inspired lines sum up far better than any prose criticism can do, his essential quality: Sweet Spenser moving through his clouded heaven With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace. To him the significance of the situations that he describes and his attitude with regard to them were more than the situations themselves; the music in which his imagination phrased them was a part of their significance. To admit this is to deny him a supreme place among narrative poets, even among those whose narrative is romance; and readers who love a story for its own sake will often find him tedious, and turn with relief to Ariosto, Byron, or Scott. Spenser is never outside his subject, delighting in a spectacle of movement or of passion, allowing to his creation the irresponsible freedom of actual life, and curbed only by life's capricious laws. All that he creates is alike moulded and controlled by his personal emotions, and is deeply charged with his own reflection.) The world of reality was profoundly dissatisfying to him; it was filled with baffling contradictions, where splendour clashed with meanness, and high endeavour was tainted with base self-seeking. As a man he was ready to play his part in it, and the part he played was courageous and noble, worthy of his ideals. But as an artist it was his aim to escape from it, into the delightful land of his dream, whose ways Are so exceeding spacious and wide that his travel never wearies him—a land of clear spiritual vision, in which truth is always sure of triumph, and the fierce conflicts of earth are heard faintly as from a distance, hardly disturbing the enchanted atmosphere of serene beauty. Here it was that his art found its home, with careless Quiet Wrapped in eternall silence, farre from enemyes; and when his voice broke in upon this paradise of his imagination' Silence was pleased'. |