Chapter 9 - Edmund Spenser, 1552–99
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Edmund Spenser, born in 1552, was (like most great English writers) a member of the middle class, the son of a Londoner. He was sent to the Merchant Taylors’ School, where he learned, and doubtless suffered, under the famous Richard Mulcaster. There is some evidence that Mulcaster, even by the ferocious standards of that age, was a cruel teacher, but he was an interesting man whose views on education can still be studied in his Positions (1581) and Elementary (1582). Though long and very serious, they hardly go further than the theory of spelling, and if Mulcaster had completed a system of education on the same scale it would have been about as long as the Bible; a fact which might possibly have some bearing on the gigantic project (only a quarter of it was carried out) of The Faerie Queene. In 1569 Spenser entered Pembroke Hall at Cambridge. The most interesting thing about his university career is that he passed through it without becoming attached to either of the two intellectual movements by which Cambridge was then agitated.
We can hardly help calling them ‘Puritanism’ and ‘humanism’, but neither word meant the same as it does in modern America. By purity the Elizabethan Puritan meant not chastity but ‘pure’ theology and, still more, ‘pure’ church discipline. That is, he wanted an all-powerful Presbyterian Church, a church stronger than the state, set up in England, on the model of Calvin’s church at Geneva. Knox in Scotland loudly demanded, and at least one English Puritan hinted, that this should be done by armed revolution. Calvin, the great successful doctrinaire who had actually set up the ‘new order’, was the man who had dazzled them all. We must picture these Puritans as the very opposite of those who bear that name today: as young, fierce, progressive intellectuals, very fashionable and up-to-date. They were not teetotallers; bishops, not beer, were their special aversion. And humanists in this context means simply ‘classicists’—men very interested in Greek, but more interested in Latin, and far more interested in the ‘correct’ or ‘classical’ style of Latin than in what the Latin authors said. They wanted English drama to observe the (supposedly) Aristotelian ‘unities’, and some of them wanted English poets to abandon rhyme—a nasty, ‘barbarous’ or ‘Gothic’ affair—and use classical metres in English. There was no necessary enmity between Puritans and humanists. They were often the same people, and nearly always the same sort of people: the young men ‘in the Movement’, the impatient progressives demanding a ‘clean sweep’. And they were united by a common (and usually ignorant) hatred for everything medieval: for scholastic philosophy, medieval Latin, romance, fairies, and chivalry.
There are some possible signs (but all ambiguous) in Spenser’s Shepheards Calendar (1579) that he was once or twice nearly captured by the Puritans, but it certainly did not last long. What is more remarkable is that he never surrendered to humanism, though he clearly lived in a humanistic circle of the narrowest sort. His friend Gabriel Harvey—a very grotesque creature and, to judge from his surviving records, a textbook case of the Inferiority Complex—disapproved of the whole design of The Faerie Queene. He complained that in it ‘Hobgoblin’ was stealing the garland from ‘Apollo’: in other words, that medieval romance was winning the day against classicism. Another member of the circle, the rather fatuous young man who contributed a commentary to The Shepheards Calendar over the signature E.K., could not let Spenser’s references to fairies pass without adding ‘To roote that rancke opinion of Elfes out of mens hearts, the truth is, that there be no such thinges’. Nothing is more impressive about Spenser than his reaction to these humanist friends. He did neither of the two things we should expect. He never quarrelled with them; and he never took the slightest notice of their advice. He remained a faithful friend to Harvey (who had few friends); and he devoted his whole poetical career to a revival, or prolongation, of those medieval motifs which humanism wished to abolish.
Spenser had taken his M.A. in 1576, and in 1578 had found temporary employment as secretary to the Bishop of Rochester. In 1579 he had been at Leicester House and enjoyed the very exciting experience of being noticed (and even used with some ‘familiarity’) by Philip Sidney himself. It must have seemed to the young poet that the world was opening to him. There was of course no question of living by his pen. In the 90’s it was possible to live (precariously) by pamphleteering or (rather better) by writing and acting for the new companies of players, but this was hardly so in the 70’s; nor would such a Bohemian and ‘rake-helly’ career have been at all to Spenser’s mind. On the other hand, we must not picture him choosing a profession or looking for a business opening as a young man might do today. Literary distinction could still lead to employment in the service of one of those great nobles who carried on the work of government. Such a reward fell to Spenser when he became secretary to Lord Grey of Wilton in 1580. Doubtless, it was not the kind of post Spenser had hoped for. It meant ‘foreign service’, for Lord Grey had just been appointed Deputy of Ireland, and Spenser arrived in Dublin in August 1580. He thus became (for life, had he known it) an instrument of the English domination in a hostile and incompletely conquered country. He had already begun The Faerie Queene.
Conquest is an evil productive of almost every other evil both to those who commit and to those who suffer it, and we should look in vain for any fruitful or pleasant relations between Spenser and the Irish. Nothing of that sort was possible. They were to him merely ‘natives’, rebels, and Papists; he to them, a vile heretic and alien Sassenach. The plans which he propounded for their subjugation in his View of the Present State of Ireland (never printed in his lifetime, but written in 1596) are harsh and even cynical; and if some scholars have pleaded, not without success, that they are excusable, this of itself admits that they require excuse. But that, as we shall presently see, is not the whole story about Spenser’s relations to Ireland.
In 1589, after receiving a visit from Raleigh, Spenser returned to England, bringing with him the manuscript of the first three Books of The Faerie Queene, which were published in the following year. They brought him fame, but not the post in England for which, no doubt, he had been hoping, and he returned to his house at Kilcolman in the county Cork. In 1594 he married Elizabeth Boyle: the sonnets (Amoretti) and the Epithalamion, both published in 1595, poetize his courtship and its conclusion. Epithalamion is his happiest poem. But happiness did not last long. There was another visit to England in 1595, and the second instalment of The Faerie Queene was printed in 1596. Then came his doom. In 1598 the Irish rose under the Earl of Tyrone, defeated the English near Armagh, and flung a force into Munster. What they would do when they reached Kilcolman, every reader of Irish history knows in advance. It was, after all, the old seat of the Desmonds: the heretic, foreigner, and upstart had usurped it long enough. It is said (by Ben Jonson) that Spenser’s third child, a baby, died in the flames. By December Spenser had contrived to reach London, carrying dispatches about the late rising. He died, certainly in poverty, as some say actually of hunger, in January 1599.
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Though Spenser seldom made poetry out of his own life in the direct fashion of Wordsworth’s Prelude, the pattern of his biography and that of his poetical output are nevertheless interlocked in an interesting way. On the biographical side we have the long years of residence in Ireland punctuated by brief visits to England: that is, to civilization, safety, the court, patrons, and the hope of social success. On the poetical side, we have the single great work, certainly begun very early and perhaps begun even before the appearance of The Shepheards Calendar, obstinately adhered to in the teeth of criticism, worked at all his life and left unfinished; its composition punctuated, or interrupted, by the minor poems, all of them (except the Epithalamion) inferior to it. They usually came out just after a visit to England. It is not hard to guess what was happening. Whenever Spenser can reach England—whenever, in our language, he ‘goes on leave’—he brings with him some more Faerie Queene to be published. That is what he cares about. But of course the publisher urges him to ‘follow it up’. Spenser gets together a volume of odds and ends, some of them not very recent work. Thus we get the Complaints volume of 1591 and the Colin Clouts Come Home Againe volume of ’95. However their contents were written, they were published, we feel, less by Spenser the poet than by Spenser the man; Spenser the man, seizing an opportunity of reminding the patrons and the public that he was still in existence. For of course a great work slowly growing, stanza by stanza, through a lifetime, is a thing that people easily overlook. It thus comes about that the many years in Ireland lie behind Spenser’s greatest poetry, and the few years in England behind his minor poetry. It is hard to resist the conviction that his prolonged exile was a great gain to English literature. It removed him perforce from the rapid changes of fashion, the ephemeral hopes and fears, the petty intrigues, and the time-wasting attendance upon great persons, which would almost certainly have been the portion of a literary man hanging upon the fringes of the court: it forced him to sink deeper and deeper into the world he was creating. To that extent, we can call The Faerie Queene an Irish product.
We can perhaps say a little more. Spenser could not love the people, but, surprisingly, he loved the country. He chose an Irish hill, Arlo, for his assembly of gods (Book VII, the ‘Mutability’ cantos, vi and vii). He introduced a poetic catalogue of Irish rivers (Book IV, canto xi) into one of his most highly wrought passages. In prose (View of the Present State) he pronounced Ulster ‘a most beautifull and sweete countrie as any is under heaven’. He delighted in Irish history and antiquities and hoped to write a book about them. What is even stranger (and helps to show his freedom from the narrowness of humanistic taste), he had listened to Irish poetry in translation and thought that it ‘savored of sweete witt and good invencion’. Most interesting from this point of view is the poem Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, not published until 1595 but written to celebrate Colin Clout’s (that is, Spenser’s) return from his first English visit in 1590—his return to an Ireland which, as the title shows, has now become ‘home’. It is a curiously broken-backed poem. It starts out with the view that we should expect. The visit to England has been wonderful because there Colin Clout saw the ‘blessed eye’ of ‘that Angel’ Queen Elizabeth, because her realm is all ‘fruitful corne, faire trees, fresh herbage’, because (unlike Ireland) it has no ‘raging sword’, no ‘ravenous wolves’ nor ‘outlawes’, and because the court is full of exquisite ladies and admirable poets. This, I say, is what we should expect: a compliment to the queen and the possible patrons and an appeal for an English job. But then Colin goes on in the latter part of the poem to paint a wholly different picture. His Anglo-Irish friends ask him why he ever returned from such a delightful country to ‘this barren soil’ of Ireland ‘where cold and care and penury do dwell’. Colin replies: one glance at the ‘enormities’ of the English court convinced him that it would be a great mistake to ‘abandon quiet home’ for court life and far wiser ‘back to his sheep to turne’. For now it appears that court is full of ‘malice and strife’, lying, backbiting, treachery, and dissimulation, no place ‘for any gentle wit’, and that the love which courtiers incessantly talk of is a lewd, faithless affair quite unlike the high mystery of love as ‘we poore shepheards’ know it. All this rings true. Spenser’s visit to England had been a disappointment. He was not made for the fashionable world. This contrast between the ‘vain shows’ of court and the simplicities of rustic life recurs increasingly in the later parts of The Faerie Queene. Shepherds, hermits, satyrs, even the Savage, become types to which he turns with love. It is difficult not to conclude that this represents his growing (though perhaps unadmitted) reconciliation to what had once been his place of exile but had now become home. He was coming to need that Irish life: the freedom, the informality, the old clothes, the hunting, farming, and fishing (he was proud of the super-excellent trout in his own river at Kilcolman). He may, as a poet, have needed the very country. There is a real affinity between his Faerie Queene, a poem of quests and wanderings and inextinguishable desires, and Ireland itself—the soft, wet air, the loneliness, the muffled shapes of the hills, the heart-rending sunsets. It was of course a different Ireland from ours, an Ireland without potatoes, whitewashed cottages, or bottled stout: but it must already have been ‘the land of longing’. The Faerie Queene should perhaps be regarded as the work of one who is turning into an Irishman. For Ireland shares with China the power of assimilating all her invaders. It is an old complaint that all who go there—Danes, Normans, English, Scotch, very Firbolgs—rapidly become ‘more Irish than the Irish themselves’. With Spenser the process was perhaps beginning. It is true he hated the Irish and they him: but, as an Irishman myself, I take leave to doubt whether that is a very un-Irish trait. (‘The Irish, sir,’ said Dr Johnson, ‘are an honest people. They never speak well of one another.’)
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When Spenser and Sidney began writing, English poetry was in a deplorable condition. Short histories of literature sometimes give the impression that the ‘Revival of Learning’ began from the first to exercise a quickening influence upon our literature. I find no evidence that this was so. Nearly all the good poetry of the sixteenth century is crowded into its last twenty years (except in Scotland, where it comes at the beginning of the century and is overwhelmingly medieval in character). In England, until Sidney and Spenser arose, the last poet of real importance had been Sir Thomas Wyatt, who died in 1542: and his poetry, at its best, owes at least as much to the Middle Ages as the Revival of Learning. Between Wyatt and Spenser there extends a period in which it looks as though English poetry were never going to rise again even half so high as it had already risen in the Middle Ages. The best product of this dull period had been the Songs and Sonnets (1557), usually called Tottel’s Miscellany from the name of its publisher, which had contained, along with a very large body of wooden and clumsy verse, Wyatt’s lyrics and some graceful (though rather tame) pieces by Surrey and others. Far worse and more characteristic was the huge Mirror for Magistrates which came out, repeatedly added to, at various dates from 1555 to 1587. In it the ghosts of various historical characters appeared to tell their stories or, as the Mirror calls them, their ‘tragedies’. Apart from a good ‘induction’ by Thomas Sackville and one goodish ‘tragedie’ by John Dolman, the Mirror is about as bad as it could be. But it was fatally popular and thus important for its bad influence on later poets and as an index of the depths to which taste had sunk. In it, as in the work of Googe, Brooke, Turberville, or the truly appalling translators of Seneca, we see a total loss of that feeling for style which seems to have come so easily to most medieval poets. It is against this background that we can best understand the value, for their own age, of Spenser’s minor works and most easily pardon the fact that even in his greatest poetry he was seldom safe from a relapse into the bad manner of his predecessors. He was not a man laying the coping stone on an edifice of good poetry already half-built; he was a man struggling by his own exertions out of a horrible swamp of dull verbiage, ruthlessly over-emphatic metre, and screaming rhetoric.
Thus The Shepheards Calendar is not, at this distance of time, a very attractive work. Even if we can re-acquire (and if we are to study English literature, we must try) a taste for the pastoral, we shall still find that Spenser’s shepherds fall between two stools. They are not realistic enough to give us the pleasure we get from the rustics of Hardy or of Huckleberry Finn: yet they are far too realistic to waft us away into the purely poetic pastoral world of Drayton’s Muses Elizium or Milton’s Lycidas. This happened, I believe, because Spenser was hesitating between two incompatible models: the wholly idealized Arcadia of Sannazaro and the more realistic (but poetically negligible) Eclogues (1515 and 1521) of Alexander Barclay. But if we had come to the Calendar, as its first readers did, from verse like that of the Mirror, we should feel as if we were passing from winter to spring. We should read
The simple ayre, the gentle warbling wynde,
So calme, so coole, as no where else I fynde:
The grassye ground with daintye Daysiès dight,
The Bramble bush, where Byrds of every kynde
To the waters fall their tunes attemper right,
(Calendar, ‘June’, 4–8)
and we should perceive that poetry, which for nearly forty years had been able only to shout or mumble, was now once more beginning to sing. There are moments in literary history at which to achieve a manner and a music is more important than to deliver any ‘message’, however profound or prophetic. The message can wait; it will have to wait forever unless the manner and music are found. It is idle to talk about a great ballet until people have, in the crudest and simplest sense, learned to dance, learned the steps. In the Calendar Spenser is learning—in its best passages has already learned—the steps.
Three poems which were not printed till they appeared in the Complaints of 1591 may have been written shortly after the Calendar. One of them is merely a translation from the difficult and very minor poem of Virgil’s called the ‘Culex’, or ‘Gnat’, but the other two are interesting because they are so different from each other and from The Faerie Queene, thus warning us not to suppose that a great poet can write only the sort of poetry which he chooses to write chiefly. Muiopotmos is about the adventures of a butterfly, a poem full of flowers and sunshine written with great enjoyment in a lighter and swifter stanza than the famous ‘Spenserian’. In it, as nowhere else, we see Spenser at play. Many critics believe that it is a veiled account of some affair at court, but I do not think this is certain. The third poem is Mother Hubberds Tale, a satire, modelled not (as Spenser’s humanist friends would doubtless have wished) on the formal satire of the Romans but on the great medieval beast fable Reynard the Fox. The Ape and the Fox go into partnership and play all manner of tricks on the other beasts, even stealing the Lion’s crown and sceptre. The tale is, of course, full of allusions to contemporary politics which cannot be discussed here. In this poem we find none of the slow, stately pace which is characteristic of The Faerie Queene. Spenser writes in couplets, uses a homely style, and gets over the ground briskly.
Colin Clouts Come Home Againe has already been mentioned; the ‘ambivalence’ which makes it so interesting as a personal document spoils its unity of effect as a poem. Daphnaida (1591), an elegy on the death of a noble lady, is perhaps the worst poem Spenser ever wrote. It is modelled on Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess but entirely loses the charm of its original by exaggeration and straining after effect. The Elizabethans, even at their best, seem to lack that effortless good taste—one might almost say, that good breeding—which we nearly always find in the work of the Middle Ages. The Renaissance did not make men, in all senses, more civilized.
In the years ’95 and ’96 Spenser published a body of poetry about love which perhaps marks the summit of his achievement outside The Faerie Queene. The sonnets, or Amoretti (1595), are not among our greatest sonnets. We shall not find in them the almost divine selflessness and evocative power of Shakespeare’s sonnets nor the immediacy of Drayton’s ‘Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part’. Yet if we go to them for what they have to give, for grace and harmony, we can read them with enjoyment. But the Epithalamion which was added to them belongs to a different world, and indeed there is no poem in English at all like it. It traces the whole bridal day and night from the moment at which the bride is awaked to the moment at which the tired lovers fall asleep and the stars pour down good influences on the child they have engendered and on all their descendants yet to be. Into this buoyant poem Spenser has worked all the diverse associations of marriage, actual and poetic, Pagan and Christian: summer, landscape, neighbours, pageantry, religion, riotous eating and drinking, sensuality, moonlight—are all harmonized. The metre is a very long stanza with varying line lengths and a refrain, modelled, in fact, on the Italian canzone but filled with such festal pomp and jollity, such sustained exuberance of the whole man (spiritual, imaginative, and animal), that the effect is much closer to that of some great ode by Pindar than to any Italian poem. Those who have attempted to write poetry will know how very much easier it is to express sorrow than joy. That is what makes the Epithalamion matchless. Music has often reached that jocundity; poetry, seldom.
The Foure Hymnes (of Love and Beauty) which followed in 1596 are not on the same level. It would be hopeless, in the space at my disposal, to attempt to unravel their very learned and curious blend of scriptural, Platonic, and medieval ideas. They contain good poetry, but poetry hardly great enough for the arduous, and indeed overwhelming, themse that Spenser has chosen. The same year saw the publication of the Prothalamion in which Spenser, now writing on someone else’s marriage, tries to repeat the splendours of his own marriage song: I think, with very imperfect success.
But it is high time that we turned to the life work by which Spenser’s name really lives.
Like most of his contemporaries Spenser believed that English literature could never hold up its head in the world until it had produced a great epic, and that a poet ought to be a moral teacher; unlike some of his contemporaries, he also felt a strong impulse to continue and develop the medieval tradition of chivalrous romance. He did not in fact know very much medieval literature. Much of it was inaccessible in his time and, anyway, too hard for him in language: he makes little use of Malory; what he called ‘Chaucer’ included many un-Chaucerian works and was so textually corrupt that Spenser could not have read it metrically even if he had understood Middle English metre (which he did not). The English poem which probably influenced him most was the late, allegorical romance The Pastime of Pleasure by Stephen Hawes, who wrote in the reign of Henry VII. This lack of medieval scholarship in Spenser was, however, far from being such a disadvantage as we might suppose. In the first place it set him free to embody, almost unconsciously, those elements of the Middle Ages which were still alive all around him in tournament and heraldry, pageant and symbolical pictures, whereas accurate knowledge might have made him merely a pedant and an antiquarian. In the second place, he could find a great deal of the method and temper of medieval romance, already refashioned, already, as it were, predigested and made more available for his purpose, in three great Italian poems: the Orlando Innamorato of Boiardo, the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto, and the Gerusalemme Liberata of Tasso. The first two of these deal with the adventures of Charlemagne and his paladins at war with the Saracens, and admit large comic elements; they are sometimes laughing at the marvels and high-flown sentiments of romance, but then at other times seriously enjoying these very same things. It is not absolutely certain that, in their comic passages, Spenser always saw the joke. The third is about the capture of Jerusalem by Godfrey of Bouillon and his crusaders: it is as serious and religious a poem as Spenser’s own. All three together constitute such a varied, vigorous, unflagging body of poetical storytelling as is hardly equalled anywhere in European literature. They are Spenser’s chief models.
By turning to them he turned his back on the strict humanists, who would have wished him to write a pseudo-classical epic, closely modelled on Virgil, like Ronsard’s Franciade. By making Arthur the hero, or at least the nominal hero, of his poem he nevertheless attempted to gratify the humanists’ wish, and his own, that the great poem should be, in some sort, a national epic. But in order to fulfil the demand that the poet should be a moral teacher he decided that he would follow Hawes as well as the Italians. His poem was to be a romance of chivalry, but it was also to have a secondary meaning throughout: to be, as he said, ‘a continued allegory’. He decided, further, to introduce a new metre. All the Italians had used what is called ottava rima, the stanza which rhymes abababcc, best known to English readers in Byron’s Don Juan or Shelley’s Witch of Atlas. It is a beautifully light, rapid medium, excellently adapted for describing a breathless chase on horseback or telling an amusing anecdote with a dash of impropriety in it. Spenser himself had used it very well in Muiopotmos. But for The Faerie Queene he invented his new nine-line stanza which has wholly different qualities. The more complex interlacing of the rhymes and, still more, the concluding alexandrine, which gives to each stanza the effect of a wave falling on a beach, combine to make it slower, weightier, more stately. Of all Spenser’s innovations his stanza is perhaps the most important. It makes all his resemblances to the Italians merely superficial. It dictates the peculiar tone of The Faerie Queene. Milton, who knew and loved both Spenser and Spenser’s models, described it as ‘sage and solemn tunes’. A brooding solemnity—now deeply joyful, now sensuous, now melancholy, now loaded with dread—is characteristic of the poem at its best.
This brief account of the genesis of The Faerie Queene is needed in order to explain some features of it which may deter modern readers. The necessity is, of course, to be deplored; and it is of very recent growth. From the time of its publication down to about 1914 it was everyone’s poem—the book in which many and many a boy first discovered that he liked poetry; a book which spoke at once, like Homer or Shakespeare or Dickens, to every reader’s imagination. Spenser did not rank as a hard poet like Pindar, Donne, or Browning. How we have lost that approach I do not know. And unfortunately The Faerie Queene suffers even more than most great works from being approached through the medium of commentaries and ‘literary history’. These all demand from us a sophisticated, self-conscious frame of mind. But then, when we have used all these aids, we discover that the poem itself demands exactly the opposite response. Its primary appeal is to the most naïve and innocent tastes: to that level of our consciousness which is divided only by the thinnest veil from the immemorial lights and glooms of the collective Unconscious itself. It demands of us a child’s love of marvels and dread of bogies, a boy’s thirst for adventures, a young man’s passion for physical beauty. If you have lost or cannot re-arouse these attitudes, all the commentaries, all your scholarship about ‘the Renaissance’ or ‘Platonism’ or Elizabeth’s Irish policy, will not avail. The poem is a great palace, but the door into it is so low that you must stoop to go in. No prig can be a Spenserian. It is of course much more than a fairy-tale, but unless we can enjoy it as a fairy-tale first of all, we shall not really care for it.
Those features in the poem which might deter a reader are: (1) its narrative technique; (2) its allegory; and (3) the texture of its language.
(1) The narrative technique, especially after the first two Books, consists in constantly shifting from one story and one set of characters to another, but with a ‘dovetail’ or liaison at the point where we change. Thus in Book III, canto i, we start out on a journey with Sir Guyon, Prince Arthur, and Prince Arthur’s squire, Timias. Presently a strange knight appears riding towards them and tries a course of the lance with Guyon, who is unhorsed. Guyon’s annoyance at this reverse is soothed down by the others, and the strange knight now joins the party. They are all proceeding quietly together when suddenly an unknown lady on a milk-white horse flashes past, obviously in flight. A moment later her pursuer, a forester, is seen galloping after her. Arthur, Guyon, and Timias give chase, but the strange knight does not. And Spenser, instead of telling us what happened to the lady and the forester and Arthur and Guyon and Timias, now proceeds to relate the further adventures of the strange knight, which are quite irrelevant to the story we began with. We have thus got rid of all the characters we started with (not to meet Arthur again till canto iv, or Timias till v) and, in effect, changed trains.
The uninstructed reader would get the impression that Spenser was merely rambling, drifting at the mercy of his own imagination, as a man does in a dream. But the reader who knows a little more would remember that he had met exactly the same technique in Malory; and that it is also the technique of Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso. It is, I think, ultimately derived from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and may be called the ‘interwoven’ or ‘polyphonic’ narrative. Spenser is obeying a method as well established as the fugue. To what I have previously said about the naïve or childlike appeal of the stories he tells, we must now add the opposite truth that his method of disposing them is highly formal and sophisticated. (This contrast of naïve matter and sophisticated arrangement will seem less paradoxical if we remember how a composer can weave into a most learned symphonic whole the materials which he has derived from simple folk songs.) Now of course to explain that a certain method had a long history behind it does not, of itself, prove that it is a good one. Polyphonic narrative might be a vicious form, however many people had used it. But when we know that this technique dominated European fiction both in prose and verse from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, that civilized audiences in so many different countries went on demanding it, and that Tasso’s father (also a poet) lost all his popularity when he wrote a narrative poem without it, common sense will surely make us pause before we assume that it was simply wrong and that the technique of modern fiction is simply right. The old polyphonic story, after all, enjoyed a longer success than the modern novel has enjoyed yet. We do not know which will seem the more considerable literary phenomenon to a critic looking back from the year 2500. Such reflexions should induce us to give the old technique, at least, a fair trial. Perhaps, if we have patience, it will begin to charm us as it charmed our ancestors.
Obviously, it produces great variety. In a polyphonic narrative the weird, the voluptuous, the exciting, the melancholy scenes can succeed one another not where the exigencies of a single rigid ‘plot’ permit but wherever artistic fitness demands them. To that extent it is more like the technique of music than like that of modern literature. Obviously, too, the interruption of one story by another, often at a critical moment, has something in common with the technique of the serial story: the adventures of Arthur in pursuit of the fugitive lady are left ‘to be continued in our next’. If we reply that this kind of suspense is lost on us because our bad memories frustrate it and when we get back to Arthur we have forgotten all about him, then, since our ancestors made no such objection, it would seem that we differ from them by an inferiority, not by a superiority. And no doubt we do. Cheap paper, typewriters, notebooks, and indexes have impaired our memories just as automobiles have made some people almost incapable of walking. (One of the great uses of literary history is to keep on reminding us that while man is constantly acquiring new powers he is also constantly losing old ones.) It behoves us therefore to be humble and do our best. The obstacle is not, in fact, insurmountable: growing familiarity with this kind of poetry will presently enable us to hold the different, and constantly suspended, stories in our heads, just as growing familiarity enables us to follow complex music. And even if we sometimes lose our way, I think we shall find, as we go on reading, that the polyphonic technique has a far more important effect than those two which I have already mentioned, although it is one very difficult to describe. It is an effect particularly suitable to a tale of strange adventures.
It adds to the poem what might be called depth, or thickness, or density. Because the (improbable) adventure which we are following is liable at any moment to be interrupted by some quite different (improbable) adventure, there steals upon us unawares the conviction that adventures of this sort are going on all round us, that in this vast forest (we are nearly always in a forest) this is the sort of thing that goes on all the time, that it was going on before we arrived and will continue after we have left. We lose the feeling that the stories we are shown were arbitrarily made up by the poet. On the contrary, we are sure there are plenty more which he has not time to show us. We are being given mere selections, specimens: instances of the normal life of that wooded, faerie world. The result of this is an astonishing sense of reality.
The young student should here be warned that the word ‘lifelike’ as applied to literature is ambiguous. It may mean ‘like life as we know it in the real world’; in that sense the dullest character in a realistic novel may be ‘lifelike’; i.e. he is very like some real people and as lifeless as they. On the other hand ‘lifelike’ may mean ‘seeming to have a life of its own’; in that sense Captain Ahab, old Karamazov, Caliban, Br’er Rabbit, and the giant who says ‘fee-fi-fo-fum’ in Jack the Giant-Killer, are all lifelike. Whether we have met anything like them in the real world is irrelevant. Now Spenser’s ‘faerie lond’ is very unlike life in the first sense, but the polyphonic technique makes it extremely lifelike in the second. It is lifelike by its consistency—all the adventures bear the stamp of the world that produced them, have the right flavour, make each other probable; in its apparent planlessness—they collide, and get mixed up with one another and drift apart, just as events would in a real world; in its infinity—we can, so obviously, never get to the end of them, there are so obviously more and more, round the next corner. That is why Keats in his sonnet ‘To Spenser’ speaks of one who loved The Faerie Queene as ‘a forester deep in thy midmost trees’. There is forest, and more forest, wherever you look: you cannot see out of that world, just as you cannot see out of this.
(2) The allegory or ‘inner meaning’ of The Faerie Queene is generally regarded as twofold: a ‘moral’ or ‘philosophical’ allegory, and a ‘historical’ or ‘political’ allegory. The first is clear, certain, essential; the second obscure, often doubtful, and poetically of little importance. Spenser himself in his prefatory ‘Letter’ to Raleigh has told us that Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, means (in a certain sense) Queen Elizabeth; James I complained that Duessa was obviously Mary Queen of Scots; and there are places, in the worst parts of the worst Book (v), where the allegory about foreign affairs becomes unmistakable. Apart from these few equivalences, interpretation of the historical allegory is controversial and speculative. I myself (here differing from many scholars whom I respect) regard it with a good deal of scepticism. Some published fantasies of my own have had foisted on them (often by the kindliest critics) so many admirable allegorical meanings that I never dreamed of as to throw me into doubt whether it is possible for the wit of man to devise anything in which the wit of some other man cannot find, and plausibly find, an allegory. I do not believe that a consistent and detailed historical allegory (such as we find, say, in Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel) runs through The Faerie Queene. Particular scenes contain, in addition to their moral or philosophical meaning, a parallel to some contemporary event. Probably it does not last beyond the scene in which it occurs: when we meet the same characters in a different scene we need not expect them to have the same (or, necessarily, any) historical meaning. How lightly the whole thing should be taken may be judged from the way in which Spenser himself speaks of it. Gloriana at some points and for some purposes symbolizes Elizabeth, but Elizabeth is also at other points and for other purposes, Bel-phoebe. But in his ‘generall intention’ Gloriana is ‘Glory’; that is her permanent and essential meaning in the poem. The many generations who have read and re-read The Faerie Queene with delight paid very little attention to the historical allegory; the modern student, at his first reading, will be well advised to pay it none at all.
The moral or philosophical meaning is, on the other hand, essential; and fortunately in approaching this we have an advantage which the nineteenth century lacked. Our grandfathers might regard allegory as an arbitrary literary device, a ‘figure’ listed in the books on rhetoric. The work of Jung and Freud, and the practice of many modern poets and prose writers, has taught us an entirely different view. We now know that symbols are the natural speech of the soul, a language older and more universal than words. This truth, if not understood exactly as modern psychology would understand it, was accepted and acted upon by the ancient and medieval world, and had not yet been lost in Spenser’s day. He came, in fact, just in time, just before the birth of that new outward-looking, rationalizing spirit which was going to give us victory over the inanimate while cutting us off from the depths of our own nature. After Spenser allegory became, till quite modern times, merely a sort of literary toy, as it is in Addison’s or Johnson’s essays. Spenser was the last poet who could use the old language seriously and who had an audience that understood it.
They understood it because they had been brought up to it. We shall understand it best (though this may seem paradoxical) by not trying too hard to understand it. Many things—such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly—are done worst when we try hardest to do them. Allegory is not a puzzle. As each place or person is presented to us in The Faerie Queene we must not sit down to examine it detail by detail for clues to its meaning as if we were trying to work out a cipher. That is the very worst thing we can do. We must surrender ourselves with childlike attention to the mood of the story. The broad outlines of the allegory are quite unmistakable. Spenser himself tells us that the six knights who are the heroes of the six Books are six virtues; and each therefore fights against, or is endangered by, the vices particularly opposed to the virtue he represents. Thus in Book I Holiness encounters the various obstacles to the religious life—error, heresy, pride, despair, and so forth; in Book II Temperance encounters anger, avarice, and lust; in V Justice encounters graft or bribery (Lady Munera), egalitarianism, and the giantess who represents the domination of women over men. At a first glance, indeed, the reader might complain not so much of obscurity as of copybook platitude.
But he would be mistaken. In the first place, what looks like a platitude when it is set out in the abstract may become a different sort of thing when it puts on flesh and blood in the story; according to the theory which Sidney set out in his Defense of Poesie, the poetic art existed for the precise purpose of thus turning dead truism into vital experience. Secondly, ideas have changed since the sixteenth century, and much of Spenser’s thought is now not platitudinous but highly controversial. Not many readers of this book have been brought up to think either equality or feminism a form of injustice. On these points, therefore, The Faerie Queene can now do us one of the services for the sake of which (among other things) we read old literature. It can re-admit us to bygone modes of thought and enable us to imagine what they felt like, to see the world through our ancestors’ eyes. After we have done that, our rejection of those modes of thought (if we still reject them) will have some value. There is a great difference between rejecting something you have known from the inside and rejecting something (as uneducated people tend to do) simply because it happens to be out of fashion in your own time. It is like the difference between a mature and travelled man’s love for his own country and the cocksure conviction of an ignorant adolescent that his own village (which is the only one he knows) is the hub of the universe and does everything in the Only Right Way. For our own age, with all its accepted ideas, stands to the vast extent of historical time much as one village stands to the whole world.
And thirdly, Spenser’s moral thought is not in itself so platitudinous as we might at first suppose. Guyon, the knight of Book II who represents Temperance, comes to the Bower of Acrasia, obviously a place of sexual temptation. But then the female knight of Book III, Britomart, represents Chastity. Obviously she too must be brought through a place of sexual temptation; and so she is, in the House of Busirane. If we were writing an allegory instead of reading one, we should at once see that we were coming to a difficulty. What are we to do with these two places? How are we to prevent the second from being merely a repetition of the first? But in Spenser there is no resemblance between them and no trace (which would have been just as bad) of a faked or forced difference between them. The Bower of Acrasia is a luscious garden, genuinely luscious but in rather bad taste (they have metal ivy, painted to look like real, round a fountain); two naked girls are playing the fool in a bathing pond to attract Guyon’s attention; Acrasia herself, in a beautiful ‘creation’ of transparent lingerie, lies on a bed of roses leaning over the last young man she has captured. This is all plain sailing: the simplest reader cannot fail to understand it. But the House of Busirane is a vast building, hard to get into and hard to get out of when you are in. Britomart is there for hours. One empty room leads endlessly into another empty room: all silent, all blazing with an almost sickly splendour of intricate decoration. It is only at midnight, in the last room of all, that a little iron door opens and out of it comes a strange procession, like a masque, of silent people who ignore Britomart, intent upon their own strange ceremonial. Behind that iron door the girl whom Britomart has come to rescue is being tortured.
As I have said before, we must not look for clues as if we were solving a puzzle. We must, if need be, re-read both passages and soak ourselves in their differing atmospheres; the obvious, provocative, even garish sensuality of Acrasia’s Bower, which is the foe to ‘temperance’, to mere self-control and moderation, and the monotonous glitter, the claustrophobia, the costliness, loneliness, anguish of Busirane’s House which is the foe to ‘chastity’ (Spenser makes quite clear that ‘chastity’ for him includes faithful love, married, or hoping to be married). To a man tempted by the Bower, one would say ‘Pull yourself together’, but to a man tempted by Busirane, one would say ‘Can you not come out? Out into the free air and sunlight? Can you never break this lifelong obsession?’ It will dawn on every reader in the end that the difference between Acrasia and Busirane is that between Lust (appetite) and Love, bad love. Many moderns have been brought up to think that the difference between good and evil in sexual matters simply coincides with that between Love and Lust, that every affaire becomes ‘good’ just in so far as it concerns the heart and not merely the senses. If that is our view, then Spenser is here offering us not (as we feared) platitude but full paradox. For he thinks there may be Loves quite distinct from Lust, but evil, miserable, poisoning a whole life; illicit, secret loves that break up homes and lead to divorce courts, suicide pacts, and murders. They are expensive; the House of Busirane is ablaze with gold. They take a long time; the House of Busirane goes on and on. After fully comprehending Acrasia and Busirane (not as I have here given them in abstract but as they really live in the poem), the reader may of course still disagree with Spenser. He may think that the solemnity and grandeur of Busirane’s House make it obviously superior to any establishment Acrasia could ever run. Or he may agree with Spenser and feel that he has learned something about human life which will stand him in very good stead. But whichever way he decides, his decision will be a more informed one than any he could have made without reading The Faerie Queene. Even that is not the whole story. A poet inventing with such energy as Spenser produces things that mean more than he knew or intended. The House of Busirane may become, to this or that reader, a symbol of (hence, partly a liberation from) some other psychic imprisonment which has nothing to do with love. This kind of poetry, if receptively read, has psychotherapeutic powers.
Another factor which saves Spenser’s moral allegory from platitude is his method of hinting in each Book at what may be called ‘the virtue behind the virtue’, the inner shrine. Book VI is about Courtesy (which in those days meant much more than etiquette or good manners, and included what we should call ‘chivalry’) and is, of course, full of examples of courteous behaviour. But then in canto x we discover that our attempts at courtesy, however laudable and necessary, will never make us perfectly courteous men. We shall still be clumsy, unless the Graces come and dance with us, unless a beauty which no man can achieve by effort flows into our daily acts of its own will. So in Book IV we discover that Justice can never be perfect while it remains mere Justice: it must go into the temple of Isis and learn better things from ‘clemence’ or ‘equity’. So in Book I, all the Redcrosse Knight’s struggles with Error and Pride will not make him holy until he has been in the House of Caelia. This may be cold comfort to most of us, but it is hardly a copybook platitude; and it might be true.
Three obstacles may prevent a receptive reading of Spenser’s allegory. The first great obstacle for the reader of this volume is that he is being given only selections from it, not the poem itself. I have found it impossible to select in such a way that the pieces I included required no support from those I left out—if not support in respect of the ‘plot’ or sequence of events, yet support from contrasting or harmonizing moods. Far from wishing to conceal this defect, I wish to emphasize it as much as possible. In that way I may possibly convince a reader what selections are for. Except for some (poetically irrelevant) purpose such as passing an examination, the only use of selections is to deter those readers who will never appreciate the original, and thus to save them from wasting their time on it, and to send all the others on to the original as quickly as possible. The sooner you toss my selections impatiently aside and go out to buy a copy of The Faerie Queene, the better I shall have succeeded. If I lead anyone to imagine, twenty years hence, that he has really read the poem, when in fact he has read only these shreds and patches, I shall have done him (but not without his own assistance) a grave injury.
The second obstacle is this. The picture-language of allegory is ultimately derived, as I have said, from the unconscious. But by Spenser’s time allegory (both literary and pictorial) had been practised so long that certain symbols had an agreed meaning which everyone could understand directly, without plunging into the depths. Many of these are lost on the modern reader who does not know the Bible, the classics, astrology, or the old emblem books. A simple example (still, we may hope, intelligible to many) would be the silver anchor which lay on Speranza’s arm (I, x, 14). The text in Hebrews vi. 19 explains it. Similarly in I, iv, 24 not all readers will now know why Lechery should be riding a goat: all Elizabethans knew that the goat was the sign of Lust. Again, Spenser’s readers, comparing the Bower of Acrasia with the House of Busirane, would have noticed at the very outset a difference which I never mentioned (because I did not think it would help the modern student). Cupid is absent from the Bower and very much present in the House. Now in medieval allegory Cupid regularly meant Love (humanized, sentimental, refined, but not necessarily innocent); when they wanted to symbolize the mere sexual appetite they usually represented it by Cupid’s mother, Venus.
Finally, an obstacle may arise from our own preconceptions. We may be so certain in advance what a word or an image ought to mean that we omit to notice what it really does mean in the poem. A ludicrous example would be if anyone took ‘Temperance’ (the subject of Book II) to mean ‘not getting drunk’, instead of control and moderation of all our passions, including our desire for wealth. A much more serious preconception occurs about the significance of beautiful, naked women in The Faerie Queene. A man may have a ‘puritan obsession’ (in the modern, not the Elizabethan sense of the word ‘puritan’) which leads him to assume that these will all be images of sin. Much more probably in our days he will have an anti-puritan obsession and assume that they are all to be welcomed as fruits of Spenser’s ‘renaissance’ or ‘Pagan’ liberty. Both obsessions, if uncorrected, will lead to false reading. In the poem (as perhaps also in dreams and myths) this image may mean quite different things. And there is no need at all to be puzzled. If read without preconceptions the poem itself will make this perfectly clear. Everyone will see that the two young women in Acrasia’s swimming pool are images of Sin; and that the Graces who dance round Colin Clout (VI, x) are nothing of the sort. They are the ‘virtue behind the virtue’ of Courtesy, what Burke called ‘the unbought grace of life’.
(3) The general quality of The Faerie Queene is so highly poetic that it has earned Spenser the name of ‘the poet’s poet’. But if we examine the texture of the language line by line we may think that it is sometimes flat and very often little distinguished from that of prose. There are, no doubt, some stanzas which, even in isolation, anyone would acclaim as high poetry. But usually we shall look in vain for anything like the phrase-by-phrase deliciousness of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the ‘gigantic loftiness’ of Milton’s epic style, or the point and subtlety and pressure of Donne or the modern poets. The truth is that Spenser belongs to an older school. In the earliest times theology, science, history, fiction, singing, instrumental music, and dancing were all a single activity. Traces of this can still be found in Greek poetry. Then the different arts which had once all been elements of poesis developed and became more different from one another, and drew apart (the enormous gains and losses of this process perhaps equal one another). Poetry became more and more unlike prose. It is now so unlike it that the number of those who can read it is hardly greater than the number of those who write it. Spenser is of course a long way from the ancient Greeks, but he belongs to an older school than Shakespeare. He is about midway between Shakespeare and Boiardo. Boiardo is first and foremost a storyteller, not a ‘poet’ in the more specialized modern sense. As far as language is concerned, his poetry might be improvised—the phrases could be made up as one goes along. Spenser’s style is richer, more elaborated than that. But it still has in view an audience who have settled down to hear a long story and do not want to savour each line as a separate work of art. Much of The Faerie Queene will therefore seem thin or over-obvious if judged by modern standards. The ‘thickness’ or ‘density’ which I have claimed for it does not come from its language. It comes from its polyphonic narrative, from its different layers of meaning, and from the high degree in which Spenser’s symbols embody not simply his own experience, nor that of his characters at a given moment, but the experience of ages. In one sense a passage of Spenser is childishly simple compared with a poem by Donne, but in another sense this is not so. Donne wrote from his vivid consciousness of his own situation at a particular moment. He knew what he was putting into his poem, and we cannot get out of it more than he knew he was putting in. But Spenser, with his conscious mind, knew only the least part of what he was doing, and we are never sure that we have got to the end of his significance. The water is very clear, but we cannot see to the bottom. That is one of the delights of the older kind of poetry: ‘thoughts beyond their thoughts to those high bards were given’. I do not mean by this that we should prefer the older kind. Their difference is a reason for reading both. There is no one right or absolute kind of poetry.
Spenser wrote primarily as a (Protestant) Christian and secondarily as a Platonist. Both systems are united with one another and cut off from some—not all—modern thought by their conviction that Nature, the totality of phenomena in space and time, is not the only thing that exists: is, indeed, the least important thing. Christians and Platonists both believe in an ‘other’ world. They differ, at least in emphasis, when they describe the relations between that other world and Nature. For a Platonist the contrast is usually that between an original and a copy, between the real and the merely apparent, between the clear and the confused: for a Christian, between the eternal and the temporary, or the perfect and the partially spoiled. The essential attitude of Platonism is aspiration or longing: the human soul, imprisoned in the shadowy, unreal world of Nature, stretches out its hands and struggles towards the beauty and reality of that which lies (as Plato says) ‘on the other side of existence’. Shelley’s phrase ‘the desire of the moth for the star’ sums it up. In Christianity, however, the human soul is not the seeker but the sought: it is God who seeks, who descends from the other world to find and heal Man; the parable about the Good Shepherd looking for and finding the lost sheep sums it up. Whether in the long run there is any flat contradiction between the two pictures need not be discussed here. It is certainly possible to combine and interchange them for a considerable time without finding a contradiction, and this is what Spenser does. The Christian picture dominates the first two Books: divine grace, in the person of Una, is constantly helping St George out of his difficulties, and an angel is sent down to preserve Guyon. On the other hand the central story of the whole poem was to have been Platonic: I say ‘was to have been’ because Spenser did not live to finish it. In the fragment that we have, Prince Arthur is always seeking for ‘Gloriana’. He knows almost nothing about her. When the beautiful Florimell flashes past him in the forest, he at once pursues her: she might be Gloriana (III, iv, 54). He has seen the real Gloriana only in a dream (I, ix, 13 ff.). This is a picture of the soul, as in Platonism, endlessly seeking that perfect beauty of which it has some dim premonition but which cannot be found—only shadows and blurred images of it—in the realm of Nature. This enables us to see what Spenser means when he says that Gloriana is ‘Glory’. In his many-levelled poetry ‘Glory’ is the divine glory or splendour which the Christian soul will not only see but share in Heaven; it is the glory of that real and perfect world which the Platonist is seeking; it is also, in so far as Arthur is a knight-errant in a romance of chivalry, ‘Glory’ in the sense of fame or honour. To add that it is also in some sense and at some moments Queen Elizabeth seems to us a profane and silly anti-climax. But we are not to suppose that Elizabeth appeared to Spenser as she does to us or even as she did to contemporaries who really knew her; and we must understand that her royal office had an importance for him which it could have for no modern. For monarchy, like everything else in this world, had its chief value in being the shadow or reflexion of something in that other and more real world. Every earthly court was an imitation, however imperfect, of the Divine Court. Its splendour and order had a poetic, religious, and metaphysical appeal which had nothing to do with snobbery—a ritual appeal. Spenser would have understood the ancient Chinese idea that the function of the Emperor was to reproduce on earth the ‘Order of Heaven’. His view was consistent, as we have seen, with the clearest insight into the corruptions of actual court life.