Chapter 7 - The Faerie Queene
‘The quiet fulness of ordinary nature.’
GEORGE MACDONALD
I
In the last chapter I have endeavoured to trace the process whereby the erotic and homiletic allegories of the Middle Ages were fused together to produce something that anticipates The Faerie Queene more closely than either. But it must be confessed at once that this anticipation is slight. The passages in which Spenser reminds us of medieval allegory are not very numerous, and even where we are reminded we are not always sure of a real connexion. His Seven Deadly Sins certainly follow the familiar model: his House of Holinesse is not utterly unlike Deguileville’s Cistercian castle; and the offence and punishment of Mirabella in the sixth book might have come in any medieval love poem. The Temple of Venus, however, in the fourth book, though it has a general similarity to the old allegories, is not really very like any one of them. The combats with allegorical monsters are like those in Hawes but not so like that they prove imitation: even the Rich Strand may be independent of its analogue in the Pastime. If Spenser’s poem had no fresh models, if an unbroken evolution led up to it from the Romance of the Rose, its novelty would be overwhelmingly more remarkable than its truth to the type. In fact, of course, it is the lineal descendant not of English allegory but of Italian epic.
Since this is so, it may be asked what place The Faerie Queene has in the present study. To this question there are two answers. In the first place, Spenser, while borrowing the form of the Italian epic, deliberately modified it by turning it into a ‘continued allegory or dark conceit’. He may have been influenced in this by the allegorical interpretations which critics had fastened upon Ariosto, and which Tasso, by an afterthought, was later to fasten on himself. But the allegory is no afterthought in Spenser’s poem. When it is allegorical at all it is radically and momentously allegorical, and continues the medieval impulse whether under medieval guidance or not. The second answer is more important. I am trying to tell the history not only of the form, allegory, but also of the sentiment, courtly love: and in the latter story Spenser is not so much part of my subject as one of my masters or collaborators. The last phase of that story—the final defeat of courtly love by the romantic conception of marriage—occupies the third book of The Faerie Queene and much of the fourth.
Before I proceed to make good this claim I must say a word of Spenser’s immediate model—the Italian epic. This vast body of poetry has in our time fallen strangely out of favour. But its products were familiar masterpieces to readers so diverse as Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Hurd, Macaulay, and Scott, and young ladies in the eighteenth century would have been ashamed to neglect what is now not infrequently neglected by scholars. Our oblivion of these poets is much to be regretted, not only because it vitiates our understanding of the Romantic Movement—a phenomenon which becomes baffling indeed if we choose to neglect the noble viaduct on which the love of chivalry and ‘fine fabling’ travelled straight across from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century—but also because it robs us of a whole species of pleasures and narrows our very conception of literature. It is as if a man left out Homer, or Elizabethan drama, or the novel. For, like these, the romantic epic of Italy is one of the great trophies of the European genius: a genuine kind, not to be replaced by any other, and illustrated by an extremely copious and brilliant production. It is one of the successes, the undisputed achievements.
Its subject-matter has a long history. In the eighth century the Frankish hero Hruodland dies fighting for Charlemain in a rearguard action against the Basques. By the middle of the ninth century the story is already epic, the names of the heroes vulgata sunt. In the tenth and the eleventh, Christendom, hard pressed by Saracen and Viking, is still telling the tale, and now all Charlemain’s enemies are paynims indiscriminately—worshippers of Tervagaunt and Mahound—the original models for the ‘Saracen’s Head’ on our signs. Taillefer, the story tells us, rides singing the song of Roland before the Norman van at Hastings. Very early in the twelfth comes the compiler, the pseudo-Turpin, who is the Dares or Dictys or Geoffrey of this cycle: by the end of the century he is widely read and much translated. Italian versions of the story come next—an Entrée en Espagne in the fourteenth, a Spagna in verse, and another Spagna in prose. With the fifteenth century we reach the great poets.
As a form, the Italian epic illustrates the conversion, partly by way of parody, of a popular genre to literary respectability. The verse Spagna is said to have the character of minstrel or mendicant poetry:
And now we’ve reached the end of canto Five,
Will ’t please you all in guerdon of my verses
To put your hands, my masters, in your purses?
When the ‘literary’ poets arrive they take up the extravagances of popular romance with a smile—a smile half of amusement and half of affection—like men returning to something that had charmed their childhood. They too will write of giants and ‘orcs’, of fairies and flying horses, of Saracens foaming at the mouth. They will do it with an occasional gravity, referring us to Turpin whenever the adventures are most preposterous, and it will be great fun. But they find that their pleasure is not only the pleasure of mockery. Even while you laugh at it, the old incantation works. Willy-nilly the fairies allure, the monsters alarm, the labyrinthine adventures draw you on. This blend of parody and true delight is the secret of the Italian epic, and also the thing which is so hard to explain to those who have not read the poems. There are, indeed, analogies. The French fairy-tale, as practised at the court of Louis XIV, hovers in the same way between patronage of a childish absurdity and surrender to a childlike charm; and so does Parnell’s Fairy Tale. Pickwick changes while we watch him from a farcical puppet to a man we love. But there is no parallel on the same scale as the Orlando Innamorato and the Orlando Furioso.
Boiardo, who began his Innamorato about 1472, is in many ways very close to popular poetry. His cantos often begin with complimentary addresses to the audience who have gathered round to listen to him, and usually end with a reminder that there is another instalment to follow. His poem is like an endless serial—like the cycle of Pip, Squeak, and Wilfred. At the first glance it would seem as aimless, but this is not the case. His method is that of interlocked story. The formula is to take any number of chivalrous romances and arrange such a series of coincidences that they interrupt one another every few pages. The English reader will be apt to think of Malory or Spenser. But Malory so often leaves his separate stories unfinished or else, if he finishes them, fails to interlock them at all (so that they drop away from the rest of the book as independent organisms) and is so generally confused that he is not a good parallel. Boiardo keeps his head: we have no doubt that if he had finished the poem all the threads would have been neatly tied up. Spenser, on the other hand, has so few stories compared with the Italian (a prose abstract of The Faerie Queene would be a mere trifle compared with one of the Innamorato) and is so leisurely, that he can give no idea of Boiardo’s scherzo. Boiardo would have told the story of Spenser’s first canto in a few stanzas—the story of the whole Faerie Queene in a few cantos. The speed, the pell-mell of episodes, the crazy carnival jollity of Boiardo are his very essence. He invents a world in which, though love and war are almost the sole occupations, yet a major character hardly ever has time to lose a life or a maidenhead, for always, at the critical moment, a strange knight, a swift ship, a bandersnatch or a boojum, breaks in, and we are caught up into another story. It is extremely enjoyable, but in a breathless way; it is rather like a ride on a switchback. But as soon as I have said this I must correct that impression—so paradoxical is this genre—by warning the reader that a true chivalric valiancy mixes with the hurly-burly, that serious love poetry and even love allegory may crop up at any moment. Near the end of the poem, when Brandiamante and Roger meet, the poet surprises us by his power of delineating passion. Reynold’s meeting with Love in the forest is a scene more ‘romantic’ (in the English sense of the word) and more tender than anything in Ariosto. The reflective passages at the beginnings of his cantos are full of lyrical beauty. The knight, the lover, the poet, exist in him side by side with the manipulator of a sort of Punch and Judy show. He is very like a boy—the best sort of boy. It is a little remarkable that a poem of this length and a predominantly comic poem in the Latin tradition should be so chaste.
Ariosto is admittedly the greatest of Italian poets after Dante; but his superiority to Boiardo is not, perhaps, immediately obvious to an Englishman. This is partly because this superiority is, in the first place, one of style which cannot be fully discerned except by an Italian; and partly because he is more typically Latin than his predecessor—a harder and more brilliant intelligence. He has received his whole method, and much of his material, ready made from Boiardo. He is much more like Boiardo than is commonly supposed. But the differences are important. In the first place, he is far ahead of the older poet as a delineator of character. His people are not, indeed, what the countrymen of Shakespeare would call ‘characters’: they are drawn from the outside and drawn by one who is more interested in the general nature of ‘the passions’ (it is the Latin way) than in idiosyncrasies. But they live. Bradamant, with her undisguised southern jealousies and despairs, and her strange mixture of arrogance and humility, is certainly one of the great heroines. Closely connected with this delineation of character is Ariosto’s command of pathos—again, not such a pathos as Englishmen like best, but very good in its way. Roland’s lament over Brandimart may sound to our ears but thin and rhetorical compared with Ector’s lament over Launcelot—but this is our insular disability. In the third place, Ariosto’s humour, at its best, is very unlike Boiardo’s. Boiardo’s indeed had hardly been humour, hardly more than fun, whereas Ariosto is a master of irony and of comic construction. But we must not insist too much on these differences. The power in which Ariosto excels all poets that I have read is one which he shares with Boiardo—invention. The fertility of his fancy is ‘beyond expectation, beyond hope’. His actors range from archangels to horses, his scene from Cathay to the Hebrides. In every stanza there is something new: battles in all their detail, strange lands with their laws, customs, history and geography, storm and sunshine, mountains, islands, rivers, monsters, anecdotes, conversations—there seems no end to it. He tells us what his people ate; he describes the architecture of their palaces. It is ‘God’s plenty’: you can no more exhaust it than you can exhaust nature itself. When you are tired of Ariosto, you must be tired of the world. If ever you come near to feeling that you can read no more adventures, at that very moment he begins another with something so ludicrous, so piquant, or so questionable, in its exordium, that you decide to read at least this one more. And then you are lost: you must go on till bedtime, and next morning you must begin again. The art by which this interest is kept up almost conceals itself. Part of the secret, no doubt, is Ariosto’s practice of alternating stretches which are as headlong as Boiardo with resting-places where he luxuriates in description; and part is the excellence of his transitions. The Furioso, in its own peculiar way, is as great a masterpiece of construction as the Oedipus Rex. But nothing will finally explain, as no criticism of mine can adequately represent, the overwhelming achievement of Ariosto. There is only one English critic who could do justice to this gallant, satiric, chivalrous, farcical, flamboyant poem: Mr. Chesterton should write a book on the Italian epic.
Ariosto raises an interesting question in literary theory. A modern American critic has remarked that we have founded our taste in English poetry on ‘a partial perception of the value of Shakespeare and Milton, a perception which dwells upon sublimity of theme and action’. We tend, in fact, with Arnold, to demand high seriousness of a poem before we call it great. Ariosto is the poet who of all others brings out this distinction between the English and the continental criterion—or, to speak more truly, between the Greek and English on the one hand and the Latin (should we add, the American?) tradition on the other. If you stand by Athens and London and Oxford, as I do, then of course Ariosto is not a ‘great poet’: but if you abandon ‘high seriousness’, if brilliance and harmony and sheer technical supremacy are enough, in your eyes, to constitute greatness, then The Madness of Roland ranks with the Iliad and The Divine Comedy.
Tasso’s Jerusalem came too late to be more than an occasional influence on The Faerie Queene. It is different in kind from the work of Boiardo and Ariosto—an attempt, and a successful one, to recall the romantic epic to true epic gravity and unity of action, while retaining as much as possible of its variety, its love interests, and its romanticism. A great critic has described it as ‘a sterile hybrid’—which shows how dangerous metaphors can be. If we substitute the literal statement ‘It has never been successfully imitated’ we shall retain the truth which this metaphor enshrined, and be rid of its depreciatory flavour. The best of all criticisms on the Jerusalem is that of W. P. Ker’s unnamed friend, that it is ‘a good story’. It can be read for the story alone from beginning to end. Its mixture of realism and fantasy is the happiest imaginable. Its quite unforced nobility and piety set it in a class apart from other things of the same kind.
Johnson once described the ideal happiness which he would choose if he were regardless of futurity. My own choice, with the same reservation, would be to read the Italian epic—to be always convalescent from some small illness and always seated in a window that overlooked the sea, there to read these poems eight hours of each happy day.
II
‘Influence’ is too weak a word for the relation which exists between the Italian epic and The Faerie Queene. To fight in another man’s armour is something more than to be influenced by his style of fighting. Spenser is not merely helped by the Italians: the very kind to which his poem belongs was invented by them, and his work is bound to theirs as closely as Samson Agonistes is bound to Athenian drama. But his debt by no means ends with the adoption of their form. The moralizing proems to his cantos, which sound so characteristically Spenserian, are in accordance with the regular practice of Boiardo and Ariosto. The prosaic endings of his cantos, with their promises that the story will be ‘continued in our next’, come from the same source. The genealogical mythus in the story of Britomart comes from the similar mythus in the story of Bradamant. The prophetic function of Merlin is the same in both. Even the reference to Merlin’s betrayal by the Lady of the Lake—which so inevitably reminds an English reader of the Morte Darthur—has its counterpart in Ariosto. The digressions on female valour are common to Spenser and his originals; and if Britomart counts the hours till Artegall’s return, Bradamant first counted the hours till Roger’s. The shield of Arthur is borrowed from the shield of Atlant, the novello of Phaon from that of Ariodante, Fradubio’s arborification from Astulph’s, Belphoebe’s leechcraft from Angelica’s. As Ariosto apologizes for stories that offend his female readers, so does Spenser. The terms on which Blandamour tries to fight Braggadochio are the same on which Marfisa had actually fought Zerbin. The similarities are so numerous and patent that it would be waste labour to make a complete list. The English poet follows the Italian as closely as Virgil followed Homer, and with the same anxiety to boast, rather than to conceal, his debt.
All studies of The Faerie Queene which do not start from a clear recognition of this fact are really out of court, and those who pursue them end by finding obscure parallels in our earlier native literature for episodes in Spenser whose real source stares us in the face the moment we open our Ariosto. It cannot be too clearly stated that, when we reach The Faerie Queene, the story I am trying to tell is cut in two by the decisive appearance of a new, and foreign, model. Spenser’s demonstrable debts to earlier English poetry and romance are very few. His discipleship to Chaucer exists only in profession, not in practice; and I believe it would be impossible to prove from internal evidence that he had read much of Malory. It is only after we have fully admitted this sharp discontinuity that we can safely allow ourselves to discuss his hidden affinities with English medieval poetry and to speculate on his possible debts to it—debts not in structure or style (which is out of the question) but in sentiment and outlook. Certainties must come before probabilities.
The Faerie Queene, then, is primarily an English branch of that excellent Italian genre the romantic epic; and on a broad view of European literature as a whole, its truth to the type would have to be emphasized at least as much as its idiosyncrasy. But when we have grasped this, we must beware of an opposite danger. Nothing is easier, or more unprofitable, than to set up Spenser and Ariosto as rivals, and to ‘write down’ the one in favour of the other. If your taste is for speed and gaiety you will choose Ariosto, and you will find no difficulty in showing that Spenser is hopelessly inferior to his model. His loves and wars are intolerably languid compared with the briskness of the Italian. We feel at once that Mandricard or Roland would have made short work of all these slow moving, heavy-spoken fairy knights, whose allegory seems to encumber them more than their armour. As for Bradamant, inimitable Bradamant, by her side Britomart is little better than a big-boned country girl. Her speech is dull and pretentious, her love-sorrows without dignity; she carries her nurse about with her, and often suggests the anglaise of continental tradition. Nor will Spenser’s small zoo of monsters, his reiterated single combats, his monotonous forest (relieved by no change of season), stand comparison for a moment with the inexhaustible inventions of the Italians. From this point of view The Faerie Queene will appear but a faint shadow of its originals. If, on the other hand, you are a romantic, if your taste is more for Wonder than for wonders, if you demand of poetry high seriousness and an admission to worlds of sensation which prose cannot enter, then you will find it just as easy to turn the tables. Dr. Richards has complained that the poetry of Rupert Brooke ‘has no inside’. It would be easy to say the same of Ariosto’s—to show how unevocative, how merely entertaining, all his marvels are, how metallic and external his pathos. It could even be argued that the clarity of his characters is a specious clarity, and that we never know more of them than prose could tell us. The whole thing, it might be said, is hardly poetry at all in the English sense of the word.
But these two suggested views would be equally foolish, and foolish in the same way. Both are specimens of that pernicious criticism which tries to recommend one excellence by depreciating another. It is true that The Faerie Queene belongs to the same kind as the Italian poems; but then, as the example of Homer and Virgil shows, this does not mean that we are to expect precisely the same sort of pleasure from it. Identity of genre admits diversity of imaginative quality. Virgil himself has sometimes suffered from the neglect of this principle and critics have wasted time in showing that he is a weak Homer—forgetting that Homer is a far weaker Virgil, and that neither poet could possibly console us for the loss of the other. In the same way, comparisons between Ariosto and Spenser are useful only up to a point: beyond that point we discover that the one poet is weak precisely where the other is strong. They are least alike when each is at his greatest.
Thus Spenser and the Italians are equally full of marvels, and even, in a sense, of similar marvels. In a prose abstract they would sound very alike. But in the real poems there is no common measure between them. The marvels of Boiardo and Ariosto are a literary form of one of the oldest games in the world—the ‘tall story’, the brag, the lie: they belong to the same world as the adventures of Baron Munchausen. The marvels of Spenser, quite apart from his explicit allegory, are always gravely imaginative. In Boiardo, the thief Brunel finds Sacripante sitting on his horse in such a study that he is oblivious of all around him. He immediately loosens the saddle, props it up with a log underneath, and leads the horse away from under the knight, who continues his meditations. We have only to think of the impossibility of such an episode in The Faerie Queene to understand the difference between Italian and English romance. But perhaps the difference is most easily seen when the episodes are superficially alike. Orrilo in the Italians is magically difficult to kill, and so is Maleger in The Faerie Queene. But the trouble about Orrilo is that any bit of him which you cut off immediately sticks itself on again; and in Boiardo the conflict with Orrilo leads up to the moment at which the knight has the ingenious idea of cutting off both his arms in quick succession, picking them up, and throwing them into a river. It is such a problem, and such a solution, as we should expect from Mickey Mouse. We are a thousand miles away from this when we read of Maleger
of such subtile substance and unsound
That like a ghost he seem’d whose grave-clothes were unbound.
The one story is fun, the other nightmare.
It is, in fact, only the surfaces of the English and Italian poems that are alike; and by ‘surface’ I here mean what is first presented to our gaze—interlocked stories of chivalrous adventure in a world of marvels. In calling this the surface I do not suggest that it is unimportant: it is of such importance that it attracts or repels readers in its own right, and most (not all) of those who like one of these poems will like the other two also. But it is only a surface. There are, so to speak, layers beneath, which can be discovered by scraping, and which are essentially different.
What lies immediately below the surface of the Italian epic is simply the actual—the daily life of travel, war, or gallantry in the Mediterranean world. I am not referring to those stories of the novello type in which the actual appears without disguise, but to the Innamorato and Furioso as a whole. Thus Agramant’s war with the Franks is, on the surface, purely fantastic, and the prowess of its combatants impossible; but beneath all this we detect the familiar lineaments of a real war. There are problems of transport and lines of communication. Defeat for the invader means falling back on cities already taken. The divergent interests of allies show themselves in the councils of war. The real defeat of Agramant is plainly due not to the knightly deeds before Paris but to Astulph’s blow in a different, and remote, theatre. The whole story could be plausibly re-written in headlines or generals’ memoirs. When we leave the war for subordinate adventures we find the same thing. Knights may be sailing to fabulous cities of the Amazons or to the dens of ogres, but the squalls and the seamanship are those of the real Mediterranean, and so are the pirates, the brigands, the inn-keepers, the ‘lousy’ coloured troops (pidocchiosi) and all that mass of rascality which unites the romantic epic, so closely in places, to the picaresque novel. Even the loves of Roger and Bradamant have a solid background of family life and parental matchmaking: it is part of the beauty of Bradamant’s character that besides being the sternest knight that ever struck with sword she is the dutifullest daughter that ever cried for an ineligible lover. Thus, in the Italians the fantastic is attached at a hundred points to the real and even to the commonplace; nothing is in the air. Even Astulph’s cruises on the hippogryph are controlled by continual reference to the most recent and reliable geographers. All this lies, so to speak, an inch below the surface. But if we scratch deeper we shall find a third layer and another sort of actuality; we shall find below this realism, and far below the surface fantasy, the faint yet quite decipherable traces of the original legend—the theme of the chansons de geste, the old ‘world’s debate’ of cross and crescent. The presence of this theme, which the poets can suppress and revive at will, is used to supply gravity when gravity is desired. We can always be reminded that Roland is a senator and Charlemain the champion of Christendom. This theme dictates that the ‘machines’ of the poems should be God and His Angels instead of classical deities; it lends a force which would otherwise be lacking to the death of Isabella or the assault on Paris.
Such is the Italian epic: in the foreground we have fantastic adventure, in the middle distance daily life, in the background a venerable legend with a core of momentous historical truth. There is no reason why the English poem should not have been much more like this than it actually is, if Spenser had chosen. Arthur’s wars with the Saxons could have been worked up just as Boiardo and Ariosto had worked up Charlemain’s wars with the Saracens. The scene of the poem could have been laid in Britain and a real topography (as in the Italians) could have been used at every turn. But Spenser keeps his Arthurian lore for occasional digressions and detaches his Prince Arthur from Saxons, from Guinevere, Gawain, and Launcelot, even from Sir Ector. There is no situation in The Faerie Queene, no when nor where. Ariosto begins with a situation—Roland’s return from the East and Agramant’s invasion of France. The Faerie Queene begins quite differently. A knight and a lady ride across our field of vision. We do not know where they are, nor in what period; the poet’s whole energy is devoted to telling us what they look like. Ariosto begins like a man telling us, very well and clearly, a series of events which he has heard: Spenser begins like a man in a trance, or a man looking through a window, telling us what he sees. And however deep we dig in Spenser we shall never get to a situation, and never find a context in the objective world for the shapes he is going to show us.
But this does not mean that he is all surface. He, too, has his lower levels, though they are much harder to describe than those of the Italians. In one sense, of course, we know already what they are going to be: Spenser has allegorized the romantic epic (that is the only formal novelty of his work) and what lies below the surface of his poem will therefore be something subjective and immaterial. But, for the moment, it will be better to proceed inductively—to notice what lies beneath his poetry from moment to moment without yet inquiring into his ‘continued’ allegory.
Let us return to the Knight and the Lady in the opening stanzas. The knight has a red cross on a silver shield; the lady is leading a lamb. The lamb has puzzled many readers; but we now know that it had a real function in earlier versions of the legend of St. George, and (what is much more important) we know that the lady was commonly represented leading her lamb in the pageants of St. George and the dragon. In other words, the two figures which meet us at the beginning of The Faerie Queene were instantly recognized by Spenser’s first readers, and were clothed for them not in literary or courtly associations, but in popular, homely, patriotic associations. They spoke immediately to what was most universal and childlike in gentle and simple alike. This at once suggests an aspect of Spenser’s poetry which it will be fatal for us to neglect, and which is abundantly illustrated in the First Book. The angels who sing at Una’s wedding probably come from the same pageant source as the lamb. The well in which St. George is refreshed during his fight with the dragon comes from Bevis of Southampton. The whole similarity between his allegory and that of Bunyan, which has exercised many scholars, is best explained by the fact that they have a common source—the old-fashioned sermon in the village church still continuing the allegorical tradition of the medieval pulpit. Innumerable details come from the Bible, and specially from those books of the Bible which have meant much to Protestantism—the Pauline epistles and the Revelation. His anti-papal allegories strike the very note of popular, even of rustic, Protestant aversion; they can be understood and enjoyed by the modern reader (whatever his religion) only if he remembers that Roman Catholicism was in Spenser’s day simply the most potent contemporary symbol for something much more primitive—the sheer Bogey, who often changes his name but never wholly retires from the popular mind. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs was in every one’s hands; horrible stories of the Inquisition and the galleys came from overseas; and every nervous child must have heard tales of a panel slid back at twilight in a seeming innocent manor house to reveal the pale face and thin, black body of a Jesuit. The ghosts crying from beneath the altar in Orgoglio’s chapel and the mystery of iniquity beneath that other altar of Gerioneo are accurate embodiments of popular contemporary horror at these things. Gerioneo himself, who
Laught so loud that all his teeth wide bare
One might have seene enraungd disorderly
Like to a rancke of piles that pitched are awry
is the genuine raw-head and bloody-bones of our remembered night nurseries. A dragon’s mouth is the ‘griesly mouth of hell’ as in medieval drama. Mammon is the gold-hoarding earthman of immemorial tradition, the gnome. The witcheries of Duessa, when she rides in Night’s chariot and ‘hungry wolves continually did howle’, or of the hag with whom Florimel guested, are almost incomparably closer to the world of real superstition than any of the Italian enchantments. We have long looked for the origins of The Faerie Queene in Renaissance palaces and Platonic academies, and forgotten that it has humbler origins of at least equal importance in the Lord Mayor’s show, the chap-book, the bedtime story, the family Bible, and the village church. What lies next beneath the surface in Spenser’s poem is the world of popular imagination: almost, a popular mythology.
And this world is not called up, as Ariosto may call up a fragment of folk lore, in order to amuse us. On the contrary, it is used for the sake of something yet deeper which it brings up with it and which is Spenser’s real concern; the primitive or instinctive mind, with all its terrors and ecstasies—that part in the mind of each of us which we should never dream of showing to a man of the world like Ariosto. Archimago and Una, in their opposite ways, are true creations of that mind. When we first meet them we seem to have known them long before; and so in a sense we have, but only the poet could have clothed them for us in form and colour. The same may be said of Despair and Malengin, of Busirane’s appalling house, and of the garden of Adonis. For all of these are translations into the visible of feelings else blind and inarticulate; and they are translations made with singular accuracy, with singularly little loss. The secret of this accuracy in which, to my mind, Spenser excels nearly all poets, is partly to be sought in his humble fidelity to the popular symbols which he found ready made to his hand; but much more in his profound sympathy with that which makes the symbols, with the fundamental tendencies of human imagination as such. Like the writers of the New Testament (to whom, in the character of his symbolism, he is the closest of all English poets) he is endlessly preoccupied with such ultimate antitheses as Light and Darkness or Life and Death. It has not often been noticed—and, indeed, save for a special purpose it ought not to be noticed—that Night is hardly even mentioned by Spenser without aversion. His story leads him to describe innumerable nightfalls, and his feeling about them is always the same:
So soone as Night had with her pallid hew
Defaste the beautie of the shyning skye,
And refte from men the worldes desired vew—
or,
whenas chearelesse Night ycovered had
Fayre heaven with an universall cloud,
That every wight dismayed with darkenes sad—
or, again,
when as daies faire shinie-beame, yclowded
With fearefull shadowes of deformed night,
Warnd man and beast in quiet rest be shrowded—
And, answering to this, in his descriptions of morning we have a never failing rapture: mere light is as sweet to Spenser as if it were a new creation. Such passages are too numerous and too widely scattered (often at unimportant places in the story) to be the result of any conscious plan: they are spontaneous and the better proof of the flawless health, the paradisal naïveté, of his imagination. They form a background, hardly noticed at a first reading, to those great passages where the conflict of light and dark becomes explicit. Such is the sleepless night of Prince Arthur in the third book, where the old description of lover’s insomnia is heightened and spiritualized into a ‘statement’ (as the musicians say) of one of Spenser’s main themes;
Dayes dearest children be the blessed seed
Which darknesse shall subdue and heaven win:
Truth is his daughter; he her first did breed
Most sacred virgin without spot of sinne.
It is no accident that Truth, or Una, should be mentioned here, for she is indeed the daughter of Light, and through the whole First Book runs the antithesis between her father as emperor of the East and Duessa as queen of the West—a conception possibly borrowed from Reason and Sensuality—and in the Fifth canto of that book we meet Night face to face. The contrast between her ‘visage deadly sad’ as she comes forth from her ‘darksome mew’ and Duessa
sunny bright
Adornd with gold and jewels shining cleare,
(though Duessa is but pretended, reflected light!) is, of course, a familiar example of that pictorial quality which critics have often praised in Spenser—but praised without a full understanding of those very unpictorial, unpicturable, depths from which it rises. Spenser is no dilettante, and has a low opinion of the painter’s art as compared with his own. He is not playing mere tricks with light and shade; and few speeches in our poetry are more serious than Night’s sad sentence (the very accent of a creature dréame bedǽled)
The sonnes of Day he favoureth, I see
And yet it is characteristic of him that the constant pressure of this day and night antithesis on his imagination never tempts him into dualism. He is impressed, more perhaps than any other poet, with the conflict of two mighty opposites—aware that our world is dualistic for all practical purposes, dualistic in all but the very last resort: but from the final heresy he abstains, drawing back from the verge of dualism to remind us by delicate allegories that though the conflict seems ultimate yet one of the opposites really contains, and is not contained by, the other. Truth and falsehood are opposed; but truth is the norm not of truth only but of falsehood also. That is why we find that Una’s father, King of the East and enemy of the West, is yet de jure King of the West as well as of the East. That is why Love and Hatred, whom the poet borrows no doubt from Empedocles, are opposites but not, as in Empedocles, mere opposites: they are both the sons of Concord. And that, again, in the passage we were discussing, is why Aesculapius, a creature of Night’s party, asks Night the formidable question,
Can Night defray
The wrath of thundring Jove that rules both night and day?
The other antithesis—that of Life and Death, or, in its inferior degrees, of Health and Sickness—enables Spenser to avoid the insipidity of representing good as arbitrary law and evil as spontaneity. His evils are all dead or dying things. Each of his deadly sins has a mortal disease. Aesculapius sits in the bowels of the earth endlessly seeking remedies for an incurable fever. Archimago makes Guyon ‘the object of his spight, and deadly food’. Despair is an immortal suicide, Malbecco lives transfixed with ‘deathes eternall dart’. The porter of the garden of intemperance, the evil genius, is the foe of life, and so are the violent passions, red-headed and adust, who attack Guyon in the earlier stages of his pilgrimage. Over against these mortal shapes are set forces of life and health and fecundity. St. George, in combat with the beast who
was deadly made
And al that life preserved did detest
is refreshed with water from the well of life and saved by the shadow of the tree of life. Babies cluster at Charissa’s breasts: Belphoebe’s lilly handës twaine crush virtuous herbs for the healing of wounds: in the garden of Adonis,
Ne needs there Gardiner to sett or sow,
To plant or prune: for of their owne accord
All things, as they created were, doe grow,
And yet remember well the mighty word
Which first was spoken by th’ Almighty Lord,
That bad them to increase and multiply
—and throughout the whole garden ‘franckly each paramor his leman knowes’. The love of Britomart is enobled by prophecies of famous offspring. The poem is full of marriages. Una’s face unveiled shines ‘as the great eye of heaven’, and Cambina carries a cup of Nepenthe. The whole shining company of Spenser’s vital shapes make up such a picture of ‘life’s golden tree’ that it is difficult not to fancy that our bodily, no less than our mental, health is refreshed by reading him.
If all this is true, it will follow that we must approach Spenser in a spirit widely different from that of the last age in criticism. We must recognize the humility and seriousness of his poetry, and we must be humble and serious ourselves. A young lady whom I once had the honour to examine advanced the view that Charissa suckling her babies was a figure, in its own way, no less disgusting than Error vomiting. If there is any lingering sympathy with this attitude in us, we shall do well to leave The Faerie Queene unread. It is a twofold offence against Spenser’s poem. It is a blasphemy against Life and fertility, and it is the sin of pride, of nicety; and Spenser will tolerate neither. He himself has nobly practised and praised the humility which he demands of his readers.
Entire affection hateth nicer hands—
So love does loathe disdainefull nicetee—
No service lothsome to a gentle kind
If these lines occurred in a set ‘Legend of Humilitie’ we might distrust them; but in fact they slip unnoticed from his pen when he is writing of other virtues. That dislike and distrust of the court and courtly life which one critic finds only in the Sixth Book is really characteristic of the poem from the beginning, as we shall presently see. And in the House of Holinesse, the name of the groom who lays us ‘in easie bedd’ is ‘meek Obedience’. In fine, as Hegel said of a very different matter, it is ‘no good putting on airs’ about The Faerie Queene.
Misconceptions about the real merit and limitation of Spenser’s genius have led to his present neglect. The very phrase ‘poets’ poet’, I believe, has done incalculable damage. The genitive of poets’ is taken to have an intensive force and the phrase is interpreted on the analogy of Holy of Holies. Readers trained on such a conception open their Spenser expecting to find some quintessential ‘poeticalness’ in the lowest and most obvious sense of that word—something more mellifluous than Shakespeare’s sonnets, more airy than Shelley, more swooningly sensuous than Keats, more dreamlike than William Morris: and then, as likely as not, what first meets their eye is something of this sort:
But I with better reason him aviz’d,
And shew’d him how, through error and misthought
Of our like persons, eath to be disguiz’d,
Or his exchange or freedom might be wrought.
Whereto full loth was he, ne would for ought
Consent that I, who stood all fearlesse free,
Should wilfully be into thraldome brought,
Till fortune did perforce it so decree:
Yet, over-ruld at last, he did to me agree.
Such a reader, at this point, excusably throws the book away. Now you may say that I have selected a specimen of Spenser at his worst; and so I have. But this ‘worst’ would not matter unless Spenser had a false reputation for sheer ‘poeticalness’. The reader, unless he were a fool, would be prepared for flats in a long poem: he would not be put off by one such experience from making the acquaintance of Wordsworth or Chaucer. The real trouble is that he cannot be prepared for such a flat as this in a poem such as The Faerie Queene is commonly supposed to be: he has been taught not to look for vigorous thought or serious issues or even coherence and sanity in his Spenser—taught that the man’s only merit is voluptuousness and day dream. And if Spenser can, in any passage, do so badly the only thing he is supposed to be able to do at all, he is naturally rejected. We tolerate bad manners in a learned, or a funny, or a good man; but how if the man admittedly has no claim on us except his reputed good breeding, and then turns out to be deficient even in that? In order to avoid such false judgements we must revise the popular opinion of Spenser. So far from being a poet whose excellent and sustained mastery of language is his only merit, he is a poet whose chief fault is the uncertainty of his style. He can be as prosaic as Wordsworth: he can be clumsy, unmusical, and flat. On this side, and on this side only, his work requires historical extenuation. He wrote in an age when English poetry had reached its stylistic nadir, the age of ‘hunting the letter’, of violent over-emphasis and exquisitely bad taste, the age in which that most ignoble metre, the Poulter’s measure, was popular. It was an age which produced such poetry as
Slash off his head! as though Albinius’ head
Were then so easy to be slashèd off
or
And for revenge thereof I vow and swear thereto,
A thousand spoils I shall commit I never thought to do.
And if to light on you my luck so good shall be
I shall be glad to feed on that which would have fed on me
It was an age in which even Peele could make Venus speak thus to Paris in description of Helen:
A gallant girl, a lusty minion trull
That can give sport to thee thy bellyful
—lines of which we can but exclaim, ‘No, this is not the face that launched a thousand ships’.
Spenser himself is, of course, one of the principal agents in the recovery which our poetry made from this clownish period; but just as Wordsworth retains to the end many traces of the diction he revolted against, so Spenser is always liable to give us ‘huge heaps of words uphoarded hideously’. His excessive alliteration is a disease of the period, and so is his tendency to abandon true poetic presentation in favour of mere eulogistic or dyslogistic adjectives. Such words as ‘direfull’, ‘goodly’, ‘foul’, ‘fair’, ‘filthie’, and the like (abdications of the poet’s true office) are far too common in his work. And even when he is at his best the merits of his verse are not always those which critical tradition—
generalizing too hastily from the Cave of Sleep and the Bower of Bliss—has led us to expect. Let us dip our hands into the lucky-bag again.
Nought under heaven so strongly doth allure
The sence of man, and all his minde possesse,
As beauties lovely baite that doth procure
Great warriours oft their rigour to represse,
And mighty hands forget their manlinesse;
Drawn with the powre of an heart-robbing eye,
And wrapt in fetters of a golden tresse.
And troubled blood through his pale face was seen
To come and goe with tidings from the heart.
What time the native Belman of the night
The bird that warned Peter of his fall—
In all these there is undoubted poetry; but it is a poetry far more nervous and masculine—a drier flavour and a wine with more body—than the modern reader has been taught to anticipate. Even more remarkable, in this context, are those passages where the pungency of the writing depends on a deliberate approximation to the prosaic, as this, of the amazon Radigund:
For all those knights, the which by force or guile
She doth subdue, she fowly doth entreate.
First, she doth them of warlike armes despoile,
And cloth in womens weedes: and then with threate
Doth them compell to worke, to earne their meate,
To spin, to card, to sew, to wash, to wring—
A few stanzas later, the same amazon, sending her ambassadors to Arthegall, whom she hopes to conquer on the morrow and to set to washing and wringing (how admirably the verbs were chosen!), bids them
bear with you both wine and juncates fit
And bid him eate: henceforth he oft shall hungry sit.
From this discussion I hope it has now become plain in what sense Spenser is the poets’ poet. He is so called in virtue of the historical fact that most of the poets have liked him very much. And with this conclusion comes the important corollary that perhaps poets, when they read poetry, do not demand that it should be specially ‘poetical’—perhaps, indeed, this demand is one of the marks of the prosaic reader who secretly suspects that poetry is at bottom nonsensical and, if he is in for a penny, would fain be in for a pound. In the same way, those who have least real sympathy with childhood become most laboriously childish when they talk to children; and no one has such high-flown notions of refinement as the temporarily converted boor. But these are generalities. For the study of Spenser himself, I think the most useful thing we can do as a preparative (‘Laughing to teach the truth, what hinders?’) is to draw up two lists of epithets after the manner of Rabelais. The first would run something like this:
Elfin Spenser: Renaissance Spenser: voluptuous Spenser: courtly Spenser: Italianate Spenser: decorative Spenser.
For the second I propose—
English Spenser: Protestant Spenser: rustic Spenser: manly Spenser: churchwardenly Spenser: domestic Spenser: thrifty Spenser: honest Spenser.
All that I have hitherto said has been directed to persuading the reader that the second of these lists is quite as fully justified as the first—that Spenser is the master of Milton in a far deeper sense than we had supposed. It is the measure of his greatness that he deserves the epithets of both lists.
III
In considering The Faerie Queene as a consciously allegorical poem I shall neglect entirely its political allegory. My qualifications as an historian are not such as would enable me to unravel it; and my critical principles hardly encourage me even to make the attempt. By his political allegory Spenser doubtless intended to give to his poem a certain topical attraction. Time never forgives such concessions to ‘the glistering of this present’, and what acted as a bait to unpoetic readers for some decades has become a stumbling-block to poetic readers ever since. The contemporary allusions in The Faerie Queene are now of interest to the critic chiefly in so far as they explain how some bad passages came to be bad; but since this does not make them good—since to explain by causes is not to justify by reasons—we shall not lose very much by ignoring the matter. My concern is with the moral or philosophical allegory.
In approaching this latter, the modern reader needs a little encouragement. He has been told that the significacio of The Faerie Queene is not worth looking for. Critics have talked as if there were a fatal discrepancy between Spenser’s spiritual pretensions and the actual content of his poetry. He has been represented as a man who preached Protestantism while his imagination remained on the side of Rome; or again, as a poet entirely dominated by the senses who believed himself to be an austere moralist. These are profound misunderstandings.
The first—that of unconscious or involuntary Roman Catholicism—may be answered pretty shortly. It is quite true that Una is dressed (in her exile) like a nun, that the House of Holinesse is like a conventual house, that Penaunce dwells there with a whip, and that Contemplation, like the hermit of Book Six, resembles a Catholic recluse. It is equally true that we can find similarly Catholic imagery in Bunyan; and I know a man in our own time who wrote what he intended to be a general apologetic allegory for ‘all who profess and call themselves Christians’, and was surprised to find it both praised and blamed as a defence of Rome. It would appear that all allegories whatever are likely to seem Catholic to the general reader, and this phenomenon is worth investigation. In part, no doubt, it is to be explained by the fact that the visible and tangible aspects of Catholicism are medieval, and therefore steeped in literary suggestion. But is this all? Do Protestant allegorists continue as in a dream to use imagery so likely to mislead their readers without noticing the danger or without better motive than laziness for incurring it? By no means. The truth is not that allegory is Catholic, but that Catholicism is allegorical. Allegory consists in giving an imagined body to the immaterial; but if, in each case, Catholicism claims already to have given it a material body, then the allegorist’s symbol will naturally resemble that material body. The whip of Penaunce is an excellent example. No Christian ever doubted that repentance involved ‘penaunce’ and ‘whips’ on the spiritual plane: it is when you come to material whips—to Tartuffe’s discipline in his closet—that the controversy begins. It is the same with the ‘House’ of Holinesse. No Christian doubts that those who have offered themselves to God are cut off as if by a wall from the World, are placed under a regula vitae, and ‘laid in easy bed’ by ‘meek Obedience’; but when the wall becomes one of real bricks and mortar, and the Rule one in real ink, superintended by disciplinary officials and reinforced (at times) by the power of the State, then we have reached that sort of actuality which Catholics aim at and Protestants deliberately avoid. Indeed, this difference is the root out of which all other differences between the two religions grow. The one suspects that all spiritual gifts are falsely claimed if they cannot be embodied in bricks and mortar, or official positions, or institutions: the other, that nothing retains its spirituality if incarnation is pushed to that degree and in that way. The difference about Papal infallibility is simply a form of this. The proper corruptions of each Church tell the same tale. When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the world-old, world-wide religio of amulets and holy places and priestcraft: Protestantism, in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes. Catholicism is accused of being much too like all the other religions; Protestantism of being insufficiently like a religion at all. Hence Plato, with his transcendent Forms, is the doctor of Protestants; Aristotle, with his immanent Forms, the doctor of Catholics. Now allegory exists, so to speak, in that region of the mind where the bifurcation has not yet occurred; for it occurs only when we reach the material world. In the world of matter, Catholics and Protestants disagree as to the kind and degree of incarnation or embodiment which we can safely try to give to the spiritual; but in the world of imagination, where allegory exists, unlimited embodiment is equally approved by both. Imagined buildings and institutions which have a strong resemblance to the actual buildings and institutions of the Church of Rome, will therefore appear, and ought to appear, in any Protestant allegory. If the allegorist knows his business their prevalence will rather mean that the allegory is not Catholic than that it is. For allegory is idem in alio. Only a bungler, like Deguileville, would introduce a monastery into his poem if he were really writing about monasticism. When Spenser writes about Protestant sanctity he gives us something like a convent: when he is really talking about the conventual life he gives us Abessa and Corceca. If I might, without irreverence, twist the words of an important (and very relevant) Protestant article, I would say that a Catholic interpretation of The Faerie Queene, ‘overthroweth the nature of an allegory’. Certainly, a Catholic reader anxious to do justice to this great Protestant poem, would be very ill advised to read it in that way. Here, as in more important matters, frontier courtesies do not help; it is at their fiery cores that the two faiths are most nearly in sympathy.
The charge of actual sensuality and theoretical austerity cannot be answered so briefly. The spear-head of this attack is usually directed against the Bower of Bliss, and it is sometimes strengthened by the statement that the Garden of Adonis is not sufficiently distinguished from it; and an analysis of these two places is as good a method as any other of beginning a study of Spenser’s allegory. The home of Acrasia is first shown to us in the fifth canto of Book Two, when Atin finds Cymochles there asleep. The very first words of the description are
And over him art, striving to compare
With nature, did an Arber greene dispred.
This explicit statement that Acrasia’s garden is art not nature can be paralleled in Tasso, and would be unimportant if it stood alone. But the interesting thing is that when the Bower of Bliss reappears seven cantos later, there again the very first stanza of description tells us that it was
goodly beautifide
With all the ornaments of Floraes pride,
Wherewith her mother Art, as halfe in scorne
Of niggard Nature, like a pompous bride
Did decke her, and too lavishly adorne.
In order to be perfectly fair to Spenser’s hostile critics, I am prepared to assume that this repetition of the antithesis between art and nature is accidental. But I think the hardest sceptic will hesitate when he reads, eight stanzas further,
And that which all faire workes doth most aggrace,
The art which all that wrought appeared in no place.
And if this does not satisfy him let him read on to the sixty-first stanza where we find the imitation ivy in metal which adorns Acrasia’s bathing-pool. Whether those who think that Spenser is secretly on Acrasia’s side, themselves approve of metal vegetation as a garden ornament, or whether they regard this passage as a proof of Spenser’s abominable bad taste, I do not know; but this is how the poet describes it,
And over all of purest gold was spred
A trayle of yvie in his native hew;
For the rich metall was so coloured
That wight who did not well avis’d it vew
Would surely deeme it to bee yvie trew.
Is it possible now to resist the conviction that Spenser’s hostile critics are precisely such wights who have viewed the Bower ‘not well avis’d’ and therefore erroneously deemed it to be true? Let us suppose, however, that the reader is still unconvinced: let us even help him by pointing out stanza 59 where the antithesis is blurred. But we have still to deal with the garden of Adonis; and surely all suspicion that the insistence on Acrasia’s artificiality is accidental must disappear if we find throughout the description of the garden of Adonis an equal insistence on its natural spontaneity. And this is just what we do find. Here, as in the description of the Bower, the very first stanza gives us the key-note: the garden of Adonis is
So faire a place as Nature can devize.
A few stanzas later, in lines which I have already quoted, we are told that it needs no Gardiner because all its plants grow ‘of their owne accord’ in virtue of the divine word that works within them. It even needs no water, because these plants have eternall moisture ‘in themselves’. Like the Bower, the Garden has an arbour, but it is an arbour
not by art
But of the trees owne inclination made.
and the ivy in this arbour is living ivy not painted metal. Finally, the Bower has the story of a false love depicted by art on its gate, and the Garden has faithful lovers growing as live flowers out of its soil. When these facts have once been pointed out, only prejudice can continue to deny the deliberate differentiation between the Bower and the Garden. The one is artifice, sterility, death: the other, nature, fecundity, life. The similarity between them is just that similarity which exists between the two gardens in Jean de Meun; the similarity of the real to the pretended and of the archetype to the imitation. Diabolus simius Dei.
Before continuing our analysis of the Garden and the Bower we must digress for a little to notice an important corollary which has already emerged. Spenser, as I have shown, distinguishes the good and evil paradises by a skilful contrast between nature and art; and this at once throws a flood of light upon his poetic use of the arts in general. It has often been noticed that he is fond of describing pictures or tapestries; but it has not been equally noticed that he usually puts such artefacts in places which he thinks evil. It would be rash to infer from this that the poet disliked pictures: his practice is probably a calculated symbolic device and not a mere slavish obedience to temperament. But the fact is incontestable. There is, so far as I have noticed, only one exception, and it is very easily explained. In the House of Alma, the cells of the brain are internally decorated with pictures because this is the obvious, perhaps the only, way of allegorizing the fact that the external world enters as image into the human mind. Everywhere else Spenser uses art to suggest the artificial in its bad sense—the sham or imitation. Thus he uses pictures to suggest luxurious corruption in the house of Malecasta; and it is deliciously characteristic of our poet (thrifty Spenser) that St. George and Britomart at first sight of the place should wonder uneasily (like the sober English soldier and gentlewoman they are) who is paying for it all, and how. So, again, he uses pictures to build up an unbearable silent splendour in the House of Busirane. In the Temple of Venus, on the other hand, a place ‘wall’d by nature gainst invaders wrong’, we have no pictures of lovers, but the living lovers themselves: as against the pictured Cupid of Busirane we have ‘a flocke of little loves’, all alive and fluttering about the neck and shoulders of Venus, as birds, in another mythology, fly about the head of Aengus. The gardener’s art which had been excluded from the home of Adonis is indeed admitted into the Temple of Venus, for a reason which will appear later; but it is allowed only to supplement Nature, not to deceive or sophisticate as it does in the Bower of Bliss. The abiding impression is that of a place ‘lavishly enricht with Natures threasure’, ‘by nature made’. Thus, again, Pride has a palace, Belphoebe a pavilion in the woods, and the hill where the Graces dance is adorned only ‘by natures skill’.
Truth is an unruly subject and, once admitted, comes crowding in on us faster than we wish. I had intended only a short digression to show the deliberate contrast between nature and art (or reality and imitation) in all Spenser’s good and bad places, but I find that I have stumbled on another of those great antitheses which run through his whole poem. Like Life and Death, or Light and Darkness, the opposition of natural and artificial, naïve and sophisticated, genuine and spurious, meets us at every turn. He had learned from Seneca and the Stoics about the life according to Nature; and he had learned from Plato to see good and evil as the real and the apparent. Both doctrines were congenial to the rustic and humble piety of his temper—that fine flower of Anglican sanctity which meets us again in Herbert or Walton. He is not at home in the artificialities of the court, and if, as a man, he was sometimes seduced, as a poet he never was. The rotting captives in Pride’s dungeon are those who ‘fell from high Princes court’ after long wasting their ‘thrift-lesse howres’. Guyon, like a true Stoic, rejects Mammon’s offers of wealth in favour of ‘untroubled Nature’, because ‘at the well head the purest streames arise’. Philotime’s beauty is not ‘her owne native hew, but wrought by art’, and the description of her court (‘some thought to raise themselves to high degree’ &c.) is so vivid that an officer of my acquaintance thought of presenting a framed and illuminated text of that stanza to the Head Quarters Mess of the——. The whole conception of the false Florimel, not to mention Braggadochio, expresses the same feeling; and at her making, Nature ‘grudg’d to see the counterfet should shame the thing it selfe’. True love is praised because it is ‘naturall affection faultlesse’, whereas the false love of Paridell is an ‘art’ which he ‘learned had of yore’, and he himself ‘the learned lover’ equipped with ‘Bransles, ballads, virelayes and verses vaine’. The pictures in the House of Busirane have already been mentioned; but perhaps the simile with which they are introduced gives us more of the depth of Spenser’s mind on these matters than the whole description that follows.
Woven with gold and silke, so close and nere
That the rich metall lurked privily
As faining to be hid from envious eye;
Yet here, and there, and every where, unwares
It shewd it selfe and shone unwillingly;
Like a discoloured Snake, whose hidden snares
Through the greene gras his long bright burnisht back declares.
Any moralist may disapprove luxury and artifice; but Spenser alone can turn the platitude into imagery of such sinister suggestion. It is thought completely converted into immediate sensation. Even the innocent trappings of the courtly life do not attract him, and he dismisses the externals of a tournament as contemptuously as Milton himself: to describe them, he says,
Were worke fit for an Herauld, not for me.
Clothes and jewellery interest him only when they adorn his ‘shining ones’, and become, as a modern critic has well pointed out, the symbol of a spiritual radiance. Everywhere else the pomps and vanities of the ‘World’ are for him illusions
Fashion’d to please the eies of them that pas
Which see not perfect things but in a glas,
and easily rejected by those who compare them with ‘plaine Antiquitie’. The Noble Savage, long before Dryden gives him that name, has played his part in the Sixth Book of The Faerie Queene. Una’s face is fairest unveiled. ‘Naturals’—lions and satyrs—come to her aid. True courtesy dwells among shepherds who alone have never seen the Blatant Beast.
All this is quite compatible with Spenser’s horror of something else which is also commonly called ‘nature’. As we had to remind ourselves in an earlier chapter, Nature may be opposed not only to the artificial or the spurious, but also to the spiritual or the civil. There is a nature of Hobbes’ painting as well as of Rousseau’s. Of nature in this second sense, nature as the brutal, the unimproved, the inchoate, Spenser has given us notice enough in his cannibals, brigands, and the like; and, more philosophically, in the ‘hatefull darknes’ and ‘deepe horrore’ of the chaos whence all the fair shapes in the garden of Adonis have taken their ‘substance’. This is what moderns tend to mean by Nature—the primitive, or original, and Spenser knows what it is like. But most commonly he understands Nature as Aristotle did—the ‘nature’ of anything being its unimpeded growth from within to perfection, neither checked by accident nor sophisticated by art. To this ‘nature’ his allegiance never falters, save perhaps in some regrettable compliments to the Queen which accord ill with his general feeling about the court: and when Nature personified enters his poem she turns out to be the greatest of his shining ones. In some respects, indeed, she symbolizes God Himself.
The reader may well be excused if he has, by this, forgotten that the whole subject of nature and art arose out of our analysis of the Bower of Bliss and the Garden of Adonis. But the Bower and the Garden (the very names, I trust, have now become significant) are so important that we have still not exhausted them. We have dealt only with their contrast of nature and art. It still remains to consider the equally careful, and even more important, contrast between the explicitly erotic imagery of the one and the other. We here approach a subject on which Spenser has been much misunderstood. He is full of pictures of virtuous and vicious love, and they are, in fact, exquisitely contrasted. Most readers seem to approach him with the vulgar expectation that his distinction between them is going to be a quantitative one; that the vicious loves are going to be warmly painted and the virtuous tepidly—the sacred draped and the profane nude. It must be stated at once that in so far as Spenser’s distinction is quantitative at all, the quantities are the other way round. He is at the opposite pole from the scholastic philosophers. For him, intensity of passion purifies: cold pleasure, such as the scholastics seem to approve, is corrup-
tion. But in reality the distinction has very little to do with degree or quantity.
The reader who wishes to understand Spenser in this matter may begin with one of his most elementary contrasts—that between the naked damsels in Acrasia’s fountain and the equally naked (in fact rather more naked) damsels who dance round Colin Clout. Here, I presume, no one can be confused. Acrasia’s two young women (their names are obviously Cissie and Flossie) are ducking and giggling in a bathing-pool for the benefit of a passerby: a man does not need to go to fairie land to meet them. The Graces are engaged in doing something worth doing,—namely, dancing in a ring ‘in order excellent’. They are, at first, much too busy to notice Calidore’s arrival, and when they do notice him they vanish. The contrast here is almost too simple to be worth mentioning; and it is only marginal to our immediate subject, for the Graces symbolize no sexual experience at all. Let us proceed to something a little less obvious and more relevant: let us compare the pictured Venus and Adonis in the house of Malecasta with the real Venus and Adonis in the Garden. We find at once that the latter (the good and real) are a picture of actual fruition. Venus, in defiance of the forces of death, the Stygian gods,
Possesseth him and of his sweetnesse takes her fill.
Nothing could be franker; a dainty reader might even object that the phrase ‘takes her fill’ brings us too close to other and more prosaic appetites. But daintiness will be rebuked (as Spenser is always ready to rebuke it) if any one tries to prefer the pictured Venus on Malecasta’s wall. For she is not in the arms of Adonis: she is merely looking at him,
And whilst he bath’d, with her two crafty spyes
She secretly would search each daintie lim.
The words ‘crafty,’ ‘spies,’ and ‘secretly’ warn us sufficiently well where we have arrived. The good Venus is a picture of fruition: the bad Venus is a picture not of ‘lust in action’ but of lust suspended—lust turning into what would now be called skeptophilia. The contrast is just as clear as that in the previous example, and incalculably more important. Thus armed, we may now return to the Bower. The very first person we meet there is Cymochles. He has come there for pleasure and he is surrounded by a flock of wanton nymphs. But the wretched creature does not approach one of them: instead, he lies in the grass (‘like an Adder lurking in the weedes’) and
Sometimes he falsely faines himselfe to sleepe
Whiles through their lids his wanton eies do peepe.
The word ‘peepe’ is the danger signal, and once again we know where we are. If we turn to the Garden of Adonis we shall find a very different state of affairs. There ‘all plenty and all pleasure flowes’: the garden is full of lovers and ‘Frankly each Paramor his leman knowes’. And when we have noticed this it ought to dawn upon us that the Bower of Bliss is not a place even of healthy animalism, or indeed of activity of any kind. Acrasia herself does nothing: she is merely ‘discovered’, posed on a sofa beside a sleeping young man, in suitably semi-transparent raiment. It is hardly necessary to add that her breast is ‘bare to ready spoyle of hungry eies’, for eyes, greedy eyes (‘which n’ote therewith be fild’) are the tyrants of that whole region. The Bower of Bliss is not a picture of lawless, that is, unwedded, love as opposed to lawful love. It is a picture, one of the most powerful ever painted, of the whole sexual nature in disease. There is not a kiss or an embrace in the island: only male prurience and female provocation. Against it we should set not only the Garden of Adonis, but the rapturous reunion of Scudamour with Amoret, or the singularly fresh and frank account of Arthur’s meeting with Gloriana. It is not to be supposed of course that Spenser wrote as a scientific ‘sexologist’ or consciously designed his Bower of Bliss as a picture of sexual perversion. Acrasia indeed does not represent sexual vice in particular, but vicious pleasure in general. Spenser’s conscious intention, no doubt, was merely to produce a picture which should do justice both to the pleasantness and to the vice. He has done this in the only way possible—namely, by filling his Bower of Bliss with sweetness showered upon sweetness and yet contriving that there should be something subtly wrong throughout. But perhaps ‘contriving’ is a bad word. When he wishes to paint disease, the exquisite health of his own imagination shows him what images to exclude.
The usual charges against the skill or the sincerity of Spenser’s allegory turn out, then, to be ungrounded, and we may begin the work of interpretation with increased confidence. To hope for success where great critics have failed would be rash in the writer and in the readers of this book, if we had not one definite advantage—namely, that we are coming to The Faerie Queene from the same direction whence Spenser himself came to it, from earlier love-poetry and earlier allegory, and from the Italian epic. It is to be hoped, also, that most readers share with the writer the advantage of having read that admirable third chapter on symbolism in Dr. Janet Spens’ Spenser’s Faerie Queene, which is perhaps the best initiation we have into the whole subject. We have also learned by now that allegory is not a puzzle. The worst thing we can do is to read it with our eyes skinned for clues, as we read a detective story. If the reader has some familiarity with the allegorical method in general and an ordinary measure both of sensibility and adult experience, then he may be assured that any significacio which does not seem natural to him after a second reading of the poem, is erroneous. And to this general principle we must add Spenser’s own warning in the preface, that ‘many adventures are intermedled, rather as Accidents than intendments’. Not everything in the poem is equally allegorical, or even allegorical at all. We shall find that it is Spenser’s method to have in each book an allegorical core, surrounded by a margin of what is called ‘romance of types’, and relieved by episodes of pure fantasy. Like a true Platonist he shows us the Form of the virtue he is studying not only in its transcendental unity (which comes at the allegorical core of the book) but also ‘becoming Many in the world of phenomena’. Finally, we must remind ourselves that we are dealing with an unfinished book—a fragment, and even a fragment so hastily sent to press that it contains an alexandrine where it should have a decasyllable, and a fourteener where it should have an alexandrine.
The subject of the first book is Sanctification—the restoring of the soul to her lost paradisal nature by holiness. This is presented in two interlocked allegories. Una’s parents, who represent homo, or even, if you like, Adam and Eve, after long exclusion from their native land (which of course is Eden) by the Devil, are restored to it by Holiness whom Truth brings to their aid. That is the first allegory. In the second, we trace the genesis of Holiness; that is, the human soul, guided by Truth, contends with various powers of darkness and finally attains sanctification and beats down Satan under her feet. Truth, rather than Grace, is chosen as the heroine of both actions because Spenser is writing in an age of religious doubt and controversy when the avoidance of error is a problem as pressing as, and in a sense prior to, the conquest of sin: a fact which would have rendered his story uninteresting in some centuries, but which should recommend it to us. This is why forces of illusion and deception such as Archimago and Duessa play such a part in the story; and this is why St. George and Una so easily get separated. Intellectual error, however, is inextricably mixed with moral instability, and the soul’s desertion of truth (or the knight’s desertion of his lady) has an element of wilful rebellion as well as of illusion.
Will was his guide and griefe led him astray.
The various temptations with which he contends are, for the most part, easily recognizable. The distinction between Pride and Orgoglio is the only difficulty. In the historical allegory, no doubt, Orgoglio is the dungeons of the Inquisition, but his moral signification is not so obvious. If we remember, however, that he is a blood relation to Disdain, and consider (with our imagination rather than our intellect) the character of both giants, I think we shall get an inkling. Pride and Orgoglio are both pride, but the one is pride within us, the other pride attacking us from without, whether in the form of persecution, oppression, or ridicule. The one seduces us, the other browbeats us. But the utter hopelessness with which St. George, unarmed and newly roused from the fountain of sloth, staggers forward (‘Disarmd, disgraste, and inwardly dismayde’), to meet Orgoglio, is not very easily reconciled with this view, and it is by no means unlikely that the giant is a survival from some earlier version of the poem.
This is the allegorical core of the book. Una’s adventures are much less allegorical. In a very general sense the lion, the satyrs, and Satyrane represent the world of unspoiled nature, which, in the words of a modern critic ‘cannot hold Una: she blesses it and passes on her way’. But to go further than this—to expect that Truth parted from the soul could, or should, be allegorized as fully as the soul parted from Truth—is almost certainly a mistake. Satyrane himself is the first of many characters in the poem who are types rather than personifications. He is one of Spenser’s happy pictures of the ‘child of nature’. Although he is a knight, we are told that ‘in vaine glorious frayes he little did delight’—which is a deliberate rejection by Spenser of that essential element of chivalry which had most clearly survived, as the duello, into the courtly code of his own time. This anti-courtly character in Satyrane is emphasized by the fact that when Spenser reintroduces him twenty-four cantos later it is with the reminder that he
in vain sheows, that wont yong knights bewitch
And courtly services, tooke no delight.
It will be noticed that I have made no mention of Prince Arthur. The regrettable truth is that in the unfinished state of the poem we cannot interpret its hero at all. We know from the preface that he personifies Magnificence and is seeking Gloriana, or Glory. But if we consider how little we should know of Britomart from the mere statement that she is Chastity, we shall see that this tells us little about Arthur. And if we consider how little we should know of Spenser’s ‘chastity’ if we had never been to the Garden of Adonis, and how little of his ‘justice’ if we had never been to the Temple of Isis, or of his ‘courtesy’ if we had never seen its connexion with the Graces on Mount Acidale, then we must conclude that we do not know what ‘Glory’ would have come to mean in the completed poem. I have very little doubt that Dr. Janet Spens is right in supposing that Glory would have been spiritualized and Platonized into something very like the Form of the Good, or even the glory of God; and my belief is not shaken by the fact that there is very little in the existing poem to suggest this. Spenser’s whole method is such that we have a very dim perception of his characters until we meet them or their archetypes at the great allegorical centres of each book. Amoret, for example, would reveal nothing of her real nature if the Garden of Adonis and the Temple of Venus had been lost. Spenser must have intended a final book on Arthur and Gloriana which would have stood to the whole poem as such central or focal cantos stand to their several books. If we had it we should know what the city of Cleopolis and its tower Panthea really are; we should have the key to the tantalizing history of Elfe and Fay; and we should be much less troubled than we now are by the recollection of Queen Elizabeth throughout the poem. As things are, however, Arthur is inexplicable. If he is Aristotelian ‘Magnanimity’, in search of earthly glory, his deliverance of St. George is arrant nonsense. ‘Magnanimity’, in this sense, cannot come to the rescue of Holiness; for whatever in the pagan character of the μεγαλόψυχος is not sin, belongs already to the Saint. And the error is one which Spenser is the least likely of all poets to have committed: distrust of ‘the World’ and worldly ambition, even to a fault, is the essence of the man. Here, at the very outset, we come up against an irremovable obstacle. The poem is not finished. It is a poem of a kind that loses more than most by being unfinished. Its centre, the seat of its highest life, is missing.
Book II is plain sailing. As the theme of Light and Darkness, though present throughout the poem, becomes specially prominent in Book I, so that of Life and Death or Health and Sickness dominates Book II. Its subject is the defence of Health or Nature against various dangers, and the allegoric centre of this book is to be sought in the description, and siege, of the House of Alma—the human soul ruling the healthy body. The dangers are of three kinds. In the first five cantos we meet passions which are the direct and admitted enemies of Nature and ‘foes to life’—passions of Wrath and Grief. These cantos are full of drought and heat, of ‘smouldering dust’, armours that sparkle fire, blood-red horses, red hair, gnashing teeth, and burning. They contain some of the simplest, but also the most powerful, allegory in The Faerie Queene. From these we pass on to Phaedria. Phaedria is not an enemy to nature at all. Her charming island (in sharp antithesis to the Bower of Bliss) is the work of ‘Natures cunning hand’; and if she excludes Guyon’s Palmer she excludes Atin as well. She is mirth, rest, recreation—the relaxed will floating in the idle lake, secure against the arduous virtues and the arduous vices alike. Ethically she is evil per accidens and in a given situation: on the natural level, she is not evil at all. From the enemies and the neutral we pass on to the false friends, to the hypertrophies and diseases of natural desires, Mammon and Acrasia. Both are created by Spenser at the height of his power and are among the most obviously poetical passages in The Faerie Queene. But he is well aware that the virtue he here presents to us is a dull and pedestrian one to fallen man. That is why Guyon loses his horse in the second canto. It is better that he should be without it, for he had found it difficult to restrain its pace to that of the Palmer and impossible to pull up in the presence of St. George. But Spenser continually reminds us of the weariness of his subsequent journey on foot, and the book is full of allurements to rest. Interwoven with this allegory we have the story of Mordant and Amavia, a romance of types which illustrates opposite kinds of intemperance, and things that are not allegorical at all such as the story of Braggadochio or the sonorous history of the Kings of Britain.
For the purposes of our particular study the third and fourth books of The Faerie Queene are by far the most important, for in them Spenser, as I promised, becomes our collaborator and tells the final stages of the history of courtly love. I do not mean, of course, that he would have understood the phrase ‘history of courtly love’, nor that he knew he was ending a story. But it is in his mind, none the less, that the last phase of the long process becomes conscious.
The subjects of these two books are respectively Chastity and Friendship, but we are justified in treating them as a single book on the subject of love. Chastity, in the person of Britomart, turns out to mean not virginity but virtuous love: and friends are found to be merely ‘another sort of lovers’ in the Temple of Venus. The Proem to the legend of Friendship deals entirely with ‘lovers deare debate’, and its story is equally concerned with friendship, reconciliation and marriage. In the ninth canto Spenser explicitly classifies Eros, Storgë, and Philia as ‘three kinds of love’. Finally, his conception of love is enlarged so as to include even the harmonies of the inanimate world, and we have the wedding of Thames and Medway. For this all-embracing interpretation of love Spenser, of course, has precedent in ancient philosophy, and specially in the Symposium. His subject-matter in these two books is therefore extremely complex: and as, in these same books, the non-allegorical fringe becomes wider and more brilliant than ever, there is some excuse for the bewilderment of those critics (too quick despairers!) who suppose that Spenser has abandoned his original design. But those who have learned to look for the allegorical centres will not go astray.
A few pages ago we were considering the difference between the Bower of Bliss and the Garden of Adonis. While we did so I carefully excluded a much more interesting question—that of the difference between the Bower of Bliss and the Houses of Malecasta and Busirane. It is now time to rectify this omission. The Bower, it will be remembered, turned out to be a place not of lawless loves or even lawless lusts, but of disease and paralysis in appetite itself. It will be remembered that the Bower is the home not of vicious sexuality in particular, but of vicious Pleasure in general. The poet has selected one kind of pleasure chiefly because it is the only kind that can be treated at length in serious poetry. The Bower is connected with sex at all only through the medium of Pleasure. And this is borne out by the fact—very remarkable to any one well read in previous allegory—that Cupid is never mentioned in the Bower, a clear indication that we are not yet dealing with love. The Bower is not the foe of Chastity but of Continence—of that elementary psychic integration which is presupposed even in unlawful loves. To find the real foe of Chastity, the real portrait of false love, we must turn to Malecasta and Busirane. The moment we do so, we find that Malecasta and Busirane are nothing else than the main subject of this study—Courtly Love; and that Courtly Love is in Spenser’s view the chief opponent of Chastity. But Chastity for him means Britomart, married love. The story he tells is therefore part of my story: the final struggle between the romance of marriage and the romance of adultery.
Malecasta lives in Castle Joyeous amid the ‘courteous and comely glee’ of gracious ladies and gentle knights. Somebody must be paying for it all, but one cannot find out who. The Venus in her tapestries entices Adonis ‘as well that art she knew’: we are back in the world of the Vekke and the commandments of Love. In the rooms of the castle there is ‘dauncing and reveling both day and night’, and ‘Cupid still emongst them kindles lustfull fyres’. The six knights with whom Britomart contends at its gate (Gardante, Parlante, and the rest) might have stepped straight out of the Roman de la Rose, and in the very next stanza the simile of the rose itself occurs. The place is dangerous to spirits who would have gone through the Bower of Bliss without noticing its existence. Britomart gets a flesh wound there, and Holiness himself is glad to be helped in his fight against Malecasta’s champions by Britomart; by which the honest poet intends, no doubt, to let us know that even a religious man need not disdain the support which a happy marriage will give him against fashionable gallantry. For Britomart is married love.
Malecasta clearly represents the dangerous attractions of courtly love—the attractions that drew a Surrey or a Sidney. Hers is the face that it shows to us at first. But the House of Busirane is the bitter ending of it. In these vast, silent rooms, dazzling with snake-like gold, and endlessly pictured with ‘Cupid’s warres and cruell battailes’, scrawled over with ‘a thousand monstrous formes’ of false love, where Britomart awaits her hidden enemy for a day and a night, shut in, entombed, cut off from the dawn which comes outside ‘calling men to their daily exercise’, Spenser has painted for us an unforgettable picture not of lust but of love—love as understood by the traditional French novel or by Guillaume de Lorris—in all its heartbreaking glitter, its sterility, its suffocating monotony. And when at last the ominous door opens and the Mask of Cupid comes out, what is this but a picture of the deep human suffering which underlies such loves?
Unquiet care and fond Unthriftyhead;
Lewd Losse of Time, and Sorrow seeming dead,
Inconstant Chaunge, and false Disloyalty;
Consuming Riotise, and guilty Dread
Of heavenly vengeaunce: faint Infirmity;
Vile Poverty; and, lastly, Death with infamy.
The Mask, in fact embodies all the sorrows of Isoud among the lepers, and Launcelot mad in the woods, of Guinevere at the stake or Guinevere made nun and penitent, of Troilus waiting on the wall, of Petrarch writing vergogna è ’l frutto and Sidney rejecting the love that reaches but to dust; or of Donne writing his fierce poems from the house of Busirane soon after Spenser had written of it. When Britomart rescues Amoret from this place of death she is ending some five centuries of human experience, predominantly painful. The only thing Spenser does not know is that Britomart is the daughter of Busirane—that his ideal of married love grew out of courtly love.
Who, then, is Amoret? She is the twin sister of Belphoebe and both were begotten by the Sun,
pure and unspotted from all loathly crime
That is ingenerate in fleshly slime
The meaning of which is best understood by comparison with Spenser’s sonnet,
More then most faire, full of the living fire,
Kindled above unto the maker neare.
And we know that the Sun is an image of the Good for Plato, and therefore of God for Spenser. The first important event in the life of these twins was their adoption by Venus and Diana: Diana the goddess of virginity, and Venus from whose house ‘all the world derives the glorious features of beautie’. Now the circumstances which led up to this adoption are related in one of the most medieval passages in the whole Faerie Queene—a débat between Venus and Diana; but this débat has two remarkable features. In the first place, the Venus who takes part in it is a Venus severed from Cupid, and Cupid, as we have already seen, is associated with courtly love. I say ‘associated’ because we are dealing with what was merely a feeling in Spenser’s mind, not a piece of intellectual and historical knowledge, as it is to us. There is therefore no consistent and conscious identification of Cupid with courtly love, but Cupid tends to appear in one kind of context and to be absent from another kind. And when he does appear in contexts approved by our domestic poet, he usually appears with some kind of reservation. He is allowed into the Garden of Adonis on condition of his ‘laying his sad dartes asyde’: in the Temple of Venus it is only his younger brothers who flutter round the neck of the goddess. We are therefore fully justified in stressing the fact that Venus finds Amoret only because she has lost Cupid, and finally adopts Amoret instead of Cupid. The other important novelty is that this débat ends with a reconciliation; Spenser is claiming to have settled the old quarrel between Venus and Diana, and that after a singularly frank statement of the claims of each. And when the two goddesses have agreed, their young wards
twixt them two did share
The heritage of all celestiall grace;
That all the rest it seemd they robbed bare,
and one of them, Amoret, became
th’ensample of true love alone
And Lodestarre of all chaste affection.
She was taken by Venus to be reared in the Garden of Adonis, guarded by Genius the lord of generation, among happy lovers and flowers (the two are here indistinguishable) whose fecundity never ceases to obey the Divine Command. This was her nursery: her school or university was the Temple of Venus. This is a region neither purely natural, like the Garden, nor artificial in the bad sense, like the Bower of Bliss: a region where,
all that nature did omit,
Art, playing second natures part, supplyed it.
Here Amoret no longer grows like a plant, but is committed to the care of Womanhood; the innocent sensuousness of the garden is replaced by ‘sober Modestie’, ‘comely Curtesie’,
Soft Silence and submisse Obedience,
which are gifts of God and protect His saints ‘against their foes offence’. Indeed the whole island is strongly protected, partly by Nature, and partly by such immemorial champions of maidenhead in the Rose tradition, as Doubt, Delay, and Daunger. But when the lover comes he defeats all these and plucks Amoret from her place among the modest virtues. The struggle in his own mind before he does so, his sense of ‘Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear’, is a beautiful gift made by the humilities of medieval love poetry to Spenser at the very moment of his victory over the medieval tradition:
my hart gan throb
And wade in doubt what best were to be donne;
For sacrilege me seem’d the Church to rob,
And folly seem’d to leave the thing undonne.
Amoret, however, cannot withdraw her hand, and the conclusion of the adventure may be given in the words of the poet who has studied most deeply this part of The Faerie Queene:
she what was Honour knew,
And with obsequious Majestie approv’d
My pleaded reason.
The natural conclusion is marriage, but Busirane for centuries has stood in the way. That is why it is from the marriage feast that Busirane carries Amoret away, to pine for an indefinite period in his tomblike house. When once Britomart has rescued her thence, the two lovers become one flesh—for that is the meaning of the daring simile of the Hermaphrodite in the original conclusion of Book III. But even after this, Amoret is in danger if she strays from Britomart’s side; she will then fall into a world of wild beasts where she has no comfort or guide, and may even become the victim of monsters who live on the ‘spoile of women’.
If it is difficult to write down in prose the significacio of all this, the difficulty arises from the fact that the poetic version has almost too much meaning for prose to overtake. Thus, in general, it is plain that Amoret is simply love—begotten by heaven, raised to its natural perfection in the Garden and to its civil and spiritual perfections in the Temple, wrongly separated from marriage by the ideals of courtly gallantry, and at last restored to it by Chastity—as Spenser conceives chastity. But the danger of such analysis is that some stupid person will ask us ‘Who, then, is Scudamour? And if Chastity means (for Spenser) married love, and that is Britomart, then what is the difference between Britomart and Amoret?’ Now, if we must, we can of course answer such questions. We can say that while Scudamour and Amoret united by Britomart are a picture of one thing—Marriage—yet Scudamour, taken by himself, is hardly a personification at all; he is the lover, the husband, any husband, or even homo in search of love. Or we can say that while Britomart represents Chastity attained—the triumphant union of romantic passion with Christian monogamy—Amoret, in isolation, represents the romantic passion which Chastity must so unite. We can even go on to say that whereas Amoret is the passion, Florimel is the object of the passion, The Beautiful or Loveable, and that her sufferings illustrate the miseries to which this object is exposed outside marriage: that the false Florimel is the false Loveable grasped by Courtly Love: and we might point out that the girdle which will fit only the true Florimel (and Amoret) was made for Venus, but for Venus, once more, carefully dissociated from courtly love. But I have no intention of following this plan. The very speed and ease with which the ‘false secondary power’ produces these interpretations, warns us that if once we give it its head we shall never be done. The more concrete and vital the poetry is, the more hopelessly complicated it will become in analysis: but the imagination receives it as a simple—in both senses of the word. Oddly as it may sound, I conceive that it is the chief duty of the interpreter to begin analyses and to leave them unfinished. They are not meant as substitutes for the imaginative apprehension of the poem. Their only use is to awaken, first of all, the reader’s conscious knowledge of life and books in so far as it is relevant, and then to stir those less conscious elements in him which alone can fully respond to the poem. And perhaps I have already done too much. Perhaps all we need to know is that the twins Amoret and Belphoebe represent Spenser’s view that there are two kinds of chastity, both heaven-born.
The less allegorical parts group themselves easily enough round this core. The swashbucklers—the Paridells and Blandamours—are an almost literal picture of court life. In Book IV they are the enemies of true friendship; they are the young men, described by Aristotle, who change their friends several times in the same day. In Book III, Paridell wooing Hellenore, is a picture of courtly love in action: he is the learned lover and knows all the Ovidian tricks. That is why the one constant element in him is his hatred of Scudamour. Marinell is a sort of pendant to Belphoebe: she represents virginity as an ideal, while he avoids love on prudential grounds, which Spenser disapproves. His marriage with Florimel probably expresses no allegorical relation; it comes in, like the wedding of the rivers, or Arthur’s reconciliation of Poeana and Amyas, to illustrate the general theme of the book, which is Reconciliation rather than what we should call Friendship. Concord is for Spenser the resolution of discord: her two sons are Hate and Love, and Hate is the elder. That is why we meet Ate, and her works, long before we meet Concord, and also why the titular heroes of the book are friends who were once foes; and the same theme of reconciliation connects Arthur’s activities with the main subject.
In addition to such merely typical adventures, we have, as usual, passages that are quite free from allegory. Such are the beautiful ‘episode’ of Timias and Belphoebe, and the prophecies of Merlin. We also have, so to speak, ‘islands’ of pure allegory such as that of Malbecco or the House of Care, which are not closely connected with the central allegorical action. The two books, taken together, are a kind of central massif in The Faerie Queene, in which the poet’s originality is at its highest and his command (for his own purposes) of the Italian art of interweaving is most perfect. It is very unfortunate that they also contain some of his worst writing; but this must not be taken as proof that he is tiring of his design. It comes mainly from the very simple cause, that in these books Spenser is facing the necessity, incumbent on a professed disciple of Ariosto, of giving us some big, set battle-pieces, and Spenser, like all the Elizabethans, does this kind of thing very badly. It is idle to seek deep spiritual causes for literary phenomena which mere incompetence can explain. If a man who cannot draw horses is illustrating a book, the pictures that involve horses will be the bad pictures, let his spiritual condition be what it may.
The fifth book is the least popular in The Faerie Queene. This is partly the poet’s fault, for he has included in it some flat and uninspired passages; but in part it results from the differences between his conception of justice and ours. The modern reader is apt to start from an egalitarian conception; to assume, in fact, that the fair way of dividing a cake between two people is to cut it into two equal pieces. But to this Aristotle, and the most reputable political thinkers between Aristotle’s time and Spenser’s, would have replied at once ‘It all depends who the two people are. If A is twice as good a man as B, then obviously justice means giving A twice as much cake as B. For justice is not equality simpliciter but proportional equality.’ When this principle is applied to things more important than cakes, justice becomes the art of allotting carefully graded shares of honour, power, liberty and the like to the various ranks of a fixed social hierarchy, and when justice succeeds, she produces a harmony of differences very like the Concord of Book IV. The poet describes this harmony in the following lines:
The hils doe not the lowly dales disdaine,
The dales doe not the lofty hils envy.
He maketh Kings to sit in soverainty;
He maketh subjects to their powre obey.
Justice, in fact, is ‘the grand principle of Subordination’. The priests of Isis abstain from wine because wine comes from the blood of the old rebellious giants, who are the very type of insubordination, and to drink their blood
Mote in them stirre up old rebellious thought
To make new warre against the Gods againe.
The egalitarian giant in Canto II offends against subordination by believing in equality simpliciter. The amazon Radigund, who enslaves men and sets them to female tasks, represents another form of insubordination—the ‘monstrous regiment of women’. Apart from its political allusions, this allegory is an attack on uxoriousness—a vice to which the way is easily left open when once we have directed the whole force of romantic passion into marriage, and which is, for Spenser, a form of injustice—a disturbance of the hierarchy of things. For we must not conceal the fact that Spenser, for all his chivalry, is in complete agreement with Milton about the right relations of the sexes, and his picture of Radigund is a good commentary on the fact that Amoret had learned ‘soft silence and submisse obedience’ in the Temple of Venus. The doctrine is not very congenial to modern sentiment; but perhaps Spenser’s delineation of the cruelty of Radigund (So hard it is to be a woman’s slave), if seasoned with our recollections of Mrs. Proudie or of the Simla memsahibs in Kipling’s early work, will go down palatably and profitably enough.
But these considerations do not alter the fact that Artegall is one of the most disagreeable characters in the whole poem. He alienates us from the very beginning by his vindictive ill temper at being defeated in a perfectly fair tournament, and continues to alienate us by his cruelty. And when we reflect on the judicial methods of the time, the statement that his iron page Talus ‘could reveale all hidden crimes’ becomes abominable, for it means that Talus is the rack as well as the axe. In all this there is something I shall not attempt to excuse. Spenser was the instrument of a detestable policy in Ireland, and in his fifth book the wickedness he had shared begins to corrupt his imagination. But while it would be absurd to suggest that Spenser saw Artegall with our eyes, he has none the less made it clear that Artegall is not intended to be perfect. His motto Salvagesse sans Finesse warns us that, if he is Justice, he is not meant to be more than a rough justice, and when we reach the Temple of Isis this is explained. The doors of that temple, it will be remembered, do not admit Talus, and inside the temple we find that the true goddess is Equity or ‘clemence’, and that Artegall is symbolized by the crocodile
That under Isis feete doth sleepe for ever,
To shew that clemence oft, in things amis
Restraines those sterne behests and cruell doomes of his.
Artegall, in fact, is to the whole virtue much as Talus is to Artegall. This fruitful idea ought to have found its full expression in the canto on Mercilla, but Spenser has allowed himself to be carried away by flattery and historical allegory (his ‘fatal Cleopatra’) and that canto is his one great failure in this kind—a failure which paralyzes the whole book because that canto should have been its heart. The actual behaviour of his Mercilla vies with that of Tertullian’s patientia for the palm of absurdity:
So did this mightie Ladie, when she saw
Those two strange knights such homage to her make,
Bate somewhat of that Majestie and awe
That whylome wont to doe so many quake.
An exquisite Mercy this, that can just velvet her claws for a moment if you gorge her with cream!
The rest of the book needs little comment. It is not, and ought not to be, a favourite, but it contains some excellent passages, such as the vanishing of false Florimel, the fight with Gerioneo, and, above all, the weird scene of Malengin’s capture among the mountains.
From this stony plateau—for the fifth book would have been severe even if it had been successful—the sixth leads us down into the gracious valley of Humiliation. Spenser himself seems to pause at the brow of the barren country and look down with relief at this delightful land, spacious and wide, and sprinkled with such sweet variety. The greatest mistake that can be made about this book is to suppose that Callidore’s long delay among the shepherds is a pastoral truancy of Spenser’s from his moral intention. On the contrary, the shepherd’s country and Mount Acidale in the midst of it are the core of the book, and the key to Spenser’s whole conception of Courtesy. As any one who has read The Faerie Queene carefully will expect, Courtesy, for the poet, has very little connexion with court. It grows ‘on a lowly stalke’; and though the present age seems fruitful of it, yet a glance at ‘plaine Antiquitie’ will convince us that this is all ‘fayned showes’. I have already pointed out how the whole tenor of the book bears this out; and it is only necessary here to remind the reader that the great opposite of courtesy, the Blatant Beast, has ravaged all the world except the shepherds. If we add to this that courtesy’s other enemy—the enemy defeated by Arthur—is Disdaine, we shall have made some progress towards understanding Spenser’s conception. Since the virtue, as Spenser saw it, is one that does not exist in the modern scheme of values at all, we have to represent it by combining those virtues we do know. We may say for the moment that it is a combination of charity and humility, in so far as these are social, not theological, virtues. But there is another important aspect of it to be noticed. According to Spenser, courtesy, in its perfect form, comes by nature; moral effort may produce a decent substitute for everyday use, which deserves praise, but it will never rival the real courtesy of those who
so goodly gracious are by kind,
That every action doth them much commend,
And in the eyes of men great liking find,
Which others that have greater skill in mind,
Though they enforce themselves cannot attaine:
For everie thing to which one is enclin’d
Doth best become and greatest grace doth gaine.
And this doctrine is confirmed by the allegory of the Graces in Canto X. The important thing about these beautiful dancers is that they vanish if disturbed, and then
being gone, none can them bring in place
But whom they of themselves list so to grace.
The meaning of the Graces, in their relation to Colin Clout, is perfectly clear: they are ‘inspiration’, the fugitive thing that enables a man to write one day and leaves him dry as a stone the next, the mysterious source of beauty. But not, Spenser holds, of literary beauty alone. There is a similar inspiration that comes and goes in all human activities—and by its coming adds the last unpurchasable beauty—and specially in our social activities. There it produces ‘comely carriage’, ‘sweete semblaunt’, ‘friendly offices’, right behaviour whether among our friends or our enemies, and all that is collectively called ‘Civility’. To Spenser, in fact, as to Shelley or Plato, there is no essential difference between poetic beauty and the beauty of characters, institutions, and behaviour, and all alike come from the ‘daughters of sky-ruling Jove’. Writers such as Elyot and Castiglione, who combine high flights of philosophy with the minutiae of etiquette and see nothing absurd in so doing, would here have understood Spenser much more easily than we. But enough has been said to give us an inkling of what is meant. We are to conceive of courtesy as the poetry of conduct, an ‘unbought grace of life’ which makes its possessor immediately loveable to all who meet him, and which is the bloom (as Aristotle would say)—the supervenient perfection—on the virtues of charity and humility.
Around this central conception we find the usual variety of allegories, romance of types, and pure fiction. The episode of Disdaine and Mirabella is remarkable for its close approximation to the oldest models. Turpine and Blandina are Aristotelian—the boor and the flatterer, representing the defect and excess which lie on either side of the virtue. The courtly life which Meliboe condemns, and the brutal life of Serena’s or Pastorella’s captors, are arranged according to the same scheme—the one being a sophistication of nature, in whose humilities true courtesy dwells, and the other being a lapse below nature, as nature was defined by Aristotle. The noble savage I have already referred to. He and the Hermit are in a sense opposites: one emphasizes the natural aspect of courtesy, the other its spiritual aspect—its affinity with the sterner or more awful forms of the good. The wise old man, full of true courtesy without ‘forged shows’ such as ‘fitter beene for courting fools’, happy as ‘carelesse bird in cage’, and gently teaching his penitents that the Blatant Beast cannot do you much permanent injury unless something is wrong within, is one of the loveliest of Spenser’s religious figures. The whole book is full of sweet images of humility; Calidore and Priscilla carrying the wounded knight, Calepine looking after the baby, the Salvage man fumblingly doing his best with the harness of Serena’s horse. Some readers cannot enjoy the shepherds because they know (or they say they know) that real country people are not more happy or more virtuous than any one else; but it would be tedious here to explain to them the many causes (reasons too) that have led humanity to symbolize by rural scenes and occupations a region in the mind which does exist and which should be visited often. If they know the region, let them try to people it with tram conductors or policemen, and I shall applaud any success they may have; if not, who can help them?
The sixth book is distinguished from its predecessors by distinct traces of the influence of Malory (a welcome novelty) and by the high proportion of unallegorical, or faintly allegorical, scenes. This last feature easily gives rise to the impression that Spenser is losing grip on the original conception of his poem; and it suggests a grave structural fault in The Faerie Queene in so far as the poem begins with its loftiest and most solemn book and thence, after a gradual descent, sinks away into its loosest and most idyllic. But this criticism overlooks the fact that the poem is unfinished. The proportion of allegoric core to typical, or purely fictional, fringe has varied all along from book to book; and the loose texture of the sixth is a suitable relief after the very high proportion of pure allegory in the fifth. The only fragment of any succeeding book which we have proves that the poem was to rise from the valley of humiliation into allegory as vast and august as that of the first book.
In the poem as a whole our understanding is limited by the absence of the allegorical centre, the union of Arthur and Gloriana. In the Mutabilitie cantos the opposite difficulty occurs—we have there the core of a book without the fringe. The fact that this should be so is interesting because it suggests (what is likely enough a priori) that Spenser was in the habit of writing his ‘cores’ first and then draping the rest round them. But we lose much by not seeing the theme of change and permanence played out on the lower levels of chivalrous adventure. It is obvious, of course, that the adventures would have illustrated the theme of constancy and inconstancy, and that the mighty opposites would have appeared in the form of Mutabilitie and the Gods only at the central allegorical gable of the book—which is the bit we have. It is obvious too, that the Titaness, despite her beauty, is an evil force. Her very name ‘bold Alteration’, and the fact that she rises against the gods, put her at once among the enemies for any reader who understands Spenser’s conceptions of health, concord, and subordination. The state of affairs which she would fain upset in heaven and has already upset in earth, is precisely that state which Spenser (or Aristotle) would have described as just and harmonious,
all which Nature had establisht first
In good estate, and in meet order ranged
She did pervert.
She is, in fact, Corruption, and since corruption, ‘subjecting the creature to vanity’, came in with the Fall, Spenser practically identifies his Titaness with sin, or makes her the force behind the sin of Adam. She it is who
Wrong of right, and bad of good did make
And death for life exchanged foolishly:
Since which all living wights have learn’d to die,
And all the world is woxen daily worse.
O pittious worke of Mutability,
By which we all are subject to that curse,
And death, instead of life, have sucked from our Nurse!
The full impact of that last line can be felt only when we have read the whole Faerie Queene. The enemies of Mutability are, first, the gods, and then Nature. Taken together they represent the Divine order in the universe—the concord, the health, the justice, the harmony, the Life, which, under many names, is the real heroine of the whole poem. If we take them apart, however, then the gods represent precisely what we should call ‘nature’, the laws of the phenomenal universe. That is why the Titaness so far prevails with them—they are that world over which, even in the highest regions, she asserts some claim. But Nature, taken apart, is the ground of the phenomenal world. The reverence with which Spenser approaches this symbol contrasts favourably with the hardier attempts of Tasso and Milton to bring God, undisguised, upon the stage—and indeed it would be a pleasant task, if this chapter were not already too long, to show how much more religious a poem The Faerie Queene is than the Paradise Lost. Mutability’s appeal, it should be noticed, is not in the first instance to Nature at all, but
to the highest him, that is behight
Father of Gods and men of equall might,
To weete the God of Nature.
Yet when this appeal is answered it is the goddess Natura who appears, as in Claudian, Bernardus, Alanus, and Jean de Meun,
This great Grandmother of all creatures bred,
Great Nature, ever young, yet full of eld;
Still mooving, yet unmoved from her sted,
Unseene of any, yet of all beheld.
The woody pavilion (unlike those fashioned by the ‘idle skill’ of craftsmen) which rises up to receive her, the ‘flowers that voluntary grow’ beneath her feet, and the homage of the river-god, are all in the same tradition. Yet at the same time Spenser can compare her garments to those of Our Lord on the mount of Transfiguration, and even put into the mouth of Mutability words that separate Nature by a great gulf from the mere gods:
Sith heaven and earth are both alike to thee,
And gods no more then men thou doest esteeme;
For even the gods to thee, as men to gods, do seeme.
The modern reader is tempted to inquire whether Spenser, then, equates God with Nature: to which the answer is, ‘Of course not. He was a Christian, not a pantheist’. His procedure in this passage would have been well understood by all his contemporaries: the practice of using mythological forms to hint theological truths was well established and lasted as late as the composition of Comus. It is, for most poets and in most poems, by far the best method of writing poetry which is religious without being devotional—that is, without being an act of worship to the reader. In the medieval allegories and the renaissance masks, God, if we may say so without irreverence, appears frequently, but always incognito. Every one understood what was happening, but the occasion remained an imaginative, not a devotional, one. The poet thus retains liberties which would be denied him if he removed the veil. For even Spenser, daring though he is in such matters, could hardly have descended so suddenly and delightfully as he does from the high court of the universe to the grotesque antimask of Faunus (‘A foolish Faune indeed’), if he had placed the Almighty undisguised instead of ‘Nature’ on the bench of that high court; though in the long run this intermeddling of the high and low—the poet’s eye glancing not only from earth to heaven but from the shapeless, funny gambollings of instinct to the heights of contemplation—is as grave, perhaps even as religious, as the decorum that would, in a different convention, have forbidden it.
I find the significance of the whole débat hard to determine with precision because of the deep obscurity of the lines in which Nature gives her sentence; but the general outlines of the meaning I think I have grasped. It is a magnificent instance of Spenser’s last-moment withdrawal from dualism. The universe is a battlefield in which Change and Permanence contend. And these are evil and good—the gods, the divine order, stand for Permanence; Change is rebellion and corruption. But behind this endless contention arises the deeper truth—that Change is but the mode in which Permanence expresses itself, that Reality (like Adonis) ‘is eterne in mutabilitie’, and that the more Mutability succeeds the more she fails, even here and now—not to speak of her more ultimate ruin when we reach the
rest of all things, firmely stayd
Upon the pillars of Eternity.
To praise this fragment seems almost an impertinence. In it all the powers of the poet are more happily united than ever before; the sublime and the ridiculous, the rarified beauties of august mythology and the homely glimpses of daily life in the procession of the months, combine to give us an unsurpassed impression of the harmonious complexity of the world. And in these cantos Spenser seems to have soared above all the usual infirmities of his style. His verse has never been more musical, his language never so strong and so sweet. Such poetry, coming at the very end of the six books, serves to remind us that the existing Faerie Queene is unfinished, and that the poet broke off, perhaps, with many of his greatest triumphs still ahead. Our loss is incalculable; at least as great as that we sustained by the early death of Keats.
If this chapter is not radically erroneous, then the history of Spenserian criticism, with one or perhaps two honourable exceptions, is a history of gross under-estimation. I have not tried to conceal his faults; on some of them I have spoken more severely than most of his professed admirers. His prosaic, and even prosy, tendencies I almost claim to have set for the first time in their true light. I have exposed, without extenuation, those unpleasing passages where he becomes a bad poet because he is, in certain respects, a bad man. But they must be set beside the barbarity of Homer, the hatreds of Dante, the pride of Milton—and perhaps we may add, Shakespeare’s apparently contented acquiescence in the ethical tomfoolery of honour and revenge. I do not mention these things with the absurd intention of exalting Spenser by depreciating others. I wish merely to indicate the level on which Spenser stands, the poets with whom he is to be compared.
My claim for Spenser may take the form of the old eulogy—totam vitae imaginem expressit; but perhaps my meaning will be clearer if we omit the word totam, if we say simply vitae imaginem. Certainly this will help to clear up a common misunderstanding. People find a ‘likeness’ or ‘truth’ to life in Shakespeare because the persons, passions and events which we meet in his plays are like those which we meet in our own lives: he excels, in fact, in what the old critics called ‘nature’, or the probable. When they find nothing of the sort in Spenser, they are apt to conclude that he has nothing to do with ‘life’—that he writes that poetry of escape or recreation which (for some reason or other) is so intensely hated at present. But they do not notice that The Faerie Queene is ‘like life’ in a different sense, in a much more literal sense. When I say that it is like life, I do not mean that the places and people in it are like those which life produces. I mean precisely what I say—that it is like life itself, not like the products of life. It is an image of the natura naturans, not of the natura naturata. The things we read about in it are not like life, but the experience of reading it is like living. The clashing antitheses which meet and resolve themselves into higher unities, the lights streaming out from the great allegorical foci to turn into a hundred different colours as they reach the lower levels of complex adventure, the adventures gathering themselves together and revealing their true nature as we draw near the foci, the constant re-appearance of certain basic ideas, which transform themselves without end and yet ever remain the same (eterne in mutability), the unwearied variety and seamless continuity of the whole—all this is Spenser’s true likeness to life. It is this which gives us, while we read him, a sensation akin to that which Hegelians are said to get from Hegel—a feeling that we have before us not so much an image as a sublime instance of the universal process—that this is not so much a poet writing about the fundamental forms of life as those forms themselves spontaneously displaying their activities to us through the imagination of a poet. The invocation of the Muse hardly seems to be a convention in Spenser. We feel that his poetry has really tapped sources not easily accessible to discursive thought. He makes imaginable inner realities so vast and simple that they ordinarily escape us as the largely printed names of continents escape us on the map—too big for our notice, too visible for sight. Milton has well selected wisdom as his peculiar excellence—wisdom of that kind which rarely penetrates into literature because it exists most often in inarticulate people. It is this that has kept children and poets true to him for three centuries, while the intellectuals (on whom the office of criticism naturally devolves) have been baffled even to irritation by a spell which they could not explain. To our own troubled and inquiring age this wisdom will perhaps show its most welcome aspect in the complete integration, the harmony, of Spenser’s mind. His work is one, like a growing thing, a tree; like the world-ash-tree itself, with branches reaching to heaven and roots to hell. It reaches up to the songs of angels or the vision of the New Jerusalem and admits among its shining ones the veiled image of God Himself: it reaches down to the horror of fertile chaos beneath the Garden of Adonis and to the grotesque satyrs who protect Una or debauch Hellenore with equal truth to their nature. And between these two extremes comes all the multiplicity of human life, transmuted but not falsified by the conventions of chivalrous romance. The ‘great golden chain of Concord’ has united the whole of his world. What he feels on one level, he feels on all. When the good and fair appear to him, the whole man responds; the satyrs gambol, the lances splinter, the shining ones rise up. There is a place for everything and everything is in its place. Nothing is repressed; nothing is insubordinate. To read him is to grow in mental health.
With Spenser my story comes to an end. His chivalrous and allegorical poem was already a little out of date when it first appeared, as great poems not infrequently are. Its literary influence is much more important for the student of Milton and the Romantics than for the student of the Elizabethans. There is a history of great literature which has a slower rhythm than that of literature in general, and which goes on in a higher region. The biggest things do not work quickly. It is only after centuries that Spenser’s position becomes apparent; and then he appears as the great mediator between the Middle Ages and the modern poets, the man who saved us from the catastrophe of too thorough a renaissance. To Hurd and the Wartons and Scott he appeared chiefly as a medieval poet, to Keats and Shelley as the poet of the marvellous. What the romantics learned from him was something different from allegory; but perhaps he could not have taught it unless he had been an allegorist. In the history of sentiment he is the greatest among the founders of that romantic conception of marriage which is the basis of all our love literature from Shakespeare to Meredith. The synthesis which he helped to effect was so successful that this aspect of his work escaped notice in the last century: all that Britomart stands for was platitude to our fathers. It is platitude no longer. The whole conception is now being attacked. Feminism in politics, reviving asceticism in religion, animalism in imaginative literature, and, above all, the discoveries of the psycho-analysts, have undermined that monogamic idealism about sex which served us for three centuries. Whether society will gain or lose by the revolution, I need not try to predict; but Spenser ought to gain. What once was platitude should now have for some the brave appeal of a cause nearly lost, and for others the interest of a highly specialized historical phenomenon—the peculiar flower of a peculiar civilization, important whether for good or ill and well worth our understanding.