The Course of English Poetry – 3 85execution fell a victim to all these defects of the intelligence. He
has taken his intellectual scheme from his Hellenism, the virtues
to be figured in typical human beings; but he has dressed it up
with the obvious and trivial mediaeval ingenuity of the allegory.
Nor is he satisfied with a simple form of this combination; he
has an ambition of all-including representativeness which far
exceeds his or perhaps any possible power of fusing creation.
The turn of the allegory must be at once ethical, ecclesiastical
and political in one fell complexity; his witch of Faery-land em-
bodies Falsehood, the Roman Catholic Church and Mary Queen
of Scots in an irritating and impossible jumble. The subject of a
poem of this kind has to be the struggle of the powers of good
and evil, but the human figures through whom it works out to its
issues, cannot be merely the good or the evil, this or that virtue or
vice; they should stand for them as their expressive opportunity
of life, not merely as their allegorical body. Spenser, a great poet,
is not blind to this elementary condition; but his tangled skein of
allegory continually hampers the sounder conception, and the
interpretative narration works itself out through the confused
maze of its distracting elements which we are obliged to accept,
not for their own interest or living force and appeal, but for the
beauty of the poetic expression and description to which they
give occasion.
Besides this fault of the initial conception, there are de-
fects in the execution. After a time at least the virtues and
vices altogether lose their way in faery-land or they become
mistily vague and negligible; and this, considering the idea of
the poem, ought not to be, but certainly is a great relief to
the reader. We are well contented to read the poem or, still
better, each canto apart as a romance and leave the ulterior
meaning to take care of itself; what was intended as a great
ethical interpretative poem of the human soul, lives only as
a beautiful series of romantic descriptions and incidents. We
can see where the defect is if we make a comparison with the
two greater poems of Greece and India which had an intention
not altogether unsimilar, the Ramayana fusing something like a
vast faery-tale with the story of an immense struggle between