Which when he knew, and felt our feeble hearts
Emboss'd with bale, and bitter-biting grief,
Which love had launced with his deadly darts,
With wounding words, and terms of foul reprief,
He plucked from us all hope of due relief;
That erst us held in love of ling'ring life;
Then hopeless, heartless, 'gan the cunning thief
Persuade us die, to stint all further strife:
To me he lent this rope, to him a rusty knife.
The following is the picture.
The darksome cave they enter, where they find,
That cursed man, low sitting on the ground,
Musing full sadly in his sullen mind;
His greasy locks, long growing and unbound,
Disordered hung about his shoulders round,
And hid his face; through which his hollow eyne,
Look'd deadly dull, and stared as astound;
His raw bone cheeks thro' penury and pine,
Were shrunk into his jaws, as he did never dine,
His garments nought, but many ragged clouts,
With thorns together pinn'd and patched was,
The which his naked sides he wrapt abouts;
And him beside, there lay upon the grass
A dreary corse, whose life away did pass,
All wallowed in his own, yet luke-warm blood,
That from his wound yet welled fresh alas;
In which a rusty knife fast fixed stood,
And made an open passage for the gushing flood.
It would perhaps be an injury to Spenser to dismiss his Life without a few remarks on that great work of his which has placed him among the foremost of our poets, and discovered so elevated and sublime a genius. The work I mean is his allegorical poem of the Fairy Queen.
Sir William Temple in his essay on poetry, says, "that the religion of the Gentiles had been woven into the contexture of all the ancient poetry with an agreeable mixture, which made the moderns affect to give that of christianity a place also in their poems; but the true religion was not found to become fictitious so well as the false one had done, and all their attempts of this kind seemed, rather to debase religion than heighten poetry. Spenser endeavoured to supply this with morality, and to make instruction, instead of story the subject of an epic poem. His execution was excellent, and his flights of fancy very noble and high. But his design was poor; and his moral lay so bare, that it lost the effect. It is true, the pill was gilded, but so thin that the colour and the taste were easily discovered.—Mr. Rymer asserts, that Spenser may be reckoned the first of our heroic poets. He had a large spirit, a sharp judgment, and a genius for heroic poetry, perhaps above any that ever wrote since Virgil, but our misfortune is, he wanted a true idea, and lost himself by following an unfaithful guide. Tho' besides Homer and Virgil he had read Tasso, yet he rather suffered himself to be misled by Ariosto, with whom blindly rambling on marvels and adventures, he makes no conscience of probability; all is fanciful and chimerical, without any uniformity, or without any foundation in truth; in a word his poem is perfect Fairy-Land. Thus far Sir William Temple, and Mr. Rymer; let us now attend to the opinion of a greater name. Mr. Dryden in his dedication of Juvenal, thus proceeds: The English have only to boast of Spenser and Milton in heroic poetry, who neither of them wanted either genius or learning to have been perfect poets, and yet both of them are liable to many censures; for there is no uniformity in the design of Spenser; he aims at the accomplishment of no one action; he raises up a hero for every one of his adventures, and endows each of them with some particular moral virtue, which renders them all equal, without subordination or preference: Every one is valiant in his own legend; only we must do him the justice to observe, that magnanimity, which is the character of prince Arthur, shines throughout the whole poem, and succours the rest when they are in distress. The original of every knight was then living in the court of Queen Elizabeth; and he attributed to each of them that virtue which he thought was most conspicuous in them; an ingenious piece of flattery, tho' it turned not much to his account. Had he lived to finish his poem in the remaining legends, it had certainly been more of a piece; but could not have been perfect because the model was not true. But prince Arthur, or his chief patron Sir Philip Sidney, dying before him, deprived the poet both of means and spirit to accomplish his design. For the rest, his obsolete language, and ill choice of his stanza, are faults both of the second magnitude; for notwithstanding the first, he is still intelligible, at least after a little practice, and for the last he is more to be admired, that labouring under such disadvantages, his verses are so numerous, so various, and so harmonious, that only Virgil, whom he has professedly imitated, has surpassed him among the Romans, and only Waller among the English."
Mr. Hughes in his essay on allegorical poetry prefixed to Spenser's works, tells us, that this poem is conceived, wrought up, and coloured with stronger fancy, and discovers more the particular genius of Spenser, than any of his other writings; and having observed that Spenser in a letter to Sir Walter Raleigh calls it, a continued allegory, or dark conceit, he gives us some remarks on allegorical poetry in general, defining allegory to be a fable or story, in which, under imaginary persons or things, is shadowed some real action or instructive moral, or as I think, says he, it is somewhere very shortly defined by. Plutarch; it is that, in which one thing is, related, and another thing understood; it is a kind of poetical picture, or hieroglyphick, which by its apt resemblance, conveys instruction to the mind, by an analogy to the senses, and so amuses the fancy while it informs the understanding. Every allegory has therefore two senses, the literal and mystical, the literal sense is like a dream or vision, of which the mystical sense is the true meaning, or interpretation. This will be more clearly apprehended by considering, that as a simile is a more extended metaphor, so an allegory is a kind of continued simile, or an assemblage of similitudes drawn out at full length.
The chief merit of this poem, no doubt, consists in that surprising vein of fabulous invention, which runs through it, and enriches it every where with imagery and descriptions, more than we meet with in any other modern poem. The author seems to be possessed of a kind of poetical magic, and the figures he calls up to our view rise so thick upon us, that we are at once pleased and distracted with the exhaustless variety of them; so that his faults may in a manner be imputed to his excellencies. His abundance betrays him into excess, and his judgment is over-born by the torrent of his imagination. That which seems the most liable to exception in this work is the model of it, and the choice the author has made of so romantic a story. The several books rather appear like so many several poems, than one entire fable. Each of them has its peculiar knight, and is independent of the rest; and tho' some of the persons make their appearance in different books, yet this has very little effect in concealing them. Prince Arthur is indeed the principal person, and has therefore a share given him in every legend; but his part is not considerable enough in any one of them. He appears and vanishes again like a spirit, and we lose sight of him too soon to consider him as the hero of the poem. These are the most obvious defects in the fable of the Fairy Queen. The want of unity in the story makes it difficult for the reader to carry it in his mind, and distracts too much his attention to the several parts of it; and indeed the whole frame of it would appear monstrous, were it to be examined by the rules of epic poetry, as they have been drawn from the practice of Homer and Virgil; but as it is plain, the author never designed it by these rules, I think it ought rather to be called a poem of a particular kind, describing in a series of allegorical adventures, or episodes, the most noted virtues and vices. To compare it therefore with the models of antiquity, would be like drawing a parallel between the Roman and Gothic architecture. In the first, there is doubtless a more natural grandeur and simplicity; in the latter, we find great mixtures of beauty and barbarism, yet assisted by the invention of a variety of inferior ornaments; and tho' the former is more majestic in the whole, the latter may be very surprizing and agreeable in its parts.
[Footnote 1: Hughes's Life of Spencer, prefixed to the edition of our author's works.]
[Footnote 2: Hughes ubi supra,]