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CHARACTERISTICS OF SPENSER'S POETRY

It has been said that Spenser is a poet for poets; and there is truth in the remark, implying as it does that his poetry addresses itself to something above the range of merely human, as distinguished from imaginative sympathies; but it expresses only half the truth, and the other half is commonly ignored, if not denied. Many portions of his poetry on which he must have set most value are doubtless beyond the appreciation of readers who do not combine an unusual thoughtfulness with a large imagination. It is also true that there is much in human character in which he took little of that special interest which a dramatist takes; and no less that much of that familiar incident which delighted the ballad-maker of old, and constitutes the chief ingredient in narrative poetry, was foreign to Spenser's purpose. But so far from being true that his poetry is deficient in human interest, there is a sense in which he was especially a poet of the humanities. More than any predecessor he was the 4) VOL. I.

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poet of beauty; but he sought that beauty in the human relations even more than in that world of ideal thought which was his native land. This truth seems little recognised, and is yet momentous if we would understand Spenser. Spenser was a great thinker, but he seldom writes in a speculative vein; and deep and sound as was his best philosophy, he knew that poetry must express it in a strain "simple, sensuous, and impassioned," or not at all. No one was more familiar with forest scenery, or with the charm of mead and meadow and river-bank; but he left it for poets of a later age to find in natural description the chief sphere for the exercise of their faculties. He lived too near the chivalrous age of action and passion to find in aught, save man, the chief subject for the exercise of his genius. He stood between those ages in which knightly deeds had shared with spiritual contemplation the reverence of mankind, and that later age in which activities yet more intense, but less nobly balanced, addressed themselves to political ambitions, to polemical controversies, to the discovery and the ruthless subjugation of unfortunate races discovered, only to be degraded. In its newly awakened energies he took an interest. He had given instruction to statesmen, and he had listened to Raleigh when the "shepherd of the ocean sat beside him at Kilcolman Castle, and narrated his adventures in the Western Wonderland. But there were enterprises that interested him more than these; and in them what he valued most

was the emblematic illustration of human nature. That world which, as it receded, kissed hands to him alone, had for him more charm than the world that proffered her ungarnered spoils to the new settlers. The clarion voice from fields where the knights of old had sought honour only, was more to him than the clamours of sectarian dispute, or the clash of swords directed by that Macchiavellian policy which in nearly all countries had taken the place of medieval statesmanship. And thus the first poet of the new era was yet more emphatically the last poet of the old—at once the morning star of England's later, and the evening star of her earlier literature. The associate of Leicester and Burleigh and Essex sang of Paladins in whom they had no belief, and embodied Virtues in which they had no part. He kept his higher genius for the celebration of a wonder-world gone by. That world, too, was a world of men and women; but those among them in whom the poet intended us to be interested were by necessity beings over whom the "Ages of Faith" had cast a spiritual gleam. It was humanity that Spenser sang in the main, but it was an ideal humanity. By some this will be regarded as dispraise, and supposed to imply a charge of unreality. Spenser might have retorted that charge. He saw habitually in humanity, notwithstanding the Fall, the remains of its "original brightness"; and for him the unreality would have consisted in hiding what he saw. He saw, resting on the whole of God's creation, a remnant of the Divine beauty, impressed upon it from