Spenser and the Frame of Faith

SEAN KANE Spenser and the Frame of Faith The sensibility that could appeal to both Milton and the Romantics is especially ambivalent in matters of the faith. In disavowing Rome Spenser sounds like pure Geneva, while in picturing Contemplation and Penance in the same Legend of Holiness he affirms a set of distinctions worthy of a Jesuit. To ask what holds the facets of such an intelligence together in one man or in one poem is to acknowledge the artist underneath it all, in whom the culture of his time crystallizes into patterns of relationship. Each of the legends of The Faerie Queene has its source in some aesthetic formation of experience which must anticipate the more accessible levels of allegory in the story, and perhaps no pattern is so unconscious and yet applicable to several realms of experience at once as the frame of metaphors that sustains the Legend of St George. I use 'frame' deliberately, thinking that the word meant much to Spenser, perhaps more than 'structure' means to us. In his second legend he uses the word when a synoptic structure of correspondences is set in relief - 'Now gins this goodly frame of Temperance I Fairely to rise" - and other contexts suggest something that is at once a plan of construction (m.i.31), progress towards a goal (m.i.20), intention (II.V.l), and, among his contemporaries, the order of things, imagination or conception, and artistic organization: 'All verse is but a frame of words." What is the frame of Book I then? The question assumes a structure woven from a number of unexamined premises for action and habits of response, a context of contexts, which underlies a society's whole way of thinking and feeling. This coincidence of habits is stored in the gloom of the unconscious in states of virtually pure relationship or economy, until it is brought to light by the artist as a set of containing forms. Once projected, free of its usual reiata, the set of relationships becomes visible and conscious of itself for the first time as a framework for action, and so as a system with pronounced limits and deficiencies standing in need of correction. I am going to assume that this natural experience of artistic insight was Spenser's in the act of composing Book I. The result is that a frame of experience - Protestant idealism - is offset with such formal resolution that Spenser is able to clarify the contradictions of that experience from the viewpoint of a deeper wisdom which that framework had previously negated. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 50, NUMBER), SPRING 19lh 0042-o247/81/o500-o253$o~ _5°/0 ttl UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS 254 SEAN KANE The most explicit part of the frame first; then we may see the deficiencies of the frame as it starts to gain outline. Let us start by assuming an obvious ideological context for Spenser. Having chosen to write about faith as the true basis of holiness, would he not have heard the familiar cadence of the sermons 'appointed to be read in churches'? The official sermons and homilies must have fallen on Spenser's generation like the English rain, and with the same pervasiveness.3 Among the topics none is more firmly stressed than the danger of sliding from the new faith into 'a phantasy and imagination of faith.' Indeed, the way the Tudor homilists state it, there hardly seems a more interesting and quicker way to sin than through substituting a materialist, sensual, and Roman religiosity for true piety. 'A Sermon of Faith' describes the descent as a sequence of incremental and horrifying peril, and in this order: 'temptations of wickedness and sin, errors, superstitions, idolatry and all evil." 'Errors, superstitions, idolatry and all evil' - the phrases ring with doom, as they did also in Bishop Jewel's sermon against Rome.s In this cultural commonplace Spenser has the beginning of a pattern. Errors are the monster and brood of canto i; superstitions are suggested in Archimago, idolatry in Duessa, and all evil in Despair offering nothing less than homicidia animae, the sin of sins. Redcrosse's actual experience is not as categorical as the...