It is instructive to
compare the effect of his purely sensuous verses with that of
Dante's, which have such a wonderful reach behind them. They are
singularly pleasing, but they do not stay by us as those of his model
had done by him. Spenser was, as Milton called him, a "sage and
serious poet"; he would be the last to take offence if we draw from
him a moral not without its use now that Priapus is trying to
persuade us that pose and drapery will make him as good as Urania.
Better far the naked nastiness; the more covert the indecency, the
more it shocks. Poor old god of gardens! Innocent as a clownish
symbol, he is simply disgusting as an ideal of art. In the last
century, they set him up in Beatrice recalls her Germany and in
France as befitting an era of enlightenment, the light of which came
too manifestly from the wrong quarter to be long endurable.
[159] This touch of nature recalls another. The Italians claim humor
for Dante. We have never been able to find it, unless it be in that
passage (Inferno, XV. 119) where Brunetto Latini lingers under the
burning shower to recommend his Tesoro to his former pupil. There is
a comical touch of nature in an author's solicitude for his little
work, not, as in Fielding's case, after _its_, but his own damnation.
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