by C. S. Lewis
It adds to the poem what might be called depth, or thickness, or density. Because the (improbable) adventure which we are following is liable at any moment to be interrupted by some quite different (improbable) adventure, there steals upon us unawares the conviction that adventures of this sort are going on all round us, that in this vast forest (we are nearly always in a forest) this is the sort of thing that goes on all the time, that it was going on before we arrived and will continue after we have left. We lose the feeling that the stories we are shown were arbitrarily made up by the poet. On the contrary, we are sure there are plenty more which he has not time to show us. We are being given mere selections, specimens: instances of the normal life of that wooded, faerie world. The result of this is an astonishing sense of reality.
The young student should here be warned that the word ‘lifelike’ as applied to literature is ambiguous. It may mean ‘like life as we know it in the real world’; in that sense the dullest character in a realistic novel may be ‘lifelike’; i.e. he is very like some real people and as lifeless as they. On the other hand ‘lifelike’ may mean ‘seeming to have a life of its own’; in that sense Captain Ahab, old Karamazov, Caliban, Br’er Rabbit, and the giant who says ‘fee-fi-fo-fum’ in Jack the Giant-Killer, are all lifelike. Whether we have met anything like them in the real world is irrelevant. Now Spenser’s ‘faerie lond’ is very unlike life in the first sense, but the polyphonic technique makes it extremely lifelike in the second. It is lifelike by its consistency—all the adventures bear the stamp of the world that produced them, have the right flavour, make each other probable; in its apparent planlessness—they collide, and get mixed up with one another and drift apart, just as events would in a real world; in its infinity—we can, so obviously, never get to the end of them, there are so obviously more and more, round the next corner. That is why Keats in his sonnet ‘To Spenser’ speaks of one who loved The Faerie Queene as ‘a forester deep in thy midmost trees’. There is forest, and more forest, wherever you look: you cannot see out of that world, just as you cannot see out of this.
(2) The allegory or ‘inner meaning’ of The Faerie Queene is generally regarded as twofold: a ‘moral’ or ‘philosophical’ allegory, and a ‘historical’ or ‘political’ allegory. The first is clear, certain, essential; the second obscure, often doubtful, and poetically of little importance. Spenser himself in his prefatory ‘Letter’ to Raleigh has told us that Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, means (in a certain sense) Queen Elizabeth; James I complained that Duessa was obviously Mary Queen of Scots; and there are places, in the worst parts of the worst Book (v), where the allegory about foreign affairs becomes unmistakable. Apart from these few equivalences, interpretation of the historical allegory is controversial and speculative. I myself (here differing from many scholars whom I respect) regard it with a good deal of scepticism. Some published fantasies of my own have had foisted on them (often by the kindliest critics) so many admirable allegorical meanings that I never dreamed of as to throw me into doubt whether it is possible for the wit of man to devise anything in which the wit of some other man cannot find, and plausibly find, an allegory. I do not believe that a consistent and detailed historical allegory (such as we find, say, in Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel) runs through The Faerie Queene. Particular scenes contain, in addition to their moral or philosophical meaning, a parallel to some contemporary event. Probably it does not last beyond the scene in which it occurs: when we meet the same characters in a different scene we need not expect them to have the same (or, necessarily, any) historical meaning. How lightly the whole thing should be taken may be judged from the way in which Spenser himself speaks of it. Gloriana at some points and for some purposes symbolizes Elizabeth, but Elizabeth is also at other points and for other purposes, Bel-phoebe. But in his ‘generall intention’ Gloriana is ‘Glory’; that is her permanent and essential meaning in the poem. The many generations who have read and re-read The Faerie Queene with delight paid very little attention to the historical allegory; the modern student, at his first reading, will be well advised to pay it none at all.
The moral or philosophical meaning is, on the other hand, essential; and fortunately in approaching this we have an advantage which the nineteenth century lacked. Our grandfathers might regard allegory as an arbitrary literary device, a ‘figure’ listed in the books on rhetoric. The work of Jung and Freud, and the practice of many modern poets and prose writers, has taught us an entirely different view. We now know that symbols are the natural speech of the soul, a language older and more universal than words. This truth, if not understood exactly as modern psychology would understand it, was accepted and acted upon by the ancient and medieval world, and had not yet been lost in Spenser’s day. He came, in fact, just in time, just before the birth of that new outward-looking, rationalizing spirit which was going to give us victory over the inanimate while cutting us off from the depths of our own nature. After Spenser allegory became, till quite modern times, merely a sort of literary toy, as it is in Addison’s or Johnson’s essays. Spenser was the last poet who could use the old language seriously and who had an audience that understood it.
They understood it because they had been brought up to it. We shall understand it best (though this may seem paradoxical) by not trying too hard to understand it. Many things—such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly—are done worst when we try hardest to do them. Allegory is not a puzzle. As each place or person is presented to us in The Faerie Queene we must not sit down to examine it detail by detail for clues to its meaning as if we were trying to work out a cipher. That is the very worst thing we can do. We must surrender ourselves with childlike attention to the mood of the story. The broad outlines of the allegory are quite unmistakable. Spenser himself tells us that the six knights who are the heroes of the six Books are six virtues; and each therefore fights against, or is endangered by, the vices particularly opposed to the virtue he represents.1 Thus in Book I Holiness encounters the various obstacles to the religious life—error, heresy, pride, despair, and so forth; in Book II Temperance encounters anger, avarice, and lust; in V Justice encounters graft or bribery (Lady Munera), egalitarianism, and the giantess who represents the domination of women over men. At a first glance, indeed, the reader might complain not so much of obscurity as of copybook platitude.
But he would be mistaken. In the first place, what looks like a platitude when it is set out in the abstract may become a different sort of thing when it puts on flesh and blood in the story; according to the theory which Sidney set out in his Defense of Poesie, the poetic art existed for the precise purpose of thus turning dead truism into vital experience. Secondly, ideas have changed since the sixteenth century, and much of Spenser’s thought is now not platitudinous but highly controversial. Not many readers of this book have been brought up to think either equality or feminism a form of injustice. On these points, therefore, The Faerie Queene can now do us one of the services for the sake of which (among other things) we read old literature. It can re-admit us to bygone modes of thought and enable us to imagine what they felt like, to see the world through our ancestors’ eyes. After we have done that, our rejection of those modes of thought (if we still reject them) will have some value. There is a great difference between rejecting something you have known from the inside and rejecting something (as uneducated people tend to do) simply because it happens to be out of fashion in your own time. It is like the difference between a mature and travelled man’s love for his own country and the cocksure conviction of an ignorant adolescent that his own village (which is the only one he knows) is the hub of the universe and does everything in the Only Right Way. For our own age, with all its accepted ideas, stands to the vast extent of historical time much as one village stands to the whole world.
And thirdly, Spenser’s moral thought is not in itself so platitudinous as we might at first suppose.2 Guyon, the knight of Book II who represents Temperance, comes to the Bower of Acrasia, obviously a place o
f sexual temptation. But then the female knight of Book III, Britomart, represents Chastity. Obviously she too must be brought through a place of sexual temptation; and so she is, in the House of Busirane. If we were writing an allegory instead of reading one, we should at once see that we were coming to a difficulty. What are we to do with these two places? How are we to prevent the second from being merely a repetition of the first? But in Spenser there is no resemblance between them and no trace (which would have been just as bad) of a faked or forced difference between them. The Bower of Acrasia is a luscious garden, genuinely luscious but in rather bad taste (they have metal ivy, painted to look like real, round a fountain); two naked girls are playing the fool in a bathing pond to attract Guyon’s attention; Acrasia herself, in a beautiful ‘creation’ of transparent lingerie, lies on a bed of roses leaning over the last young man she has captured. This is all plain sailing: the simplest reader cannot fail to understand it. But the House of Busirane is a vast building, hard to get into and hard to get out of when you are in. Britomart is there for hours. One empty room leads endlessly into another empty room: all silent, all blazing with an almost sickly splendour of intricate decoration. It is only at midnight, in the last room of all, that a little iron door opens and out of it comes a strange procession, like a masque, of silent people who ignore Britomart, intent upon their own strange ceremonial. Behind that iron door the girl whom Britomart has come to rescue is being tortured.
As I have said before, we must not look for clues as if we were solving a puzzle. We must, if need be, re-read both passages and soak ourselves in their differing atmospheres; the obvious, provocative, even garish sensuality of Acrasia’s Bower, which is the foe to ‘temperance’, to mere self-control and moderation, and the monotonous glitter, the claustrophobia, the costliness, loneliness, anguish of Busirane’s House which is the foe to ‘chastity’ (Spenser makes quite clear that ‘chastity’ for him includes faithful love, married, or hoping to be married). To a man tempted by the Bower, one would say ‘Pull yourself together’, but to a man tempted by Busirane, one would say ‘Can you not come out? Out into the free air and sunlight? Can you never break this lifelong obsession?’ It will dawn on every reader in the end that the difference between Acrasia and Busirane is that between Lust (appetite) and Love, bad love. Many moderns have been brought up to think that the difference between good and evil in sexual matters simply coincides with that between Love and Lust, that every affaire becomes ‘good’ just in so far as it concerns the heart and not merely the senses. If that is our view, then Spenser is here offering us not (as we feared) platitude but full paradox. For he thinks there may be Loves quite distinct from Lust, but evil, miserable, poisoning a whole life; illicit, secret loves that break up homes and lead to divorce courts, suicide pacts, and murders. They are expensive; the House of Busirane is ablaze with gold. They take a long time; the House of Busirane goes on and on. After fully comprehending Acrasia and Busirane (not as I have here given them in abstract but as they really live in the poem), the reader may of course still disagree with Spenser. He may think that the solemnity and grandeur of Busirane’s House make it obviously superior to any establishment Acrasia could ever run. Or he may agree with Spenser and feel that he has learned something about human life which will stand him in very good stead. But whichever way he decides, his decision will be a more informed one than any he could have made without reading The Faerie Queene. Even that is not the whole story. A poet inventing with such energy as Spenser produces things that mean more than he knew or intended. The House of Busirane may become, to this or that reader, a symbol of (hence, partly a liberation from) some other psychic imprisonment which has nothing to do with love. This kind of poetry, if receptively read, has psychotherapeutic powers.
Another factor which saves Spenser’s moral allegory from platitude is his method of hinting in each Book at what may be called ‘the virtue behind the virtue’, the inner shrine. Book VI is about Courtesy (which in those days meant much more than etiquette or good manners, and included what we should call ‘chivalry’) and is, of course, full of examples of courteous behaviour. But then in canto x we discover that our attempts at courtesy, however laudable and necessary, will never make us perfectly courteous men. We shall still be clumsy, unless the Graces come and dance with us, unless a beauty which no man can achieve by effort flows into our daily acts of its own will. So in Book IV we discover that Justice can never be perfect while it remains mere Justice: it must go into the temple of Isis and learn better things from ‘clemence’ or ‘equity’. So in Book I, all the Redcrosse Knight’s struggles with Error and Pride will not make him holy until he has been in the House of Caelia. This may be cold comfort to most of us, but it is hardly a copybook platitude; and it might be true.
Three obstacles may prevent a receptive reading of Spenser’s allegory. The first great obstacle for the reader of this volume is that he is being given only selections from it, not the poem itself. I have found it impossible to select in such a way that the pieces I included required no support from those I left out—if not support in respect of the ‘plot’ or sequence of events, yet support from contrasting or harmonizing moods. Far from wishing to conceal this defect, I wish to emphasize it as much as possible. In that way I may possibly convince a reader what selections are for. Except for some (poetically irrelevant) purpose such as passing an examination, the only use of selections is to deter those readers who will never appreciate the original, and thus to save them from wasting their time on it, and to send all the others on to the original as quickly as possible. The sooner you toss my selections impatiently aside and go out to buy a copy of The Faerie Queene, the better I shall have succeeded. If I lead anyone to imagine, twenty years hence, that he has really read the poem, when in fact he has read only these shreds and patches, I shall have done him (but not without his own assistance) a grave injury.
The second obstacle is this. The picture-language of allegory is ultimately derived, as I have said, from the unconscious. But by Spenser’s time allegory (both literary and pictorial) had been practised so long that certain symbols had an agreed meaning which everyone could understand directly, without plunging into the depths. Many of these are lost on the modern reader who does not know the Bible, the classics, astrology, or the old emblem books. A simple example (still, we may hope, intelligible to many) would be the silver anchor which lay on Speranza’s arm (I, x, 14). The text in Hebrews vi. 19 explains it. Similarly in I, iv, 24 not all readers will now know why Lechery should be riding a goat: all Elizabethans knew that the goat was the sign of Lust. Again, Spenser’s readers, comparing the Bower of Acrasia with the House of Busirane, would have noticed at the very outset a difference which I never mentioned (because I did not think it would help the modern student). Cupid is absent from the Bower and very much present in the House. Now in medieval allegory Cupid regularly meant Love (humanized, sentimental, refined, but not necessarily innocent); when they wanted to symbolize the mere sexual appetite they usually represented it by Cupid’s mother, Venus.
Finally, an obstacle may arise from our own preconceptions. We may be so certain in advance what a word or an image ought to mean that we omit to notice what it really does mean in the poem. A ludicrous example would be if anyone took ‘Temperance’ (the subject of Book II) to mean ‘not getting drunk’, instead of control and moderation of all our passions, including our desire for wealth. A much more serious preconception occurs about the significance of beautiful, naked women in The Faerie Queene. A man may have a ‘puritan obsession’ (in the modern, not the Elizabethan sense of the word ‘puritan’) which leads him to assume that these will all be images of sin. Much more probably in our days he will have an anti-puritan obsession and assume that they are all to be welcomed as fruits of Spenser’s ‘renaissance’ or ‘Pagan’ liberty. Both obsessions, if uncorrected, will lead to false reading. In the poem (as perhaps also in dreams and myths) this image may mean quite different things. And there is no need at all
to be puzzled. If read without preconceptions the poem itself will make this perfectly clear. Everyone will see that the two young women in Acrasia’s swimming pool are images of Sin; and that the Graces who dance round Colin Clout (VI, x) are nothing of the sort. They are the ‘virtue behind the virtue’ of Courtesy, what Burke called ‘the unbought grace of life’.
(3) The general quality of The Faerie Queene is so highly poetic that it has earned Spenser the name of ‘the poet’s poet’. But if we examine the texture of the language line by line we may think that it is sometimes flat and very often little distinguished from that of prose. There are, no doubt, some stanzas which, even in isolation, anyone would acclaim as high poetry. But usually we shall look in vain for anything like the phrase-by-phrase deliciousness of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the ‘gigantic loftiness’ of Milton’s epic style, or the point and subtlety and pressure of Donne or the modern poets. The truth is that Spenser belongs to an older school. In the earliest times theology, science, history, fiction, singing, instrumental music, and dancing were all a single activity. Traces of this can still be found in Greek poetry. Then the different arts which had once all been elements of poesis developed and became more different from one another, and drew apart (the enormous gains and losses of this process perhaps equal one another). Poetry became more and more unlike prose. It is now so unlike it that the number of those who can read it is hardly greater than the number of those who write it. Spenser is of course a long way from the ancient Greeks, but he belongs to an older school than Shakespeare. He is about midway between Shakespeare and Boiardo. Boiardo is first and foremost a storyteller, not a ‘poet’ in the more specialized modern sense. As far as language is concerned, his poetry might be improvised—the phrases could be made up as one goes along. Spenser’s style is richer, more elaborated than that. But it still has in view an audience who have settled down to hear a long story and do not want to savour each line as a separate work of art. Much of The Faerie Queene will therefore seem thin or over-obvious if judged by modern standards. The ‘thickness’ or ‘density’ which I have claimed for it does not come from its language. It comes from its polyphonic narrative, from its different layers of meaning, and from the high degree in which Spenser’s symbols embody not simply his own experience, nor that of his characters at a given moment, but the experience of ages. In one sense a passage of Spenser is childishly simple compared with a poem by Donne, but in another sense this is not so. Donne wrote from his vivid consciousness of his own situation at a particular moment. He knew what he was putting into his poem, and we cannot get out of it more than he knew he was putting in. But Spenser, with his conscious mind, knew only the least part of what he was doing, and we are never sure that we have got to the end of his significance. The water is very clear, but we cannot see to the bottom. That is one of the delights of the older kind of poetry: ‘thoughts beyond their thoughts to those high bards were given’. I do not mean by this that we should prefer the older kind. Their difference is a reason for reading both. There is no one right or absolute kind of poetry.
