d order should mix its art with
his own long-descended, irresponsible, happy art.

IV

Allegory and, to a much greater degree, symbolism are a natural language
by which the soul when entranced, or even in ordinary sleep, communes
with God and with angels. They can speak of things which cannot be
spoken of in any other language, but one will always, I think, feel some
sense of unreality when they are used to describe things which can be
described as well in ordinary words. Dante used allegory to describe
visionary things, and the first maker of _The Romance of the Rose_, for
all his lighter spirits, pretends that his adventures came to him in a
vision one May morning; while Bunyan, by his preoccupation with heaven
and the soul, gives his simple story a visionary strangeness and
intensity: he believes so little in the world, that he takes us away
from all ordinary standards of probability and makes us believe even in
allegory for a while. Spenser, on the other hand, to whom allegory was
not, as I think, natural at all, makes us feel again and again that it
disappoints and interrupts our preoccupation with the beautiful and
sensuous life he has called up before our eyes. It interrupts us most
when he copies Langland, and writes in what he believes to be a mood of
edification, and the least when he is not quite serious, when he sets
before us some procession like a court pageant made to celebrate a
wedding or a crowning. One cannot think that he should have occupied
himself with moral and religious questions at all. He should have been
content to be, as Emerson thought Shakespeare was, a Master of the
Revels to mankind. I am certain that he never gets that visionary air
which can alone make allegory real, except when he writes out of a
feeling for glory and passion. He had no deep moral or religious life.
He has never a line like Dante's 'Thy Will is our Peace,' or like Thomas
a Kempis's 'The Holy Spirit has liberated me from a multitude of
opinions,' or even like Hamlet's objection to the bare bodkin. He had
been made a poet by what he had almost learnt to call his sins. If he
had not felt it necessary to justify his art to some serious friend, or
perhaps even to 'that rugged forehead,' he would have written all his
life long, one thinks, of the loves of shepherdesses and shepherds,
among whom there would have been perhaps the morals of the dovecot. One
is persuaded that his morality is official and impersonal--a system