Adventures in Criticism

A Plea for Spenser

Among great English poets the one who has suffered in these days of jangling nerves and psycho-analytic aberrations the utmost neglect because of his matter, mood and manner is Edmund Spenser. To the modern mind with its personal and introspective bent he seems quite useless, especially as he expended his imagination on themes which do not interest us any more, the age of chivalry and Una being more irrevocably gone than even that of the Canterbury pilgrims. In fact, whatever customs and figures of Chaucer's time may have fallen into obsolescence, the main stuff of his creation still corresponds to life's play around us, and that is why Spenser is as good as forgotten, while Chaucer with his generally less poetic temper persists. But to the true lover of poetry who is not altogether lost in the whirlpools of the life-force the "Faerie Queene" must always remain delightful despite its allegorical remoteness and its structural ambiguity. For there are so many individual scenes and episodes rich in the poetic vein that to skip Spenser completely would be a considerable aesthetic loss, larger at least than that entailed by missing to study how Mr. Aldous Huxley recoils from the Elizabethan romanticist's so-called sugary vagueness to pen doggerel about spermatozoa.

It is true that Spenser does not deal with problems immediately facing us, but after all there must be some "time to stand and stare" — particularly when such staring puts us in contact with beauty. The aim of poetry is not primarily to provide a guide to practical self-adjustment or even intellectual growth: it is to touch us with the magic and power of some absolute beauty whose image it tries to transmit by means of expressive word-music made as faultless as possible. That magic and power has a large variety of heights and depths, and I dare say if I had to choose between Spenser's perfection and Dante's I would not hesitate a minute, because Dante gives a far more intimate touch of the

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absolute beauty which great verse must draw close to us by its patterned inspiration, its unimpeachably expressed and rhythmed mood — gay, grave, subtle or vehement. Yet I do not know how one is to deny the title of great poetry to the stanza full of a grisly glimmer, which continues the description of the Cave of Mammon:

But roof and floor, and walls were all of gold,

Both overgrown with dust and old decay,

And hid in darkness that none could behold

The hue thereof: for view of cheerful day

Did never in that house itself display,

But a faint shadow of uncertain light;

Such as a lamp whose light doth fade away;

Or as the moon clothèd with cloudy night

Does show to him that walks in fear and sad affright.

Or take that other miracle of Spenser's mind, the House of Sleep to which Archimago sends for a dream:

And more to lull him in his slumber soft,

A trickling stream from high rock tumbling down,

And ever-drizzling rain upon the loft,

Mix'd with a murmuring wind, much like the sound

Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swound.

No other noise, nor people's troublous cries,

That still are wont t'annoy the wallèd town,

Might there be heard; but careless quiet lies

Wrapt in eternal silence, far from enemies.

With such passages cropping up in the "Faerie Queene", it is critical perversity to regard it as worthless; when, however, we are asked to weigh its total coinage of fancy there need be no prejudice in its favour to prevent its very unequal intensity from being acknowledged no less than the limitations of its creative range. Words such as Chaucer puts in the mouth of an old beggar —

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And on the ground, which is my modres gate,

I knockè with my staff, erlich and late,

And sa to hire, "Leve, modre, let me in,

Lo, how I vanish, flesh and blood and skin,

Alas! when shall my bonès ben at reste? —

words filled with a keen imaginative pathos are beyond Spenser's genius, fertile though it was; for his was a descriptive imagination which could cast a spell of iridescence or of grim shadows but the sudden metaphorical surprise by which psychological poignancies can be intimately revealed we do not encounter in his work; and for the simple reason that his poetic excellence is for the most part divorced from personal emotion. On the whole, however, he is more often great than Chaucer. Except for the Prologue and the episode of the Christian child slain in the ghetto there is not much in the "Canterbury Tales" about which we can feel that the metrical swing and the chime of rhyme so transfigure the composition that its soul would absolutely evaporate without them — and there is also no great intensity of expression except in scattered lines like that in the Knight's Tale when he relates how a thick wood was cut down by Theseus to make a funeral pyre but says that he will refrain from describing the plight of the nymphs, the fauns, the beasts and the birds,

Ne how the ground agast was of the light.

Volumes of description could not tell us the condition of the suddenly exposed ground with the in-feeling packed into that almost onomatopoeic "agast". Verbal and rhythmic cunning, whether of onomatopoeia or any other means to convey a mood-atmosphere, does not as a rule belong in its true poetic nature to Chaucer: it is the new element Spenser brought into play and it is the element which constitutes the vital differentia of great poetry, transfiguring the substance beyond the reach of prose style. Spenser is not uniformly

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successful, all his charm cannot persuade us that his narrative does not need pruning nor that, even after its being pruned, long stretches of an attenuated sweetness will not remain if the narrative is to have any continuity; but the remarkable point about him is that his music is never absent, thin as the matter it supports may sometimes be. This invariable command over exquisiteness of sound equips a poet for a place in the front rank; for, if he can bewitch by his choice language and cadence in the teeth of a trivial substance, how perfect must the expressive flowering be from a significant soil!

Very few artists come anywhere near the exquisiteness Spenser achieves by an ever-varying technique of recurrent harmonies: he manipulates his artistry in a thousand different ways, ringing infinite changes on a system of correspondence and reiteration, and shifting his pauses with a most effective naturalness. And all this magic is knit together by means of his rhyme-scheme, the elastic coherence of the superb stanza he invented with a ear for echoes diversely disposed, the play of pentameter resolved in an Alexandrian climax so as to introduce repeatedly a break in the monotony and yet not form too sharp a distinction because of its being linked in rhyme with the quatrain which precedes it and which again is linked to the opening four lines. Considering his conscious artistry, his marvellous charm of rhythm, it would be fair to compare him with Virgil.

Virgil is a poet unquestionably superior to Spenser in a total computation: he is more constructive and he is intense with a frequency of which the Elizabethan does not seem capable, but as an artist in sound he is not unrivalled. Spenser rendered the simple buoyant attractiveness he inherited from Chaucer multifariously subtle and richly languid, while Virgil's characteristics sprang from a smooth strength and a majesty flavoured with wistfulness, which have in them something akin to Spenser's tone but are distinct in their psychological note. Virgil is soft because he is haunted by the "tears of things", yet stately because, seeing

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no way out, he is spurred by a high moral purpose to face mortality; Spenser is soft because he has escaped from the ordinary existence and its clashes to the luxury of a dreamland, yet stately because there is nothing in that region to break his spirit, and truth and virtue can ride in triumph through its spacious enchantment. Modern psychology would say that Spenser achieves in his art a sublimation of his discontent with life's contradictions, but that Virgil carries an unresolved complex, the fighter in him bearing always an open wound which is too deep for his natural strength and can be endured only by a willed fortitude. Both, however, turned their moods into music of a rare order, though both had to face languages recalcitrant to rhythm. By means of the device of elision employed with the most appropriate finesse Virgil transmuted into a ripple of inter-blending sounds the rather ponderous strength and precision of Latin, and his ear was helped in its rhythmic inspiration by the latitude which Latin allows in manoeuvring with the position of words to secure euphony and emphasis. A similar plasticity Spenser never had at his disposal; but the English of his day resorted to frequent inversions and of this he took advantage. His greatest instrument, though, of melody no less than picturesqueness was the fact that language was not yet a fixed thing — it was in a condition of semi-fluidity, opening out dazzling prospects of assimilating archaism and innovation with current usage. So, employing a remarkable instinct for the vibration and atmosphere of words necessary to make his world of fancy bewitchingly remote and ideal, Spenser revived obsolete terms for the sake of their music and colour, arrested word-beauties about to fall into desuetude and boldly added to the extant vocabulary by coinages of his own with some pretext of old analogies and even without any if he saw the pure artistic need — all the while claiming an absolutely free hand as regards spelling and pronunciation. But he did not work out a mere tissue of verbal licences: he so deftly wove his innovations with the natural genius of contemporary speech

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that in spite of the novel sheen of his texture there remained an unpedantic simplicity and clearness which made his style the legitimate foundation for all future poetry.

Virgil marked almost a ne plus ultra of poetical Latinity; Spenser had a chord or two missing because no Lucretius and Catullus prepared his way and also on account of a certain dearth in himself of direct passion and that epic fibre which, for all his tendency towards the effeminate, Virgil never lacked — yet his spell of music was so creative that hardly any great poet since but has fallen under it. We moderns, even when free from the paroxysmal influence of our Ezra Pounds and keeping our senses sweet with the old sober ecstasies, may imagine ourselves independent of it since we do not require to worship him, having Shelley and Keats as our first guiding stars; but our independence is unreal — Shelley and Keats are the two poets whose affinity to Spenser is the deepest and in their own manner they have distilled anew his musical attar for us. His stamp on the language is as permanent and unmistakable as Shakespeare's and Milton's, and it is the surest test of critical judgment to find amidst contemporary excitements an impartial hour for appreciating the languid greatness of the "Faerie Queene".

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