I have put into this book[5] only those passages from Spenser that I
want to remember and carry about with me. I have not tried to select
what people call characteristic passages, for that is, I think, the way
to make a dull book. One never really knows anybody's taste but one's
own, and if one likes anything sincerely one may be certain that there
are other people made out of the same earth to like it too. I have taken
out of _The Shepheards Calender_ only those parts which are about love
or about old age, and I have taken out of the _Faerie Queene_ passages
about shepherds and lovers, and fauns and satyrs, and a few allegorical
processions. I find that though I love symbolism, which is often the
only fitting speech for some mystery of disembodied life, I am for the
most part bored by allegory, which is made, as Blake says, 'by the
daughters of memory,' and coldly, with no wizard frenzy. The processions
I have chosen are either those, like the House of Mammon, that have
enough ancient mythology, always an implicit symbolism, or, like the
Cave of Despair, enough sheer passion to make one forget or forgive
their allegory, or else they are, like that vision of Scudamour, so
visionary, so full of a sort of ghostly midnight animation, that one is
persuaded that they had some strange purpose and did truly appear in
just that way to some mind worn out with war and trouble. The vision of
Scudamour is, I sometimes think, the finest invention in Spenser. Until
quite lately I knew nothing of Spenser but the parts I had read as a
boy. I did not know that I had read so far as that vision, but year
after year this thought would rise up before me coming from I knew not
where. I would be alone perhaps in some old building, and I would think
suddenly 'out of that door might come a procession of strange people
doing mysterious things with tumult. They would walk over the stone
floor, then suddenly vanish, and everything would become silent again.'
Once I saw what is called, I think, a Board School continuation class
play _Hamlet_. There was no stage, but they walked in procession into
the midst of a large room full of visitors and of their friends. While
they were walking in, that thought came to me again from I knew not
where. I was alone in a great church watching ghostly kings and queens
setting out upon their unearthly business.
It was only last summer, when I read the Fourth Book of the _Faerie
Queene_, that I found I had been imagining over and over the enchanted
persecution of Amoret.
I give too, in a section which I call 'Gardens of Delight,' the good
gardens of Adonis and the bad gardens of Phaedria and Acrasia, which are
mythological and symbolical, but not allegorical, and show, more
particularly those bad islands, his power of describing bodily happiness
and bodily beauty at its greatest. He seemed always to feel through the
eyes, imagining everything in pictures. Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_ is
more energetic in its sensuality, more complicated in its intellectual
energy than this languid story, which pictures always a happiness that
would perish if the desire to which it offers so many roses lost its
indolence and its softness. There is no passion in the pleasure he has
set amid perilous seas, for he would have us understand that there alone
could the war-worn and the sea-worn man find dateless leisure and
unrepining peace.
October, 1902.
Footnotes:
[1] I had forgotten Falstaff, who is an episode in a chronicle play.
[2] Rose Kavanagh, the poet, wrote to her religious adviser from, I
think, Leitrim, where she lived, and asked him to get her the works of
Mazzini. He replied, 'You must mean Manzone.'
[3] I have heard him say more than once, 'I will not say our people know
good from bad, but I will say that they don't hate the good when it is
pointed out to them, as a great many people do in England.'
[4] A small political organiser told me once that he and a certain
friend got together somewhere in Tipperary a great meeting of farmers
for O'Leary on his coming out of prison, and O'Leary had said at it:
'The landlords gave us some few leaders, and I like them for that, and
the artisans have given us great numbers of good patriots, and so I like
them best: but you I do not like at all, for you have never given us
anyone.' I have known but one that had his moral courage, and that was a
woman with beauty to give her courage and self-possession.
[5] _Poems of Spenser: Selected and with an Introduction by W. B.
Yeats._ (T. C. and E. C. Jack, Edinburgh, N.D.)
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