26 De Audiendis Poetis
26 DE AUDIENDIS POETIS
There are more ways than one of reading old books. A choice between two of them is well expressed by Mr Speirs (note: Medieval English Poetry: The Non-Chaucerian Tradition (1957), p.48) when he denounces as discouraging' the notion that before the modern reader can properly appreciate a medieval poem he must first have somehow put himself back' into the age when it was composed. For thus he will be seeking not what the poem means', but what it once meant' and will become concerned less with reading and responding to a poem than with reading and researching outside it'.
That anything which takes us outside the poem and leaves us there is regrettable, I fully agree. But we may have to go outside it in order that we may presently come inside it again, better equipped. (We have to go outside some medieval poems pretty often to look up hard words in a glossary or dictionary.) And what we find inside will always depend a great deal on what we have brought in with us. Mr Speirs modestly underrates all the knowledge of history, all the imaginative and emotional adjustments, which he himself uses when he reads an old book. A man who read the literature of the past with no allowance at all for the fact that manners, thought, and sentiments have changed since it was written, would make the maddest work of it. Finding that Nausicaa does the washing, though her father seems to be in easy circumstances, he would think he was reading a version of Cinderella. In the Knights Tale the action of Theseus, who condemns two prisoners of war to a dungeon for life, would strike him as an atrocity. The battles of Romance, fought in peacetime between knights who had no quarrel - and what might the very word knights mean to such a reader? - would seem to him a picture of lunacy.
This is, of course, only to say that the reader of medieval poetry must already be a man of general education. But the point is that what we call general education' includes a quite considerable (2) knowledge of the past and a considerable mental adjustment to it. Some substitution of what the work may be supposed to have meant in its own day for what it would mean to us if we now read it with nothing but modern feelings and ideas, is therefore unavoidable. It is made by everyone; even, in their degree, by children of ten and by the uneducated. We are all so used to this substitution that we make it almost unconsciously. The only question is how far the process should go. Are we to rest content with putting ourselves back' into the attitudes of the old author just so far as general education permits, and indeed forces, us to do: or are we to go on and put ourselves back as completely as, with labour and patience, we can?
I am asking, of course, which we should do as lovers of literature. In so far as we are historians, there is no question. When our aim is knowledge we must go as far as all available means - including the most intense, yet at the same time most sternly disciplined, exercise of our imaginations - can possibly take us. We want to know - therefore, as far as may be, we want to live through for ourselves - the experience of men long dead. What a poem may mean' to moderns and to them only, however delightful, is from this point of view merely a stain on the lens. We must clean the lens and remove the stain so that the real past can be seen better.
But among lovers of poetry the question admits two answers. You may do which you please. There are two ways of enjoying the past, as there are two ways of enjoying a foreign country. One man carries his Englishry abroad with him and brings it home unchanged. Wherever he goes he consorts with the other English tourists. By a good hotel he means one that is like an English hotel. He complains of the bad tea where he might have had excellent coffee. He finds the natives' quaint and enjoys their quaintness. In his own way he may have a pleasant time; he likes his wintersports in Switzerland and his flutter at Monte Carlo. In the same way there is a man who carries his modernity with him through all his reading of past literatures and preserves it intact. The highlights in all ancient and medieval poetry are for him the bits that resemble - or can be so read that they seem to resemble - the poetry of his own age. Thus when modernity was Romanticism (for modernity naturally changes) the great thing in Sophocles was the nightingale chorus in the Coloneus; and Dante meant the Inferno and the Inferno meant Paolo and Francesca and Ulysses: and what really mattered about Villon was just the Old Frenchness, so archaic, so wistful. This sort of reading is well reflected in the successive schools of translation. A while ago the classics were made to sound like the Authorised Version or the Pre-Raphaelites; now they are to be stark and slangy and ironic. And such reading has its reward. Those who practise it will have certain enjoyments.
But there is another sort of travelling and another sort of reading. You can eat the local food and drink the local wines, you can share the foreign life, you can begin to see the foreign country as it looks, not to the tourist, but to its inhabitants. You can come home modified, thinking and feeling as you did not think and feel before. So with the old literature. You can go beyond the first impression that a poem makes on your modern sensibility. By study of things outside the poem, by comparing it with other poems, by steeping yourself in the vanished period, you can then re-enter the poem with eyes more like those of the natives; now perhaps seeing that the associations you gave to the old words were false, that the real implications were different from what you supposed, that what you thought strange was then ordinary and that what seemed to you ordinary was then strange. In so far as you succeed, you may more and more come to realize that what you enjoyed at the first reading was not really any medieval poem that ever existed but a modern poem made by yourself at a hint from the old words. But that is an extreme case. Sometimes, by luck, your first shot may not have been so wide. Not all things at a given date in the past are equidistant from the present.
I am writing to help, if I can, the second sort of reading. Partly, of course, because I have a historical motive. I am a man as well as a lover of poetry: being human, I am inquisitive, I want to know as well as to enjoy. But even if enjoyment alone were my aim I should still choose this way, for I should hope to be led by it to newer and fresher enjoyments, things I could never have met in my own period, modes of feeling, flavours, atmospheres, nowhere accessible but by a mental journey into the real past. I have lived nearly sixty years with myself and my own century and am not so enamoured of either as to desire no glimpse of a world beyond them. As the mere tourist's kind of holiday abroad seems to me rather a waste of Europe - there is more to be got out of it than he gets - so it would seem to me a waste of the past if we were content to see in the literature of every bygone age only the reflexion of our own faces zum Ekel find' ich immer nur mich?
But if I left it at this I should seem to be demanding as much austerity in one direction as Mr Speirs perhaps would approve in the other. Actually, the two approaches can to some extent be combined. We come to see the old texts with a sort of double vision. Most of us, I fancy, when we read Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, see simultaneously - or with oscillations so rapid as to give the effect of simultaneity - the poem as it may have been for the Romans and the poem as it came to be in Christian times. But this double vision, the reward of some ripeness, is different from acquiescence in our first illusions.
A man that looks on glasse,
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it passe,
And then the heav'n espie.
(Note: George Herbert: The Elixer 9-12. Ed.)
If he pleaseth. This is quite different from mistaking the flaws or blurrings of the glass for real clouds or hills.
The worst method of all, in my opinion, would be to accept the first impression that the old text happens to make on a modern sensibility and then apply to this the detailed methods of practical' criticism. That is to make the worst of both worlds. If you are content that the Heraclitus epigram should mean to you what it meant to Cory, if you are content, with Hopkins, to find sprung rhythm in Piers Plowman, best enjoy these phantoms lightly, spontaneously, even lazily. To use the microscope, yet not to focus or clean it, is folly. You will only find more and more mares' nests. You are passing from uncorrected illusions to positively invited illusions. The critic who said (of medieval poetry, as it happens) one cannot find what is not there' was unduly optimistic. Here, as elsewhere, untrained eyes or a bad instrument produce both errors; they create phantasmal objects as well as miss real ones.
The sort of problems that arise when we begin to read medieval poetry in the way I like best may be illustrated from a textual variant in the fourteenth-century Sir Orfeo. Orfeo, after he has lost Dame Heurodis, is wandering in the forest. There he often catches a glimpse of þe king o fairy wiþ his rout' hunting. Repeatedly the chase goes past him: and vanishes. It goes past with a sound: and the three MSS describe the sound thus:
A. Wiþ dim cri and bloweing
B. With dunnyng and with blowyng
C. Wyth dynne, cry, and wyth blowyng.
Leaving aside all question as to which is the correct reading, which do we like best? I agree with the poem's last editor (note: A.J. Bliss, Sir Orfeo (1954)) that the A reading is certainly more poetical'. But when I ask why it seems so to me, I find, first, that the scales are, for my sensibility, weighted against B and C by the mainly disagreeable assocations of din in Modern English. But those considerations are modern; I must try to discount them. And next, I realize where my pleasure in dim comes from. For me this is properly' (as the grammarians say) a word describing a degree of light; its use to describe a degree of sound is therefore a metonymy. These transferences from one of our senses to another delight my modern taste. But there is some evidence that dim in fourteenth-century English applied to the audible quite as properly' as to the visible, in which case a metonymy would not have been felt. (Note: Cf. Chaucer, C.T. A 2432-3, a murmuringe Ful lowe and dim'; Gower, C.A. v, 4967, A vois which cride dimme.') My scales have perhaps been weighted in favour of dim as well as against din . There are indeed other grounds for preferring A. It gives a finer conception and perhaps a more interesting rhythm. But its apparent superiority as mere language probably did not exist in the Middle Ages.
In that passage we might easily have found what was not there. In the following, we might miss what is. Langland thus describes the Incarnation:
Loue is the plonte of pees and most preciouse of vertues;
For heuene holde hit ne my3te so heuy hit semede,
Til hit hadde on erthe 3oten hym-selue.
Was neuere lef up-on lynde lyghter ther-after,
As whanne hit hadde of the folde flesch and blod ytake.
(Note: Love is the plant of peace and the most precious of powers, for heaven could not contain it, it felt so heavy, until it had poured itself out on the earth. After that, no leaf on a lime-tree was lighter (gayer, more mobile) than it, when it had taken flesh and blood from the clay.) (Piers Plowman, c. II, 149-53) On any reading, no doubt, the passage is one of most daring intensity. It ascribes weight to the immaterial and painful tension (almost physiological and sexual) to Omnipotence. It makes spirit grow lighter by assuming a load of earth. But the crowning audacity escapes us unless we realize how gay, homely, and thoroughly secular lef up-on lynde' is. Women are laughingly advised to be as light as leef on linde' (Clerkes Tale, E 1211). In the Bouge of Court that disgraceful confidence trickster Harvy Hafter comes up to the dreamer leaping light as lynde' (stanza 33). (Note: line 12. By John Skelton. Ed.) And light in Middle English, we must remember, refers at least as properly' and as often to cheerfulness, frivolity, and nimbleness of movement, as to smallness of weight. Hence the effect is almost as if Langland had said that Love, incarnate, became as merry as a lark' or as busy as a bee'. (In the next line he will be telling us it was as sharp as a needle.) The real poetry of the phrase depends on its being a good deal less poetical' (in the graver and more demanding sense) than the uninstructed modern reader would probably take it to be; on its being this, yet uttered with the deepest reverence and gratitude.
The error we might have made in reading the passage from Sir Orfeo was linguistic in a fairly narrow sense. A really good glossary or dictionary would have set us right about dim and din, as about many other words which are misleading precisely because they survive in modern English. (Against, comedy, complexion, constellation, danger, I dare say, feeling, fellow, free, girl, law, religion, sad , and wait, are all notorious pitfalls.) What we might have missed in the passage from Piers Plowman, on the other hand, can be supplied only by a fairly wide reading of medieval English literature; whether our own, or that vicarious reading which is offered to us by the quotations of parallels' in good commentaries. Those who speak with contempt of editors and their notes often show much ingratitude.
The aim of this work is mainly to prevent, or cure, errors of yet a third kind. They may first be revealed to a teacher by a mistake in his pupil's translation which is itself merely lexical; but it is symptomatic of a far wider misapprehension. Thus only a careless student will render the line from Pearl 'Fro spot my spyryt þer sprang in space' (61) as From that place my spirit sprang in space'. The conscientious man would have found out what in space really meant (in a space of time, presently). To be sure, the correction of this error even on the philological level will be most fruitful; the pupil who learns that space usually meant a temporal rather than a local extension and that space as a concrete (the abyss, the vacuity in which all material objects exist) cannot be traced earlier than Milton, will have learned something worth knowing - especially about Milton. But a far greater light dawns upon him when he comes to realize that this modern meaning of space could not have existed in the fourteenth century because the thing meant did not exist for the human mind. The drama of existence was not performed against any such forbidding backcloth. There was no abyss. Man looked up at a patterned, populous intricate finite cosmos; a builded thing, not a wilderness; heaven' or spheres' not space'. The readjustments he will find himself compelled to make when he has thoroughly grasped this will lead him on to reckon with the presence of that very different conception behind almost every stroke of the medieval chisel, brush or pen.
Later in the same Pearl the poet says that if any man in the body had suffered the favour', abiden þat bone, which was given him in his vision, then, though all the learned men in the world had him under their care,
His lyf were loste an-under mone (1092)
his life were lost beneath the moon'. Similarly Nature, in Chaucer's Phisiciens Tale, says
ech thing in my cure is
Under the mone, that may wane and waxe. (C.T. C 22-3)
The modern reader might take under the moon', like our modern under the sun', as an entirely vague synonym for everywhere or anywhere, and the whole of Chaucer's second line for padding. In reality they are of an almost scientific precision. He might misunderstand Dante’s reference to the Love that moves the sun’ (Paradiso, xxxiii, 145). Donne’s So thy love may be my loves spheare’ (Aire and Angels, 25) can be grossly misunderstood. The exact reason why Fortune may non angel dere' (Monks Tale, C.T. B 3191) or why Hamlet's lunacy will not be noticed in England (III, i, 168) may escape us. All these possible misinterpretations of single lines, however, are not the most serious danger. They will be corrected, for a careful reader, by the notes. What we really have to fear is a slighter, but more continuous and in the long run more impoverishing, blindness to the full implications of apparently innocent passages. In the language of the old poets it is not the obviously hard' words that betray us; it is the seemingly easy words which will make sense (but not the sense the poet intended) if we take them in their modern meanings. So in their images. If influence occurs in an explicitly astrological passage we shall not go wrong; but unless we have our whole imagination so impregnated with the old point of view that reference to it has become habitual, we shall almost certainly fail to respond to the metaphorical uses of influence (say, in Milton). In our own language the metaphorical use of this word is the only one, and the metaphor is thoroughly dead. In the older writers it is glitteringly alive. So again, when Chaucer exhorts his young readers to return hoom’ from worldly vanity (Troilus, v , 1837), or when Frank says in The Witch of Edmonton 'All life is but a wandring to finde home' (IV, ii, 31), we may see in this no more than a pious metaphor at all times very natural to a Christian and familiar in the Hymn-Books. But we shall have missed something.
It is on these grounds that I think it worth while to spend some labour on putting ourselves back into the universe which our ancestors believed themselves to inhabit. What their work means to us after we have done so appears to me not only more accurate (more like what they intended) but also more interesting and nourishing and delightful. But I have no special wish to make converts. I write for those, whether few or many who like me care to know more of this theatre and this play than can be seen from the particular row and seat of the mid-twentieth century.
Even this, however, does not sufficiently define my endeavours. There are two possible approaches to medieval literature which I shall not adopt and readers who favour either of them are entitled to ask why. These are the theological and the anthropological.
There are some who see all medieval literature primarily, if not exclusively, as exposition of medieval Christian doctrine. The Middle Ages would have been pleased to be taken in this way but would have known that the compliment was undeserved. Troilus is for Chaucer something to be repented of. And this approach can become baneful when it leads critics to equate the edificatory value of a work with its value as literature. From the premise (perhaps true) that Piers Plowman is a great sermon, I think, some have wrongly drawn the conclusion that it is a great poem. (That it contains great poetry, no one doubts; that is a distinct proposition.) If I say little about this error it is because I anticipate that most modern readers will be in no danger of excessive leniency to it. If I were addressing only my even-Christians' I might sing a very different tune.
About the anthropological approach two questions arise, one of fact, and one of relevance. On the question of fact I say nothing. The claims made by Professor Loomis and others for a mythical origin behind many objects, people, and situations in romance - and for a ritual origin behind the mythical - may be true or false. It would be natural to suppose that some were the one and some the other. I may believe that Gawain's property of growing stronger as the sun ascended (Note: Malory IV 18, XX 21) is causally linked, through many intermediate stages, with a story about a sun-god. I need not also believe that if someone who on a mor lay', someone sleeping rough' on a mountain side, is said to have drunk spring water, this has a connexion with well-worship. (Note: J. Speirs, op .cit . pp. 62-3.) A pint of beer or glass of wine is hard to come by on a mor.
The question of relevance, however, is one I have a view on. When we are discussing the meaning not of books but of single words, we sometimes meet a stupid person who produces an etymology with the air of one settling the whole affair; as if the earliest recorded meaning of the word (or of its remotest ancestor) necessarily threw any light on its meaning in a particular passage a thousand years later. In reality it might or might not. It is an equally gross error to suppose that the ritual or myth from which some ingredient in a romance or poem originated necessarily throws any light on its meaning and function in that romance or poem. Let us for argument's sake assume that every story in which a father fights his son is causally connected with some myth and ritual of the Eniautos Daimon. Then take four concrete pieces of literature in which such a combat occurs: the Hiltebrantslied, (page 10, line 3. An old High German lay sometimes spelt Hildebrandslied or Hildebrand ) Henry VI (Pt 3, II, v, 54-93), Sohrab and Rustum, and On Baille's Strand. What is common to all four is the pathos and irony of the human situation; a thing certainly independent of, perhaps even blunted by, the mythical association. They have no other resemblance. The Hiltebrantslied gives us that irony and pathos and nothing else. Arnold's poem gives us these, romantically, seen from an almost infinite distance, seen with a double vision at once Homeric and Victorian, blended with his own sad lucidity, filled with the charm of strange, remote places; it is a very complex poem. In Shakespeare the episode serves a crudely didactic purpose: there are the wounds of the civil war, thus stings the Serpent of Division. In Yeats's play we first get the full mythical excitement. Et pour cause . He is a modern. He is (besides being an Occultist and a spokesman of the Celtic revival), like us, an amateur of myth. But not especially of the Eniautos Daimon. I cannot, for the life of me, see what light the Daimon has cast on any of the four. After I have heard of him they do to me neither more nor less nor other than what they did before. And they do different things. What is common to them is not, from the literary point of view, important. What matters is the differences: the difference between Du bist dir, alter Hun, ummet spaher (Hiltebrantslied, 37-8. You're very clever, you old Hun) and O pity, God, this miserable age' and Right for the Polar Star past Orgunje' and ’Twas they that did it, the pale, windy people'. Similarly with Malory's Gawain. What does it matter whether his peculiar gift has a solar origin or not, when, in this story, the gift itself is utterly unimportant and leads to nothing? It throws not the least light either on the frivolous Gawain (Tennyson's Gawain) of the earlier books or on the serious Gawain of the later blood-feud. By concentrating on it or its mythical origins you will not increase your enjoyment or understanding of one single sentence in the rest of the prose Morte. The Gawain we actually meet in a book has nothing divine and (but for those two passages) nothing solar about him.
Granted then (if only for purposes of argument) the mythical origins, it is a further question what literary relevance they have, if any in this or that literary work; a question to be decided, in each case, on its merits. Some feel that such origins have on occasion carried with them into the concrete poem or romance something qualitative, some emotional flavour, which preserves the feeling of the myth, which in its turn preserves the feeling of the ritual. Anthropologists may describe to us what modern savages do; they may conjecture what our ancestors did. But what it all felt like from within, what the ritual meant to those who enacted it, we do not know. None of us have, as believing pagans, participated in a pagan fertility ritual. That old blend of religion, agriculture, sex, drink, tragedy, and buffoonery, cannot be recovered; at any rate, not by external observation. We cannot get inside it; not directly. But if that experience had infused its quality into some other thing which we can get inside, then this other, more penetrable, thing would now be the only medium through which we can get back to the experience itself Such a more penetrable thing' might be provided by a work of plastic or literary art which we can still appreciate. If so, our response to the work will in some measure introduce us to the inwardness of the rite. Let us suppose that Bercilak in Gawain and the Green Knight really is derived from Jack in the Green, and Jack from the Eniautos Daimon (both suppositions seem to me quite probable). I have never met a Jack in the Green, still less worshipped the Daimon. I don't know what it felt like to do so. But I know very well what it is like to meet Bercilak in the poem. His impact is ' immensely strong; his quality unlike that of anything else. If both our suppositions are correct, then in appreciating Bercilak I may be learning quite a lot about the concrete, qualitative, inward character of the Daimon. In other words the poem is illuminating the myth; the myth is not illuminating the poem. The unknown cannot illuminate the known. What is merely conjectured or reconstructed, or at best known only from without, cannot illumine what we encounter directly and receive deeply into our emotions and imagination. Our knowledge of savage or prehistoric religions is at best only savoir; our knowledge of Bercilak is connaitre, knowledge-by-acquaintance. It therefore seems to me that while anthropology might have much to gain from a sensitive reading of the literature, literary criticism can learn almost nothing from anthropology. Anthropology works only with the bones of paganism. In art we meet them reclothed with flesh, alive. (Always, of course, on the assumption that such theories about the origins of Romance are in fact true.) Yet the anthropological approach is clearly of great value to readers of a particular type. I never fully realized this until I read a certain passage by Mr Speirs; an invaluable passage because it shows plainly why he values anthropology so highly as an aid to literary experience and what, for him, this approach seems to be safeguarding. (That is what I should always wish to know about another man's theories; people are nearly always fighting for something they, not unjustly, prize.) He has been speaking of a certain marvellous episode in a metrical romance. I abstain from specifying either, so that no one's attention may be sidetracked by the question whether this episode or this romance would have been his own choice. He suggests for the episode a ritual origin. Then he proceeds: (Note: Op . cit . p. 117) But what difference, it may be asked, does that make to the poetry? It means that the episode is really more serious than simply a sport of fancy... it means that we might have to correct our way of taking these episodes as if they belonged to something of the order of a boy's adventure story - taking them, that is, too easily.' He adds that even if the medieval authors knew nothing about the ritual origins they surely inherited with such episodes something of the traditional reverence towards them, a sense of their mystery, a sense too of the mystery of all life'.
Let me emphasize at once my unshakeable agreement with Mr Speirs that what he calls our way of taking these episodes' needs to be corrected wherever it exists. The reader who sees in all the (let us call them) ferlies' of medieval romance mere sports of fancy', who equates them with such vulgar appeals to stupid astonishment as we too often meet in the Arabian Nights, with the half-comic marvels of Italian epic, or with the wholly comic ones of Baron Munchausen, (Note: I exclude boy's romances' because I do not, myself, share Mr Speirs's view if it is meant to apply to all of them. Neither blind Pugh tapping with his stick in Treasure Island nor the hall of petrified chieftains in King Solomon's Mines affects me as simply a sport of fancy'. This disagreement is irrelevant to the argument.) the reader who does not respond to them with reverence' and a sense of their mystery' and even a sense of the mystery of all life', utterly misunderstands the best specimens of the genre he is reading.
Once one has understood that Mr Speirs finds in his anthropological bearings a safeguard against this error, one can understand, and sympathize with, the value he puts upon them. Nor do I think he is fighting an imaginary danger. It is true that our way’ of misreading the romances is very recent. In the nineteenth century, even in the Edwardian period, a serious response to the ferlies seems to have been easy and almost universal. Even now it is common among the elderly. Most of my generation have all our lives taken these things with awe and with a sense of their mystery. But a generation has grown up which really needs the corrective that Mr Speirs is offering. For whatever reason - a materialistic philosophy, anti-romanticism distrust of one's unconscious - gigantic inhibitions have, with astonishing rapidity, been built up. The response which was once easy and indeed irresistible now needs to be liberated by some sort of mental ascesis. In working out an (anthropological) ascesis which will do this Mr Speirs is performing a useful work. He is digging again the wells that the Philistines have filled. If the choice, for his generation, lies between reading the romances as frivolous or arbitrary fancy and reading them with constant reference to The Golden Bough, let them by all means take the second alternative.
It must however be remembered that the anthropological ascesis is not the only way of dealing with ferlies (whether in romances or elsewhere). Some readers find their responses liberated by Jung's Theory of Archetypes. Others, I believe, find it helpful to see in every epic or romance the vestiges of real history. Those who cannot take the Grail for what (in the romances) it purports to be, find that they can take it either as something out of the collective unconscious, or as something out of Celtic paganism, or as a prehistoric burning-glass. (Note: Lady Flavia Anderson, The Ancient Secret (1953)) The distribution of these views does not confirm one's first suspicion that what is common to them all is simply a dislike of Christianity. Rather, they all supply the modern reader with apparently rational grounds for feeling that more is meant than meets the ear' that there is a great deal behind' the ferly, that he is surprising a secret. Thus the sense of mystery which the ferly, unaided, would evoke in the mind of an older reader, but which in the modern is inhibited, is released. He is no longer afraid of being taken in. He allows himself to feel the wonder and excitement which the old poet or romancer, I believe, intended to produce, because a sop has been given to his intellect and he now believes that his reactions can be defended on extra-literary grounds. For this purpose all three approaches can probably be equally useful. Since they are not mutually contradictory, they may even be usefully combined.
But their utility, as psychological preparatives for softening up' the reader and restoring his lapsed powers', is one thing. Their truth in fact, or their power, if true, of really explaining the way the ferlies affect us, is quite another. If I cannot accept any of them myself, this is certainly not because they are repulsive to me. Rather the reverse. (I was overjoyed when, as an undergraduate, I believed, erroneously, that brun as an epithet for swords was a survival from the Bronze Age.) My difficulties are of another sort.
We must distinguish two propositions. A. That a myth bequeaths to the ferlies which descend from it a power to move us. B. That the idea of a ferly's being thus descended from a myth increases our receptiveness so that we are moved when we read of the ferly. In A the myth within the ferly works on us by its own power, as a drug mixed with our food may work. In B it is rather as if the knowledge or belief that something was mixed with our food produced a certain reaction by suggestion; as if a sensitive person were to vomit on hearing that the stew he had eaten contained human flesh, though human flesh is not in its own nature an emetic. Now if we take A, I have the following difficulty. The myth or rite does not always (it may sometimes) seem to me superior or equal in interest to the romancer's ferly. The cauldron of the Celtic underworld seems to me a good deal less interesting than the Grail. The tests and ordeals - often nasty enough - through which savages, like schoolboys, put their juniors interest me less than the testing of Gawain in Gawain and the Green Knight. In tracing the ferly's imaginative potency to such origins you are therefore asking me to believe that something which moves me much is enabled to do so by the help of something which moves me little or not at all. If after swallowing a quadruple whisky I said I'm afraid I'm rather drunk', and you replied That's because, while you weren't looking, someone put half a teaspoonful of Lager beer into it', I do not think your theory would be at all plausible. At this stage we may adopt a modified form of the A theory. We may say No. It is not the myth simply by being the myth it is, that makes the ferly potent. What the myth does is to modify the way in which the romancer tells it; and that in turn modifies the way in which you read it. This is a great improvement; not least because, in explaining a literary effect, it does allow something to the activity of a literary artist. The mythical origin is held (even if they did not know about it) to have modified the romancers' treatment because they surely inherited with such episodes something of the traditional attitude of reverence towards them'. (Note: J. Speirs, op . cit . p. 117) But does traditional reverence for his theme always compel, or enable, a writer to move us thus, or only sometimes? If always, why are all the hymns and patriotic songs not more impressive? For we surely know that the hymnodists had a traditional reverence for Christianity, and the patriotic poets for England, quite as well (to put it mildly) as we know the attitude of the medieval poets to the things they wrote about. If, on the other hand, traditional reverence produces these happy results on some occasions but not on others, there must be some cause for the difference. And that cause the A theory does not seem to supply. It might after all be a literary cause. The impressiveness of the ferlies in a good romance might depend not on the source from which the author received his materials, nor on his reverence for them (if he had any), but on his worth as an author.
I turn with pleasure to the B theory which, I feel sure, is the true one. As Mr Speirs significantly says, after reading Miss Weston and Professor Loomis and others, he certainly notices things in the romances that one might, or would, have missed'. (Note: Op. cit. p. 103. The italics are Mr Speirs's.) This can hardly mean that certain objects or episodes were simply blacked out' when he read the romances before he had studied the anthropologists. If it did (but the supposal is injurious to so diligent a critic), it's no great wonder that a careful reading of any book gets more out of it than a skimming. I take it he means that the anthropological preparation caused him to dwell more seriously on the ferlies, to open his sensibility for moment and significance in details which he might otherwise have regarded as trivial. If so, then the mere fact of mythical origins, which of course was a fact (if at all) long before Miss Weston or Professor Loomis or anyone else thought about it, clearly gave the ferlies no power to stir his imagination; it was his believing, and thinking about, the fact which did the good. In other words, this is not like the drug mixed in the food: it is like the effect of being told you have eaten human flesh'.
Unfortunately the power of such a statement to produce nausea in a sensitive person would not in the least depend on its being true. It is enough that he should believe it. In the same way, all the beneficial effects produced on our reading of the romances by a belief in the process from ritual to romance' would operate equally well if that belief were false. Indeed, not even a belief is required. The mere surmise will do. It is the same with the Jungian archetypes, and with the (euhemeristic) theory of buried history. You only have to say Perhaps... who knows?' Perhaps, behind this odd detail in the romance there opens a dark backward and abysm of time - who knows if this is only a veil which hides immemorial paganism, with all its ecstasies and horrors - how if this were the unobtrusive mouth of a shaft by which I can descend (ibant obscuri) to the true underworld, the living darkness, of the collective human psyche? Anyone but a dull clod is moved by such conjectures. If we believe that the disguise is intentional of course the pleasure is increased. We have penetrated a mystery, undergone an initiation.
But the very thing which perhaps makes such beliefs so acceptable to some (the surmises we can all enjoy) is just what awakes my scepticism. What we are doing when we thus feel excitement, wonder, and even awe at the idea of such hidden depths behind myths or romances seems to me far too like what goes on in the myths and romances themselves. I do not mean like it in being untrue; I mean like it in quality. We are wandering in a tangled forest of anthropology as the knights wander in a literal forest. We are going down to dark ancient things like Orpheus or Aeneas. We have to depend on cryptic signs, are confronted with what would be meaningless unless The Golden Bough (or Merlin or a hermit) explained it. Above all, anything may turn out to be far more important than it looks. I enjoy this, but the enjoyment is suspiciously like that I get from the myths and romances themselves. Jung's theory of myth is as exciting as a good myth and in the same way. Mr Speirs's analysis of a romance is for me itself romantic. But I have an idea that the true analysis of a thing ought not to be so like the thing itself. I should not expect a true theory of the comic to be itself funny. Of such theories one feels, for the first moment, This is just what we wanted'. And so, in one sense, it is. It is just what our emotions craved; a licence to prolong and perhaps to intensify the very mood which, in some of us, the romance or myth had already aroused and, in others, was beginning to arouse until the inhibitions stepped in - to be deliciously dispelled by this apparently scientific sanction. But whether it is in another sense just what we wanted', whether it satisfies our intellectual desire, as psychologists, to understand our experience, or as critics to diagnose the art by which an author evoked it - that is a different matter. I remain open to conviction but so far unconvinced.
A satisfactory theory of ferlies and their effect is, I believe, still to seek. I suspect that it will not succeed unless it fulfils two conditions. In the first place, it will have to be sure it has exhausted the possibilities of purely literary diagnosis before it looks further afield. A comparison of ferlies which do, and those which do not, succeed, will be involved. We shall have to try to discover whether narrative structure, or language, or preparation, or the total atmosphere of the work in which they occur, or the immediate content of the ferlies themselves, has usually most to do with it. But literary art can never be solely responsible for the effect of literature, for literature can never be pure like music. It has to be about' something, and the things it is about' bring their own real-life quality into the work. If roses did not smell sweet Guillaume de Lorris could never have used a rose to symbolize his heroine's love. An onion would not do instead. The second condition, therefore, is that the theory should deeply study the ferlies as things (in a sense) in the real world. Probably such things do not occur. But if no one in real life had either seen, or thought he saw, or accepted on hearsay, or dreaded, or hoped for, any such things, the poet and romancer could do nothing with them. As anthropologists we may want to know how belief in them originated. But it will illuminate the literary problem more if we can imagine what it would feel like to witness, or to think we had witnessed, or merely to believe in, the things. What it would feel like, and why.
27 'DE DESCRIPTIONE TEMPORUM'
Speaking from a newly founded Chair, I find myself freed from one embarrassment only to fall into another. I have no great predecessors to overshadow me; on the other hand, I must try (as the theatrical people say) 'to create the part'. The responsibility is heavy. If I miscarry, the University might come to regret not only my election - an error which, at worst, can be left to the great healer - but even, which matters very much more, the foundation of the Chair itself. That is why I have thought it best to take the bull by the horns and devote this lecture to explaining as clearly as I can the way in which I approach my work; my interpretation of the commission you have given me.
What most attracted me in that commission was the combination 'Medieval and Renaissance'. I thought that by this formula the University was giving official sanction to a change which has been coming over historical opinion within my own lifetime. It is temperately summed up by Professor Seznec in the words: 'As the Middle Ages and the Renaissance come to be better known, the traditional antithesis between them grows less marked.' (Note CSL: J. Seznec, La Survivance des dieux antiques (London, 1940), trans. B. F. Sessions (Kingsport, Tennessee, 1953), p.3) Some scholars might go further than Professor Seznec, but very few, I believe, would now oppose him. If we are sometimes unconscious of the change, that is not because we have not shared it but because it has been gradual and imperceptible. We recognise it most clearly if we are suddenly brought face to face with the old view in its full vigour. A good experiment is to re-read the first chapter of J. M. Berdan's Early Tudor Poetry . (Note CSL: New York, 1920) It is still in many ways a useful book; but it is now difficult to read that chapter without a smile. We begin with twenty-nine pages (and they contain several misstatements) of unrelieved gloom about grossness, superstition, and cruelty to children, and on the twenty-ninth comes the sentence, 'The first rift in this darkness is the Copernican doctrine'; as if a new hypothesis in astronomy would naturally make a man stop hitting his daughter about the head. No scholar could now write quite like that. But the old picture, done in far cruder colours, has survived among the weaker brethren, if not (let us hope) at Cambridge, yet certainly in that Western darkness from which you have so lately bidden me emerge. Only last summer a young gentleman whom I had the honour of examining described Thomas Wyatt as 'the first man who scrambled ashore out of the great, dark surging sea of the Middle Ages'. (Note CSL: A delicious passage in Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, trans. E. F. M. Benecke (London, 1595), p. 241, contrasts the Middle Ages with 'more normal periods of history') This was interesting because it showed how a stereotyped image can obliterate a man's own experience. Nearly all the medieval texts which the syllabus had required him to study had in reality led him into formal gardens where every passion was subdued to a ceremonial and every problem of conduct was dovetailed into a complex and rigid moral theology.
From the formula 'Medieval and Renaissance', then, I inferred that the University was encouraging my own belief that the barrier between those two ages has been greatly exaggerated, if indeed it was not largely a figment of Humanist propaganda. At the very least, I was ready to welcome any increased flexibility in our conception of history. All lines of demarcation between what we call 'periods' should be subject to constant revision. Would that we could dispense with them altogether! As a great Cambridge historian has said: 'Unlike dates, periods are not facts. They are retrospective conceptions that we form about past events, useful to focus discussion, but very often leading historical thought astray.' (Note CSL: G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History (London, 1944), p. 92) The actual temporal process, as we meet it in our lives (and we meet it, in a strict sense, nowhere else) has no divisions, except perhaps those 'blessed barriers between day and day', our sleeps. Change is never complete, and change never ceases. Nothing is ever quite finished with; it may always begin over again. (This is one of the sides of life that Richardson bits off with wearying accuracy.) And nothing is quite new; it was always somehow anticipated or prepared for. A seamless, formless continuity-in-mutability is the mode of our life. But unhappily we cannot as historians dispense with periods. We cannot use for literary history the technique of Mrs Woolf's The Waves. We cannot hold together huge masses of particulars without putting into them some kind of structure. Still less can we arrange a term's work or draw up a lecture list. Thus we are driven back upon periods. All divisions will falsify our material to some extent; the best one can hope is to choose those which will falsify it least. But because we must divide, to reduce the emphasis on any one traditional division must, in the long run, mean an increase of emphasis on some other division. And that is the subject I want to discuss. If we do not put the Great Divide between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, where should we put it? I ask this question with the full consciousness that, in the reality studied, there is no Great Divide. There is nothing in history that quite corresponds to a coastline or a watershed in geography. If, in spite of this, I still think my question worth asking, that is certainly not because I claim for my answer more than a methodological value, or even much of that. Least of all would I wish it to be any less subject than others to continual attack and speedy revision. But I believe that the discussion is as good a way as any other of explaining how I look at the work you have given me. When I have finished it, I shall at least have laid the cards on the table and you will know the worst.
The meaning of my title will now have become plain. It is a chapter-heading borrowed from Isidore. (Note CSL: Etymologiarum, ed. W. M. Lindsay (2 vols. Oxford, 1911), V, XXXIX) In that chapter Isidore is engaged in dividing history, as he knew it, into its periods; or, as he calls them, aetates. I shall be doing the same. Assuming that we do not put our great frontier between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, I shall consider the rival claims of certain other divisions which have been, or might be, made. But, first, a word of warning. I am not, even on the most Lilliputian scale, emulating Professor Toynbee or Spengler. About everything that could be called 'the philosophy of history' I am a desperate sceptic. I know nothing of the future, not even whether there will be any future. I don't know whether past history has been necessary or contingent. I don't know whether the human tragicomedy is now in Act I or Act V; whether our present disorders are those of infancy or of old age. I am merely considering how we should arrange or schematise those facts - ludicrously few in comparison with the totality - which survive to us (often by accident) from the past. (Note: In his essay on 'Historicism' Lewis discusses at length the belief that 'men can, by the use of their natural powers, discover an inner meaning in the historical process'. The essay is found in his Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (London, 1967), pp. 100-13) I am less like a botanist in a forest than a woman arranging a few cut flowers for the drawing-room. So, in some degree, are the greatest historians. We can't get into the real forest of the past; that is part of what the word past means.
The first division that naturally occurs to us is that between Antiquity and the Dark Ages - the fall of the Empire, the barbarian invasions, the christening of Europe. And of course no possible revolution in historical thought will ever make this anything less than a massive and multiple change. Do not imagine that I mean to belittle it. Yet I must observe that three things have happened since, say, Gibbon's time, which make it a shade less catastrophic for us than it was for him.
I. The partial loss of ancient learning and its recovery at the Renaissance were for him both unique events. History furnished no rivals to such a death and such a rebirth. But we have lived to see the second death of ancient learning. In our time something which was once the possession of all educated men has shrunk to being the technical accomplishment of a few specialists. If we say that this is not total death, it may be replied that there was no total death in the Dark Ages either. It could even be argued that Latin, surviving as the language of Dark Age culture, and preserving the disciplines of Law and Rhetoric, gave to some parts of the classical heritage a far more living and integral status in the life of those ages than the academic studies of the specialists can claim in our own. As for the area and the tempo of the two deaths, if one were looking for a man who could not read Virgil though his father could, he might be found more easily in the twentieth century than in the fifth.
2. To Gibbon the literary change from Virgil to Beowulf or the Hildebrand, if he had read them, would have seemed greater than it can to us. We can now see quite clearly that these barbarian poems were not really a novelty comparable to, say, The Waste Land or Mr Jones's Anathemata. They were rather an unconscious return to the spirit of the earliest classical poetry. The audience of Homer, and the audience of the Hildebrand, once they had learned one another's language and metre, would have found one another's poetry perfectly intelligible. Nothing new had come into the world.
3. The christening of Europe seemed to all our ancestors, whether they welcomed it themselves as Christians, or, like Gibbon, deplored it as humanistic unbelievers, a unique, irreversible event. But we have seen the opposite process. of course the un-christening of Europe in our time is not quite complete; neither was her christening in the Dark Ages. But roughly speaking we may say that whereas all history was for our ancestors divided into two periods, the pre-Christian and the Christian, and two only, for us it falls into three - the pre-Christian, the Christian, and what may reasonably be called the post-Christian. This surely must make a momentous difference. I am not here considering either the christening or the un-christening from a theological point of view. I am considering them simply as cultural changes. (Note CSL: It is not certain that either process, seen (if we could see it) sub specie aeternitatis, would be more important than it appears to the historian of culture. The amount of Christian (that is, of penitent and regenerate) life in an age, as distinct from 'Christian Civilization', is not to be judged by mortals.) When I do that, it appears to me that the second change is even more radical than the first. Christians and Pagans had much more in common with each other than either has with a post-Christian. The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as that between those who worship and those who do not. The Pagan and Christian ages alike are ages of what Pausanias would call the drwmenon, (Note CSL: De Descriptione Graec. II, xxxvii) the externalised and enacted idea; the sacrifice, the games, the triumph, the ritual drama, the Mass, the tournament, the masque, the pageant, the epithalamium, and with them ritual and symbolic costumes, trabea and laticlave, crown of wild olive, royal crown, coronet, judge's robes, knight's spurs, herald's tabard, coat-armour, priestly vestment, religious habit - for every rank, trade, or occasion its visible sign. But even if we look away from that into the temper of men's minds, I seem to see the same. Surely the gap between Professor Ryle and Thomas Browne is far wider than that between Gregory the Great and Virgil? Surely Seneca and Dr Johnson are closer together than Burton and Freud?
You see already the lines along which my thought is working; and indeed it is no part of my aim to save a surprise for the end of the lecture. If I have ventured, a little, to modify our view of the transition from 'the Antique' to 'the Dark', it is only because I believe we have since witnessed a change even more profound.
The next frontier which has been drawn, though not till recently, is that between the Dark and the Middle Ages. We draw it somewhere about the early twelfth century. The frontier clearly cannot compete with its predecessor in the religious field; nor can it boast such drastic redistribution of populations. But it nearly makes up for these deficiencies in other ways. The change from Ancient to Dark had, after all, consisted mainly in losses. Not entirely. The Dark Ages were not so unfruitful in progress as we sometimes think. They saw the triumph of the codex or hinged book over the roll or volumen - a technical improvement almost as important for the history of learning as the invention of printing. All exact scholarship depends on it. And if - here I speak under correction - they also invented the stirrup, they did something almost as important for the art of war as the inventor of Tanks. But in the main, they were a period of retrogression: worse houses, worse drains, fewer baths, worse roads, less security. (We notice in Beowulf that an old sword is expected to be better than a new one.) With the Middle Ages we reach a period of widespread and brilliant improvement. The text of Aristotle is recovered. Its rapid assimilation by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas opens up a new world of thought. In architecture new solutions of technical problems lead the way to new aesthetic effects. In literature the old alliterative and assonantal metres give place to that rhymed and syllabic verse which was to carry the main burden of European poetry for centuries. At the same time the poets explore a whole new range of sentiment. I am so far from underrating this particular revolution that I have before now been accused of exaggerating it. But 'great' and 'small' are terms of comparison. I would think this change in literature the greatest if I did not know of a greater. It does not seem to me that the work of the Troubadours and Chrétien and the rest was really as great a novelty as the poetry of the twentieth century. A man bred on the Chanson de Roland might have been puzzled by the Lancelot. He would have wondered why the author spent so much time on the sentiments and so (comparatively) little on the actions. But he would have known that this was what the author had done. He would, in one important sense, have known what the poem was 'about'. If he had misunderstood the intention, he would at least have understood the words. That is why I do not think the change from 'Dark' to 'Middle' can, on the literary side, be judged equal to the change which has taken place in my own lifetime. And of course in religion it does not even begin to compete.
A third possible frontier remains to be considered. We might draw our line somewhere towards the end of the seventeenth century, with the general acceptance of Copernicanism, the dominance of Descartes, and (in England) the foundation of the Royal Society. Indeed, if we were considering the history of thought (in the narrower sense of the word) I believe this is where I would draw my line. But if we are considering the history of our culture in general, it is a different matter. Certainly the sciences then began to advance with a firmer and more rapid tread. To that advance nearly all the later, and (in my mind) vaster, changes can be traced. But the effects were delayed. The sciences long remained like a lion-cub whose gambols delighted its master in private; it had not yet tasted man's blood. All through the eighteenth century the tone of the common mind remained ethical, rhetorical, juristic, rather than scientific, so that Johnson could truly say, 'the knowledge of external nature, and the sciences which that knowledge requires or includes, are not the great or the frequent business of the human mind.' (Note: 'Life of Milton', in Lives of the English Poets, vol. 1, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1905), p.99) It is easy to see why. Science was not the business of Man because Man had not yet become the business of science. It dealt chiefly with the inanimate; and it threw off few technological by-products. When Watt makes his engine, when Darwin starts monkeying with the ancestry of Man, and Freud with his soul, and the economists with all that is his, then indeed the lion will have got out of its cage. Its liberated presence in our midst will become one of the most important factors in everyone's daily life. But not yet; not in the seventeenth century.
It is by these steps that I have come to regard as the greatest of all divisions in the history of the West that which divides the present from, say, the age of Jane Austen and Scott. The dating of such things must of course be rather hazy and indefinite. No one could point to a year or a decade in which the change indisputably began, and it has probably not yet reached its peak. But somewhere between us and the Waverley Novels, somewhere between us and Persuasion, the chasm runs. Of course, I had no sooner reached this result than I asked myself whether it might not be an illusion of perspective. The distance between the telegraph post I am touching and the next telegraph post looks longer than the sum of the distances between all the other posts. Could this be an illusion of the same sort? We cannot pace the periods as we could pace the posts. I can only set out the grounds on which, after frequent reconsideration, I have found myself forced to reaffirm my conclusion.
1. I begin with what I regard as the weakest; the change, between Scott's age and ours, in political order. On this count my proposed frontier would have serious rivals. The change is perhaps less than that between Antiquity and the Dark Ages. Yet it is very great; and I think it extends to all nations, those we call democracies as well as dictatorships. If I wished to satirise the present political order I should borrow for it the name which Punch invented during the first German War: Govertisement. This is a portmanteau word and means 'government by advertisement'. But my intention is not satiric; I am trying to be objective. The change is this. In all previous ages that I can think of the principal aim of rulers, except at rare and short intervals, was to keep their subjects quiet, to forestall or extinguish widespread excitement and persuade people to attend quietly to their several occupations. And on the whole their subjects agreed with them. They even prayed (in words that sound curiously old-fashioned) to be able to live 'a peaceable life in all godliness and honesty' and 'pass their time in rest and quietness'. But now the organisation of mass excitement seems to be almost the normal organ of political power. We live in an age of 'appeals', 'drives', and 'campaigns'. Our rulers have become like schoolmasters and are always demanding 'keenness'. And you notice that I am guilty of a slight archaism in calling them 'rulers'. 'Leaders' is the modern word. I have suggested elsewhere (Note: 'New Learning and New Ignorance', English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, excluding Drama, The Oxford History of English Literature, vol. III (Oxford, 1954), p. 50) that this is a deeply significant change of vocabulary. Our demand upon them has changed no less than theirs on us. For of a ruler one asks justice, incorruption, diligence, perhaps clemency; of a leader, dash, initiative, and (I suppose) what people call 'magnetism' or 'personality'.
On the political side, then, this proposed frontier has respectable, but hardly compulsive, qualifications.
2. In the arts I think it towers above every possible rival. I do not think that any previous age produced work which was, in its own time, as shatteringly and bewilderingly new as that of the Cubists, the Dadaists, the Surrealists, and Picasso has been in ours. And I am quite sure that this is true of the art I love best, that is, of poetry. This question has often been debated with some heat, but the heat was, I think, occasioned by the suspicion (not always ill-grounded) that those who asserted the unprecedented novelty of modern poetry intended thereby to discredit it. But nothing is farther from my purpose than to make any judgement of value, whether favourable or the reverse. And if once we can eliminate that critical issue and concentrate on the historical fact, then I do not see how anyone can doubt that modern poetry is not only a greater novelty than any other 'new poetry' but new in a new way, almost in a new dimension. To say that all new poetry was once as difficult as ours is false; to say that any was is an equivocation. Some earlier poetry was difficult, but not in the same way. Alexandrian poetry was difficult because it presupposed a learned reader; as you became learned you found the answers to the puzzles. Skaldic poetry was unintelligible if you did not know the kenningar, but intelligible if you did. And - this is the real point - all Alexandrian men of letters and all skalds would have agreed about the answers. I believe the same to be true of the dark conceits in Donne; there was one correct interpretation of each and Donne could have told it to you. Of course you might misunderstand what Wordsworth was 'up to' in Lyrical Ballads; but everyone understood what he said. I do not see in any of these the slightest parallel to the state of affairs disclosed by a recent symposium on Mr Eliot's 'Cooking Egg'. (Note CSL: 'A Cooking Egg', Essays in Criticism, vol. III (July 1953), pp. 345-57) Here we find seven adults (two of them Cambridge men) whose lives have been specially devoted to the study of poetry discussing a very short poem which has been before the world for thirty-odd years; and there is not the slightest agreement among them as to what, in any sense of the word, it means. I am not in the least concerned to decide whether this state of affairs is a good thing, or a bad thing. (Note CSL: In music we have pieces which demand more talent in the performer than in the composer. Why should there not come a period when the art of writing poetry stands lower than the art of reading it.? Of course rival readings would then cease to be 'right' or wrong' and become more and less brilliant 'performances'.) I merely assert that it is a new thing. In the whole history of the West, from Homer - I might almost say from the Epic of Gilgamesh there has been no bend or break in the development of poetry comparable to this. On this score my proposed division has no rival to fear.
3. Thirdly, there is the great religious change which I have had to mention before: the un-christening. Of course there were lots of sceptics in Jane Austen's time and long before, as there are lots of Christians now. But the presumption has changed. In her days some kind and degree of religious belief and practice were the norm: now, though I would gladly believe that both kind and degree have improved, they are the exception. I have already argued that this change surpasses that which Europe underwent at its conversion. It is hard to have patience with those Jeremiahs, in Press or pulpit, who warn us that we are 'relapsing into Paganism'. It might be rather fun if we were. It would be pleasant to see some future Prime Minister trying to kill a large and lively milk-white bull in Westminster Hall. But we shan't. What lurks behind such idle prophecies, if they are anything but careless language, is the false idea that the historical process allows mere reversal; that Europe can come out of Christianity 'by the same door as in she went' and find herself back where she was. It is not what happens. A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce. The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past and therefore doubly from the Pagan past.
4. Lastly, I play my trump card. Between Jane Austen and us, but not between her and Shakespeare, Chaucer, Alfred, Virgil, Homer, or the Pharaohs, comes the birth of the machines. This lifts us at once into a region of change far above all that we have hitherto considered. For this is parallel to the great changes by which we divide epochs of pre-history. This is on a level with the change from stone to bronze, or from a pastoral to an agricultural economy. It alters Man's place in nature. The theme has been celebrated till we are all sick of it, so I will here say nothing about its economic and social consequences, immeasurable though they are. What concerns us more is its psychological effect. How has it come about that we use the highly emotive word 'stagnation', with all its malodorous and malarial overtones, for what other ages would have called 'permanence'? Why does the word 'primitive' at once suggest to us clumsiness, inefficiency, barbarity? When our ancestors talked of the primitive church or the primitive purity of our constitution they meant nothing of that sort. (The only pejorative sense which Johnson gives to Primitive in his Dictionary is, significantly, 'Formal; affectedly solemn; imitating the supposed gravity of old times'.) Why does 'latest' in advertisements mean 'best'? Well, let us admit that these semantic developments owe something to the nineteenth-century belief in spontaneous progress which itself owes something either to Darwin's theorem of biological evolution or to that myth of universal evolutionism which is really so different from it, and earlier. For the two great imaginative expressions of the myth, as distinct from the theorem - Keats's Hyperion and Wagner's Ring - are pre-Darwinian. Let us give these their due. (Note: Lewis pronounces a funeral oration over the 'myth of universal evolutionism' in his essay 'The Funeral of a Great Myth', Christian Reflections , pp. 82-93) But I submit that what has imposed this climate of opinion so firmly on the human mind is a new archetypal image. It is the image of old machines being superseded by new and better ones. For in the world of machines the new most often really is better and the primitive really is the clumsy. And this image, potent in all our minds, reigns almost without rival in the minds of the uneducated. For to them, after their marriage and the births of their children, the very milestones of life are technical advances. From the old push-bike to the motor-bike and thence to the little car; from gramophone to radio and from radio to television; from the range to the stove; these are the very stages of their pilgrimage. But whether from this cause or from some other, assuredly that approach to life which has left these footprints on our language is the thing that separates us most sharply from our ancestors and whose absence would strike us as most alien if we could return to their world. Conversely, our assumption that everything is provisional and soon to be superseded, that the attainment of goods we have never yet had, rather than the defence and conservation of those we have already, is the cardinal business of life, would most shock and bewilder them if they could visit ours.
I thus claim for my chosen division of periods that on the first count it comes well up to scratch; on the second and third it arguably surpasses all; and on the fourth it quite clearly surpasses them without any dispute. I conclude that it really is the greatest change in the history of Western Man.
At any rate, this conviction determines my whole approach to my work from this Chair. I am not preparing an excuse in advance lest I should hereafter catch myself lecturing either on the Epic of Gilgamesh or on the Waverley Novels. The field 'Medieval and Renaissance 'is already far too wide for my powers. But you see how to me the appointed area must primarily appear as a specimen of something far larger, something which had already begun when the Iliad was composed and was still almost unimpaired when Waterloo was fought. of course within that immense period there are all sorts of differences. There are lots of convenient differences between the area I am to deal with and other areas; there are important differences within the chosen area. And yet - despite all this - that whole thing, from its Greek or pre-Greek beginnings down to the day before yesterday, seen from the vast distance at which we stand today, reveals a homogeneity that is certainly important and perhaps more important than its interior diversities. That is why I shall be unable to talk to you about my particular region without constantly treating things which neither began with the Middle Ages nor ended with the end of the Renaissance. In that way I shall be forced to present to you a great deal of what can only be described as old European, or old Western, Culture. If one were giving a lecture on Warwickshire to an audience of Martians (no offence: Martians may be delightful creatures) one might loyally choose all one's data from that county: but much of what you told them would not really be Warwickshire lore but 'common tellurian'.
The prospect of my becoming, in such halting fashion as I can, the spokesman of old Western Culture, alarms me. It may alarm you. I will close with one reassurance and one claim.
First, for the reassurance. I do not think you need fear that the study of a dead period, however prolonged and however sympathetic, need prove an indulgence in nostalgia or an enslavement to the past. In the individual life, as the psychologists have taught us, it is not the remembered but the forgotten past that enslaves us. I think the same is true of society. To study the past does indeed liberate us from the present, from the idols of our own marketplace. But I think it liberates us from the past too. I think no class of men are less enslaved to the past than historians. The unhistorical are usually, without knowing it, enslaved to a fairly recent past. Dante read Virgil. Certain other medieval authors (Note CSL: On their identity see Comparetti, Virgilio nel Medio Evo, ed. G. Pasquali (Firenze, 1943), p. xxii. I owe this reference to Mr C. G. Hardie) evolved the legend of Virgil as a great magician. It was the more recent past, the whole quality of mind evolved during a few preceding centuries, which impelled them to do so. Dante was freer; he also knew more of the past. And you will be no freer by coming to misinterpret old Western Culture as quickly and deeply as those medievals misinterpreted Classical Antiquity; or even as the Romantics misinterpreted the Middle Ages. (Note CSL: As my examples show, such misinterpretations may themselves produce results which have imaginative value. If there had been no Romantic distortion of the Middle Ages, we should have no Eve of St Agnes. There it room both for an appreciation of the imagined past and an awareness of its difference from the real past; but if we want only the former, why come to a university.' (The subject deserves much fuller treatment than I give it here.)) Such misinterpretation has already begun. To arrest its growth while arrest is still possible, is surely a proper task for a university.
And now for the claim: which sounds arrogant but, I hope, is not really so. I have said that the vast change which separates you from old Western has been gradual and is not even now complete. Wide as the chasm is, those who are native to different sides of it can still meet; are meeting in this room. This is quite normal at times of great change. The correspondence of Henry More (Note CSL: A Collection of several Philosophical Writings (Cambridge, 1662)) and Descartes is an amusing example; one would think the two men were writing in different centuries. And here comes the rub. I myself belong far more to that old Western order than to yours. I am going to claim that this, which in one way is a disqualification for my task, is yet in another a qualification. The disqualification is obvious. You don't want to be lectured on Neanderthal Man by a Neanderthaler, still less on dinosaurs by a dinosaur. And yet, is that the whole story? If a live dinosaur dragged its slow length into the laboratory, would we not all look back as we fled? What a chance to know at last how it really moved and looked and smelled and what noises it made! And if the Neanderthaler could talk, then, though his lecturing technique might leave much to be desired, should we not almost certainly learn from him some things about him which the best modern anthropologist could never have told us? He would tell us without knowing he was telling. One thing I know: I would give a great deal to hear any ancient Athenian, even a stupid one, talking about Greek tragedy. He would know in his bones so much that we seek in vain. At any moment some chance phrase might, unknown to him, show us where modern scholarship had been on the wrong track for years. Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you somewhat as that Athenian might stand. I read as a native texts that you must read as foreigners. You see why I said that the claim was not really arrogant; who can be proud of speaking fluently his mother tongue or knowing his way about his father's house? It is my settled conviction that in order to read old Western literature aright you must suspend most of the responses and unlearn most of the habits you have acquired in reading modern literature. And because this is the judgement of a native, I claim that, even if the defence of my conviction is weak, the fact of my conviction is a historical datum to which you should give full weight. That way, where I fail as a critic, I may yet be useful as a specimen. I would even dare to go further. Speaking not only for myself but for all other old Western men whom you may meet, I would say, use your specimens while you can. There are not going to be many more dinosaurs.