tended to do. It may be readily admitted that the "Faerie Queene" wants the unity of plan which is regarded as essential to the epic. It is broken. into many parts, and the design, as stated by the poet in the preface, lacks fulfilment in the verse. Prince Arthur is far too insubstantial and shadowy a personage to form the hero of the poem, and Spenser is assuredly not happy in representing his "Faerie Queene" as "glory in general and Queen Elizabeth in particular." "There are a hundred faults in this thing, and a hundred things might be said to prove them beauties," writes Goldsmith of his immortal "Vicar of Wakefield;" and a similar judgment may be passed on the "Faerie Queene." Some of these faults may be mentioned. Spenser's plan was too vast to be carried out satisfactorily, and it is probably a gain to the reader that some of the promised books were never written, or are lost. As it is, there are six books and a portion of a seventh, instead of the twelve books designed by the poet, and each book, it has been justly said, may be considered as almost amounting in quantity to an ordinary epic. The vast length of the poem is unfavourable to vigour of language and compression of thought, although sometimes the force of the style is as conspicuous as its beauty, and what the poet himself calls its "dark conceit" is an obstacle to the reader's enjoyment. On his choice of allegory something more shall be said presently, but it may be observed here that Spen ser's explanation of his purpose in the long letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, prefixed to the work, proves that he foresaw the necessity of furnishing a key to his "dark sayings." A poem that does not tell its own story is, in a measure, defective as a work of art. Another fault due to the construction of the work is the abstract nature of the characters. Unlike Shakespeare's men and women of flesh and blood, who are as real to us as the people with whom we have clasped hands, Spenser's shadowy personages represent vices and virtues, and finely drawn though they be, lack a human interest. The adventures of his heroes, who are pledged to relieve the distresses of forlorn damsels, are the adventures of knights-errant; but the moral purpose of the poem gives to every exploit a sacred significance. Thus chivalry and religion are linked together; and Spenser's warriors are bound —as we also are bound by our baptismal vows-to resist the world, the flesh and the devil, and to continue Christ's faithful soldiers and servants unto their lives' end. But the scheme even as conceived by the author is not clearly maintained, and while pouring forth the wealth of his imagination, and revelling in splendid imagery, Spenser frequently forgets his purpose as an allegorist and moral teacher. On this point Dean Church writes so clearly that I am glad to substitute his words for my own. The poem, says Spenser's latest critic and biographer-"is really a collection of separate tales and allegories as much as the 'Arabian Nights,' or as its counterpart and rival of our own century, the 'Idylls of the King.' As a whole it is confusing; but we need not treat it as a whole. Its continued interest soon breaks down. But it is probably best that Spenser gave his mind the vague freedom which suited it, and that he did not make efforts to tie himself down to his pre-arranged but too ambitious plan. We can hardly lose our way in it, for there is no way to lose. It is a wilderness in which we are left to wander. But there may be interest and pleasure in a wilderness if we are prepared for the wandering. Still the complexity, or rather the uncared-for and clumsy arrangement of the poem, is matter which disturbs a reader's satisfaction till he gets accustomed to the poet's way and resigns himself to it. It is a heroic poem in which the heroine who gives her name to it never appears; a story of which the basis and starting-point is whimsically withheld for disclosure in the last book, which was never written." Another objection often made to the "Faerie Queene" is the archaic character of the language. Spenser is in the habit of using words that had ceased to be used in his own day. He goes to Chaucer for old forms, wishing probably to fix them permanently in our English tongue. Poets are makers in two senses. They give a shape to imaginative conceptions, and they form the language in which they write. It was therefore by no means unreasonable of Spenser, the first poet worthy to be named as the successor of Chaucer, to endeavour as far as he might, to recall words and expressions that had fallen out of use. But he was too daring in this exploit; for not only did he employ obsolete words, he also invented words with a contemptuous disregard of precedent or grammar, in order to suit the exigencies of rhyme. These eccentricities, although hurtful to the poet's fame, interfere but little with the pleasure of his readers, who, if they cannot sometimes explain a word, can always guess at a meaning. Dean Church has pointed out another fault in Spenser's poetry, which unhappily he shares in common with the poets of his own and of the next two centuries. The adulation of monarchs has been until of late years the glaring vice of poets. The disease was at its height in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and Spenser, a great poet, offended greatly. This at least may be said, that there was more reasonableness in his flattery, absurd though it sometimes appears, than in the stupendous adulation lavished by smaller poets upon the Stuarts and Georges. Another count brought against the "Faerie Queene" is the offensiveness of the imagery sometimes employed by the poet. Spenser can excite the strongest feelings of disgust, and does this in such forcible language that the reader is compelled to remember what he would fain forget. All great poets, however, know how much in their art, as in the art of the painter, may be effected by contrast. The presentation of a disagreeable scene makes the reader all the more ready to welcome a scene of beauty; and Spenser, who is pre-eminently the poet of the beautiful, no doubt used repulsive imagery as a foil to the incomparable loveliness of the passages in which his genius expands most freely. In vivid power of representation and a belief in what he sees, Spenser has been compared to Homer. He is like him in the directness and force of his imagery, in his simplicity and homeliness, in the faith with which he narrates impossible adventures. To an artificial, world-ridden nature, Spenser may seem childish; he is really childlike, and to him may be applied with more exquisite pertinence, the fine lines which Collins dedicated to Tasso "Prevailing poet! whose undoubting mind Believed the magic wonders which he sung! To many readers the principal stumbling-block in the "Faerie Queene" is the allegory. The modern mind is not attracted by the figurative representation of ideas; and if the "Pilgrim's Progress" continues to be the most popular of books, it is because Bunyan's pictures are regarded as real, because the personations of spiritual agencies speak and move in his pages as if endowed with bodily life. We forget the allegory while reading about Christian and Christiana, Great-heart and Giant Despair, and we may, without much loss, forget the allegory (which, by the way, Spenser himself often forgets) while reading the "Faerie Queene." The student will do well to |