Let Gryll be Gryll, and have his hoggish mind,
But let us hence depart, whilst weather serves and wind.
The whole is derived, in the last resort, from the palace of Circe in the Tenth book of the "Odyssey," and it is curious to compare the severe and classic charm of the Greek with the boundless luxury of the Italian Renaissance in Spenser.
The "Faery Queen," indeed, despite the moral intention, which is perfectly sincere, is the very Lotusland of poetry. It is a garden of endless varieties of delight, endless but not prolix, for there is a perpetual change of scene and of characters and nothing is constant but the long and ever-varying music of the verse, Spenser's own measure, in which each stanza is a poem, while the strong stream of melody carries the half-dreaming reader down the enchanted river, and forth into the fairy seas.
The Spenserian measure with the Alexandrine that ends the stanza may not be the best vehicle for narrative. But Spenser's stream does flow from the mountains of Lotusland, and the air of Lotusland occasionally lulls the vigilance of the poet as well as of the the reader. The stanza (Book VI, Canto X) which opens
One day, as they all three together went
To the greene wood to gather strawberries,
There chaunst to them'a dangerous accident:
A Tigre forth out of the wood did rise,
narrates an accident as unexpected as dangerous! We cannot but be reminded of the "Swiss Family Robinson," and when Spenser makes Sir Calidore kill the tiger and cut off its head with a shepherd's crook, he is plainly overcome by "drowsihead".[2]
It is true that Spenser soon lost hold of his main allegory, and allegorized the moving events and some of the personages of his time. The gods, in Euripides, make a false Helen of clouds and sunbeams and for her the Trojans and Achæans war and die. So, in Spenser's poem, the witch makes a false Florimel of snow, informed by "a wicked spright" with burning eyes for the destruction of mankind, and the false Florimel is another form of the white witch, Mary Stuart. The affairs of Ireland, France, "Belge," and Spain appear in knightly or magical disguise in the procession of dissolving views; a pageant of the rivers of Ireland and England anticipates Drayton's "Polyolbion": the romance becomes, like "Piers Plowman," a farrago of all that is in the poet's mind.
Of Spenser, Ben Jonson might have said, as of Shakespeare, Sufflaminandus erat, "he needed to have the drag put on". Like Pindar in youth, "he sowed from the sack, not from the hand". His archaic words and unsuccessful imitations of archaic words annoyed the critics of his time more than they vex us. If he "writ no language," "writ the language of no time," as Ben Jonson said, the "Iliad" and "Odyssey," too, are in the language of no time, represent no one dialect that ever was actually spoken. But Spenser was writing about no actual time: his own age is confused with the fairy age of chivalry, and the ages of the "Morte d'Arthur," and of Greek mythology. With Spenser we are "out of space, out of time," and of his adoration of Chaucer, his ancient words keep us in mind. That great and noble effort towards perfection, the spirit of chivalry, was his ideal; and in Sir Philip he saw the last of the gentle and perfect knights. To the flattery of Elizabeth we must submit: she needed it all if to her subjects she was to, stand for England and their love of England.
Spenser's blemishes are of his age; no pure and perfect work of immaculate art could arise in a poetry which was only emerging from a kind of chaos, too much learning being the successor of too much ignorance, and a divine genius being left at large with no control from sane and temperate criticism.
Somewhat eclipsed by the new star of Elizabeth's fresh favourite, Essex, Raleigh visited his Irish lands in 1589, met Spenser, read the "Faery Queen" in manuscript, and brought "Colin Clout Home again". The poem of that name (1591) while full of sugared compliments to Elizabeth, is also touched with satire of her new courtiers. Sidney was dead, Leicester was dead, Burleigh "hated poetry and painting". The first part of the "Faery Queen" (1590) had made Spenser famous, but had won him no prize of Court favour save a small pension.