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THE FAERIE QUEENE DICTION , lxi
character, less forceful perhaps than Milton's, is no less indelibly stamped)
on all he wrote Wordsworth and Keats have written lines which might
have come from the pen" of Milton; "no one has ever written a stanza
that could be taken for Spenser's His many imitators in the eighteenth
century only succeeded in mingling the magniloquent with the childish,
and Thomson, the best of them, emphasized his failure to recapture the
tones of his master by apologizing ' for a simplicity of diction which
borders on the ludicrous' ¹ Those who, like Shelley and Keats, have
fallen most deeply under his spell come nearest: to "attaining "his effects
By avoiding all attempt at detailed imitation, and writing in their own
b€st manner His distinctive quality is to be found .in his language and its
melody. To an archaism which is inimitable because it is purely capricious,
he was drawn at once by its reminiscent picturesqueness and by its
musical possibilities Already, in the Sbepbeardes Calender, he had experimented
in the use of archaic language , the diction, of the Faerie Queene
is the mature product of his peculiar poetic temperament Undeterred
by criticism, he took full advantage of the unsettled state of English
in his day, not only to revive the obsolete, but to coin new words on old
analogies, and to adapt both his spelling and his pronunciation to his
desired effects of cadence and melody It was his aim to perfect for
himself an instrument from which he could extract a music as subtle as
Chaucer's, and by means of which he could create around his subject the
atmosphere of an ideal antique world
The Chaucerian element in his language is like a distinct but seldom
perceived flavour, which can be tasted in occasional words like * warray',
' encheason', or ' solas', in the use of abstract nouns with romance
terminations, and in the cadence or verbal reminiscence of such a line as
There many minstrales maken melodye,
which suggests that from Chaucer he learnt the metrical value of the
short syllable A special touch of the old romance, transplanted by Malory
and others from France, is given by such words as ' prow ', ' persaunt',
' belgardes ', ' beauperes', ' paravaunt' But it is significant that many of
Spenser's supposed archaisms are really' in a sense Elizabethan" He
cherished words which though still In use Were rapidly passing out of
fashion, and the sustained colouring and atmosphere of his style is thus
given by a constant use of words which are found in Marlowe, Shakespeare,
or Sidney, perhaps once or twice ' Eftsoons', ' ne',' als', ' whilom',
' uncouth', ' wight', ' eke', ' sithens', ywis '—it is words like these
continually woven into the texture of his diction which, more even than
the Chaucerian or romance elements, give it the Spenserian colour. Thus
by freely adapting spelling, pronunciation, and even word-formation, to
his needs, Spenser made the fullest use of this richly compounded language
To lighten the movement and smooth the flow of his metre he could
1 Introduction to the Castle of lndolence.