Spensers The Faerie Queene | Page 6

their wrongs. The ideal knight, Prince Arthur, is the central male figure of the poem. He is enamoured of Gloriana, having seen her in a wondrous vision, and is represented as journeying in quest of her. He appears in all of the legends at opportune moments to succor the knights when they are hard beset or in the power of their enemies. The six extant books contain respectively the legends of (I) the Knight of the Redcrosse, or Holiness, (II) Sir Guyon, the Knight of Temperance, (III) Britomart, the female Knight of Chastity, (IV) Sir Campbell and Sir Triamond, the Knights of Friendship, (V) Sir Artegall, the Knight of Justice, and (VI) Sir Caledore, the Knight of Courtesy. Book I is an allegory of man's relation to God, Book II, of man's relation to himself, Books III, IV, V, and VI, of man's relation to his fellow-man. Prince Arthur, the personification of Magnificence, by which Spenser means Magnanimity (Aristotle's [Greek: megalopsych��a]), is the ideal of a perfect character, in which all the private virtues are united. It is a poem of culture, inculcating the moral ideals of Aristotle and the teachings of Christianity.
2. INFLUENCE OF THE NEW LEARNING.--Like Milton, Gray, and other English poets, Spenser was a scholar familiar with the best in ancient and modern literature. As to Spenser's specific indebtedness, though he owed much in incident and diction to Chaucer's version of the Romance of the Rose and to Malory's Morte d'Arthur, the great epic poets, Tasso and Ariosto, should be given first place. The resemblance of passages in the _Faerie Queene_ to others in the Orlando Furioso_ and the _Jerusalem Delivered is so striking that some have accused the English poet of paraphrasing and slavishly borrowing from the two Italians. Many of these parallels are pointed out in the notes. To this criticism, Mr. Saintsbury remarks: "Not, perhaps, till the Orlando has been carefully read, and read in the original, is Spenser's real greatness understood. He has often, and evidently of purpose, challenged comparison; but in every instance it will be found that his beauties are emphatically his own. He has followed Ariosto only as Vergil has followed Homer, and much less slavishly."
The influence of the New Learning is clearly evident in Spenser's use of classical mythology. Greek myths are placed side by side with Christian imagery and legends. Like Dante, the poet did not consider the Hellenic doctrine of sensuous beauty to be antagonistic to the truths of religion. There is sometimes an incongruous confusion of classicism and medi?valism, as when a magician is seen in the house of Morpheus, and a sorcerer goes to the realm of Pluto. Spenser was guided by a higher and truer sense of beauty than the classical purists know.
A very attractive element of his classicism is his worship of beauty. The Greek conception of beauty included two forms--the sensuous and the spiritual. So richly colored and voluptuous are his descriptions that he has been called the painters' poet, "the Rubens," and "the Raphael of the poets." As with Plato, Spenser's idea of the spiritually beautiful includes the true and the good. Sensuous beauty is seen in the forms of external nature, like the morning mist and sunshine, the rose gardens, the green elders, and the quiet streams. His ideal of perfect sensuous and spiritual beauty combined is found in womanhood. Such a one is Una, the dream of the poet's young manhood, and we recognize in her one whose soul is as fair as her face--an idealized type of a woman in real life who calls forth all our love and reverence.
3. INTERPRETATION OF THE ALLEGORY.--In the sixteenth century it was the opinion of Puritan England that every literary masterpiece should not only give entertainment, but should also teach some moral or spiritual lesson. "No one," says Mr. Patee, "after reading Spenser's letter to Raleigh, can wander far into Spenser's poem without the conviction that the author's central purpose was didactic, almost as much as was Bunyan's in _Pilgrim's Progress." Milton doubtless had this feature of the _Faerie Queene in mind when he wrote in Il Penseroso:--
"And if aught else great bards beside?In sage and solemn tunes have sung?Of turneys, and of trophies hung,?Of forests and enchantments drear,?Where more is meant than meets the ear."
That the allegory of the poem is closely connected with its aim and ethical tendency is evident from the statement of the author that "the generall end therefore of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline. Which for that I conceived should be most plausible and pleasing, being coloured with an historical fiction, the which the most part of men delight to read, rather for varietie of matter then for profite of the ensample." The Faerie Queene