Fortunately Spenser followed his own genius, and, though he dallied with the fashion for wedding Greek measures to English words, as in the English hexameters of Watson and Harvey, he dropped many projects at which he had glanced, and was constant to his "Faery Queen".
The manuscript of that great poem must have been the companion of Spenser in many strange wanderings,
In savage soil far from Parnassus Mount,
as he says. He was attached, as we have seen, in 1578, to the household of Leicester, and may have gone on a mission of his to France. To be patronized by Leicester was to risk incurring the enmity of Burleigh. The long rivalry between Elizabeth's brilliant and wavering favourite—who once so nearly brought her into a plight almost as bad as that of Mary Stuart—and her sagacious counsellor, Sir William Cecil (Lord Burleigh)—who now and again saved his Queen "as by fire"—might have furnished Spenser with a high theme for a poetic allegory. But chance had made him Leicester's man, not Burleigh's man, so that he never won the fortune for which he sought. Who, indeed, would seek fortune in Ireland? Spenser did, accompanying Lord Grey of Wilton to an isle more than commonly distressful.
To the natural hatred between the Irish and their English invaders was now added the fury of religious rancour. Rebellion after rebellion was punished by horrible reprisals. Lord Grey is notorious for his massacre of six hundred disarmed Italian and Spanish filibusters at Smerwick (November, 1580), and the poet of the "Faery Queen" was present at this abominable deed. It was neither without precedent nor imitation. Seventy years later David Leslie, urged on by a preacher, massacred the remnant of Montrose's Irish contingent at Dunaverty. Spenser himself in his most Interesting "View of the Present State of Ireland" says concerning the foreign prisoners, "there was no other way but to make that short way with them which was made". He defends Grey's ruthless policy; he had made Ireland "ready for reformation" when he was recalled, on the charge of being "a bloody man" who had left the country in ashes (1582). Grey was pursued by the clamour of a horrified people, that is, he was Spenser's Sir Arthegal, molested by the Blatant Beast, the public. The idea of the public is a Blatant Beast is borrowed from Plato.
It was in the service of Grey, and in a land laid waste, that Spenser, acting as Grey's secretary during the horrors of the war in Munster, wrote part of the "Faery Queen". He held public posts, was Clerk of Decrees, and Clerk of the Council of Munster, he received 3000 acres of land, and a ruinous castle of the Desmond family, Kilcolman, between Mallow and Limerick (1586).
Unhappy was his fortune, but, in absence from London, he had the advantage of being beyond the influences of the critical literary society of the capital with its reviews in form of pamphlets, its satires, jealousies, and quarrels. There is a record of a conversation of 1584 (published in 1606) in which Spenser described to his friends the aim and scope of the "Faery Queen". Each virtue was to be incarnate in a knight, whose adventures should teach it by example. In a letter to Raleigh, whom he met in Ireland, Spenser says that Prince Arthur (as in the first Canto) is to be a perfect exemplar of "the twelve private virtues". The Faery Queen herself is, first, Glory in general and next Gloriana, the royal and "most virtuous and beautiful" Queen Elizabeth, who also appears as Belphœbe. He is to begin in the middle, before telling how knights, ladies, dwarfs, and a palmer bearing an infant with bloody hands came seeking adventures to a festival of the Faery Queen. "Many other adventures are intermeddled."
The "Faery Queen" is not, and does not aim at being an epic. It is without beginning, middle, or end, for the last six books were not written, or the manuscript perished when Spenser was driven from Kilcolman.
The original scheme is that of the "Morte d'Arthur," moralized, and intermingled with allegory. The poem is an allegorical romance adapted to the state of England, Ireland, and the Continent under Elizabeth, and to the war of the Reformation against the dragon of Rome and the Scarlet Woman of the Seven Hills, the seeming fair and inwardly filthy Duessa, who is occasionally meant for Mary Stuart. Such unity as the poem possesses is given by the conflict of Good, as Spenser understood it, against Evil, private and public, the vices, and the Church of Rome. The Red Cross Knight wears the armour which St. Paul describes, and in which Bunyan equipped Christian and Greatheart.
There are people, says Spenser, who prefer to have Virtue "sermoned at large, as they use". But while Spenser insists on being taken as a moral preacher in his way, his true ideal is Beauty, and it is the gleam of Beauty that he follows as he wanders with knights and ladies through enchanted forests, and "awtres dire". Like the knights in the "Morte d'Arthur" he "rides at adventure"; in every page a new adventure opens, and leads to others endlessly, through conflicts with Saracens,—Sansfoy, Sansloy, Sansjoy,—with the wily Magician, Archimage, and his glamour; with Despair, in a wonderful passage; with dragons and dragonettes, with Acrasia and all the charms of her abode of wanton bliss, which is depicted with great enthusiasm (Book II, Canto XII). This canto is remote indeed from the puritan taste, despite its moral ending