A SELECTION FROM SPENSER.* WE welcome with the heartiest good-will
any book that is calculated to make Spenser better known to young readers. For them he has special charms. His imagination is boundless, his fancy inexhaustible, his purpose always noble, his purity divine. These expressions may seem extravagant to the man
• Poem'ci Spnwer. Belectel and arranged, with Notes. by Lucy Harrison. Leaden: Bentley and flo2.
who is but slightly acquainted with the Faerie Queene, but let him read it through from end to end, and if he be a lover of the things that are lovely, he will feel that our words do not exaggerate its excellence. After such a perusal, the faults of Spenser as a poetical artist may not be less obvious, but the supreme power and enchanting loveliness of his verse will so take the reader captive that, forgetting to criticise, he will be satisfied to enjoy.
Spenser has been always styled the poet's poet, and the influence he has exercised on all, or nearly all his great successors, has been frankly acknowledged. How this prince of poets was loved and honoured in his own lifetime we all know, and when he died "his hearse was attended by poets, and mournful elegies and poems, with the pens that wrote them, were thrown into his tomb." "What a funeral was that," adds Dean Stanley, "at which Beaumont, Fletcher, Jonson, and, in all probability, Shakespeare attended ; what a grave, in which the pen of Shakespeare may be mouldering away !" It has been said, probably with truth, that Spenser is the greatest Christian poet in the language, and we need not wonder that Milton thought him a better teacher than &otos or Aquinas ; or, to come nearer our own time, that John Wesley, the most practical of men, recommended the Faerie Queens to his divinity students. A poet's teaching, however, is an indirect influence, and cannot be weighed and estimated like the teach- ing of a scholiast or theologian. His power is subtle, pene- trating, pervasive, and like the atmosphere, it acts upon us im- perceptibly. How is it possible to say what Shakespeare and Wordsworth have done for us? We know that we owe to them some portion of our lives, that they have made us think and feel as we could not otherwise have thought and felt ; but how far we, as pupils, have learnt from those great masters, to what degree we should have been different men and women, had we never sat at their feet, is a question that cannot be answered. As well might we endeavour to analyse and define the influences of nature.
Miss Harrison's attempt to produce a selection from Spenser, "for home and school," is not, we think, likely to be wholly successful. Her notes are excellent, and she has spared no labour; but, in our judgment, two or three errors have been made which may to some extent interfere with the popularity of the volume. More than a third of the book con- sists of what, for want of a better term, must be called Spenser's minor poems. From the Shepherd's Calendar two eclogues are selected, doubtless for their historical interest ; they would not have been chosen for their poetic beauty. Then follow "Mother Hubbard's Tale," "Cohn Clout's Come Home Again," and ten sonnets" chosen with a view to their biographical interest ;" and here, again, with perhaps one exception, Spenser's most poetical sonnets seem to be purposely omitted. He is never great, it is true, as a sonnet-writer, but among his eighty-eight poems com- posed in this form are several which none but a poet could have written; and, moreover, they are quite as biographical in character as those Miss Harrison has inserted, for they describe the Eliza- beth he was destined to immortalise in the Epithalamion, the wife whom he has raised upon the wings of poetry to an un- exampled height in English literatnre. Now, we venture to doubt whether the poems above mentioned, attractive though they may be to the poetical student, will have any charm for boys and girls. Spenser's special gifts are but slightly displayed in them, and if used in school, they are not unlikely to create the feeling of repugnance which, when a boy, Byron expressed for Horace. And the repulsion will be felt all the more strongly, since Miss Harrison has reprinted her selections in the antique spelling. No doubt there are cases in which this must be done for the sake of the rhyme, and there are words also in Spenser —some of them obsolete in his own time—that will not allow of being converted to the modern form; but as a rule, the editor would have done well to follow Professor Craik's example with regard to Spenser who does not lose, as Chaucer would lose, by the substitution as far as possible of modern orthography. The reason is obvious. Chaucer's construction and spelling belong to the age and to the poet ; they are not the mere dress of his thought, but a portion of it, and are also inseparable from his music. To modernise the Canterbury Tales is to translate them, and in the work of translation the aroma of a poet's song is lost. On the other hand, if a canto of The Faerie Queens be read aloud, it will be found that, in spite of a few Spenserian pecu- liarities, the verse moves with the smoothness of a modern poem in the same metre.
And, here we observe, with regret, that neither is the ifuiopotmos inserted, which Mr. Lowell calls "the most airily fanciful of Spenser's poems," nor the Epithalamion, a nuptial song transcendent in loveliness, and in its purity "white as driven snow." We do not forget that this poem, which would alone suffice to make the name of Spenser immortal, was omitted from the Golden Treasury, on the ground that it is out of harmony with modern manners. The plea has always seemed to us unreasonable. The poem contains 433 lines, and the innocent simplicity and honest frankness of about 0 lines may be unfitted for the delicacy of an age that reads Zola, and more than tolerates Walt Whitman. Be it so. Spenser's homely speech may be sometimes too homely, but the poem can be abridged, and will lose comparatively little by a process not undesirable perhaps in a selection made for schools. To omit it altogether seems to us an injustice to the great name of Spenser.
Considering the little space at her disposal, the editor has, we think, done her best with The Faerie Queene, of which she prints the first book, with slight omissions, and such a glossary as will make the reading of the poem interesting to children. Students who wish to study it more thoroughly are referred to the copious annotations of Mr. Kitchin, who has edited the First Book of The Fcterie Queen,e in the Clarendon Press Series. From the remaining books extracts are given, and these are generally well chosen. If they fail, as all extracts needs must, to show the genius of the poet, they will prove to all who have ears for verse the richness of his music, and to quote Shelley's words, the "inexpressible beauty of the measure" in which his great allegory is written.
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