To feed on flowers and weeds of glorious feature.
The poetical temperament has nowhere been at once so exquisitely defined and illustrated. Among poets, Spenser stands for the temperament personified.
But how did it happen that this lightsome creature, whose only business was
To reign in the air from earth to highest sky,
should have attempted in his greatest work to mix together two such incoherent things as sermon and poem? In the first place, the age out of which a man is born is the mother of his mind, and imprints her own likeness more or less clearly on the features of her child. There are two destinies from which no one can escape, his own idiosyncrasy, and that of the time in which he lives. Or shall we say that where the brain is in flower of its conceptions, the very air is full of thought-pollen, or some wandering bee will bring it, we know not from what far field, to hybridize the fruit?
In Spenser’s time England was just going through the vinous stage of that Puritanic fermentation which became acetous in Milton, and putrefactive in the Fifth Monarchy men. Here was one motive. But, besides this, it is evident that Spenser’s fancy had been colored by the Romances which were popular in his day; and these had all been allegorized by the monks, who turned them into prose. The adventure of the San Grail in the “Morte d’Arthur” reads almost like an extract from the “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Allegories were the fashion, and Spenser put one on as he did a ruff, not because it was the most convenient or becoming thing in the world, but because other people did.
Another reason is probably to be found in the nature of the man himself. The poetical temperament, when it comes down to earth and mingles with men, is conscious of a certain weakness. On the unsubstantial skyey floors of its own ideal world it walks firmly enough, and speaks the native language of the shadowy population there. But there is a knell at which that beautiful land dissolves like the baseless fabric of a vision—and that is the dinner bell. The poetical temperament becomes keenly conscious that it also has a stomach. It must dine, and commonly it likes rather better dinners than other people. To this end it must carry its wares to market where the understanding is master. Will the understanding pay hard money for the flowers of speech! Only what is practical will do there. “Fine words,” grumbles the Understanding proverbially, “butter no parsnips; and then, to make the matter worse, the parsnips are ideal.” “But, my dear sir,” remonstrates Temperament mildly—“Dear me no dears,” growls Understanding. “Everybody must earn his own salt—I do.” “Let me read you my beautiful poem.” “Can’t comprehend a word of it. The only language I know a word of is my old mother tongue, the useful. Look at the towns and ships I’ve built. Nothing ideal there, you’ll find. Ideal, I suppose, is a new-fangled way of spelling idle. It won’t go here.” Suddenly the useful seems a very solid and powerful thing to our poor friend, the Poetic Temperament. It begins to feel a little absurd in talking enthusiasm to such a matter-of-fact generation. The problem is how to translate the ideal into the useful. How shall Master Edmund Spenser make himself comprehensible to Master John Bull? He will try a picture-book, and a moral one, too—he will write an Allegory.
Allegory is the Imagination of the Understanding, or what it supposes to be, which is the same thing. It is the ideal in words of one syllable, illustrated with cuts, and adapted to the meanest comprehension.
Spenser was a good and pure-minded man, and wished probably to combine the sacred office of Teacher with that of Poet. The preaching part of him came afterwards in Jeremy Taylor, who was Spenser with his singing-robes off.
Spenser’s mind was so thoroughly imbued with the beautiful that he makes even the Cave of Mammon a place one would like to live in.