Warton and Hurd observe that Spenser copied real manners of his time as much as Homer. We must here distinguish an essential difference, if Homer really represented the manners of the heroic age. It is true, that much of the manners and forms of chivalry prevailed among the courtiers of Elizabeth; but such adventures of chivalry as Spenser has described in his singular poem were transplanted from the ancient romances. The incidents are therefore not of the poet’s age; and we can only read his narrative as the last of the romances.
The old romance of “La Morte d’Arthur” was still the fashionable reading of the court; nor had the gorgeous enchantments of Stephen Hawes yet vanished, for a new edition had issued in 1555. Spenser had read Hawes; and however entranced by the pageantry of the fiction, from the uncouth stanza of “The Pastime of Pleasure” he may have been led to the construction of the Spenserian; for it is one of the aptitudes of true genius to carry to perfection what it finds imperfect.
“The Faery Queen” was produced at a crisis of transition when the old romantic way was departing, notwithstanding the temporary influence of a courtly revival, and the new had not yet arrived. The whole machinery of Gothic invention could hardly be worked; its marvels had ceased to be wondrous, and began to be ridiculed. The fantastic extravagance of the ordinary writers of fiction—that crowd of poet-apes which always rise after a great work has appeared—has been censured by the two great literary satirists of that day, Marston and Hall; Hall, indeed, suddenly checks his censorial temerity in blaming themes made sacred by the Faery Muse.
| Let no rebel satire dare traduce Th’ eternal legends of thy fairy Muse, Renowned Spenser, whom no earthly wight Dares once to emulate—— |
The compliment to Spenser does not diminish the satire levelled at the class.
Contemporary satirists furnish a precise date when ancient things are on the turn and getting out of fashion; they are the first who, like hawks, descend on their quarry.
If Spenser attempted to infuse a rejuvenescence into the dry veins of the old age of romance, by the vitality of Allegory, he has fallen into a great error; for his twelve knight-errants do not interest our sympathies the more for being twelve wandering virtues. Allegorical poetry not long after his day also declined; and when it was resumed by Phineas Fletcher, in what he has fantastically named and described as “The Purple Island,” or “the little Isle of Man,” the poetry can hardly preserve itself amid the ludicrous analogies which, with such ingenious perversity of taste, are struck out between anatomy and poesy, too many not very agreeable to recollect.
Chivalry and Allegory, two columns of our poet’s renown, thus soon gave way; and Spenser has often suffered the heaviest penalty to which a great poet was ever condemned—neglect!
But these infelicitous forms, which disguised the most tender and imaginative genius, could not deprive it of its “better parts.” Spenser still remained the poet among poets themselves; though for the world at large, indeed, Spenser seemed to be recognised only as a poet in the chronology of poetry. A critic of great delicacy, and a votary of “the Gothic school,” despaired for the destiny of our poet. “The Faery Queen,” exclaimed Hurd, in the agony of his taste, “one of the noblest productions of modern poetry, is fallen into so general a neglect, that all the zeal of the commentators is esteemed officious and impertinent, and will never restore it to those honours which it has, once for all, irrecoverably lost.”