POETS AND PURITANS SPENSER OME time ago I was reading the Faerie Queene, and one evening I laid aside the poem for a little. Sand I was wishful to know what I ought to think of what I had read. I turned to the work of a biographer of Spenser,1 and I happened upon the place in which he sets out the faults of the poem. I found that the allegory breaks down, that it is diffuse and inconsequent, that two or even three or four figures may stand for one thing; and again that the allegory is crossed by contemporary history hardly disguised at all, and is complicated with pagan mythology; that the poet is guilty of affectation of the antique in the structure of his scheme, the garbs and habits of his knights, and in his own language; in fact, that Ben Jonson was right in saying Spenser writ no language"; that some of his passages, if innocent in intention, are hardly to be innocently read; and finally that the flattery of Queen Elizabeth, which pervades the whole, is excessive, and indeed a gross flaw upon the art and character of the poet. The doubt came to my mind as to whether it were worth while to go on reading such a poem--a doubt that must often occur to those who read criticism. Happily this time I laid the critic down and took the poet up again, and read on till the Blatant Beast was captured by Sir Calidore, though to be sure, as the poet says and 1 Dean Church. Mr J. W. Mackail, in his Springs of Helicon, adds several other counts to the indictment. as I had perhaps reason to believe, it escaped, and goes barking and biting Ne spareth he the gentle Poets rime. The poet, once accepted, had made his own impression despite the faults which the critic-it is true, an admiring critic-had found in him. But now I was thrown back on another question which I had to solve, for the unexamined life is after all, as Plato said, un-live-able for a human being. What was it that had triumphed over the defects of the Faerie Queene? Why had it been such a prolonged happiness to read it, and why did it leave so strong a sense of a permanent enrichment of one's life? There can be no doubt that one great cause of this is the power of sheer beauty over the mind. It invades and it penetrates, and insensibly, it brings peace. O! turne thy rudder hitherward awhile Here may thy storme-bett vessell safely ryde, Such a sweet In" many a weary heart has found in the beauty of the Faerie Queene. But then a question may again be raised. These lines come from the song of the Mermaids. Is the peace that the great poem brings a vanity from which the Palmer with temperate advice would discounsel us? Can we trust it? In his Hymne in Honour of Beautie the poet suggests that we can. Therefore where-ever that thou doest behold The This is what the poets feel about their work. pleasure which it produces is no trivial thing—it is, as Wordsworth said,1 " an acknowledgment of the beauty of the universe," "a task light and easy to him who looks at the world in the spirit of love." Poetry depends on truth, on true feeling and true expression; its essence is not delusion but interpretation. It has well been called a "touchstone for insincerity." " No one, who read the Faerie Queene with an open heart, could think of Spenser as anything but one of the most deeply sincere of poets. For some his poetry lies too far away from the real. Yet if we watch our words, we have to own that there are two "reals," and that Spenser takes us from the accidental-real into the ideal-real-which he at least as a loyal Platonist and true mystic would call the true world. But that true world of the ideal is rarely reached by those who have not made use of this common world, or if they do reach it they find it empty. They have travelled But by the Negative Path and arrive with empty hands. the poets take another way, and Spenser is as true a poet as he is a mystic. He has "looked at the world in the spirit of love." He has seen and fallen in love with "this worlds faire workemanship," and for him Atè has never managed (though it is evident that she tried) that great golden chaine quite to divide With which it blessed Concord hath together tide. (iv. I, 30.) So much is done for him by his gift of keen realization of beauty-the genuine experience of the world which none have but those who are in heart poets. But such responsiveness to beauty carries with it a converse in a heightened sensibility to impressions of pain and ugliness. This is not however all loss. Fair and foul, foul-in-fair and fair-in-foul make this strange fabric 1 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800. |