But to return to Spenser; who, as we have seen, had no better way to take in his distress, than to hide his fairy fancies under the mystic cover of moral allegory. The only favourable circumstance that attended him (and this no doubt encouraged, if it did not produce, his untimely project) was, that he was somewhat befriended in these fictions, even when interpreted according to the Letter, by the Romantic Spirit of his age; much countenanced, and for a time brought into fresh credit, by the Romantic Elizabeth. Her inclination for the fancies of Chivalry is well known; and obsequious wits and courtiers would not be wanting, to feed and flatter it. In short, tilts and tournaments were in vogue: the Arcadia and the Fairy Queen were written.
With these helps the new spirit of Chivalry made a shift to support itself for a time, when reason was but dawning, as we may say, and just about to gain the ascendant over the portentous spectres of the imagination. Its growing splendour, in the end, put them all to flight, and allowed them no quarter even among the poets. So that Milton, as fond as we have seen he was of the Gothic fictions, durst only admit them on the bye, and in the way of simile and illustration only.
And this, no doubt, was the main reason of his relinquishing his long-projected design of Prince Arthur, at last, for that of the Paradise Lost; where, instead of Giants and Magicians, he had Angels and Devils to supply him with the marvellous, with greater probability. Yet, though he dropped the tales, he still kept to the allegories of Spenser. And even this liberty was thought too much, as appears from the censure passed on his Sin and Death by the severer critics.
Thus at length the magic of the old Romances was perfectly dissolved. They began with reflecting an image indeed of the feudal manners, but an image magnified and distorted by unskilful designers. Common sense being offended with these perversions of truth and nature (still accounted the more monstrous, as the antient manners, they pretended to copy after, were now disused, and of most men forgotten), the next step was to have recourse to allegories. Under this disguise they walked the world a while; the excellence of the moral and the ingenuity of the contrivance making some amends, and being accepted as a sort of apology, for the absurdity of the literal story.
Under this form the tales of Fairy kept their ground, and even made their fortune at court; where they became, for two or three reigns, the ordinary entertainment of our princes. But reason, in the end (assisted however by party, and religious prejudices), drove them off the scene, and would endure these lying wonders, neither in their own proper shape, nor as masked in figures.
Henceforth, the taste of wit and poetry took a new turn: and the Muse, who had wantoned it so long in the world of fiction, was now constrained, against her will,
“To stoop with disenchanted wings to truth,”
as Sir John Denham somewhere expresses her present enforced state, not unhappily.
What we have gotten by this revolution, you will say, is a great deal of good sense. What we have lost, is a world of fine fabling; the illusion of which is so grateful to the charmed Spirit, that, in spite of philosophy and fashion, Fairy Spenser still ranks highest among the poets; I mean, with all those who are either come of that house, or have any kindness for it.
Earth-born critics, my friend, may blaspheme: