Introduction to Browning | Page 7

College, Dublin, in his lecture on
`The Influence of National Character on English Literature', remarks of
Spenser: "After that dark period which separated him from Chaucer,
after all the desolation of the Wars of the Roses, and all the deep trials
of the Reformation, he rose on England as if, to use an image of his
own,
"`At last the golden orientall gate
Of greatest heaven gan to open
fayre,
And Phoebus, fresh as brydegrome to his mate,
Came
dauncing forth, shaking his deawie hayre,
And hurled his glistering
beams through gloomy ayre.'
"That baptism of blood and fire through which England passed at the
Reformation, raised both Protestant and Catholic to a newness of life.
That mighty working of heart and mind with which the nation then
heaved throughout, went through every man and woman,
and tried
what manner of spirits they were of. What a preparation was this for
that period of our literature in which man,
the great actor of the drama

of life, was about to appear on the stage! It was to be expected that the
drama should then start into life, and that human character should speak
from the stage
with a depth of life never known before; but who
could have imagined Shakespeare?"
And what a new music burst upon the world in Spenser's verse! His
noble stanza, so admirably adapted to pictorial effect, has since been
used by some of the greatest poets of the literature, Thomson, Scott,
Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Shelley, and numerous others; but none of
them, except in rare instances, have drawn the music out of it which
Spenser drew.
Professor Goldwin Smith well remarks, in his article
on Mark
Pattison's Milton, "The great growths of poetry have coincided with the
great bursts of national life, and the great bursts of national life have
hitherto been generally periods
of controversy and struggle. Art itself,
in its highest forms, has been the expression of faith. We have now
people who profess to cultivate art for its own sake; but they have
hardly produced anything which the world accepts as great, though they
have supplied some subjects for `Punch'."
Spenser who, of all the great English poets, is regarded
by some
critics as the most remote from real life,
and the least reflecting his
age, is, nevertheless, filled with the spirit of his age -- its chivalric,
romantic, patriotic, moral, and religious spirit. When he began to write,
the nation had just passed through the fiery furnace of a religious
persecution, and was rejoicing in its deliverance from the papistical rule
of Mary. The devotion to the new queen with which it was inspired was
grateful, generous, enthusiastic, and even romantic. This devotion

Spenser's great poem everywhere reflects, and it has been
justly
pronounced to be the best exponent of the subtleties of that Calvinism
which was the aristocratic form of Protestantism at that time in both
France and England.
The renewed spiritual life which set in so strongly with Spenser,
reached its springtide in Shakespeare. It was the secret
of that sense
of moral proportion which pervades his plays. Moral proportion cannot

be secured through the laws of the ancients, or through any formulated
theory of art. It was, I am assured, through his deep and sensitive
spirit-life that Shakespeare felt the universal spirit and constitution of
the world as fully, perhaps, as the human soul, in this life, is capable of
feeling it. Through it he took cognizance of the workings of nature, and
of the life of man, BY DIRECT ASSIMILATION OF THEIR
HIDDEN PRINCIPLES, --
principles which cannot be reached
through an observation,
by the natural intelligence, of the
phenomenal. He thus became possessed of a knowledge, or rather
wisdom, far beyond
his conscious observation and objective
experience.
Shakespeare may be regarded as the first and the last
great artistic
physiologist or natural historian of the passions; and he was this by
virtue of the life of the spirit, which enabled him to reproduce
sympathetically the whole range of human passion within himself. He
was the first of the world's dramatists that exhibited the passions in
their evolutions, and in
their subtlest complications. And the moral
proportion he preserved in exhibiting the complex and often wild play
of the passions must have been largely due to the harmony of his soul

with the constitution of things. What the Restoration dramatists
regarded or understood as moral proportion, was not moral proportion
at all, but a proportion fashioned according to merely conventional
ideas of justice. Shakespeare's moral proportion appeared to them, in
their low spiritual condition, a moral chaos, which they set about
converting, in some of his great plays, into a cosmos; and a sad muss, if
not a ridiculous muss, they made of it.
Signal examples of this are the
`rifacimenti' of the Tempest by Dryden and Davenant, the King Lear by
Tate, and the Antony and Cleopatra (entitled `All