It is a peculiarity of the romance of fairyland that it never introduces us to fairies. Nothing is so prosaic as a fairy, seen in the broad light of Early Victorian illustration. A little being in short skirts and sandals, standing on one toe on the tip of a rosebud, with a spangle in her sleek hair and a wand in her taper fingers--nothing is more repulsive to the Muses. But the whole secret of the great fairy poets is that they are engaged in searching for fairies without ever suffering the disenchantment of finding them. There are none, I think, in the broad pages of Spenser; even, by a beautiful pleasantry, the Fairie Queene herself being entirely absent throughout the poem, at all events as we now possess it.
The personages in _The Faerie Queene_, noble and miraculous as they are, are not of the fairy persuasion at all. They wander through the forests in the hope of coming upon these supernatural denizens, but they never succeed in doing so. The Holy Grail appeared far oftener to the Knights of the Round Table than a real fairy was perceived by Paradel or Blandamour. These men of chivalry were much interested in the subject, but, as a rule, they were poorly instructed. It was in the House of Temperance that Sir Guyon found the book, that hight _Antiquity of Faeryland_, which seems to have been a sort of _Who's Who_, or _Complete Peerage_ of the supernatural world. He flew to the perusal of it, and wherever in it
"he greedily did look, Offspring of Elves and Fairies there he found,"
"island, waste and void, That floated in the midst of that great lake,"
(where it is impossible not to believe that Mr. W. B. Yeats would have been more successful).
A critic has said that nothing is closer to an intensely lyrical song than a violently burlesque story. The sense of beauty immediately evoked by the one is suggested, conversely, or in the way of topsy-turvy, by the other. This principle had been introduced into literature--or at least into modern literature, for the Greeks had it illustrated in Aristophanes--a hundred years before the time of Spenser, by the _Morgante Maggiore_ of Pulci, where Orlando, the pink of romantic chivalry, comes into collision with certain "immeasurable giants" and other wild absurdities. The atmosphere of that poem is perfectly heroic: