But in him,
also, moral beauty is in full harmony with the beauty of art and the
senses. Spenser was a Puritan, but a Puritan of the earlier English
Renaissance, to whom the foes of righteousness were also the foes of
external loveliness. Of the three fierce Saracen brother-knights who
repeatedly appear in the service of Evil, two are Sansloy, the enemy of
law, and Sansfoy, the enemy of religion, but the third is Sansjoy, enemy of
pleasure. And of external beauty there has never been a more gifted lover
than Spenser. We often feel, with Lowell, that 'he is the pure sense of the
beautiful incarnated.' The poem is a romantically luxuriant wilderness of
dreamily or languorously delightful visions, often rich with all the
harmonies of form and motion and color and sound. As Lowell says, 'The true
use of Spenser is as a gallery of pictures which we visit as the mood takes
us, and where we spend an hour or two, long enough to sweeten our
perceptions, not so long as to cloy them.' His landscapes, to speak of one
particular feature, are usually of a rather vague, often of a vast nature,
as suits the unreality of his poetic world, and usually, since Spenser was
not a minute observer, follow the conventions of Renaissance literature.
They are commonly great plains, wide and gloomy forests (where the trees of
many climates often grow together in impossible harmony), cool caves--in
general, lonely, quiet, or soothing scenes, but all unquestionable portions
of a delightful fairyland.
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