Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T08:17:48.315Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

III.—Spenser, Thomson, and Romanticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Extract

Many students of English literature are agreed that the Eighteenth Century stands in special need of reconsideration. In earlier days Wordsworth, Keats, and many more, with the new dawn on their lips, consigned their Augustan fathers and grandfathers to an ill-considered damnation. In our own age we have tried to be more tolerant. But our methods have been unfortunate. We admit the Eighteenth Century to be interesting, but interesting only in so far as it anticipates romanticism. In consequence all scholarship on the Eighteenth Century literature of England has become a mad scramble in search of romanticism. Since Professor Beers and Professor Phelps traced its growth in the Eighteenth Century it has become so fashionable to detect signs of revolt against neo-classicism that some brilliant critic of the future may gain distinction by turning the tables and by proving that a school of Pope actually existed. Of the many conceptions of the Eighteenth Century one of the most exaggerated is the notion that the influence of Spenser was one of the main forces that made for romanticism. It is the purpose of this study to examine the Spenserian problem by a brief analysis of those poems which fashion dubbed Spenserian Imitations. My contentions may be made more clear by departing from the strict chronological method and by taking Thomson's Castle of Indolence, a very composite poem, as a climax.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1911

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

page 53 note 1 For the comments of Mr. Phelps on Addison see The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement, Boston, 1893, p. 49. For examples of Addison's mature appreciation of Spenser see Spectator, Nos. 62, 183, 419, and Guardian, September 4, 1713.

page 54 note 1 See The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement, pp. 53, sq., for the quotation from Pope and Mr. Phelps' remarks.

page 54 note 2 Mr. Phelps quotes the assertion in Dr. Johnson's Life of Philips that Pope took Virgil for his pattern. This is to overlook a very substantial indebtedness to Spenser. Pope avowedly grouped his eclogues according to seasons in imitation of Spenser's arrangement by months. Minor indications of direct Spenserian influence are plentiful, e. g.:

Pope, Spring, ll. 3 and 4:

“Fair Thames, flow gently from thy sacred spring,
While on thy banks Sicilian Muses sing;“

and Spenser, Prothalamion, refrain:

“Sweete Themmes! runne softly, till I end my Song.”

Pope's Summer, line 16:

“The woods shall answer, and their echo ring.”

Spenser, Epithalamion, refrain:

“The woods shall to me answer, and my Echo ring.”

Pope's Summer, ll. 39, sq.:

“That flute is mine which Colin's tuneful breath

Inspired, when living, and bequeath'd in death:

He said, 'Alexis, take this pipe, the same
That taught the groves my Rosalinda's name.'“

Pope, Winter, ll. 89, sq.:

“Adieu, ye vales, ye mountains, streams, and groves,
Adieu, ye shepherds' rural lays and loves;
Adieu, my flocks, farewell, ye sylvan crew;
Daphne, farewell; and all the world adieu!“

Spenser, December, the last stanza:

“Adieu, delights 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 adieu.“

page 56 note 1 Colin's Mistakes, once only ascribed to Prior, is now generally accepted. Mr. Phelps (p. 52, note) has some excellent arguments. Mr. A. R. Waller, Prior's latest editor (Dialogues of the Dead and Other Works in Prose and Verse, Cambridge University Press, 1907), includes it without question.

page 57 note 1 Whoever doubts the genuineness of the poet's desire may read Prior's praise of Spenser and new aspirations in his remarkable preface to his execrable Solomon.

page 58 note 1 Accessible in Cambridge Prize Poems, London, 1817. I can only list here a few of the poems in the Spenser-Prior stanza. Samuel Boyse: The Olive: An Heroic Ode (1736–7), Ode to the Marquis of Tavistock (1740), The Vision of Patience (1741?), a paraphrase of Psalm XLII, Albion's Triumph, An Ode on the Battle of Deitingen (1743), Stanzas Occasioned by Mr. Pope's Translation of Horace, a modernization of Chaucer's Squire's Tale supplemented by Ogle's modernization of Spenser's continuation of Chaucer also in the ten-lined stanza of Prior (the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer Modernis'd by Several Hands. Published by Mr. Ogle. London, 1761. First edition?). So Samuel Say, with more taste, utilized the beautiful love-story of Belphoebe and Timias to give point to his love-lyric, The Dream. So Dr. Dodd, whose divine efflatus may be estimated by the title of his very serious imitation of The Shepheards Calender, Diggon Davy's Resolution on the Death of His Last Cow, perpetrated a Sonnet Occasioned by Hearing a Young Lady sing Spenser's Amoretti.

page 60 note 1 E. g.: On Happiness and Palinodia, in J. Husband's Miscellany of Poems by Several Hands (1731). Dodsley, the publisher, contributed two deadly effusions: Pain and Patience (1742) and On the Death of Mr. Pope (1744?). The Juvenilia of Thomas Gibbons contains An Elegaic Ode on the Death of the Reverend Mr. Mordecai Andrew, A Vision. Dodsley's supplementary Collection (1783), contains a poem in this stanza, The Hospitable Oak, of more interest because it practically retells Spenser's fable of the oak in Februarie with a liberal use of archaisms, etc., etc. The stanza has remained popular to this day.

page 60 note 2 The poem contains an allusion to Spenser's elegy on Sidney, Astrophel, in the same stanza as Warton's elegy (ababcc), though Spenser did not here employ the final alexandrine. Joseph Warton's Ode on his brother's death has a similar allusion in which he desires his master's elegaic gifts.

page 60 note 3 See ll. 28–69, passim.

page 61 note 1 This is true except that Spenser did not use the final alexandrine here.

page 61 note 2 They are: Morning (written 1745), Ode viii, An Elegy on the Death of Prince Frederick (written 1751), The Complaint of Cherwell (written 1761). Joseph Warton shows even less indications of Spenserian influence on his poetry. In his youth Joseph Warton sketched a stiff allegorical poem with pageants of Vices of a Spenserian cast. His Ode to Liberty, in tetrameter couplets, is varied by two Prior-Spenserian stanzas. His poems in general contain occasional allusions to Spenser.

page 62 note 1 Letters, No. xxiii, To Mr. Graves. The Day before Xmas, 1742.

page 63 note 1 This is curiously like Spenser's Muiopotmus, sts. 24, 25, a garden of:

“The wholesome Saulge, and Lavender still gray,
Bank-smelling Rue, and Cummin good for eyes,“ etc.

page 64 note 1 Akenside's The Virtuoso, a boyish poem in Spenserian stanzas, which appeared in The Gentleman's Magazine for 1737, the year of the first edition of the School-mistress, may have been an imitation of Shenstone. It is the character-sketch of a curious old book-worm. See also: The Parish Clerk (no date), by W. Vernon (d. shortly after 1760); Henry Mackenzie: The Old Bachelor, After the Manner of Spenser, and The Old Maid, After the Same Manner; etc. Tom Hood's burlesque The Irish School-master, in Spenserian stanzas looks like a nineteenth century imitation of Shenstone, though Hood knew his Spenser well. I may mention here several of Akenside's other poems listed by Mr. Phelps as Spenserian because their stanza-forms seem like variations of the Spenserian stanza: Ode to Curio (1744), Ode to the Author of the Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg (1751), To Country Gentlemen of England, all in ababccdee D.

page 64 note 2 E. g.: William Finlayson, Andrew and Jock (1806); Isaac Brown, Refrewshire Characters and Scenery (1824); Alexander Balfour, The Ploughman's Death and Burial (1825); Robert White, The Highland Emigrant (1867); etc., etc.

page 65 note 1 Published by James Ralph in Miscellaneous Poems by Several Hands. For other modernizations of Spenser see: Spenser Redivivus (1687), the modernization of Spenser's Cambel and Triamond episode appended to Boyse's paraphrase of The Squire's Tale mentioned in a note above (1763?), Cantos in blank verse (18 pages, 1774), Cantos iiv in blank verse (1783), Prince Arthur, An Allegorical Romance (2 vols., prose, 1779). See The Monthly Review (1775), for an interesting attack on the sacreligious habit of modernizing Spenser.

page 66 note 1 Cf. The Faërie Queene, l. 1, 34: “A little lowly Hermitage it was.”

page 67 note 1 For examples of other poems of this group: Gilbert West, the translator of Pindar, printed On the Abuse of Travelling. A Canto, In Imitation of Spenser (1739), a typical Augustan moralistic and satirical poem with all the tinsel of Spenser, and Education; A Poem written in Imitation of the Style and Manner of Spenser's Fairy Queen, which contains an attack on the artificial gardening of the day. Gloster Ridley's Psyche, a moral allegory, was first published in Dodsley's Museum, April, 1747. Its popularity induced Ridley to expand it into four cantos. It was published posthumously as Melampus, or the Religious Groves (1781). See also Industry and Genius, a Fable attempted in the Manner of Spencer (London Magazine, 1751).

page 69 note 1 For other examples of Augustan-Spenserian satire see Richard Owen Cambridge's Archimage (1742–50), a rather graceful bit of vers de societè with some playful satire on his friends. The poem shows a distinct appreciation of and a power to reproduce Spenser's qualities. He also wrote On the Marriage of His Royal Highness, Frederick Prince of Wales; In Imitation of Spencer (1736), A glance at the poet's other work will show how uncomprisingly neo-classical he was. Robert Lloyd's The Progress of Envy (1751) is a virulent Spenserian satire on Lauder, the Scotch tutor, who spent his learning in the endeavour to convict Milton of plagiarism. Lloyd attacked Spenserian “ Imitations” in a tirade against imitation in general: To … about to Publish a Volume (1755). Dr. Johnson was the force who encouraged a wave of protest against the Augustan ideal of imitation. Lloyd's poem is not to be seriously reckoned with. He even attacked those who strove to imitate “Mat Prior's unaffected ease,” a thing which he himself never ceased doing throughout his career. Equally cursed were those who imitated Milton or Pope. William Wilkie's A Dream, In the Manner of Spenser (1759) may be mentioned as literary satire in part. He revolts, in thought, against the neo-classical “Cobweb limits fixed by fools.” But the style of his poem, like that of his fossilized epic, The Epigoniad, which he is defending, is thoroughly neo-classical. See also Cowper's Anti Thelyphthora, A Tale in Verse (1781), occasioned by his ire over a tract by Martin Madan defending polygamy on scriptural grounds.

page 71 note 1 This is obviously an imitation of Spenser's “Maske of Cupid,” (F. Q. 3, 12) where Lore enters riding on a lion, accompanied by Fancy and Desire, Fear and Hope, and many more.

page 72 note 1 For other examples of late Augustan-Spenserian see: Mrs. Mary Robinson's The Cavern of Woe and The Foster-Child (Poetical Works, 1806), Henry Kirke White's Fragment (on consumption) and portions of an epic The Christiad (c. 1804).

page 73 note 1 Yet they deluded the fine insight of his doting friend, Charles Lamb. “I want room to tell you how we are charmed with your verses in the manner of Spenser” (Letters to Coleridge, No. 2, 1796). The Blossoming of the Solitary Date-Tree, in the old stanza of Phineas Fletcher's Purple Island has some of Coleridge's elusive magic but none of Spenser's.

page 73 note 2 The episode in question occurs in The Faërie Queene, 5, 2. To Spenser the giant's radical notions were naturally revolting and the henchman of Justice kicked him off a cliff. To Keats, with his eyes dilated by the French Revolution and by many new political visions, the giant's spirit of revolt was crude but far more worthy than Artegall's inflexible conservatism.

page 74 note 1 Of course no absolute line of demarcation can be drawn. But I readily place the following poems under the Augustan-Spenserian group already discussed as containing no qualities that warrant detailed treatment. The Pastorals of Ambrose Philips (1709), like Pope's, have many definite echoes of Spenser and are excellent examples of neo-classicism. With these group Congreve's The Mourning Muse of Alexis (1695); Gay's Shepherd's Week (1714), which avowedly borrows its general scheme from Spenser and which really makes use of the homely rusticity of The Shepheards Calender both for purposes of burlesque and to make verse of genuine picturesque attractiveness; Elijah Fenton's Florellio, A Pastoral Lamenting the Death of the Late Marquis of Blandford (1717) with its definite reference to Spenser's Astrophel; Moses Browne's Piscatory Eclogues (1727–29), with its interesting preface; Mrs. Mary Leapor's The Month of August in which a shepherdess instead of a shepherd laments an unrequited love and expires elegantly of a broken heart; John Whalley's Thenot and Cuddy (1738), a typical example of academic activity of this kind; Sir William Jones's well-known versification of Steele's pastoral allegory on Spenser and other bucolic poets in the Guardian, etc., etc. For other examples of the formal “Imitation”:—Mrs. Mary Leapor (1742–46) imitated Spenser's episode of the “maske of Cupid” in her Temple of Love. In a vision an attractive pageant goes through the Temple of Venus. The poet's eyes are dazzled by Pride, Riot, Flattery, Pomp, Folly, Suspicion, Rage. Palace and pageant vanish and, in a feeble light the poet sees an abbey. About a pale ruined girl throng Reproach, Revenge, hollow-eyed Despair, etc. Samuel Croxall should be mentioned for: An Original Canto of Spenser (1713), Ode to the King (1714), Another Original Canto (1714), and The Vision (1725). Another Original Canto, the only one of these poems I have seen, is merely a clever use of Spenser for purposes of political allegory. The Fair Circassian (1720), a paraphrase of the Canticles, is mentioned by some critics in this connection. It does not seem to me to turn from its original to follow Spenser in any marked way. To Professor Edward Payson Morton I owe a record of a fragment after the manner of Spenser, in heroic couplets, by George Sewall (A New Collection of Original Poem?, 1720). In 1746 appeared two conventional Spenserian poems by Thomas Blacklock: A Hymn to Divine Love (ababbcbcC) and Philantheus: A Monody. In 1758 a collected edition of the sonnets of Thomas Edwards, author of the ireful Canons of Criticism and sturdy lover of Spenser, was published. Some of the sonnets are in the seldom essayed Spenserian form and others, such as On the Cantos of Spenser's Fairy Queen lost in the passage from Ireland, bristle with allusions to the master. In William Mason's Musaeus: A Monody to the Memory of Mr. Pope (1747) various poets assemble to lament. Spenser is given two stanzas (the ababcc of Januarie and December), wherein the manner and even the particular archaisms of The Shepheards Calender are imitated, and three regular Spenserian stanzas in the style of the Faërie Queene. In 1755 appeared Cornelius Arnold's The Mirror, Spenserian stanzas on Westminster Abbey (Gentleman's Magazine for August), and Lewis Bagot's imitation of the Epithalamion (in Gratulatio Academiœ Cantabrigiensis, etc., on the marriage of George III and Charlotte). In the same year Charles Emily wrote The Praises of his, a close though not acknowledged imitation of Spenser's episode of the marriage of the Thames and the Medway (published in Dodsley, ed. 1763, vol. 1, p. 26). The scheme of Mason's Musaeus was followed by Philip Doyne in The Triumph of Parnassus, A Poem on the Birth of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales (1763). The advent of the royal babe is first celebrated by Collin in a long speech in Spenserian stanzas steeped in allusions to all parts of The Faërie Queene. Cowley sings with Pindaric rage, Prior furnishes some Prior-Spenserian stanzas, Ossian and others appear. Doyne wrote also Irene, A Canto on the Peace; Written in the Stanza of Spencer, a political allegory. William Blake's Poetical Sketches (written between 1768 and 1777, published 1783) contains An Imitation of Spencer, little more than an invocation to Apollo, Mercury, and Pallas, probably the boyish beginnings of an ambitious work. Although Blake was strongly influenced by the Elizabethans at this time the Imitation is purely Augustan. Evidently the young poet was non-plussed by the difficulties of the Spenserian form for some of his stanzas are irregular in rime scheme and in the final alexandrine

page 76 note 1 Compare the following, Faërie Queene, 4, 11, sts. 48, sq.:

“All which the Oceans daughter to him bare
The gray eyde Doris: all which fifty are,“
“Fairest Pherusa,”
“And she that with her least word can asswage
The surging seas, when they do sorest rage,
Cymodoce,“
“All goodly damzels deckt with long greene haire,”
“With Erato that doth in love delight,”
“Galene glad,” “Phao lilly white.”

page 78 note 1 Cf. Epithalamion, ll. 332, sq.:

“Let no lamenting cryes, nor dolefull teares,
Be heard all night within, nor yet without:
Ne let the Pouke, nor other evil sprights
Ne let mischeivous witches with theyr charmes,
Ne let hobgoblins, names whose sense we see not,
Ne let the shriech oule, nor the storke be heard,
Nor let the night raven that still deadly yels,
Nor damned ghosts cald up by mighty spels,“ etc.

page 79 note 1 See Faërie Queene, 1, 9, sts. 33, sq., for strong verbal resemblances.

page 79 note 2 Thompson was also one of the few who wrote Spenserian sonnets. See: Garden Inscriptions: 1) On Spenser's Faerie Queene, 2) On Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar, (printed only in Fawkes' and Woty's Poetical Calendar, 1763, vol. 8, p. 97).

page 79 note 3 I catalogue here a few poems that show interesting anticipatory qualities but which need not receive detailed treatment at a time when scholarship is only too busy finding heralds of romanticism real and fancied. William Collins, at his best the truest and most visionary of the early romanticists, shows interesting evidence of Spenserian inspiration in a long passage at the beginning of his Ode on the Poetical Character. William Melmoth was one of those interesting Eighteenth Century country gentlemen without any genius who, being far from the modish town, satire, and dull Occasional Poems, could contribute to the revival of romanticism by his leisurely pursuits. In his once popular Fitzosborne's Letters (To Timoclea, October 1, 1743) he writes his sentimental fair friend: “ But, though you have drained me of my whole stock of romance, I am not entirely unprovided for your entertainment.” Whereupon he transcribes The Transformation of Lycon and Euphormius in Spenserian stanzas. The tale, however, has little that can be called “ romance” from our point of view. A quickened appreciation of nature that may be called romantic is apparent in The Seasons, a poem in Spenserian stanzas by Moses Mendez (1751) and in R. Potter's A Farewell Hymn to the Country, Attempted in the Manner of Spenser's Epithalamion (1749), a close copy both of the intricate stanza-form of Spenser's marriage hymn and of its rich music. Mr. Beers has well noted in William Julius Mickle's The Concubine, A Poem in the Manner of Spenser (1767) a feeling for nature that may have influenced Scott. The plot of the poem, however, a rather powerful picture of an ill-considered marriage, is quite Augustan in its didactic treatment of country squire and wanton servant. Mrs. Tighe's Psyche (written before the end of the century but not published until 1805) is famous for its influence over the young Keats. It is a fluent, sensuous, somewhat langorous poem, the work of a talented lover of Spenser, and transitional from the artificial spirit of the Eighteenth Century to the freer expression of the new era. The first two cantos give the regular version of Psyche's marriage with Cupid and of the ruinous influence of her jealous sisters. The later trials of Psyche are related with some romantic freedom but with much allegory of the Augustan-Spenserian kind. Psyche is befriended by a stranger knight and his squire, Constancy. Passion in the form of a lion appears but is submissive when he sees the knight. They arrive at the Bower of loose Delight. A dove saves Psyche from a perilous draught by dashing the cup from the tempting hand of the queen of the bower. They escape through wild ways to a hermit's cell where they remain for a time. Psyche is betrayed into the subtle net of Ambition but is rescued by her knight. Psyche is then tortured by the hag Credulity and led to the Blatant Beast, who is driven away by her knight. In the Castle of Suspicion, Gelyso shows her a false vision of Cupid in the Bower of loose Delight. Other adventures at the Palace of Chastity, the Coast of Spleen, Glacella's ice-palace on the Island of Indifference follow. At last Psyche is brought by her knight (Cupid of course) to Venus and reconciled.

page 82 note 1 E. g.:—John Herman Merivale began his career by: The Minstrel, or The Progress of Genius. In Continuation of Dr. Beattie. Miss Hunt (in Poems chiefly by Gentlemen of Devonshire and Cornwall—1792); Written on Visiting the Ruins of Dunkerwell Abbey in Devonshire, September, 1786. Hector Macneill: The Pastoral, or Lyric Muse of Scotland (1801). Bernard Barton: Fancy and Imagination, Power and Benevolence, Stanzas Selected from ‘The Pains of Memory,‘ Stanzas addressed to Percy Bysshe Shelley, etc. William Millar: The Fairy Minstrel (1822). John Wright. The Retrospect (1824). Professor Wilson (Christopher North): Waking Dreams, The Children's Dance, etc.

page 82 note 2 Though Byron himself mentions Beattie as an authority on the Spenserian stanza in his preface to Childe Harold.

page 84 note 1 These influences have received final treatment in Mr. Selincourt's well-known edition of Keats.

page 86 note 1 Compare especially canto 1, stanzas 3 and 4, beginning, “Was nought around but images of rest,” and Faerie Queene, 1, 1, 40 and 41. Compare with these also: Castle of Indolence, c. 1, 43 and 44.

page 87 note 1 C. of I., c. 1, sts. 49, sq., and F. Q., 3, 2, sts. 18, sq.

page 88 note 1 See Lizzy's Parting with her Cat and On the Hoop in his Juvenile Poetry.