II

SPENSER AS A PHILOSOPHIC POET

It often happens that some eminent characteristic of a great poet has almost escaped observation owing to the degree in which other characteristics, not higher but more attractive to the many, have also belonged to him. Spenser is an instance of this. If it were asked what chiefly constitutes the merit of his poetry, the answer would commonly be, its descriptive power, or its chivalrous sentiment, or its exquisite sense of beauty; yet the quality which he himself desiderated most for his chief work was one not often found in union with these, viz. sound and true philosophic thought. This characteristic is perhaps his highest. It was the one which chiefly gained for him the praise of Shakespeare

Spenser to me, whose deep conceit is such

As, passing all conceit, needs no defence ;

and it was doubtless the merit to which he owed the influence which Milton acknowledged that Spenser's poetry had exercised over his own. There is more of

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philosophy in one book of the Faery Queen than in / all the cantos of his Italian models. In Italy the thinkers were generally astute politicians or recluse theologians; and her later poets, excepting of course Tasso, cared more to amuse a brilliant court with song and light tale than to follow the steps of Dante along the summits of serious thought. England, on the other hand, uniting both the practical and the meditative mind with the imaginative instincts of southern lands, had thereby strengthened that mind and those instincts, and thus occupied a position neither above nor beneath the region of thoughtful poetry. In the latter part of the sixteenth and earlier part of the seventeenth century, she possessed a considerable number of poets who selected, apparently without offence, very grave themes for their poetry. It will suffice to name such writers as Samuel Daniel, John Davies, George Herbert, Dr. Donne, Giles Fletcher, Habington, and, not much later, Dr. Henry More, the Platonist.

These poets, however, came later than Spenser, and were not a little indebted to him, while yet they were, in some respects, unlike him. Some of them worked on themes so abstract and metaphysical as to be almost beyond the limits of true poetic art. The difficulty was itself an attraction to them, and their ambition was more to instruct than to delight. Spenser loved philosophy as well as they, but was too truly a poet to allow of his following her when she strayed into "a barren and dry land," or of his adopting the

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didactic method when he illustrated philosophic themes. Truth and beauty are things correlative; and very profound truths can be elucidated in verse without the aid of such technical reasoning processes as those with which Dryden conducted his argument in the "Hind and Panther," and Pope in his "Essays." Spenser's imagination never forsook the region of the sympathies; but it had the special gift of drawing ✓ within their charmed circle themes which for another poet must have ever remained outside it, and of suffusing them at once with the glow of passion and with the white light of high intelligence. It is true that he dealt much in allegory; but though allegory is commonly a cold thing-always, indeed, if it be mere allegory-yet whenever Spenser's genius is true to itself, his allegory catches fire and raises to the heights of song themes which would otherwise have descended to the level of ordinary prose. Had Spenser's poetry not included this philosophic vein, it would not have been in sympathy with a time which produced a Bacon, whose prose is often the noblest poetry, as well as a Sidney, whose life was a poem. At the Merchant Taylors' Grammar School, Bishop Andrews and, as is believed, Richard Hooker, were among his companions; and when he entered Cambridge, Pembroke Hall was at least as much occupied with theological and metaphysical discussion as with classical literature.

We may go further. It was in a large measure the strength of his human sympathies which at once

forced Spenser to include philosophy among the subjects of his poetry, and prevented that philosophy from becoming unfit for poetry. As he was eminently a poet of the humanities, so his philosophy was a philosophy of the humanities; he could no more have taken up a physiological theme for a poem, like Phineas Fletcher's "Purple Island," than a geographical one, like Drayton's "Polyolbion." The philosophy which interested him was that which "comes home to the business and bosoms of men." It was philosophy allied to life-philosophy moral, social, and political. Such philosophy is latent in all great poetry, though it is in some ages only that it becomes patent. Let us turn first to his political and social philosophy.

We know from Spenser's letter to Sir Walter Raleigh that to embody a great scheme of philosophy was the end which he proposed to himself in writing the Faery Queen. That poem was to consist of twelve books; and the hero of each was to impersonate one of the twelve moral virtues enumerated by Aristotle. This poem he proposed to follow up by a second, the hero of which was to have been King Arthur after he had acceded to the throne, and which was to have illustrated the political virtues. We learn from Todd's Life of Spenser that at a party of friends held near Dublin, in the house of Ludowick Bryskett, the poet gave the same account of his poem, then unpublished, but of which a considerable part had been written. Bryskett, on that occasion, spoke of him as "not only

perfect in the Greek tongue, but also very well read in philosophy, both moral and natural.”

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That

Unhappily, only half of the earlier romance was written, or at least has reached us, and no part of the second; but much which belongs to the subject of the second poem may be found in fragments scattered over the six books of the Faery Queen. One of these political fragments vindicates the old claim of poets to be prophets; for the great revolutionary dogma expounded in it is one which, though its earlier mutterings may have been heard at the time of the German Anabaptists, did not "open its mouth" and 'speak great things" for two centuries after Spenser had denounced the approaching imposture. imposture is the one, now but too well known, which, in the name of justice, substitutes for it the fiction of a universal equality in the interests of which all human society hitherto known is to be levelled down and remodelled. Artegal, Spenser's emblem of Justice, rides forth on his mission accompanied by his squire Talus, the iron man, with the iron flail. On the seaside they descry "many nations" gathered togetherThere they beheld a mighty gyant stand Upon a rocke, and holding forth on hie An huge great paire of ballaunce in his hand, With which he boasted in his surquedrie 1 That all the world he would weigh equallie, If aught he had the same to counterpoize; For want whereof he weighed vanity, And filled his ballaunce full of idle toys; And was admired much of fools, women, and boys.

Pride.