IV

Allegory and, to a much greater degree, symbolism are a natural language

by which the soul when entranced, or even in ordinary sleep, communes

with God and with angels. They can speak of things which cannot be

spoken of in any other language, but one will always, I think, feel some

sense of unreality when they are used to describe things which can be

described as well in ordinary words. Dante used allegory to describe

visionary things, and the first maker of _The Romance of the Rose_, for

all his lighter spirits, pretends that his adventures came to him in a

vision one May morning; while Bunyan, by his preoccupation with heaven

and the soul, gives his simple story a visionary strangeness and

intensity: he believes so little in the world, that he takes us away

from all ordinary standards of probability and makes us believe even in

allegory for a while. Spenser, on the other hand, to whom allegory was

not, as I think, natural at all, makes us feel again and again that it

disappoints and interrupts our preoccupation with the beautiful and

sensuous life he has called up before our eyes. It interrupts us most

when he copies Langland, and writes in what he believes to be a mood of

edification, and the least when he is not quite serious, when he sets

before us some procession like a court pageant made to celebrate a

wedding or a crowning. One cannot think that he should have occupied

himself with moral and religious questions at all. He should have been

content to be, as Emerson thought Shakespeare was, a Master of the

Revels to mankind. I am certain that he never gets that visionary air

which can alone make allegory real, except when he writes out of a

feeling for glory and passion. He had no deep moral or religious life.

He has never a line like Dante's 'Thy Will is our Peace,' or like Thomas

a Kempis's 'The Holy Spirit has liberated me from a multitude of

opinions,' or even like Hamlet's objection to the bare bodkin. He had

been made a poet by what he had almost learnt to call his sins. If he

had not felt it necessary to justify his art to some serious friend, or

perhaps even to 'that rugged forehead,' he would have written all his

life long, one thinks, of the loves of shepherdesses and shepherds,

among whom there would have been perhaps the morals of the dovecot. One

is persuaded that his morality is official and impersonal--a system of

life which it was his duty to support--and it is perhaps a half

understanding of this that has made so many generations believe that he

was the first poet laureate, the first salaried moralist among the

poets. His processions of deadly sins, and his houses, where the very

cornices are arbitrary images of virtue, are an unconscious hypocrisy,

an undelighted obedience to the 'rugged forehead,' for all the while he

is thinking of nothing but lovers whose bodies are quivering with the

memory or the hope of long embraces. When they are not together, he will

indeed embroider emblems and images much as those great ladies of the

courts of love embroidered them in their castles; and when these are

imagined out of a thirst for magnificence and not thought out in a mood

of edification, they are beautiful enough; but they are always

tapestries for corridors that lead to lovers' meetings or for the walls

of marriage chambers. He was not passionate, for the passionate feed

their flame in wanderings and absences, when the whole being of the

beloved, every little charm of body and of soul, is always present to

the mind, filling it with heroical subtleties of desire. He is a poet of

the delighted senses, and his song becomes most beautiful when he writes

of those islands of Phaedria and Acrasia, which angered 'that rugged

forehead,' as it seems, but gave to Keats his _Belle Dame sans Merci_

and his 'perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,' and to William Morris

his 'waters of the wondrous Isle.'

V

The dramatists lived in a disorderly world, reproached by many,

persecuted even, but following their imagination wherever it led them.

Their imagination, driven hither and thither by beauty and sympathy, put

on something of the nature of eternity. Their subject was always the

soul, the whimsical, self-awakening, self-exciting, self-appeasing soul.

They celebrated its heroical, passionate will going by its own path to

immortal and invisible things. Spenser, on the other hand, except among

those smooth pastoral scenes and lovely effeminate islands that have

made him a great poet, tried to be of his time, or rather of the time

that was all but at hand. Like Sidney, whose charm it may be led many

into slavery, he persuaded himself that we enjoy Virgil because of the

virtues of AEneas, and so planned out his immense poem that it would set

before the imagination of citizens, in whom there would soon be no great

energy, innumerable blameless AEneases. He had learned to put the State,

which desires all the abundance for itself, in the place of the Church,

and he found it possible to be moved by expedient emotions, merely

because they were expedient, and to think serviceable thoughts with no

self-contempt. He loved his Queen a little because she was the

protectress of poets and an image of that old Anglo-French nation that

lay a-dying, but a great deal because she was the image of the State

which had taken possession of his conscience. She was over sixty years

old, and ugly and, it is thought, selfish, but in his poetry she is

'fair Cynthia,' 'a crown of lilies,' 'the image of the heavens,'

'without mortal blemish,' and has 'an angelic face,' where 'the red

rose' has 'meddled with the white'; 'Phoebus thrusts out his golden

head' but to look upon her, and blushes to find himself outshone. She is

'a fourth Grace,' 'a queen of love,' 'a sacred saint,' and 'above all

her sex that ever yet has been.' In the midst of his praise of his own

sweetheart he stops to remember that Elizabeth is more beautiful, and an

old man in _Daphnaida_, although he has been brought to death's door by

the death of a beautiful daughter, remembers that though his daughter

'seemed of angelic race,' she was yet but the primrose to the rose

beside Elizabeth. Spenser had learned to look to the State not only as

the rewarder of virtue but as the maker of right and wrong, and had

begun to love and hate as it bid him. The thoughts that we find for

ourselves are timid and a little secret, but those modern thoughts that

we share with large numbers are confident and very insolent. We have

little else to-day, and when we read our newspaper and take up its cry,

above all its cry of hatred, we will not think very carefully, for we

hear the marching feet. When Spenser wrote of Ireland he wrote as an

official, and out of thoughts and emotions that had been organised by

the State. He was the first of many Englishmen to see nothing but what

he was desired to see. Could he have gone there as a poet merely, he

might have found among its poets more wonderful imaginations than even

those islands of Phaedria and Acrasia. He would have found among

wandering story-tellers, not indeed his own power of rich, sustained

description, for that belongs to lettered ease, but certainly all the

kingdom of Faerie, still unfaded, of which his own poetry was often but

a troubled image. He would have found men doing by swift strokes of the

imagination much that he was doing with painful intellect, with that

imaginative reason that soon was to drive out imagination altogether and

for a long time. He would have met with, at his own door, story-tellers

among whom the perfection of Greek art was indeed as unknown as his own

power of detailed description, but who, none the less, imagined or

remembered beautiful incidents and strange, pathetic outcrying that made

them of Homer's lineage. Flaubert says somewhere, 'There are things in

Hugo, as in Rabelais, that I could have mended, things badly built, but

then what thrusts of power beyond the reach of conscious art!' Is not

all history but the coming of that conscious art which first makes

articulate and then destroys the old wild energy? Spenser, the first

poet struck with remorse, the first poet who gave his heart to the

State, saw nothing but disorder, where the mouths that have spoken all

the fables of the poets had not yet become silent. All about him were

shepherds and shepherdesses still living the life that made Theocritus

and Virgil think of shepherd and poet as the one thing; but though he

dreamed of Virgil's shepherds he wrote a book to advise, among many like

things, the harrying of all that followed flocks upon the hills, and of

all 'the wandering companies that keep the woods.' His _View of the

State of Ireland_ commends indeed the beauty of the hills and woods

where they did their shepherding, in that powerful and subtle language

of his which I sometimes think more full of youthful energy than even

the language of the great playwrights. He is 'sure it is yet a most

beautiful and sweet country as any under heaven,' and that all would

prosper but for those agitators, 'those wandering companies that keep

the woods,' and he would rid it of them by a certain expeditious way.

There should be four great garrisons. 'And those fowre garrisons issuing

foorthe, at such convenient times as they shall have intelligence or

espiall upon the enemye, will so drive him from one side to another and

tennis him amongst them, that he shall finde nowhere safe to keepe his

creete, or hide himselfe, but flying from the fire shall fall into the

water, and out of one daunger into another, that in short space his

creete, which is his moste sustenence, shall be wasted in preying, or

killed in driving, or starved for wante of pasture in the woodes, and he

himselfe brought soe lowe, that he shall have no harte nor abilitye to

indure his wretchednesse, the which will surely come to passe in very

short space; for one winters well following of him will so plucke him on

his knees that he will never be able to stand up agayne.'

He could commend this expeditious way from personal knowledge, and could

assure the Queen that the people of the country would soon 'consume

themselves and devoure one another. The proofs whereof I saw

sufficiently ensampled in these late warres of Mounster; for

notwithstanding that the same was a most rich and plentifull countrey,

full of corne and cattell, that you would have thought they would have

bene able to stand long, yet ere one yeare and a halfe they were brought

to such wretchednesse, as that any stonye heart would have rued the

same. Out of every corner of the woodes and glynnes they came creeping

forth upon theyr hands, for theyr legges could not beare them; they

looked like anatomyes of death, they spake like ghosts crying out of

their graves; they did eate of the dead carrions, happy were they if

they could finde them, yea, and one another soone after, insomuch as the

very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of theyr graves; and if

they found a plot of watercresses or shamrokes, there they flocked as to

a feast for the time, yet not able long to continue therewithall; that

in short space there were none allmost left, and a most populous and

plentifull countrey suddaynely left voyde of man or beast; yet sure in

all that warre, there perished not many by the sword, but all by the

extremitye of famine.'