VOLUME XVII JANUARY, 1922 NUMBER 1 THE CRITICAL ORIGINS OF SPENSER'S DICTION. FROM Sidney, Webbe, Puttenham and Jonson down to the present day, the peculiarity of Spenser's diction has engaged the attention of the critics. The language of his poems, and especially of his greatest work, The Faerie Queene, and of The Shepheards Calendar, in which he declared himself, in an artificial speech, constructed for his own purposes out of many and various elements drawn from many different sources, and it has been the object of analysis, notably by Professor C. H. Herford, whose Introduction to The Shepheards Calendar is the basis of these as of all subsequent remarks on the question. The problem of language is one that faces the poet at all times; it was particularly insistent in the time of Spenser. For poetical purposes the English of the midsixteenth century was practically untried. In his Induction to A Mirror for Magistrates Sackville had moulded speech into dignified form, bringing into verse that inherent virtue of the English language which was already apparent in prose, its value for the rhythmical utterance of serious meditation, but the Induction stood alone, in fifty years the only artistic success in English verse. Apart from this there had been no attempt to use the language in high or sustained flights of poetry, that is, in such poetry as Spenser proposed to himself as his life-work, and within this one example there was no variety. Thought and experiment were forced on Spenser. The speech of every day did not suffice for his needs, and he felt no compulsion to confine himself to it. His inspiration was divine; he sought the approbation of the skilful and hoped for fame in the future. He mounted up in ecstasy, or escaped to an ideal world, and he required a language that would bear him up in these elevations of spirit, that would not be a discordant echo of actuality in his land of dreams. His speech, then, is ancient, for the land of dreams lay in the past, or it is a rustic speech suited to the quiet of the country and the simplicity of shepherd life; it is new and brave, for it had to attempt new heights; it is cultured, since from the masters of the elder world and from the French and Italian artists in word-craft it caught something of their utterance. Thus it may be said that Spenser's diction is a natural growth-not natural to English, but natural to Spenser-that it took its colour from his temperament and his studies. Yet if we are to accept this as a complete explanation we M. L. R. XVII. 1 must allow that in this most challenging particular, in this alone of all his poetic activity, Spenser made a daring departure without guidance and unsupported by precedent. It was on a foundation of critical theory and practical example that he built the new poetry in England; that he should construct a new poetic diction except on a similar basis cannot be admitted without examination. Such a basis is not to be found in England. The deficiencies of English were recognised by all, and the duty of its improvement accepted, but the problems involved had never been attacked on any scale or on sufficiently inclusive lines. Certain elements of Spenser's diction appear in the work of the translators, and in the experiments of Sir Thomas Elyot: to some extent the latter performed for prose the office that Spenser did for poetry, but their field was limited, their problems less weighty and less complicated, and their consciences less tender. What is more striking, Spenser's choice, or rather creation, of language was the negation of all that was authoritative in extant English criticism. The body of that criticism was small, but it was greatly concerned with this particular subject, and the views held were very definite and very forcibly pronounced. Cheke, Ascham, and Wilson, the leaders and mouthpieces of the Cambridge humanists, were extreme purists in the matter of language, condemning equally the foreign phrase of the translators and the obfuscate curiosity so illecebrous to Elyot. They had seen the purism of the humanist carried into the criticism of the vernacular by the great Bembo himself, and the example would strengthen the natural tendency of their training to measure all things by the standard of their Ciceronianism, to demand in English the same purity that they strove after in their Latin. If Wilson was forced to admit a certain foreign element into the language, he did it with a bad grace and under plea of strict necessity. The doctrine of the humanists broke down on its linguistic even more obviously than on its literary side, and for the same reason, that it postulated a standard. For them purity meant that authoritative precedent could be adduced for every word and phrase. They had models for Latin in Cicero and Virgil; Bembo had set up Petrarch and Boccaccio as the norm of Tuscan: in England no standard of contemporary speech was in existence. At home, then, Spenser could find little help and much opposition, but there was a precedent for him in the experience of France. The same problem of language which confronted Spenser had been attacked by the Pléiade; they had forced a solution, and had placed that solution on record in clear terms. The Pléiade took very seriously the calling of poetry; they viewed with equal seriousness the language in which that poetry should be written. A high and serious poetry demanded a noble utterance; but the language of a great people was not to be discarded as barbarous: French, therefore, should be cultivated to supply the needs of the new poetry, should be made worthy of its thought. . This is the key-note of La Deffence et Illustration: reverence for the great masters of Greece and Rome, but a decided independence of the pedantry which would impose a dead language upon a living spirit; a proper jealousy of Italian, the one vernacular that had achieved literature fit to rank near the classics; and a determination to raise for their own. land, in their own tongue, a trophy of verse that should equal, if not surpass, the proudest of the ancient or of the modern world. The parallel with the position of Spenser has been noted, as by Courthope: Besides giving a picturesque utterance to the commonplaces of contemporary thought, Spenser had another, and purely artistic purpose: he was making experiments, like Ronsard...in poetical diction'.' That linguistic purpose is avowed by E. K. in his Introduction to The Shepheards Calendar, with a claim for the good service done to English by 'this Authour.' ་ The most immediately perceptible quality of Spenser's diction is that one which, though some precedent existed, aroused most hostile comment, its archaism. On this point he was in direct conflict with the ideas of the Cambridge critics; for though Ascham in his insistence on pure English was inclined himself to an old fashion of speech, and though he explains that Cheke's objection to old words in Sallust was mainly that they were not used by Cicero, yet he quotes that censure on Sallust with some emphasis, and from the preface to The Shepheards Calendar it is clear that E. K., and therefore in all probability Spenser himself, took Ascham's remark as an objection to archaism in general. On the other hand, Wilson, the only member of the Cambridge group who provides formal instruction for writers in English, in his Arte of Rhetorique (which was probably among Spenser's text-books) relates with characteristic gusto how 'Phauorinus the Philosopher...did hit a yong man ouer the Thumbes very handsomely, for sing of ouer olde, and ouer strange wordes,' and scorns 'the fine courtier (who) will speake nothing 1 History of English Poetry, Vol. 1, p. 244. For albe, amongst many other faultes, it be specially objected of Valla against Liuie, and of other against Sallust, that with ouer much studie they affect antiquitye...yet I am of opinion, and eke the best learned are of the lyke, that these ancient solemn words are a great ornament.' See Ascham, in Gregory Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, Vol. 1, pp. 39-44. The oral tradition of these critics must also be kept in mind, as exemplified here. 3 Ed. G. H. Mair, p. 3. but Chaucer. This last remark suggests a court fashion by which Spenser might have been influenced and to which he might appeal, and the Mirror for Magistrates and the practice of the courtly poets of Tottel's Miscellany partly bear out the suggestion; but those were works of an earlier generation, and the first objection to Spenser's archaic speech came from the leader and mirror of court poetry in Spenser's own day, from Sir Philip Sidney himself, to whom Spenser looked up with admiration, to whom his first book was dedicated. The new antiquarianism of Parker and Camden aroused the sympathy of Spenser-The Ruines of Time is a sufficient testimony-but the affectation of antiquity is a very different thing from an affection for the antique. Though in a forward-reaching age Spenser earned the just reproaches of Gabriel Harvey by looking back with longing to an idealised past, his archaistic tendency in the choice of language was not a form of antiquarianism, nor was it based on mere sentiment: it was essentially an artistic procedure, part of a design for the improvement of English for literary purposes. To this feature of archaism in his author's diction the scholiast almost entirely confines himself, and he makes the purpose clear. And first of the wordes to speake, I graunt they be something hard, and of most men unvsed, yet both English, and also vsed of most excellent authors and most famous Poetes".' 'If any will rashly blame such his purpose in choyse of old and vnwonted words, him may I more iustly blame and condemne...for in my opinion it is one special prayse of many, which are dew to this Poete, that he hath laboured to restore, as to theyr rightful heritage, such good and naturall English words, as haue ben long time out of vse, and almost clean disherited. Which is the only cause, that our Mother tonge, which truely for it self is both ful enough for prose, and stately enough for verse, hath long time ben counted most bare and barrein of both.' After an attack on indiscriminate borrowing, he returns to the cavillers at old words, who 'of their owne country and natural speach...haue so base regard and bastard iudgement, that they will not onely themselves not labor to garnish and beautifie it, but also repine that of other it shold be embellished.' This view of archaism, that it serves for the improvement of the language by recovery of forgotten phrases, however misliked in England, was a familiar argument of the Pléiade. For them the first step in the 'illustration' of French was to make full use of its 1 Ibid., p. 162. 3 In Gregory Smith, Vol. 1, p. 128. 2 Letter-Book, pp. 82-86. 4 Ibid., p. 129. |