6 guileless innocence of the satiric point of view, but from his conviction that he had something greater to achieve. His high seriousness of purpose did not make him insensible to the humour of others, least of all when that humour was directed against the object of his instinctive reverence. A man is most sensitive where his love is engaged; and Spenser, in his passion for chivalry, was not likely to confound the accents of somewhat cynical amusement with his own sympathetic idealism. It is significant that he takes from Orlando Furioso passage after passage of purely humorous flavour, and moulds them to serve his deeper purpose. He could appreciate Ariosto's distinctive charm at the same time as he realized its essential divergence from his point of view. O gran bontà de' cavalieri antiqui, laughs Ariosto in good-humoured raillery at a situation which illustrates with more than usual piquancy the unreal aspects of the chivalric ideal. Spenser borrows from the situation all except its absurdity, and breaks forth in accents of genuine enthusiasm. O goodly vsage of those antique times, In which the sword was seruant vnto right; Let later age that noble vse enuie, Vile rancour to auoid, and cruell surquedrie. (III. i. 13.) He found much in Ariosto which was a mocking challenge to his idealism. He accepted the challenge, and met it by transmuting the mockery into a triumphant expression of his faith. Nowhere is Spenser's independence in spirit and treatment, in all truly poetic qualities, more clearly asserted than where his matter owes to Ariosto an obvious debt. Here at least he was confident that he would' overgo' the Orlando Furioso.1 In 1582, when Spenser was already 'well entered upon' the Faerie Queene, Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata made its appearance, and threatened to eclipse the fame of Orlando Furioso as the modern rival to the epics of Homer and Virgil. Spenser read it eagerly. Its more rigid construction, which later led Hurd, in his Letters on Chivalry, to regard it as trimming between the classic and the Gothic manner', strengthened him in his desire to make his plot closely dependent upon his moral design; whilst its greater dignity of tone, its sincerity of sentiment, its patent seriousness both of style and manner, responded more fully to his own conception of a poet's calling. He found the Gerusalemme Liberata far less suggestive of incident and situation than the Orlando Furioso; but where, as in his description of the Bower of Bliss, he borrowed from 1 Cf. Spenser and Ariosto, by R. E. Neil Dodge (Mod. Lang. Assoc. Am., 1897). 1 it, he had no need to change the spirit of his original. It was his aim in the Faerie Queene to combine something of Ariosto's exuberance with the poetic temper of Tasso. The passion for dignified and worthy precedent, which led him to compare his poem with the works of Homer, Virgil, Ariosto, and Tasso, referred him for his ethical framework to that philosopher whose name was still held in the highest reverence-the twelve moral vertues as Aristotle bath devised. But he has no intention of fettering his imagination by too literal a subservience. Even if Aristotle's virtues be twelve in number, they are certainly not the twelve which Spenser desired to treat, and it is highly probable that epic propriety rather than philosophic analysis determined the number.1 From Aristotle, indeed, he takes some hints in his treatment of incontinence, and in his review of the different aspects of friendship; but his chief debt is to be traced in his analysis of virtue into separate, though at times barely distinguishable, virtues, and in the conception of one, μeyaλovvxía, called by Spenser Magnificence, which in a measure presupposes the possession of them all. On that conception he moulded his plot as he expounds it in the letter to Sir W. Ralegh. Prince Arthur has seen in a vision Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, and, ravished by her beauty, resolves to seek her out in faery land; the adventures that befall him on the way are to form the main plot, and to serve as connecting links to bind the whole together. Now the Faerie Queene has an annual feast which lasts twelve days, and on each day she sends forth a knight to aid some suppliant who has come to beg a champion from her court. It so falls that the redress of each wrong calls for the exercise of a separate virtue. To the adventures of each knight a book is principally to be devoted; and in the fortunes of each, Arthur, still in quest of his lady, is in some measure to bear a part, thus gaining experience in all that befits a perfect character. Guided partly by that precedent of classical epic which Ariosto had been blamed for neglecting, partly by the desire to make his description of the court of Gloriana the climax to his poem, Spenser plunges at once in medias res, and begins his story with the adventures of his first knight. Critics have blamed him because in the first place he found need to explain his poem in an introductory letter, and because in the second his explanation does not tally with its later progress. They forget that the letter was written when only the first three books of the projected twelve were given to the world, and that the explanation was only necessary because the poem was incomplete. And they fail to recognize that no artist is bound down to the rigid scheme on which he first conceived his work. 1 M. Jusserand (Mod. Phil., January 1906) suggests that Spenser was indebted for his idea to Piccolomini's treatise, Della Institutione morale di tutta la vita dell' uomo (1542), wherein special attention is paid to the moral virtues, of which he speaks in a phrase identical with Spenser's, ' l'undici virtù morali che pone Aristotele', save that he mentions eleven virtues instead of twelve. An artistic plot is not something that can be worked out like a geometric design, beforehand, but the living product of characters and ideas. It often develops with a vitality that seems organic, and independent of the author's deliberate intention. At first, indeed, Spenser adhered closely enough to his proposed method. In Book I, of Holinesse, the Red Cross Knight sets forth as the champion of Una, or Truth, to slay the old Dragon that is devastating her father's country. In her company he fights a successful battle against the monster Error, but he is soon led by the arch deceiver Archimago, the impersonation of Guile and Fraud, to distrust the integrity of his lady and take Duessa in her stead. Enamoured of false Religion, he is able to defeat the pagan knights Sans Foy and Sans Joy, but he falls an easy victim to Orgoglio, the Giant of Pride. Una brings to his aid the divine strength of Arthur; but though rescued from the sin of Pride he is weakened by suffering and remorse, and narrowly escapes the toils of Despayre. It is only after dwelling in the House of Holinesse and learning there the full meaning of the Christian faith that he gains strength to overcome the Dragon, and becomes worthy to wed with Una. The story of Book II is shaped by Spenser's idea of the psychological development of the human character striving after moral control. Sir Guyon, seeing in the fates of Amavia and Mordaunt the dangers of intemperance, learns in the Castle of Medina that the secret of virtue is moderation. What his intellect has grasped is soon put to proof in his own emotional experience. His first serious encounter is with Furor, and he has next to deal with the embroilments of Atin. He manfully overcomes these violent passions of anger and malignity, only to be seduced for a while by idle pleasures. But Spenser clearly regards his defection with sympathetic tolerance; and Sir Guyon suffers no great hurt from his short passage with irresponsible Mirth upon the lake of Idlenesse. He returns to his more strenuous journey, and visiting the cave of Mammon, is called upon to grapple with the passion of Avarice. He escapes, but so strong are the evil temptations of the world that he falls into a deadly swoon, and is despoiled of his armour by the sons of Acrates. Prince Arthur comes to his rescue, and together they enter the House of Alma. Here Guyon receives a fuller teaching than the merely intellectual guidance of Medina. For Alma is the human soul in perfect command over the body. The final canto depicts Guyon's resistance of the supreme temptations of the sensuous life. Those who blame Spenser for lavishing the resources of his art upon this canto, and filling it with magic beauty, have never been at the heart of the experience that it shadows. It is from the ravishing loveliness of all that surrounds and leads to the Bower of Acrasia that she herself draws her almost irresistible power. When Guyon has bound Acrasia and destroyed the Bower of Bliss, he has achieved his last and hardest victory, and is sealed as the true knight of Temperance. These first two books are alike in their simple design. In each a single knight, representing a particular virtue, brings his quest to a successful issue, and in each Prince Arthur plays a well defined and significant rôle.1 But in the second of them we see signs of a different handling, not only in the more intimate human psychology, but also in the introduction of characters, like Braggadocchio and Belphoebe, who are irrelevant to the main plot. In the third and fourth books this change in the conduct of the poem is so far developed as to break the pattern of the original design. Spenser's canvas becomes more crowded. He realizes that the mere presence of Arthur in each book is not enough to save his poem from falling into twelve separate romances; he feels the need of a closer interdependence; and desires not only to keep in sight those heroes whose mission is already fulfilled,2 but also to introduce others whose main achievements are to be his subsequent theme. His action, therefore, becomes more complicated. He starts adventures, but keeps the reader in suspense as to their issue, and as far as mere narrative is concerned he seems to be treating his plot with all the daring inconsequence of Ariosto. But to argue from this impression that Spenser was writing at random, and, grown weary of his allegory, was using his poem as a mere receptacle for any casual and irrelevant thought or incident, is to draw a false conclusion. For this modification of his plan was suggested by the nature of the virtues that he came in these books to interpret; and the allegory only becomes more intricate because, in dealing with Love and Friendship, it must adapt itself to the complex realities of life. The position of women in society had lately undergone a significant change. At the court of Elizabeth women no longer received an empty homage which excluded them from all the more serious interests of life. Their culture, their education, their artistic accomplishments, enabled them to share in the intellectual life of their time: they were not merely lovers, they had become companions and friends. At the same time, the veneration in which the Middle Ages had professed to hold them, though it was often a transparent cloak for contempt, had received new life from the teaching of the Platonists, whose doctrines, as set forth for example in the Courtier of Castiglione, had a wide vogue among the more thoughtful men of the time. Love was to them the expression of the yearning of the soul after true beauty. They recognized its physical basis, but saw in 'sensuall covetynge the lowermost steppe in the stayers by the whiche a man may ascende to true love'. Beautie, said Bembo in the Courtier,3 was good, and consequently the true love of it is most good, holy, and evermore bringeth forth good frutes in the soules of them, that with the It is worth noticing, as illustrative of the care with which Spenser arranged his plot, that the part played by Arthur, important as it is as a first climax in the general allegorical development, is described in the eighth canto of each book, except in Book III, where, as Britomart is herself invulnerable, Arthur finds no organic place. 2 This, indeed, begins în Book II, into which the Red Cross Knight enters. Castiglione's Courtier, translated by Hoby 1561. Ed. Tudor Translations, PP. 345, 346. 3 brydle of reason restrayne the yll disposition of sense'. The interaction of Platonic theory and personal experience is responsible for much of the portraiture of woman in Elizabethan literature. Thus the Arcadia differs from earlier romances both in the prominence and the variety of its heroines. And Spenser, the friend of Sidney, had long been an ardent Platonist. His early hymns to Love and Beauty, are the completest expression in our literature of the doctrines of Bembo and Ficino, and in the Shepheardes Calender he had voiced the same conviction. Like all lovers of beauty he was keenly susceptible to the influence of women, and if we may judge by the dedications of his poems he had found in their company both friendship and understanding. The virtue of Chastity, therefore, appears to him in a widely different form from that in which it was celebrated either by the mediaeval saint, or in the knightly conventions of the Courts of Love. Chastity to Spenser is no monastic virtue, the mere escape from all the temptations of the flesh. This aspect of the matter had already been treated in the triumph of Sir Guyon over the wiles of Acrasia, and could easily have been elaborated by a rigid adherence to the original scheme of the poem. To Spenser it has a far wider significance, it is the key to the intercourse of man and woman in all the relationships of life. It is, in fact, inseparable from some aspects of friendship; and the alteration of the close of Book III, so as to hold in suspense the fates of Scudamour and Amoret, was designed to bring out more clearly the close kinship of these two virtues, based as they both are on physical instinct, and potent alike either for good or evil, according to the spiritual quality of the character in which they worked. Wonder it is to see, in diuerse minds, How diuersly loue doth his pageants play, And shewes his powre in variable kinds. (III. V. I.) This diversity, wherein lies at once the interest and the ethical significance of the study, could not be shown by dwelling exclusively upon the fortunes of one hero and heroine. It calls for a fuller canvas, in which the ideal may be presented in different types of character, and may be seen in relation with characters who illustrate its variable kinds. Britomart, Amoret, Belphoebe, Florimel, are all types of 'Chastity', but are essentially different And no student of life can doubt that Spenser is right in giving prominence to a heroine rather than a hero. He has been blamed because the adventure assigned to Scudamour is in reality achieved by Britomart, who thus becomes the dominant figure in the legend of Chastity. But he had seen enough of life to realize where man, for all his heroism and nobility, was likely to be found the weakest, and where he must turn for aid, not to other men, but to the noblest type of womanhood. And so he conceives of Scudamour as a man of high courage, in many respects a noble knight, and certainly a sincere lover, yet unable, without the help of Britomart, |