Of Nature’s riches, in her beauties placed,
And there in contemplation feed desire,
Which till it wonder, is not rightly graced;
For those sweet glories, which you do aspire,
Must, as idea’s, only be embraced,
Since excellence in other forme enjoyed,
Is by descending to her saints destroyed.”
The love of the idea of beauty, however, in its absolute nature is nowhere present in the mass of love lyrics written between 1590 and 1600. The term is used to give title to Drayton’s “Idea,” and to denominate the object of twelve sonnets addressed by Craig to “Idea”; and anagrams on the French word for the term L’Idée, Diella and Delia, are used to name two series of poems by Linche and Samuel Daniel, respectively. Crashaw’s “Wishes” is addressed to “his (supposed) mistresse,” as an idea. No better commentary on the whole movement can be made than these words of Spenser in which it is easily seen how the method conduced only to feeding the lower desires of the soul in love. Writing in 1596, in the midst of the period when sonnet writing was most popular in England, he says, speaking of his two “Hymnes”:
“Having in the greener times of my youth, composed these former two Hymnes in the praise of Love and beautie, and finding that the same too much pleased those of like age and disposition, which being too vehemently caried with that kind of affection, do rather sucke out poyson to their strong passion, then hony to their honest delight, I was moved ... to call in the same. But being unable so to doe, by reason that many copies thereof were formerly scattered abroad, I resolved at least to amend, and by way of retraction to reforme them, making in stead of those two Hymnes of earthly or naturall love and beautie, two others of heavenly and celestiall.”
The great representative of Platonism in English poetry thus condemns the less vital phase of Platonic thought. The great weakness of the theory lay in the fact that it had no moral significance; and just here lay the great strength of Plato’s ethics. Although preaching that beauty was a spiritual thing, this phase of Platonic æsthetics never blended with the conception of the beauty of moral goodness. And it failed to do this because it is a theory not of Plato but of Plotinus, who throughout the period of the Renaissance was understood to expound the true meaning of Plato’s thought. But Plato left no system of æsthetics; Plotinus, however, constructed a theory to account for beauty in its strictest sense. Now Ficino in his propaganda of Platonic theory throughout the Renaissance interpreted Plato’s “Symposium” in the light of Plotinus and thus in his commentary, the source of all Renaissance theorizing on love, is found the theory reflected in the English poets. This fusion of Plato’s ethics with the æsthetics of Plotinus was not perfect; and to the deep moral genius of Spenser’s mind the disparity soon became evident.