f buds and catkins, which never
suggest the tangle of bush, grasses, and magnificent flowers and fruits,
sweet, splendid, or poisonous, which the sun will make out of them. The
Renaissance, in the past for Tasso, in the proximate and very visible
future for Spenser, has frightened both; the cynicism and bestiality of
men like Machiavelli and Aretino; the godless, muscular lustiness of
Marlowe, Greene, and Peele, seen in a glimpse by Tasso and Spenser, have
given a shock to their sensitive nature, have made them turn away and
hide themselves from a second sight of it. They both take refuge in a
land of fiction, of romance, from the realities into which they dread to
splash; a world unsubstantial, diaphanous, faint-hued, almost
passionless, which they make out of beauty and heroism and purity, which
they alembicize and refine, but into which there never enters any vital
element, anything to give it flesh and bone and pulsing life: it is a
mere soap bubble. And beautiful as is this world of their own making, it
is too negative even for them; they move in it only in imagination,
calm, serene, vacant, almost sad. There is in it, and in themselves, a
something wanting; and the remembrance of that unholy-life of reality
which jostled and splashed their delicate souls, comes back and haunts
them with its evil thought. There is no laugh--what is worse, no smile
--in these men. Incipient puritanism, not yet the terrible brawny
reality of Bunyan, but a vague, grey spectre, haunts Spenser; and the
puritanism of Don Quixote, the vague, melancholy, fantastic reverting
from the evil world of to-day to an impossible world of chivalry, is
troubling the sight of Tasso. He cannot go crazy like Don Quixote, and
instead he grows melancholy; he cannot believe in his own ideals; he
cannot give them life, any more than can Spenser give life to his
allegoric knights and ladies, because the life would have to be fetched
by Tasso out of the flesh of Ariosto, and by Spenser out of the blood of
Marlowe; and both Tasso and Spenser shrink at the thought of what might
with it be inoculated or transfused; and they rest satisfied with
phantoms. The phantoms of Spenser are more shadowy much more utterly
devoid of human character; they are almost metaphysical abstractions,
and they do not therefore sadden us: they are too unlike living things
to seem very lifeless. But the phantoms of Tasso, he would fain make
realities; he works at every detail of characte