In regard to Spenser, after all these allusions problematical for a succeeding generation, the poet is no longer to be judged by the darkness which has hidden small and fugitive matters. We cannot know the degree which Spenser allowed himself in distant allusions to the court of Elizabeth, or, as the poet himself vaguely said, to “Fairy-land;” he may have promised far more than he would care to perform; for an epical poet must have found the descent into a chronicler of scandalous legends, a portrayer of so many nameless personages, incompatible with the flow and elevation of his themes. And for what was never ascertained in its own age we dare not confide to that mystical vaticinator of past events, a conjectural historian!
Our interpreter of allegory was honest as well as hardy; in truth, he is sometimes startled at the historical revelations which crowd on his mind. It required “the hound’s fine footing,” to borrow the beautiful figure of Spenser himself, for our conjecturer to course in this field of allegory. With great candour he says, “Let us take care we do not overrun our game, or start more game than we are able to catch.” His occasional dilemmas are amusing. He perplexed himself by a discovery that Amoret, whom he had made the lady of Sir Walter Rawleigh, might also have served for Mary Queen of Scots. In this critical crucifixion, he cries in torture, “I will neither affirm nor deny that Amoret is the type of Mary Queen of Scots!” But he had his ecstasies; for on another occasion, having indulged a very extravagant fancy, he exclaims in joyous rapture, “This may show how far types and symbols may be carried!” Yet, with his accustomed candour, he lowers down. “If the reader should think my arguments too flimsy, and extended beyond their due limits, and should laugh
| To see their thrids so thin as spiders frame, And eke so short that seem’d their ends out shortly came, |
let him consider the latitude of interpretation all types and symbolical writings admit.”[7] Truly that latitude has been too often abused on graver subjects than “The Faery Queen;” but the honesty of our mystical interpreter of double senses may plead for the extravagance of his ingenuity whenever he needs our indulgence.
Enough on this curious subject of allegory—this child of darkness among the luminous progeny of fancy. We have shown its changeable nature, and how frequently it fails in unity and clearness; we have demonstrated that “the double sense”—this system of types and symbols—has served as an imposture, since allegories have been deduced from works which were not allegorical, and forced interpretations of an ambiguous sense have led to fallacies which have fatally been introduced into history, into politics, and into theology.
[1] We have a collection of these “Allegoricæ Homericæ.” Even the great Verulam caught the infectious ingenuity; and, in “the wisdom of the ancients,” explains everything with the skill of a great Homeric scholiast.
[2] Berni’s “Bojardo,” canto xxxi. st. 2. He has hardly improved the verse in the “Inferno,” canto ix. ver. 61.—
| O voi ch’avete gl’intelletti sani, Mirate la dottrina che s’asconde, Sotto il velame degli versi strani. |
[3] The “Allegoria dalla Poema” is appended to the ancient editions of Tasso’s “Gerusalemme Liberata.” The one before me is dated Ferrara, 1582. I believe it has been indignantly rejected by modern editors. When we detect Tasso seriously describing Godfrey as the type of the human understanding—Rinaldo, and Tancred, and others, as different faculties of the soul—and the common soldiers as the body of man—we regret that an honourable mind should degrade itself by such literary imposture. At length, having succeeded in imposing on others, he attempted to impose on himself; for he actually commenced a second “Jerusalem” on the allegorical system, and did not more happily succeed in his elder days than our Akenside in his philosophical destruction of his youthful poem.