The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume III. Renascence and Reformation.
§ 14. Spenser as a word-painter and as a metrical musician
The medium of allegory through which he viewed the institution of knighthood, while it deprived The Faerie Queene of human interest and unity of action, gave fine scope for the exercise of the imaginative powers peculiar to the poet. As a poetical painter, using words and rhythms in the place of external form and colour, he is, perhaps, unrivalled. We pass through his scenes, laid in the “delightful land of Faerie,” as through an enchanted landscape, in which a dream-like succession of pageants, and dissolving views of forests, lakes, castles, caves and palaces, each suggesting some spiritual meaning, and, at the same time, raising in the fancy a concrete image, relieve the tedium of the journey. “An ampler ether, a diviner air,” diffused by his imagination over the whole prospect, blends the most dissimilar objects in a general effect of harmony; and so exquisite is the chiaroscuro of the composition that no sense of discord is felt in the transition from the celestial hierarchy to “Cupido on the Idaean hill,” from woodland satyrs to the mount of heavenly contemplation, from Una, the abstract symbol of Christian truth, to Belphoebe, the half-pagan anti-type of the chaste Elizabeth. At the same time, each portion of the picture is brought into relief by the firmness of the outlines and the richness of the colouring, fine examples of which are the cave of Despair and the masque of the Seven Deadly Sins, in the first book, the house of Mammon and the bower of Bliss in the second. In these two books, as the spiritual sense is more emphatic, the allegorical imagery abounds: with the progress of the poem, the allegory dwindles, and adventures become proportionately more frequent; but, even in the third and fourth books, the poet always seems to diverge with pleasure into picturesque descriptions, such as that of the witch’s cottage, in canto
Besides the imagination of a great word-painter, Spenser brought to the expression of his allegory the gifts of a skilful metrical musician. As in The Shepheards Calender, so in The Faerie Queene, it was his object to invent a kind of poetical dialect suitable to the unreal nature of his subject. Effects of strangeness and antiquity, mingled with modern elegance, are produced, in the later poem, partly by the revival of old words and the importation of foreign ones, partly by the musical disposition of words in the line, partly by combinations of rime, in a stanza of his own invention, constructed, by the addition of an alexandrine verse, out of the ten-syllabled eight-lined stanza used by Chaucer. The character of his vocabulary and of his syntax may be exemplified in the following stanza:
The idea of simplicity mingled with archaism here aimed at is also raised by the avoidance of anything like a precise search for epithets in those classical combinations of adjective and substantive which he frequently employs. His epithets are generally of the conventional kind—“busy care,” “bloody might,” “huge great balance,” etc. He also uses deliberately archaic forms, such as “to achieven” for “to achieve,” “worldës” for “world’s,” and the like. The frequent use of inversions, such as “him assayld,” “his sword forth drew,” is, in part, the result of conscious archaism; but it is also the natural consequence of the recurrence of rime. This recurrence, again, suggested to Spenser many characteristic effects of sound: he saw, for example, that the immediate sequence of rime in the fourth and fifth lines provided a natural half-way house for a turn in the rhetoric of the sentence; so that the fifth line is used, generally, either as the close of the first stage in the stanza, or the beginning of the second; but he is very skilful in avoiding monotony, and will often run a single sentence through the stanza, or will break up the stanza into as many parts as there are lines, e.g.
These metrical combinations and permutations are often employed very beautifully in pathetic passages:
Throughout the various examples here given, it will be noticed that alliteration plays an important part in the composition of the general effect. Spenser would not have deigned to include himself among those whom his commentator E. K. calls “the rakehelly rout of our ragged rymers (for so themselves use to hunt the letter)”; but he knew that alliteration was in the genius of the English language, and he was the first to show its capacities for those liquid sequences of labial letters, carried through a rhythmical sentence, by means of which Milton afterwards produced his effects of verbal harmony.