Queen." The world of the Renascence is around us, but it is ordered,
refined, and calmed by the poet's touch. The warmest scenes which he
borrows from the Italian verse of his day are idealized into purity; the
very struggle of the men around him is lifted out of its pettier
accidents and raised into a spiritual oneness with the struggle in the
soul itself. There are allusions in plenty to contemporary events, but
the contest between Elizabeth and Mary takes ideal form in that of Una
and the false Duessa, and the clash of arms between Spain and the
Huguenots comes to us faint and hushed through the serener air. The
verse, like the story, rolls on as by its own natural power, without
haste or effort or delay. The gorgeous colouring, the profuse and often
complex imagery which Spenser's imagination lavishes, leave no sense of
confusion in the reader's mind. Every figure, strange as it may be, is
seen clearly and distinctly as it passes by. It is in this calmness,
this serenity, this spiritual elevation of the "Faerie Queen," that we
feel the new life of the coming age moulding into ordered and harmonious
form the life of the Renascence. Both in its conception, and in the way
in which this conception is realized in the portion of his work which
Spenser completed, his poem strikes the note of the coming Puritanism.
In his earlier pastoral, the "Shepherd's Calendar," the poet had boldly
taken his part with the more advanced reformers against the Church
policy of the Court. He had chosen Archbishop Grindal, who was then in
disgrace for his Puritan sympathies, as his model of a Christian pastor;
and attacked with sharp invective the pomp of the higher clergy. His
"Faerie Queen" in its religious theory is Puritan to the core. The worst
foe of its "Red-cross Knight" is the false and scarlet-clad Duessa of
Rome, who parts him for a while from Truth and leads him to the house of
Ignorance. Spenser presses strongly and pitilessly for the execution of
Mary Stuart. No bitter word ever breaks the calm of his verse save when
it touches on the perils with which Catholicism was environing England,
perils before which his knight must fall "were not that Heavenly Grace
doth him uphold and steadfast Truth acquite him out of all." But it is
yet more in the temper and aim of his work that we catch the nobler and
deeper tones of English Puritanism. In his earlier musings at Penshurst
the poet had purposed to surpass Ariosto, but the gaiety of Ari