CHAPTER V.

THE FAERY QUEEN.

"_Uncouth_ [= unknown], _unkist_," are the words from Chaucer,[118:1]

with which the friend, who introduced Spenser's earliest poetry to the

world, bespeaks forbearance, and promises matter for admiration and

delight in the _Shepherd's Calendar_. "You have to know my new poet, he

says in effect: and when you have learned his ways, you will find how

much you have to honour and love him." "I doubt not," he says, with a

boldness of prediction, manifestly sincere, which is remarkable about an

unknown man, "that so soon as his name shall come into the knowledge of

men, and his worthiness be sounded in the trump of fame, but that he

shall be not only kissed, but also beloved of all, embraced of the most,

and wondered at of the best." Never was prophecy more rapidly and more

signally verified, probably beyond the prophet's largest expectation.

But he goes on to explain and indeed apologize for certain features of

the new poet's work, which even to readers of that day might seem open

to exception. And to readers of to-day, the phrase, _uncouth, unkist_,

certainly expresses what many have to confess, if they are honest, as to

their first acquaintance with the _Faery Queen_. Its place in

literature is established beyond controversy. Yet its first and

unfamiliar aspect inspires respect, perhaps interest, rather than

attracts and satisfies. It is not the remoteness of the subject alone,

nor the distance of three centuries which raises a bar between it and

those to whom it is new. Shakespere becomes familiar to us from the

first moment. The impossible legends of Arthur have been made in the

language of to-day once more to touch our sympathies, and have lent

themselves to express our thoughts. But at first acquaintance the _Faery

Queen_ to many of us has been disappointing. It has seemed not only

antique, but artificial. It has seemed fantastic. It has seemed, we

cannot help avowing, tiresome. It is not till the early appearances have

worn off, and we have learned to make many allowances and to surrender

ourselves to the feelings and the standards by which it claims to affect

and govern us, that we really find under what noble guidance we are

proceeding, and what subtle and varied spells are ever round us.

I. The _Faery Queen_ is the work of an unformed literature, the product

of an unperfected art. English poetry, English language, in Spenser's,

nay in Shakespere's day, had much to learn, much to unlearn. They never,

perhaps, have been stronger or richer, than in that marvellous burst of

youth, with all its freedom of invention, of observation, of reflection.

But they had not that which only the experience and practice of eventful

centuries could give them. Even genius must wait for the gifts of time.

It cannot forerun the limitations of its day, nor anticipate the

conquests and common possessions of the future. Things are impossible to

the first great masters of art which are easy to their second-rate

successors. The possibility, or the necessity of breaking through some

convention, of attempting some unattempted effort, had not, among other

great enterprises, occurred to them. They were laying the steps in a

magnificent fashion on which those after them were to rise. But we ought

not to shut our eyes to mistakes or faults to which attention had not

yet been awakened, or for avoiding which no reasonable means had been

found. To learn from genius, we must try to recognize, both what is

still imperfect, and what is grandly and unwontedly successful. There is

no great work of art, not excepting even the Iliad or the Parthenon,

which is not open, especially in point of ornament, to the scoff of the

scoffer, or to the injustice of those who do not mind being unjust. But

all art belongs to man; and man, even when he is greatest, is always

limited and imperfect.

The _Faery Queen_, as a whole, bears on its face a great fault of

construction. It carries with it no adequate account of its own story;

it does not explain itself, or contain in its own structure what would

enable a reader to understand how it arose. It has to be accounted for

by a prose explanation and key outside of itself. The poet intended to

reserve the central event, which was the occasion of all the adventures

of the poem, till they had all been related, leaving them as it were in

the air, till at the end of twelve long books the reader should at last

be told how the whole thing had originated, and what it was all about.

He made the mistake of confounding the answer to a riddle with the

crisis which unties the tangle of a plot and satisfies the suspended

interest of a tale. None of the great model poems before him, however

full of digression and episode, had failed to arrange their story with

clearness. They needed no commentary outside themselves to say why they

began as they did, and out of what antecedents they arose. If they

started at once from the middle of things, they made their story, as it

unfolded itself, explain, by more or less skilful devices, all that

needed to be known about their beginnings. They did not think of rules

of art. They did of themselves naturally what a good story-teller does,

to make himself intelligible and interesting; and it is not easy to be

interesting, unless the parts of the story are in their place.

The defect seems to have come upon Spenser when it was too late to

remedy it in the construction of his poem; and he adopted the somewhat

clumsy expedient of telling us what the poem itself ought to have told

us of its general story, in a letter to Sir Walter Ralegh. Ralegh

himself, indeed, suggested the letter: apparently (from the date, Jan.

23, 1590), after the first part had gone through the press. And without

this after-thought, as the twelfth book was never reached, we should

have been left to gather the outline and plan of the story, from

imperfect glimpses and allusions, as we have to fill up from hints and

assumptions the gaps of an unskilful narrator, who leaves out what is

essential to the understanding of his tale.

Incidentally, however, this letter is an advantage: for we have in it

the poet's own statement of his purpose in writing, as well as a

necessary sketch of his story. His allegory, as he had explained to

Bryskett and his friends, had a moral purpose. He meant to shadow forth,

under the figures of twelve knights, and in their various exploits, the

characteristics of "a gentleman or noble person," "fashioned in virtuous

and gentle discipline." He took his machinery from the popular legends

about King Arthur, and his heads of moral philosophy from the current

Aristotelian catalogue of the Schools.

Sir, knowing how doubtfully all Allegories may be construed,

and this booke of mine, which I have entituled the Faery

Queene, being a continued Allegory, or darke conceit, I haue

thought good, as well for avoyding of gealous opinions and

misconstructions, as also for your better light in reading

thereof, (being so by you commanded,) to discover unto you the

general intention and meaning, which in the whole course

thereof I have fashioned, without expressing of any particular

purposes, or by accidents, therein occasioned. The generall

end therefore of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or

noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline: Which for that

I conceived shoulde be most plausible and pleasing, being

coloured with an historicall fiction, the which the most part

of men delight to read, rather for variety of matter then for

profite of the ensample, I chose the historye of King Arthure,

as most fitte for the excellency of his person, being made

famous by many mens former workes, and also furthest from the

daunger of envy, and suspition of present time. In which I

have followed all the antique Poets historicall; first Homere,

who in the Persons of Agamemnon and Ulysses hath ensampled a

good governour and a vertuous man, the one in his Ilias, the

other in his Odysseis: then Virgil, whose like intention was

to doe in the person of Aeneas: after him Ariosto comprised

them both in his Orlando: and lately Tasso dissevered them

againe, and formed both parts in two persons, namely that part

which they in Philosophy call Ethice, or vertues of a private

man, coloured in his Rinaldo; the other named Politice in his

Godfredo. By ensample of which excellente Poets, I labour to

pourtraict in Arthure, before he was king, the image of a

brave knight, perfected in the twelve private morall vertues,

as Aristotle hath devised; the which is the purpose of these

first twelve bookes: which if I finde to be well accepted, I

may be perhaps encoraged to frame the other part of polliticke

vertues in his person, after that hee came to be king.

Then, after explaining that he meant the _Faery Queen_ "for glory in

general intention, but in particular" for Elizabeth, and his Faery Land

for her kingdom, he proceeds to explain, what the first three books

hardly explain, what the Faery Queen had to do with the structure of the

poem.

But, because the beginning of the whole worke seemeth abrupte,

and as depending upon other antecedents, it needs that ye know

the occasion of these three knights seuerall adventures. For

the Methode of a Poet historical is not such, as of an

Historiographer. For an Historiographer discourseth of

affayres orderly as they were donne, accounting as well the

times as the actions; but a Poet thrusteth into the middest,

even where it most concerneth him, and there recoursing to the

thinges forepaste, and divining of thinges to come, maketh a

pleasing Analysis of all.

The beginning therefore of my history, if it were to be told

by an Historiographer should be the twelfth booke, which is

the last; where I devise that the Faery Queene kept her

Annuall feaste xii. dayes; uppon which xii. severall dayes,

the occasions of the xii. severall adventures hapned, which,

being undertaken by xii. severall knights, are in these xii.

books severally handled and discoursed. The first was this. In

the beginning of the feast, there presented him selfe a tall

clownishe younge man, who falling before the Queene of Faries

desired a boone (as the manner then was) which during that

feast she might not refuse; which was that hee might have the

atchievement of any adventure, which during that feaste should

happen: that being graunted, he rested him on the floore,

unfitte through his rusticity for a better place. Soone after

entred a faire Ladye in mourning weedes, riding on a white

Asse, with a dwarfe behinde her leading a warlike steed, that

bore the Armes of a knight, and his speare in the dwarfes

hand. Shee, falling before the Queene of Faeries, complayned

that her father and mother, an ancient King and Queene, had

beene by an huge dragon many years shut up in a brasen Castle,

who thence suffred them not to yssew; and therefore besought

the Faery Queene to assygne her some one of her knights to

take on him that exployt. Presently that clownish person,

upstarting, desired that adventure: whereat the Queene much

wondering, and the Lady much gainesaying, yet he earnestly

importuned his desire. In the end the Lady told him, that

unlesse that armour which she brought would serve him (that

is, the armour of a Christian man specified by Saint Paul, vi.

Ephes.) that he could not succeed in that enterprise; which

being forthwith put upon him, with dewe furnitures thereunto,

he seemed the goodliest man in al that company, and was well

liked of the Lady. And eftesoones taking on him knighthood,

and mounting on that straunge courser, he went forth with her

on that adventure: where beginneth the first booke, viz.

A gentle knight was pricking on the playne, &c.

That it was not without reason that this explanatory key was prefixed to

the work, and that either Spenser or Ralegh felt it to be almost

indispensable, appear from the concluding paragraph.

Thus much, Sir, I have briefly overronne to direct your

understanding to the wel-head of the History; that from thence

gathering the whole intention of the conceit, ye may as in a

handfull gripe al the discourse, which otherwise may happily

seeme tedious and confused.

According to the plan thus sketched out, we have but a fragment of the

work. It was published in two parcels, each of three books, in 1590 and

1596; and after his death two cantos, with two stray stanzas, of a

seventh book were found and printed. Each perfect book consists of

twelve cantos of from thirty-five to sixty of his nine-line stanzas. The

books published in 1590 contain, as he states in his prefatory letter,

the legends of _Holiness_, of _Temperance_, and of _Chastity_. Those

published in 1596, contain the legends of _Friendship_, of _Justice_,

and of _Courtesy_. The posthumous cantos are entitled, _Of Mutability_,

and are said to be apparently parcel of a legend of _Constancy_. The

poem which was to treat of the "politic" virtues was never approached.

Thus we have but a fourth part of the whole of the projected work. It is

very doubtful whether the remaining six books were completed. But it is

probable that a portion of them was written, which, except the cantos

_On Mutability_, has perished. And the intended titles or legends of the

later books have not been preserved.

Thus the poem was to be an allegorical story; a story branching out into

twelve separate stories, which themselves would branch out again and

involve endless other stories. It is a complex scheme to keep well in

hand, and Spenser's art in doing so has been praised by some of his

critics. But the art, if there is any, is so subtle that it fails to

save the reader from perplexity. The truth is that the power of ordering

and connecting a long and complicated plan was not one of Spenser's

gifts. In the first two books, the allegorical story proceeds from point

to point with fair coherence and consecutiveness. After them the attempt

to hold the scheme together, except in the loosest and most general way,

is given up as too troublesome or too confined. The poet prefixes indeed

the name of a particular virtue to each book, but, with slender

reference to it, he surrenders himself freely to his abundant flow of

ideas, and to whatever fancy or invention tempts him, and ranges

unrestrained over the whole field of knowledge and imagination. In the

first two books, the allegory is transparent and the story connected.

The allegory is of the nature of the _Pilgrim's Progress_. It starts

from the belief that religion, purified from falsehood, superstition,

and sin, is the foundation of all nobleness in man; and it portrays,

under images and with names, for the most part easily understood, and

easily applied to real counterparts, the struggle which every one at

that time supposed to be going on, between absolute truth and

righteousness on one side, and fatal error and bottomless wickedness on

the other. Una, the Truth, the one and only Bride of man's spirit,

marked out by the tokens of humility and innocence, and by her power

over wild and untamed natures--the single Truth, in contrast to the

counterfeit Duessa, false religion, and its actual embodiment in the

false rival Queen of Scots--Truth, the object of passionate homage, real

with many, professed with all, which after the impostures and scandals

of the preceding age, had now become characteristic of that of

Elizabeth--Truth, its claims, its dangers, and its champions, are the

subject of the first book: and it is represented as leading the manhood

of England, in spite, not only of terrible conflict, but of defeat and

falls, through the discipline of repentance, to holiness and the

blessedness which comes with it. The Red Cross Knight, St. George of

England, whose name Georgos, the Ploughman, is dwelt upon, apparently to

suggest that from the commonalty, the "tall clownish young men," were

raised up the great champions of the Truth,--though sorely troubled by

the wiles of Duessa, by the craft of the arch-sorcerer, by the force and

pride of the great powers of the Apocalyptic Beast and Dragon, finally

overcomes them, and wins the deliverance of Una and her love.

The second book, _Of Temperance_, pursues the subject, and represents

the internal conquests of self-mastery, the conquests of a man over his

passions, his violence, his covetousness, his ambition, his despair, his

sensuality. Sir Guyon, after conquering many foes of goodness, is the

destroyer of the most perilous of them all, Acrasia, licentiousness, and

her ensnaring Bower of Bliss. But after this, the thread at once of

story and allegory, slender henceforth at the best, is neglected and

often entirely lost. The third book, the _Legend of Chastity_, is a

repetition of the ideas of the latter part of the second, with a

heroine, Britomart, in place of the Knight of the previous book, Sir

Guyon, and with a special glorification of the high-flown and romantic

sentiments about purity, which wore the poetic creed of the courtiers of

Elizabeth, in flagrant and sometimes in tragic contrast to their

practical conduct of life. The loose and ill-compacted nature of the

plan becomes still more evident in the second instalment of the work.

Even the special note of each particular virtue becomes more faint and

indistinct. The one law to which the poet feels bound is to have twelve

cantos in each book; and to do this he is sometimes driven to what in

later times has been called padding. One of the cantos of the third book

is a genealogy of British kings from Geoffrey of Monmouth; one of the

cantos of the _Legend of Friendship_ is made up of an episode,

describing the marriage of the Thames and the Medway, with an elaborate

catalogue of the English and Irish rivers, and the names of the

sea-nymphs. In truth, he had exhausted his proper allegory, or he got

tired of it. His poem became an elastic framework, into which he could

fit whatever interested him and tempted him to composition. The gravity

of the first books disappears. He passes into satire and caricature. We

meet with Braggadochio and Trompart, with the discomfiture of Malecasta,

with the conjugal troubles of Malbecco and Helenore, with the imitation

from Ariosto of the Squire of Dames. He puts into verse a poetical

physiology of the human body; he translates Lucretius, and speculates on

the origin of human souls; he speculates, too, on social justice, and

composes an argumentative refutation of the Anabaptist theories of right

and equality among men. As the poem proceeds, he seems to feel himself

more free to introduce what he pleases. Allusions to real men and events

are sometimes clear, at other times evident, though they have now ceased

to be intelligible to us. His disgust and resentment breaks out at the

ways of the Court in sarcastic moralizing, or in pictures of dark and

repulsive imagery. The characters and pictures of his friends furnish

material for his poem; he does not mind touching on the misadventures of

Ralegh, and even of Lord Grey, with sly humour or a word of candid

advice. He becomes bolder in the distinct introduction of contemporary

history. The defeat of Duessa was only figuratively shown in the first

portion; in the second the subject is resumed. As Elizabeth is the "one

form of many names," Gloriana, Belphoebe, Britomart, Mercilla, so

"under feigned colours shading a true case" he deals with her rival.

Mary seems at one time the false Florimel, the creature of enchantment,

stirring up strife, and fought for by the foolish knights whom she

deceives, Blandamour and Paridell, the counterparts of Norfolk and the

intriguers of 1571. At another, she is the fierce Amazonian queen,

Radegund, by whom for a moment, even Arthegal is brought into

disgraceful thraldom, till Britomart, whom he has once fought against,

delivers him. And finally the fate of the typical Duessa is that of the

real Mary Queen of Scots described in great detail--a liberty in dealing

with great affairs of state for which James of Scotland actually desired

that he should be tried and punished.[128:2] So Philip II. is at one

time the Soldan, at another the Spanish monster Geryoneo, at another the

fosterer of Catholic intrigues in France and Ireland, Grantorto. But

real names are also introduced with scarcely any disguise: Guizor, and

Burbon, the Knight who throws away his shield, Henry IV., and his Lady

Flourdelis, the Lady Beige, and her seventeen sons: the Lady Irena, whom

Arthegal delivers. The overthrow of the Armada, the English war in the

Low Countries, the apostasy of Henry IV., the deliverance of Ireland

from the "great wrong" of Desmond's rebellion, the giant Grantorto,

form, under more or less transparent allegory, great part of the _Legend

of Justice_. Nay, Spenser's long fostered revenge on the lady who had

once scorned him, the _Rosalind_ of the _Shepherd's Calendar_, the

_Mirabella_ of the _Faery Queen_, and his own late and happy marriage in

Ireland, are also brought in to supply materials for the _Legend of

Courtesy_. So multifarious is the poem, full of all that he thought, or

observed, or felt; a receptacle, without much care to avoid repetition,

or to prune, correct, and condense, for all the abundance of his ideas,

as they welled forth in his mind day by day. It is really a collection

of separate tales and allegories, as much as the _Arabian Nights_, or,

as its counterpart and rival of our own century, the _Idylls of the

King_. As a whole it is confusing: but we need not treat it as a whole.

Its continued interest soon breaks down. But it is probably best that

Spenser gave his mind the vague freedom which suited it, and that he did

not make efforts to tie himself down to his pre-arranged but too

ambitious plan. We can hardly lose our way in it, for there is no way to

lose. It is a wilderness in which we are left to wander. But there may

be interest and pleasure in a wilderness, if we are prepared for the

wandering.

Still, the complexity, or rather, the uncared-for and clumsy arrangement

of the poem is matter which disturbs a reader's satisfaction, till he

gets accustomed to the poet's way, and resigns himself to it. It is a

heroic poem, in which the heroine, who gives her name to it, never

appears: a story, of which the basis and starting-point is whimsically

withheld for disclosure in the last book, which was never written. If

Ariosto's jumps and transitions are more audacious, Spenser's intricacy

is more puzzling. Adventures begin which have no finish. Actors in them

drop from the clouds, claim an interest, and we ask in vain what has

become of them. A vein of what are manifestly contemporary allusions

breaks across the moral drift of the allegory, with an apparently

distinct yet obscured meaning, and one of which it is the work of

dissertations to find the key. The passion of the age was for ingenious

riddling in morality as in love. And in Spenser's allegories we are not

seldom at a loss to make out what and how much was really intended, amid

a maze of overstrained analogies and over-subtle conceits, and attempts

to hinder a too close and dangerous identification.

Indeed Spenser's mode of allegory, which was historical as well as

moral, and contains a good deal of history, if we knew it, often seems

devised to throw curious readers off the scent. It was purposely

baffling and hazy. A characteristic trait was singled out. A name was

transposed in anagram, like Irena, or distorted, as if by imperfect

pronunciation, like Burbon and Arthegal, or invented to express a

quality, like Una, or Gloriana, or Corceca, or Fradubio, or adopted with

no particular reason from the _Morte d'Arthur_, or any other old

literature. The personage is introduced with some feature, or amid

circumstances which seem for a moment to fix the meaning. But when we

look to the sequence of history being kept up in the sequence of the

story, we find ourselves thrown out. A character which fits one person

puts on the marks of another: a likeness which we identify with one real

person passes into the likeness of some one else. The real, in person,

incident, institution, shades off into the ideal; after showing itself

by plain tokens, it turns aside out of its actual path of fact, and

ends, as the poet thinks it ought to end, in victory or defeat, glory or

failure. Prince Arthur passes from Leicester to Sidney, and then back

again to Leicester. There are double or treble allegories; Elizabeth is

Gloriana, Belphoebe, Britomart, Mercilla, perhaps Amoret; her rival is

Duessa, the false Florimel, probably the fierce temptress, the Amazon

Radegund. Thus, what for a moment was clear and definite, fades like the

changing fringe of a dispersing cloud. The character which we identified

disappears in other scenes and adventures, where we lose sight of all

that identified it. A complete transformation destroys the likeness

which was begun. There is an intentional dislocation of the parts of the

story, when they might make it imprudently close in its reflection of

facts or resemblance in portraiture. A feature is shown, a manifest

allusion made, and then the poet starts off in other directions, to

confuse and perplex all attempts at interpretation, which might be too

particular and too certain. This was no doubt merely according to the

fashion of the time, and the habits of mind into which the poet had

grown. But there were often reasons for it, in an age so suspicious, and

so dangerous to those who meddled with high matters of state.

2. Another feature which is on the surface of the _Faery Queen_, and

which will displease a reader who has been trained to value what is

natural and genuine, is its affectation of the language and the customs

of life belonging to an age which is not its own. It is indeed redolent

of the present: but it is almost avowedly an imitation of what was

current in the days of Chaucer: of what were supposed to be the words,

and the social ideas and conditions, of the age of chivalry. He looked

back to the fashions and ideas of the Middle Ages, as Pindar sought his

materials in the legends and customs of the Homeric times, and created a

revival of the spirit of the age of the Heroes in an age of tyrants and

incipient democracies.[132:3] The age of chivalry, in Spenser's day far

distant, had yet left two survivals, one real, the other formal. The

real survival was the spirit of armed adventure, which was never

stronger or more stirring than in the gallants and discoverers of

Elizabeth's reign, the captains of the English companies in the Low

Countries, the audacious sailors who explored unknown oceans and

plundered the Spaniards, the scholars and gentlemen equally ready for

work on sea and land, like Ralegh and Sir Richard Grenville, of the

"Revenge." The formal survival was the fashion of keeping up the

trappings of knightly times, as we keep up Judge's wigs, court dresses,

and Lord Mayor's shows. In actual life it was seen in pageants and

ceremonies, in the yet lingering parade of jousts and tournaments, in

the knightly accoutrements still worn in the days of the bullet and the

cannon-ball. In the apparatus of the poet, as all were shepherds, when

he wanted to represent the life of peace and letters, so all were

knights or the foes and victims of knights, when his theme was action

and enterprise. It was the custom that the Muse masked, to use Spenser's

word, under these disguises; and this conventional masquerade of

pastoral poetry or knight errantry was the form under which the poetical

school that preceded the dramatists naturally expressed their ideas. It

seems to us odd that peaceful sheepcotes and love-sick swains should

stand for the world of the Tudors and Guises, or that its cunning

statecraft and relentless cruelty should be represented by the generous

follies of an imaginary chivalry. But it was the fashion which Spenser

found, and he accepted it. His genius was not of that sort which breaks

out from trammels, but of that which makes the best of what it finds.

And whatever we may think of the fashion, at least he gave it new

interest and splendour by the spirit with which he threw himself into

it.

The condition which he took as the groundwork of his poetical fabric

suggested the character of his language. Chaucer was then the "God of

English poetry;" his was the one name which filled a place apart in the

history of English verse. Spenser was a student of Chaucer, and borrowed

as he judged fit, not only from his vocabulary, but from his grammatical

precedents and analogies, with the object of giving an appropriate

colouring to what was to be raised as far as possible above familiar

life. Besides this, the language was still in such an unsettled state

that from a man with resources like Spenser's, it naturally invited

attempts to enrich and colour it, to increase its flexibility and power.

The liberty of reviving old forms, of adopting from the language of the

street and market homely but expressive words or combinations, of

following in the track of convenient constructions, of venturing on new

and bold phrases, was rightly greater in his time than at a later stage

of the language. Many of his words, either invented or preserved, are

happy additions; some which have not taken root in the language, we may

regret. But it was a liberty which he abused. He was extravagant and

unrestrained in his experiments on language. And they were made not

merely to preserve or to invent a good expression. On his own authority,

he cuts down, or he alters a word, or he adopts a mere corrupt

pronunciation, to suit a place in his metre, or because he wants a rime.

Precedents, as Mr. Guest has said, may no doubt be found for each one of

these sacrifices to the necessities of metre or rime, in some one or

other living dialectic usage, or even in printed books--"_blend_" for

"_blind_," "_misleeke_" for "_mislike_," "_kest_" for "_cast_,"

"_cherry_" for "_cherish_," "_vilde_" for "_vile_," or even "_wawes_"

for "_waves_," because it has to rime to "_jaws_." But when they are

profusely used as they are in Spenser, they argue, as critics of his own

age such as Puttenham, remarked,--either want of trouble, or want of

resource. In his impatience he is reckless in making a word which he

wants--"fortunize," "mercified," "unblindfold," "relive"--he is reckless

in making one word do the duty of another, interchanging actives and

passives, transferring epithets from their proper subjects. The "humbled

grass," is the grass on which a man lies humbled: the "lamentable eye,"

is the eye which laments. "His treatment of words," says Mr. Craik, "on

such occasions"--occasions of difficulty to his verse--"is like nothing

that ever was seen, unless it might be Hercules breaking the back of the

Nemean lion. He gives them any sense and any shape that the case may

demand. Sometimes he merely alters a letter or two; sometimes he twists

off the head or the tail of the unfortunate vocable altogether. But this

fearless, lordly, truly royal style makes one only feel the more how

easily, if he chose, he could avoid the necessity of having recourse to

such outrages."

His own generation felt his licence to be extreme. "In affecting the

ancients," said Ben Jonson, "he writ no language." Daniel writes

sarcastically, soon after the _Faery Queen_ appeared, of those who

Sing of knights and Palladines,

In aged accents and untimely words.

And to us, though students of the language must always find interest in

the storehouse of ancient or invented language to be found in Spenser,

this mixture of what is obsolete or capriciously new is a bar, and not

an unreasonable one, to a frank welcome at first acquaintance. Fuller

remarks with some slyness, that "the many Chaucerisms used (for I will

not say, affected) by him, are thought by the ignorant to be blemishes,

known by the learned to be beauties, in his book; which notwithstanding

had been more saleable, if more conformed to our modern language." The

grotesque, though it has its place as one of the instruments of poetical

effect, is a dangerous element to handle. Spenser's age was very

insensible to the presence and the dangers of the grotesque, and he was

not before his time in feeling what was unpleasing in incongruous

mixtures. Strong in the abundant but unsifted learning of his day, a

style of learning, which in his case was strangely inaccurate, he not

only mixed the past with the present, fairyland with politics, mythology

with the most serious Christian ideas, but he often mixed together the

very features which are most discordant, in the colours, forms, and

methods by which he sought to produce the effect of his pictures.

3. Another source of annoyance and disappointment is found in the

imperfections and inconsistencies of the poet's standard of what is

becoming to say and to write about. Exaggeration, diffuseness,

prolixity, were the literary diseases of the age; an age of great

excitement and hope, which had suddenly discovered its wealth and its

powers, but not the rules of true economy in using them. With the

classics open before it, and alive to much of the grandeur of their

teaching, it was almost blind to the spirit of self-restraint,

proportion, and simplicity which governed the great models. It was left

to a later age to discern these and appreciate them. This unresisted

proneness to exaggeration produced the extravagance and the horrors of

the Elizabethan Drama, full, as it was, nevertheless, of insight and

originality. It only too naturally led the earlier Spenser astray. What

Dryden, in one of his interesting critical prefaces says of himself, is

true of Spenser; "Thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so fast

upon me, that my only difficulty is to choose or to reject; to run them

into verse, or to give them the other harmony of prose." There was in

Spenser a facility for turning to account all material, original or

borrowed, an incontinence of the descriptive faculty, which was ever

ready to exercise itself on any object, the most unfitting and

loathsome, as on the noblest, the purest, or the most beautiful. There

are pictures in him which seem meant to turn our stomach. Worse than

that there are pictures which for a time rank the poet of _Holiness_ or

_Temperance_, with the painters who used their great art to represent at

once the most sacred and holiest forms, and also scenes which few people

now like to look upon in company--scenes and descriptions which may

perhaps from the habits of the time may have been playfully and

innocently produced, but which it is certainly not easy to dwell upon

innocently now. And apart from these serious faults, there is

continually haunting us, amid incontestable richness, vigour, and

beauty, a sense that the work is over-done. Spenser certainly did not

want for humour and an eye for the ridiculous. There is no want in him,

either, of that power of epigrammatic terseness, which, in spite of its

diffuseness, his age valued and cultivated. But when he gets on a story

or a scene, he never knows where to stop. His duels go on stanza after

stanza till there is no sound part left in either champion. His palaces,

landscapes, pageants, feasts, are taken to pieces in all their parts,

and all these parts are likened to some other things. "His abundance,"

says Mr. Craik, "is often oppressive; _it is like wading among unmown

grass_." And he drowns us in words. His abundant and incongruous

adjectives may sometimes, perhaps, startle us unfairly, because their

associations and suggestions have quite altered; but very often they are

the idle outpouring of an unrestrained affluence of language. The

impression remains that he wants a due perception of the absurd, the

unnatural, the unnecessary; that he does not care if he makes us smile,

or does not know how to help it, when he tries to make us admire or

sympathize.

Under this head comes a feature which the "charity of history" may lead

us to treat as simple exaggeration, but which often suggests something

less pardonable, in the great characters, political or literary, of

Elizabeth's reign. This was the gross, shameless, lying flattery paid to

the Queen. There is really nothing like it in history. It is unique as a

phenomenon that proud, able, free-spoken men, with all their high

instincts of what was noble and true, with all their admiration of the

Queen's high qualities, should have offered it, even as an unmeaning

custom; and that a proud and free-spoken people should not, in the very

genuineness of their pride in her and their loyalty, have received it

with shouts of derision and disgust. The flattery of Roman emperors and

Roman Popes, if as extravagant, was not so personal. Even Louis XIV. was

not celebrated in his dreary old age, as a model of ideal beauty and a

paragon of romantic perfection. It was no worship of a secluded

and distant object of loyalty: the men who thus flattered knew

perfectly well, often by painful experience, what Elizabeth was:

able, indeed, high-spirited, successful, but ungrateful to her

servants, capricious, vain, ill-tempered, unjust, and in her old age,

ugly. And yet the Gloriana of the _Faery Queen_, the Empress of

all nobleness,--Belphoebe, the Princess of all sweetness and

beauty,--Britomart, the armed votaress of all purity,--Mercilla, the

lady of all compassion and grace,--were but the reflections of the

language in which it was then agreed upon by some of the greatest of

Englishmen to speak, and to be supposed to think, of the Queen.

II. But when all these faults have been admitted, faults of design and

faults of execution--and when it is admitted, further, that there is a

general want of reality, substance, distinctness, and strength in the

personages of the poem--that, compared with the contemporary drama,

Spenser's knights and ladies and villains are thin and ghostlike, and

that, as Daniel says, he

Paints shadows in imaginary lines--

it yet remains that our greatest poets since his day have loved him and

delighted in him. He had Shakespere's praise. Cowley was made a poet by

reading him. Dryden calls Milton "the poetical son of Spenser:"

"Milton," he writes, "has acknowledged to me that Spenser was his

original." Dryden's own homage to him is frequent and generous. Pope

found as much pleasure in the _Faery Queen_ in his later years as he had

found in reading it when he was twelve years old: and what Milton,

Dryden, and Pope admired, Wordsworth too found full of nobleness,

purity, and sweetness. What is it that gives the _Faery Queen_ its hold

on those who appreciate the richness and music of English language, and

who in temper and moral standard are quick to respond to English

manliness and tenderness? The spell is to be found mainly in three

things--(1) in the quaint stateliness of Spenser's imaginary world and

its representatives; (2) in the beauty and melody of his numbers, the

abundance and grace of his poetic ornaments, in the recurring and

haunting rhythm of numberless passages, in which thought and imagery and

language and melody are interwoven in one perfect and satisfying

harmony; and (3) in the intrinsic nobleness of his general aim, his

conception of human life, at once so exacting and so indulgent, his high

ethical principles and ideals, his unfeigned honour for all that is pure

and brave and unselfish and tender, his generous estimate of what is due

from man to man of service, affection, and fidelity. His fictions

embodied truths of character which with all their shadowy incompleteness

were too real and too beautiful to lose their charm with time.

1. Spenser accepted from his age the quaint stateliness which is

characteristic of his poem. His poetry is not simple and direct like

that of the Greeks. It has not the exquisite finish and felicity of the

best of the Latins. It has not the massive grandeur, the depth, the

freedom, the shades and subtle complexities of feeling and motive, which

the English dramatists found by going straight to nature. It has the

stateliness of highly artificial conditions of society, of the Court,

the pageant, the tournament, as opposed to the majesty of the great

events in human life and history, its real vicissitudes, its

catastrophes, its tragedies, its revolutions, its sins. Throughout the

prolonged crisis of Elizabeth's reign, her gay and dashing courtiers,

and even her serious masters of affairs, persisted in pretending to look

on the world in which they lived, as if through the side-scenes of a

masque, and relieved against the background of a stage-curtain. Human

life, in those days, counted for little; fortune, honour, national

existence hung in the balance; the game was one in which the heads of

kings and queens and great statesmen were the stakes,--yet the players

could not get out of their stiff and constrained costume, out of their

artificial and fantastic figments of thought, out of their conceits and

affectations of language. They carried it, with all their sagacity, with

all their intensity of purpose, to the council-board, and the

judgment-seat. They carried it to the scaffold. The conventional

supposition was that at the Court, though every one knew better, all was

perpetual sunshine, perpetual holiday, perpetual triumph, perpetual

love-making. It was the happy reign of the good and wise and lovely. It

was the discomfiture of the base, the faithless, the wicked, the

traitors. This is what is reflected in Spenser's poem; at once, its

stateliness, for there was no want of grandeur and magnificence in the

public scene ever before Spenser's imagination; and its quaintness,

because the whole outward apparatus of representation was borrowed from

what was past, or from what did not exist, and implied surrounding

circumstances in ludicrous contrast with fact, and men taught themselves

to speak in character, and prided themselves on keeping it up by

substituting for the ordinary language of life and emotion a cumbrous

and involved indirectness of speech.

And yet that quaint stateliness is not without its attractions. We have

indeed to fit ourselves for it. But when we have submitted to its

demands on our imagination, it carries us along as much as the fictions

of the stage. The splendours of the artificial are not the splendours of

the natural; yet the artificial has its splendours, which impress and

captivate and repay. The grandeur of Spenser's poem is a grandeur like

that of a great spectacle, a great array of the forces of a nation, a

great series of military effects, a great ceremonial assemblage of all

that is highest and most eminent in a country, a coronation, a royal

marriage, a triumph, a funeral. So, though Spenser's knights and ladies

do what no men ever could do, and speak what no man ever spoke, the

procession rolls forward with a pomp which never forgets itself, and

with an inexhaustible succession of circumstance, fantasy, and incident.

Nor is it always solemn and high-pitched. Its gravity is relieved from

time to time with the ridiculous figure or character, the ludicrous

incident, the jests and antics of the buffoon. It has been said that

Spenser never smiles. He not only smiles, with amusement or sly irony;

he wrote what he must have laughed at as he wrote, and meant us to laugh

at. He did not describe with a grave face the terrors and misadventures

of the boaster Braggadochio and his Squire, whether or not a caricature

of the Duke of Alençon and his "gentleman," the "petit singe," Simier.

He did not write with a grave face the Irish row about the false

Florimel (IV. 5),--

Then unto Satyran she was adjudged,

Who was right glad to gaine so goodly meed:

But Blandamour thereat full greatly grudged,

And litle prays'd his labours evill speed,

That for to winne the saddle lost the steed.

Ne lesse thereat did Paridell complaine,

And thought t'appeale from that which was decreed

To single combat with Sir Satyrane:

Thereto him Atè stird, new discord to maintaine.

And eke, with these, full many other Knights

She through her wicked working did incense

Her to demaund and chalenge as their rights,

Deserved for their perils recompense.

Amongst the rest, with boastfull vaine pretense,

Stept Braggadochio forth, and as his thrall

Her claym'd, by him in battell wonne long sens:

Whereto her selfe he did to witnesse call:

Who, being askt, accordingly confessed all.

Thereat exceeding wroth was Satyran;

And wroth with Satyran was Blandamour;

And wroth with Blandamour was Erivan;

And at them both Sir Paridell did loure.

So all together stird up strifull stoure,

And readie were new battell to darraine.

Each one profest to be her paramoure,

And vow'd with speare and shield it to maintaine;

Ne Judges powre, ne reasons rule, mote them restraine.

Nor the behaviour of the "rascal many" at the sight of the dead Dragon

(I. 12),--

And after all the raskall many ran,

Heaped together in rude rablement,

To see the face of that victorious man,

Whom all admired as from heaven sent,

And gazd upon with gaping wonderment;

But when they came where that dead Dragon lay,

Stretcht on the ground in monstrous large extent,

The sight with ydle feare did them dismay,

Ne durst approch him nigh to touch, or once assay.

Some feard, and fledd; some feard, and well it fayned;

One, that would wiser seeme then all the rest,

Warnd him not touch, for yet perhaps remaynd

Some lingring life within his hollow brest,

Or in his wombe might lurke some hidden nest

Of many Dragonettes, his fruitfull seede:

Another saide, that in his eyes did rest

Yet sparckling fyre, and badd thereof take heed;

Another said, he saw him move his eyes indeed.

One mother, whenas her foolehardy chyld

Did come too neare, and with his talants play,

Halfe dead through feare, her litle babe revyld,

And to her gossibs gan in counsell say;

'How can I tell, but that his talants may

Yet scratch my sonne, or rend his tender hand?'

So diversly them selves in vaine they fray;

Whiles some more bold to measure him nigh stand,

To prove how many acres he did spred of land.

And his humour is not the less real that it affects serious argument, in

the excuse which he urges for his fairy tales (II. 1).

Right well I wote, most mighty Soveraine,

That all this famous antique history

Of some th' aboundance of an ydle braine

Will judged be, and painted forgery,

Rather then matter of just memory;

Sith none that breatheth living aire dees know

Where is that happy land of Faery,

Which I so much doe vaunt, yet no where show,

But vouch antiquities, which no body can know.

But let that man with better sence advize,

That of the world least part to us is red;

And daily how through hardy enterprize

Many great Regions are discovered,

Which to late age were never mentioned

Who ever heard of th' Indian Peru?

Or who in venturous vessell measured

The Amazon huge river, now found trew

Or fruitfullest Virginia who did ever vew?

Yet all these were, when no man did them know,

Yet have from wisest ages hidden beene;

And later times thinges more unknowne shall show.

Why then should witlesse man so much misweene,

That nothing is but that which he hath seene?

What if within the Moones fayre shining spheare,

What if in every other starre unseene

Of other worldes he happily should heare,

He wonder would much more; yet such to some appeare.

The general effect is almost always lively and rich: all is buoyant and

full of movement. That it is also odd, that we see strange costumes and

hear a language often formal and obsolete, that we are asked to take for

granted some very unaccustomed supposition and extravagant assumption,

does not trouble us more than the usages and sights, so strange to

ordinary civil life, of a camp, or a royal levée. All is in keeping,

whatever may be the details of the pageant; they harmonize with the

effect of the whole, like the gargoyles and quaint groups in a Gothic

building harmonize with its general tone of majesty and subtle

beauty;--nay, as ornaments, in themselves of bad taste, like much of the

ornamentation of the Renaissance styles, yet find a not unpleasing place

in compositions grandly and nobly designed:

So discord oft in music makes the sweeter lay.

Indeed, it is curious how much of real variety is got out of a limited

number of elements and situations. The spectacle, though consisting only

of knights, ladies, dwarfs, pagans, "salvage men," enchanters, and

monsters, and other well-worn machinery of the books of chivalry, is

ever new, full of vigour and fresh images, even if, as sometimes

happens, it repeats itself. There is a majestic unconsciousness of all

violations of probability, and of the strangeness of the combinations

which it unrolls before us.

2. But there is not only stateliness: there is sweetness and beauty.

Spenser's perception of beauty of all kinds was singularly and

characteristically quick and sympathetic. It was one of his great gifts;

perhaps the most special and unstinted. Except Shakespere, who had it

with other and greater gifts, no one in that time approached to Spenser,

in feeling the presence of that commanding and mysterious idea,

compounded of so many things, yet of which, the true secret escapes us

still, to which we give the name of beauty. A beautiful scene, a

beautiful person, a beautiful poem, a mind and character with that

combination of charms, which, for want of another word, we call by that

half-spiritual, half-material word "beautiful," at once set his

imagination at work to respond to it and reflect it. His means of

reflecting it were as abundant as his sense of it was keen. They were

only too abundant. They often betrayed him by their affluence and

wonderful readiness to meet his call. Say what we will, and a great deal

may be said, of his lavish profusion, his heady and uncontrolled excess,

in the richness of picture and imagery in which he indulges,--still

there it lies before us, like the most gorgeous of summer gardens, in

the glory and brilliancy of its varied blooms, in the wonder of its

strange forms of life, in the changefulness of its exquisite and

delicious scents. No one who cares for poetic beauty can be insensible

to it. He may criticize it. He may have too much of it. He may prefer

something more severe and chastened. He may observe on the waste of

wealth and power. He may blame the prodigal expense of language, and the

long spaces which the poet takes up to produce his effect. He may often

dislike or distrust the moral aspect of the poet's impartial

sensitiveness to all outward beauty,--the impartiality which makes him

throw all his strength into his pictures of Acrasia's Bower of Bliss,

the Garden of Adonis, and Busirane's Masque of Cupid. But there is no

gainsaying the beauty which never fails and disappoints, open the poem

where you will. There is no gainsaying its variety, often so unexpected

and novel. Face to face with the Epicurean idea of beauty and pleasure

is the counter-charm of purity, truth, and duty. Many poets have done

justice to each one separately. Few have shown, with such equal power,

why it is that both have their roots in man's divided nature, and

struggle, as it were, for the mastery. Which can be said to be the most

exquisite in all beauty of imagination, of refined language, of

faultless and matchless melody, of these two passages, in which the same

image is used for the most opposite purposes;--first, in that song of

temptation, the sweetest note in that description of Acrasia's Bower of

Bliss, which, as a picture of the spells of pleasure, has never been

surpassed; and next, to represent that stainless and glorious purity

which is the professed object of his admiration and homage. In both the

beauty of the rose furnishes the theme of the poet's treatment. In the

first, it is the "lovely lay" which meets the knight of Temperance amid

the voluptuousness which he is come to assail and punish.

The whiles some one did chaunt this lovely lay:

Ah! see, whoso fayre thing doest faine to see,

In springing flowre the image of thy day.

Ah! see the Virgin Rose, how sweetly shee

Doth first peepe foorth with bashfull modestee,

That fairer seemes the lesse ye see her may.

Lo! see soone after how more bold and free

Her bared bosome she doth broad display;

Lo! see soone after how she fades and falls away.

So passeth, in the passing of a day,

Of mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flowre;

Ne more doth florish after first decay,

That earst was sought to deck both bed and bowre

Of many a lady, and many a Paramowre.

Gather therefore the Rose whilest yet is prime,

For soone comes age that will her pride deflowre;

Gather the Rose of love whilest yet is time,

Whilest loving thou mayst loved be with equall crime.

In the other, it images the power of the will--that power over

circumstance and the storms of passion, to command obedience to reason

and the moral law, which Milton sung so magnificently in _Comus_:--

That daintie Rose, the daughter of her Morne,

More deare then life she tendered, whose flowre

The girlond of her honour did adorne:

Ne suffred she the Middayes scorching powre,

Ne the sharp Northerne wind thereon to showre;

But lapped up her silken leaves most chayre,

When so the froward skye began to lowre;

But, soone as calmed was the christall ayre,

She did it fayre dispred and let to florish fayre.

Eternall God, in his almightie powre,

To make ensample of his heavenly grace,

In Paradize whylome did plant this flowre;

Whence he it fetcht out of her native place,

And did in stocke of earthly flesh enrace,

That mortall men her glory should admyre.

In gentle Ladies breste, and bounteous race

Of woman kind, it fayrest Flowre doth spyre,

And beareth fruit of honour and all chast desyre.

Fayre ympes of beautie, whose bright shining beames

Adorne the worlde with like to heavenly light,

And to your willes both royalties and Reames

Subdew, through conquest of your wondrous might,

With this fayre flowre your goodly girlonds dight

Of chastity and vertue virginall,

That shall embellish more your beautie bright,

And crowne your heades with heavenly coronall,

Such as the Angels weare before Gods tribunall!

This sense of beauty, and command of beautiful expression is not seen

only in the sweetness of which both these passages are examples. Its

range is wide. Spenser had in his nature besides sweetness, his full

proportion of the stern and high manliness of his generation; indeed, he

was not without its severity, its hardness, its unconsidering and cruel

harshness, its contemptuous indifference to suffering and misery when on

the wrong side. Noble and heroic ideals captivate him by their

attractions. He kindles naturally and genuinely at what proves and draws

out men's courage, their self-command, their self-sacrifice. He

sympathizes as profoundly with the strangeness of their condition, with

the sad surprises in their history and fate, as he gives himself up with

little restraint to what is charming and even intoxicating in it. He can

moralize with the best in terse and deep-reaching apophthegms of

melancholy or even despairing experience. He can appreciate the

mysterious depths and awful outlines of theology--of what our own age

can see nothing in, but a dry and scholastic dogmatism. His great

contemporaries were, more perhaps than the men of any age, many-sided.

He shared their nature; and he used all that he had of sensitiveness and

of imaginative and creative power, in bringing out its manifold aspects,

and sometimes contradictory feelings and aims. Not that beauty, even

varied beauty, is the uninterrupted attribute of his work. It alternates

with much that no indulgence can call beautiful. It passes but too

easily into what is commonplace, or forced, or unnatural, or

extravagant, or careless and poor, or really coarse and bad. He was a

negligent corrector. He only at times gave himself the trouble to

condense and concentrate. But for all this, the _Faery Queen_ glows and

is ablaze with beauty; and that beauty is so rich, so real, and so

uncommon, that for its sake the severest readers of Spenser have

pardoned much that is discordant with it, much that in the reading has

wasted their time and disappointed them.

There is one portion of the beauty of the _Faery Queen_, which in its

perfection and fulness had never yet been reached in English poetry.

This was the music and melody of his verse. It was this wonderful,

almost unfailing sweetness of numbers which probably as much as anything

set the _Faery Queen_ at once above all contemporary poetry. The English

language is really a musical one, and say what people will, the English

ear is very susceptible to the infinite delicacy and suggestiveness of

musical rhythm and cadence. Spenser found the secret of it. The art has

had many and consummate masters since, as different in their melody as

in their thoughts from Spenser. And others at the time, Shakespere

pre-eminently, heard, only a little later, the same grandeur, and the

same subtle beauty in the sounds of their mother-tongue, only waiting

the artist's skill to be combined and harmonized into strains of

mysterious fascination. But Spenser was the first to show that he had

acquired a command over what had hitherto been heard only in exquisite

fragments, passing too soon into roughness and confusion. It would be

too much to say that his cunning never fails, that his ear is never dull

or off its guard. But when the length and magnitude of the composition

are considered, with the restraints imposed by the new nine-line stanza,

however convenient it may have been, the vigour, the invention, the

volume and rush of language, and the keenness and truth of ear amid its

diversified tasks are indeed admirable, which could keep up so prolonged

and so majestic a stream of original and varied poetical melody. If his

stanzas are monotonous, it is with the grand monotony of the seashore,

where billow follows billow, each swelling diversely, and broken into

different curves and waves upon its mounting surface, till at last it

falls over, and spreads and rushes up in a last long line of foam upon

the beach.

3. But all this is but the outside shell and the fancy framework in

which the substance of the poem is enclosed. Its substance is the poet's

philosophy of life. It shadows forth, in type and parable, his ideal of

the perfection of the human character, with its special features, its

trials, its achievements. There were two accepted forms in poetry in

which this had been done by poets. One was under the image of warfare.

The other was under the image of a journey or voyage. Spenser chose the

former, as Dante and Bunyan chose the latter. Spenser looks on the scene

of the world as a continual battle-field. It was such in fact to his

experience in Ireland, testing the mettle of character, its loyalty, its

sincerity, its endurance. His picture of character is by no means

painted with sentimental tenderness. He portrays it in the rough work of

the struggle and the toil, always hardly tested by trial, often

overmatched, deceived, defeated, and even delivered by its own default

to disgrace and captivity. He had full before his eyes what abounded in

the society of his day, often in its noblest representatives--the

strange perplexing mixture of the purer with the baser elements, in the

high-tempered and aspiring activity of his time. But it was an ideal of

character which had in it high aims and serious purposes, which was

armed with fortitude and strength, which could recover itself after

failure and defeat.

The unity of a story, or an allegory--that chain and backbone of

continuous interest, implying a progress and leading up to a climax,

which holds together the great poems of the world, the _Iliad_ and

_Odyssey_, the _Æneid_, the _Commedia_, the _Paradise Lost_, the

_Jerusalem Delivered_--this is wanting in the _Faery Queen_. The unity

is one of character and its ideal. That character of the completed man,

raised above what is poor and low, and governed by noble tempers and

pure principles, has in Spenser two conspicuous elements. In the first

place, it is based on manliness. In the personages which illustrate the

different virtues, Holiness, Justice, Courtesy, and the rest, the

distinction is not in nicely discriminated features or shades of

expression, but in the trials and the occasions which call forth a

particular action or effort: yet the manliness which is at the

foundation of all that is good in them is a universal quality common to

them all, rooted and imbedded in the governing idea or standard of moral

character in the poem. It is not merely courage, it is not merely

energy, it is not merely strength. It is the quality of soul which

frankly accepts the conditions in human life, of labour, of obedience,

of effort, of unequal success, which does not quarrel with them or evade

them, but takes for granted with unquestioning alacrity that man is

called--by his call to high aims and destiny--to a continual struggle

with difficulty, with pain, with evil, and makes it the point of honour

not to be dismayed or wearied out by them. It is a cheerful and serious

willingness for hard work and endurance, as being inevitable and very

bearable necessities, together with even a pleasure in encountering

trials which put a man on his mettle, an enjoyment of the contest and

the risk, even in play. It is the quality which seizes on the paramount

idea of duty, as something which leaves a man no choice; which despises

and breaks through the inferior considerations and motives--trouble,

uncertainty, doubt, curiosity--which hang about and impede duty; which

is impatient with the idleness and childishness of a life of mere

amusement, or mere looking on, of continued and self-satisfied levity,

of vacillation, of clever and ingenious trifling. Spenser's manliness is

quite consistent with long pauses of rest, with intervals of change,

with great craving for enjoyment--nay, with great lapses from its ideal,

with great mixtures of selfishness, with coarseness, with

licentiousness, with injustice and inhumanity. It may be fatally

diverted into bad channels; it may degenerate into a curse and scourge

to the world. But it stands essentially distinct from the nature which

shrinks from difficulty, which is appalled at effort, which has no

thought of making an impression on things around it, which is content

with passively receiving influences and distinguishing between emotions,

which feels no call to exert itself, because it recognizes no aim

valuable enough to rouse it, and no obligation strong enough to command

it. In the character of his countrymen round him, in its highest and in

its worst features, in its noble ambition, its daring enterprise, its

self-devotion, as well as in its pride, its intolerance, its fierce

self-will, its arrogant claims of superiority, moral, political,

religious, Spenser saw the example of that strong and resolute

manliness, which, once set on great things, feared nothing--neither toil

nor disaster nor danger, in their pursuit. Naturally and unconsciously,

he laid it at the bottom of all his portraitures of noble and virtuous

achievement in the _Faery Queen_.

All Spenser's "virtues" spring from a root of manliness. Strength,

simplicity of aim, elevation of spirit, courage are presupposed as their

necessary conditions. But they have with him another condition as

universal. They all grow and are nourished from the soil of love; the

love of beauty, the love and service of fair women. This of course, is a

survival from the ages of chivalry, an inheritance bequeathed from the

minstrels of France, Italy, and Germany to the rising poetry of Europe.

Spenser's types of manhood are imperfect without the idea of an

absorbing and overmastering passion of love; without a devotion, as to

the principal and most worthy object of life, to the service of a

beautiful lady, and to winning her affection and grace. The influence of

this view of life comes out in numberless ways. Love comes on the scene

in shapes which are exquisitely beautiful, in all its purity, its

tenderness, its unselfishness. But the claims of its all-ruling and

irresistible might are also only too readily verified in the passions of

men; in the follies of love, its entanglements, its mischiefs, its

foulness. In one shape or another it meets us at every turn; it is never

absent; it is the motive and stimulant of the whole activity of the

poem. The picture of life held up before us is the literal rendering of

Coleridge's lines:--

All thoughts, all passions, all delights,

Whatever stirs this mortal frame,

Are all but ministers of Love,

And feed his sacred flame.

We still think with Spenser about the paramount place of manliness, as

the foundation of all worth in human character. We have ceased to think

with him about the rightful supremacy of love, even in the imaginative

conception of human life. We have ceased to recognize in it the public

claims of almost a religion, which it has in Spenser. Love will ever

play a great part in human life to the end of time. It will be an

immense element in its happiness, perhaps a still greater one in its

sorrows, its disasters, its tragedies. It is still an immense power in

shaping and colouring it, both in fiction and reality; in the family, in

the romance, in the fatalities and the prosaic ruin of vulgar fact. But

the place given to it by Spenser is to our thoughts and feelings even

ludicrously extravagant. An enormous change has taken place in the ideas

of society on this point: it is one of the things which make a wide

chasm between centuries and generations which yet are of "the same

passions," and have in temper, tradition and language, so much in

common. The ages of the Courts of Love, whom Chaucer reflected and whose

ideas passed on through him to Spenser, are to us simply strange and

abnormal states through which society has passed, to us beyond

understanding and almost belief. The perpetual love-making, as one of

the first duties and necessities of a noble life, the space which it

must fill in the cares and thoughts of all gentle and high-reaching

spirits, the unrestrained language of admiration and worship, the

unrestrained yielding to the impulses, the anxieties, the pitiable

despair and agonies of love, the subordination to it of all other

pursuits and aims, the weeping and wailing and self-torturing which it

involves, all this is so far apart from what we know of actual life, the

life not merely of work and business, but the life of affection, and

even of passion, that it makes the picture of which it is so necessary a

part, seem to us in the last degree, unreal, unimaginable, grotesquely

ridiculous. The quaint love sometimes found among children, so quickly

kindled, so superficial, so violent in its language and absurd in its

plans, is transferred with the utmost gravity to the serious proceedings

of the wise and good. In the highest characters it is chastened,

refined, purified: it appropriates, indeed, language due only to the

divine, it almost simulates idolatry; yet it belongs to the best part of

man's nature. But in the lower and average characters, it is not so

respectable; it is apt to pass into mere toying pastime and frivolous

love of pleasure: it astonishes us often by the readiness with which it

displays an affinity for the sensual and impure, the corrupting and

debasing sides of the relations between the sexes. But however it

appears, it is throughout a very great affair, not merely with certain

persons, or under certain circumstances, but with every one: it obtrudes

itself in public, as the natural and recognized motive of plans of life

and trials of strength; it is the great spur of enterprise, and its

highest and most glorious reward. A world of which this is the law, is

not even in fiction a world which we can conceive possible, or with

which experience enables us to sympathize.

It is, of course, a purely artificial and conventional reading of the

facts of human life and feeling. Such conventional readings and

renderings belong in a measure to all art; but in its highest forms they

are corrected, interpreted, supplemented by the presence of interspersed

realities which every one recognizes. But it was one of Spenser's

disadvantages, that two strong influences combined to entangle him in

this fantastic and grotesque way of exhibiting the play and action of

the emotions of love. This all-absorbing, all-embracing passion of love,

at least, this way of talking about it, was the fashion of the Court.

Further, it was the fashion of poetry, which he inherited; and he was

not the man to break through the strong bands of custom and authority.

In very much he was an imitator. He took what he found; what was his

own was his treatment of it. He did not trouble himself with

inconsistencies, or see absurdities and incongruities. Habit and

familiar language made it not strange that in the Court of Elizabeth,

the most high-flown sentiments should be in every one's mouth about the

sublimities and refinements of love, while every one was busy with keen

ambition, and unscrupulous intrigue. The same blinding power kept him

from seeing the monstrous contrast between the claims of the queen to be

the ideal of womanly purity--claims recognized and echoed in ten

thousand extravagant compliments--and the real licentiousness common all

round her among her favourites. All these strange contradictions, which

surprise and shock us, Spenser assumed as natural. He built up his

fictions on them, as the dramatist built on a basis, which, though more

nearly approaching to real life, yet differed widely from it in many of

its preliminary and collateral suppositions; or as the novelist builds

up his on a still closer adherence to facts and experience. In this

matter Spenser appears with a kind of double self. At one time he speaks

as one penetrated and inspired by the highest and purest ideas of love,

and filled with aversion and scorn for the coarser forms of passion--for

what is ensnaring and treacherous, as well as for what is odious and

foul. At another, he puts forth all his power to bring out its most

dangerous and even debasing aspects in highly coloured pictures, which

none could paint without keen sympathy with what he takes such pains to

make vivid and fascinating. The combination is not like anything modern,

for both the elements are in Spenser so unquestionably and simply

genuine. Our modern poets are, with all their variations in this

respect, more homogeneous; and where one conception of love and beauty

has taken hold of a man, the other does not easily come in. It is

impossible to imagine Wordsworth dwelling with zest on visions and

imagery, on which Spenser has lavished all his riches. There can be no

doubt of Byron's real habits of thought and feeling on subjects of this

kind, even when his language for the occasion is the chastest; we detect

in it the mood of the moment, perhaps spontaneous, perhaps put on, but

in contradiction to the whole movement of the man's true nature. But

Spenser's words do not ring hollow. With a kind of unconsciousness and

innocence, which we now find hard to understand, and which perhaps

belongs to the early childhood or boyhood of a literature, he passes

abruptly from one standard of thought and feeling to another; and is

quite as much in earnest when he is singing the pure joys of chastened

affections, as he is when he is writing with almost riotous luxuriance

what we are at this day ashamed to read. Tardily, indeed, he appears to

have acknowledged the contradiction. At the instance of two noble ladies

of the Court, he composed two Hymns of Heavenly Love and Heavenly

Beauty, to "retract" and "reform" two earlier ones composed in praise of

earthly love and beauty. But, characteristically, he published the two

pieces together, side by side in the same volume.

In the _Faery Queen_, Spenser has brought out, not the image of the

great Gloriana, but in its various aspects, a form of character which

was then just coming on the stage of the world, and which has played a

great part in it since. As he has told us, he aimed at presenting before

us, in the largest sense of the word, the English gentleman. It was as a

whole a new character in the world. It had not really existed in the

days of feudalism and chivalry, though features of it had appeared, and

its descent was traced from those times: but they were too wild and

coarse, too turbulent and disorderly, for a character which, however

ready for adventure and battle, looked to peace, refinement, order, and

law as the true conditions of its perfection. In the days of Elizabeth

it was beginning to fill a large place in English life. It was formed

amid the increasing cultivation of the nation, the increasing varieties

of public service, the awakening responsibilities to duty and calls to

self-command. Still making much of the prerogative of noble blood and

family honours, it was something independent of nobility and beyond it.

A nobleman might have in him the making of a gentleman: but it was the

man himself of whom the gentleman was made. Great birth, even great

capacity, were not enough; there must be added a new delicacy of

conscience, a new appreciation of what is beautiful and worthy of

honour, a new measure of the strength and nobleness of self-control, of

devotion to unselfish interests. This idea of manhood, based not only on

force and courage, but on truth, on refinement, on public spirit, on

soberness and modesty, on consideration for others, was taking

possession of the younger generation of Elizabeth's middle years. Of

course the idea was very imperfectly apprehended, still more imperfectly

realized. But it was something which on the same scale had not been yet,

and which was to be the seed of something greater. It was to grow into

those strong, simple, noble characters, pure in aim and devoted to duty,

the Falklands, the Hampdens, who amid so much evil form such a

remarkable feature in the Civil Wars, both on the Royalist and the

Parliamentary sides. It was to grow into that high type of cultivated

English nature, in the present and the last century, common both to its

monarchical and its democratic embodiments, than which, with all its

faults and defects, our western civilization has produced few things

more admirable.

There were three distinguished men of that time, who one after another

were Spenser's friends and patrons, and who were men in whom he saw

realized his conceptions of human excellence and nobleness. They were

Sir Philip Sidney, Lord Grey of Wilton, and Sir Walter Ralegh: and the

_Faery Queen_ reflects, as in a variety of separate mirrors and

spiritualized forms, the characteristics of these men and of such as

they. It reflects their conflicts, their temptations, their weaknesses,

the evils they fought with, the superiority with which they towered over

meaner and poorer natures. Sir Philip Sidney may be said to have been

the first typical example in English society of the true gentleman. The

charm which attracted men to him in life, the fame which he left behind

him, are not to be accounted for simply by his accomplishments as a

courtier, a poet, a lover of literature, a gallant soldier; above all

this there was something not found in the strong or brilliant men about

him, a union and harmony of all high qualities differing from any of

them separately, which gave a fire of its own to his literary

enthusiasm, and a sweetness of its own to his courtesy. Spenser's

admiration for that bright but short career was strong and lasting.

Sidney was to him a verification of what he aspired to and imagined; a

pledge that he was not dreaming, in portraying Prince Arthur's greatness

of soul, the religious chivalry of the Red Cross Knight of Holiness, the

manly purity and self-control of Sir Guyon. It is too much to say that

in Prince Arthur, the hero of the poem, he always intended Sidney. In

the first place, it is clear that under that character Spenser in places

pays compliments to Leicester, in whose service he began life, and

whose claims on his homage he ever recognized. Prince Arthur is

certainly Leicester, in the historical passages in the Fifth Book

relating to the war in the Low Countries in 1576: and no one can be

meant but Leicester in the bold allusion in the First Book (ix. 17) to

Elizabeth's supposed thoughts of marrying him. In the next place,

allegory, like caricature, is not bound to make the same person and the

same image always or perfectly coincide; and Spenser makes full use of

this liberty. But when he was painting the picture of the Kingly

Warrior, in whom was to be summed up in a magnificent unity the

diversified graces of other men, and who was to be ever ready to help

and support his fellows in their hour of need, and in their conflict

with evil, he certainly had before his mind the well-remembered

lineaments of Sidney's high and generous nature. And he further

dedicated a separate book, the last that he completed, to the

celebration of Sidney's special "virtue" of Courtesy. The martial strain

of the poem changes once more to the pastoral of the _Shepherd's

Calendar_ to describe Sidney's wooing of Frances Walsingham, the fair

Pastorella; his conquests by his sweetness and grace over the

churlishness of rivals; and his triumphant war against the monster

spirit of ignorant and loud-tongued insolence, the "Blatant Beast" of

religious, political, and social slander.

Again, in Lord Grey of Wilton, gentle by nature, but so stern in the

hour of trial, called reluctantly to cope not only with anarchy, but

with intrigue and disloyalty, finding selfishness and thanklessness

everywhere, but facing all and doing his best with a heavy heart, and

ending his days prematurely under detraction and disgrace, Spenser had

before him a less complete character than Sidney, but yet one of grand

and severe manliness, in which were conspicuous a religious hatred of

disorder, and an unflinching sense of public duty. Spenser's admiration

of him was sincere and earnest. In his case the allegory almost becomes

history. Arthur, Lord Grey, is Sir Arthegal, the Knight of Justice. The

story touches apparently on some passages of his career, when his

dislike of the French marriage placed him in opposition to the Queen,

and even for a time threw him with the supporters of Mary. But the

adventures of Arthegal mainly preserve the memory of Lord Grey's

terrible exploits against wrong and rebellion in Ireland. These exploits

are represented in the doings of the iron man Talus, his squire, with

his destroying flail, swift, irresistible, inexorable; a figure,

borrowed and altered, after Spenser's wont, from a Greek legend. His

overthrow of insolent giants, his annihilation of swarming "rascal

routs," idealize and glorify that unrelenting policy, of which, though

condemned in England, Spenser continued to be the advocate. In the story

of Arthegal, long separated by undeserved misfortunes from the favour of

the armed lady, Britomart, the virgin champion of right, of whom he was

so worthy, doomed in spite of his honours to an early death, and

assailed on his return from his victorious service by the furious

insults of envy and malice, Spenser portrays almost without a veil, the

hard fate of the unpopular patron whom he to the last defended and

honoured.

Ralegh, his last protector, the Shepherd of the Ocean, to whose judgment

he referred the work of his life, and under whose guidance he once more

tried the quicksands of the Court, belonged to a different class from

Sidney or Lord Grey; but of his own class he was the consummate and

matchless example. He had not Sidney's fine enthusiasm and nobleness; he

had not either Sidney's affectations. He had not Lord Grey's

single-minded hatred of wrong. He was a man to whom his own interests

were much; he was unscrupulous; he was ostentatious; he was not above

stooping to mean, unmanly compliances with the humours of the Queen. But

he was a man with a higher ideal than he attempted to follow. He saw,

not without cynical scorn, through the shows and hollowness of the

world. His intellect was of that clear and unembarrassed power which

takes in as wholes things which other men take in part by part. And he

was in its highest form a representative of that spirit of adventure

into the unknown and the wonderful of which Drake was the coarser and

rougher example, realizing in serious earnest, on the sea and in the New

World, the life of knight-errantry feigned in romances. With Ralegh, as

with Lord Grey, Spenser comes to history; and he even seems to have been

moved, as the poem went on, partly by pity, partly by amusement, to

shadow forth in his imaginary world, not merely Ralegh's brilliant

qualities, but also his frequent misadventures and mischances in his

career at Court. Of all her favourites Ralegh was the one whom his

wayward mistress seemed to find most delight in tormenting. The offence

which he gave by his secret marriage suggested the scenes describing the

utter desolation of Prince Arthur's squire, Timias, at the jealous wrath

of the Virgin Huntress, Belphoebe,--scenes, which extravagant as they

are, can hardly be called a caricature of Ralegh's real behaviour in the

Tower in 1593. But Spenser is not satisfied with this one picture. In

the last Book Timias appears again, the victim of slander and ill-usage,

even after he had recovered Belphoebe's favour; he is baited like a

wild bull, by mighty powers of malice, falsehood, and calumny; he is

wounded by the tooth of the Blatant Beast; and after having been cured,

not without difficulty, and not without significant indications on the

part of the poet that his friend had need to restrain and chasten his

unruly spirit, he is again delivered over to an ignominious captivity,

and the insults of Disdain and Scorn.

Then up he made him rise, and forward fare,

Led in a rope which both his hands did bynd;

Ne ought that foole for pity did him spare,

But with his whip, him following behynd,

Him often scourg'd, and forst his feete to fynd:

And other-whiles with bitter mockes and mowes

He would him scorne, that to his gentle mynd

Was much more grievous then the others blowes:

Words sharpely wound, but greatest griefe of scorning growes.

Spenser knew Ralegh only in the promise of his adventurous prime--so

buoyant and fearless, so inexhaustible in project and resource, so

unconquerable by checks and reverses. The gloomier portion of Ralegh's

career was yet to come: its intrigues, its grand yet really gambling and

unscrupulous enterprises, the long years of prison and authorship, and

its not unfitting close, in the English statesman's death by the

headsman--so tranquil though violent, so ceremoniously solemn, so

composed, so dignified;--such a contrast to all other forms of capital

punishment, then or since.

Spenser has been compared to Pindar, and contrasted with Cervantes. The

contrast, in point of humour, and the truth that humour implies, is

favourable to the Spaniard: in point of moral earnestness and sense of

poetic beauty, to the Englishman. What Cervantes only thought

ridiculous Spenser used, and not in vain, for a high purpose. The ideas

of knight-errantry were really more absurd than Spenser allowed himself

to see. But that idea of the gentleman which they suggested, that

picture of human life as a scene of danger, trial, effort, defeat,

recovery, which they lent themselves to image forth, was more worth

insisting on, than the exposure of their folly and extravagance. There

was nothing to be made of them, Cervantes thought; and nothing to be

done, but to laugh off what they had left, among living Spaniards, of

pompous imbecility or mistaken pretensions. Spenser, knowing that they

must die, yet believed that out of them might be raised something nobler

and more real, enterprise, duty, resistance to evil, refinement, hatred

of the mean and base. The energetic and high-reaching manhood which he

saw in the remarkable personages round him he shadowed forth in the

_Faery Queen_. He idealized the excellences and the trials of this first

generation of English gentlemen, as Bunyan afterwards idealized the

piety, the conflicts, and the hopes of Puritan religion. Neither were

universal types; neither were perfect. The manhood in which Spenser

delights, with all that was admirable and attractive in it, had still

much of boyish incompleteness and roughness: it had noble aims, it had

generosity, it had loyalty, it had a very real reverence for purity and

religion; but it was young in experience of a new world, it was wanting

in self-mastery, it was often pedantic and self-conceited; it was an

easier prey than it ought to have been to discreditable temptations. And

there is a long interval between any of Spenser's superficial and thin

conceptions of character, and such deep and subtle creations as Hamlet

or Othello, just as Bunyan's strong but narrow ideals of religion, true

as they are up to a certain point, fall short of the length and breadth

and depth of what Christianity has made of man, and may yet make of him.

But in the ways which Spenser chose, he will always delight and teach

us. The spectacle of what is heroic and self-devoted, of honour for

principle and truth, set before us with so much insight and sympathy,

and combined with so much just and broad observation on those accidents

and conditions of our mortal state which touch us all, will never appeal

to English readers in vain, till we have learned a new language, and

adopted new canons of art, of taste, and of morals. It is not merely

that he has left imperishable images which have taken their place among

the consecrated memorials of poetry and the household thoughts of all

cultivated men. But he has permanently lifted the level of English

poetry by a great and sustained effort of rich and varied art, in which

one main purpose rules, loyalty to what is noble and pure, and in which

this main purpose subordinates to itself every feature and every detail,

and harmonizes some that by themselves seem least in keeping with it.

FOOTNOTES:

[118:1]

"Unknow, unkyst; and lost, that is unsoght."

_Troylus and Cryseide_, lib. i.

[128:2] Hales' _Life_, Globe Edition.

[132:3] _Vid._ Keble, _Prælect. Acad._, xxiv. p. 479, 480.