Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB
[graphic]

undergraduate days were embittered by conflicts with the authorities, but we have no reliable data for such opinion. John Aubrey, in a statement which must be examined later, asserted that the poet "missed the fellowship there which Bishop Andrews got," but

throws no further light on the subject. Perhaps the theory that Spenser was unhappy in his student life receives slight support from the fact that, although he refers with affection to his university, he makes no mention of his college.

It is known that Spenser left Cambridge in 1576 on taking his M.A. degree, and it is also established that he was in London by October, 1579. Where did he spend the interval? If Mr. Knowles is correct in

thinking the poet's parents were now living at Burnley, it

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

A WARRANT OF TITLE BY SPENSER This relates to the poet's Kilcolman estate.

is natural to suppose that a part of the time at least was passed in their company. All authorities are agreed, and on good evidence, that Spenser went into the North of England on leaving Cambridge, but it seems impossible to locate his exact whereabouts. Just here, however, it is right that the statement of John Aubrey, the antiquarian, should be considered. In one of his manuscripts he sets down these particulars of our poet: "Mr. Edmond Spencer was of Pembroke hall, in Cambridge. He missed the fellowship there which Bishop Andrews got. He was an acquaintance and frequenter of Sir Erasmus Dryden his mistress Rosalinde was a kinswoman of Sir Erasmus's lady. The chamber

there at Sir Erasmus's is still called Spenser's chamber. Lately in college, taking down the wainscot of his chamber, they found abundance of cards, with stanzas of the Faerie Queene written on them. From John Dryden, poet laureate, Mr. Beeston says, he was a little man, wore short hair, and little band, and little cuffes."

Amid so much that is nebulous in the history of Spenser it would be a relief to think that the mask has been removed from the fair face of his Rosalind. Of course there have not been lacking theories of her identification; and they have, in the main, been as childish if not as numerous as those which cluster around the person of Dante's Beatrice.

No one, however, has yet arisen to dissolve Rosalind away as a myth; she was so real to the poet that her personality refuses to be translated into a philosophical abstraction. How real she was, and what a sad time Spenser had with her! Meeting her when fresh from college and while full of high hopes as he stood on the threshold of life, her image dominated his life to within a few years of its close.

Although Spenser loved in vain for himself, he did not love in vain for his art-no poet ever does. From the travail of his unrequited passion there were born children

One authority declares the poet to have become a member of the household of Leicester House not later than 1578. Gabriel Harvey roundly told his friend that life was too serious a thing to be spent in vain regrets for Rosalind; he had better be off to London and try his fortune there. And Gabriel Harvey gave more than advice; he, it seems, was the means of introducing Spenser to Sir Philip Sidney, and thus opening to him the avenue along which such preferment as was to be his lot eventually came.

So persistent and probable is the tradition which makes Spenser the companion of Sid

[graphic][merged small][merged small]

of fancy who long ago joined the dwellers of that dream-world which is peopled with the creations of poets. In the words of Dean Church, "Rosalind had given an impulse to the young poet's powers and a color to his thoughts, and had enrolled Spenser in that band and order of poets-with one exception, not the greatest order to whom the wonderful passion of love, in its heights and its depths, is the element on which their imagination works, and out of which it molds its most beautiful and characteristic creations."

It is certain that Spenser returned to London by October, 1579, and it seems probable that an earlier date may be accepted.

ney at Penshurst that one inclines hopefully to the theory which dates the return of the poet some months, at least, prior to October, 1579. Than Penshurst for a home and Sidney for a companion, there could have been no fitter education for the poet who was to sing the swan-song of English chivalry. Time has dealt tenderly with the gray walls of the fair Kentish home of Sidney; they stand to-day little changed by the summers and winters of more than three centuries. Here, indeed, are environments amid which it is easy to frame a picture of the poet and his courtly friend; it would strike no discord to meet them in earnest talk in this old-world

baronial hall, or wandering arm in arm amid the glades of this ancestral park. "The generall end of all the booke," wrote Spenser of the "Faerie Queene," "is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline." And who but Sidney was his model? He "impressed his own noble and beautiful character deeply on Spenser's mind. Spenser saw and learned in him what was then the highest type of the finished gentleman."

But the poet had other occupation at Penshurst than that of studying the character of his host. While it is probable that the "Shepheard's Calendar" was begun in the north, internal evidence points clearly to its completion amid the southern dales which surround Sidney's home. Wherever begun and ended, the poem was out of Spenser's hands ere the year closed, for on December 5, 1579, this entry was made on behalf of one "Hugh Singleton" in the register of Stationers' Hall: "Lycenced unto him the Shepperdes Calender conteyninge xij ecloges proportionable to the xij monthes." Although there are reasons for believing that the "Shepheard's Calendar" was by no means the first-fruits of Spenser's muse, that volume was his first serious bid for the suffrages of Elizabethan England as its chief poet. But the bid was made in a very modest manner. The volume appeared anonymously, under the sheltering wing of a dedication to Sidney, and with a commendatory epistle from the pen of E. K.—the initials, as we now know, of the poet's Cambridge friend. True, the epistle was bold enough; E. K. had no doubts about the quality of the poet for whom he stood sponsor. Spenser's success appears to have been instantaneous. England was waiting for a new poet, and had grace given to recognize him when he appeared. "But now yet at the last," wrote one critic while his mind was filled with thoughts of Virgil, "hath England hatched one poet of this sort, in my conscience comparable with the best in any respect: even Master Sp., author of the Shepheard's Calendar,' whose travail in that piece of English poetry I think verily is so commendable, as none of equal judgement can yield him less praise for his excellent skill and skilful excellency showed forth in the same, than they would to either Theocritus or Virgil."

Sidney was the relative of many influential men in those days, and the friend of many

more, and he it was, we may be sure, who secured the poet a place in the household of Leicester House. That was a notable riverside mansion in Spenser's time. Once the home of Lord Paget, it was now the abode of the Earl of Leicester, and known by his name. Years after it was bequeathed to his son-in-law, the Earl of Essex, and as Essex House it sheltered Spenser when in London, sixteen years later, on his last quest for "more preferment." It has all vanished now, save the arch and steps at the bottom of Essex Street, which once served as the water-gate of the mansion and saw the "two gentle Knights" of the "Prothalamion" receive those "two faire Brides, their Loves delight." There are probably no other stones standing in all London which can claim to have figured as these archway pillars did in the life of Spenser.

Perhaps those were not happy days he spent in Leicester House; instinctively they recall the sorrow of the solitary Florentine and his

Thou shalt have proof how savoureth of salt The bread of others, and how hard a road The going down and up another's stairs. It may have been otherwise; we cannot tell; but to the high-spirited man there are few trials so galling as waiting for the opportunity to put out to usury the talents of which he is conscious.

At last Spenser's opportunity came, but in a form he probably little expected. It seems clear that his heart was set on some State service which would give him space to approve the reputation he had won; his letters to his friend Harvey bristle with poetic projects and schemes for high achievement in the realm of letters. That he fulfilled his mission, but independent of the aid he had anticipated, is not the least jewel in his crown.

While Spenser was still waiting, the Ministers of Elizabeth were struggling with the problem which has been the nightmare of English statesmen for countless generations— the problem of what to do with Ireland. Deputy after Deputy, many of them men of clear vision and high purpose, had returned home foiled in the task of giving that country a stable government. Sidney's father, Sir Henry Sidney, had been the last to resign the hopeless labor, and for two years the Queen had no personal representative among her Irish subjects. But circumstances bad arisen which made the appointment of a new Deputy an urgent necessity, and in the

[subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][merged small][ocr errors]

summer of 1580 Lord Grey of Wilton was appointed to fill that "great place which had wrecked the reputation and broken the hearts of a succession of able and high-spirited servants of the English Crown." This appointment was of great moment to Spenser, for, probably at the advice of Philip Sidney, Lord Grey made choice of the "new Poet" as his secretary.

contrast to the environment he had left behind: instead of the settled comfort of Elizabethan England, the perturbed life of rebellious Ireland. His verse reflects the change in many passages, some of which are charged with that pensive feeling which even to-day besets the traveler in some parts of Ireland.

Our conception of what exactly were Spenser's official occupations in Ireland is by no means so clear as might be wished. He went thither as the new Deputy's secretary, and when that office took end he seems to have passed from one clerkship to another until his days were numbered. Various grants were made to him from time to time. Now he receives a lease of the Abbey of Enniscorthy, and a year later a six years' lease of a house in Dublin. When Munster was settled, he shared with many others in the grants of land then made, his portion being the Castle of Kilcolman and an estate of three thousand acres. This was the most considerable prize that ever fell to his lot, and Kilcolman, as it became his home, is the one definite mark on the map of Ireland which Spenser's name suggests.

[graphic]

When Spenser went to Ireland, he carried the scheme of the "Faerie Queene" with him. He may have shaped it into some form during his college or North of England days; there can be little doubt that he talked it over with Sidney at Penshurst. But, admitting that the idea of the poem took early root in his mind, the fashioning of it into its final form was accomplished almost wholly on Irish soil. In a curious and very scarce pamphlet, bearing the title of "A Discourse of Civil Life," there is given a description of a meeting of literary men which took place in a cottage near Dublin somewhere between the years 1584 and 1588. The author, Ludowick Bryskett, explains that a debate on ethics took place at that meeting, and he describes himself as asking one member of the company, "very well read in Philosophy, both moral and natural," to favor the rest with his conclusions on the matter. The one so appealed to was Edmund Spenser. His answer, as reported by Bryskett, inasmuch as it is practically our only Boswellian glimpse of the poet, is worth transcribing: "Though Socially, too, his new life presented a sad it may seem hard for me to refuse the request

For the remainder of Spenser's life we have to think of him as an exile. There were, it is true, as will be seen, several visits home, each undertaken apparently in the hope of "more preferment" on English soil, but those visits are the only relief in the picture. Probably it is quite reasonable to suppose that the poet distilled some enjoyment out of his life in Ireland, but it is impossible to ignore the fact that his absence from London in those days of intense life in literature and politics robbed him of much keen pleasure. He was in the golden era of English letters, and yet not of it; it was his fate to "live in the Elizabethan age, and to be severed from those brilliant spirits to which the fame of that age is due."

made by you all, whom every one alone I should for many respects be willing to gratify; yet, as the case standeth, I doubt not but with the consent of the most part of you I shall be excused at this time of this task which would be laid upon me; for sure I am that it is not unknown unto you that I have already undertaken a work tending to the same effect, which is in heroical verse, under the title of a Faerie Queene,' to represent all the moral virtues, assigning to every virtue a Knight to be the patron and defender of the same, in whose actions and feats of arms and chivalry the operations of that vertue whereof he is the protector are to be expressed, and the vices and unruly appetites that oppose themselves against the same, to be beaten down and overcome. Which work, as I have already well entered into, if God shall please to spare me life that I may finish it according to my mind, your wish will be in some sort accomplished, though perhaps not so effectually as you could desire."

One of the principal sharers in the planting of Munster was Sir Walter Raleigh, and a large bay window in his house at Youghal is still pointed out as the spot where Spenser wrote many stanzas of his great poem. Certainly Raleigh and Spenser renewed their friendship in Ireland, and there is nothing improbable in the legend which makes the poet a guest at Youghal. Raleigh was quick to measure the value of the work Spenser had done, and forthwith urged him to return to London with him and give it to the world. It is impossible to resist a suspicion that Raleigh was thinking of his own advantage as well as Spenser's. He had left England under the frown of Elizabeth; to return as sponsor to a poet who would reflect luster on her person and her reign might be a cheap method of changing the frown to a smile. In any case, Spenser can hardly have wanted much persuasion. He had tasted exile for ten years; he had finished enough of his great task to make a considerable volume; it might be that, as the "Shepheard's Calendar" started the sequence

of events which took him across the Irish Channel, the "Faerie Queene" would be the means of ending his banishment. Raleigh's plan was approved, and Spenser returned to London in his company, bearing with him the first three books of the "Faerie Queene."

Arriving in England, probably some time in November, 1589, Spenser lost no time in arranging for the publication of his first installment of the "Faerie Queene." The "Shepheard's Calendar" had been published by one Hugh Singleton, "at the signe of the gylden Tunne;" the "Faerie Queene" was intrusted to the hands of William Ponsonby, who did business at the sign of the Bishop's Head in St. Paul's Churchyard. When the "Faerie Queene" proved to be such a success, and had set the tongues of men wagging with Spenser's praise, Ponsonby, on his own initiative, raked together such of the poet's minor

[graphic]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

ENTRY IN STATIONERS' HALL

Registry of "The Shepheard's Calendar," December 5, 1589.

« AnteriorContinuar »