But when the allegory runs into obscurer incidents and more fictitious personages than those which we have noticed, it becomes rarefied into volatile conjecture, or by our ingenuity may be shaped into partial resemblances, always uncertain, when we accept invented fictions as historical evidence. We know that a writer of an elaborate fictitious narrative may have touched on circumstances and characters caught from life; but all these, in passing through the mind of the inventor, are usually so altered from their reality, to be accommodated to the higher design of the invention, that any parallel in private history, or any likeness of an individual character, any indistinct allusion, can never deserve our historical confidence. A picture of human nature would be an anomalous work, in which we could trace no resemblance to individuals, or discover no coincidences of circumstances.
A century and a half after the publication of the “Faery Queen,” a commentator of “the double sense” revealed to its readers that sealed history which they had never read, and which the poet had never divulged. A few traditional rumours may have floated down; but it was Upton’s edition which startled the world by the abundance of its modern revelations.
John Upton, prebendary of Rochester, and the master of a public school, which he raised to eminence, was distinguished for his scholastic acquirements, the depth of his critical erudition, and for his acquaintance with the history of the Elizabethan court, chiefly, however, drawn from Camden. Acute in his emendations of texts, they were not, however, slightly tinged by an over-refining pedantry at the cost of his taste; and as his judgment was the infirmest of his faculties, in his enthusiasm for an historical illustration of Spenser, he seems often encumbered by his knowledge striking out similitudes and parallels; a few appear not infelicitous, but many are suggested in the licentiousness of vague conjecture, or left half in the light and half in the dark. His “Critical Observations on Shakspeare” remind one of Bentley’s “slashing” of Milton. Dr. Johnson has been censured for the severity of his character of Upton; I know not whether the doctor ever attended to Upton’s Commentary on Spenser; he has, however, admirably hit off a prominent feature of our critic. “Every cold”—in Upton’s case I would rather say warm—“empiric, when his heart is expanded by a successful experiment, swells into a theorist.”
“In one sense,” says Upton, “you are in Fairy-Land, yet in another you may be in the British dominions.” And further, “where the moral allusion is not apparent, you must look for an historical allusion.” Such are the fundamental positions of the allegorical theory, by which a conjectural historian designs to unveil the secret sense of a romantic epic; the poet, according to him, having frigidly descended into the historiographer of the court of Elizabeth, rather than of the court of the Faery Queen—to catch “the Cynthias of the minute,” and to waste his colours on their evanescent portraits.
And amusing it is to watch the historical conjecturer of a romantic poem perilously creeping along the dark passages of secret history; but he is often at a stand. In “the palpable obscure,” the historical reality, which he seems to be touching, suddenly disappears under his grasp. We have no golden key to open the occult chamber, where we are told so many knights and ladies lie entranced near two centuries in their magical sleep, and where, amid the shadowiness, the historical necromancer promptly furnishes us with their very names, recognising all these enchanted persons by their very attitudes.
One of his most felicitous conjectures regards “the gentle squire Timias” as the poet’s honoured friend, Sir Walter Rawleigh. Sir Walter once incurred the disgrace of the Queen by a criminal amour with one of the maids of honour; he was for some time banished the court; but the injury to the lady was expiated by marriage. The private history we are to look for in the Allegory. Timias offends Belphœbe the patroness of Chastity, and the Queen of England, who surprised “the gentle squire” in a very suspicious attitude of tenderness with Amoret. This lady was suffering from violence, having been “rapt by greedie Lust,” and the gentle squire himself had partaken of the mischance, in encountering that savage. Timias; the knight, is seen—
| From her fair eyes wiping the dewy wet, Which softly slid; and kissing them atween, And handling soft the hurts which she did get. |
Belphœbe on the sudden appears, and indignantly exclaims—
| “Is this the Faith?” she said, and said no more; But turn’d her face, and fled away for evermore. |
In a romantic scene,[5] “the gentle squire” in banishment is wasted with grief, so as not to be recognised by his friends; his lone companion is a turtle-dove, a magical and sympathizing bird, who entices Belphœbe, that Sovereign Chastity, to pursue its playful flight, till it leads her to the cell of the miserable man from whom she had so long averted her face, and Timias recovers her favour.