But it was one of Spenser's
disadvantages, that two strong influences combined to entangle him in
this fantastic and grotesque way of exhibiting the play and action of
the emotions of love. This all-absorbing, all-embracing passion of love,
at least, this way of talking about it, was the fashion of the Court.
Further, it was the fashion of poetry, which he inherited; and he was
not the man to break through the strong bands of custom and authority.
In very much he was an imitator. He took what he found; what was his
own was his treatment of it. He did not trouble himself with
inconsistencies, or see absurdities and incongruities. Habit and
familiar language made it not strange that in the Court of Elizabeth,
the most high-flown sentiments should be in every one's mouth about the
sublimities and refinements of love, while every one was busy with keen
ambition, and unscrupulous intrigue. The same blinding power kept him
from seeing the monstrous contrast between the claims of the queen to be
the ideal of womanly purity--claims recognized and echoed in ten
thousand extravagant compliments--and the real licentiousness common all
round her among her favourites. All these strange contradictions, which
surprise and shock us, Spenser assumed as natural. He built up his
fictions on them, as the dramatist built on a basis, which, though more
nearly approaching to real life, yet differed widely from it in many of
its preliminary and collateral suppositions; or as the novelist builds
up his on a still closer adherence to facts and experience. In this
matter Spenser appears with a kind of double self. At one time he speaks
as one penetrated and inspired by the highest and purest ideas of love,
and filled with aversion and scorn for the coarser forms of passion--for
what is ensnaring and treacherous, as well as for what is odious and
foul. At another, he puts forth all his power to bring out its most
dangerous and even debasing aspects in highly coloured pictures, which
none could paint without keen sympathy with what he takes such pains to
make vivid and fascinating. The combination is not like anything modern,
for both the elements are in Spenser so unquestionably and simply
genuine. Our modern poets are, with all their variations in this
respect, more homogeneous; and where one conception of love and beauty
has taken hold of a man, the other does not easily come in. It is
impossible to imagine Wordsworth dwelling with zest on vision