poetrie (1586), is full of enthusiasm for the new poet. He longed for the appearance of the Dreames, Legends, Court of Cupid, and the prose English Poet. He depre- ciated English poetry in general but judged Spenser not inferior to Theocritus and Virgil. In his remarks on eclogues, after prais- ing Theocritus and Virgil and after approving of Chaucer with qualifications, he remarks : "But nowe yet at the last hath England hatched uppe one Poet of this sorte, in my conscience comparable with the best in any respect; even Master Spenser. '* 3 Quoted by Professor E. P. Morton in * * The History of the Spenserian Stanza before 1700, ' ' Modern Philology, IV, no. 4, April, 1907. 1911] • Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 93 Again : "What one thing is there in them so worthy admiration whereunto we may not adjoyne something of his of equall desert. ' ' Thomas Nashe, in his preface to Greene's Menaphon (1589), in which he heartily championed the glory of English poetry, held forth in praise of Spenser with his customary exuberance. "And should the challenge of deepe conceit be intended by any forreiner to bring our English wits to the tutchstone of Arte, I would preferre divine Master Spenser, the miracle of wit to bandie line for line for my life in the honor of England, gainst Spaine, France, Italic, and all the worlde. ' ' When he dedicated his Christs Tears over Jerusalem to Lady Elizabeth Carey, the highest compliment he could pay was that ** Fames eldest favourite, Maister Spencer, in all his writings hie prizeth you." Puttenham, or the author of The Art of English Poesie (1859), mentions ''that other gentleman who wrote the late Shepheards Callender" among the English poets to be com- mended. Soon all England shared Nashe 's sublime faith in the native poets. Francis Meres wrote his Palladis Tamia (1598) to prove them the peers of the singers of all the world. Concerning Spenser he uttered a stately pageant of elaborate compliments: "As Sextus Propertius said 'nescio quid magis nascitur Iliade': so I say of Spenser's I'airy Queene, I know not what more excellent or exquisite poem may be written." In his remarks on the epic poets he declared : "As Homer and Vergil among the Greeks and Latins are the chief e Heroic Poets: So Spenser and Warner be our chief e heroicall makers." Spenser, it seems, was perfect in everything : "As Pindarus, Anacreon, and Callimachus among the Greeks, and Horace and Catullus among the Latines are the best Lyrick poets; so in this faculty the best among our poets are Spenser (who excelleth in all kinds), Daniel, Drayton, Shakespere and Breton. ... As Theocritus in Greek, Virgil and Mantuan in Latine, Sana2ijir in Italian and the Authour of Amintae Gaudia and Walsingham's Melibaeus are the best for Pastorall, so amongst us the best in this kind are Sir Philip Sidney, Master Challener, Spenser, Stephen Gosson, Abraham Fraunce and Barne- field." This is typical work of the Age of Enthusiasm. Unbounded faith in Spenser, appreciation of Shakespeare, Drayton, and 94 University of California Fuhlications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 Daniel is accompanied by a grotesque lack of discrimination in citing such names as those of Fraunce and Gosson without a smile. We can see from the literary swashbuckling of men like Nashe and Meres what England had to learn before literary criticism became an art and what a rare world of fine frenzy England had to lose to buy her discrimination. We can touch upon but a few of the more interesting poems in the torrent which sang the praises of Spenser. Samuel Daniel requires special attention. In one of the best known sonnets to Delia, Daniel had cried somewhat scornfully : **Let others sing of knights and paladins In aged accents and untimely words.'* This has often been plausibly assumed to be a refererce to The Faerie Queene. In consequence some have thought that Daniel did not reciprocate Spenser's kindly admiration.^ But it is easy to show that Daniel had the same rapturous faith that stirred Nashe and Meres to intemperate eloquence. In his Dedication of Cleopatra he lamented that England is bounded by the ocean and longed that her songs might be known to other nations. *' Whereby Great Sidney and our Spenser might With those Po Singers being equalled, Enchant the World with such a sweet Delight That their eternal Songs forever read. May shew what great Elisa 's Eeign hath bred. ' ' Michael Drayton's weighty Epistle to Henry Reynolds of Poets and Poesie should be always remembered as a piece of remark- ably acute criticism at a time when national self-confidence and the spirit of eulogy ran so high that literary criticism was prac- tically impossible. Drayton's estimate of his immediate prede- cessors was genial, sympathetic, and extraordinarily shrewd. For Spenser, however, nothing but hallelujahs could be expected from his pen. His noble lines are famous. "Grave moral Spenser after these came on, Than whom I am persuaded there was none. Since the blind bard his Iliads up did make, Fitter a task like that to undertake; To set down boldly, bravely to invent, In all high knowledge surely excellent. ' ' 4 See Colin Clouts Come Home Again, 11. 405-416, for Spenser's kindly praise of the younger poet. 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser, 95 Joseph Hall, bishop and rough-and-ready satirist, has per- plexed more than one critic with what they consider his incon- sistent attitude toward Spen^£r.^ He has been named as an admirer of Spenser, as an enemy of Spenser, as hopelessly, even treacherously, inconsistent. But with those who have found him at any time hostile lies the burden of proof. All the definite refer- ences to Spenser laud him. The harsh lines tell no tales and have been quoted too often without any explanation of their general context. A careful examination of Hall's poems in toto makes his attitude perfectly clear. He called himself the first English satirist. He believed that the age of creative poetry was at least temporarily over. His was the academic or bookish attitude common in many ages. The great writers have said it all. What is the use of writing feeble echoes? And to Hall one of the supreme writers who had left nothing more to be done was Edmund Spenser. In 1597 the disgruntled bishop brought out his Virgidemiarum containing six books of satires. As a kind of preface he wrote a Defiance of Envy, the seventh stanza of which has offended the admirers of Spenser. He asserted that he did not care to ". . . . Secure the rusted swords of Elvish Knights, Bathed in Pagan blood; or sheath them new In misty morall Types, or tell their fights, Who mightie Giants, or who Monsters slew. And by some strange inchanted speare and shield, Vanquisht their foe, and won the doubtful field.'' This certainly seems, by itself, like girding at The Faerie Queene. But let us look at the poem as a whole. It begins humbly enough with the statement that the pines of Ida may fear the sudden fires of heaven. With his lowly shrubs, in their humble dales, he may feel secure. If his muse did attempt to "scoure the rusted swords of Elvish Knights, ' ' then Envy might attack him. *'But now such lowly Satyres here I sing. Not worth our Muse, not worth their envying." 5 Thus Dr. Grosart, Hall's Poems ed. Manchester, 1879, p. xviii: "I cannot help regretting his double-dealing treatment of Spenser as the most unpleasant alloy of the satires." Thomas Warton, too, (quoted by Grosart, ibid.), was very much disturbed over the same problem. Other critics have conveyed even more unfortunate impressions by tearing fragmentary selec- tions inconsiderately from HalPs references or possible references to Spenser. 96 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 The swords are rusted, then, because there is no Spenser to draw them. That is the point. The poem is full of Spenserian phrases and ends with an unmistakable tribute. He dares try no high pastoral strain but **At Collin's feete I throw my yeelding reede. '' It is not possible to use these lines as evidence that Hall loved The Shepheards Calender but thought meanly of The Faerie Queene. For elsewhere he writes : '*Tli' eternall Legends of thy Faerie Muse, Eenowned Spenser: whom no earthly wight Dares once to emulate, much less dares despight Salust of France and Tuscan Ariost Yeeld up the Lawrell garland ye have lost: And let all others willow wear with me Or let their undeserving Temples bared be. "« It is important to know, moreover, that our quotation closes with a vigorous attack on Romantic poems, particularly the Orlando Furioso, but makes careful exception in the case of Spenser. And we should note Hall's conviction of the futility of writing new poems in emulation of the master. It is the satiety of the bookish mind. ''Whilome the sisters nine were Vestal maides. Now is Parnassus turned to a stewes And on Bay-stocks the wanton Myrtle grewes. "7 The great poets have written. Times are degenerate. What seem like attacks on Spenser generally close with self-abasement. So it was with the Defiance of Envy. So we find it in another, passage that has worried the critics. ''Nor Ladies wanton love, nor wandering knight, Legend I out in rimes all richly dight," but * * Eather had I, albee in careless rymes. Check the mis-ordered world and lawlesse times. "8 This is the characteristic attitude of the Jeremiah who thinks that all the beautiful things have been said and that the present « Book I, Sat. IV, 11. 21 sq. 7 Book I, Sat. II, 11. 1-18. 8 Book I, Sat. I, 11. 30 sq. 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 97 is diseased, A few lines below he is more specific in self-efface- ment. '^Or if we list [viz. to make lofty songs] what baser muse can bide, To sit and sing by Grantaes naked side? They haunt the tyded Thames and salt Medway Ere since the fame of their late Bridall day. "9 This is evidently a reference to Spenser's beautiful description of the marriage of the Thames and the Medway^*^ and an expres- sion of diffidence. We may complete our citations by quoting from Hairs lines to William Bedell on his poem, A Protestant Memorial,^^ which are at once imitative of Spenser and a tribute. "Willy, thy Khythms so sweetly run and rise And answers rightly to thy tuneful Eead That Collin dying, his Immortal Muse, Into thy Learned Breast did late infuse. ' ' It is ridiculous to attempt, in the face of all this, to attack Hall ^s attitude toward Spenser. We cannot pause over the myriad voices of the other poets who threw their garlands at the feet of the great singer. Every- one should know Barnfield's exquisite sonnet, "If Music and sweete Poetrie agree." Peele, Breton, Browne, Davies, William Basse, Francis Beaumont, a legion, glowed with the most gener- ous praise. The sweet persuasiveness of some well-known lines from The Return from Parnassus may fitly represent the full- chorused laud. "A sweeter swan than ever sang in Po, A shriller nightingale than ever blessed The prouder groves of self -admiring Kome! Blithe was each valley, and each shepherd proud. While he did chant his rural minstrelsy; Attentive was full many a dainty ear; Nay, hearers hung upon his melting tongue. While sweetly of his Faerie Queene he sung, While to the waters' fall he tun'd his fame." 9 Book I, Sat. I, 11. 30 sq. 10 Faerie Queene, Book IV, Canto 11. 11 Bedell 's poem is an imitation of The Shepheards Calender. University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 III THE AGE OF EEASON AND THE RISE OF LITERARY CRITICISM While the Elizabethans were in the first rapture of self-dis- / covery, extravagant mutual eulogy was to be expected. But when they dropped back to the C-major of this life and rodomontade ceased to be the fashion, a genuine literary criticism was born. Even in the Age of Enthusiasm, Drayton and Hall have been seen to show some critical discrimination. But Ben Jonson's burly figure looms largest among the first English writers of critical works. Unfortunately he gave us no well-rounded esti- ^mate of Spenser although he was liberal with tantalizing allus- ions. With Spenser's stanza and diction he was clearly out of V tune. He told Drummond {Conversations, 1619), that '^Spenser's stanzaes pleased him not, nor his matter; the meaning of which Allegoric he had delivered in papers to Sir Walter Rauglie." But Jonson was grumbling almost unintermittently at this famous symposium. And perhaps Drummond tinged his record more deeply with his own apparent impression of Ben 's perennial surliness. Jonson, at all events, had some good words for Spen- ser's matter in his Discoveries (1625-35 ?) . "Spenser, in affecting the Ancients writ no Language. Yet I would have him read for his matter, but as Virgil read Ennius. ' ' The attack on Spenser's archaisms was promptly caught up by subsequent critics.^ In another part of the Discoveries Jonson says, somewhat inconsistently : ** Words borrowed of Antiquity doe lend a kind of Majesty to style, and are not without their delight sometimes." 1 There is a bare possibility that Jonson was influenced in his distaste for Spenser's diction by Sidney. Professor J. E. Spingarn (Crit. Essays of the 17th Century Introd. p. xiii) points out that the Prologue to Every Man in his Humour is "a noble patchwork of passages from the Apology for Poesie. Jonson may have learned his distaste for Spenser's old words from the stricture in the same work. 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 99 But, on the whole, he prefers the newest words. That Ben Jon- son of the rocky face and mountain belly was not always imper- vious to Spenserian appeal is attested in Drummond 's record that *'He hath by heart some verses of Spenser's Calender about wyne, be- tween Coline and Pereye. " Jonson 's masque, The Golden Age Restored, introduces Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Spenser as ideal figures of the good old days. When Pallas has driven away Iron Age and her rout of Vices, she summons Astraea and Golden Age with a flourish of her aegis. And for their retinue she calls : **You far-famed spirits of this happy isle, That, for your sacred songs have gained the style Of Phoebus' sons, whose notes the air aspire Of the old Egyptian, or the Thracian lyre That Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, Spenser hight. Put on your better flames and larger light. To wait upon the Age that shall your names new nourish. Since Virtue pressed shall grow, and buried Arts shall flourish. ' ' This readiness to accept Spenser as at least a traditional classic *^' is also apparent in a characteristic fling at the rascal many in the Discoveries. ''There were never wanting those that dare prefer the worst poets. . . . Nay, if it were put to the question of the water-rimers works against Spenser's, I doubt not but they would find more suffrages; be- cause the most favor common vices out of a prerogative the vulgar have to lose their judgements and like that which is nought. ' ' It is not unlikely that Jonson, on the whole, was an admirer of Spenser. And his animadversions are those of a man who prob- ably loved Spenser as he loved Shakespeare — ''on this side idolatry. ' * Edmund Bolton, although his contribution to Spenserian criticism is slight, should not be forgotten, because he has con- siderable significance in the history of English criticism. He reacted against the irresponsible sentences and parti-coloured dic- tion of Elizabethan novelists and pamphleteers. In feeling the need of conscious ideals in prose style he was of the new age. His Hypercritica, Or A Rule of Judgment For Writing Or Beading 100 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 Our Histories (completed e. 1618 but first published in 1722 )2 treated not only the problem of sources but the kind of prose that was suitable for good historical writing. For this purpose Bolton considered the manner of both English poetry and prose. He seems to have had a wide knowledge and a fair appreciation of English literature. For prose suitable to the writing of his- tories he preferred, sensibly enough, the poetry of Jonson and the prose of Bacon as supreme models. But he found Spenser's Hymns valuable for the same purpose. ''In verse there are Ed. Spencer's Hymns. I cannot advise the allowance of other of his Poems, as for practick English, no more than I can do Jeff Chaucer, Lydgate, Pierce Ploughman, or Laureate Skelton. ' ' For the use of **old outworn words" in history was, in Bolton's opinion, to be condemned. In the tenth chapter of his Compleat Gentleman (1622) Henry Peacham pointed out the value of the study of poetry and closed his review of great poets with a brief but flattering pic- ture of those of Elizabeth's days. "In the time of our late Queen Elizabeth which was truly a golden age .... above others who honoured Poesie with their pennes and practise .... were Edward Earle of Oxford, the Lord Buckhurst, Henry Lord Paget; our Phoenix, the noble Sir Philip Sidney; M. Edward Dyer, M. Edmund Spencer, M. Samuel Daniel, with sundry others whom .... not out of Envie but to avoide tediousnesse I overpasse. This much of Poetrie.'' William L'isle in prefatory words to the reader before his translation of Du Bartas (1625) made a thoroughly neo-classical comment on Spenser's alexandrines that should be quoted as among the comparatively few definite criticisms of Spenser's stanza in the seventeenth century. "The Bartasian verse (not unlike herein to the Latin Pentameter) hath ever this propertie, to part in the mids betwixt two wordes: so much doe French prints signifie with a stroke interposed. . . . The neglect of this hath caused many a brave stanza of the Faerie Queene to end but harshly, which might have been prevented at the first; but now the fault may be sooner found than amended." 2 By Anthony Hall, at the end of his Nicolai Triveti Annalium Contin- uatio, Oxford, 1722. 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 101 In the next century a critic as acute as Thomas Warton expressed the same insistence on the middle caesura and the same blindness to the charm of the flowing, pauseless alexandrine that Spenser used, at times, with such felicity. The self-abasement or doubt that comes with an Age of Rea- son appears in Henry Reynolds, the mystic, to whom Drayton addressed his Epistle, Of Poets and Poesie. Reynolds lamented the bad state of English poetry, a mood which would not have occurred to a full-fledged Elizabethan, in his Mythomestes wherein a short survay is taken of the nature and value of true Poesie, and the depth of the Ancients above our Moderne Poets (1633). It is significant of the growing sense for criticism care- fully weighed, and significant of Spenser's impregnable fame, that Reynolds included him in a brief list of well-selected poets whom he regarded as exempt from the sweeping condemnation that he had bestowed on most moderns. With the judgment of the acute connoisseurs who always know what will last in litera- ture, Reynolds selected Chaucer (especially in his Troilus), Sid- ney, Spenser, Daniel, and Drayton as the true elect. ''Next, I must approve the learned Spencer, in the rest of his Poems no lesse than his Fairy Queene, an exact body of the Ethicke doctrine; though some good judgments have wisht, and perhaps not without cause, that he had therein been a little freer of his fiction, and not so close rivetted to his Morall. " This guarded criticism of Spenser 's didactic method is an expres- sion of an attitude toward the Faerie Queene which we have inherited as a birthright and an affliction principally from the later romanticists who are responsible for many of our limita- tions in appreciating Spenser. But they are less careful in their statements than this gentle, far-seeing mystic of the seventeenth century. The general tendency, however, throughout the seventeenth century and the first part of the eighteenth was to take Spenser's moralistic aspect very seriously and, on the whole, more justly and sympathetically than many of us do to-day. Sir Kenelm Digby's Observations on the Twenty -Second Stanza of the Ninth Canto of the Second Book of Spencer's Faery Queen (1644) is 102 University of California PuMications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 typical of the attitude of so many who accepted Spenser as poet and teacher. Sir Kenelm Digby took one of the most abstruse stanzas in The Faerie Queene and gave it an elaborate philosophi- cal interpretation. We approach a figure who was so significant in his own day and such a bare name at the present time that he must be elab- orately considered. I have said that the Age of Reason inevit- ably begot a doubt which scattered into anarchy. Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, is a figure to be expected at such a crisis. Serene-eyed with the still-deep wisdom of Plato, he turned proudly and calmly from the growing materialism of the day and wrought strange, dim tapestries of mystical dreams. His cult was a power in its time against the rationalism of Descartes so ready to link hands with the ideals of the new classicists, "vrai- semblance," ''nature," " commonsense. " He was one of the many forces that kept this neo-classicism starving in England for a half -century. In 1642 More published his Psychodia Platonica and in 1647 he brought out an enlarged edition of this Platonick Song of the Soul under the general heading Philosophi- call Poems. This gigantic affair in Spenserian stanzas was cer- tainly not calculated to captivate the masses who run. But it was the profound if eccentric utterance of a man who stood on the battle-line of a great controversy of the day. More's dedication to his father indicates how much of his idealism must have grown out of a life-long intimacy with Spenser 's poems. "You deserve the Patronage of better Poems than these though you may lay a more proper claim to these than to any. You having from my childhood tuned mine ears to Spenser's rhymes, entertaining us on winter nights, with that incomparable Piece of his, The Fairy Queen a Poem as richly fraught with divine Morality as Phansy. '^ To More, then, the poet was a noble priest, a conception too unpopular in our own day since the romanticists have taught us to toy with his seductive music alone. More, indeed, was at the other pole. He was one of those quixotic idealists who reared, with pathetic enthusiasm, towers of Babel in a noble but almost fruitless cause. He wrote in the days when men dared to justify the ways of God to man, though he wrote when the doubting 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 103 Thomases were becoming legion. In the eighteenth century men took to celebrating in song the cotton industry or The Art of Preserving Health. Today some of us have fallen lower and write for ''Art's sake." In the growing Age of Literary Anarchy we have already noted another figure proudly independent of the frailties of one age---John Milton. He, too, gave sturdy praise to the moralistic aspect of Spenser's genius. In the Areopagitica (1644) he wrote of ''Our sage and serious Spenser, whom I dare be kno^vn to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas. ' ' Edward Dowden has made this the text of the richest essay on Spenser that our age can claim. We come now to one of the earliest apostles of that neo-classi- cism which in England struggled only with great difficulty through the Age of Literary Anarchy and gained supremacy at last when Pope and Addison planted the standard on the heights. The first important critical document of the neo-classicists was Sir William Davenant's preface to Gondihert. This has been inconsiderately damned as crass and unsympathetic in its atti- tude toward Spenser. In Davenant 's own day Aubrey wrote : *'Sir John Denham told me that A. BP. Usher, Lord Primate of Armagh was acquainted with him [Spenser], by this token, when Sir W. Davenant 's 'Gondibert' came forth, Sir John askt the Lord Primate if he had seen it? Said the Primate, 'Out upon him, with his vaunting preface, he speaks against my old friend, Edmund Spenser '. ' ' Something like the Lord Primate's idea seems to have prevailed ever since. But to call Davenant hostile to Spenser is to read his preface without any sense of perspective. Davenant shared the generally increasing objections to the archaisms. ''But as it is false husbandry to graft old branches upon young stocks: so we may wonder that our language . . . should receive from his [Spenser's] hand, new grafts of old wither 'd words." Again : * ' The unlucky choice of his stanza hath by repetition of Rime brought him to the necessity of many exploded words. ' ' Although the preface is emphatic in its identification of the ideal poet and the moralist, yet Davenant was not in sympathy with 104 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 Spenser's method of inculcating virtue, — ''His allegorical Story . . . . resembling (methinks) a continuation of extraordinary Dreams; such as excellent Poets, and Painters, by being over- studious may have in the beginning of Feavers." These are the shrewd complaints of Sir William Davenant, a sane literary critic who believed criticism to be the noble art of praise with intelligent qualifications. We must consider the general scheme of his essay to understand his full estimate of Spenser. He was about to propound the rules for an ideal epic and he began by naming those whom he considered the supreme writers of heroic poetry. He thus placed Spenser with Homer, Virgil, Lucan, Statins, and Tasso. He then pointed out the failings of each writer and Spenser hardly fared worse than any of the others. In this way Davenant gave Spenser implicitly the highest praise. "Spencer may stand here as the last of this short File of Heroick Poets — Men whose intellectuals were of so great a making (though some have thought them lyable to those few Censures we have mentioned) as perhaps they will in worthy memory outlast even the Makers of Laws and Founders of Empires, and all but such as must live equally with them because they have recorded their manner; and consequently with their own hand led them to the Temple of Fame. And since we have dar'd to remember those exceptions which the Curious have against them, it will not be expected I should forget what is objected against Spenser whose obsolete Language we are constrain 'd to mention, though it be grown the most vulgar accusation that is laid to his charge. ' ' Davenant 's tone was distinctly apologetic. He more than once foisted his adverse criticisms on ' ' the Curious. ' ' He feared that his censures of ''this short File of Heroick Poets" would make Hobbes, to whom he addressed his preface, think him "malicious" in observing the faults which "the Curious" had found with the revered writers. His detailed criticisms, restored to their con- text, become! then of minor importance. There have been ardent admirers of Spenser, in every period, who could subscribe with little emendation to Davenant 's complaints. Abraham Cowley's delightful tribute needs no comment. "I believe I can tell the particular little chance that filled my head first with such chimes of verse, as have never since left ringing there: for I remember, when I first began to read, and to take some pleasure in it, there was wont to lie in my mother's parlour (I know not by what 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 105 accident, for she herself never in her life read any book but of devo- tion) — but there was wont to lie Spenser's works; thus I happened to fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with the stories of the knights, and giants, and monsters, and brave houses, which I found everywhere /^ there (though my understanding had little to do with all this); so that, I think I had read him all over before I was twelve years old, and thus was made a poet as irremediably as a child is made a eunuch. ' '3 In 1669 Edward Howard, Dryden's disputant and a fairly staunch neo-classicist, brought out his The British Princes. Spen- ser was remembered as ''the first of England's poets'' and *'by many granted a Parallel to most of the Antients. ' ' The Age of Reason, meanwhile, had been verging rapidly into the Age of Literary Anarchy. But it seems fitting to begin our review of the later period with John Dryden who, as I have said, epitomizes its spirit. y 3 Essays in Prose and Verse 1668. No. XI. 106 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 IV THE AGE OF LITERARY ANARCHY Many times already, in this study, we have had occasion to note the change from the Elizabethan Age of rapturous faith to an age of doubt, of unrest, finally of absolute literary anarchy which corresponded well with the great political upheavals which distressed England throughout the reign of the Stuarts. Eliza- bethan ideals were unified by their abounding faith. In spite of our disgust for the fulsome eulogies of Elizabeth, we must admit that, when the last shred of the courtier's mask is torn away, there glows a genuine admiration, a deep faith in the sovereign. We have seen that the climax of the Elizabethan Age was the time of boyish panegyric, and that England's faith in her literature was so immense that .sanely regulated literary criticism was impossible until the canker doubt had done deadly work. Then English poetry, which had moved in comparative harmony, gradually divided and subdivided itself into a hundred jarring sects. Hostile schools despised each other and doubted themselves. Men became inconstant or inconsistent members of two warring cults. The neo-classical credo, which was to unify literature once more, gained ground slowly, and did not, as some have thought, triumph in the days of Waller, Denham, or Dryden. It struggled for bare existence till Pope and Addison became dictators. The Age of Literary Anarchy had no well-defined beginning. It came about very slowly. Such men as William Drummond of Hawthornden, Ben Jonson, and Edward Fairfax spread, con- sciously or unconsciously, the spirit of sedition. Drummond and Fairfax combined the Elizabethan love of sensuousness with a truly classical interest in form. Fairfax lived in the limelight and his tastes descended to Waller, who was glad to acknowl- edge him as a model. Drummond was unusually fond of using 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 107 and polishing the couplet, the form that the neo-classicists were to accept as supreme. His bookishness sent him directly back to the Latin poets again and again. His love of form stimulated him to experiment more with sonnet-schemes than any man in the language. In the abandon of the Elizabethan genius, then, his almost over-cultivated mind must have found some rough dissonances. Ben Jonson was a more definite classicist and his influence was immense. Of these earlier figures Edward Fair- fax interests us most of all because, as the ardent student of Spenser and the acknowledged master of Waller, he linked Spen- serian traditions with neo-classicism, the two currents of English literature that critics have long mistakenly regarded as anti- pathetic. In 1600 Fairfax published his translation of Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered {Godfrey of Bulloigne or The Becoverie of Jerusalem Done into English Heroicall Yerse), a poem which, though in ottava rima, taught Waller how to fashion the smooth couplets that made him the model of all true believers in neo- classicism. Fairfax was an enthusiastic follower of Spenser, and frequently departed from his original to draw more near to The Faerie Queene. Spenser, for instance, had already translated and in many cases improved passages from Tasso in his sensuous account of the Bower of Bliss. As Fairfax turned his Italian into English, memories of Spenser often led him delightedly astray. He describes the two wantons, who would have lured Carlo and Ubaldo from their quest for Rinaldo, with an evident relish of Spenser's exquisite translation in his mind.^ One siren loosed her long tresses so that they fell down and half hid her naked body. "Withal she smiled and she blushed withal, Her blush, her smilings, smiles her blushing graced. Over her face her amber tresses fall, Whereunder Love himself in ambush placed." The play on words is ultimately Tasso 's. But Spenser wrote : ''Withall she laughed, and she blusht withall That blushing to her laughter gave more grace. ' ' 1 Tasso, C. 15. St. 62. Spenser, B. II, C. 12, St. 108 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 Fairfax was plainly captivated by the charming cadence of the repeated ''withal" and pillaged Spenser's first line. In his description of the amorous Armida (C. 16, St. 18), Fairfax adds to the conceits of Tasso with a phrase from Spenser. "Her breasts were naked for the day was hot. Her locks unbound waved in the wanton wind; Some deal she sweat tired with the game you wot. Her sweat-drops bright, white, round, like pearls of Inde; Her humid eyes a firey smile forthshot That like sunbeams in silver fountains shined. O'er him her looks she hung and her soft breast The pillow was, where he and love took rest." From Spenser's interpolation, "pure Orient perles," (2, 12, 78) Fairfax borrowed his simile, "like pearls of Inde," (for there is no trace in the original) to overweight a picture already langor- ous to the last degree. He constantly sought words as well as fancies from his master, making free use of Spenser's archaisms. In emulating the highly wrought technique of Spenser and Tasso the lesser man doubtless found himself forced into that more conscious attention to finish which caught the eye of Edmund Waller. At all events, Waller and Dryden considered Fairfax as one of their sacred authorities for the new couplet. In decadent Elizabethans, who outlived the Elizabethan spirit of youth, ruddy enthusiasm became hectic disease, careless fancy was metamorphosed into ingenious artifice, the sensuousness of Petrarch was laid aside for the conceits of Marini. Such a spirit laid prematurely a blighting finger on the large soul of Donne and spread even more insidiously through the religious ecstasy of Crashaw. By 1630 England's poetry was visibly disturbed by the struggles of these discordant forces. From about 1650 to the end of the century the influence of Spenser was at its lowest ebb in the history of English poetry. The cause of this lies precisely in that multiplicity of artistic theories that brought about the literary civil wars. When the Elizabethans thought that they tallied all antecedents they can- nonized Spenser in a thoroughly uncritical way. He was their morning star, their high priest of poetry. He was with Homer. 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 109 The admiration of later writers .was no less deep and sincere, but doubt had sharpened their critical insight. The influence of Spenser was no less great than that of any other writer. It was only that influences were legion. There were no great central convictions like those which inspired the Elizabethans, Augustans, and romanticists at their highest point of development. The wonder is that Spenser was hospitably received in so many antag- onistic gfoups of writers. In this way, indeed, a slender* bond of unity remained. But it was a mere shadow of the old community of feeling. The spirit of classicism had as yet but a thin voice in the literary affairs of the age. The heavy cloth of gold of the renais- sance made a mantle which the poets were loth to relinquish. Giles and Phineas Fletcher, for instance, those pastor-poets of Cambridge University who sang, in Spenser 's allegorical manner, of the sacrifice of Christ and the soul of man, founded a school of poets who perpetuated the sensuous Spenserian manner even into the eighteenth century. Quarles, Thomas Robinson, Dr. Joseph Beaumont, and others published ambitious attempts in imitation of Spenser and the Fletchers, and emulated their spirit in an age when chaotic sectarianism was vitally connected with the issues of the day. As late as 1679 this movement was very much alive in Samuel Woodford 's Legend of Love and its Epoda in Spenserian stanzas. Even in the eighteenth century, when neo-classicism held full sway, "William Thompson registered his name as the last in this school with his Hymn to May (1757), a piece which closely followed Spenser 's Epithalamion and Phineas Fletcher's Purple Island and which is pure Elizabethan even in an age of trim paterres. From Cambridge came a man who owed a debt to the school of the Fletchers although he was too large to be imprisoned as a member, John Milton, the supreme poet of his age, who learned from Spenser much of the eloquence with which he wrought his great religious and political experiences into immortal song. The spirit of the dreamer of The Faerie Queene was not, after all, so far remote from the great issues of the middle decades of the seventeenth century. These poets. /T 110 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 with the exception of Milton (who, like all supreme artists, knew how to reconcile classicism and romanticism), formed one of the many groups of seventeenth century poets who still preferred to worship beauty with Elizabethan exuberance and childlike enumeration of infinite detail rather than by attention to finish, the sense of finiteness, of repression which attracted the new classicists. Literary anarchy became bewildering toward the close of the century because English poetry had fallen among little men. During the last two decades of the seventeenth century, except for Dryden, there were only the very dregs. The various warring creeds quarreled to the end. Marinism, which found its most brilliant supporter in Crashaw, was upheld by men like John Norris of Bemerton in his Miscellanies (1678). Two very dif- ferent schools worked against them: the boisterous satirists of the type of John Cleveland and Dr. Robert Wild, who battled with the decadent poets by using a rugged style which constantly broke down into doggerel; Waller, Denham, and Sidney Godol- phin, who fought for neo-classicism. Then there was the great number of belated Elizabethans, the school of the Fletchers and many more. These men were generally perfectly conscious of their conservatism. Mr. Edmund Gosse notes a volume by Philip Ayres, Lyric poems, made in Imitation of the Italians, as ''the very last effort made to restore romantic poetry to its old place in English literature." There were some who inconsistently wrote in different veins. Such a man was Sir Richard Fanshawe, a good friend of the classicist Denham, but having many sym- pathies with the Elizabethans and Marinists. In 1676 a number of his miscellaneous poems appeared along with his translation of Guarini's II Pastor Fido. A Canto of the Progress of Learning, though in Spenserian stanzas, is far less florid than some of his sonnets and lyrics. On the other hand its opening line, * ' Tell me, O Muse, and tell me Spencer's Ghost," seems to indicate that the master's poetry was not far from his thoughts. Again he trans- lated Virgil, the idol of the Augustans, in the Spenserian stanza, a form quite generally regarded, even by its admirers in that day. 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. Ill as unfit for heroic poetry. The civil wars in English poetry might easily be illustrated far beyond due proportion in this study. Charles Cotton continued at once the wholesome nature poetry of Browne, Herrick, and Marvel and wrote amorous lyrics in the vein of Suckling, Lovelace, Carew, men who cared little for the quiet country, who preferred the rustle of the silk j:,owns of court ladies to the wind among the trees. Cowley's eccentric Pindaric odes fell into disrepute toward the close of the century. Yet Thomas Flatman, one of the very few lyrists who wrote with high seriousness at the end of the century, followed Cowley almost exclusively. Flatman ^s friends, Dr. Samuel Woodford, the Spen- serian, and Katherine Philips, *'the matchless Orinda," wrote often in the manner of Cowley. Yet Katherine Philips, with her affected elegance and her importation of French ideals from the Hotel Eambouillet, contributed definitely to the rise of neo- classicism. Finally Dryden, who was to give the death-blow to Abraham Cowley, wrote one of his maturest poems, To Mrs. Anne Killegreiv, (1686) in the Pindaric and metaphysical vein of the despised poet. Against the lyrics of the court amorists we may pit the long line of religious lyrics from Crashaw, himself as ardent a royalist as Lovelace or Suckling, to Vaughn. In the love-lyric, too, the approach of the dissolution of faith, of the Age of Anarchy, may be seen in Habington's Castara, a some- what uneasy, overconscious attempt to fuse the erotic cavalier poetry with religion and Platonism, utterly unlike the fiery Platonism of the Elizabethans. Then complete cynicism broke in. At the close of the century Rochester, Sedley, Aphra Behn, and others were retailing the commonplaces of the amorists, striving to eke out their slender originality and to heal their shattered faith in the finer things of life with feverish sensuality, cynicism, and obscenity. Except for the slow and hotly contested rise of neo-classieism, this degradation of the court lyric is typical of the degradation of English poetry. Neo-classicism promised at least a wholesome repression in style and a theory, if no more, of the moral responsibility of poetry in its highest moods. It promised a much needed increase of intellectuality as opposed to unbridled fancy. 112 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 In turning to the heralds of Augustanism we must never for- get that they were not outside the influence of Spenser and did not regard Spenser as necessarily opposed to their regime. We shall see how they came more and more to reconcile him with their ideals much as they reconciled Virgil. Sir John Denham classed Spenser and Jonson together as exponents of "Art" as opposed to the less revered native woodnotes wild which were falling into disrepute. "Next (like Aurora), Spenser rose Whose purple blush the day foreshows; Old Mother Wit and Nature gave Shakespeare and Fletcher all they have, In Spenser and in Jonson, Art Of slower Nature got the start. "2 Edmund Waller, as we have noted, learned his devotion to finish from Fairfax. He seems to have returned to Spenser as well for that mellifluousness which is characteristic of his smooth, sen- suous verse. His most elaborate poem, The Battle of the Mid- summer Islands, follows Spenser and Fairfax in the creation of a sort of tropical Bower of Bliss, or Eden.^ A reference in the third canto seems to show that Waller, unlike many professed students of English literature, had arrived as far as the fifth book of The Faerie Queene. For he describes a wounded whale scourging the waves *'like Spenser's Talus with his iron flail." Similarly Katherine Philips, whom we have described as mainly neo-classical, draws from Spenser to adorn a polite and languid Sapphic effusion. Content, To my dearest Lucasia. "Content, the false World's best disguise, The search and faction of the wise. Is so abstruse and hid in night That, like that Fairy Eed-Cross ]S[night, Who treacherous Falsehood for clear Truth had got. Men think they have it when they have it not.'' But it was Dryden who sanctified Spenser for the Augustans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With Dryden Eng- 2 On Mr. Abraham Cowley *s Death. 3 Canto I. See Mr. G. Thorn Drury's notes on this poem in the Muses' Library edition of Waller. 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 113 lish criticism came to a brilliant climax and the Age of Literary Anarchy received complete and powerful expression. England felt a growing interest in the superbly unified French theories of poetry, but found them practically impossible to reconcile with her sturdy native traditions and the restless spirit of the age. When we learn to realize thoroughly how some writers took refuge in an idolatrous worship of the classics, how others clam- ored for the perpetuation of the Elizabethan manner, how many caught up th» extravagances of the English Marinists, the attempt to goad jaded emotions with the highly spiced diet of jaded con- ceits, and carried the hectic fancies of Cowley, Crashaw, and their crew to excess beyond excess, how some gave up hope of solution and sought false relief in cynicism and rough mockery, how the exquisite idyllic vein of Andrew Marvel could turn to barren and querulous satire, when we realize that it was the day of a hundred schools, the age of literary anarchy, as it was the age of civil broils and political plots, then we can understand Dryden with some human sympathy. In Dryden 's day uncertainty ran riot. His admirers and detractors have long puzzled over his vacillations in matters religious, literary, and political. How- ever servile he may have been, it is difficult to deny that he was a man of strong if somewhat fickle convictions that changed, not merely with the breeze of public opinion, but with his own true moods. Some of his inconsistencies are readily explainable by his enthusiasm for the subject under immediate consideration. In his Discourse on Epick Poetry (1697), he devoted much time to proving triumphantly, in spite of Aristotle, that heroic poetry is a greater form than tragedy. But in his Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1667), where all his eloquence was being spent on the drama, he did not even pause to support a confident parenthesis: ''Though tragedy may be justly preferred to the other," [viz., epic]. In his Preface to the second Miscellany (1685), Spenser's endeavour to imitate the rustic speech of Theocritus by an infus- ion of archaic and dialect words is adjudged unsuccessful. "Spenser has endeavoured it [to imitate the Doric of Theocritus] in his Shepherds Kalendar; but neither will it succeed in English [any more 114 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 than in the severe Latin tongue] for which reason I have forbore to attempt it. ' ' Yet in his Dedication of the Pastorals of Virgil (1697), he wrote : **But Spencer being master of our northern dialect, and skilled in Chaucer's English, has so exactly imitated the Dorick of Theocritus, that his love is a perfect image of that passion which God infused into both sexes, before it was corrupted with the knowledge of arts, and the cere- monies of what we call good manners." Without pausing to consider any more of Dryden's many self-contradictions, we may turn to his comments on Spenser as disclosing matters most significant for our general conception of Dryden as a critic. His first reference to Spenser occurs in a preface Of Heroic Plays, published in 1672 with an edition of The Conquest of Granada, where he merely cites The Faerie Queene in support of the use of gods, spirits, and ''enthusiastic parts ' ' in poetry. In his youth Dryden, like many young writers, was a victim of the poets of his own generation. His early servi- tude to the conceit-hunters is well known. He himself tells us in his Dedication of The Spanish Friar (1681), that he once thought "inimitable Spenser a mean poet in comparison of Syl- vester's Dubartas." But he came to dub the idol of his callow days a writer of ' ' abominable fustian. ' * In his maturity Dryden spoke enthusiastically and discern- ingly about Spenser. In his Essay on Satire (1693), he made his most elaborate criticism. In a long digression on heroic poetry, in which he asserted that no one equalled Homer and Virgil, he criticised Lucan, Statins, Ariosto, and Tasso, scorned utterly the French epics, and added : **The English have only to boast of Spenser and Milton, who neither of them wanted either genius or learning, to have been perfect poets; and yet, both of them are liable to many censures. For there is no uni- formity in the design of Spenser: he aims at the accomplishment of no one action: he raises up a hero for every one of his adventures; and endows each of them with some particular moral virtue which renders them all equal, without subordination or performance. Every one is most valiant in his own legend; only we must do them that justice to observe, that magnanimity, which is the character of prince Arthur, shines throughout the whole poem; and succours the rest, when they are in distress. The original of every knight was then living in the court 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 115 of queen Elizabeth; and he attributed to each of them, that virtue which he thought most conspicuous in them: an ingenious piece of flattery, though it turned not much to his account. Had he lived to finish the Poem, in the six remaining legends, it had certainly been more of a piece; but could not have been perfect, because the model was not true. But prince Arthur, or his chief patron. Sir Philip Sidney, whom he intended to make happy by the marriage of his Gloriana, dying before him, deprived the Poet both of means and spirit to accomplish his design: for the rest his obsolete language and ill choice of his stanzas, are faults but of the second magnitude; for, notwithstanding the first, he is still intelligible, at least after a little practice: and for the last, he is the more to be admired, that, labouring under such a difficulty, his verses are so numerous, so various, and harmonious, that only Virgil, whom he professedly imitated, has surpassed him among the Komans; and only Mr. Waller among the English." y It is important to observe that this very just criticism of the y^ general structure of The Faerie Queene began with Dryden and has become the current comment to our own day. Even Thomas Warton had nothing to add to it. It is moreover worth special attention that Dryden did not share Jonson's and Davenant's aversion for the use of obsolete words. Nor did he always regard them as even "faults of the second magnitude." We have seen that he first condemned but later praised the archaisms in The Shepheards Calender. And in his discussion of Milton in this same digression in the Essay on Satire he treats archaisms with a justice that is beyond reproach : *'His [Milton's] antiquated words were his choice, not his necessity; for therein he imitated Spenser as Spenser imitated Chaucer. And though, perhaps, the love of their master may have transported both too far, in the frequent use of them; yet, in my opinion words may then be laud- ably revived, when either they are more sounding or more significant, than those in practice; and, when their obscurity is taken away, by join- ing other words to them which clear the sense; according to the rule of Horace, for the admission of new words. But in both cases a moderation is to be observed in the use of them. For unnecessary coinage, as well as unnecessary revival runs into affectation; a fault to be avoided on either hand. ' ' Dryden 's association of the names of Spenser and Virgil in the discussion of the structure of The Faerie Queene quoted above is only one of many passages that indicate that Spenser and the darling of the neo-classicists were endeared to him as poetical X 116 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 comrades. In his Discourse on Epick Poetry (1697) Dryden wrote : **I must acknowledge that Virgil in Latin and Spencer in English, have been my masters. ' ' Again : **If the design be good and the draught be true, the colouring is the first beauty that strikes the eye. Spencer and Milton are the nearest, in English, to Virgil and Horace in Latin; and I have endeavoured to form my style by imitating their masters." The association of Virgil and Spenser is very significant because it throws a clear light on an aspect of neo-classicism completely misunderstood. The Augustans did not, as has been so con- stantly averred, forget or despise Spenser. They found him, on the whole, sufficiently reconcilable with their ideals and appre- ciated sides of his poetry to which the romanticists, to our own day, have remained blind. Dryden taught the Augustans to accept Virgil and Spenser as common models. The cherished project of his own life was to write an epic about Arthur, the hero of The Faerie Queene, or the Black Prince, ''wherein, after Virgil and Spenser, I would have taken occasion to represent my living friends and patrons of noblest families, and also shadowed the events of future ages, in the succession of our Im- perial lines."* But he was unfortunately encouraged only by the "fair words of Charles II" and ''my little salary ill paid." But the thorn which seems to have pricked the sides of all who read Dryden, devoutly or sacrilegiously, is his admiration for the faultless commonplaces of Waller and Denham with their rippling heroic couplets. In his Dedication of The Rival Ladies (1672) Dryden asserted of "rhyme" that: "The excellence and dignity of it were never fully known till Mr. Waller taught it. ' ' In the Defence of the Epilogue to The Conquest of Granada he said: "Well-placing of words, for the sweetness of pronunciation, was not known till Mr. Waller introduced it." 4 The Essay on Satire. 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 117 By the time we arrive at the Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1667) we become belligerent when we read : "They [the Elizabethans] can produce .... nothing so even sweet, and flowing as Mr. Waller nothing so majestic, so correct, as Sir John Denham. ' ' In the Essay on Satire, to be sure, this fetish-worship lends op- portunity for gratifying praise of Spenser and a new interweav- ing of his name with Virgil's. For, having been advised by Sir George Mackenzie to imitate "the turns of Mr. Waller and Sir John Denham, " it " first made me sensible to my own wants, and brought me afterwards to seek for the supply of them in other English authors.'' Not even "the darling of my youth, the famous Cowley," rewarded a search. ' ' Then I consulted a greater genius (without offense to the manes of that noble author) I mean Milton; but as he endeavours everywhere to express Homer, whose age had not arrived to that fineness, I found in him a true sublimity, lofty thoughts which were clothed with admirable Grecisms, and ancient words which he had been digging from the mines of Chaucer and Spenser, and which, with all their rusticity, had some- what of venerable in them. At last I had recourse to his master, Spenser, the author of that immortal poem called The Fairy Queen; and there I met with that which I had been looking for so long in vain. Spenser had studied Virgil to as much advantage as Milton had done Homer and among the rest of his excellencies, had copied that." This is truly mellifluous to the ear of the ardent Spenserian. But a famous passage in the Preface to the Fables (1700), the brilliant work of Dryden's maturity, has been most unduly exalted into prominence and cited as an example of that crass- ness which is said to have tainted even the large mind of Dryden in an age of literary narrowness. We expect only the choicest wisdom in this preface. We gloat over the damnation of the once revered Cowley. We breathe the fire of the noble eloquence which exalts Chaucer. But, as Dryden's thought reverts to metrics, our enthusiasm grows pale. ''Equality of numbers in every verse which we call heroick, was either not known or not always practised in Chaucer's age. . . . We can only say that he lived in the infancy of our poetry, and that nothing is brought to perfection at first. We must be children before we grow men. There was an Ennius, and in process of time a Lucilius and a Lucretius before Virgil and Horace. Even after Chaucer, there was a Spencer, a 118 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 Harrington, a Fairfax, before Waller and Denham were in being and our numbers were in their nonage till these appeared. '^ These sentences have brought reproach on the memory of Dryden. It is surprising to see how widespread is the opinion that here Dryden, in his splendid maturity, capriciously expressed a senile preference for Waller and Denham over Chaucer and Spenser. But it is to be observed that most of Dryden 's refer- ences to Denham and Waller have to do with technique — and with the technique of the heroic couplet solely. It is the ' ' num- bers" and ''rhyme'* (which readers of the Essay of Dramatick Poesie will recognize as practically technical terms for the coup- let) which Dryden admired in Waller and Denham. When Dry- den wrote of the peers of the ancients and considered poetry in all its aspects he praised Chaucer, Tasso, Spenser, Jonson, Shake- speare, Milton, and Corneille in the highest terms. But Waller and Denham were not mentioned. That he did not rate mere technique highest among the qualifications of a poet is proved by a glance at his preference for Chaucer over Ovid in the Preface to the Fables. From his point of view Chaucer was an inferior metrist. The best he could say of Chaucer 's melody was that "there is the rude sweetness of a Scotch tune in it, which is natural and pleasing though not perfect.'' As a confirmed lover of Latin poetry he could not but greatly prefer the artful cadences of Ovid's lines, though he was probably not blind to their saccharine qualities as compared with the stronger music of Virgil. But, though he was emphatic in favor of Ovid's metrical superiority, the Latin poet came off very badly in the comparison and was ranked definitely below Chaucer. It is evi- dent that he ranked Chaucer, whom he considered somewhat primitive, far above Ovid, a poet of the days of a great nation's mature culture and formal perfection. By the same token it is not fanciful to argue that while Dryden considered Waller and Denham to be great as the perfectors of the popular heroic coup- let of the day, he would not have dreamed a moment of placing them as high as Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton. We have observed that whenever Dryden took a poet or an 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 119 ideal as the topic of an essay or a text for the exploitation of a pet theory he exalted the subject with a youthful enthusiasm for the interest of the hour and a fine indifference to what he had ever said before. When we consider the consistent and high praise in his many references to Spenser, it does not seem illogi- cal to suppose that had he written an essay on his acknowledged master he would have glowed with an eloquence sublimated with his patriotic preference for English poets over the ancients and over the immaculate French rule-worshippers.^ As it is, he has left some generalizations on Spenser that are at once in the spirit of warm and rational admiration. In the Discourse on Epick Poetry he found that ''the file of heroick poets is very short." There had been only one Iliad and Aeneid. "After these are entered some Lord Chamberlain should be appointed, some critick of an authority should be set before the door to keep out a crowd of little poets, who press for admission, and are not of quality. . . . The next, but the next with a long intervall betwixt was the Jerusalem; I mean not so much in distance of time as in excellency.'' Pulci, Bojardo, Ariosto, Le Moine, Scudery, Chapelain are hud- dled together and receive scant grace. But : ''Spencer has a better plea for his Fairy Queen had his action been finished, or had been one; and Milton, if the devil had not been his hero, instead of Adam. . . . After these the rest of our English poets shall not be mentioned. I have that honour for them which I ought to have; but if they are worthies, they are not to be ranked amongst the three whom I have named, and who are established in their reputation. ' ' In the same essay we are told that : "Spenser wanted only to have read the rules of Bossu; for no man was ever born with a greater genius, or had more knowledge to support it. "6 Today we voice precisely the same complaints against Spenser's form. To be sure, we fancy that we could prescribe something better than the fossilized Bossu. But though we all bow to Spen- ser 's marvellous genius we wish, with Dry den, that he had chosen 5 See the Essay of Dramatick Poesie for his preference for English and modern poetry. « Luke Melbourne, a contentious parson, gained much notoriety, includ- irg a savage trust from Pope (Essay on Criticism, 11. 462, sq.) for a book o^- observations on Dryden's translation of Virgil. But Melbourne at least made just and grim sport of Dryden's prescription of Bossu for Spenser. 120 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 or perfected a mould more vertebrate into which to pour the immense treasures of his mind. In the Dedication of his transla- tion of the Pastorals of Virgil (1697) Dryden, besides praising the ^ * imitation ' ^ of the Doric of Theocritus, as before noted, gave Spenser the highest rank among the shepherd-poets. Having discussed the bucolics of Theocritus and Virgil he added : "Our own nation has produced a third poet in this kind, not inferior to the two former. For the Shepherd's Calendar of Spencer is not to be matched in any modern language, not even by Tasso 's Aminta, which infinitely transcends Guarini's Pastor-Fido, as having more of nature in it, and being almost wholly clear from the wretched affectation of learn- ing. I will say nothing of the piscatory eclogues, because no modern Latin can bear criticism. It is no wonder that rolling down through so many barbarous ages, from the spring of Virgil, it bears along with it the filth and ordures of the Goths and Vandals. Neither will I mention Monsieur Fontenelle, the living glory of the French. It is enough for him to have excelled his master, Lucian, without attempting to compare our miserable age with that of Virgil or Theocritus. Let me only add, for his reputation, si Pergama dextra Defendi possent, etiam hac defensa fuissent. But Spencer being master of our northern dialect, and skilled in Chaucer 's English, has so exactly imitated the Dorick of Theocritus, that his love is a perfect image of that passion which God infused into both sexes, before it was corrupted with the knowledge of arts, and the ceremonies of what we call good manners." The obvious conclusions from these citations certainly add little but lustre to Dryden 's fame as a critic. Mr. Waller and Mr. Denham are given credit only for what they actually accom- plished. To be sure, Dryden overrated the heroic couplet, which from his point of view they perfected, as a measure. But it is absurd to suppose that he placed them, on these grounds, above the acknowledged masters of English poetry. As for Spenser, no man has praised more nobly and more rationally than Dryden. We have little occasion to question the opinions of those who hold him to be the greatest English critic. Thomas Rymer interests us because he was an important man in his own day, because he espoused neo-classicism, in an age of struggle and doubt, with an uncompromising faith, and because he shows how readily the Augustans reconciled Spenser, on the 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 121 whole, with their ideals. In his preface to the translation of Rapin's Reflections on Aristotle's Treatise of Poesie (1674) he wrote : "Spencer, I think, may be reckoned the first of our Heroick Poets; he had a large spirit, a sharp judgement, and a Genius for Heroick Poesie, perhaps above any that ever writ since Virgil. But our misfortune is, he wanted a true Idea, and lost himself by following an unfaithful guide. Though besides Homer and Virgil, he had read Tasso, yet he rather suffer 'd himself to be misled by Ariosto; with whom blindly rambling on marvellous adventures he makes no conscience of Probability. All is fanciful and chimerical, without any uniformity, without any foundation in truth; his Poem is perfect Fairy-land. . . . They who can love Ariosto will be ravish 'd with Spencer, whilst men of juster thoughts lament that such great Wits have miscarried in their Travels for want of direction to set them in the right way. But the truth is, in Spencer's time, Italy itself was not well satisfied with Tasso; and few amongst them would allow that he had excell'd their divine Ariosto. And it was the vice of these times to affect superstitiously the Allegory; and nothing would then be current without a mystical meaning. We must blame the Italians for debauching great Spencer's judgement; and they cast him on the unlucky choice of the stanza which in no wise is proper for our Lan- guage." In 1675 Edward Phillips published his Theatrum Poetarum Anglicanorum, a work which became very popular as a handbook of criticisms and accounts of English Poets, and from which writers of similar treatises, Gerard Langbaine, William Win- stanley, and others, borrowed with great freedom. Critics have doubtless been right in ascribing some of the real wisdom and largeness of Phillips' utterances to the influence of his uncle, Milton. Thus it was, perhaps, that he never bowed in blind wor- ship to the heroic couplet. Indeed his curious preference of an irregular lyrical verse, which he called ' ' Pindarick, ' ' to the coup- let for tragedy suggests that his mind may have been full of the rafified choruses of Samson Agonistes. The keynote of his atti- tude toward poetry is opposed to the Augustan worship of reason and sounds like Milton. "Wit, ingenuity and learning in verse, even elegancy itself, though that comes nearest, are one thing; true native poetry is another; in which there is a certain air and spirit, which, perhaps, the most learned and judicious in other arts do not perfectly apprehend; much less is it attainable by any study or industry." 122 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 His appreciation of the Spenserian stanza is notable and almost unique in his period. ''How much more stately and majestic in epic poems, especially of heroic argument, Spenser's stanza (which I take to be but an improve- ment upon Tasso 's Ottava Eima, or the Ottava Rima itself, used by many of our once-esteemed poets) is above the way, either of couplet, or altera- tion of four verses only, I am persuaded were it revived, would soon be acknowledged. ' ' Phillips may have influenced Dr. Samuel Woodford who pub- lished, in 1679, A Paraphrase Upon the Canticles with a preface that is full of interest for us. "Among the several other Papers that we have lost of the Excellent and Divine Spenser, one of the happiest Poets that this Nation ever bred (and out of it the world it may be (all things considered) had not his Fellow, excepting only such as were immediately Inspired) I bewail nothing methinks so much, as his Version of the Canticles. For doubt- less, in my poor Judgement, never was Man better made for such a Work, and the Song itself as directly suited, with his Genius and manner of Poetry (that I mean wherein he best shews and even excels himself, His Shepherd's Kalender, and other occasional Poems, for I cannot yet say the same directly for his Faery Queen designed for an Heroic Poem) that it could not but from him receive the last Perfection, whereof it was capable out of its original. '' Woodford's eccentric notions and terrifying plesiosaurian sen- tences do not prove that he was out of the literary world of his day. He was the friend of Sprat, the famous biographer of Cowley, and seems to have commanded no small respect from Flatman, **the matchless Orinda," and other distinguished con- temporaries that are now with the snows of yesteryear. His opinions are always interesting and often sound and suggestive. He thinks that couplets are best in an heroic poem, *'as in Mr. Cowley's Davideis (for the Quatrains of Sir William Davenant, and the Stanza of Nine in Spenser 's Faery Queen, which are but an Improvement of the Ottava Rima, to instance in no more, seem not to me so proper)." But that he had some admiration for the Spenserian stanza, for other purposes, seems certain, for he employed it himself in his most pretentious poem, The Legend of Love. In his paraphrase of the Canticles Woodford carried the dialogue-setting of Quarles (S ion's Sonnets) even farther and 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 123 attempted an approximation of the classical drama and the classi- cal epithalamium. The verses are not only assigned to the Spouse and the Beloved but to the friends on either side and to a chorus. "Woodford takes occasion, incidentally, to condemn blank verse as used by Milton, though he is an enthusiastic lover of Paradise Lost. For blank verse, he thinks, as ''likest prose," is unfit for any form but the drama. The Song of Solomon may be divided, he thinks, into such parts as a Protasis, the ** Divine Amoris Ecstasis, an Epitasis or the counterturn of action, the Dolor de Absentia Sponsi," and a third division. The unity of action, we are told, is ''strictly observed in this Hymn, and the Chorus, which is everywhere regular." In short, Woodford is a com- pound of the Spenserians, the Marinists, and the neo-classicists, a very characteristic poet of the late seventeenth century. To his version of the Canticles Woodford prefixed a stern Proazma bidding the profane to ''avoid." He was evidently somewhat disturbed over the possible influence of the Oriental love-language. In his preface he was scandalized by some un- speakable freethinkers who dared to murmur that the Song of Solomon might, after all, be a literal love-lyric and have nothing to do with an allegory of Christ and the Church. To make his cheveux de frise perfect against any loose lovers of wanton lyrics who should chance on his ground in search of amorous poetry to their taste, he added his moralistic Epoda or Legend of Love, imi- tated partly from Spenser's Hymne to Divine Love and partly from the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins in The Faerie Queene. We may let Woodford describe its content in his own words. After defending his use of the term ' ' Epoda, ' ' he says : *'The ^Legend,' further, of 'Love' I have stiled it, for honour's sake to the great Spenser, whose Stanza of Nine I have used, and who has Intituled the six Books which we have compleat of his Faery Queen, by the several Legends of Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship Jus- tice and Courtesy, and to any who knows what the word Legend there, or in its true and first notion signifies, it will neither seem strange, ridiculous, or improper. I have made it to consist of three Cantos, agree- able enough to the nature of an Epode or Legend, if it be judged indecent, as indeed it is, considering its length, for an Epilogue; the first whereof taking occasion from the Canticles, to which in the beginning it refers, 124 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 I have endeavoured to shew the true Nature of Love, and what it was in the State of Innocence, describing it by the liveliest Images, which I form to myself suitable to a poetical composition. In the second I have considered the thing whatever it be, vulgarly called Love, under the dominion and government of Sense, exclusive of Reason, which it too often either draws to its party or wholly extinguishes, than which noth- ing can be conceived more absurd, unreasonable, extravagant, and inhumane. The third canto, in the close of it, is designed for the Eestau- ration of Love, by Sacred Marriage, or Wedlock, according to the Divine Institution, to its ancient Dignity and Lustre." John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave and Duke of Buckingham- shire, published in 1682 a very clever Essay on Poetry in the last couplet of which he asserted that the ideal poet **Must above Cowley, nay, and Milton too, prevail Succeed where great Torquato and our greater Spenser fail." In the edition of 1713 he revised these lines, significantly striking out the name of Cowley, who had then been dashed from the firmament of poets. Here he decided that the poet * ' Must above Milton 's lofty flights prevail Succeed where Spenser and even Torquato fail." In 1723 the couplet was made to read : *'Must above Tasso's lofty flights prevail. Succeed where Spenser and even Milton fail. ' ' Dr. Johnson was the first to comment on these revisions as a mark of the increase of Milton 's fame. But they have another import- ance as well. The names of Tasso, Spenser, and Milton were plainly not marshalled merely to make a high-sounding couplet, but the shifts in the order and the omission of Cowley indicate that these men were carefully selected because of their eminence and, most probably, with a shrewd eye to their popular eminence. I must not omit some lines from a satire by John Oldham (Poems and Translations 1683) because, though their connection with Spenserian criticism is of the slightest, there is something in their grim despair that is typical of the poet 's attitude at the end of the seventeenth century. Poets are always complaining that their times care not for the muse. But there is something in the raw power of these lines that is more than the proper and customary protest against the indifference to those who practice the humble slighted shepherd's trade. 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 125 *'Oiie night, as I was pondering of late On all the miseries of my hapless Fate, Cursing my rhiming Stars, raving in vain At all the Pow.'rs, who over Poets reign: In came a ghastly Shape, all pale and thin, As some poor Sinner, who by Priest had been Under a long Lent's Penance, starv'd and whip'd. Or par-boil'd Lecher, late from Hot-house crept: Famish 'd his Looks appear 'd his eyes sunk in, Like Morning-Gown about him hung his Skin: { A Wreath of Laurel on his Head he wore, A book inscribed the Fairy Queen he bore." This spectre, who is no other than Spenser himself, dissuades the young poet from the unrewarded allegiance to the muses. It is difficult to realize that this harsh, crude verse was written by a poet highly esteemed in his day. But Dryden wrote one of his noblest, most genuine poems in his memory. Crude as these verses are, they show a spirit much more real than the complaints of the Elizabethan shepherd-poets in the Age of Enthusiasm and are much more manly than the everlasting whines of our dis- gruntled magazine poets of the twentieth century against com- mercialism. They show a feeling for a real fin de siecle. In Sir William Temple's essay Of Poetry (1685) Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser are selected as the three supreme modern poets to name with the Ancients. *' After these three I know none of the Moderns that have made any achievements in Heroic poetry worth recording.'' Of Spenser in particular he wrote : "Spenser endeavoured to supply this with morality to make instruc- tion instead of story, the subject of an epic poem. His execution was excellent and his flights of fancy very noble and high, but his design was poor, and his moral lay so bare that it lost the effect. ' ' Those timid tasters of The Faerie Queene who believe with Lowell that the allegory is the grit in the dish of strawberries and cream, will find this critcism in some accord with their views, views. William Winstanley has been long spurned as a wretched barber and a graceless thief from the writings of Edward Phillips. In his account of Spenser {Lives of the most famous English Foets, 1686), he referred to him as: 126 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 ''Especially very happy in English Poetry, as his learned, elaborate Works do declare .... and though some blame his Writings for the many Chaucerisms used by him, yet to the Learned they are known not to be blemishes but rather beauties to his Book. ' "^ Again : ''But his main Book, and which I think Envy itself cannot carp at, was his Fairy Queen, a Work of such ingenuous composure as will last as long as time endures.'^ In 1694 Sir Thomas Pope Blount brought out a collection of remarks on poets and poetry called De Be Poetica, an important document to determine the standing of critics of that period and the ideas of an author apparently held by the reading public. Spenser fares excellently. The eulogies of Edward Phillips, Camden, and Fuller are quoted together with the high praise, with its rational qualifications, of Temple, Bymer, and Dryden {Essay on Satire). In these days English poetry was at its lowest ebb and Spen- ser 's influence at its faintest was coincident with this drab age. The fact that it was an Age of Literary Anarchy, that there were many conflicting influences and many hostile ideals, was the cause of this degeneration. It is remarkable, under the circum- stances, to find Spenser admired and followed by poets in other respects so inimical to one another. Neo-classicism was neces- sary to save English poetry. But it grew only very slowly and painfully. Neo-classicism, when it did prevail, found inspiration in Spenser and reconciled him, for the most part, with its ideals. It is significant, as we have already seen, to note how often he was named with Virgil. It is not true that Spenser fell into dis- repute and so remained until the romanticists * ' revived ' ' him. 7 This sentence is lifted bodily from Thomas Fuller 's account of Spenser in The History of the Worthies of England 1662. 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 127 V THE NEO-CLASSICAL DESPOTISM All scholarship on eighteenth century literature has of late been a mad scramble in search of romanticism. Since Professor Phelps and Professor Beers traced its growth in the eighteenth century it has become so fashionable to detect signs of revolt, even among the most hard-shelled neo-classicists, that some brilliant critic of the future may gain distinction by turning the tables and by proving that a school of Pope actually existed. It becomes necessary, then, to attempt to describe romanticism at the very outset of this section of our study. For our purposes it is best to enumerate a number of the most commonly accepted types of romanticism, realizing how seldom they exist in combination, and that they are often utterly unlike one another, occasionally even irreconcilable. The most distinctive feature of Coleridge's romanticism, in his greatest poems, is the passion for mystery in the most exalted sense, the power of suggestion, the devotion to things that may be real. In Woodsworth, romanticism lies in the intimate relating of man's soul and nature. The romanticism of Byron is intense subjectivity and the spirit of revolt. Sometimes the roman- ticism of Keats, a luxurious heaping up of exquisite details, is the exact opposite. It may be the passion for things as they are. The delight in the bee and the flower brings no yearning for things as they should be. Often, however, Keats is the idealist with a spirit of intense longing. Again, in a few lines in the Ode to the Nightingale, in La Belle Dame Sans Merci, in The Eve of St. Mark, Keats is with Coleridge. In Shelley it is, more broadly, the spirit of revolt; at its best, a peculiarly refined and intense spirit of aspiration and of intellectual adventure. In Scott it is a passion for the grandeur of the past which, however, by no means implies a dissatisfaction with the present. Professor 128 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 Phelps finds the most notable characteristics of romanticism to be: *' Subjectivity, Love of the Picturesque, and a Reactionary Spirit." Theodore Watts-Dunton 's phrase, ''The Renaissance of Wonder," is worth a book on romanticism. These assertions, while they do not absolutely define romanticism, are sufficiently inclusive of those qualities generally urged in defence of all newly discovered eighteenth century romanticists so that we may use them as touchstones. It is certainly true that the great poets, if not all poets, are both romantic and classical. But one temper generally predom- inates. It will take a hardy investigator to find much roman- ticism in the first few decades of the eighteenth century. For my part, beginning as romanticism-hunter, I have gradually parted with my hopes. The amount of neo-classical survival even among the poets of the first third of the nineteenth century, is much more striking than the amount of significant romantic material even in the last half of the eighteenth. The classicism of Byron is much more remarkable than the romanticism of Gray and Collins. The Neo-classical Despotism, once fully established, was profound and lasting. In the search for neo-classical beginnings, in the last infirmity of noble scholars, the desire to find signs of a new movement farther back than any investigator has hitherto indicated, we exaggerate the relations of Ben Jonson, Waller, Denham, even Dryden, to this Neo-classical Despotism. I have already tried to make it clear that the latter part of the seventeenth century was not an Augustan Age, as the text-books would have it, but an Age of Literary Anarchy, that neo-classicism gained head- way only with desperate slowness. The Neo-classical Despotism may be said (for convenience only, for exact dates are impossible), to have struggled into supremacy by 1709, the date of the appear- ance of the Pastorals of Pope and Ambrose Philips, of Prior's first poems, of the opening numbers of the Tatler, of the writing of Pope 's dictatorial Essay on Criticism. There is a wholesome lesson in a study of the development, for better or worse, of Spenser-criticism in the hands of the 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 129 classicists and romanticists. It shows the inability of one age ^ to appreciate all the merits of a supreme poet at one time. Be- cause of ephemeral whims men term one aspect bad which the next age will admire. The neo-classicist appreciated sides of Spenser to which the romanticists became stone-blind. The romanticists revealed beauties in Spenser that had been tarnished by the disregard of a century and some beauties, perhaps, that had never before been discerned. Two fallacious ideas about the neo-classical attitude toward Spenser are current ; that he was unpopular even among literary men, and that the Augustans approached him in a spirit of mockery. Professor Phelps, for instance, quotes some platitudes in Addison's boyish Epistle to Sacheverel to indicate how little Addison knew or cared about Spenser. But he does not take into consideration a long series of admiring references in Addi- son's mature work, including a prose allegory professedly in the manner of Spenser which Addison once aspired to develop in poetic form. Similarly Professor Phelps makes too much of the Spenserian burlesque. The Alley, which Pope and Gay wrote in a few moments of triviality. If we examined consistently all the vulgar parodies in eighteenth century poetry and made the same deductions, we should be forced to conclude that the eigh- teenth century admired nobody, ancient or modern. Eighteenth century England devoted occasional moments of recreation to that peculiarly pointless type of obscenity that is now current among boys at grammar schools. It is of little significance. The essential truth is that the neo-classicists had a genuine admiration for Spenser, and that they appreciated a great aspect of his genius now misunderstood through the influence of literary epicures, from Leigh Hunt down to our "Art for Art's Sake" men who know not what they do. The Augustans appreciated Spenser 's moral earnestness and his allegory. Nowadays we have a morbid fear of didacticism. We consider it all bad. The Augustans considered it all good. The golden mean is to know the difference between crude didacticism — almost any sermon, the Essay on Man — and artistic didacticism — the last lines of the Ode to a Grecian Urn, the first lines of Tennyson's Ulysses. 130 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 The Augustans also knew and often named many of Spenser's qualities which we admire today, his sweetness, his peculiar kind of naive simplicity, his tenderness, his copious fancy. They wrote so-called Spenserian ' ' Imitations, ' ' not as a mere literary exercise but because one of their fundamental ideals was to imitate. And the Augustan imitations of Spenser are no more unlike the model than their Virgilian imitations are unlike their idol, Virgil. It is well to begin an account of the attitude of the Augustan critics towards Spenser with an investigation of the ideas of the two dictators, Addison and Pope. In 1694 Addison's Epistle to Sacheverel, a very youthful account of the greatest English poets, appeared. It is simply a succession of boyish platitudes in decorous couplets and is insignificant from every point of view. Whatever he may have known or thought about Spenser at first, Addison became, in his mature years, a deep admirer of The Faerie Queene. A comment in the Spectator (No. 62) where he made famous classification of the kinds of "Wit," is extremely significant because it is at once thoroughly Augustan and in praise of Spenser. Whatever romantic tendencies Addison may have felt, he here admires Spenser because Spenser, if you please, is at one with all true believers. He is with Monsieur Boileau. "As true Wit consists in the Eesemblance of Ideas, and false "Wit in the Eesemblance of Words, according to the foregoing Instances; there is another kind of Wit which consists partly in the Eesemblance of Ideas, and partly in the Eesemblance of Words; which for Distinction Sake I shall call mixt Wit. This Kind of Wit is that which abounds in Cowley more than in any Author that ever wrote. Mr. Waller has like- wise a great deal of it. Mr. Dryden is very sparing in it. Milton had a Genius much above it. Spencer is in the same class with Milton. The Italians, even in their Epic Poetry are full of it. Monsieur Boileau, who formed himself upon the Ancient Poets, has everywhere rejected it with Scorn.'' For US the significant points to notice are : the neo-classical mania for mechanical definition and classification, the surprising attack on the immortal Mr. Waller, the usual Augustan onslaught on the Italian poets, the fact that Spenser and Milton are classed with the divine Monsieur Boileau and the venerable Ancients, even 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 131 above Dry den. Plainly the Augustan had no need to think meanly of Spenser here. It must be added, however, that Spen- ser, from another point of view, was once grouped by his urbane critic with the censured Italians. In the Spectator, Number 297, he wrote : "Milton has interwoven in the Texture of his Fable some particulars which do not seem to have Probability enough for an Epic Poem, particu- larly in the Actions which he ascribes to Sin and Death. . . . Such alle- gories rather savour of the Spirit of Spencer and Ariosto, than of Homer and Vergil." But our critic seems to have recanted. For in a subsequent num- ber (419), Addison wrote of what Dryden called ''The Fairy Way of Writing" in a tone that has been called romantic, and lauded these ''allegories." ''There is another sort of imaginary Beings, that we sometimes meet with among the Poets, when the Author represents any Passion, Appetite, Virtue or Vice, under a visible Shape and makes it a Person or an Actor in his Poem. . . . We find a whole Creation of the like shadowy Persons in Spencer, who had an admirable talent in Eepresentations of this kind. ' ' However romantic the general tenets of this paper may be con- sidered, the comments on Spenser are but that praise of allegory which was becoming orthodox among the Augustans. We may assume that, at this latter date, Addison would have been less ready to have his fling at Milton's Sin and Death, at Spenser and the Italians. Indeed the neo-classical admiration for the allegory of The Faerie Queene, though native to the didactic temperament of the eighteenth century, doubtless received some stimulus from the words of the revered Addison. He asserts that : ''Allegories, when well chosen, are like so many Tracks of Light in / a discourse, that makes everything about them clear and beautiful, "i V Identifying "Fables," for the moment, with allegory he writes approvingly : "Spencer's Fairy Queen is one continued Series of them from the Beginning to the end of that admirable Work. "2 He regrets the little cultivation of allegory and, in the Guardian for September 4, 1713, leaves us his most interesting tribute to Spenser : 1 Spectator, 421. 2 Spectator, 183. 132 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 "Though this kind of composition was practised by the finest authors among the ancients, our country-man, Spenser, is the last writer of note who has applied himself to it with success. I was once thinking to have written a whole canto in the spirit of Spenser, and in order to do it, contrived a fable of imaginary persons and characters. I raised it on that common dispute between the com- parative perfections and preeminence between the two sexes. Since I have not time to accomplish this work, I shall present my reader with the naked fable, reserving the embellishments of verse and poetry to another opportunity." The "fable" is then transcribed.^ It is apparent that Spenser was not only favored by Addison the critic, but was no small force in the making of those graceful and attractive allegories which were widely imitated by the host of urbane essayists in the eighteenth century who took Addison for their model. Pope's admiration for Spenser is emphatically expressed in his words to Hughes (1715).* He wrote: "Spenser has been ever a favorite poet to me; he is like a mistress, whose faults we see, but love her with them all." But Pope left little detailed criticism. His only elaborate com- ments are to be found in the Discourse on Pastoral Poetry which he prefixed to the 1717 edition of his Pastorals. This is partially borrowed from Dryden's preface to his translation of Virgil's eclogues but contains the fullest and best consideration of The Shepheards Calender that had yet appeared. The tendency to reconcile Spenser with the ' ' Ancients ' ' in true Augustan fashion is again apparent. "Among the moderns, their success has been greatest who have most endeavoured to make these ancients [viz Theocritus and Virgil] their pattern. The most considerable genius appears in the famous Tasso and our Spenser. . . . Spenser 's Calendar, in Mr. Dryden 's opinion, is the most complete work of this kind which any nation has produced ever since the time of Vergil." 3 Samuel Wesley's Poems on Several Occasions (second edition, 1763) contains a versification of The Battle of the Sexes in Prior-Spenserian stanzas. 4 Quoted by Phelps, The Beginnings of the English Eomatitic Movement, Boston, 1893, p. 53. 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 133 He critcises Spenser justly for his imitation of Mantuan's satirical eclogues and crassly for one of his chief merits, the introduction of varied stanza-forms in the poem. Spenser should have used the everlasting couplet, of course. Pope criticises Spenser for imitating the Doric of Theocritus by the use of * ' old English and country phrases." In this he may have followed Dryden who, as we have seen, once condemned and once praised. Yet Pope writes with discernment when he adds : '^As there is a difference betwixt simplicity and rusticity, so the expression of simple thoughts should be plain, but not clownish. ' ' He is the first to give Spenser credit for inventing the device of a "calendar:" ' * The addition he has made of a calendar to his eclogues is very beau- tiful; since by this, besides the general moral of innocence and sim- plicity, which is common to other authors of Pastoral, he has one peculiar to himself; he compares human life to the several seasons, and at once exposes to his readers a view of the great and little worlds, in their various changes and aspects." Yet Pope, whose name is almost always connected with decorous lawns, was the first to point out that Spenser's nature descrip- tions are not always appropriate to the month, that : "Some of his eclogues (as the sixth, eighth, and tenth for example) have nothing but their titles to distinguish them." Beginning with Dryden 's criticism, then. Pope developed the first detailed study of the Shepheards Calender. His contribu- tions are brilliant when we examine all that was written before. Never had the Shepheards Calender been at once admired and judged so discerningly. It is evident that the obscene Spen- serian stanzas, The Alley (the product of a trivial hour with Gay) can be relegated to their deserved insignificance. We have seen that the two chiefs of the Augustans of the early eighteenth century were not only warm admirers of Spen- ser but that they made distinct contributions to the development of Spenserian criticism. It is w^orth emphasizing that they did this by no foreshadowing of doctrines that may by any means be called romantic. They weighed him in the neo-classical bal- ance and found him wanting in few respects. 134 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 Pope was not the only Augustan who was stimulated by The Shepheards Calender. Mr. Phelps writes misleadingly : "Some interest in Spenser on tlie Pastoral side was aroused by Ambrose Philips (1671-1749), who was mainly inspired by Spenser in writing his Pastorals (1709).*' This is to suggest that there was a mere shadow of interest in the Spenserian pastoralist at this time. Since there was a good deal of interest, since the pastoral of this period is never noticed by the literary historians, and since it involves some important truths in connection with the Augustan attitude toward Spenser, I must examine a few of the more important figures with some detail. The formal eclogue which, by the close of the seventeenth century, contained, for the most part, the dregs of poetry, is nevertheless of very considerable importance for the student of Augustan poetry. It was, in general, a decadent form with the neo-classicists. Elsewhere I have shown how the Elizabethan pastoral, which became sprightly and lyrical and full of careless charm soon after Spenser, through the influence of innovations which he suggested when he naturalized the form in England, sank rapidly into hopeless insipidity as the classical influences came to mingle more freely with that of Spenser.^ The Virgilian bucolic song was always sickly on English soil. Decay and oblivion would seem inevitable for such anaemic verse. Yet the Augustan pastoral attained an immense vogue which lasted even into the early nineteenth century. In the skill- ful hands of Ambrose Philips, Pope, and Gay it became one of the minor forces which established the Neo-classical Despotism. In another path rough burlesque, combined with a genuine relish for the homely, led up to Allan Aamsay's blithe, fresh Gentle Shepherd and to the spirited notes of Burns ; it had its share in stimulating an interest in nature not to be found in books. The immense vogue of the pastoral may have given it some share in B I have discussed this in * ' The Golden Age of the Spenserian Pas- toral, ' ' Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, June, 1910. 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 135 the rise of the Gothic-romanticism, that jaded passion for some- thing merely new and strange which gradually became exalted into the fine spirit of revolt against what Watts-Dunton calls the Age of Acceptance. The titles of Colin 's Oriental Eclogues^ Chatterton's Arabian Eclogues, if not their content, show a vague desire to pass beyond "Nature'' as Boileau conceived it, beyond the town, beyond pseudo-imitations of the ancients, be- yond the decorous lawns of an English manor. The craze for this romantic pose which became romanticism may be indicated by one title: '' Exaltation, An Eclogue; Translated from the Original Babylonian.*'^ In the first half of the eighteenth century the influence of Spenser over the formal eclogue was remote but pervasive. In 1709 Ambrose Philips published his Pastorals in the Sixth Part of Tonson's Poetical Miscellanies. Philips, in his preface, com- plains unaccountably at the neglect of pastoral poetry. Per- haps, however, he was only hitting at its insipidity : *'It is somewhat strange to conceive, in an age so addicted to the Muses, how pastoral poetry comes to be never so much as thought upon; considering, especially, that it is of the greatest antiquity, and hath ever been accounted the foremost, among the smaller poems in dignity. '* Philips is explicit in the choice of masters : '^Virgil and Spenser made use of it as a prelude to epic poetry: But, I fear, the innocency of the subject makes it so little inviting. . . . Theocritus, Virgil, and Spenser, are the only poets who seem to have hit upon the true nature of pastoral compositions; so that it will be suflficient praise for me, if I have not altogether failed in my attempt." In the first eclogue, Lobbin (a character in Spenser's Novem- ber), like Colin Clout in Januarie and December, complains of his unrequited love : '* Lobbin, a shepherd-boy, one evening fair. Thus plained him of his dreary discontent Whilom7 did I, all as this poplar fair. Upraise my heedless head then void of care. '^ 7 The Spenserian veneer will be apparent to all students of the Shep- heards Calender in such phrases as "whilom" and "all as" and many more. 6 This poem is printed in an anthology called The Poetry of the World, London, 1791, vol. 3, p. 274. 136 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 But now Colin is the victim of the heedless Lucy. Readers of Spenser will recognize at once that Philips colors his Augustan couplets with a slight infusion of Spenserian diction. "The jolly grooms I fly, and all alone, To rocks and woods pour forth my fruitless moan. The gifts, alike, and giver she disdains And now, left heiress of the glens she'll deem Me, landless lad, unworthy her esteem. ' ' Lobbin sings, with some real charm, of his devotion if Lucy would listen. * ' How would I wander, every day, to find The choice of wildings, blushing through the rind! For glossy plums how lightsome climb the tree, How risk the vengeance of the thrifty bee ! ' ' In the second Pastoral, ''Thenot and Colinet," Colinet^ com- plains to Thenot, who is an aged shepherd as in Spenser's Fehruarie, that he had left his native land for greater gain but had become poor and ill. "My sheep quite spent through travel and ill-fare And, like their keeper, ragged grown and bare. The damp cold greensward for my nightly bed, And some slant willow 's trunk to rest my head. ' ' For this motive Philips could find inspiration in Virgil, Man- tuan, and Spenser's September. Eclogue three, ''Albino," con- tains a resolution to write pastorals because they were cultivated by Virgil and Spenser. "And Spenser, when amid the rural throng He carol 'd sweet and graz'd along the flood Of gentle Thames, made every sounding wood With good Eliza 's name to ring around. ' 'lo Angelot and Palin sing an elegy for Albino. Angelot laments, but Palin sings of hope in the vein popularized for English pas- toral elegy by Spenser in his lament for Dido. The old Spen- serian fashion of flower-passages is revived. 8 Spenser describes his Eosalind as ' * the widow 's daughter of the glen. ' * 9 A diminutive for Colin once used by Spenser himself {December y 1. 18, "careful Colinet.") 10 Spenser sang to Eliza and Thames in April. Perhaps Philips remem- bered also the Epithalamion: "The woods shall to me answer and my Eccho ring." 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 137 "O now, if ever, bring The laurell green, the smelling eglantine, And tender branches from the mantling vine, The dewy cowslip which in meadow grows, The fountain violet and the garden rose. Marsh-lilies sweet and tufts of daffodil. '^n The fourth eclogue, "Myco and Argol," opens with a pretty- picture which shows a genuine interest in nature, however frag- mentary Philips ' real knowledge of rural scenery may have been. **This place may seem for shepherd's leisure made. So close these elms inweave their lofty shade; The twining woodbine, how it climbs to breathe Eefreshing sweets around on all beneath: The ground with grass of cheerful green bespread. Through which the springing flower up-rears the head; Medley 'd with daisies white and endive blue, And honeysuckles of a purple dye, Confusion gay bright waving to the eye. ' ' Myco sings to Argol the elegy on Stella which Colinet taught him. In the fifth Pastoral, ' ' Cuddy, ' ' many shepherds sing. "Then Cuddy last (who Cuddy can excel In neat device?) his tale began to tell. "12 Cuddy's pipes are outsung by the nightingale. He takes a harp and wins. The nightingale falls dead, Cuddy bewails her, and breaks the cruel strings. The sixth Pastoral is one of the con- ventional singing contest. Philips had some real love for nature, though little apparent knowledge at first hand. He was a master of smooth verse. The influence of Spenser upon him is very marked. Like most Augus- tans, he fused the Spenserian vein with the spirit of neo-classi- 11 Compare the famous flower set-piece in Spenser 's Song to Elisa in April, and its many imitations, some of which are cited in The Golden Age of the Spenserian Pastoral referred to above. In this eclogue occur two other of Spenser's shepherd-names, Cuddy and Hobbinol. 12 The regular Spenserian trick much cultivated by Spenser and his fol- lowers. Compare : "A shepeheards boye (no better doe him call)." — Januarie. "Poore Colin Clout (who knows not Colin Clout?)." — Faerie Queene, 6, 10, 16, etc., etc. 138 University of California Fublications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 cism. The general qualities of Philips 's style may be best seen in his version of Strada's famous "Nightingale," already men- tioned, in ' ' Cuddy. ' ' Strada 's poem was very popular. It had been translated with rare fineness by John Ford. Crashaw's unpruned and exquisite fancy had twined it in a maze of true- lover 's-knots. It is instructive to compare with these the liquid passionless cadences of Philips, a clear brook which has flowed out of its wonderful forest haunts to a flat land adorned with trim paterres. The same volume of Tonson's Miscellanies (1709) contained the Pastorals of Alexander Pope, whose preface, written later, with its interesting praise and censure of the Shepheards Calen- der, has already been treated. His admiration for Spenser's Calendar-idea induced Pope to name each of his four eclogues after a season. Spenser's failure to make month, mood, and nature correspond, Pope attributed, with true Augustan ignor- ance, to the fact that : * ' The year has not enough variety in it to furnish every month with a particular description, as it may every season. ' ' Pope claims for his Pastorals : ''That they have as much variety of description, in respect to the several seasons, as Spenser's, that, in order to add to this variety, the several times of the day are observed, the rural employments in each season or time of day, and the rural scenes or places proper to such employments, not without some regard to the several ages of man, and the different passions proper to each age. **But after all, if they have any merit, it is to be attributed to some good old authors, whose works, as I had leisure to study, so, I hope, I have not wanted care to imitate." The world has long laughed and sneered at Pope's jealousy which led him to encourage the mad wag John Gay to pillory ' ' namby-pamby Philips ' ' with coarse pastoral banter. As a result the remarkable Shepherd's Week appeared in 1714. Steele, as we shall see, had placed Philips in a flattering genealogy of bucolic poets as descendant of Theocritus, Virgil, and Spenser. Pope had vented his spleen in a masterpiece of irony which he 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 139 had deluded the good-natured Addison into printing. Now, being unable to take issue with the cudgel which the stalwart *' namby-pamby Philips" had hung up in a tavern for future argument, he was glad to crouch behind Gay's wit. But Gay proved to be something more than a mere rhymster-mercenary. In his burlesque he took pride in treading the ''plain highway of Pastoral" in opposition to the ''rout and rabblement of critical gallimawfry" that was "made of late days by certain young men of insipid delicacy concerning, I wist not what, golden age, and other outrageous conceits, to which they would confine the Pastoral." Gay's introductory words throughout show the strong influence of E. K.'s preface and glosses of The Shep- heards Calender. That he got much stimulus from the more un- couth aspects of some of Spenser 's eclogues may well be believed. His comments on Spenser and avowals of indebtedness may be taken with a degree of seriousness. "For as much as I have mentioned maister Spenser, soothly I must acknowledge him a bard of sweetest memorial. Yet hath his shepherd's boy at some times raised his rustic reed to rhimes more rumbling than rural. Diverse grave points also hath he handled of churchly matter and doubts in religion daily arising, to great clerks only appertaining. What liketh me best are his names, indeed right simple and meet for the country, such as Lobbin, Cuddy, Hobbinol, Diggon, and others, some of which I have made bold to borrow. Moreover, as he called his eclogues, the shepherd's calendar, and divided the same into twelve months, I have chosen (peradventure not over-rashly) to name mine by the days of the week." There is enough of the picturesque in Spenser's eclogues to have given Gay much inspiration. Doubtless the memory of the good rustic words in The Shepheards Calender which Gay used occas- ionally gave him the main suggestion for doing something more than merely mocking Philips and stimulated him to write with some real interest of shepherdesses not "idly piping on oaten reeds, but milking the kine, tying up the sheaves, or if the hogs are astray driving them to their styes." He rose above mere burlesque when he wrote : 140 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 "Now he goes on, and sings of fairs and shows, For still new fairs before his eyes arose. How pedlar's stalls with glitt'ring toys are laid. The various fairings of the country maid. Long silken laces hang upon the twine. And rows of pins and amber bracelets shine; How the tight lass, knives, combs, and scissors spies. And looks on thimbles with desiring eyes. Of lotteries next with tuneful note he told, Where silver spoons are won, and rings of gold. The lads and lasses trudge the street along, And all the fair is crowded in his song." Gay's merry notes cleared a path for such true song of the country-side as Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd. His satirical town- eclogues, with those of Swift, Pope and Lady Mary Wortly Mon- tague, stimulated wide-spread imitation. But the languid, seri- ous pastoral with a Spenserian tinge continued. Indeed, in the utterances of Isaac Browne we find a protest against the irreverent spirits which may, with plausibility, be taken as typical of many writers of the time. For Browne, despite the choking dust and the mildew which his valiant or docile reader encounters in pulling him off the shelves of a twentieth century library, was a live figure in his day. His Piscatory Eclogues (1729)^^ went through a number of editions in answer to a demand which seems to have remained unabated to the end of the century. Gay had not ruined the artificial pas- torals for the Augustans. They were actively cultivated, as I have said, even within the portals of the nineteenth century. And in Browne's Essay in Defence of Piscatory Eclogue scoffers like Gay and Swift were scorned. "The Criticks, an arbitrary positive sort of men, have taken upon them to make a much too nice comparison between the success of Heroic and Pastoral Poetry: for they allow scarcely more than three who are deservedly ranked in the class of writers of either sort; not- withstanding there have been numerous performers in each kind, in several ages; .... for besides Theocritus, Virgil and Tasso,i* whom they make to have been the only writers of the true Pastoral, our Spen- ser, Fletcher, and Milton, and I am free to add Mr. Phillips, Mr. Con- greve and many others have a deserved praise for the pieces they have given us of this kind. 13 Browne says they were written during the summer of 1727. 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 141 "Clownish and low expressions, quaint obsolete phrases, on the one hand, though they cover a false and improper sentiment; and on the other, laboured turns of wit and amorous extravagancies, appear to be mistook by some, for its distinguishing graces." The last sentence is doubtless a hit at Gay, whose enmity he defies by his defence of Philips. Browne would have placed pastoral poetry in ''as high estimation as the epic." He pointed out that many good poets, Virgil, Tasso, Spenser, succeeded in both. Like a good Augustan he went to Rapin for definitions. ** Pastoral is the imitation of the action of a Shepherd, or one taken under that character." Nature, contended Browne, is a wide field for contemplation and beautiful ideas. Shepherds, however, were to be lovers as well as shepherds. Angling was praised. The Piscatorie Eclogues of the sedulous Spenserian, Phineas Fletcher, were mentioned with admiration. It is a striking fact that Browne, endowed with an enthusiastic angler's passion for real nature, believed in the artificial pastoral and imitated Spenser in the Augustan manner. It would be painful and unprofitable to stay longer in these arid fields. Perhaps I have bullied the reader, with my dull details, into accepting my conclusions. Through the early de- cades of the eighteenth century the formal eclogue was definitely influenced by Spenser and played some part in the development of Augustan ideals. When the taste for ''Oriental" eclogues developed, Spenserianism waned before this pastoral side of the romantic pose. We must insist, with monotonous iteration, that Spenser and neo-classicism were perfectly reconciled, that Spen- ser sowed few seeds of romanticism. As for the insipid pastoral it did, however, point vaguely to a revival of interest in nature at first hand through the brisk verses of Ramsay, Ferguson, and the more vigorous in proportion as they broke away from the shadows of Spenser and Virgil. Jolly quixotic Dick Steele, who has been mentioned as the unwitting cause of that most unpastoral feud which involved Pope, Philips and Gay, had some gallant words for Spenser. It 14 The critics generally chose Spenser rather than Tasso, as we have seen. I have quoted Dryden's explicit praise of Spenser above Tasso. 142 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 is easy to understand Sir Richard's admiration for Spenser's chivalric spirit. On November 19, 1712, he published a Spectator essay on Spenser. Professor Phelps, intent on proving the indif- ference to Spenser during the first decades of the eighteenth cen- tury, mentions the article under consideration but is inclined to question the sincerity of Steele's appreciation. But the paper certainly shows some knowledge of The Faerie Queene, Steele characteristically fixes upon Britomart, or Chastity, for special admiration. He says justly that the "Legend of Friendship" is more diffuse. At least, then, he has been reading the third and fourth books of The Faerie Queejie, a pastime that our ravens would have us believe quite out of date in our days of hurried and dyspeptic reading. He is one of those who praised Spenser's use of archaisms. ''His old Words are all true English and Numbers exquisite; and since of Words there is the Multa Eenascentur, since they are all proper, such a Poem should not (any more than Milton's) subsist all of it of common ordinary Words." Still, were this all, we might share Mr. Phelps's doubt as to Steele's sincerity. "How far Steele was prompted to all this by real love of Spenser, or by the necessity of writing his sheet is hard to say, ' ' writes Mr. Phelps. No doubt we might conjure up pictures of our beloved knight, somewhat muddled with port, tearing his hair at blear dawn over a Spectator article. A clouded but ecstatic memory of Addison on Milton and lo! our hero's pen wags madly about Spenser, upon whom he has nothing to write except what wells from his good nature unsupported by knowledge. This would make a plausible and attractive picture. But there is more evidence, besides the article quoted, to make us believe that Steele's admiration for Spenser was full of his wonted sincerity and was founded on knowledge. In the Guar- dian for April 15, 1713, he again praised Spenser and asserted that Spenser and Ambrose Philips, in their pastorals, "have copied and improved the beauties of the Ancients." He fol- lowed Dryden in asserting that the English rustic language makes imitation of the Doric of Theocritus more possible than 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 143 the language of the Latin poets. In the Guardian for April 17, 1713, he wrote a prose pastoral in which the great writers of eclogues were treated allegorically. Spenser is made the son of Virgil and the father of Philips, In 1762 Sir William Jones, the famous Orientalist, versified Steele's pastoral allegory. We may quote from the description of Spenser : *'High in the midst the plaintive Colin rose, Born on the lilied banks of royal Thame, Which oft had rung with Eosalinda's name; And, like the nymph who fir'd his youthful breast. Green were his buskins, green his simple vest. With careless ease his rustick lays he sung. And melody flow'd smoothly from his tongue: Of June's gay fruits, and August's corn he told. The bloom of April, and December's cold; The loves of Shepherds, and their harmless cheer In every month that decks the varied year." That Steele read Spenser con amove is further confirmed by a very representative article in the Tatler for July 6, 1710. "I was this morning reading the tenth canto of the fourth book of Spenser, in which Sir Scudamour relates the progress of his courtship of Amoret under a very beautiful allegory, which is one of the most natural and unmixed of any in that most excellent author." Steele appends a brief prose paraphrase * ' for the benefit of many English Lovers, who have, by frequent letters desired me to lay down some rules for the conduct of their virtuous Amours.'' Spenser is adroitly turned into the graceful eighteenth century style. Surely we may conclude that Dick Steele, devoted if not always thoughtful lover of Prue, could hardly have resisted the fascination of Spenser's court of love. Another one of the most urbane spirits of the day and a tower of Augustanism, Mat Prior, paid liberal homage to Spenser. In 1706 he brought out An Ode, Humbly Inscribed to the Queen, on the Glorious Success of Her Majesty ^s Arms. Written in Imi- tation of Spenser's style. His preface is a capital example of the ease which the Augustan found in reconciling Spenser with Augustan ideals. '*As to the style, the choice I made of following the ode in Latin determined me in English to the stanza: and herein it was impossible 144 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 not to have a mind to follow our great countryman Spenser; which I have done (as well, at least, as I could) in the manner of my expression, and the turn of my number; having only added one verse to his stanza, which I thought made the number more harmonious; and avoided such of his words as I found too obsolete. I have, however, retained some few of them, to make the colouring look more like Spenser's. . . . "My two great examples, Horace and Spenser, in many things re- semble each other; both have a height of imagination, and a majesty of expression in describing the sublime; and both know to temper those talents, and sweeten the description, so as to make it lovely as well as pompous; both have equally that agreeable manner of mixing morality with their story, and that curiosa felicitas in the choice of their diction, which every writer aims at and so few have reached; both are particu- larly fine in their images, and knowing in their numbers. ' ' Mr. Phelps quotes this passage as exhibiting "that confusion of ideals so often shown by the Augustans." He smiles at Prior's comparison of Spenser and Horace. But the comparison is per- fectly sound. Here is an Augustan who appreciated the moral- istic side of Spenser which we romanticists are too likely to neg- lect or despise. He respects Horace, a much better authority than our * ' Art for Art 's sake ' ' men, for his association of the poet and seer of morality. Prior's distortion of the Spenserian stanza was indeed an example of Augustan stupidity. He was influ- enced by the deadening cadence of the heroic couplet. In his preface to Solomon, however, Prior shows a restless dissatisfac- tion with the couplet, along with an admiration of Spenser that Mr. Phelps should not have neglected. "In our Language Spenser has not contented himself with this sub- missive Manner of Imitation [i.e., the methods of the French and Italian imitations of the orthodox Classical epics] : He launches out into flowery Paths, which still seem to conduct him into one great Road. His Fairy Queen (had it been finished) must have ended in the Account, which every Knight was to give of his Adventures, and in the accumulated praises of his Heroic Poem, but in another Cast and Figure, than any that had ever been written before. Yet it is observable, that every Hero (as far as We can judge by the Books still remaining) bears his distinguished Char- acter and represents some particular Virtue conducive to the whole Design. "If striking out into Blank Verse as Milton did (and in this kind Mr. Philipps, had he lived, would have excelled) or running the thought into Alternate and Stanza, which allows greater Variety and still pre- 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 145 serves the Dignity of the Verse; as Spenser and Fairfax have done; If either of these, I say, be a proper Kemedy for my Poetical Complaint, or if any other may be found, I dare not determine: I am only enquiring, in order to be better informed, without presuming to direct the judg- ment of Others. ' ' With all his diffidence, Prior was outspoken in his objection to the couplet. He considered it "too confined," ''too broken and weak for Epic," and that it tires both writer and reader. God knows this is all true enough of poor Prior's Solomon, the ambi- tion of his life. We may now approach the Augustan attitude toward Spenser through another medium, that of the Spenser-scholar of the period. John Hughes (1677-1720), a contributor to The Spec- tator, was the greatest Spenser-scholar of the early eighteenth century. His edition of Spenser (1715) must still be taken into account by students of The Faerie Queene}^ Hughes's methods were for the most part thoroughly Augustan. He displays the neo-classical interest in allegory and essays an elaborate discus- sion of allegory as a type of literature in the same manner in which Bossu had discussed the epic. A short citation will show how strongly Hughes was influenced by the French makers of mechanical rules for the creation of poetry. '* There is no doubt but men of critical learning, if they had thought fit, might have given us rules about Allegorical writing, as they have done about Epick, and other kinds of poetry; but they have rather chosen to let this forest remain wild, as if they thought there was some- thing in the nature of the soil which could not be so well restrained and cultivated in enclosures." 15 It may be worth noting here that Mr. Beers makes capital of Hughes 's glossary to indicate how little the eighteenth century knew of Spenser. The fact that it contains explanations of such words as ''baleful," "aghast," ''behest," "dreary," "craven," "forlorn," "carol," "foray," "guer- don," "plight," "welkin," "yore," — words well-known today through our poets — argues, thinks Mr. Beers, for eighteenth century ignorance of Spenser. Yet, to go no further, I find in the latest and best one-volume editions, the Globe and the Cambridge, that all these words, except "dreary," "craven," and "yore," are carefully explained in the glos- saries. Furthermore, eighteenth century love of learned lumber, of foot- less footnotes, and the Uke is enough explanation. Poems are constantly adorned with notes explaining allusions to the commonplaces of Greek myth. Why not argue from this that the Augustans did not know Homer, Virgil, and Ovid? 146 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 Nothing daunted, however, Hughes formulates four rules. Tried by this standard Spenser is found praiseworthy. "Spenser's conduct [in respect to allegory] is much more reasonable [than Tasso's]. As he designed his Poem upon the Plan of the Virtues by which he has entitled his several Books he scarce ever loses sight of his design." Since Hughes's fourth rule is that the allegory ''must be clear and intelligible, ' ' he censures Temple for his judgment that Spen- ser 's "moral lay too bare." But we must not come* to consider the Augustans as obsessed by their devotion to Spenser as an allegorist. They knew many of his other essential qualities. In his Remarks on the Faerie Queene Hughes writes : "The chief merit of this poem consists in that surprising vein of fabulous invention which runs through it everywhere with imagery and description more than we meet with in any modern poem. . . . His abund- ance betrays him into excess, and his judgement is overborne by the torrent of his imagination." These phrases should be remembered because, whoever first used them, they were quickly adopted by a number of writers of hand- books on poetry just as our compilers of short histories of English literature paraphrase or adopt the orthodox statements of larger works. Hughes followed Dryden in his criticism of unity in The Faerie Queene as a whole. "The several Books appear rather like so many several poems than one entire fable : each of them has its peculiar Knight, and is independent of the rest; and though some of the persons make their appearance in dif- ferent Books, yet this has very little effect in connecting them. Prince Arthur is, indeed, the principal person and has a share given him in every legend: but his part is not considerable enough in any one of them; he appears and vanishes again like a spirit; and we lose sight of him too soon to consider him as the hero of the Poem. ' ' Thomas Warton also imitated Dryden in his investigation of the unity of The Faerie Queene and the assertions in the preface to the translation of the Aeneid became, with Warton 's powerful aid, the accepted utterance. To our own day critics have merely , paraphrased or agreed with Dryden, whether they knew his comments at first hand or not. We now come to Hughes's most significant contribution to Spenserian criticism. He argues that the whole frame of The 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 147 Faerie Queene would appear monstrous if it were examined by rules of epic poetry drawn from the practice of Homer and Virgil. "But as it is plain the Author never designed it by those rules, I think it ought rather to be considered as a poem of a particular kind, describing, in a series of Allegorical adventures or episodes, the most noted virtues and vices. To compare it ... . with the models of An- tiquity would, be like drawing a parallel between the Roman and the Gothick architecture. In the first there is, doubtless, a more natural grandeur and simplicity; in the latter we find great mixtures of beauty and barbarism, yet assisted by the invention of inferior ornaments; and though the former is more majestick in the whole, the latter may be very surprising, and agreeable in its parts. ' ' This looks as though it might lead us by degrees to romanticism. But in a moment we are brought stoutly back within the Augus- tan enclosure. The Orlando Furioso of Ariosto was frequently compared with The Faerie Queene, by the neo-classicists, much to the reproach of the former. Like a true Augustan, Hughes insists that it is Spenser's moral allegory which exalts Ariosto 's Romantic trash into heroic poetry. "In the Orlando Furioso we everywhere meet with an exuberant invention, joined with great liveliness and facility of description, yet debased by frequent mixtures of the comick genius, as well as many shocking indecorums. . . . On the other hand, Spenser's Fable, though often wild, is, as I have observed, always emblematical; and this may very much excuse likewise that air of romance in which he has followed the Italian author. The perpetual stories of knights, giants, castles, and enchantments, and all that train of legendary adventures, would indeed appear very trifling, if Spenser had not found a way to turn them into Allegory, or if a less masterly hand had filled up the draught; but it is surprising to observe how much the strength of the painting is superior to the design." It is characteristic neo-classicism in Hughes to select, as one of the great cantos of The Faerie Queene, the very unimpressive episode of Duessa's visit to Hell, doubtless because it seems like an "imitation" of Virgil.^^ But his taste is generally of a high order. He takes delight in the first appearance of Prince Arthur, the first description of Belphoebe, the Mammon episode, the 16 Faerie Queene, 1. 5. 148 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 Bower of Bliss, the Garden of Adonis, the Masque of Cupid, the marriage of the Thames and the Medway, Colin Clout piping to the Graces, the Mutability fragment. He names, indeed, prac- tically all of the supreme passages as his chosen reading. There was, perhaps, a tinge of romanticism in Hughes. Some interest- ing lines in his Essay on Allegorical Poetry might be classed as romantic with considerable plausibility. ^'Allegory is indeed the Fairy Land of poetry, peopled by imagina- tion; its inhabitants are so many apparitions; its woods, caves, wild beasts, rivers, mountains, and palaces, are produced by a kind of magical power, and are all visionary and typical; and it abounds in such licenses as would be shocking and monstrous, if the mind did not attend to the mystick sense contained under them. ' ' But few romanticists would defend allegory with such warmth. Romantic eloquence and neo-classical reasoning I should call this. Doubtless Hughes, like all large men, was both romantic and classical. But the essential feature to us is that, like the other critics of his time, he found Spenser, judged by purely Augustan standards, a great poet. We may dismiss him by citing what seems to have been his most ambitious attempt to hit off Spen- ser's qualities concisely and comprehensively. It is one of the most acute and inclusive criticisms of Spenser ever made. ^* [Spenser] was of the serious turn, had an exalted and elegant mind, a warm and boundless fancy, and was an admirable imager of virtues and vices, which was his particular talent. The embellishments of description are rich and lavish in him beyond comparison; and as this is the most striking part of poetry, especially to young readers, I take it to be the reason that he has been the father of more poets among us than any other of our writers." Joseph Spence, the Boswell of Pope, was another important Augustan admirer of Spenser who may be grouped among the scholars with Hughes. In a Dissertation on the Defects of Spen- ser's Allegory he found the fioet not fulfilling certain neo-classi- cal requirements. Spenser, it seems, should not have mixed the "fables of Heathendom with the truths of Christianity." Boileau had damned this procedure. Spenser, too, was occasion- ally guilty of misrepresenting the allegories of the ancients. This, 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 149 to be sure, is mere neo-classical pedantry. But concerning *'the Allegories of his [Spenser's] own invention" the censor wrote some shrewd criticisms that speak well for the soundness of neo- classicism at its best. Though he considered the invention in The Faerie Queene to be ''one of the richest and most beautiful that perhaps ever was," he found good cause for complaint. Spenser's allegories are sometimes too complicated, overdone. /\ r^ Discord, who looks in two directions, whose tongue, even heart, is split, is justly cited as an example of distorted fancy. Spenser is fairly taken to task for his freedom in describing loathsome figures with filthy detail. The poet is unfortunately sometimes merely extravagant rather than great. So it is when he describes the Dragon's tail as three furlongs in length. These and similar sensible complaints are made. The usual regret that Spenser fol- lowed Ariosto too closely and the ancients too little is retailed. There is the orthodox lament at the need of rules. ''The reason of my reproducing these instances, is only to show what faults the greatest Allegorist may commit; whilst the manner of allegor- izing is left upon so unfixed and irregular a footing as it was in his time, and is still among us. ' ' And Spence goes on to apologize profusely for his strictures and shows unmistakable enthusiasm for The Faerie Queene. **If they [the faults noted] should prejudice a reader at all against so fine a writer; let him read almost any one of his entire Cantos, and it will reconcile him to him again." Mr. Phelps and Mr. Beers, in asserting that the Augustans looked with dull eyes on Spenser, write of the apologetic tone of his defenders. But here, at least, is a solid Augustan who apolo- gizes to Augustans for presuming to take Spenser to task. John Upton, the editor of Spenser, passed far beyond any other neo-classicist in his reconcilement of The Faerie Queene and augustanism. His Remarks on the Action and History of the Faerie Queene strove zealously but somewhat speciously to defend Spenser's unity on purely classical grounds. ''How readily has every one acquiesced in Dryden's opinion? 'That the action of this Poem is not one'." 150 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 Critics, we are told, attacked old Homer once in the same way. So Upton sets out to vindicate Homer and Spenser in one breath '*as they have both fallen under one common censure." Spen- ser's action centres around Arthur as Homer's around Achilles. "Nor can it be fairly objected to the unity of the Iliad, that, when Achilles is removed from the scene of action, you scarcely hear him mentioned in several books.'' Agammemnon, Diomed, Hector become the heroes of successive books. "For his extensive plan required his different heroes to be shown in their different characters and attitudes. What, therefore, you allow to the old Grecian, be not so ungracious as to deny your own countryman.'' "Again 'tis observable that Homer's poem though he sings the anger of Achilles, is not called the Achilleid, but the Iliad; because the action was at Troy. So Spenser does not call his Poem by the name of his chief hero: but because his chief hero sought for the Faerie Queene in Fairy Land, and therein performed his various adventures, therefore he entitled his Poem The Faerie Queene. ' ' Homer's device of keeping Achilles away from the field until he outshines all is compared with the purposed holding oif of Arthur till the end where he was to accomplish all that the other knights had failed to do. Upton is unique in so stoutly maintaining Spenser's absolute agreement with Homer. But it is obvious that he did not strike at the roots of the matter. His glittering palace of argument was erected on sand like the House of Pride : ' ' A stately Pallace built of squared bricke. Which cunningly was without mortar laid. Whose wals were high, but nothing strong nor thick, And golden foile all over them displaid. " These more authoritative voices were swelled by many less elaborate but equally laudatory utterances. The good Wesley family left tributes. Samuel Wesley, the elder, laid down poetic precepts in his Epistle to a Friend concerning Poetry (1700) and exhorted him that he might "Some new Milton or a Spenser grow." Samuel Wesley, the younger, versified Addison's Spen- 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 151 serian allegory of The Battle of the Sexes already mentioned.^^ John Wesley among other works, recommended to Methodists Spenser's Faerie Queene in the second year of a course in aca- demic learning. An essay Of the Old English Poets and Poetry in The Muses' Mercury for June, 1707, praised The Faerie Queene which "Surpriz'd and charmed everybody, and still has the same Effect. ' ' Giles Jacob, in An Historical Account of the Lives and Writings of Our most Considerable English Poets (1720) and in the Poetical Register (1723), praised Spenser in the manner of Dryden and Hughes. **He was the first of our English Poets that ever brought Heroick Poesy to any Perfection; and Dryden says the English have only to boast of Spenser and Milton in Heroick Poetry. **His Fairy Queen, for great Invention and Poetick Height, is judged little inferiour, if not equal to the chief of the antient Greeks and Latins. He had a large Spirit, a sharp Judgement, and a Genius beyond any that have writ since Virgil; his Flights of Fancy are noble and his Execution excellent; but sometimes his Judgement is overborne by the Torrent of his Imagination,i8 and he seem'd to want a true Idea and Uniformity; though whatever Fault this may be, he endows all his Heroes with some moral Virtue (though in a romantick Story) and makes Instruction the Subject of his Epick Poem, which is very much to his Praise." Elizabeth Cooper's Historical and Poetical Medley or Muses Library (1737) shows considerable knowledge of Spenser's con- temporaries and some novelty of critical opinion. In praise of Buckhurst 's combination of ' ' allegory and fable ' ' she adds : ' ' Spencer made a Noble Use of so fine a model, overflowing with Tenderness, Courtesy, and Benevolence, reconciling Magnificence with Decorum, Love, Fidelity; and, together with Fairfax, opening to us a new World of Ornament, Elegance, and Taste. She voices a sentiment that grows clamorous with men like the Wartons : * ' Though Chaucer and Spenser are ever nam 'd with much Eespect, not many are intimately acquainted with their beauties. ' ^ But this assertion cannot be taken as an argument for any notable unpopularity of Spenser in the eighteenth century when 17 Poems on Several Occasions, second edition, 1763. Wesley says the first edition was printed without his knowledge. 18 This clause is almost verbatim from Hughes. 152 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 we consider how narrow is his audience today. Like all good Augustans, she bemoans the fact that Spenser ** debauch 't his taste with the extravagancies of Ariosto." She observes, like the other critics, that his influence has been great. And she chooses for her selection the Masque of Cupid, not because it is the best passage possible but because she thinks it is less known. Of greater importance is Mr. Cihher's Lives of the Foets^^ because it is a patchwork of critical dicta from Dryden, Hughes and others, and represents the consensus of opinions among the cultivated Augustans of the first half of the century. It shows, moreover, some learning and a real knowledge of Spenser 's minor works. **No writer ever found a nearer way to the heart than he,2o and his verses have a peculiar happiness of recommending the author to our friendship as well as raising our admiration; one cannot read without fancying oneself transported into Fairy Land, and there conversing with the Graces, in that enchanted region.21 In elegance of thinking and fer- tility of imagination, few of our English authors have approached him and no writers have such power as he to awake the spirit of poetry in others. Cowley owns that he derived his inspiration from him; and I have heard the celebrated Mr. James Thomson, the author of the Seasons, and justly esteemed one of our best descriptive poets, say, that he formed himself upon Spenser: and how closely he pursued the model, and how nobly he has imitated him, whoever reads his Castle of Indolence with taste will readily confess. ' ' The critic announces emphatically: ^'To produce authorities in favour of Spenser, as a poet, I should reckon an affront to his memory." He thinks that ''the works of Spenser will never perish." He attacks the obsolete words. He criticizes the unity of The Faerie Queene exactly as Dryden, Hughes, and Thomas Warton criti- cized it. But there is enough enthusiasm and enough that is new to convince us. 19 The exact authorship of this work is, I believe, still a matter of dis- pute. Nor do I know the date of the first edition. I have used the edition of 1758. 20 Verbatim in Mrs. Elizabeth Cooper. 21 This clause is substantially from Hughes. 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Speriser. 153 A reference in William Whitehead's A Charge to the Poets (1762), a plea for catholic taste, has something of the interest of Cihher's Lives in that it gives us a suggestion of the opinions of the cultivated many. **Some hate all rhyme; some seriously deplore That Milton wants that one enchantment more. Tir 'd with th ' ambiguous tale or antique phrase, O'er Spenser's happiest paintings, loveliest lays, Some heedless pass: while some with transport view Each quaint old word, which scarce Eliza knew. And, eager as the fancied knights, prepare The lance, and combat in ideal war Dragons of lust, and giants of despair Why be it so; and what each thinks the best Let each enjoy: but not condemn the rest." We now turn to the great dictator. It is unfortunate that Samuel Johnson left us no rounded estimate of Spenser. His allusions to him are frequent, but they are mainly due to a vigor- ous and wholesome crusade which Johnson was making against two hollow literary fashions: the insipid pastoral and the arti- ficial ** Imitation. " In his Life of West Dr. Johnson laid his heavy hand on ' * Imitation. " **His Imitations of Spenser are very successfully performed, both with respect to the metre, the language, and the fiction; and being engaged at once by the excellence of the sentiments, and the artifice of the copy, the mind has two amusements to-gether. But such composi- tions are not to be reckoned among the great achievements of intellect, because their effect is local and temporary, they appeal not to reason or passion, but to memory, and pre-suppose an accidental or artificial State of mind. An imitation of Spenser is nothing to a reader, however acute, by whom Spenser has never been perused. Works of this kind may de- serve praise, as proofs of great industry, and great nicety of observa- tion; but the highest praise, the praise of genius, they cannot claim. The noblest beauties of art are those of which the effect is co-extended with rational nature, or at least with the whole circle of polished life; what is less than this can be only pretty, the plaything of fashion and the amusement of a day. ' ' It is absurd, of course tQ quote this admirable criticism as evi- dence that Johnson thought meanly of Spenser. The impressive fact is that the doctor had hit upon one of the greatest causes of the insignificance of eighteenth century poetry. The Augus- 154 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 tan ideal of imitation has its good points. The more romantic poets have imitated too, but with a noble independence as well. As practised by the Augustans it became mere languid academic exercise. Except for Thomson's Castle of Indolence and Shen- stone's School-Mistress f which transcend the mere exercise in versification, the Spenserian imitation of the eighteenth century deserved the doctor's censure. In the Rambler for May 14, 1751, Johnson proved that imitation, not Spenser, was his aversion bj^ a well-directed attack on the ideal of imitation in general. In a spirit far from Augustan he strikes at the very roots of the matter. *'In the boundless regions of possibility, which fiction claims for her dominion, there are a thousand flowers unplucked, a thousand fountains unexhausted, combinations of imagery yet unobserved, and races of ideal inhabitants not hitherto described. ' ' Imitation, he thinks, is ruinous to the imagination. Even Virgil is shown to have been often seduced into blemishes in his imita- tions of Homer because he was too eager to use all of Homer's material. The doctor then turns to the pestiferous Spenserian imitation. "To imitate the fictions and sentiments of Spenser can incur no reproach, for allegory is perhaps one of the most pleasing vehicles of instruction. But I am far from extending the same respect to his diction or his stanza. His style was in his own time allowed to be vicious, so darkened with old words, peculiarities of phrase, and so remote from common use, that Jonson boldly pronounces him to have written no language. ' '22 Outside of the attack on imitation, Johnson is here purely neo- classical. He praises the moral allegory and damns the stanza and diction. Yet in the Preface to his Dictionary, compiled at the same time he was at work upon the Rambler, he cites Spen- ser's language as standard for its time.^^ The burly doctor smote the pastoral, another curse of Augus- tan poetry, in the Rambler for July 24, 1750. He was plainly 22 Johnson doubtless knew only the criticisms of Sidney, Jonson, Daven- ant, none of the host of admiring sixteenth and seventeenth century refer- ences to Spenser before Dryden 's. 23 Preface, edition 1825, p. 48. 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 155 infuriated by the languid eclogues of his day and was hardly in the mood to sing the praises of the masters who were indirectly responsible for their existence. Johnson gives some praise to Virgil but has much to blame. His only reference to The Shep- heards Calender is a just and severe attack upon the crabbed archaisms of November. His general animadversions are per- fectly sound. He points out the inconsistency between the homely dialect and the learned thought that many pastorals affect. Yet praise of Spenser is not lacking in Johnson's works. In his Life of Ambrose Philips he retails the high praise of Spen- ser's pastoral poetry in the Guardian which we have already seen, though he says nothing at first hand. That he could appre- ciate a good Spenserian imitation is proved by his admiration for Shenstone's School-Mistress. Two passages in the Preface to Shakespeare (1765) imply some praise of Spenser. Of Shake- speare 's diction and versification he writes : ' * To him we must ascribe the praise, unless Spenser may divide it with him, of having first discovered to how much smoothness and harmony the English language could be softened. ' ' A propos of A Midsummer-Night 's Dream we read : "Fairies in his time were much in fashion; common tradition had made them familiar, and Spenser's poem had made them great." It is greatly to be regretted that Johnson never wrote defin- itely on Spenser. His sane criticism, his clear-eyed kindliness would have made a great contribution. Reports concerning the omission of Spenser in The Lives of the Poets are conflicting. A Life of Johnson by Thomas Tyson in The Gentleman's Maga- zine for December, 1784^* states that : ''His [Johnson's] employers wanted him to undertake the life of Spenser. But he said Warton had left little or nothing for him to do." In Hannah More 's Anecdotes she relates : ''Johnson told me he had been with the king that morning, who en- joined him to add Spenser to his Lives of the Poets. I seconded the motion; he promised to think of it but said the booksellers had not included him in their list of poets. ' '25 2-1 Boswell {Life, ed. Hill, 3, 308) says Tyson's statements are unre- liable. 25 Hill 's note says the Lives were not directed by Johnson but ' ' he was to furnish a Preface to any poet the booksellers pleased." {Life, 3, 137.) 156 University of California Publications in Modern Philology, [Vol. 2 Johnson's letters to Warton are full of a kindly interest in the forthcoming Observations on the Faerie Queene. He offers assistance. But a critique on Spenser never came. It seems to me fair to assume that Johnson's admiration for Spenser was genuine and considerable. His most harsh animad- versions appear only where he is heated in the act of striking some contemporary affectation, imtation or the pastoral, and they were probably exaggerated for his main purpose. Johnson was a truer classicist than the earlier Augustans and pointed to some of their most serious faults with unerring skill. Johnson's Phillipics against imitation were echoed by many who saw their justice. Robert Lloyd, wayward debauchee and light-hearted imitator of Mat Prior's Familiar Verse, wrote a Spenserian poem, before he damned the genre, which demands attention because of its literary criticism. In 1751 he published The Progress of Envy, a Spenserian imitation, in which he abused poor Lauder, the Scotch tutor who spent his learning in the endeavour to convict Milton of plagiarism. The poem is cast in a form perhaps a compromise of the Spenserian stanza and Prior's adaptation in his Ode to the Queen.^^ The poem opens with the favorite Augustan imitation of Spenser's moralistic overtures — here a lament at the power of Envy. Mount Par- nassus is described. On either side of Phoebus sat "a peerless wight," Spenser and Milton. Not far from these Dan Chaucer, with reverend locks silvered with eld, was seated in lofty emi- nence. Next was Shakespeare, "irregularly great." Nearby stood the beautiful maids Fancy and Nature. But Envy, leav- ing Acheron, went to the gloomy cave of her deformed sister Malice and exhorted her to attack Milton. In a serpent-drawn chariot they went to Caledonian plains, where dwelt the eldest son of Malice (Lauder). Together they attacked Parnassus and the son of Malice overcame Milton by his venom. But the poet recovered when "Douglas and Truth" appeared. In 1755 Lloyd raised his voice, with Johnson and other dis- ss ababbcbcC and ababcdcdeE. Lloyd used a stanza rhyming ababcdcdD. 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 157 senters, against this very modish passion of imitation. In To .... about to Publish a Volume he attacked even those who strove to imitate ''Mat Prior's unaffected ease," a thing which he himself never ceased doing throughout his career. Equally- cursed are those who imitate Swift, Milton, or Pope. "Others, who aim at fancy, choose To woo the gentle Spenser's Muse. The poet fixes for his theme An allegory or a dream: Fiction and truth to-gether joins Through a long waste of flimsy lines: Fondly believes his fancy glows And image upon image grows: Thinks his strong Muse takes wondrous flights, Whene'er she sings of peerless wights, Of dens, of palfreys, spells and knights, Till allegory, Spenser's veil T ' instruct and please in moral tale, With him's no veil the truth to shroud, But one impenetrable cloud." All this is very true, but the outcries of Johnson and his fol- lowers were of no avail. With Oliver Goldsmith, Johnson's gentle admirer, we must cease our examination of the bootless complaints against imitation and of the long role of Augustan critics, though their opinions were still voiced by many sur- vivers for some time after the Romantic Triumph.^^ Goldsmith followed Johnson in his admiration for Shenstone but general opposition to Spenserian imitation.^* But he showed a warm appreciation of Spenser himself in a review of Church's edition of The Faerie Queene in Smollett's Critical Review (February, 1759 ) . Thanks to Church : "We can now tread the regions of fancy without interruption, and expatiate on fairy wilds such as our great magician has been pleased to represent them." Unlike Johnson, Goldsmith shared the romanticists' distaste for the allegory. 27 Among the many protests against Spenserian imitation is one which should not be completely passed over. This is by Hume (History of Eng- land, ed. 1773, V, 492, VI, 195). 28 The Beauties of English Poesy, 1767, vol. 1, introductory remarks to Shenstone 's School-mistress. 158 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 ''There is a pleasing tranquillity of mind which ever attends the reading of this ancient poet. We leave the ways of the present world, and all the ages of primeval innocence and happiness rise to our view. . . . The imagination of his reader leaves reason behind, pursues the tale without considering the allegory, and upon the whole, is charmed without instruction." But there are plenty of fashionable Augustan dicta. ' * No poet, ' ' he states, '* enlarges the imagination more than Spenser." He cites Cowley, Gray, Akenside, and others as examples. He warns poets to imitate ''his beauties" not ''his words" which are "justly fallen into disuse." He makes the usual complaint that Spenser followed Virgil too little and vicious mediaeval and Italian models too much. But the essay shows clearly how native to Goldsmith's gentle irresponsible spirit were the lovely dreams of The Faerie Queens. I believe that we have evidence a plenty, probably ad nauseam^ for my contentions. But my conception of the August ans is worth establishing at the expense of much dry-as-dust catalogu- ing. We are gradually outgrowing the ill-considered contempt with which our romantic grandfathers estimated the Augustans. Let us now give over that somewhat supercilious or even false spirit of toleration with which we try to justify the Augustans in so far as they show symptoms, real or chimerical, of romanticism. Take them for what they were and what do we find? We find that they could at least accord a poet like Spenser warm appre- ciation from a purely neo-classical point of view and that interest in Spenser did not necessarily have anything whatever to do with romanticism. We find that the term ' ' Spenserian Revival, ' ' which has long decked the chapters of many a text-book, is a misnomer. We find that the Augustans, like ourselves, occas- ionally said asinine things about Spenser but that they had an appreciation of his high seriousness much sounder than that which has gone current since the Triumph of Romanticism. 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 159 VI ; THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANTICISM In the foregoing pages it has been maintained that a thorough- going neo-elassicist could admire Spenser discerningly and imitate him with perfect consistency. Yet the influence of Spen- ser has been considered by Professor Phelps and Professor Beers as one of the great causes of the romantic revival. With this idea I cannot agree. It is rather that, once romanticism had gained a foothold, Spenser was imitated in a romantic way. The Augustans had admired Spenser for his moral earnestness — as Milton had admired him. They appreciated the beauties of his allegory which we often mock hastily and inconsistently. Despite their occasional disapproval of his stanza and diction, they were naturally always impressed by his highly wrought technique. It was in no spirit of romantic revolt, then, that an Augustan penned his mechanical "Imitation of Spenser." But once the romantic seeds were sown there was infinite suggestion to be found in Spenser for an Apostle of Wonder. The earliest exponents of what they vaguely termed Gothic or romantic were often not strong men with a new faith, but decadents weary of the old. It was the passion of jaded, bookish minds for novelty in no exalted sense rather than that spirit of idealised aspiration by which Professor W. A. Neilson has finely characterized the force which stirred the great poets of the early nineteenth century. The tinsel trappings of a Walpole, surely, are not romanticism according to our exalted ideas. The eighteenth century men often connected romanticism with a com- fortable melancholy and crocodile tears. Even in our o\\ti day Edgar Allan Poe has argued for the indispensability of melan- choly (much more sincere, to be sure), in poetry. The jaded writers of the latter half of the eighteenth century cultivated graveyards, gloomy abbeys, thunderstorms, all comfortably con- 160 University of California Fublications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 jured up in the warm and snug seclusion of the study. It was as artificial as Pope's pastorals. And we must be cautious about linking this romantic pose too closely witli the various types of romanticism represented by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. With this warning in mind we may turn to the men who are often named as the forerunners of romanticism. The name of William Thompson, a minor poet of talents ill rewarded by posterity, should be mentioned as that of the earliest romanticist who has any proper connection with our study. Thompson had a very catholic taste. He admired Elizabethan, Marinist, and Augustan alike. But he is only a romanticist in so far as he is a belated Elizabethan, and he sounds none of the new notes that we shall find in the later romanticism. The preface to Thompson's An Hymn to May, a luxuriant imitation of Spenser, contains, however, some rather remarkable doctrine for the first decades of the eighteenth century.^ It is a defence of his Elizabethan sensuousness. ''As Spenser is the most descriptive and florid of all our English writers, I attempted to imitate his manner in the following vernal poem. I have been very sparing of the antiquated words which are too frequent in most of the imitations of this author; however I have introduced a few here and there which are explain 'd at the bottom of each page where they occur. ... I followed Fletcher's measure in his Purple Island; a poem printed at Cambridge in twelve cantos, in quarto, scarce heard of in this age, yet the best in the allegorical way (next to the Fairy Queen), in the English language. I hope I have no apology to make for describing the the beauties, the pleasures, and the loves of the season in too tender or too florid a manner. The nature of the subject required a luxuriousness of versification, and a softness of sentiment; but they are pure and chaste at the same time: otherwise this canto had neither ever been written or offered to the public." Here is romanticism of a kind. Thompson is certainly one of the first of the eighteenth century poets to seek Spenser rather as a poet of ardent emotion and sensuous glow than as a poet of vast moral visions. But Thompson uses many neo-classical authori- 1 An Hymn to May was not published until 1757, but Thompson was writing poetry with this same romantic richness of colour at least as early as 1736. 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 161 ties, including Prior, Davenant, and Scaliger. He made a wide but short-lived reputation and certainly could not have had any- appreciable influence on the rise of romanticism. Perhaps no men among the early romanticists have loomed larger and larger in the eyes of recent critics than the brothers Joseph and Thomas Warton. Both must occupy a considerable position in any history of Spenser's influence. Their passion for The Faerie Queene was doubtless learned from their father, Thomas Warton, senior, who wrote a very Augustan Spenserian imitation in the stanza adopted by William Whitehead and a group of the most barren followers of Spenser that fill the dull pages of a history of eighteenth century poetry. The elder War- ton's poem. Philander, An Imitation of Spencer: Occasioned hy the Death of Mr. William Jening, Nov., 1706, is only a typical pastoral elegy of the time. Two stanzas may be resurrected to show from what loins sprang the great Wartons. **When rural Spencer sung, the listening Swains Wou'd oft' forget to feed the fleecy Throng; The fleecy Throng, charm 'd with the melting Strains, Fed not — ^but on the Musick of his Song His MuUa would in lingering Bubbles play. Till his pleas 'd waters stole unwillingly away. **And cou'd my Verse but with its Theme compare, Moving as Spencer I my Grief wou'd tell; The ravish 'd Bard shou'd to Elysium hear A second Colin mourn a second Astrophel. My lays shou'd more than equal glory boast And the fam'd Mulla be in smoother Channel lost. "2 The good man's two sons, though to be ranked among the great- est students of Spenser, did not improve upon their father on the matter of Spenserian imitations. In The Pleasures of the Melancholy Thomas Warton alludes to Spenser in a somewhat romantic spirt. 2 A reference, of course, to Spenser 's Astrophel, an elegy to Sidney, in the same stanza as Warton 's elegy, though Spenser did not here employ his final alexandrine. Joseph Warton, in an Ode on his brother's death has a similar desireful allusion to Spenser's Astrophel and this stanza was almost exclusively employed by the Wartons in their imitations of Spenser. 162 University of California Puhlications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 "Such mystic visions send as Spenser saw When through bewildering Fancy's magic maze, To the fell house of Busyrane, he led Th ' unshaken Britomart. ..." But his own imitations are so frigid and remote from their model that were they our only evidence we should suspect that Warton had no first-hand knowledge of Spenser. It is practically as critics only that the Wartons have achieved any permanence. Here they have been scarcely awarded the high position they should occupy. Joseph Warton 's magnum opus is the famous Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (1756). To call it, as Lowell does, ' * The earliest public official declaration of war against the reigning mode" is to tempt the reader into a rather too exalted notion of Warton 's spirit of revolt. To be sure, there is much talk about things that are ' ' Romantic ' ' and about things which have ' ' a pleasing wildness. ' ' But the reverence for things ''elegant" and "decorous" and the horror of "impro- priety" is even more frequently expressed. Certainly, at all events, Joseph Warton had an acute appreciation of Spenser. Apropos of an attack on Pope 's Alley, he wrote a sustained pane- gyric on The Faerie Queene. Like the Augustans, he praised the allegorical "living figures whose attitudes and behaviour Spenser has minutely drawn with so much clearness and truth, that we behold them with our eyes, as plainly as we do on the ceiling of the banqueting-house. " He quotes several examples, concluding with the picture of Jealousy, and cries^ out with con- tagious enthusiasm: ''Here all is in life and motion; here we behold the true Poet or Maker; this is creation; it is here, might we cry out to Spenser, it is here that you display to us, that you make us feel the sure effects of genuine poetry. ' ' For those who have any temptation to suspect that the criticisms of Johnson and others on Spenserian imitations implied any hostility to Spenser, it may be well to note that Warton looked askance at the practice. *'It has been fashionable of late to imitate Spenser; but the likeness of most of these copies hath consisted rather in using a few of his ancient 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 163 expressions than in catching his real manner. Some, however, have been executed with happiness, and with attention to that simplicity, that ten- derness of sentiment, and those little touches of nature, that constitute Spenser's character." It is to be observed that this is only the usual Augustan criticism of Spenser and that these are the very points which have too often been culpably forgotten by romantic critics to our own day. Warton's ranking of English poets, at the close of the Essay, is the most famous passage. *' Where, then, . . . shall we with justice be authorized to place our admired Pope? Not, assuredly, in the same rank with Spenser, Shake- speare, and Milton. ' ' The whole passage is a remarkably acute bit of criticism. It is not because the three great poets were exalted. That was unnec- essary. They were praised by all. But the placing of Pope was the great stroke. The age was close to a great man, in the same situation as certain sonneteers who sang, a few years ago, to * * Shakespeare, Milton, Tennyson. " It is not a limitation peculiar to the eighteenth century to overestimate their own poet. War- ton's prophetic view is certainly striking in an age of smug self- sufficiency. He seems to me to be an almost thoroughgoing Augustan. But the Augustans produced some great critics. It was perhaps romantic but not remarkably romantic to write : "Where are the lays of artful Addison, Coldly correct to Shakspear's warblings wild.'' Occasionally he adopted the romantic pose. But when he was true to his best instincts he was solid Augustan. Thomas Warton's temperament was larger, more mellow than that of his brother. It is not that he was more of a romanticist. His attitudes toward romanticism and Spenser may be best inter- preted through two lines of his verse : *'As oft, reclin'd on CherwelPs shelving shore, I trac'd romantick Spenser's moral page." The word "romantick" here is in a precisely opposite situation of that of today. Then it was vague because it had little or no 164 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 meaning. Now it is vague because it has a thousand meanings. It is significant, too, that Spenser was to Warton the pleasant "moral" Spenser of the Augustans. But Warton was rich- spirited enough to be the first English critic to apply the his- torical method with any skill. All centuries of literature swam into his learned ken. His Observations on the Faerie Queene still remains the best book ever written about Spenser. But Thomas Warton must not be considered as a very serious roman- tic revolter and therefore forced, as an ardent admirer of Spenser, to be apologetic in an unsympathetic age. His complaint that Spenser was "admired" but "neglected" is not to be taken as true in the sense of being a peculiar and widespread limitation of his age. We have examined a considerable body of evidence that Spenser was widely appreciated in the first half of the eigh- teenth century by those who were ordained then, as in all ages, to love him. And any scholar of our own day might very accurately refer to Spenser as "this admired but neglected poet." We shall presently see, too, how much Warton owed to his Augus- tan predecessors in Spenserian criticism. The Observations begins^ with a brief review of romantic poetry, from Provencal to that of Ariosto and Tasso, in which we at once perceive, however inadequate the account from the point of view of modern investigators, the wide vision and schol- arly solidity of the man. He turns a calm brow from grovelling pedants and he is equally exalted above the slap-dash trifler in letters who is bound in by his own age. Warton insists that in order to appreciate a poet we must study the times in which he lived. He finds that "Ariosto — rejecting truth for magic and preferring the ridiculous excursions of Boyardo, to the pro- priety and uniformity of the Grecian and the Roman models ' ' — wrote a very heterodox poem. Beni is scored for comparing Ariosto and Homer. Trissino is praised for having "taste and boldness enough to publish an epic poem written in professed imitation of the Iliad. ' ' 3 Chapter I, On the Plan and Conduct of the Faerie Queene. 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 165 **Tasso took the ancients for his guides but was still too sensible of the popular prejudice in favour of ideal beings, and romantic adventures to neglect or omit them entirely. '*Such was the prevailing taste when Spenser projected the Faerie Queene. ' ' This is Augustan criticism — the regret that Spenser was misled by the damnable Ariosto — pure and simple. Warton does not attempt to praise Ariosto and to approve Spenser's choice of models as we shall find the early romanticists doing. He only attempts an ample explanation by the use of the historical method. The plan of the Faerie Queene is now examined and criticized just as Dryden, Hughes, and many more had analysed it and found it wanting. Nay, Warton thinks Dryden is too mild in his condemnation of the unity of the poem. Augustanism is ram- pant. Warton says it is "inartificial" to introduce the hero of one book on a less dangerous exploit later. It sullies the hero's lustre and does little for the unity. *'The poet might have established twelVe knights without an Arthur or an Arthur without twelve knights." Hughes had already made this suggestion. It is all neo-classi- cal and it is all perfectly just. But Warton abruptly strikes a blow for the defence. Again he is indebted to Hughes for the idea. ''But it is absurd to think of judging Ariosto or Spenser by precepts which they did not attend to. We who live in the days of writing by rule, are apt to try every composition by those laws which we have been taught to think the whole criterion of excellence. ' ' Spenser's poetry is "the careless exuberance of a warm imagina- tion and a strong sensibility. ' ' He * * wrote rapidly from his own feelings which at the same time were naturally noble." "We scarcely regret the loss" of "that arrangement and economy which Epic severity required" in the appeal of "feelings of the heart rather than the cold approbation of the head. " "In read- ing Spenser ; if the critic is not satisfied, yet the reader is trans- iir.^ 166 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 ported." Here, at last, was a critic large enough to appreciate Augustan sanity, yet able, at the same time, to look beyond the rules if so required. Now w^e stand on the brink of romanticism. Warton now leads us through a pleasant maze of facts and speculations concerning Spenser's sources in the romances, Greek legends, Ariosto, and Chaucer.* Here, indeed, is a romantic spirit of childlike wonder as, like Spenser himself, he pores over the immense treasures of the past. He writes a charming and unanswerable apologia for source-hunting. "We feel a sort of malicious triumph in detecting the latent and obscure source from which an original author has drawn some celebrated description: yet this .... soon gives way to the rapture that naturally results from contemplating the chymical energy of true genius, which can produce so noble a transmutation." With Spenser's stanza Warton is almost as unsympathetic as Jonson, Davenant, and an occasional Augustan who happened to dislike it. Its "constraint led our author into many absurdi- ties," 'Ho dilate with trifling and tedious circumlocutions," to run "into a ridiculous redundancy and repetition of words." Warton was plainly blind to some of Spenser's most graceful artifices. Yet he realizes certain advantages. The stanza, for instance, causes fullness of details. "Some images," he writes, "perhaps were produced by a multiplicity of rhymes." Dry den is quoted as saying that a rhyme often helped him to a thought. Spenser's extraordinary virtuosity is praised, but he is described as "laden with .... many shackles." Spenser's archaisms receive sensible and sympathetic treatment. But with an Augus- tan worship of decorous monotony, Warton could not see why Spenser did not place the caesura of his alexandrines invariably in the middle. The tenth section. Of Spenser's Allegorical Character, is of particular interest. Warton borrows Hughes's theory that it was a product of Spenser's age, of the pageants and spectacles which he considers more like Spenser's peculiar mode of allegor- 4 Chapters II, III, V, and VI. 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 167 izing ''than any other possible sources." Spenser's allegoristic method is compared with Ariosto's to the discredit of the latter. much more serious moralist than he really is). Warton follows / 1 'J Spence in condemning justly the meaningless confusions of allei ) j/ ti gory and reality, like the House of Alma. Warton, after Spencel \ like a good student of Boileau, attacks Spenser for minglinJ . / ** divine mystery" with human allegory. He gives the sam^ ^ example as Spence, that the Mount of Olives and Parnassus are ly^ ''impertinently linked together." But our critic decides "that allegorical poetry, through many gradations, at last received its ultimate consummation in the Fairy Queen." He concludes tamely by quoting "the just and pertinent sentiments" of Abbe du Bos : »». **It is impossible for a piece, whose subject is of an allegorical action to interest us very much. . . . Our heart requires truth even in fiction itself; and when it is presented with an allegorical fiction, it cannot determine itself, if I may be allowed the expression, to enter into the sentiments of those chimerical personages.'' Warton, poring too long by a fatal minute over this stupid Frenchman, was made as Midas when he heard Marsyas. He could not see in Spenser's allegory the magic that Gray saw with his poet's eye when he wrote beautifully of The Faerie Queene, of 'Tierce war and faithful love. And truth severe, by fairy fiction drest. ' ' Thomas Warton has been described as apologetic in champion- ing The Faerie Queene. On the contrary, he apologizes in the Postscipt, like Spence, for having been ' ' more diligent in remark- ing the faults than the beauties of Spenser." There was no necessity for a defence of The Faerie Queene. Wliarton was enabled to take many excellent ideas from Augustan critics of Spenser. He did not often fall into their absurdities. But he united their soundest principles to the historical method and to something of the romantic spirit. It was this jast, this spirit of childlike wonder, that led him to close his book with an enthus- iastic and delightful quotation from Spenser. 168 University of California Pudlications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 **The waies, through which my weary steps I guyde In this delightful land of Faery, Are so exceeding spacious and wyde, And sprinckled with such sweet variety Of all that pleasant is to eare or eye, That I, nigh ravisht with rare thoughts delight, My tedious travell doe forget thereby; And when I gin to f eele decay of might. It strength to me supplies, and chears my dulled spright. ' ' With Richard Hurd (1720-1808) we come to the first import- ant critic of the rebellious school who concerns us. His remarks on the "Plan and Conduct" of The Faerie Queene open with a fine romantic swagger. *' Spenser, though he had long been nourished with the spirit and sub- stance of Homer and Virgil, chose the times of chivalry for his Theme, and Fairy Land for the Scene of his fictions. He could have planned, no jjj^ubt, an heroick design on the exact classic model: Or, he might have ^mmmed between the Gothick and Classick as his contemporary Tasso did. But the charms of Fairy prevailed. And if any think he was seduced by Ariosto into his choice, they should consider that it could be only for the sake of his subject; for the genius and character of these poets was widely different. ''Under this idea then of a Gothick, not classical. Poem, the Faerie Queene is to be read and criticised. And on these principles, it would not be difficult to unfold its merit in another way than has been hitherto attempted. ' ' Hurd now becomes apologetic. * ' I have taken the fancy to try my hand on this curious subject. ' ' Here the apology of the Spenserian critics really begins. And it is not due to any unpopularity of Spenser but to the fact that they were advancing a somewhat new conception of him. We have seen that the neo-classicists apologized only when they were censuring Spenser. The romanticists apologized because they wished to link Spenser more closely with their brotherhood. Hurd draws the usual parallel between classical and Gothic architec- ture, which had some vogue since Hughes ventured upon it as throwing some light on Spenser, and adds : ''The question is not which of the two is conducted in the simplest or truest taste; but, whether there be not sense and design in both, when scrutinized by the laws on which each is projected. ... It was as 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 169 requisite for the Faerie Queen to consist of the adventures of twelve knights, as for the Odyssey to be confined to the adventures of one Hero: justice had otherwise not been done to his subject. "If it be asked then, what is this Unity of Spenser's Poem? I say, it consists in the relation of its several adventures to one common origin, the appointment of the Faerie Queene; and to one common end, the com- pletion of the Faerie Queene 's injunctions. ' ' This is not urged as classical unity but unity of another sort. Hurd thinks that the introduction of Arthur was a mere after- thought, an expedient from classical models which narrated only one action. "The truth was, the violence of classick prejudices forced the poet to affect this appearance of Unity, though in contradiction to his Gothick system. ' ' Spenser, according to Hurd, never should have attempted to ally the Gothic and the classical unities. It is interesting to compare Hurd and the Augustans at this point. The Augustans, includ- ing Warton, lamented that Spenser was compelled by the roman- tic prejudices of his time to follow the vicious example of Ariosto. Hurd lamented that Spenser was compelled by the prejudices of his time to allow classical ideals to play havoc with his natural Gothic inclinations. Hurd now turns to an entirely different defence of The Faerie Queene, based on its allegorical character. "His twelve knights are to exemplify as many virtues, out of which one illustrious character is to be composed. And in this view, the part of Prince Arthur in each Book becomes essential not principal, exactly as the poet has contrived it." \ » * Hurd thinks the objection to Prince Arthur and the unity of the poem is unanswerable on any other grounds. "But how faulty soever this conduct be in the literal story, it is per- fectly right in the moral: and that for an obvious reason, though his criticks seem not to have been aware of it. His chief hero was not to have the twelve virtues in the degree in which the knights had each of them, their own; (such a character would be a monster;) but he was to have so much of each as were requisite to form his superior character. Each virtue, in its perfection, is exemplified in its own knight: they are all, in a due degree concentered on Prince Arthur. "The conclusion is, that, as an allegorical Poem the method of the Faerie Queene is governed by the justness of the moral: as a narrative 170 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 Poem, it is conducted on the ideas and usages of chivalry. In either view, if taken by itself, the plan is defensible. But from the union of the two designs there arises a perplexity, and confusion, which is the proper, and only considerable defect of this extraordinary Poem. ' ' Hurd now launches forth in breezy defence of the Gothic method. Tasso is sneered at because ''he thought fit to trim between Gothic and classical models. ' ' The French depreciation of Ariosto is roundly abused. We must remember that the Augus- tans had patted Tasso on the back and girded at Ariosto. And Hurd scores * * our obsequious and over modest critics ' ' for allow- ing themselves to be overridden by French authority. ''It grew into a sort of cant, with which Kymer, and the rest of that School, filled their flimsy essays, and rambling prefaces. ... A lucky word in a verse which sounds well and everybody gets by heart, goes further than a volume of just criticism. In short, the exact but cold Boileau happened to say something of the clinquant of Tasso; and the magick of this word, like the report of Astolfo's horn in Ariosto, over- turned at once the solid and well-built reputation of Italian poetry." Hurd closes with an utterance of even more glowing roman- ticism that lifts him safely above the jaded connoisseurs of "Gothick" of his time. He defends the ''tales of the Faery" and the fantastic exploits of the unfettered imagination as the greatest material for epic poetry. Bad criticism, which had relegated such matters to children, is blamed as the result of the abuse of terms. "A poet, they say, must follow Nature; and by Nature we are to suppose can only be meant the known and experienced course of affairs in this world. Whereas the poet has a world of his own where experience has less to do than consistent imagination. . . . Without ad- miration (which cannot be affected but by the marvellous of celestial intervention, I mean, the agency of superior natures really existing, or by the illusion of fancy taken to be so) no epick poem can be long-lived. I am not afraid to instance the Henriade itself; which, notwithstanding the elegance of the composition, will in a short time be no more read than the Gondibert of Sir William Davenant, and for the same reason." The "pomp of verse, the energy of description" and even "the finest moral paintings ' ' will not produce a great epic without the quality of "admiration." By "admiration," I take it, Hurd means, in a slightly more restricted sense, what Mr. Theodore 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 171 Watts-Dunton means when he characterizes romanticism as the spirit of "Wonder" which revolted against the Augustan *'Age of Acceptance. ' ' Hurd's last words on Spenser explain what I have been fre- quently asserting — that the romanticists, though they discovered new beauties in Spenser, became blind to certain of the qualities of The Faerie Queene that had long been wisely cherished by Milton and by the Augustans. From the ridicule of chivalry and magic, thinks Hurd, Spenser was forced to give ."an air of mystery to his subject" and to pretend "that his stories of knights and giants" were but the mantle "of an abundance of profound wisdom." *'In short, to keep off the eyes of the prophane from prying too nearly into his subject he threw about it the mist of allegory. ** Fancy that had wantoned it so long in the world of fiction was now constrained, against her will, to ally herself with strict Truth if she would gain admittance into reasonable company. "What we have gotten by this revolution, it will be said, is a great deal of good sense. What we have lost, is a world of fine fabling; the illusion of which is so grateful to the charmed spirit; that, in spite of philosophy and fashion. Faery Spenser still ranks highest among the Poets. I mean with all those that either come of that house, or have any kindness for it. Earth-born criticks may blaspheme: 'But all the gods are ravish 'd with delight Of his celestial song, and musick's wondrous might.' " Hurd merits the highest praise for his spirited defence of the romantic side of Spenser. But, for all his eloquence, his depreciation of Spenser's allegory deserves reproach. Anyone who reads Spenser's contemporaries in Italy, France and Eng- land can see that, despite the rapid growth of Augustan criticism on the continent. Fancy could easily wanton it at her own sweet will without feeling constained to go masked in moral allegory. Spenser was not forced to constrain his copious visions within bounds, but the beautiful high seriousness that always dwells with the? greatest poets made him choose allegory uncommanded. Hurd and most succeeding romanticists have forgotten that there is much rich beauty in Spenser of which the moral alle- gory is the direct cause, that many of the passages which they \ 172 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 admire cannot be cherished consistently unless the allegory be accepted as artistic. Enthusiasm for the canto on Despair, to which the coldest reader of Spenser accords high praise, implies enthusiasm for the episode as allegory no matter what fine- spun theories the reader chooses to flaunt. The restraining power and architectonic value of Spenser's allegory, despite its incomplete working-out, will be apparent to any man who reads the Poly-Olhion of Drayton and the Britannia's Pastorals of Browne, huge poems by men who had much of Spenser 's heaped treasures of fancy and glimmering lore but none of the deeper dream that strove to pour the riches into the vast, the too vast, mould of the allegory that strove to erect that gorgeous Utopia which would have shaped and perfected even the spacious court of Queen Elizabeth. Among other beauties of Spenser which the romanticists taught all England to appreciate fully for the first time was the Spenserian stanza. It is strange that it remained for Beattie, the gentle poetaster who was once lionized for his Minstrel, to write the first elaborate and thoroughly appreciative comments on the marvellous stanza which Spenser fashioned subtly for his Faerie Queene. A letter to Dr. Blacklock (September 22, 1766), reveals the placid Beattie in the process of composition. **Not long ago I began a poem in the style and stanza of Spenser, in which I propose to give full scope to my inclination, and to be either droll or pathetic, descriptive or sentimental, tender or satirical, as the humour strikes me; for, if I mistake not, the manner which I have adopted admits equally of all these kinds of composition. I have written one hundred and fifty lines, and am surprised to find the structure of that complicated stanza so little troublesome. . I was always fond of it, for I think it the most harmonious that ever was contrived. It admits of more variety of pauses than either the couplet or the alternate rhyme; and it concludes with a pomp and majesty of sound, which, to my ear, is won- derfully delightful. It seems also very well adapted to the genius of our language, which, from its irregularity of inflexion and number of mono- syllables, abounds in diversified terminations, and consequently renders our poetry susceptible of an endless variety of legitimate rhymes. Bnt I am so far from intending this performance for the press, that I am morally certain it will never be finished. I shall add a stanza now and then, when I am at leisure, and when I have no humour for other amuse- ment; but I am resolved to write no more poetry with a view to publica- 1911 J Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 173 tion, till I see some dawnings of a poetical taste among the generality of readers, of which, however, there is not at present anything like an appearance. ' ' Beattie shows the bookish man 's ignorance of his times. The public was waiting to devour stuff like The Minstrel. And when he did publish the first book, in 1771, there was a thunder of applause. These opinions have brought us well into the camp of the romanticists, where fewer citations and explanations are neces- sary for the reader of today. The Augustan attitude lingered on with certain critics, but most men followed in the wake of Hurd. We are near enough oulTown time to conclude this long survey of Spenserian criticism with the opinions of three of the most delightful romantic admirers of Spenser — Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), William Hazlitt (1778-1830), and Leigh Hunt (1784-1859). In order thoroughly to appreciate Scott's attitude toward Spenser we must glance at his poetry along with his prose. Like many poets he has left evidence of his early delight in Spenser, to whose works he was introduced by Dr. Blacklock. ''Spenser I could have read forever. Too young to trouble myself about the allegory, I considered all the knights and ladies and dragons and giants in their outward and exoteric sense, and God only knows how delighted I was to find myself in such society." And in the days of his maturity Scott's boyish appreciation of Spenser remained essentially the same. For Scott was always a boy. Beyond a certain interest as a man of affairs and an antiquarian, in Spenser 's political allegory,^ he rather abandoned himself, like all the full-fledged romanticists, to the delights of the rich succession of pictures that was stirred by Spenser's lofty purposes. Scott's romanticism, with its love of antiquar- ianism, was not a strong spirit of rebellion, nor even a very strong spirit of wonder. Allowing for its immensely superior 5 See his essay on Todd's edition of Spenser (Edinburgh Beview, 1805). ''But although everything belonging to the reign of the Virgin Queen carries with it a secret charm to Englishmen, no commentator of the Faery Queen has taken the trouble to go very deep into those annals, for the pur- pose of illustrating the secret, and as it were, esoteric allusions of Spen- ser 's poems. ' ' 174 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 vigor and its wholesome scorn of introspection, it has something in common with the pretty trifling of Beattie. Scott's roman- ticism involved little more than a change in what the Augustans called ''machinery." Take out your pagan divinities; put in your knights. Add to this a change of landscape. Describe a mountain or forest scene. Put in an indispensable moon and a castle. This was the setting, not for the sentimental reflections of Beattie, but for the stirring narrative and ring so like the old ballad that Matthew Arnold has well called it the only English equivalent of Homer. What Scott found in Spenser was the dim forest, the furtive flash of armor as the sun stole through at intervals, silent maidens who were to Scott mere vague flowers of mediaeval landscape, and ever and anon a great castle upleaping unexpectedly in the silver winding path. Even in the breathless flow of his narra- tive Scott delighted to pause and to consider these lovely scenes. So he hit upon the happy device of using Spenser in a rather novel way. In almost all his narrative poems he introduced Spenserian stanzas, generally at the opening of his cantos, to make a setting before the quick beat of the free tetrameters called to arms. He showed a relic of Augustan- Spenser ianism by occasionally employing the stanza of The Faerie Queene for a moralistic prelude or interlude, as the master himself did. Fin- ally he strewed his narrative with allusions to the beautiful pic- tures in The Faerie Queene. In some of his later poems the influence of Byron 's Childe Harold tinged his introductory Spen- serian stanzas. But, in general, the landscapes thus introduced are not disturbed by the more personal, stormier note of Byron. Almost any of these stanzas taken at random will illustrate. The idyllic scenes on the island in the second canto of The Lady of the Lake are introduced by a charming setting. "At morn the black-cock trims his jetty wing , 'Tis morning prompts the linnet's blithest lay. All Nature's children feel the matin spring Of life reviving, with reviving day; And while yon little bark glides down the bay, Wafting the stranger on his way again. And sweetly o'er the lake was heard thy strain, Mix'd with the sounding harp, O white-hair 'd Allan-Bane." 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 175 The Spenserian allusions, with which the Ariosto of the North, ever haunted by visions of The Faerie Queene, strewed richly his poems, may be illustrated by a passage from Marmion which conjures up scenes with the delight of a child rocking him- self into ecstasy by a fire-place and recalling his store of fairy- tales. ''Not she, the championess of old, In Spenser's magic tale enroll 'd, She, for the charmed spear renown 'd. Which forced each knight to kiss the ground, — Not she more changed, when, placed at rest, What time she was Malbecco's guest, She gave to flow her maiden vest; When from the corslet's grasp relieved, Free to the sight her bosom heaved; Sweet was her blue eye's honest smile, Erst hidden by the aventayle; And down her shoulders gracefull roU'd, Her locks profuse, of paly gold. They who whilom, in midnight fight. Had marvell'd at her matchless might, ^ No less her maiden charms approved. But looking liked, and liking loved. The sight could jealous pangs beguile. And charm Malbecco's cares a while; And he^he wandering Squire of Dames, Forgot his Columbella 's claims. And passion, erst unknown, could gain The breast of blunt Sir Satyrane; Nor durst light Paridel advance. Bold as he was, a looser glance. She charmed at once, and tamed the heart, Incomparable Britomarte! " Thus, too, The Vision of Don Roderick closes with Spenser's favorite figurative method of saying adieu. "But all too long, through seas unknown and dark, (With Spenser's parable I close my tale,) By shoal and rocks hath steer 'd my venturous bark, And landward now I drive before the gale. And now the blue and distant shore I hail. And nearer now I see the port expand. And now I gladly furl my weary sail. And as the prow light touches on the strand, I strike my red-cross flag and bind my skiff to land. ' ' 176 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 Scott was always a hearty, delighted boy and this lovable trait is no better illustrated than in his Spenser-worship. The beautiful things in Spenser were ever straying in some convenient corner of Hazlitt's mind. Hazlitt shares with Byron in Don Juan the supreme honors in English literature for the mastery of the fine art of quoting. So adroitly does Hazlitt slip a fine phrase or verse from a beloved writer into the rich tex- ture of his own prose that he becomes a second creator, as great as the first, and we forget that it was merely quoted. This is one of the most effective and difficult of stylistic tricks. Hazlitt quoted Spenser a propos of things in general, often very quaintly. * ' We felt as much disconcerted, ' ' he writes, ' ' by the uncalled for phrensy of this theatrical Amazon, as the Squire of Dames in Spenser did, when he was carried off by the giantess Orgygia." Coleridge's Lay Sermon reminded him of "A gentle husher Vanitie by name.^' Hazlitt certainly penned the most brilliant detached com- ments on Spenser ever written. ''The essence of Spenser's poetry," he tells us, ''was a continuous, endless flow of inde- scribable beauties like the galaxy or milky way. ' ' He says pene- trating things about the vexed question of Spenser 's passion. ''But he has been unjustly charged with a want of passion and of strength. He has both in an immense degree. He has not indeed the pathos of immediate action or suffering, which is more properly the dramatic; but he has all the pathos of sentiment and romance — all that belongs to distant objects of terror, and uncertain, imaginary distress. ' ' After all the endless talk about Ariosto and Spenser, Hazlitt makes the best comparison ever written. ''If Ariosto transports us into regions of romance, Spenser's poetry is all fairy-land. In Ariosto we walk upon the ground, in a company, gay, fantastic, and adventurous enough. In Spenser, we wander in another world, among ideal beings. The poet takes us and lays us in the lap of a lovelier nature, by the sound of softer streams, among greener hills and fairer valleys. He paints nature, not as we find it, but as we expected to find it, and fulfills the delightful promise of our youth. ' ' Hazlitt is quaintly non-committal on the problem of Spenser's allegory. 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 177 ' ' But some people will say that all this may be very fine, but that they cannot understand it on account of the allegory. They are afraid of the allegory, as if they thought it would bite them: they look at it as a child looks at a painted dragon, and think it will strangle them in its shining folds. This is very idle. If they do not meddle with the allegory, the allegory will not meddle with them. Without minding it at all, the whole is as plain as a pike-staff." Hazlitt was a literary epicurean, the product of the romantic attitude toward Spenser, who has done incalculable good for the master and yet has encouraged men to take The Faerie Queene as an intellectual anesthetic (if they are not unfortunate enough to have taken it as a soporific). If we tempered our Hazlitt and all the romanticists with Milton, Dryden, and Addison for an antidote, then we should get the perfect conception of Spenser. But I must leave the reader with a relish of Hazlitt rather than of my polemics. *'In reading the Faery Queene, you see a little withered old man by a wood-side opening a wicket, a giant and a dwarf lagging far behind, a damsel in a boat upon an enchanted lake, wood-nymphs, and satyrs; and all of a sudden you are transported into a lofty palace, with tapers burn- ing, amid knights and ladies, with dance and revelry and song, ' and mask, and antique pageantry. ' ' ' From boyhood to the days of his sunny maturity, when he poured out his graceful garrulous essays, Spenser haunted Leigh Hunt like a passion. He tells us, in his Autobiography, that he secured an odd volume of Spenser at Christ's Hospital and com- completed about a hundred stanzas called The Fairy King which **was to be in emulation of Spenser." From that time Spenser was his favorite among all poets. In 1801 he published his Juvenilia, or a Collection of Poems, Written between the Ages of Twelve and Sixteen. The most ambitious poem is The Palace of Pleasure; An Allegorical Poem in Two Cantos. Written in Imita- tion of Spenser. His epicurean Story of Bimini (1816), so im- portant in the history of nineteenth century romanticism, shows the influence of Spenser, the sensuous builder of the Bower of Bliss, both for better and for worse. But in his beautiful essay, Imagination and Fancy, we find the key-note of Hunt's \ 178 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 attitude toward Spenser. Here he furnishes a wonderful pic- ture-gallery. He compares scene after scene of concentrated loveliness with some appropriate picture which hangs in the great galleries of Europe. No book could be more perfect to teach both youth and crabbed age to love Spenser. Yet I must be ungracious enough to charge Hunt with a good deal of respon- sibility for the common conception current today of Spenser as a pictorial poet and nothing more. Spenser 's pictures have been admired till he is given absolutely no credit as a writer of narra- tive. This is absurd extreme. Had Hunt appreciated some of Spenser's larger qualities, his own verse would doubtless have been less saccharine and spineless. But it seems almost sacri- legious to quarrel with this charming old literary epicurean. How eloquently he could write of Spenser may be seen in one short apostrophe. ** Around us are the woods; in our distant ear is the sea; the glimmer- ing forms that we behold are those of nymphs and deities; or a hermit makes the loneliness onore lonely; or we hear a horn blow, and the ground trembling with the coming of a giant; and our boyhood is again existing, full of belief, though its hair be turning grey; because thou, a man, hast written its books, and proved the surpassing riches of its wisdom. ' ' A catalogue of later opinions is unnecessary. We all know the current notions about Spenser. Endless are the pale com- ments of writers of text-books who have bolted The Faerie Queene with all the terrifying velocity with which the ghastly Americans in Martin Chuzzleivit devoured their dinner — ''in huge wedges." A few words about Spenser's worship of beauty, a fling at his allegory, and the necessary paragraphs in any proper history of English literature are complete. Such is the baneful influence of the literary epicureanism of Hurd, Scott, Leigh Hunt, and other brilliant writers whose utterances culminate in Lowell's glowing but dangerous essay on Spenser, which, with all its real appreciation of one side of the master's genius, has had a blight- ing influence on many. Professor Dowden, whose perfect essay on Spenser will be mentioned presently, has conveniently com- 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 179 pressed the splendid Luciferian assertions of Lowell into a para- graph. '*A teacher, — what is the import of this? 'The true use of Spenser,' says a poet of our own day, Mr. J. E. Lowell, 'is as a gallery of pictures which we visit as the mood takes us, and where we spend an hour or two at a time, long enough to sweeten our perceptions, not so long as to cloy them.' And again: 'Whenever in the Faery Queen you come sud- denly on the moral, it gives you a shock of unpleasant surprise, a kind of grit, as when one's teeth close on a bit of gravel in a dish of straw- berries and cream.' This, then, is the Faery Queen — a dish of straw- berries and cream mixed up unfortunately with a good deal of grit. ' And as for the allegory, we may 'fairly leave it on one side; ' Spenser employed it to 'convince the scorners that poetry might be seriously useful, and show Master Bull his new way of making fine words butter parsnips, in a rhymed moral primer.' Shall we accept this view, or that of Milton— 'a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas?' Was Spenser such a teacher 'sage and serious' to his own age? If so, does he remain such a teacher for this age of ours?" This age of ours, about which Professor Dowden has his fears, is too much devoted to the doctrine of Art for Art 's sake to be in harmony with the ideals of Spenser and ]\Iilton. Poets who are ineffectually concerned with pale, anaemic Isoldes gazing sadly into the solitary West cannot understand the full beauty of fig- ures like Una, who symbolizes Truth. They onl^ admir^the colors, not the exquisite lines of the picture. Had they Spenser's richer view, their poetry would not so often confuse the white- ness of beauty with the preternatural whiteness of leprosy. They are for all the world like the exclusive and selfish people in Boc- caccio who assembled in rural sequestration to divert each other with stories while their comrades in the city groaned with the plague and stretched out imploring hands for help. If you make poetry the gilded plaything of an exclusive and esoteric cult, you are doing as did Boccaccio 's fine lords and ladies. You will have none of the humanity of the Man of Law and the Prioress, you will have none of the high poetry of the Knight and the Squire. Spenser studied Plato and knew Sidney. Therefore he had a profound understanding of the function of poetry. Our present-day romanticists sometimes look upon Spenser askance because of his idealism and sum it up with the accusa- 180 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 tion that he has no human interest. They think this because present-day romanticism often means the reverse of idealism. Many people who would be realistic, yet who have romantic tastes, gratify their love of mystery and sensation by realistic studies of pathological cases. Sentimentalism so intimately con- nected with the first years of romanticism as it rose in its glori- ous youth and smote the dead ideals of Acceptance is now held in disrepute not only by the commercialists, with their rule-of- thumb realism, but by the most adventurous romanticists. The later-day romanticists, with a false sense of shame, have hard- ened themselves against it. Nowadays, for instance, an orthodox musician does not dare to admire the sweet, wholesome roman- ticism of Mendelssohn. The lover of poetry who prefers the gentle pensiveness of Longfellow to Poe's inarticulate Ulalume is considered senile. It is certainly true that contemporary romanticists need a revival of sentimentalism as badly as the eighteenth century, though for a different reason. The Augus- tans were hard because they believed in repression and glittering reason. Present-day romanticists are hard because they are jaded and do not respond to normal emotions. And better for us than sentimentalism would be the beautiful idealism of Edmund Spenser. His sweet leisureliness would cure us of our literary dyspepsia induced by our breathless short- story technique which we admire with such blind exclusiveness. His profound moral consciousness would impress us again with the high function of poetry and make us laugh at Art for Art's sake. But I would close in a major key. As it has always been so, , we can boast of a few critics who have written great essays on Spenser. I should like space to dilate on the rare essays of that fine-souled poet Aubrey de Vere with their sober and profound adoration of the qualities that run deep in Spenser. I should like to plunder from the many fervid passages that Professor Saintsbury, one of the truest of Spenser's champions, has drawn from his perennial contagious enthusiasm. But I must confine myself to what I believe to be the greatest essay on Spenser ever 1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 181 written, to Professor Edward Dowden's Spenser, the Poet and } Teacher. Since Warton's Observations on the Faery Queene, I know of nothing so many-sided and so near the ideal method which I have advocated at the cost of so much dull pedantry and raucous polemic. Now, at last, I will gladly disappear and leave the rostrum to Professor Dowden. "In England of the age of Elizabeth what place is filled by the poetry of Spenser? What blank would be made by its disappearance? In what, for each of us who love that poetry resides its special virtue? Shall we say in answer to these questions that Spenser is the weaver of spells, the creator of illusions, the enchanter of the Elizabethan age; and that his name is to us a word of magic by which we conjure away the pain of actual life, and obtain entrance into a world of faery? Was Spenser, as a poet of our own time names himself, 'the idle singer' of his day — that day not indeed 'an empty day,' but one filled with heroic daring and achievement? While Ealeigh was exploring strange streams of the New World, while Drake was chasing the Spaniard, while Bacon was seeking for the principles of a philosophy which should enrich man's life, while Hooker, with the care of a wise master-builder, was laying the foundation of polity in the National Church, where was Spenser? Was he forgetful of England, forgetful of earth, lulled and lying in some bower of fantasy, or moving in a dream among imaginary champions of chivalry, distressed damsels, giants and dragons and satyrs and savage men, or shepherds who pipe and shepherdesses who dance forever in a serene Arcady? ''Assuredly it was not thus that a great Englishman of a later age thought of Spenser. When Milton entered upon his manhood, he entered upon a warfare; the peaceful days, days of happy ingathering of varied culture, days of sweet repose amid rural beauty, were past and gone; and he stood with loins girt, prepared for battle in behalf of liberty. And then, in London, when London was a vast arsenal in which weapons were forging for the defence of truth and freedom, Milton in his moment of highest and most masculine ardour, as he wrote his speech on behalf of unlicensed printing, thought of Spenser. It was not as a dreamer that Milton thought of him. Spenser had been a power with himself in youth, when he, 'the lady of his college,' but such a lady as we read of in 'Comus,' grew in virginal beauty and virginal strength. He had listened to Spenser's 'sage and solemn tunes,' 'Of turneys and of trophies hung; Of forests and enchantments drear. Where more is meant than meets the ear. ' And now, in his manhood, when all of life had grown for him so grave, so glorious with heroic effort, Milton looks back and remembers his master, and he remembers him not as an idle singer, not as a dreamer of y^ 182 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 dreams, but as 'our sage and serious Spenser, whom I dare to name a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas. ' ** *A better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas.' Yet we are told by the Dean of St. Paul's, that in giving himself credit for a direct purpose to instruct, Spenser 'only conformed to the utilitarian spirit which pervaded ^ the literature of the time.' It is the heresy of modern art that only useless things should be made beautiful. We want beauty only in play- things. In elder days the armour of a knight was as beautiful as sunlight, or as flowers. 'In unaffected, unconscious, artistic excellence of inven- tion,' says one of our chief living painters, 'approaching more nearly to the strange beauty of nature, especially in vegetation, mediaeval armour perhaps surpasses any other effort of human ingenuity. ' i What if Spenser wrought armour for the soul, and, because it was precious and of finest temper, made it fair to look upon? That which gleams as bright as the waters of a sunlit lake is perhaps a breastplate to protect the heart; that which appears pliant as the blades of summer grass may prove at our need to be a sword of steel. ' ' ") Transmitted September 27, 1910. A^ i ■mi.y>