Pastoral Poetry & Pastoral Drama Part 6

My lute, awake! perform the last Labour that thou and I shall waste, And end that I have now begun; For when this song is sung and past, My lute, be still, for I have done--

so they in their turn heralded the full strophic sonority of the _Epithalamium_.

Lastly, in the 'December' we have the counterpart of the January eclogue, a monologue in which Colin laments his wasted life and joyless, for

Winter is come, that blowes the balefull breath, And after Winter commeth timely death.

Adieu, delightes, that lulled me asleepe; Adieu, my deare, whose love I bought so deare; Adieu, my little Lambes and loved sheepe; Adieu, ye Woodes, that oft my witnesse were: Adieu, good Hobbinoll, that was so true, Tell Rosalind, her Colin bids her adieu.[94]

It will be seen from the above a.n.a.lysis that the architectonic basis of Spenser's design consists of the three Colin eclogues standing respectively at the beginning, in the middle, and at the close of the year. These are symmetrically arranged: the 'January' and 'December' are both alike monologues and agree in the stanza used, while the 'June' is a dialogue and likewise differs in metrical form. This latter is supported as it were by two subsidiary eclogues, those of April and August, in both of which another shepherd sings one of Colin's lays and refers incidentally to his pa.s.sion for Rosalind. It is upon this framework that are woven the various moral, polemical, and idyllic themes which Spenser introduces. The attempt at uniting a series of poems into a single fabric is Spenser's chief contribution to the formal side of pastoral composition. The method by which he sought to correlate the various parts so as to produce the singleness of impression necessary to a work of art, and the measure of success which he achieved, though they belong more strictly to the general history of poetry, must also detain us for a moment. The chief and most obvious device is that suggested by the t.i.tle--_The Shepherd's Calender_--'Conteyning twelve Aeglogues proportionable to the twelve monethes.' This might, indeed, have been no more than a fanciful name for any series of twelve poems;[95] with Spenser it indicates a conscious principle of artistic construction. It suggests, what is moreover apparent from the eclogues themselves, that the author intended to represent the spring and fall of the year as typical of the life of man. The moods of the various poems were to be made to correspond with the seasons represented; or, conversely, outward nature in its cycle through the year was to reflect and thereby unify the emotions, thoughts, and pa.s.sions of the shepherds. This was a perfectly legitimate artistic device, and one based on a fundamental principle of our nature, since the appearance of objective phenomena is ever largely modified and coloured by subjective feeling. Nor can it reasonably be objected against the device that in the hands of inferior craftsmen it degenerates but too readily into the absurdities of the 'pathetic fallacy,' or that Spenser himself is not wholly guiltless of the charge.

Winter is come, that blowes the balefull breath, And after Winter commeth timely death.

These lines bear witness to Spenser's intention. But the conceit is not fully or consistently carried out. In several of the eclogues not only does the subject in no way reflect the mood of the season--the very nature of the theme at times made this impossible--but the time of year is not so much as mentioned. This is more especially the case in the summer months; there is no joy of the 'hygh seysoun,' and when it is mentioned it is rather by way of contrast than of sympathy. Thus in June Colin mourns for other days:

Tho couth I sing of love, and tune my pype Unto my plaintive pleas in verses made: Tho would I seeke for Queene-apples unrype, To give my Rosalind; and in Sommer shade Dight gaudy Girlonds was my common trade, To crowne her golden locks: but yeeres more rype, And losse of her, whose love as lyfe I wayd, Those weary wanton toyes away dyd wype.

In the same eclogue we may trace a deliberate contrast between various descriptive pa.s.sages. Thus Hobbinol feels the magie of the summer woods--

Colin, to heare thy rymes and roundelayes, Which thou were wont on wastfull hylls to singe, I more delight then larke in Sommer dayes: Whose Echo made the neyghbour groves to ring, And taught the byrds, which in the lower spring Did shroude in shady leaves from sonny rayes, Frame to thy songe their chereful cheriping, Or hold theyr peace, for shame of thy swete layes.

Closely following upon this stanza we have Colin's lament, 'The G.o.d of shepheards, t.i.tyrus, is dead,' containing the lines:

But, if on me some little drops would flowe Of that the spring was in his learned hedde, I soone would learne these woods to wayle my woe, And teache the trees their trickling teares to shedde.

We have here a specifie inversion of the 'pathetic fallacy.' The moods of nature are no longer represented as varying in sympathy with the pa.s.sions of man, but are deliberately used to heighten an effect by contrast. Even this inverted correspondence, however, is for the most part lacking in the subsequent eclogues, and it must be admitted that in so far as Spenser depended on a cyclic correlation for the unifying of his design, he achieved at best but partial effect. Another means by which he sought, consciously or unconsciously, to produce unity of impression was by consistently pitching his song in the minor key. This accounts for the inverted correspondence just noted, and for the fact that even the polemics have an undercurrent of regret in them. In this case the poet has undoubtedly succeeded in carrying out the prevailing mood of the central motive--the Rosalind drama--in the subsidiary scenes. Or should we not rather say that he has extracted the general mood of the whole composition, and infused it, in a kind of typical form, into the three connected poems placed at critical points of the complex structure? The unity, however, thus aimed at, and achieved, is very different from the cyclic or architectonic unity described above, and of a much less definite character.

It remains to say a few words concerning the language of the _Calender_ and the rough accentual metre in which parts of it are composed, since both have a particular bearing upon Spenser's att.i.tude towards pastoral in general.

Ben Jonson, in one of those utterances which have won for him the reputation of churlishness, but which are often marked by acute critical sense, a.s.serted that Spenser 'in affecting the Ancients writ no Language.'[96] The remark applies first and foremost, of course, to the _Calender_, and opens up the whole question of archaism and provincialism in literature. This is far too wide a question to receive adequate treatment here, and yet it appears forced upon us by the nature of the case. For Spenser's archaism, in his pastoral work at least, is no unmeaning affectation as Jonson implies. He perceived that the language of Chaucer bore a closer resemblance to actual rustic speech than did the literary language of his own day, and he adopted it for his imaginary shepherds as a fitting subst.i.tute for the actual folk-tongue with which he had grown familiar, whether in the form of rugged Lancas.h.i.+re or full-mouthed Kentish. And the homely dialect does undoubtedly naturalize the characters of his eclogues, and disguise the time-honoured plat.i.tudes that they repeat from their learned predecessors. With our wider appreciation of literary effect, and our more historical and less authoritative manner of judging works of art, we can no longer endorse Sidney's famous criticism:[97] 'That same framing of his stile, to an old rustick language, I dare not alowe, sith neyther Theocritus in Greeke, Virgill in Latine, nor Sanazar in Italian, did affect it.'[98] If a writer finds an effective and picturesque word in an old author or in a homely dialect it is but pedantry that opposes its use, and it matters little moreover from what quarter of the land it may hail, as Stevenson knew when he claimed the right of mingling Ayrs.h.i.+re with his Lothian verse. Even such archaisms as 'deemen' and 'thinken,' such colloquialisms as the p.r.o.nominal possessive, need not be too severely criticized. What goes far towards justifying Jonson's acrimony is the wanton confusion of different dialectal forms; the indiscriminate use for the mere sake of archaism of such variants as 'gate' beside the usual 'goat,' of 'sike' and 'sich'

beside 'such'; the coining of words like 'stanck,' apparently from the Italian _stanco_; and lastly, the introduction of forms which owe their origin to mere etymological ignorance, for instance, 'yede' as an infinitive, 'behight' in the same sense as the simple verb, 'betight,'

'gride,' and many others--all of which do not tend to produce the homely effect of mother English, but reek of all that is pedantic and unnatural.[99]

The influence of Chaucer was not confined to the language: from him Spenser borrowed the metre of a considerable portion of the _Calender_. It may at first sight appear strange to attribute to imitation of Chaucer's smooth, carefully ordered verse the rather rugged measure of, say, the February eclogue, but a little consideration will, I fancy, leave no doubt upon the subject. This measure is roughly reducible to four beats with a varying number of syllables in the _theses_, being thus purely accentual as distinguished from the more strictly syllabic measures of Chaucer himself on the one hand and the English Petrarchists on the other. Take the following example:

The soveraigne of seas he blames in vaine, That, once sea-beate, will to sea againe: So loytring live you little heardgroomes, Keeping you beastes in the budded broomes: And, when the s.h.i.+ning sunne laugheth once, You deemen the Spring is come attonce; Tho gynne you, fond flyes! the cold to scorne, And, crowing in pypes made of greene corn, You thinken to be Lords of the yeare; But eft, when ye count you freed from feare, Cornes the breme Winter with chamfred browes, Full of wrinckles and frostie furrowes, Drerily shooting his stormy darte, Which cruddles the blood and p.r.i.c.ks the harte: Then is your carelesse corage accoied, Your careful heards with cold bene annoied: Then paye you the price of your surquedrie, With weeping, and wailing, and misery.[100]

The syllabic value of the final _e_, already weakening in the London of Chaucer's later days, was more or less of an archaism even with his most immediate followers, none of whom use it with his unvarying correctness, and it soon became literally a dead letter. The change was a momentous one for English prosody, and none of the fifteenth-century writers possessed sufficient poetic genius to adapt their verse to the altered conditions of the language. They lived from hand to mouth, as it were, without arriving at any systematic tradition. Thus it was that at the beginning of the sixteenth century Hawes could write such verse as:

Of dame Astronomy I dyd take my lycence For to travayle to the toure of Chyvalry; For al my minde, wyth percyng influence, Was sette upon the most fayre lady La Bell Pucell, so muche ententyfly, That every daye I dyd thinke fyftene, Tyl I agayne had her swete person sene.[101]

It is this prosody, dependent usually upon a strong caesural pause to differentiate it from prose, which may account for the harshness of some of Wyatt's verse, and which rendered possible the barbarous metre of Barclay. It was obviously impossible for a poet with an ear like Spenser to accept such a metrical scheme as this; but his own study of Chaucer produced a somewhat strange result. The one point which the late Chaucerians preserved of their master's metric was the five-stress character of his decasyllabic line; but in Spenser's day all memory of the syllabic _e_ had long since vanished, and the only rhythm to be extracted from Chaucer's verse was of a four-stress type. Professor Herford quotes a pa.s.sage from the Prologue of the _Canterbury Tales_ as it appears in Thynne's second edition (1542), which Spenser would inevitably have read as follows:

When zephirus eke wyth hs sote breth Enspred hath every holte and heth, The tendre croppes, and the yong sonne Hath in the Ram halfe hys course yronne, And smale foules maken melode That slepen al nght with open eye, &c.

This certainly bears on the face of it a close resemblance to Spenser's measure. There are, moreover, occasional difficulties in this method of scansion, some lines refusing to accommodate themselves to the Procrustean methods of sixteenth-century editors, and exactly similar anomalies are to be found in Spenser. Such, for instance, are the lines in the May eclogue:

Tho opened he the dore, and in came The false Foxe, as he were starke lame.

Now these lines may be written in strict Chaucerian English thus:

Tho opened he the dore, and inne came The false fox, as he were starke lame,

and they at once become perfectly metrical. Under these circ.u.mstances there can, I think, be little doubt as to the literary parentage of Spenser's accentual measure.[102]

Like the archaic dialect, this homely measure tends to bring Spenser's shepherds closer to their actual English brethren. And hereby, it should be frankly acknowledged, the incongruity of the speakers and their discourse is emphasized and increased. That discourse, it is true, runs on pastoral themes, but the disguise and allegory have worn thin with centuries of use. We can no longer separate the words from the allusions, and consequently we can no longer accept the speakers in their unsophisticated shepherd's role. Yet it was precisely the desire to give reality to these transparent phantasms that led Spenser to endow them with a rustic speech. Whether he failed or succeeded the paradox of the form remains about equal.[103]

The importance of the _Shepherd's Calender_ was early recognized, not only by friendly critics, but by the general public likewise, and six editions were called for in less than twenty years. Not long after its appearance John Dove, a Christ Church man, who appears to have been ignorant of the authors.h.i.+p, turned the whole into Latin verse, dedicating the ma.n.u.script to the Dean.[104] Another Latin version is found in ma.n.u.script in the British Museum copy of the edition of 1597, and after undergoing careful revision finally appeared in print in 1653. This was the work of one Bathurst, a fellow of Spenser's own college of Pembroke at Cambridge.[105]

The _Shepherd's Calender_ was Spenser's chief contribution to pastoral; indeed it was by so much his most important contribution that it would hardly be worth while examining the others did they not bear witness to a certain change in his att.i.tude towards the pastoral ideal.

The first of these later works is the isolated but monumental eclogue ent.i.tled _Colin Clouts come Home again_, of which the dedication to Raleigh is dated 1591, though it was not published till four years later.

This, perhaps the longest and most elaborate eclogue ever written, describes how the Shepherd of the Ocean, that is Raleigh, induced Colin Clout, who as before represents Spenser, to leave his rustic retreat in

the cooly shade Of the greene alders by the Mallaes sh.o.r.e,

and try his fortune at the court of the great shepherdess Cynthia, and how he ultimately returned to Ireland. The verse marks, as might be expected, a considerable advance in smoothness and command of rhythm over the non-lyrical portions of the _Calender_, and the dialect, too, is much less harsh, being far advanced towards that peculiar poetic diction which Spenser adopted in his more ambitions work. On the other hand, in spite of a certain _allegrezza_ in the handling, and in spite of the Rosalind wound being at least partially healed, the same minor key prevails as in the earlier poems. In the spring of the great age of English song Spenser's note is like the voice of autumn, not the fruitful autumn of cornfield and orchard, but a premature barrenness of wet and fallen leaves--

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall.

Thus though time has purged the bitterness of his sorrow, the regret remains; his early love is still the mistress of his thoughts, but years have softened his reproaches, and he admits:

who with blame can justly her upbrayd, For loving not; for who can love compell?--

a petard, it may be incidentally remarked, which, sprung within the bounds of pastoral, is of power to pulverize in an instant the whole artificial system of amatory ethics.

The most notable points in the poem are the loves of the rivers Bregog and Mulla, the famous list of contemporary poets, and the presentation of the seamy side of court life, recalling the more direct satire of the probably contemporary _Mother Hubberd's Tale_. The first of these belongs to the cla.s.s of Ovidian myths already noticed in such works as Lorenzo's _Ambra_.

The subject, however, is treated in a more subtly allegorical manner than by Ovid's direct imitators, and this mode of presentment likewise characterizes Spenser's tale of Molanna in the fragment on Mutability.[106] Browne returned to a more crudely metamorphical tradition in the loves of Walla and Tavy, while a similarly mythological _Naturanschauung_ may be traced in Drayton's chorographical epic.

Of the miscellaneous _Astrophel_, edited and in part composed by Spenser, which was appended to _Colin Clout_, and of the _Daphnada_ published in 1596, though, like the former volume, containing a dedication dated 1591, a pa.s.sing mention must suffice. The former is chiefly remarkable as ill.u.s.trating the uniformly commonplace character of the verse called forth by the death of one who, while he lived, was held the glory of Elizabethan chivalry. It contains, beside other verse, pastoral elegies from the pens, certainly of Spenser, and probably of the Countess of Pembroke, Matthew Roydon, and Lodowick Bryskett. The last-named, or at any rate a contributor with the same initiais, also supplied a 'Pastorall Aeglogue'

on the same theme. _Daphnada_ is a long lament in pastoral form on the death of Douglas Howard, daughter of the Earl of Northampton.

Of far greater importance for our present purpose is the pastoral interlude in the quest of Sir Calidore, which occupies the last four cantos of the sixth book of the _Faery Queen_.[107] Here is told how Sir Calidore, the knight of courtesy, in his quest of the Blatant Beast came among the shepherd-folk and fell in love with the fair Pastorella, reputed daughter of old Meliboee; how he won her love in return through his valour and courtesy; how while he was away hunting she was carried off by a band of robbers; how he followed and rescued her; and finally, how she was discovered to be the daughter of the lord of Belgard--at which point the poem breaks off abruptly. The story has points of resemblance with the Dorastus and Fawnia, or Florizel and Perdita, legend; but it also has another and more important claim upon our attention. For as Shakespeare in _As You Like It_, so Spenser in this episode has, as it were, pa.s.sed judgement upon the pastoral ideal as a whole. He is acutely sensitive to the charm of that ideal and the seductions it offers to his hero--

Ne, certes, mote he greatly blamed be,

says the poet of the _Faery Queen_ recalling the days when he was plain Colin Clout--but the

perfect pleasures, which do grow Amongst poore hyndes, in hils, in woods, in dales,

are not allowed to afford more than a temporary solace to the knight; the robbers break in upon the rustic quietude, rapine and murder succeed the peaceful occupations of the shepherds, and Sir Calidore is driven once again to resume his arduous quest. The same idea may be traced in the knight's visit to the heaven-haunted hill where he meets Colin Clout. In the

hundred naked maidens lilly white All raunged in a ring and dauncing in delight

to the sound of Colin's bagpipe, and who, together with the Graces and their sovereign lady, vanish at the knight's approach, it is surely not fanciful to see the gracious shadows of the idyllic poet's vision trooping reluctantly away at the call of a more lofty theme. With this sense of regret at the vanis.h.i.+ng of an ideal long cherished, but at last deliberately abandoned for matters of deeper and more real import, we may turn from the work of the most important figure in English pastoral poetry to his less famous contemporaries.