If such noble inventions appear rare, it perhaps is owing to the wide extent of the “faery land,” as well as to the poet’s proneness to luxuriance of diction. If from that voluminous inspiration the poet has sometimes trespassed on the critic’s bourn, or the romantic eulogist of chastity itself has sometimes violated his own virgin page, for Spenser, always imitative, caught a slight infection from his old romancers and his Italian favourites, all this exuberance bears fruit; freedom and force will ever interest the artists of poetry.
Whoever has passed into the house of Pride,
Whose walls were high, but nothing strong nor thick,
and marked her on her progress, “drawn by six unequal beasts,” with her vile counsellors in their wicked gradation; or has entered “the ancient house of Holiness;” or counted in the den of Riches,
The huge great iron chests, and coffers strong,
amid the dead men’s bones scattered around those chests and coffers, has realized the marvellous architecture of Fancy; or, whoever roving with the muse of Spenser through all her localities, meets the sylvan men whom the chaste Una governed, or the satyrs whom the frail Hellenore would not quit; or when that muse unveils her voluptuous charms, listens to her song in the enchanted gardens of Armida; or in the approach to Acrasia in the bower of Bliss, starts at the nymphs wantonly wrestling in the glassy waters, laughing and blushing; or more innocently gazes on the gorgeous Masque of Cupid, or the dance of the poet and mistress among the Graces,—finds all endowed with poetic existences, unchangeable in their nature amid the changes of taste so long as imagination shall seek for its delights, and genius for the language of its emotions.
“The Faery Queen” was designed by its author to consist of twelve books; six of which we only possess, published at two several times, and a fragment of another. The subject of each book is a moral attribute; Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy. Each attribute is personified by a knight-errant, with all the passions of bodily mortality.
The plan of the poem is so inartificial, that the twelve books, had it been completed, could only have formed twelve separate poems; our poet followed the free and fertile way of Ariosto. The introduction of Prince Arthur may have been designed to give a sort of unity to the incoherent twelve knights, who would have been finally led under his auspices to the court of the Faery Queen; but as the prince, however respectable in romance, comes and vanishes, does nothing, and says little, we incline to the humour of the editor, Hughes, that “the prince is here seen only in his minority, performing his exercises in Fairy-land as a private gentleman.” The versatile plan was adapted to the genius of the poet; the ductility of his invention, the luxuriance of his imagination, and the never-ceasing flow of his mellifluous stanza, would have suffered constraint and mutilation, bound by prescribed forms, and modelled by the classical epic. At the period that the poet Hughes published his edition[6] of Spenser, our editors and critics were little conversant with the Elizabethan literature, nor had the taste of the learned emancipated itself from the established form of the epic of antiquity. But Hughes was alive to the vital poetry before him, though evidently perplexed to fix on a criterion, or to specify the class of poetry, for “The Faery Queen.” His excellent judgment struck into a new and right path. He describes it as “a poem of a particular kind;” and in his “Remarks on The Faery Queen,” he had the merit of distinguishing poetry, like architecture, into its Gothic origin, as well as its classical. This was a discovery at that period; and subsequent critics, such as Bishop Hurd, and more recently Schlegel, have run away with the honour, by their more ample development of the romantic school. Hughes was hardly aware of the importance of this division; for his discovery amounts to little more than one of those first thoughts, which have not ripened into a principle.
“The Faery Queen” was the last great work modelled on Chivalry. Awakening from the gloom of the theological contests of Edward and Mary, the court of the Maiden Queen, from state-policy and her own disposition, had been transformed into a court of romance. Glory was the cheap but inappreciable meed bestowed by the economical sovereign; and love was the language to which the female from the throne could bend to listen to her subject.
Elizabeth, stately and tender, was herself “the Faery Queen,” without even the poet’s flattery, when seated under the dais, amid long galleries hung with cloth of gold or silver, and all the moving tilt-yard glittering in its shine; “the noise of music,” and the sound of shields; the solemn procession, and gay crowd of the many-coloured liveries; the tasselled caparisons of the horses, and the nodding plumes of the knights. There our poet fed his eyes on the pageant, enchanting by its scenical allegory—as when four noble challengers approached—the children of Desire—attempting to win the Fortress of Beauty,—that is, Whitehall and her Majesty![7] They stand in a car, “shadowed with white and carnation silk, being the colours of Desire.” But the challengers must yield to Beauty, whose princely voice is their ample guerdon; and on the following day were the tourney and the barriers “courageously tried.” Thus were the days of chivalry, in its forms or its “fopperies,” restored by the Faery Queen; and with such festivals Spenser nursed his gorgeous fancy, and the Queen was the true inspirer of his romantic Epic.