f humour, and the truth that humour implies, is
favourable to the Spaniard: in point of moral earnestness and sense of
poetic beauty, to the Englishman. What Cervantes only thought
ridiculous Spenser used, and not in vain, for a high purpose. The ideas
of knight-errantry were really more absurd than Spenser allowed himself
to see. But that idea of the gentleman which they suggested, that
picture of human life as a scene of danger, trial, effort, defeat,
recovery, which they lent themselves to image forth, was more worth
insisting on, than the exposure of their folly and extravagance. There
was nothing to be made of them, Cervantes thought; and nothing to be
done, but to laugh off what they had left, among living Spaniards, of
pompous imbecility or mistaken pretensions. Spenser, knowing that they
must die, yet believed that out of them might be raised something nobler
and more real, enterprise, duty, resistance to evil, refinement, hatred
of the mean and base. The energetic and high-reaching manhood which he
saw in the remarkable personages round him he shadowed forth in the
_Faery Queen_. He idealized the excellences and the trials of this first
generation of English gentlemen, as Bunyan afterwards idealized the
piety, the conflicts, and the hopes of Puritan religion. Neither were
universal types; neither were perfect. The manhood in which Spenser
delights, with all that was admirable and attractive in it, had still
much of boyish incompleteness and roughness: it had noble aims, it had
generosity, it had loyalty, it had a very real reverence for purity and
religion; but it was young in experience of a new world, it was wanting
in self-mastery, it was often pedantic and self-conceited; it was an
easier prey than it ought to have been to discreditable temptations. And
there is a long interval between any of Spenser's superficial and thin
conceptions of character, and such deep and subtle creations as Hamlet
or Othello, just as Bunyan's strong but narrow ideals of religion, true
as they are up to a certain point, fall short of the length and breadth
and depth of what Christianity has made of man, and may yet make of him.
But in the ways which Spenser chose, he will always delight and teach
us. The spectacle of what is heroic and self-devoted, of honour for
principle and truth, set before us with so much insight and sympathy,
and combined with so much just and broad observation on those accidents
and conditions of our mortal