The Poetical Works of - OUDL Home

THE FAERIE QUEENE ITS ESSENTIAL QUALITY lxvII
inspired lines sum up far better than any prose criticism can do, his
essential quality
Sweet Spenser moving through his clouded heaven
With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace
To him the significance of the situations that he describes and his attitude
with regard to them were more than the situations themselves, the music
in which his imagination phrased them was a part of their significance
To admit this is to deny him a supreme place among narrative poets,
even among those whose narrative is romance , and readers who love
a story for its own sake will often find him tedious, and turn with relief
to Anosto, Byron, or Scott Spenser is never outside his subject, delighting
in a spectacle of movement or of passion, allowing to his creation the
irresponsible freedom of actual life, and curbed only by life's capricious
laws All that he creates is alike moulded and controlled by his personal
emotions, and is deeply charged with his own jeflection The world of
reality was profoundly dissatisfying to him, it was filled with baffing contradictions,
where splendour clashed with meanness, and high endeavour
was tainted with base self-seeking As a man he was ready to play his
part in it, and the part he played was courageous and noble, worthy
of his ideals But as an artist it was his aim" to escape From It, into the
delightful land of his dream, whose ways
Are so exceeding spacious and wide
And sprinkled with such sweet variety
Of all that pleasant is to car and eye,
that his travel never wearies him—a land of clear spiritual vision, in which
truth Is always sure of triumph, and the fierce conflicts of earth are heard
faintly as from a distance, hardly disturbing the enchanted atmosphere
of serene beauty Here it was that his art found its home, with careless
Quiet
Wrapped in eternall silence, farrc from enemyes ,
and when his voice broke in upon this paradise of his imagination ' Silence
was pleased'