Platonism in English poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

by John Smith Harrison

His partes to reasons rule obedient,

And letteth her that ought the scepter weeld,

All happy peace and goodly government

Is setled there in sure establishment;

There Alma like a virgin Queene most bright,

Doth florish in all beautie excellent:

And to her guestes doth bounteous banket dight,

Attempred goodly well for health and for delight.

(II. xi. 2.)

After this examination of Spenser’s ideals of holiness and temperance, it is clear why Platonism as a system of ethics is absent in the remaining books of the “Faerie Queene.” Spenser’s avowed aim in his poem was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline.” Since he conceives of life as a constant warfare with inward and outward foes, his method of presenting his thought is to send each virtue on a journey during which it is to perfect itself by overcoming the vices to whose assaults it is especially liable. This plan is carefully followed in the first two books. The allegorical scheme is unbroken; the personages encountered by the Knights are objectified states of their own spiritual consciousness. In the remaining books, however, the allegorical scheme has well-nigh broken down; and the poetic method is that of the romantic epic of adventure in the manner of Ariosto. This change was due very largely to the fact that after Spenser had completed his first two books he had exhausted the ethical teachings of Plato; and when he went on to his remaining books, he passed out of the sphere of virtue as taught by Plato into an essentially different realm of thought in which the graces of courtly accomplishment were dignified as virtues. He tried to treat these later virtues of chastity, friendship, justice, courtesy, and constancy as if they were coördinate with the virtues of holiness and temperance. But they fall into a distinct class by themselves. They are the ideals of conduct to be followed when man is acting in his purely social capacity as a member of society. They may be dignified as virtues, but can never be coördinate with the Platonic conception of virtue, which conceives of it not as an outward act, but as the very health of the soul when realizing, unhampered by any disturbing influences, its native impulses toward the good.