When Spenser was buried at Westminster Abbey many poets read verses in
his praise, and then threw their verses and the pens that had written
them into his tomb. Like him they belonged, for all the moral zeal that
was gathering like a London fog, to that indolent, demonstrative Merry
England that was about to pass away. Men still wept when they were
moved, still dressed themselves in joyous colours, and spoke with many
gestures. Thoughts and qualities sometimes come to their perfect
expression when they are about to pass away, and Merry England was dying
in plays, and in poems, and in strange adventurous men. If one of those
poets who threw his copy of verses into the earth that was about to
close over his master were to come alive again, he would find some
shadow of the life he knew, though not the art he knew, among young men
in Paris, and would think that his true country. If he came to England
he would find nothing there but the triumph of the Puritan and the
merchant--those enemies he had feared and hated--and he would weep
perhaps, in that womanish way of his, to think that so much greatness
had been, not as he had hoped, the dawn, but the sunset of a people. He
had lived in the last days of what we may call the Anglo-French nation,
the old feudal nation that had been established when the Norman and the
Angevin made French the language of court and market. In the time of
Chaucer English poets still wrote much in French, and even English
labourers lilted French songs over their work; and I cannot read any
Elizabethan poem or romance without feeling the pressure of habits of
emotion, and of an order of life which were conscious, for all their
Latin gaiety, of a quarrel to the death with that new Anglo-Saxon nation
that was arising amid Puritan sermons and Mar-Prelate pamphlets. This
nation had driven out the language of its conquerors, and now it was to
overthrow their beautiful haughty imagination and their manners, full of
abandon and wilfulness, and to set in their stead earnestness and logic
and the timidity and reserve of a counting-house. It had been coming for
a long while, for it had made the Lollards; and when Anglo-French
Chaucer was at Westminster its poet, Langland, sang the office at St.
Paul's. Shakespeare, with his delight in great persons, with his
indifference to the State, with his scorn of the crowd, with his feudal
passion, was of the old nation, and Spenser, though a joyless
earnestness had cast shadows upon him, and darkened his intellect wholly
at times, was of the old nation too. His _Faerie Queene_ was written in
Merry England, but when Bunyan wrote in prison the other great English
allegory, Modern England had been born. Bunyan's men would do right that
they might come some day to the Delectable Mountain, and not at all that
they might live happily in a world whose beauty was but an entanglement
about their feet. Religion had denied the sacredness of an earth that
commerce was about to corrupt and ravish, but when Spenser lived the
earth had still its sheltering sacredness. His religion, where the
paganism that is natural to proud and happy people had been strengthened
by the platonism of the Renaissance, cherished the beauty of the soul
and the beauty of the body with, as it seemed, an equal affection. He
would have had men live well, not merely that they might win eternal
happiness but that they might live splendidly among men and be
celebrated in many songs. How could one live well if one had not the joy
of the Creator and of the Giver of gifts? He says in his _Hymn to
Beauty_ that a beautiful soul, unless for some stubbornness in the
ground, makes for itself a beautiful body, and he even denies that
beautiful persons ever lived who had not souls as beautiful. They may
have been tempted until they seemed evil, but that was the fault of
others. And in his _Hymn to Heavenly Beauty_ he sets a woman little
known to theology, one that he names Wisdom or Beauty, above Seraphim
and Cherubim and in the very bosom of God, and in the _Faerie Queene_ it
is pagan Venus and her lover Adonis who create the forms of all living
things and send them out into the world, calling them back again to the
gardens of Adonis at their lives' end to rest there, as it seems, two
thousand years between life and life. He began in English poetry,
despite a temperament that delighted in sensuous beauty alone with
perfect delight, that worship of Intellectual Beauty which Shelley
carried to a greater subtlety and applied to the whole of life.
The qualities, to each of whom he had planned to give a Knight, he had
borrowed from Aristotle and partly Christianised, but not to the
forgetting of their heathen birth. The chief of the Knights, who would
have combined in himself the qualities of all the others, had Spenser
lived to finish the _Faerie Queene_, was King Arthur, the representative
of an ancient quality, Magnificence. Born at the moment of change,
Spenser had indeed many Puritan thoughts. It has been recorded that he
cut his hair short and half regretted his hymns to Love and Beauty. But
he has himself told us that the many-headed beast overthrown and bound
by Calidor, Knight of Courtesy, was Puritanism itself. Puritanism, its
zeal and its narrowness, and the angry suspicion that it had in common
with all movements of the ill-educated, seemed no other to him than a
slanderer of all fine things. One doubts, indeed, if he could have
persuaded himself that there could be any virtue at all without
courtesy, perhaps without something of pageant and eloquence. He was, I
think, by nature altogether a man of that old Catholic feudal nation,
but, like Sidney, he wanted to justify himself to his new masters. He
wrote of knights and ladies, wild creatures imagined by the aristocratic
poets of the twelfth century, and perhaps chiefly by English poets who
had still the French tongue; but he fastened them with allegorical nails
to a big barn door of common sense, of merely practical virtue. Allegory
itself had risen into general importance with the rise of the merchant
class in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; and it was natural
when that class was about for the first time to shape an age in its
image, that the last epic poet of the old order should mix its art with
his own long-descended, irresponsible, happy art.