32 Dogma And The Universe

32 Dogma And The Universe

32 DOGMA AND THE UNIVERSE

IT IS A COMMON REPROACH AGAINST CHRISTIANITY THAT ITS dogmas are unchanging, while human knowledge is in continual growth. Hence, to unbelievers, we seem to be always engaged in the hopeless task of trying to force the new knowledge into moulds which it has outgrown. I think this feeling alienates the outsider much more than any particular discrepancies between this or that doctrine and this or that scientific theory. We may, as we say, 'get over' dozens of isolated 'difficulties', but that does not alter his sense that the endeavour as a whole is doomed to failure and perverse: indeed, the more ingenious, the more perverse. For it seems to him clear that, if our ancestors had known what we know about the universe, Christianity would never have existed at all: and, however we patch and mend, no system of thought which claims to be immutable can, in the long run, adjust itself to our growing knowledge.

That is the position I am going to try to answer. But before I go on to what I regard as the fundamental answer, I would like to clear up certain points about the actual relations between Christian doctrine and the scientific knowledge we already have. That is a different matter from the continual growth of knowledge we imagine, whether rightly or wrongly, in the future and which, as some think, is bound to defeat us in the end.

In one respect, as many Christians have noticed, contemporary science has recently come into line with Christian doctrine, and parted company with the classical forms of materialism. If anything emerges clearly from modern physics, it is that nature is not everlasting. The universe had a beginning, and will have an end. But the great materialistic systems of the past all believed in the eternity, and thence in the self-existence of matter. As Professor Whittaker said in the Riddell Lectures of 1942, 'It was never possible to oppose seriously the dogma of the Creation except by maintaining that the world has existed from all eternity in more or less its present state.' (Sir Edmund Taylor Whittaker, The Beginning and End of the World, Riddell Memorial Lectures, Fourteenth Series (Oxford, 1942), p. 40.) This fundamental ground for materialism has now been withdrawn. We should not lean too heavily on this, for scientific theories change. But at the moment it appears that the burden of proof rests, not on us, but on those who deny that nature has some cause beyond herself.

In popular thought, however, the origin of the universe has counted (I think) for less than its character-its immense size and its apparent indifference, if not hostility, to human life. And very often this impresses people all the more because it is supposed to be a modern discovery - an excellent example of those things which our ancestors did not know and which, if they had known them, would have prevented the very beginnings of Christianity. Here there is a simple historical falsehood. Ptolemy knew just as well as Eddington (Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882-1944) who wrote The Expanding Universe (1933)) that the earth was infinitesimal in comparison with the whole content of space (Ptolemy lived at Alexandria in the 2nd century A.D. The reference is to his Almagest, bk. I, ch. v.). There is no question here of knowledge having grown until the frame of archaic thought is no longer able to contain it. The real question is why the spatial insignificance of the earth, after being known for centuries, should suddenly in the last century have become an argument against Christianity. I do not know why this has happened; but I am sure it does not mark an increased clarity of thought, for the argument from size is, in my opinion, very feeble.

When the doctor at a post-mortem diagnoses poison, pointing to the state of the dead man's organs, his argument is rational because he has a clear idea of that opposite state in which the organs would have been found if no poison were present. In the same way, if we use the vastness of space and the smallness of earth to disprove the existence of God, we ought to have a clear idea of the sort of universe we should expect if God did exist. But have we? Whatever space may be in itself - and, of course, some moderns think it finite-we certainly perceive it as three-dimensional, and to three-dimensional space we can conceive no boundaries. By the very forms of our perceptions, therefore, we must feel as if we lived somewhere in infinite space. If we discovered no objects in this infinite space except those which are of use to man (our own sun and moon), then this vast emptiness would certainly be used as a strong argument against the existence of God. If we discover other bodies, they must be habitable or uninhabitable: and the odd thing is that both these hypotheses are used as grounds for rejecting Christianity. If the universe is teeming with life, this, we are told, reduces to absurdity the Christian claim - or what is thought to be the Christian claim-that man is unique, and the Christian doctrine that to this one planet God came down and was incarnate for us men and our salvation. If, on the other hand, the earth is really unique, then that proves that life is only an accidental by-product in the universe, and so again disproves our religion. Really, we are hard to please. We treat God as the police treat a man when he is arrested; whatever He does will be used in evidence against Him. I do not think this is due to our wickedness. I suspect there is something in our very mode of thought which makes it inevitable that we should always be baffled by actual existence, whatever character actual existence may have. Perhaps a finite and contingent creature - a creature that might not have existed - will always find it hard to acquiesce in the brute fact that it is, here and now, attached to an actual order of things.

However that may be, it is certain that the whole argument from size rests on the assumption that differences of size ought to coincide with differences of value: for unless they do, there is, of course, no reason why the minute earth and the yet smaller human creatures upon it should not be the most important things in a universe that contains the spiral nebulae. Now, is this assumption rational or emotional? I feel, as well as anyone else, the absurdity of supposing that the galaxy could be of less moment in God's eyes than such an atom as a human being. But I notice that I feel no similar absurdity in supposing that a man of five-feet high may be more important than another man who is five-feet three and a half - nor that a man may matter more than a tree, or a brain more than a leg. In other words, the feeling of absurdity arises only if the differences of size are very great. But where a relation is perceived by reason it holds good universally. If size and value had any real connexion, small differences in size would accompany small differences in value as surely as large differences in size accompany large differences in value. But no sane man could suppose that this is so. I don't think the taller man slightly more valuable than the shorter one. I don't allow a slight superiority to trees over men, and then neglect it because it is too small, to bother about. I perceive, as long as I am dealing with the small differences of size, that they have no connexion with value whatsoever. I therefore conclude that the importance attached to the great differences of size is an affair, not of reason but of emotion - of that peculiar emotion which superiorities in size produce only after a certain point of absolute size has been reached.

We are inveterate poets. Our imaginations awake. Instead of mere quantity, we now have a quality - the sublime. Unless this were so, the merely arithmetical greatness of the galaxy would be no more impressive than the figures in a telephone directory. It is thus, in a sense, from ourselves that the material universe derives its power to overawe us. To a mind which did not share our emotions, and lacked our imaginative energies, the argument from size would be sheerly meaningless. Men look on the starry heavens with reverence: monkeys do not. The silence of the eternal spaces terrified Pascal (Blaise Pascal, Pensees, No. 206), but it was the greatness of Pascal that enabled them to do so. When we are frightened by the greatness of the universe, we are (almost literally) frightened by our own shadows: for these light years and billions of centuries are mere arithmetic until the shadow of man, the poet, the maker of myth, falls upon them. I do not say we are wrong to tremble at his shadow; it is a shadow of an image of God. But if ever the vastness of matter threatens to overcross our spirits, one must remember that it is matter spiritualized which does so. To puny man, the great nebula in Andromeda owes in a sense its greatness.

And this drives me to say yet again that we are hard to please. If the world in which we found ourselves were not vast and strange enough to give us Pascal's terror, what poor creatures we should be! Being what we are, rational but also animate, amphibians who start from the world of sense and proceed through myth and metaphor to the world of spirit, I do not see how we could have come to know the greatness of God without that hint furnished by the greatness of the material universe. Once again, what sort of universe do we demand? If it were small enough to be cosy, it would not be big enough to be sublime. If it is large enough for us to stretch our spiritual limbs in, it must be large enough to baffle us. Cramped or terrified, we must, in any conceivable world, be one or the other. I prefer terror. I should be suffocated in a universe that I could see to the end of. Have you never, when walking in a wood, turned back deliberately for fear you should come out at the other side and thus make it ever after in your imagination a mere beggarly strip of trees?

I hope you do not think I am suggesting that God made the spiral nebulae solely or chiefly in order to give me the experience of awe and bewilderment. I have not the faintest idea why He made them; on the whole, I think it would be rather surprising if I had. As far as I understand the matter, Christianity is not wedded to an anthropocentric view of the universe as a whole. The first chapters of Genesis, no doubt, give the story of creation in the form of a folk-tale - a fact recognized as early as the time of St Jerome - and if you take them alone you might get that impression. But it is not confirmed by the Bible as a whole. There are few places in literature where we are more sternly warned against making man the measure of all things than in the Book of Job: 'Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? Will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him for a servant? Shall not one be cast down even at the sight of him? (Job xli. 1, 4, 9) In St Paul, the powers of the skies seem usually to be hostile to man. It is of course, the essence of Christianity that God loves man and for his sake became man and died. But that does not prove that man is the sole end of nature. In the parable, it was the one lost sheep that the shepherd went in search of (Matthew xviii. 12; Luke xv. 4): it was not the only sheep in the flock, and we are not told that it was the most valuable - save in so far as the most desperately in need has, while the need lasts, a peculiar value in the eyes of Love. The doctrine of the Incarnation would conflict with what we know of this vast universe only if we knew also that there were other rational species in it who had, like us, fallen, and who needed redemption in the same mode, and that they had not been vouchsafed it. But we know none of these things. It may be full of life that needs no redemption. It may be full of life that has been redeemed. It may be full of things quite other than life which satisfy the Divine Wisdom in fashions one cannot conceive. We are in no position to draw up maps of God's psychology, and prescribe limits to His interests. We would not do so even for a man whom we knew to be greater than ourselves. The doctrines that God is love and that He delights in men, are positive doctrines, not limiting doctrines. He is not less than this. What more He may be, we do not know; we know only that He must be more than we can conceive. It is to be expected that His creation should be, in the main, unintelligible to us.

Christians themselves have been much to blame for the misunderstanding on these matters. They have a bad habit of talking as if revelation existed to gratify curiosity by illuminating all creation so that it becomes self-explanatory and all questions are answered. But revelation appears to me to be purely practical, to be addressed to the particular animal, Fallen Man, for the relief of his urgent necessities - not to the spirit of inquiry in man for the gratification of his liberal curiosity. We know that God has visited and redeemed His people, and that tells us just as much about the general character of the creation as a dose given to one sick hen on a big farm tells it about the general character of farming in England. What we must do, which road we must take to the fountain of life, we know, and none who has seriously followed the directions complains that he has been deceived. But whether there are other creatures like ourselves, and how they are dealt with: whether inanimate matter exists only to serve living creatures or for some other reason: whether the immensity of space is a means to some end, or an illusion, or simply the natural mode in which infinite energy might be expected to create - on all these points I think we are left to our own speculations.

No. It is not Christianity which need fear the giant universe. It is those systems which place the whole meaning of existence in biological or social evolution on our own planet. It is the creative evolutionist, the Bergsonian or Shavian, or the Communist, who should tremble when he looks up at the night sky. For he really is committed to a sinking ship. He really is attempting to ignore the discovered nature of things, as though by concentrating on the possibly upward trend in a single planet he could make himself forget the inevitable downward trend in the universe as a whole, the trend to low temperatures and irrevocable disorganization. For entrophy is the real cosmic wave, and evolution only a momentary tellurian ripple within it.

On these grounds, then, I submit that we Christians have as little to fear as anyone from the knowledge actually acquired. But, as I said at the beginning, that is not the fundamental answer. The endless fluctuations of scientific theory which seem today so much friendlier to us than in the last century may turn against us tomorrow. The basic answer lies elsewhere.

Let me remind you of the question we are trying to answer. It is this: How can an unchanging system survive the continual increase of knowledge? Now, in certain cases we know very well how it can. A mature scholar reading a great passage in Plato, and taking in at one glance the metaphysics, the literary beauty, and the place of both in the history of Europe, is in a very different position from a boy learning the Greek alphabet. Yet through that unchanging system of the alphabet all this vast mental and emotional activity is operating. It has not been broken by the new knowledge. It is not outworn. If it changed, all would be chaos. A great Christian statesman, considering the morality of a measure which will affect millions of lives, and which involves economic, geographical and political considerations of the utmost complexity, is in a different position from a boy first learning that one must not cheat or tell lies, or hurt innocent people. But only in so far as that first knowledge of the great moral platitudes survives unimpaired in the statesman will his deliberation be moral at all. If that goes, then there has been no progress, but only mere change. For change is not progress unless the core remains unchanged. A small oak grows into a big oak: if it became a beech, that would not be growth, but mere change. And thirdly, there is a great difference between counting apples and arriving at the mathematical formulae of modern physics. But the multiplication table is used in both and does not grow out of date.

In other words, wherever there is real progress in knowledge, there is some knowledge that is not superseded. Indeed, the very possibility of progress demands that there should be an unchanging element. New bottles for new wine, by all means: but not new palates, throats and stomachs, or it would not be, for us, 'wine' at all. I take it we should all agree to find this sort of unchanging element in the simple rules of mathematics. I would add to these the primary principles of morality. And I would also add the fundamental doctrines of Christianity. To put it in rather more technical language, I claim that the positive historical statements made by Christianity have the power, elsewhere found chiefly in formal principles, of receiving, without intrinsic change, the increasing complexity of meaning which increasing knowledge puts into them.

For example, it may be true (though I don't for a moment suppose it is ) that when the Nicene Creed said 'He came down from Heaven', the writers had in mind a local movement from a local heaven to the surface of the earth - like a parachute descent. Others since may have dismissed the idea of a spatial heaven altogether. But neither the significance nor the credibility of what is asserted seems to be in the least affected by the change. On either view, the thing is miraculous: on either view, the mental images which attend the act of belief are inessential. When a Central African convert and a Harley Street specialist both affirm that Christ rose from the dead, there is, no doubt, a very great difference between their thoughts. To one, the simple picture of a dead body getting up is sufficient; the other may think of a whole series of biochemical and even physical processes beginning to work backwards. The Doctor knows that, in his experience, they never have worked backwards; but the negro knows that dead bodies don't get up and walk. Both are faced with miracle, and both know it. If both think miracle impossible, the only difference is that the Doctor will expound the impossibility in much greater detail, will give an elaborate gloss on the simple statement that dead men don't walk about. If both believe, all the Doctor says will merely analyze and explicate the words 'He rose.' When the author of Genesis says that God made man in His own image, he may have pictured a vaguely corporeal God making man as a child makes a figure out of plasticine. A modern Christian philosopher may think of a process lasting from the first creation of matter to the final appearance on this planet of an organism fit to receive spiritual as well as biological life. But both mean essentially the same thing. Both are denying the same thing - the doctrine that matter by some blind power inherent in itself has produced spirituality.

Does this mean that Christians on different levels of general education conceal radically different beliefs under an identical form of words? Certainly not. For what they agree on is the substance, and what they differ about is the shadow. When one imagines his God seated in a local heaven above a flat earth, where another sees God and creation in terms of Professor Whitehead's philosophy, (Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), who wrote, among other works, Science and the Modern World (1925) and Religion in the Making (1926) this difference touches precisely what does not matter. Perhaps this seems to you an exaggeration. But is it? As regards material reality, we are now being forced to the conclusion that we know nothing about it save its mathematics. The tangible beach and pebbles of our first calculators, the imaginable atoms of Democritus, the plain man's picture of space, turn out to be the shadow: numbers are the substance of our knowledge, the sole liaison between mind and things. What nature is in herself evades us; what seem to naive perception to be the evident things about her, turn out to be the most phantasmal. It is something the same with our knowledge of spiritual reality. What God is in Himself, how He is to be conceived by philosophers; retreats continually from our knowledge. The elaborate world-pictures which accompany religion and which look each so solid while they last, turn out to be only shadows. It is religion itself-prayer and sacrament and repentance and adoration - which is here, in the long run, our sole avenue to the real. Like mathematics, religion can grow from within, or decay. The Jew knows more than the Pagan, the Christian more than the Jew, the modern vaguely religious man less than any of the three. But, like mathematics, it remains simply itself, capable of being applied to any new theory of the material universe and outmoded by none.

When any man comes into the presence of God he will find, whether he wishes it or not, that all those things which seemed to make him so different from the men of other times, or even from his earlier self, have fallen off him. He is back where he always was, where every man always is. Eadem sunt omnia semper. ('Everything is always the same') Do not let us deceive ourselves. No possible complexity which we can give to our picture of the universe can hide us from God: there is no copse, no forest, no jungle thick enough to provide cover. We read in Revelation of Him that sat on the throne 'from whose face the earth and heaven fled away' (Revelation xx.11). It may happen to any of us at any moment. In the twinkling of an eye, in a time too small to be measured, and in any place, all that seems to divide us from God can flee away, vanish leaving us naked before Him, like the first man, like the only man, as if nothing but He and I existed. And since that contact cannot be avoided for long, and since it means either bliss or horror, the business of life is to learn to like it. That is the first and great commandment.

33 DONNE AND LOVE POETRY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

I have seen an old history of literature in which the respective claims of Shelley and Mrs Hemans to be the greatest lyrist of the nineteenth century were seriously weighed; and Donne, who was so inconsiderable fifty years ago, seems at the moment to rank among our greatest poets.

If there were no middle state between absolute certainty and what Mr Kellett calls the whirligig of taste, (Note: E. E. Kellet, The Whirligig of Taste, Hogarth Lectures on Literature, no. 8 (London, 1929)) these fluctuations would make us throw up criticism in despair. But where it is impossible to go quite straight we may yet resolve to reel as little as we can. Such phenomena as the present popularity of Donne or the growing unpopularity of Milton are not to be deplored; they are rather to be explained. It is not impossible to see why Donne's poetry should be overrated in the twentieth and underrated in the eighteenth century; and in so far as we detect these temporary disturbing factors and explain the varying appearances of the object by the varying positions of the observers, we shall come appreciably nearer to a glimpse of Donne simpliciter. I shall concern myself in what follows chiefly with his love poetry.

In style this poetry is primarily a development of one of the two styles which we find in the work of Donne's immediate predecessors. One of these is the mellifluous, luxurious, 'builded rhyme', as in Spenser's Amoretti: the other is the abrupt, familiar, and consciously 'manly' style in which nearly all Wyatt's lyrics are written. Most of the better poets make use of both, and in Astrophil and Stella much of Sidney's success depends on deliberate contrast between such poetry as

Nor of that golden sea, whose waves in curles are brok'n

(Note: in The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jnr (Oxford 1962), no. 86, Fifth Song, line 39 p.213) and such poetry as

He cannot love: no, no, let him alone.

(Note: Ibid., no. 54 line 8 p.191 )

But Wyatt remains, if not the finest, yet much the purest example of the plainer manner, and in reading his songs, with their conversational openings, their surly (not to say sulky) defiances, and their lack of obviously poetic ornament, I find myself again and again reminded of Donne. But of course he is Donne with most of the genius left out. Indeed, the first and most obvious achievement of the younger poet is to have raised this kind of thing to a much higher power; to have kept the vividness of conversation where Wyatt too often had only the flatness, to sting like a lash where Wyatt merely grumbled. The difference in degree between the two poets thus obscures the similarity in kind. Donne has so far surpassed not only Wyatt but all the Elizabethans in what may be called their Wyatt moments, and has so generally abstained from attempting to rival them in their other vein, that we hardly think of him as continuing one side of their complex tradition; he appears rather as the innovator who substituted a realistic for a decorated kind of love poetry.

Now this error is not in itself important. In an age which was at all well placed for judging the comparative merits of the two styles, it would not matter though we thought that Donne had invented what in fact he only brought to perfection. But our own age is not so placed. The mellifluous style, which we may agree to call Petrarchan though no English poet is very like Petrarch, has really no chance of a fair hearing. It is based on a conception of poetry wholly different from that of the twentieth century. It descends from old provençal and Italian sources and presupposes a poetic like that of Dante. Dante, we may remember, thinks of poetry as something to be made, to be 'adorned as much as possible', to have its 'true sense' hidden beneath a rich vesture of 'rhetorical colouring'. The 'petrarchan' sonneteers are not trying to make their work sound like the speaking voice. They are not trying to communicate faithfully the raw, the merely natural, impact of actual passion. The passion for them is not a specimen of 'nature' to be followed so much as a lump of ore to be refined: they ask themselves not 'How can I record it with the least sophistication?' but 'Of its bones what coral can make?', and to accuse them of insincerity is like calling an oyster insincere because it makes its disease into a pearl. The aim of the other style is quite different. It wishes to be convincing, intimate, naturalistic. It would be very foolish to set up these two kinds of poetry as rivals, for obviously they are different and both are good. It is a fine thing to hear the living voice, the voice of a man like ourselves, whispering or shouting to us from the printed page with all the heat of life; and it is a fine thing, too, to see such life - so pitiably like our own, I doubt not, in the living - caught up and transfigured, sung by the voice of a god into an ecstasy no less real though in another dimension. (Note CSLewis: Those who object to 'emotive terms' in criticism may prefer to read '...used by an accomplished poet to produce an attitude relevant not directly to outer experience but to the central nucleus of the total attitude-and-belief-feeling system'. It must not be supposed, however, that the present writer's theory of either knowledge or value would permit him, in the long run, to accept the statement.) There is no necessary quarrel between the two. But there are many reasons why one of them should start with overwhelming odds in its favour at the present moment. For many years our poetics have been becoming more and more expressionistic. First came Wordsworth with his theory, and we have never quite worked it out of our system; even in the crude form that 'you should write as you talk', it works at the back of much contemporary criticism. Then came the final break-up of aristocracy and the consequent, and still increasing, distaste for arduous disciplines of sentiment - the wholesale acceptance of the merely and unredeemedly natural. Finally, the psychological school of criticism overthrew what was left of the old conception of a poem as a construction and set up instead the poem as 'document'. In so far as we admire Donne for being our first great practitioner in one of the many possible kinds of lyric, we are on firm ground; but the conception of him as liberator, as one who substituted 'real' or 'live' or 'sincere' for 'artificial' or 'conventional' love lyric, begs all the questions and is simply a prejudice de siècle.

But of course when we have identified the Wyatt element in Donne, we have still a very imperfect notion of his manner. We have described 'Busie old foole' (Note: 'The Sunne Rising', I) and 'I wonder by my troth' (Note: 'The Good-morrow', I) and 'For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love' (Note: 'The Canonization', I) but we have left out the cleaving remora, the triple soul, the stiff twin compasses, and a hundred other things that were not in Wyatt. There were indeed a great many things not in Wyatt, and his manly plainness can easily be over-praised pauper videri Cinna vult et est pauper. If Donne had not reinforced the style with new attractions it would soon have died of very simplicity. An account of these reinforcements will give us a rough notion of the unhappily named 'metaphysical' manner.

The first of them is the multiplication of conceits - not conceits of any special 'metaphysical' type but conceits such as we find in all the Elizabethans. When Donne speaks of the morning coming from his mistress's eyes, or tells how they wake him like the light of a taper, these fanciful hyperboles are not, in themselves, a novelty. But, side by side with these, we find, as his second characteristic, what may be called the difficult conceit. This is clearly a class which no two readers will fill up in quite the same way. An example of what I mean comes at the end of 'The Sunne Rising' where the sun is congratulated on the fact that the two lovers have shortened his task for him. Even the quickest reader will be checked, if only for an infinitesimal time, before he sees how and why the lovers have done this, and will experience a kind of astonished relief at the unexpected answer. The pleasure of the thing, which can be paralleled in other artistic devices, perhaps in rhyme itself, would seem to depend on recurrent tension and relaxation. In the third place, we have Donne's characteristic choice of imagery. The Petrarchans (I will call them so for convenience) had relied for their images mainly on mythology and on natural objects. Donne uses both of these sparingly - though his sea that 'Leaves embroider'd works upon the sand' (Note: 'An Elegie uppon the Death of the Ladie Marckham', 19) is as fine an image from nature as I know - and taps new sources such as law, science, philosophy, and the commonplaces of urban life. It is this that has given the Metaphysicals their name and been much misunderstood. When Johnson said that they were resolved to show their learning he said truth in fact, for there is an element of pedantry, of dandyism, an odi profanos air about Donne - the old printer's address not to the readers but to the understanders is illuminating. But Johnson was none the less misleading. He encouraged the idea that the abstruse nature of some of Donne's similes was poetically relevant for good or ill. In fact, of course, when we have once found out what Donne is talking about - that is, when Sir Herbert Grierson has told us - the learning of the poet becomes unimportant. The image will stand or fall like any other by its intrinsic merit - its power of conveying a meaning 'more luminously and with a sensation of delight'. The matter is worth mentioning only because Donne's reputation in this respect repels some humble readers and attracts some prigs. What is important for criticism is his avoidance of the obviously poetical image; whether the intractable which he is determined to poetize is fetched from Thomas Aquinas or from the London underworld, the method is essentially the same. Indeed it would be easy to exaggerate the amount of learned imagery in his poems and even the amount of his learning. He knows much, but he seems to know even more because his knowledge so seldom overlaps with our own; and some scraps of his learning, such as that of angelic consciousness or of the three souls in man, come rather too often - like the soldiers in a stage army, and with the same result. This choice of imagery is closely connected with the surprising and ingenious nature of the connections which Donne makes between the image and the matter in hand, thus getting a double surprise. No one, in the first place, expects lovers to be compared to compasses; and no one, even granted the comparison, would guess in what respect they are going to be compared.

But all these characteristics, in their mere enumeration, are what Donne would have called a 'ruinous anatomie'. They might all be used - indeed they all are used by Herbert - to produce a result very unlike Donne's. What gives their peculiar character to most of the Songs and Sonets is that they are dramatic in the sense of being addresses to an imagined hearer in the heat of an imagined conversation, and usually addresses of a violently argumentative character. The majority of lyrics, even where nominally addressed to a god, a woman, or a friend, are meditations or introspective narratives. Thus Herbert's 'Throw away thy rod' (Note: 'Discipline', 1 and 29) is formally an apostrophe; in fact, it is a picture of Herbert's own state of mind. But the majority of the Songs and Sonets, including some that are addressed to abstractions like Love, present the poet's state of mind only indirectly and are ostensibly concerned with badgering, wheedling, convincing, or upbraiding an imagined hearer. No poet, not even Browning, buttonholes us or, as we say, 'goes for' us like Donne. There are, of course, exceptions. Goe, and catch a falling starre', though it is in the form of an address, has not this effect; and 'Twicknam Garden' or the 'Nocturnall' are in fact, as well as in pretension, soliloquies. These exceptions include some of Donne's best work; and indeed, one of the errors of contemporary criticism, to my mind, is an insufficient distinction between Donne's best and Donne's most characteristic. But I do not at present wish to emphasize this. For the moment it is enough to notice that the majority of his love lyrics, and of the Elegies, are of the type I have described. And since they are, nearly always, in the form of arguments, since they attempt to extort something from us, they are poetry of an extremely exacting kind. This exacting quality, this urgency and pressure of the poet upon the reader in every line, seems to me to be the root both of Donne's weakness and his strength. When the thing fails it exercises the same dreadful fascination that we feel in the grip of the worst kind of bore - the hot-eyed, unescapable kind. When it succeeds it produces a rare intensity in our enjoyment - which is what a modern critic meant (I fancy) when he claimed that Donne made all other poetry sound less 'serious'. The point is worth investigation.

For, of course, in one sense these poems are not serious at all. Poem after poem consists of extravagant conceits woven into the preposterous semblance of an argument. The preposterousness is the point Donne intends to take your breath away by the combined subtlety and impudence of the steps that lead to his conclusion. Any attempt to overlook Donne's 'wit' in this sense, or to pretend that his rare excursions into the direct expression of passion are typical, is false criticism. The paradox, the surprise, are essential; if you are not enjoying these you are not enjoying what Donne intended. Thus 'Womans Constancy' is of no interest as a document of Donne's 'cynicism' - any fool can be promiscuously unchaste and any fool can say so. The merit of the poem consists in the skill with which it leads us to expect a certain conclusion and then gives us precisely the opposite conclusion, and that, too, with an appearance of reasonableness. Thus, again, the art of 'The Will' consists in keeping us guessing through each stanza what universal in the concluding triplet will bind together the odd particulars in the preceding six lines. The test case is 'The Flea'. If you think this very different from Donne's other poems you may be sure that you have no taste for the real Donne. But for the accident that modern cleanliness by rendering this insect disgusting has also rendered it comic, the conceit is exactly on the same level as that of the tears in 'A Valediction: of Weeping'.

And yet the modern critic was right The effect of all these poems is somehow serious. 'Serious' indeed is the only word. Seldom profound in thought, not always passionate in feeling, they are none the less the very opposite of gay. It is as though Donne performed in deepest depression those gymnastics which are usually a sign of intellectual high spirits. He himself speaks of his 'concupiscence of witt'. (Note: 'The Crosse', 58) The hot, dark word is well chosen. We are all familiar - at least if we have lived in Ireland - with the type of mind which combines furious anger with a revelling delight in eloquence, nay grows more rhetorical as anger increases. In the same way, wit and the delight in wit are, for Donne, not only compatible with, but actually provoked by, the most uneasy passions - by contempt and self-contempt and unconvinced sensuality. His wit is not so much the play as the irritability of intellect. But none the less, like the angry Irishman's clausulae, it is still enjoyed and still intends to produce admiration; and if we do not hold our breaths as we read, wondering in the middle of each complication how he will resolve it, and exclaiming at the end 'However did you think of that ?' (Carew speaks of his 'fresh invention'), we are not enjoying Donne.

Now this kind of thing can produce a very strong and a very peculiar pleasure. Our age has nothing to repent of in having learned to relish it. If the Augustans, in their love for the obviously poetical and harmonious, were blind to its merits, so much the worse for them. At the same time it is desirable not to overlook the special congeniality of such poetry to the twentieth century, and to beware of giving to this highly specialized and, in truth, very limited kind of excellence, a place in our scheme of literary values which it does not deserve. Donne's rejection of the obviously poetical image was a good method - for Donne; but if we think that there is some intrinsic superiority in this method, so that all poetry about pylons and non obstantes must needs be of a higher order than poetry about lawns and lips and breasts and orient sides, we are deceived - deceived by the fact that we, like Donne, happen to live at the end of a great period of rich and nobly obvious poetry. It is natural to want your savoury after your sweets; but you must not base a philosophy of cookery on that momentary preference. Again, Donne's obscurity and occasional abstruseness have sometimes (not always) produced magnificent results, and we do well to praise them. But, as I have hinted, an element of dandyism was present in Donne himself - he 'would have no such readers as he could teach' - and we must be very cautious here lest shallow call to shallow. There is a great deal of dandyism (largely of Franco-American importation) in the modern literary world. And finally, what shall we say of Donne's 'seriousness', of that persistency, that nimiety, that astringent quality (as Boehme would have said) which makes him, if not the saddest, at least the most uncomfortable, of our poets? Here, surely, we find the clearest and most disturbing congeniality of all. It would be foolish not to recognize the growth in our criticism of something that I can only describe as literary Manichaeism - a dislike of peace and pleasure and heartsease simply as such. To be bilious is, in some circles, almost the first qualification for a place in the Temple of Fame. (Note CSLewis: In this we have been anticipated. See Emma ch. 25: 'I know what worthy people they are. Perry tells me that Mr Cole never touches malt liquor. You would not think it to look at him, but he is bilious - Mr Cole is very bilious.') We distrust the pleasures of imagination, however hotly and unmerrily we preach the pleasures of the body. This seriousness must not be confused with profundity. We do not like poetry that essays to be wise, and Chaucer would think we had rejected 'doctryne' and 'solas' about equally. We want, in fact, just what Donne can give us - something stern and tough, though not necessarily virtuous, something that does not conciliate Born under Saturn, we do well to confess the liking complexionally forced upon us; but not to attempt that wisdom which dominates the stars is pusillanimous, and to set up our limitation as a norm-to believe, against all experience, in a Saturnocentric universe - is folly.

Before leaving the discussion of Donne's manner I must touch, however reluctantly, on a charge that bas been brought against him from the time of Ben Jonson till now. Should he, or should he not, be hanged for not keeping the accent? There is more than one reason why I do not wish to treat this subject. In the first place, the whole nature of Donne's stanza, and of what he does within the stanza, cannot be profitably discussed except by one who knows much more than I do about the musical history of the time. 'Confined Love', for example, is metrically meaningless without the tune. But I could make shift with that difficulty: my real trouble is of quite a different kind. In discussing Donne's present popularity, the question of metre forces me to a statement which I do not make without embarrassment. Some one must say it, but I do not care for the office, for what I have to say will hardly be believed among scholars and hardly listened to by any one else. It is simply this - that the opinions of the modern world on the metre of any poet are, in general, of no value at all, because most modern readers of poetry do not know how to scan. My evidence for this amazing charge is twofold. In the first place I find that very many of my own pupils - some of them from excellent schools, most of them great readers of poetry, not a few of them talented and (for their years) well-informed persons - are quite unable, when they first come to me, to find out from the verse how Marlowe pronounced Barabas or Mahomet. To be sure, if challenged, they will say that they do not believe in syllable-counting or that the old methods of scansion have been exploded, but this is only a smoke screen. It is easy to find out that they have not got beyond the traditional legal fiction of longs and shorts and have never even got so far: they are in virgin ignorance. And my experience as an examiner shows me that this is not peculiar to my own pupils. My second piece of evidence is more remarkable. I have heard a celebrated belle-lettrist - a printed critic and poet - repeatedly, in the same lecture, so mispronounce the name of a familiar English poem as to show that he did not know a decasyllabic line when he met it. The conclusion is unavoidable. Donne may be metrically good or bad, in fact; but it is obvious that he might be bad to any degree without offending the great body of his modern admirers. On that side, his present vogue is worth precisely nothing. No doubt this widespread metrical ignorance is itself a symptom of some deeper change; and I am far from suggesting that the appearance of vers libre is simply a result of the ignorance. More probably the ignorance, and the deliberate abandonment, of accentual metres are correlative phenomena, and both the results of some revolution in our whole sense of rhythm - a revolution of great importance reaching deep down into the unconscious and even perhaps into the blood. But that is not our business at the moment.

The sentiment of Donne's love poems is easier to describe than their manner, and its charm for modern readers easier to explain. No one will deny that the twentieth century, so far, has shown an extraordinary interest in the sexual appetite and has been generally marked by a reaction from the romantic idealization of that appetite. We have agreed with the romantics in regarding sexual love as a subject of overwhelming importance, but hardly in anything else. On the purely literary side we are wearied with the floods of uxorious bathos which the romantic conception undoubtedly liberated. As psychologists we are interested in the new discovery of the secreter and less reputable operations of the instinct. As practical philosophers we are living in an age of sexual experiment. The whole subject offers us an admirable field for the kind of seriousness I have just described. It seems odd, at first sight, that a sixteenth-century poet should give us so exactly what we want; but it can be explained.

The great central movement of love poetry, and of fiction about love, in Donne's time is that represented by Shakespeare and Spenser. This movement consisted in the final transmutation of the medieval courtly love or romance of adultery into an equally romantic love that looked to marriage as its natural conclusion. The process, of course, had begun far earlier - as early, indeed, as the Kingis Quair but its triumph belongs to the sixteenth century. It is most powerfully expressed by Spenser, but more clearly and philosophically by Chapman in that under-estimated poem, his Hero and Leander. These poets were engaged, as Professor Vinaver would say, in reconciling Carbonek and Camelot, virtue and courtesy, divine and human love; and incidentally in laying down the lines which love poetry was to follow till the nineteenth century. We who live at the end of the dispensation which they inaugurated and in reaction against it are not well placed for evaluating their world. Precisely what is revolutionary and creative in it seems to us platitudinous, orthodox, and stale. If there were a poet, and a strong poet, alive in their time who was failing to move with them, he would inevitably appear to us more 'modern' than they.

But was Donne such a poet? A great critic has assigned him an almost opposite rôle, and it behoves us to proceed with caution. It may be admitted at once that Donne's work is not, in this respect, all of a piece; no poet fits perfectly into such a scheme as I have outlined - it can be true only by round and by large. There are poems in which Donne attempts to sing a love perfectly in harmony with the moral law, but they are not very numerous and I do not think they are usually his best pieces. Donne never for long gets rid of a medieval sense of the sinfulness of sexuality; indeed, just because the old conventional division between Carbonek and Camelot is breaking up, he feels this more continuously and restively than any poet of the Middle Ages.

Donne was bred a Roman Catholic. The significance of this in relation to his learned and scholastic imagery can be exaggerated; scraps of Calvin, or, for that matter, of Euclid or Bacon, might have much the same poetical effect as his scraps of Aquinas. But it is all-important for his treatment of love. This is not easily understood by the modern reader, for later-day conceptions of the Puritan and the Roman Catholic stand in the way. We have come to use the word 'Puritan' to mean what should rather be called 'rigorist' or 'ascetic', and we tend to assume that the sixteenth-century Puritans were 'puritanical' in this sense. Calvin's rigorist theocracy at Geneva lends colour to the error. But there is no understanding the period of the Reformation in England until we have grasped the fact that the quarrel between the Puritans and the Papists was not primarily a quarrel between rigorism and indulgence, and that, in so far as it was, the rigorism was on the Roman side. On many questions, and specially in their view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party; if we may without disrespect so use the name of a great Roman Catholic, a great writer, and a great man, they were much more Chestertonian than their adversaries. The idea that a Puritan was a repressed and repressive person would have astonished Sir Thomas More and Luther about equally. On the contrary, More thought of a Puritan as one who 'loued no lenton fast, nor lightlye no faste elles, sauing brekefast, and eate fast, and drinke fast, and slepe fast, and luske fast in their lechery' (Note: The Confvtacion of Tyndales Avnswere , in The Workes of Sir Thomas More , ed. William Rastell (London, 1557), p. 651) - a person only too likely to end up in the 'abominable heresies' of the Anabaptists about communism of goods and wives. And Puritan theology, so far from being grim and gloomy, seemed to More to err in the direction of fantastic optimism. 'I covld for my parte', he writes, 'be very wel content, that sinne and payn and all wer as shortly gone as Tindall telleth vs. But I wer loth that he deceued vs if it be not so.' (Note: The Confvtacion of Tyndales Avnswere: The defence of the first argument agaynst Tyndale ibid., p. 440) More would not have understood the idea, sometimes found in the modern writers, that he and his friends were defending a 'merry' Catholic England against sour precisions; they were rather defending necessary severity and sternly realistic theology against wanton labefaction - penance and 'works' and vows of celibacy and mortification and Purgatory against the easy doctrine, the mere wish-fulfilment dream, of salvation by faith. Hence when we turn from the religious works of More to Luther's Table Talk we are at once struck by the geniality of the latter. If Luther is right, we have waked from nightmare into sunshine: if he is wrong, we have entered a fools' paradise. The burden of his charge against the Catholics is that they have needlessly tormented us with scruples; and, in particular, that 'antichrist will regard neither God nor the love of women'. (Note: The Table Talk of Martin Luther, trans. and ed. William Hatlin, Bohn's Standard Library (London, 1857), 'Of Antichrist', CCCCXXX, p. 193) 'On what pretence have they forbidden us marriage? 'Tis as though we were forbidden to eat, to drink, to sleep.' (Note: Ibid., 'Of Marriage and Celibacy', DCCXXVIII, p. 300) 'Where women are not honoured, temporal and domestic government are despised.' (Note: Ibid., 'Of Antichrist', ccccxxx, p. 194 (with slight alteration in wording)) He praises women repeatedly: More, it will be remembered, though apparently an excellent husband and father, hardly ever mentions a woman save to ridicule her. It is easy to see why Luther's marriage (as he called it) or Luther's 'abominable bichery' (Note: Sir Thomas More, The Confvtacion of Tyndales Avnswere: The defence of the first argument agaynst Tyndale op. cit., p. 648) (if you prefer) became almost a symbol. More can never keep off the subject for more than a few pages.

This antithesis, if once understood, explains many things in the history of sentiment, and many differences, noticeable to the present day, between the Protestant and the Catholic parts of Europe. It explains why the conversion of courtly love into romantic monogamous love was so largely the work of English, and even of Puritan, poets; and it goes far to explain why Donne contributes so little to that movement.

I trace in his poetry three levels of sentiment. On the lowest level (lowest, that is, in order of complexity), we have the celebration of simple appetite, as in 'Elegy XIX'. If I call this a pornographic poem, I must be understood to use that ugly word as a descriptive, not a dyslogistic, term. I mean by it that this poem, in my opinion, is intended to arouse the appetite it describes, to affect not only the imagination but the nervous system of the reader. (Note CSLewis: The restatement of this in terms acceptable to the Richardian school (for whom all poetry equally is addressed to the nervous system) should present no difficulty. For them it will be a distinction between parts, or functions, of the system) And I may as well say at once - but who would willingly claim to be a judge in such matters? - that it seems to me to be very nearly perfect in its kind. Nor would I call it an immoral poem. Under what conditions the reading of it could be an innocent act is a real moral question; but the poem itself contains nothing intrinsically evil.

On the highest, or what Donne supposed to be the highest, level we have the poems of ostentatiotisly virtuous love, 'The Undertaking', 'A Valediction: forbidding Mourning', and 'The Extasie'. It is here that the contrast between Donne and his happier contemporaries is most marked. He is trying to follow than into the new age, to be at once passionate and innocent; and if any reader will make the experiment of imagining Beatrice or Juliet or Perdita, or again, Amoret or Britomart, or even Philoclea or Pamela, as the auditress throughout these poems, he will quickly feel that something is wrong. You may deny, as perhaps some do, that the romantic conception of 'pure' passion has any meaning; but certainly, if there is such a thing, it is not like this. It does not prove itself pure by talking about purity. It does not keep on drawing distinctions between spirit and flesh to the detriment of the latter and then explaining why the flesh is, after all, to be used. This is what Donne does, and the result is singularly unpleasant. The more he labours the deeper 'Dun is in the mire', and it is quite arguable that 'The Extasie' is a much nastier poem than the nineteenth 'Elegy'. What any sensible woman would make of such a wooing it is difficult to imagine - or would be difficult if we forgot the amazing protective faculty which each sex possesses of not listening to the other.

Between these two extremes falls the great body of Donne's love poetry. In certain obvious, but superficial, respects, it continues the medieval tradition. Love is still a god and lovers his 'clergie'; (Note: 'A Valediction: of the Booke', 22) oaths may be made in 'reverentiall feare' of his 'wrath'; (Note: 'Woman's Constancy', 6,7) and the man who resists him is 'rebell and atheist'. (Note: 'Loves Deitie', 22) Donne can even doubt, like Soredamors, whether those who admit Love after a struggle have not forfeited his grace by their resistance, like

Small townes which stand stiffe, till great shot

Enforce them. (Note: 'Loves Exchange', 24)

He can personify the attributes of his mistress, the 'enormous Gyant' her Disdain and the 'enchantresse Honor', (Note: 'The Dampe', 11,12) quite in the manner of The Romance of the Rose. He writes albas for both sexes, and in the Holy Sonets repents of his love poetry, writing his palinode, in true medieval fashion. A reader may wonder, at first, why the total effect is so foreign to the Middle Ages: but Donne himself his explained this when he says, speaking of the god of Love,

If he wroung from mee'a teare, I brin'd it so

With scorne or shame, that him it naurish'd not.

(Note: 'Loves Diet', 13)

This admirable couplet not only tells us, in brief what Donne has effected but shows us that he knew what he was doing. It does not, of course, cover every single poem. A few pieces admittedly express delighted love and they are among Donne's most popular works; such are 'The Good-morrow' and 'The Anniversarie' - poems that again remind us of the difference between his best and his typical. But the majority of the poems ring the changes on five themes, all of than grim ones - on the sorrow of parting (including death), the miseries of secrecy, the falseness of the mistress, the fickleness of Donne, and finally on contempt for love itself. The poems of parting stand next to the poems of happy love in general popularity and are often extremely affecting. We may hear little of the delights of Donne's loves, and dislike what we hear of their 'purity'; the pains ring true. The song 'Sweetest love, I do not goe' is remarkable for its broken, but haunting, melody, and nowhere else his Donne fused argument, conceit, and classical imitation into a more perfect unity. 'A Feaver' is equally remarkable, and that for a merit very rare in Donne - its inevitability. It is a single jet of music and feeling, a straight flight without appearance of effort. The remaining four of our five themes are all various articulations of the 'scorne or shame' with which Donne 'brines' his reluctantly extorted tributes to the god of Love; monuments, unparalleled outside Catullus, to the close kinship between certain kinds of love and certain kinds of hate. The faithlessness of women is sometimes treated, in a sense, playfully; but there is always something - the clever surprise in 'Womans Constancy' or the grotesque in 'Goe, and catche a falling starre' - which stops these poems short of a true anacreontic gaiety. The theme of faithlessness rouses Donne to a more characteristic, and also a better, poetry in such a hymn of hate as 'The Apparition', or in the sad mingling of fear, contempt, and self-contempt in 'A Lecture upon the shadow'. The pains of secrecy give opportunity for equally fierce and turbulent writing. I may be deceived when I find in the sixteenth Elegy, along with many other nauseas and indignations, a sickened male contempt for the whole female world of nurses and 'midnights startings' (Note: 'On his Mistris', 51) and hysteries; but 'The Curse' is unambiguous. The ending here is particularly delicious just because the main theme - an attack on Jealosie or the 'lozengiers' - is so medieval and so associated with the 'honour of love'. of the poet's own fickleness one might expect, at last a merry treatment; and perhaps in 'The Indifferent' we get it But I am not sure. Even this seems to have a sting in it. And of 'Loves Usury' what shall I say? The struggle between lust and reason, the struggle between love and reason, these we know; but Donne is perhaps the first poet who has ever painted lust holding love at arm's length, in the hope 'that there's no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet' - and all this only as an introduction to the crowning paradox that in old age even a reciprocated love must be endured. The poem is, in its way, a masterpiece, and a powerful indirect expression of Donne's habitual 'shame and scorne'. For, in the long run, it must he admitted that 'the love of hatred and the hate of love' is the main, though not the only, theme of the Songs and Sonets. A man is a fool for loving and a double fool for saying so in 'whining poetry'; the only excuse is that the sheer difficulty of drawing one's pains through rhyme's vexation 'allays' than. A woman's love at best will he only the 'spheare' of a man's - inferior to it as the heavenly spheres are to their intelligences or air to angels. Love is a spider that can transubstantiate all sweets into bitter: a devil who differs from his fellow devils at court by taking the soul and giving nothing in exchange. The mystery which the Petrarchans or their medieval predecessors made of it is 'imposture all', like the claims of alchemists. It is a very simple matter (foeda et brevis voluptas ), and all it comes to in the end is

that my man,

Can be as happy as I can (Note: 'Loves Alchymie', 15)

Unsuccessful love is a plague and tyranny; but there is a plague even worse - Love might try

A deeper plague, to make her love mee too!

(Note: 'Loves Deitie', 25)

Love enjoyed is like gingerbread with the gilt off. What pleased the whole man now pleases one sense only -

And that so lamely, as it leaves behinde

A kinde of sorrowing dulnesse to the minde.

(Note: 'Farewell to Love', 19)

The doctors say it shortens life.

It may be urged that this is an unfair selection of quotations, or even that I have arrived at my picture of Donne by leaving out all his best poems, for one reason or another, as 'exceptions', and then describing what remains. There is one sense in which I admit this. Any account of Donne which concentrates on his love poetry must be unfair to the poet, for it leaves out much of his best work. By hypothesis, it must neglect the dazzling sublimity of his best religious poems, the grotesque charm of The Progresse of the Soule, and those scattered, but exquisite, patches of poetry that appear from time to time amidst the insanity of The First and Second Anniversaries. Even in the Epistles there are good passages. But as far as concerns his love poetry, I believe I am just. I have no wish to rule out the exceptions, provided that they are admitted to be exceptions. I am attempting to describe the prevailing tone of his work, and in my description no judgement is yet implied.

To Judgement let us now proceed. Here is a collection of verse describing with unusual and disturbing energy the torments of a mind which has been baffled in its relation to sexual love by certain temporary and highly special conditions. What is its value? To admit the 'unusual and disturbing energy' is, of course, to admit that Donne is a poet; he has, in the modem phrase, 'put his stuff across'. Those who believe that criticism can separate inquiry into the success of communication from that into the value of the thing communicated will demand that we should now proceed to evaluate the 'stuff'; and if we do so, it would not be hard to point out how transitory and limited and, as it were, accidental the appeal of such 'stuff' must be. But something of the real problem escapes under this treatment. It would not be impossible to imagine a poet dealing with this same stuff, marginal and precarious as it is, in a way that would permanently engage our attention. Donne's real limitation is not that he writes about, but that he writes in, a chaos of violent and transitory passions. He is perpetually excited and therefore perpetually cut off from the deeper and more permanent springs of his own excitement But how is this to he separated from his technique - the nagging, nudging, quibbling stridency of his manner? If a man writes thus, what can he communicate but excitement? Or again, if he finds nothing but excitement to communicate, how else should he write? It is impossible here to distinguish cause from effect. Our concern, in the long run, must be with the actual poetry (the 'stuff' thus communicated, this communication of such 'stuff') and with the question how far that total phenomenon is calculated to interest human imagination. And to this question I can see only one answer: that its interest, save for a mind specially predisposed in its favour, must be short-lived and superficial, though intense. Paradoxical as it may seem, Donne's poetry is too simple to satisfy. Its complexity is all on the surface - an intellectual and fully conscious complexity that we soon come to the end of. Beneath this we find nothing but a limited series of 'passions' - explicit, mutually exclusive passions which can be instantly and adequately labelled as such - things which can be readily talked about, and indeed, must be talked about because, in silence, they begin to lose their hard outlines and overlap, to betray themselves as partly fictitious. That is why Donne is always arguing. There are puzzles in his work, but we can solve them all if we are clever enough; there is none of the depth and ambiguity of real experience in him, such as underlies the apparent simplicity of How sleep the brave or Songs of Innocence, or even Aiai Leiyudrion. (Note: The superficial simplicity here is obvious; the deeper ambiguity becomes evident if we ask whether Lipsydrion is an object of detestation or of nostalgic affection.) The same is true, for the most part, of the specifically 'metaphysical' comparisons. One idea has been put into each and nothing more can come out of it. Hence they tend to die on our hands, where some seemingly banal comparison of a woman to a flower or God's anger to flame can touch us at innumerable levels and renew its virginity at every reading. Of all literary virtues 'originality', in the vulgar sense, has, for this reason, the shortest life. When we have once mastered a poem by Donne there is nothing more to do with it. To use his own simile, he deals in earthquakes, not in that 'trepidation of the spheares' which is so much less violent but 'greater far'. (Note: 'A Valediction: forbidding Mourning', 11, 12) Some, of course, will contend that his love poems should interest me permanently because of their 'truth'. They will say that he has shown me passion with the mask off, and catch at my word 'uncomfortable' to prove that I am running away from him because he tells me more truth than I can bear. But this is the mere frenzy of anti-romanticism. Of course, Donne is true in the sense that passions such as he presents do occur in human experience. So do a great many other things. He makes his own selection, like Dickens, or Gower, or Herrick, and his world is neither more nor less 'real' than theirs; while it is obviously less real than the world of Homer, or Virgil, or Tolstoy. In one way, indeed, Donne's love poetry is less true than that of the Petrarchans, in so far as it largely omits the very thing that all the pother is about. Donne shows us a variety of sorrows, scorns, angers, disgusts, and the like which arise out of love. But if any one asked 'What is all this about? What is the attraction which makes these partings so sorrowful? What is the peculiarity about this physical pleasure which he speaks of so contemptuously, and how has it got tangled up with such a storm of emotions?, I do not know how we could reply except by pointing to some ordinary love poetry. The feeblest sonnet, almost, of the other school would give us an answer with coral lips and Cupid's golden wings and the opening rose, with perfumes and instruments of music, with some attempt, however trite, to paint that iridescence which explains why people write poems about love at all. In this sense Donne's love poetry is parasitic. I do not use this word as a term of reproach; there are so many good poets, by now, in the world that one particular poet is entitled to take for granted the depth of a passion and deal with its froth. But as a purely descriptive term, 'parasitic' seems to me true. Donne's love poems could not exist unless love poems of a more genial character existed first. He shows us amazing shadows cast by love upon the intellect, the passions, and the appetite; to learn of the substance which casts them we must go to other poets, more balanced, more magnanimous, and more humane. There are, I well remember, poems (some two or three) in which Donne himself presents the substance; and the fact that he does so without much luxury of language and symbol endears them to our temporarily austere taste. But in the main, his love poetry is Hamlet without the prince.

Donne's influence on the poets of the seventeenth century is a commonplace of criticism. Of that influence at its best, as it is seen in the great devotional poetry of the period, I have not now to speak. In love poetry he was not, perhaps, so dominant. His nequitiae probably encouraged the cynical and licentious songs of his successors, but, if so, the imitation is very different from the model. Suckling's impudence, at its best, is light-hearted and very unlike the ferocity of Donne; and Suckling's chief fault in this vein - a stolid fleshliness which sometimes leads him to speak of his mistress's body more like a butcher than a lecher - is entirely his own. The more strictly metaphysical elements in Donne are, of course, lavishly reproduced; but I doubt if the reproduction succeeds best when it is most faithful. Thus Carew's stanzas 'When thou, poor Excommunicate' or Lovelace's 'To Lucasta, Going beyond the Seas' are built up on Donne's favourite plan, but both, as it seems to me, fail in that startling and energetic quality which this kind of thing demands. They have no edge. When these poets succeed it is by adding something else to what they have learned from Donne - in fact by reuniting Donne's manner with something much more like ordinary poetry. Beauty (like cheerfulness) is always breaking in. Thus the conceit of asking where various evanescent, beautiful phenomena go when they vanish and replying that they are all to be found in one's mistress is the sort of conceit that Donne might have used; and, starting from that end, we could easily work it up into something tolerably like bad Donne. As thus:

Oh fooles that aske whether of odours burn'd

The seminall forme live, and from that death

Conjure the same with chymique arte - 'tis turn'd

To that quintessence call'd her Breath!

But if we use the same idea as Carew uses it we get a wholly different

Aske me no more where Jove bestowes,

When June is past, the fading rose:

For in your beauties orient deepe,

These flowers as in their causes, sleepe. (Note: 'A Song', 1)

The idea is the same. But the choice of the obvious and obviously beautiful rose, instead of the recondite seminal form of vegetables, the great regal name of Jove, the alliteration, the stately voluptuousness of a quatrain where all the accented syllables are also long in quantity (a secret little known) - all this smothers the sharpness of thought in sweetness. Compared with Donne, it is almost soporific; compared with it, Donne is shrill. But the conceit is there; and 'as in their causes, sleepe' which looks at first like a blunder, is in fact a paradox that Donne might have envied. So again, the conceit that the lady's hair outshines the sun, though not much more than an Elizabethan conceit, might well have appeared in the Songs and Sonets; but Donne would neither have wished, nor been able, to attain the radiance of Lovelace's

But shake your head and scatter day! (Note: 'To Amarantha, That she would dishevell her haire', IV, 4)

This process of enchanting, or, in Shakespeare's sense, 'translating' Donne was carried to its furthest point by Marvell. Almost every element of Donne - except his metrical roughness - appears in the 'Coy Mistress'. Nothing could be more like Donne, both in the grimness of its content and in its impudently argumentative function, than the conceit that

worms shall try

That long preserv'd virginity.

(Note: 'To his Coy Mistress', 27)

All the more admirable is the art by which this, and everything else in that poem, however abstruse, dismaying, or sophistical, is subordinated to a sort of golden tranquillity. What was death to Donne is mere play to Marvell. 'Out of the strong', we are tempted to say, 'has come sweetness', but in reality the strength is all on Marvell's side. He is an Olympian, ruling at ease for his own good purposes, all that intellectual and passionate mobility of which Donne was the slave, and leading Donne himself, bound, behind his chariot.

From all this we may conclude that Donne was a 'good influence' - a better influence than many greater poets. It would hardly be too much to say that the final cause of Donne's poetry is the poetry of Herbert, Crashaw, and Marvell; for the very qualities which make Donne's kind of poetry unsatisfying poetic food make it a valuable ingredient. (Note: This essay was originally followed by Joan Bennett's 'The Love Poetry of John Donne: A Reply to Mr C. S. Lewis', Seventeenth Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson (Oxford, 1938), pp. 85-104)

34 EDMUND SPENSER, 1552 - 99

Edmund Spenser, born in 1552, was (like most great English writers) a member of the middle class, the son of a Londoner. He was sent to the Merchant Taylors' School, where he learned, and doubtless suffered, under the famous Richard Mulcaster. There is some evidence that Mulcaster, even by the ferocious standards of that age, was a cruel teacher, but he was an interesting man whose views on education can still be studied in his Positions (1581) and Elementary (1582). Though long and very serious, they hardly go further than the theory of spelling, and if Mulcaster had completed a system of education on the same scale it would have been about as long as the Bible; a fact which might possibly have some bearing on the gigantic project (only a quarter of it was carried out) of The Faerie Queene. In 1569 Spenser entered Pembroke Hall at Cambridge. The most interesting thing about his university career is that he passed through it without becoming attached to either of the two intellectual movements by which Cambridge was then agitated.

We can hardly help calling them Puritanism' and humanism' but neither word meant the same as it does in modern America. By purity the Elizabethan Puritan meant not chastity but 'pure' theology and, still more, 'pure' church discipline. That is, he wanted an all - powerful Presbyterian Church, a church stronger than the state, set up in England, on the model of Calvin's church at Geneva. Knox in Scotland loudly demanded, and at least one English Puritan hinted, that this should be done by armed revolution. Calvin, the great successful doctrinaire who had actually set up the new order', was the man who had dazzled them all. We must picture these Puritans as the very opposite of those who bear that name today: as young, fierce, progressive intellectuals, very fashionable and up-to-date. They were not teetotallers; bishops, not beer, were their special aversion. And humanists in this context means simply classicists' - men very interested in Greek, but more interested in Latin, and far more interested in the correct' or classical' style of Latin than in what the Latin authors said. They wanted English drama to observe the (supposedly) Aristotelian unities', and some of them wanted English poets to abandon rhyme - a nasty, barbarous' or Gothic' affair - and use classical metres in English. There was no necessary enmity between Puritans and humanists. They were often the same people, and nearly always the same sort of people: the young men in the Movement', the impatient progressives demanding a clean sweep'. And they were united by a common (and usually ignorant) hatred for everything medieval: for scholastic philosophy, medieval Latin, romance, fairies, and chivalry.

There are some possible signs (but all ambiguous) in Spenser's Shepheards Calendar (1579) that he was once or twice nearly captured by the Puritans, but it certainly did not last long. What is more remarkable is that he never surrendered to humanism, though he clearly lived in a humanistic circle of the narrowest sort. His friend Gabriel Harvey - a very grotesque creature and, to judge from his surviving records, a textbook case of the Inferiority Complex disapproved of the whole design of The Faerie Queene. He complained that in it Hobgoblin' was stealing the garland from Apollo': in other words, that medieval romance was winning the day against classicism. Another member of the circle, the rather fatuous young man who contributed a commentary to The Shepheards Calendar over the signature E.K., could not let Spenser's references to fairies pass without adding To roote that rancke opinion of Elfes out of mens hearts, the truth is, that there be no such thinges'. Nothing is more impressive about Spenser than his reaction to these humanist friends. He did neither of the two things we should expect. He never quarrelled with them; and he never took the slightest notice of their advice. He remained a faithful friend to Harvey (who had few friends); and he devoted his whole poetical career to a revival, or prolongation, of those medieval motifs which humanism wished to abolish.

Spenser had taken his M.A. in 1576, and in 1578 had found temporary employment as secretary to the Bishop of Rochester. In 1579 he had been at Leicester House and enjoyed the very exciting experience of being noticed (and even used with some familiarity') by Philip Sidney himself. It must have seemed to the young poet that the world was opening to him. There was of course no question of living by his pen. In the 90's it was possible to live (precariously) by pamphleteering or (rather better) by writing and acting for the new companies of players, but this was hardly so in the 70's; nor would such a Bohemian and rake-helly' career have been at all to Spenser's mind. On the other hand, we must not picture him choosing a profession or looking for a business opening as a young man might do today. Literary distinction could still lead to employment in the service of one of those great nobles who carried on the work of government. Such a reward fell to Spenser when he became secretary to Lord Grey of Wilton in 1580. Doubtless, it was not the kind of post Spenser had hoped for. It meant foreign service', for Lord Grey had just been appointed Deputy of Ireland, and Spenser arrived in Dublin in August 1580. He thus became (for life, had he known it) an instrument of the English domination in a hostile and incompletely conquered country. He had already begun The Faerie Queene.

Conquest is an evil productive of almost every other evil both to those who commit and to those who suffer it, and we should look in vain for any fruitful or pleasant relations between Spenser and the Irish. Nothing of that sort was possible. They were to him merely natives, rebels, and Papists; he to them, a vile heretic and alien Sassenach. The plans which he propounded for their subjugation in his View of the Present State of Ireland (never printed in his lifetime, but written in 1596) are harsh and even cynical; and if some scholars have pleaded, not without success, that they are excusable, this of itself admits that they require excuse. But that, as we shall presently see, is not the whole story about Spenser's relations to Ireland.

In 1589, after receiving a visit from Raleigh, Spenser returned to England, bringing with him the manuscript of the first three Books of The Faerie Queene, which were published in the following year. They brought him fame, but not the post in England for which, no doubt, he had been hoping, and he returned to his house at Kilcolman in the county Cork. In 1594 he married Elizabeth Boyle: the sonnets (Amoretti) and the Epithalamion, both published in 1595, poetize his courtship and its conclusion. Epithalamion is his happiest poem. But happiness did not last long. There was another visit to England in 1595, and the second instalment of The Faerie Queene was printed in 1596. Then came his doom. In 1598 the Irish rose under the Earl of Tyrone, defeated the English near Armagh, and flung a force into Munster. What they would do when they reached Kilcolman, every reader of Irish history knows in advance. It was, after all, the old seat of the Desmonds: the heretic, foreigner, and upstart had usurped it long enough. It is said (by Ben Jonson) that Spenser's third child, a baby, died in the flames. By December Spenser had contrived to reach London, carrying dispatches about the late rising. He died, certainly in poverty, as some say actually of hunger, in January 1599.

2 Though Spenser seldom made poetry out of his own life in the direct fashion of Wordsworth's Prelude, the pattern of his biography and that of his poetical output are nevertheless interlocked in an interesting way. On the biographical side we have the long years of residence in Ireland punctuated by brief visits to England: that is, to civilization, safety, the court, patrons, and the hope of social success. On the poetical side, we have the single great work, certainly begun very early and perhaps begun even before the appearance of The Shepheards Calendar, obstinately adhered to in the teeth of criticism, worked at all his life and left unfinished; its composition punctuated, or interrupted, by the minor poems, all of them (except the Epithalamion) inferior to it. They usually came out just after a visit to England. It is not hard to guess what was happening. Whenever Spenser can reach England - whenever, in our language, he goes on leave - he brings with him some more Faerie Queene to be published. That is what he cares about. But of course the publisher urges him to follow it up. Spenser gets together a volume of odds and ends some of them not very recent work. Thus we get the Complaints volume of 1591 and the Colin Clouts Come Home Againe volume of '95. However their contents were written, they were published, we feel, less by Spenser the poet than by Spenser the man; Spenser the man, seizing an opportunity of reminding the patrons and the public that he was still in existence. For of course a great work slowly growing, stanza by stanza, through a lifetime, is a thing that people easily overlook. It thus comes about that the many years in Ireland lie behind Spenser's greatest poetry, and the few years in England behind his minor poetry. It is hard to resist the conviction that his prolonged exile was a great gain to English literature. It removed him perforce from the rapid changes of fashion, the ephemeral hopes and fears, the petty intrigues, and the time-wasting attendance upon great persons, which would almost certainly have been the portion of a literary man hanging upon the fringes of the court: it forced him to sink deeper and deeper into the world he was creating. To that extent, we can call The Faerie Queene an Irish product.

We can perhaps say a little more. Spenser could not love the people, but, surprisingly, he loved the country. He chose an Irish hill, Arlo, for his assembly of gods (Book VII, the Mutability cantos, VI and VII. He introduced a poetic catalogue of Irish rivers (Book IV, canto XI) into one of his most highly wrought passages. In prose (View of the Present State) he pronounced Ulster a most beautifull and sweete countrie as any is under heaven'. He delighted in Irish history and antiquities and hoped to write a book about them. What is even stranger (and helps to show his freedom from the narrowness of humanistic taste), he had listened to Irish poetry in translation and thought that it savored of sweete witt and good invencion'. Most interesting from this point of view is the poem Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, not published until 1595 but written to celebrate Colin Clout's (that is, Spenser's) return from his first English visit in 1590 - his return to an Ireland which, as the title shows, has now become home'. It is a curiously broken-backed poem. It starts out with the view that we should expect. The visit to England has been wonderful because there Colin Clout saw the blessed eye' of that Angel' Queen Elizabeth, because her realm is all fruitful corne, faire trees, fresh herbage', because (unlike Ireland) it has no raging sword', no ravenous wolves' nor outlawes', and because the court is full of exquisite ladies and admirable poets. This, I say, is what we should expect: a compliment to the queen and the possible patrons and an appeal for an English job. But then Colin goes on in the latter part of the poem to paint a (126) wholly different picture. His Anglo-Irish friends ask him why he ever returned from such a delightful country to this barren soil' of Ireland where cold and care and penury do dwell'. Colin replies: one glance at the enormities' of the English court convinced him that it would be a great mistake to abandon quiet home' for court life and far wiser back to his sheep to turne'. For now it appears that court is full of malice and strife', lying, backbiting, treachery, and dissimulation, no place for any gentle wit', and that the love which courtiers incessantly talk of is a lewd, faithless affair quite unlike the high mystery of love as we poore shepheards' know it. All this rings true. Spenser's visit to England had been a disappointment. He was not made for the fashionable world. This contrast between the vain shows' of court and the simplicities of rustic life recurs increasingly in the later parts of The Faerie Queene. Shepherds, hermits, satyrs, even the Savage, become types to which he turns with love. It is difficult not to conclude that this represents his growing (though perhaps unadmitted) reconciliation to what had once been his place of exile but had now become home. He was coming to need that Irish life: the freedom, the informality, the old clothes, the hunting, farming, and fishing (he was proud of the super-excellent trout in his own river at Kilcolman). He may, as a poet, have needed the very country. There is a real affinity between his Faerie Queene, a poem of quests and wanderings and inextinguishable desires, and Ireland itself the soft, wet air, the loneliness, the muffled shapes of the hills, the heart-rending sunsets. It was of course a different Ireland from ours, an Ireland without potatoes, whitewashed cottages, or bottled stout: but it must already have been the land of longing'. The Faerie Queene should perhaps be regarded as the work of one who is turning into an Irishman. For Ireland shares with China the power of assimilating all her invaders. It is an old complaint that all who go there - Danes, Normans, English, Scotch, very Firbolgs - rapidly become more Irish than the Irish themselves'. With Spenser the process was perhaps beginning. It is true he hated the Irish and they him: but, as an Irishman myself, I take leave to doubt whether that is a very un-Irish trait. (The Irish, sir,' said Dr Johnson, are an honest people. They never speak well of one another.)

3 When Spenser and Sidney began writing, English poetry was in a deplorable condition. Short histories of literature sometimes give the impression that the Revival of Learning' began from the first to exercise a quickening influence upon our literature. I find no evidence that this was so. Nearly all the good poetry of the sixteenth century is crowded into its last twenty years (except in Scotland, where it comes at the beginning of the century and is overwhelmingly medieval in character). In England, until Sidney and Spenser arose, the last poet of real importance had been Sir Thomas Wyatt, who died in 1542: and his poetry, at its best, owes at least as much to the Middle Ages as the Revival of Learning. Between Wyatt and Spenser there extends a period in which it looks as though English poetry were never going to rise again even half so high as it had already risen in the Middle Ages. The best product of this dull period had been the Songs and Sonnets (1557), usually called Tottel's Miscellany from the name of its publisher, which had contained, along with a very large body of wooden and clumsy verse, Wyatt's lyrics and some graceful (though rather tame) pieces by Surrey and others. Far worse and more characteristic was the huge Mirror for Magistrates which came out, repeatedly added to, at various dates from 1555 to 1587. In it the ghosts of various historical characters appeared to tell their stories or, as the Mirror calls them, their tragedies'. Apart from a good induction' by Thomas Sackville and one goodish tragedie' by John Dolman, the Mirror is about as bad as it could be. But it was fatally popular and thus important for its bad influence on later poets and as an index of the depths to which taste had sunk. In it, as in the work of Googe, Brooke, Turberville, or the truly appalling translators of Seneca, we see a total loss of that feeling for style which seems to have come so easily to most medieval poets. It is against this background that we can best understand the value, for their own age, of Spenser's minor works and most easily pardon the fact that even in his greatest poetry he was seldom safe from a relapse into the bad manner of his predecessors. He was not a man laying the coping stone on an edifice of good poetry already half-built; he was a man struggling by his own exertions out of a horrible swamp of dull verbiage, ruthlessly over-emphatic metre, and screaming rhetoric.

Thus The Shepheards Calendar is not, at this distance of time, a very attractive work. Even if we can re-acquire (and if we are to study English literature, we must try) a taste for the pastoral, we shall still find that Spenser's shepherds fall between two stools. They are not realistic enough to give us the pleasure we get from the rustics of Hardy or of Huckleberry Finn: yet they are far too realistic to waft us away into the purely poetic pastoral world of Drayton's Muses Elizium or Milton's Lycidas. This happened, I believe, because Spenser was hesitating between two incompatible models: the wholly idealized Arcadia of Sannazaro and the more realistic (but poetically negligible) Eclogues (1515 and 1521) of Alexander Barclay. But if we had come to the Calendar, as its first readers did, from verse like that of the Mirror, we should feel as if we were passing from winter to spring. We should read

The simple ayre, the gentle warbling wynde,

So calme, so coole, as no where else I fynde:

The grassye ground with daintye Daysies dight,

The Bramble bush, where Byrds of every kynde

To the waters fall their tunes attemper right,

(Calendar, June', 4-8)

and we should perceive that poetry, which for nearly forty years had been able only to shout or mumble, was now once more beginning to sing. There are moments in literary history at which to achieve a manner and a music is more important than to deliver any message', however profound or prophetic. The message can wait; it will have to wait forever unless the manner and music are found. It is idle to talk about a great ballet until people have, in the crudest and simplest sense, learned to dance, learned the steps. In the Calendar Spenser is learning - in its best passages has already learned - the steps.

Three poems which were not printed till they appeared in the Complaints of 1591 may have been written shortly after the Calendar. One of them is merely a translation from the difficult and very minor poem of Virgil's called the Culex', or Gnat', but the other two are interesting because they are so different from each other and from The Faerie Queene , thus warning us not to suppose that a great poet can write only the sort of poetry which he chooses to write chiefly. Muiopotmos is about the adventures of a butterfly, a poem full of flowers and sunshine written with great enjoyment in a lighter and swifter stanza than the famous Spenserian'. In it, as nowhere else we see Spenser at play. Many critics believe that it is a veiled account of some affair at court, but I do not think this is certain. The third poem is Mother Hubberds Tale, a satire, modelled not (as Spenser's humanist friends would doubtless have wished) on the formal satire of the Romans but on the great medieval beast fable Reynard the Fox. The Ape and the Fox go into partnership and play all manner of tricks on the other beasts, even stealing the Lion's crown and sceptre. The tale is, of course, full of allusions to contemporary politics which cannot be discussed here. In this poem we find none of the slow, stately pace which is characteristic of The Faerie Queene . Spenser writes in couplets, uses a homely style, and gets over the ground briskly.

Colin Clouts Come Home Againe has already been mentioned; the ambivalence' which makes it so interesting as a personal document spoils its unity of effect as a poem. Daphnaida (1591), an elegy on the death of a noble lady, is perhaps the worst poem Spenser ever wrote. It is modelled on Chaucer's Book of the Duchess but entirely loses the charm of its original by exaggeration and straining after effect. The Elizabethans, even at their best, seem to lack that effortless good taste - one might almost say, that good breeding - which we nearly always find in the work of the Middle Ages. The Renaissance did not make men, in all senses, more civilized.

In the years '95 and '96 Spenser published a body of poetry about love which perhaps marks the summit of his achievement outside The Faerie Queene. The sonnets, or Amoretti (1595), are not among our greatest sonnets. We shall not find in them the almost divine selflessness and evocative power of Shakespeare's sonnets nor the immediacy of Drayton's Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part'. Yet if we go to them for what they have to give, for grace and harmony, we can read them with enjoyment. But the Epithalamion which was added to them belongs to a different world, and indeed there is no poem in English at all like it. It traces the whole bridal day and night from the moment at which the bride is awaked to the moment at which the tired lovers fall asleep and the stars pour down good influences on the child they have engendered and on all their descendants yet to be. Into this buoyant poem Spenser has worked all the diverse associations of marriage, actual and poetic, Pagan and Christian: summer, landscape, neighbours, pageantry, religion, riotous eating and drinking, sensuality, moonlight - are all harmonized. The metre is a very long stanza with varying line lengths and a refrain, modelled, in fact, on the Italian canzone but filled with such festal pomp and jollity, such sustained exuberance of the whole man (spiritual, imaginative, and animal), that the effect is much closer to that of some great ode by Pindar than to any Italian poem. Those who have attempted to write poetry will know how very much easier it is to express sorrow than joy. That is what makes the Epithalamion matchless. Music has often reached that jocundity; poetry, seldom.

The Foure Hymnes (of Love and Beauty) which followed in 1596 are not on the same level. It would be hopeless, in the space at my disposal, to attempt to unravel their very learned and curious blend of scriptural, Platonic, and medieval ideas. They contain good poetry, but poetry hardly great enough for the arduous, and indeed overwhelming, themes that Spenser has chosen. The same year saw the publication of the Prothalamion in which Spenser, now writing on someone else's marriage, tries to repeat the splendours of his own marriage song: I think, with very imperfect success.

But it is high time that we turned to the life work by which Spenser's name really lives.

Like most of his contemporaries Spenser believed that English literature could never hold up its head in the world until it had produced a great epic, and that a poet ought to be a moral teacher; unlike some of his contemporaries, he also felt a strong impulse to continue and develop the medieval tradition of chivalrous romance. He did not in fact know very much medieval literature. Much of it was inaccessible in his time and, anyway, too hard for him in language: he makes little use of Malory; what he called Chaucer' included many un-Chaucerian works and was so textually corrupt that Spenser could not have read it metrically even if he had understood Middle English metre (which he did not). The English poem which probably influenced him most was the late, allegorical romance The Pastime of Pleasure by Stephen Hawes, who wrote in the reign of Henry VII. This lack of medieval scholarship in Spenser was, however, far from being such a disadvantage as we might suppose. In the first place it set him free to embody, almost unconsciously, those elements of the Middle Ages which were still alive all round him in tournament and heraldry, pageant and symbolical pictures, whereas accurate knowledge might have made him merely a pedant and an antiquarian. In the second place, he could find a great deal of the method and temper of medieval romance, already refashioned, already, as it were, predigested and made more available for his purpose, in three great Italian poems: the Orlando Innamorato of Boiardo, the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto, and the Gerusalemme Liberata of Tasso. The first two of these deal with the adventures of Charlemagne and his paladins at war with the Saracens, and admit large comic elements; they are sometimes laughing at the marvels and high-flown sentiments of romance, but then at other times seriously enjoying these very same things. It is not absolutely certain that, in their comic passages, Spenser always saw the joke. The third is about the capture of Jerusalem by Godfrey of Bouillon and his crusaders: it is as serious and religious a poem as Spenser's own. All three together constitute such a varied, vigorous, unflagging body of poetical storytelling as is hardly equalled anywhere in European literature. They are Spenser's chief models.

By turning to them he turned his back on the strict humanists, who would have wished him to write a pseudo-classical epic, closely modelled on Virgil, like Ronsard's Franciade. By making Arthur the hero, or at least the nominal hero, of his poem he nevertheless attempted to gratify the humanists' wish, and his own, that the great poem should be, in some sort, a national epic. But in order to fulfil the demand that the poet should be a moral teacher he decided that he would follow Hawes as well as the Italians. His poem was to be a romance of chivalry, but it was also to have a secondary meaning throughout: to be, as he said, a continued allegory'. He decided, further, to introduce a new metre. All the Italians had used what is called ottava rima, the stanza which rhymes abababcc, best known to English readers in Byron's Don Juan or Shelley's Witch of Atlas. It is a beautifully light, rapid medium, excellently adapted for describing a breathless chase on horseback or telling an amusing anecdote with a dash of impropriety in it. Spenser himself had used it very well in Muiopotmos. But for The Faerie Qeene he invented his new nine-line stanza which has wholly different qualities. The more complex interlacing of the rhymes and, still more, the concluding alexandrine, which gives to each stanza the effect of a wave falling on a beach, combine to make it slower, weightier, more stately. Of all Spenser's innovations his stanza is perhaps the most important. It makes all his resemblances to the Italians merely superficial. It dictates the peculiar tone of The Faerie Queene. Milton, who knew and loved both Spenser and Spenser's models, described it as sage and solemn tunes'. A brooding solemnity - now deeply joyful, now sensuous, now melancholy, now loaded with dread - is characteristic of the poem at its best.

This brief account of the genesis of The Faerie Queene is needed in order to explain some features of it which may deter modern readers. The necessity is, of course, to be deplored; and it is of very recent growth. From the time of its publication down to about 1914 it was everyone's poem - the book in which many and many a boy first discovered that he liked poetry; a book which spoke at once, like Homer or Shakespeare or Dickens, to every reader's imagination. Spenser did not rank as a hard poet like Pindar, Donne, or Browning. How we have lost that approach I do not know. And unfortunately The Faerie Queene suffers even more than most great works from being approached through the medium of commentaries and literary history'. These all demand from us a sophisticated, self-conscious frame of mind. But then, when we have used all these aids, we discover that the poem itself demands exactly the opposite response. Its primary appeal is to the most naive and innocent tastes: to that level of our consciousness which is divided only by the thinnest veil from the immemorial lights and glooms of the collective Unconscious itself. It demands of us a child's love of marvels and dread of bogies, a boy's thirst for adventures, a young man's passion for physical beauty. If you have lost or cannot re-arouse these attitudes, all the commentaries, all your scholarship about the Renaissance' or Platonism' or Elizabeth's Irish policy, will not avail. The poem is a great palace, but the door into it is so low that you must stoop to go in. No prig can be a Spenserian. It is of course much more than a fairy-tale, but unless we can enjoy it as a fairy-tale first of all, we shall not really care for it.

Those features in the poem which might deter a reader are: (1) its narrative technique; (2) its allegory; and (3) the texture of its language.

(1) The narrative technique, especially after the first two Books, consists in constantly shifting from one story and one set of characters to another, but with a dovetail' or liaison at the point where we change. Thus in Book III, canto i, we start out on a journey with Sir Guyon, Prince Arthur, and Prince Arthur's squire, Timias. Presently a strange knight appears riding towards them and tries a course of the lance with Guyon, who is unhorsed. Guyon's annoyance at this reverse is soothed down by the others, and the strange knight now joins the party. They are all proceeding quietly together when suddenly an unknown lady on a milk-white horse flashes past, obviously in flight. A moment later her pursuer, a forester, is seen galloping after her. Arthur, Guyon, and Timias give chase, but the strange knight does not. And Spenser, instead of telling us what happened to the lady and the forester and Arthur and Guyon and Timias, now proceeds to relate the further adventures of the strange knight, which are quite irrelevant to the story we began with. We have thus got rid of all the characters we started with (not to meet Arthur again till canto iv, or Timias till v) and, in effect, changed trains.

The uninstructed reader would get the impression that Spenser was merely rambling, drifting at the mercy of his own imagination, as a man does in a dream. But the reader who knows a little more would remember that he had met exactly the same technique in Malory; and that it is also the technique of Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso. It is, I think, ultimately derived from Ovid's Metamorphoses, and may be called the interwoven' or polyphonic' narrative. Spenser is obeying a method as well established as the fugue. To what I have previously said about the naive or childlike appeal of the stories he tells, we must now add the opposite truth that his method of disposing them is highly formal and sophisticated. (This contrast of naive matter and sophisticated arrangement will seem less paradoxical if we remember how a composer can weave into a most learned symphonic whole the materials which he has derived from simple folk songs.) Now of course to explain that a certain method had a long history behind it does not, of itself, prove that it is a good one. Polyphonic narrative might be a vicious form, however many people had used it. But when we know that this technique dominated European fiction both in prose and verse from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, that civilized audiences in so many different countries went on demanding it, and that Tasso's father (also a poet) lost all his popularity when he wrote a narrative poem without it, common sense will surely make us pause before we assume that it was simply wrong and that the technique of modern fiction is simply right. The old polyphonic story, after all, enjoyed a longer success than the modern novel has enjoyed yet. We do not know which will seem the more considerable literary phenomenon to a critic looking back from the year 2500. Such reflexions should induce us to give the old technique, at least, a fair trial. Perhaps, if we have patience, it will begin to charm us as it charmed our ancestors.

Obviously, it produces great variety. In a polyphonic narrative the weird, the voluptuous, the exciting, the melancholy scenes can succeed one another not where the exigencies of a single rigid plot' permit but wherever artistic fitness demands them. To that extent it is more like the technique of music than like that of modern literature. Obviously, too, the interruption of one story by another, often at a critical moment, has something in common with the technique of the serial story: the adventures of Arthur in pursuit of the fugitive lady are left to be continued in our next'. If we reply that this kind of suspense is lost on us because our bad memories frustrate it and when we get back to Arthur we have forgotten all about him, then, since our ancestors made no such objection, it would seem that we differ from them by an inferiority, not by a superiority. And no doubt we do. Cheap paper, typewriters, notebooks, and indexes have impaired our memories just as automobiles have made some people almost incapable of walking. (One of the great uses of literary history is to keep on reminding us that while man is constantly acquiring new powers he is also constantly losing old ones.) It behoves us therefore to be humble and do our best. The obstacle is not, in fact, insurmountable: growing familiarity with this kind of poetry will presently enable us to hold the different, and constantly suspended, stories in our heads, just as growing familiarity enables us to follow complex music. And even if we sometimes lose our way, I think we shall find, as we go on reading, that the polyphonic technique has a far more important effect than those two which I have already mentioned, although it is one very difficult to describe. It is an effect particularly suitable to a tale of strange adventures.

It adds to the poem what might be called depth, or thickness, or density. Because the (improbable) adventure which we are following is liable at any moment to be interrupted by some quite different (improbable) adventure, there steals upon us unawares the conviction that adventures of this sort are going on all round us, that in this vast forest (we are nearly always in a forest) this is the sort of thing that goes on all the time, that it was going on before we arrived and will continue after we have left. We lose the feeling that the stories we are shown were arbitrarily made up by the poet. On the contrary, we are sure there are plenty more which he has not time to show us. We are being given mere selections, specimens: instances of the normal life of that wooded, faerie world. The result of this is an astonishing sense of reality.

The young student should here be warned that the word lifelike' as applied to literature is ambiguous. It may mean like life as we know it in the real world'; in that sense the dullest character in a realistic novel may be lifelike'; i.e. he is very like some real people and as lifeless as they. On the other hand lifelike' may mean seeming to have a life of its own'; in that sense Captain Ahab, old Karamazov, Caliban, Br’er Rabbit, and the Giant who says fee-fi-fo-fum' in Jack the Giant-Killer, are all lifelike. Whether we have met anything like them in the real world is irrelevant. Now Spenser's faerie lond' is very unlike life in the first sense, but the polyphonic technique makes it extremely lifelike in the second. It is lifelike by its consistency - all the adventures bear the stamp of the world that produced them, have the right flavour, make each other probable; in its apparent planlessness - they collide, and get mixed up with one another and drift apart, just as events would in a real world; in its infinity - we can, so obviously, never get to the end of them, there are so obviously more and more, round the next corner. That is why Keats in his sonnet To Spenser' speaks of one who loved The Faerie Queene as a forester deep in thy midmost trees'. There is forest, and more forest, wherever you look: you cannot see out of that world, just as you cannot see out of this.

(2) The allegory or inner meaning' of The Faerie Queene is generally regarded as twofold: a moral' or philosophical' allegory, and a historical' or political' allegory. The first is clear, certain, essential; the second obscure, often doubtful, and poetically of little importance. Spenser himself in his prefatory 'Letter' to Raleigh has told us that Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, means (in a certain sense) Queen Elizabeth; James I complained that Duessa was obviously Mary Queen of Scots; and there are places, in the worst parts of the worst Book (v), where the allegory about foreign affairs becomes unmistakable. Apart from these few equivalences, interpretation of the historical allegory is controversial and speculative. I myself (here differing from many scholars whom I respect) regard it with a good deal of scepticism. Some published fantasies of my own have had foisted on them (often by the kindliest critics) so many admirable allegorical meanings that I never dreamed of as to throw me into doubt whether it is possible for the wit of man to devise anything in which the wit of some other man cannot find, and plausibly find, an allegory. I do not believe that a consistent and detailed historical allegory (such as we find, say, in Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel) runs through The Faerie Queene . Particular scenes contain, in addition to their moral or philosophical meaning, a parallel to some contemporary event. Probably it does not last beyond the scene in which it occurs: when we meet the same characters in a different scene we need not expect them to have the same (or, necessarily, any) historical meaning. How lightly the whole thing should be taken may be judged from the way in which Spenser himself speaks of it. Gloriana at some points and for some purposes symbolizes Elizabeth, but Elizabeth is also at other points and for other purposes, Belphoebe. But in his generall intention 'Gloriana is Glory'; that is her permanent and essential meaning in the poem. The many generations who have read and re-read The Faerie Queene with delight paid very little attention to the historical allegory; the modern student, at his first reading, will be well advised to pay it none at all.

The moral or philosophical meaning is, on the other hand, essential; and fortunately in approaching this we have an advantage which the nineteenth century lacked. Our grandfathers might regard allegory as an arbitrary literary device, a figure' listed in the books on rhetoric. The work of Jung and Freud, and the practice of many modern poets and prose writers, has taught us an entirely different view. We now know that symbols are the natural speech of the soul, a language older and more universal than words. This truth, if not understood exactly as modern psychology would understand it, was accepted and acted upon by the ancient and medieval world, and had not yet been lost in Spenser's day. He came, in fact, just in time, just before the birth of that new outward-looking, rationalizing spirit which was going to give us victory over the inanimate while cutting us off from the depths of our own nature. After Spenser allegory became, till quite modern times, merely a sort of literary toy, as it is in Addison's or Johnson's essays. Spenser was the last poet who could use the old language seriously and who had an audience that understood it.

They understood it because they had been brought up to it. We shall understand it best (though this may seem paradoxical) by not trying too hard to understand it. Many things - such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly - are done worst when we try hardest to do them. Allegory is not a puzzle. As each place or person is presented to us in The Faerie Queene we must not sit down to examine it detail by detail for clues to its meaning as if we were trying to work out a cipher. That is the very worst thing we can do. We must surrender ourselves with childlike attention to the mood of the story. The broad outlines of the allegory are quite unmistakable. Spenser himself tells us that the six knights who are the heroes of the six Books are six virtues; and each therefore fights against, or is endangered by, the vices particularly opposed to the virtue he represents. (Note: Unity was to be secured by the overriding role of Arthur, who appears in every Book and helps minor champions out of difficulties. Unfortunately his own story remains unfinished in the fragment we have. On his quest for Gloriana, see below.) Thus in Book I Holiness encounters the various obstacles to the religious life - error, heresy, pride, despair, and so forth; in Book II Temperance encounters anger, avarice, and lust; in V Justice encounters graft or bribery (Lady Munera), egalitarianism, and the giantess who represents the domination of women over men. At a first glance, indeed, the reader might complain not so much of obscurity as of copybook platitude.

But he would be mistaken. In the first place, what looks like a platitude when it is set out in the abstract may become a different sort of thing when it puts on flesh and blood in the story; according to the theory which Sidney set out in his Defence of Poesie, the poetic art existed for the precise purpose of thus turning dead truism into vital experience. Secondly, ideas have changed since the sixteenth century, and much of Spenser's thought is now not platitudinous but highly controversial. Not many readers of this book have been brought up to think either equality or feminism a form of injustice. On these points, therefore, The Faerie Queene can now do us one of the services for the sake of which (among other things) we read old literature. It can readmit us to bygone modes of thought and enable us to imagine what they felt like, to see the world through our ancestors' eyes. After we have done that, our rejection of those modes of thought (if we still reject them) will have some value. There is a great difference between rejecting something you have known from the inside and rejecting something (as uneducated people tend to do) simply because it happens to be out of fashion in your own time. It is like the difference between a mature and travelled man's love for his own country and the cocksure conviction of an ignorant adolescent that his own village (which is the only one he knows) is the hub of the universe and does everything in the Only Right Way. For our own age, with all its accepted ideas, stands to the vast extent of historical time much as one village stands to the whole world.

And thirdly, Spenser's moral thought is not in itself so platitudinous as we might at first suppose. (Note: It is, for example, worth considering why the ludicrous and disgusting figure of Malbecco (Jealousy) comes in the Book on Chastity. If Hellenore's wantonness sets a man in a rage, he must not assume that his rage results from a disinterested love of virtue.) Guyon, the knight of Book II who represents Temperance, comes to the Bower of Acrasia, obviously a place of sexual temptation. But then the female knight of Book III, Britomart, represents Chastity. Obviously she too must be brought through a place of sexual temptation; and so she is, in the House of Busirane. If we were writing an allegory instead of reading one, we should at once see that we were coming to a difficulty. What are we to do with these two places? How are we to prevent the second from being merely a repetition of the first? But in Spenser there is no resemblance between them and no trace (which would have been just as bad) of a faked or forced difference between them. The Bower of Acrasia is a luscious garden, genuinely luscious but in rather bad taste (they have metal ivy, painted to look like real, round a fountain); two naked girls are playing the fool in a bathing pond to attract Guyon's attention; Acrasia herself, in a beautiful creation' of transparent lingerie, lies on a bed of roses leaning over the last young man she has captured. This is all plain sailing: the simplest reader cannot fail to understand it. But the House of Busirane is a vast building, hard to get into and hard to get out of when you are in. Britomart is there for hours. One empty room leads endlessly into another empty room: all silent, all blazing with an almost sickly splendour of intricate decoration. It is only at midnight, in the last room of all, that a little iron door opens and out of it comes a strange procession, like a masque, of silent people who ignore Britomart, intent upon their own strange ceremonial. Behind that iron door the girl whom Britomart has come to rescue is being tortured.

As I have said before, we must not look for clues as if we were solving a puzzle. We must, if need be, re-read both passages and soak ourselves in their differing atmospheres; the obvious, provocative, even garish sensuality of Acrasia's Bower, which is the foe to temperance', to mere self-control and moderation, and the monotonous glitter, the claustrophobia, the costliness, loneliness, anguish of Busirane's House which is the foe to chastity' (Spenser makes quite clear that chastity' for him includes faithful love, married, or hoping to be married). To a man tempted by the Bower, one would say Pull yourself together', but to a man tempted by Busirane, one would say Can you not come out? Out into the free air and sunlight? Can you never break this lifelong obsession?' It will dawn on every reader in the end that the difference between Acrasia and Busirane is that between Lust (appetite) and Love, bad love. Many moderns have been brought up to think that the difference between good and evil in sexual matters simply coincides with that between Love and Lust, that every affaire becomes good' just in so far as it concerns the heart and not merely the senses. If that is our view, then Spenser is here offering us not (as we feared) platitude but full paradox. For he thinks there may be Loves quite distinct from Lust, but evil, miserable, poisoning a whole life; illicit, secret loves that break up homes and lead to divorce courts, suicide pacts, and murders. They are expensive; the House of Busirane is ablaze with gold. They take a long time; the House of Busirane goes on and on. After fully comprehending Acrasia and Busirane (not as I have here given them in abstract but as they really live in the poem), the reader may of course still disagree with Spenser. He may think that the solemnity and grandeur of Busirane's House make it obviously superior to any establishment Acrasia could ever run. Or he may agree with Spenser and feel that he has learned something about human life which will stand him in very good stead. But whichever way he decides, his decision will be a more informed one than any he could have made without reading The Faerie Queene. Even that is not the whole story. A poet inventing with such energy as Spenser produces things that mean more than he knew or intended. The House of Busirane may become, to this or that reader, a symbol of (hence, partly a liberation from) some other psychic imprisonment which has nothing to do with love. This kind of poetry, if receptively read, has psychotherapeutic powers.

Another factor which saves Spenser's moral allegory from platitude is his method of hinting in each Book at what may be called the virtue behind the virtue', the inner shrine. Book VI is about Courtesy (which in those days meant much more than etiquette or good manners, and included what we should call chivalry') and is, of course, full of examples of courteous behaviour. But then in canto X we discover that our attempts at courtesy, however laudable and necessary, will never make us perfectly courteous men. We shall still be clumsy, unless the Graces come and dance with us, unless a beauty which no man can achieve by effort flows into our daily acts of its own will. So in Book IV we discover that Justice can never be perfect while it remains mere Justice: it must go into the temple of Isis and learn better things from clemence' or equity'. So in Book I, all the Redcrosse Knight's struggles with Error and Pride will not make him holy until he has been in the House of Caelia. This may be cold comfort to most of us, but it is hardly a copybook platitude; and it might be true.

Three obstacles may prevent a receptive reading of Spenser’s allegory. The first great obstacle for the reader of this volume is that he is being given only selections from it, not the poem itself. I have found it impossible to select in such a way that the pieces I included required no support from those I left out - if not support in respect of the plot' or sequence of events, yet support from contrasting or harmonizing moods. Far from wishing to conceal this defect, I wish to emphasize it as much as possible. In that way I may possibly convince a reader what selections are for. Except for some (poetically irrelevant) purpose such as passing an examination, the only use of selections is to deter those readers who will never appreciate the original, and thus to save them from wasting their time on it, and to send all the others on to the original as quickly as possible. The sooner you toss my selections impatiently aside and go out to buy a copy of The Faerie Queene , the better I shall have succeeded. If I lead anyone to imagine, twenty years hence, that he has really read the poem, when in fact he has read only these shreds and patches, I shall have done him (but not without his own assistance) a grave injury.

The second obstacle is this. The picture-language of allegory is ultimately derived, as I have said, from the unconscious. But by Spenser's time allegory (both literary and pictorial) had been practised so long that certain symbols had an agreed meaning which everyone could understand directly, without plunging into the depths. Many of these are lost on the modern reader who does not know the Bible, the classics, astrology, or the old emblem books. A simple example (still, we may hope, intelligible to many) would be the silver anchor which lay on Speranza's arm (I, X, 14.). The text in Hebrews vi. 19 explains it. Similarly in I, IV, 24 not all readers will now know why Lechery should be riding a goat: all Elizabethans knew that the goat was the sign of Lust. Again, Spenser's readers, comparing the Bower of Acrasia with the House of Busirane, would have noticed at the very outset a difference which I never mentioned (because I did not think it would help the modern student). Cupid is absent from the Bower and very much present in the House. Now in medieval allegory Cupid regularly meant Love (humanized, sentimental, refined, but not necessarily innocent); when they wanted to symbolize the mere sexual appetite they usually represented it by Cupid's mother, Venus.

Finally, an obstacle may arise from our own preconceptions. We may be so certain in advance what a word or an image ought to mean that we omit to notice what it really does mean in the poem. A ludi crous example would be if anyone took Temperance' (the subject of Book II) to mean not getting drunk', instead of control and moderation of all our passions, including our desire for wealth. A much more serious preconception occurs about the significance of beautiful, naked women in The Faerie Queene . A man may have a puritan obsession' (in the modern, not the Elizabethan sense of the word puritan') which leads him to assume that these will all be images of sin. Much more probably in our days he will have an anti-puritan obsession and assume that they are all to be welcomed as fruits of Spenser's renaissance' or Pagan' liberty. Both obsessions, if uncorrected, will lead to false reading. In the poem (as perhaps also in dreams and myths) this image may mean quite different things. And there is no need at all to be puzzled. If read without preconceptions the poem itself will make this perfectly clear. Everyone will see that the two young women in Acrasia's swimming pool are images of Sin; and that the Graces who dance round Colin Clout (VI, X) are nothing of the sort. They are the virtue behind the virtue' of Courtesy, what Burke called the unbought grace of life'.

(3) The general quality of The Faerie Queene is so highly poetic that it has earned Spenser the name of the poet's poet'. But if we examine the texture of the language line by line we may think that it is sometimes flat and very often little distinguished from that of prose. There are, no doubt, some stanzas which, even in isolation, anyone would acclaim as high poetry. But usually we shall look in vain for anything like the phrase-by-phrase deliciousness of Shakespeare's sonnets, the gigantic loftiness' of Milton's epic style, or the point and subtlety and pressure of Donne or the modern poets. The (143) truth is that Spenser belongs to an older school. In the earliest times theology, science, history, fiction, singing, instrumental music, and dancing were all a single activity. Traces of this can still be found in Greek poetry. Then the different arts which had once all been elements of poesis developed and became more different from one another, and drew apart (the enormous gains and losses of this process perhaps equal one another). Poetry became more and more unlike prose. It is now so unlike it that the number of those who can read it is hardly greater than the number of those who write it. Spenser is of course a long way from the ancient Greeks, but he belongs to an older school than Shakespeare. He is about midway between Shakespeare and Boiardo. Boiardo is first and foremost a storyteller, not a poet' in the more specialized modern sense. As far as language is concerned, his poetry might be improvised - the phrases could be made up as one goes along. Spenser's style is richer, more elaborated than that. But it still has in view an audience who have settled down to hear a long story and do not want to savour each line as a separate work of art. Much of The Faerie Queene will therefore seem thin or over-obvious if judged by modern standards. The thickness' or density' which I have claimed for it does not come from its language. It comes from its polyphonic narrative, from its different layers of meaning, and from the high degree in which Spenser's symbols embody not simply his own experience, nor that of his characters at a given moment, but the experience of ages. In one sense a passage of Spenser is childishly simple compared with a poem by Donne, but in another sense this is not so. Donne wrote from his vivid consciousness of his own situation at a particular moment. He knew what he was putting into his poem, and we cannot get out of it more than he knew he was putting in. But Spenser, with his conscious mind, knew only the least part of what he was doing, and we are never sure that we have got to the end of his significance. The water is very clear, but we cannot see to the bottom. That is one of the delights of the older kind of poetry: thoughts beyond their thoughts to those high bards were given'. I do not mean by this that we should prefer the older kind. Their difference is a reason for reading both. There is no one right or absolute kind of poetry.

Spenser wrote primarily as a (Protestant) Christian and secondarily as a Platonist. Both systems are united with one another and cut off from some - not all - modern thought by their conviction that Nature, the totality of phenomena in space and time, is not the only thing that exists: is, indeed, the least important thing. Christians and Platonists both believe in an other' world. They differ, at least in emphasis, when they describe the relations between that other world and Nature. For a Platonist the contrast is usually that between an original and a copy, between the real and the merely apparent, between the clear and the confused: for a Christian, between the eternal and the temporary, or the perfect and the partially spoiled. The essential attitude of Platonism is aspiration or longing: the human soul, imprisoned in the shadowy, unreal world of Nature, stretches out its hands and struggles towards the beauty and reality of that which lies (as Plato says) on the other side of existence'. Shelley's phrase the desire of the moth for the star' sums it up. In Christianity, however, the human soul is not the seeker but the sought: it is God who seeks, who descends from the other world to find and heal Man; the parable about the Good Shepherd looking for and finding the lost sheep sums it up. Whether in the long run there is any flat contradiction between the two pictures need not be discussed here. It is certainly possible to combine and interchange them for a considerable time without finding a contradiction, and this is what Spenser does. The Christian picture dominates the first two Books: divine grace, in the person of Una, is constantly helping St George out of his difficulties, and an angel is sent down to preserve Guyon. On the other hand the central story of the whole poem was to have been Platonic: I say was to have been' because Spenser did not live to finish it. In the fragment that we have, Prince Arthur is always seeking for Gloriana'. He knows almost nothing about her. When the beautiful Florimell flashes past him in the forest, he at once pursues her: she might be Gloriana (III, iv, 54). He has seen the real Gloriana only in a dream (I, ix, 13 ff.). This is a picture of the soul, as in Platonism, endlessly seeking that perfect beauty of which it has some dim premonition but which cannot be found - only shadows and blurred images of it - in the realm of Nature. This enables us to see what Spenser means when he says that Gloriana is Glory'. In his many-levelled poetry Glory' is the divine glory or splendour which the Christian soul will not only see but share in Heaven; it is the glory of that real and perfect world which the Platonist is seeking; it is also, in so far as Arthur is a knight-errant in a romance of chivalry, Glory' in the sense of fame or honour. To add that it is also in some sense and at some moments Queen Elizabeth seems to us a profane and silly anticlimax. But we are not to suppose that Elizabeth appeared to Spenser as she does to us or even as she did to contemporaries who really knew her; and we must understand that her royal office had an importance for him which it could have for no modern. For monarchy, like everything else in this world, had its chief value in being the shadow or reflexion of something in that other and more real world. Every earthly court was an imitation, however imperfect, of the Divine Court. Its splendour and order had a poetic, religious, and metaphysical appeal which had nothing to do with snobbery - a ritual appeal. Spenser would have understood the ancient Chinese idea that the function of the Emperor was to reproduce on earth the Order of Heaven'. His view was consistent as we have seen, with the clearest insight into the corruptions of actual court life.

35 EQUALITY

I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they're not true. And whenever their weakness is exposed, the people who prefer tyranny make capital out of the exposure. I find that they're not true without looking further than myself. I don't deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. Nor do most people - all the people who believe advertisements, and think in catchwords and spread rumours. The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.

This introduces a view of equality rather different from that in which we have been trained. I do not think that equality is one of those things (like wisdom or happiness) which are good simply in themselves and for their own sakes. I think it is in the same class as medicine, which is good because we are ill, or clothes which are good because we are no longer innocent. I don't think the old authority in kings, priests, husbands, or fathers, and the old obedience in subjects, laymen, wives, and sons, was in itself a degrading or evil thing at all. I think it was intrinsically as good and beautiful as the nakedness of Adam and Eve. It was rightly taken away because men became bad and abused it. To attempt to restore it now would be the same error as that of the Nudists. Legal and economic equality are absolutely necessary remedies for the Fall, and protection against cruelty.

But medicine is not good. There is no spiritual sustenance in flat equality. It is a dim recognition of this fact which makes much of our political propaganda sound so thin. We are trying to be enraptured by something which is merely the negative condition of the good life. And that is why the imagination of people is so easily captured by appeals to the craving for inequality, whether in a romantic form of films about loyal courtiers or in the brutal form of Nazi ideology. The tempter always works on some real weakness in our own system of values: offers food to some need which we have starved.

When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget but as an ideal we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority. That mind is the special disease of democracy, as cruelty and servility are the special diseases of privileged societies. It will kill us all if it grows unchecked. The man who cannot conceive a joyful and loyal obedience on the one hand, nor an unembarrassed and noble acceptance of that obedience on the other, the man who has never even wanted to kneel or to bow, is a prosaic barbarian. But it would be wicked folly to restore these old inequalities on the legal or external plane. Their proper place is elsewhere.

We must wear clothes since the Fall. Yes, but inside, under what Milton called "these troublesome disguises" (John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), Book IV, line 740), we want the naked body, that is, the real body, to be alive. We want it, on proper occasions, to appear: in the marriage-chamber, in the privacy of a men's bathing-place, and (of course) when medical or other emergency demands. In the same way, under the necessary outer covering of legal equality, the whole hierarchical dance and harmony of our deep and joyously accepted spiritual inequalities should be alive. It is there, of course, in our life as Christians: there, as laymen, we can obey - all the more because the priest has no authority over us on the political level. It is there in our relation to parents and teachers - all the more because it is now a willed and wholly spiritual reverence. It should be there also in marriage.

This last point needs a little plain speaking. Men have so horribly abused their power over women in the past that to wives, of all people, equality is in danger of appearing as an ideal. But Mrs Naomi Mitchison has laid her finger on the real point. Have as much equality as you please - the more the better - in our marriage laws: but at some level consent to inequality, nay, delight in inequality, is an erotic necessity. Mrs Mitchison speaks of women so fostered on a defiant idea of equality that the mere sensation of the male embrace rouses an undercurrent of resentment. Marriages are thus shipwrecked. (Naomi Mitchison, The Home and a Changing Civilisation (London, 1934), Chapter I, pp. 49-50). This is the tragi-comedy of the modern woman; taught by Freud to consider the act of love the most important thing in life, and then inhibited by feminism from that internal surrender which alone can make it a complete emotional success. Merely for the sake of her own erotic pleasure, to go no further, some degree of obedience and humility seems to be (normally) necessary on the woman's part.

The error here has been to assimilate all forms of affection to that special form we call friendship. It indeed does imply equality. But it is quite different from the various loves within the same household. Friends are not primarily absorbed in each other. It is when we are doing things together that friendship springs up - painting, sailing ships, praying, philosophizing, fighting shoulder to shoulder. Friends look in the same direction. Lovers look at each other: that is, in opposite directions. To transfer bodily all that belongs to one relationship into the other is blundering.

We Britons should rejoice that we have contrived to reach much legal democracy (we still need more of the economic) without losing our ceremonial Monarchy. For there, right in the midst of our lives, is that which satisfies the craving for inequality, and acts as a permanent reminder that medicine is not food. Hence a man's reaction to Monarchy is a kind of test. Monarchy can easily be "debunked"; but watch the faces, mark well the accents, of the debunkers. These are the men whose tap-root in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach - men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

And that is why this whole question is of practical importance. Every intrusion of the spirit that says "I'm as good as you" into our personal and spiritual life is to be resisted just as jealously as every intrusion of bureaucracy or privilege into our politics. Hierarchy within can alone preserve egalitarianism without. Romantic attacks on democracy will come again. We shall never be safe unless we already understand in our hearts all that the anti-democrats can say, and have provided for it better than they. Human nature will not permanently endure flat equality if it is extended from its proper political field into the more real, more concrete fields within. Let us wear equality; but let us undress every night.

36 EVIL AND GOD

DR JOAD'S ARTICLE ON 'GOD AND EVIL' LAST WEEK (Note: C.E.M. Joad, 'Evil and God', The Spectator, vol, CLXVI (31 January 1941), pp. 112-13) suggests the interesting conclusion that since neither 'mechanism' nor 'emergent evolution' will hold water, we must choose in the long run between some monotheistic philosophy, like the Christian, and some such dualism as that of the Zoroastrians, I agree with Dr Joad in rejecting mechanism and emergent evolution. Mechanism, like all materialist systems, breaks down at the problem of knowledge. If thought is the undesigned and irrelevant product of cerebral motions, what reason have we to trust it? As for emergent evolution, if anyone insists on using the word God to mean 'whatever the universe happens to be going to do next', of course we cannot prevent him, But nobody would in fact so use it unless he had a secret belief that what is coming next will be an improvement, Such a belief, besides being unwarranted, presents peculiar difficulties to an emergent evolutionist, If things can improve, this means that there must be some absolute standard of good above and outside the cosmic process to which that process can approximate. There is no sense in talking of 'becoming better' if better means simply 'what we are becoming' - it is like congratulating yourself on reaching your destination and defining destination as 'the place you have reached'. Mellontolatry, or the worship of the future, is a fuddled religion, We are left then to choose between monotheism and dualism - between a single, good, almighty source of being, and two equal, uncreated, antagonistic Powers, one good and the other bad. Dr Joad suggests that the latter view stands to gain from the 'new urgency' of the fact of evil. But what new urgency? Evil may seem more urgent to us than it did to the Victorian philosophers - favoured members of the happiest class in the happiest country in the world at the world's happiest period. But it is no more urgent for us than for the great majority of monotheists all down the ages. The classic expositions of the doctrine that the world's miseries are compatible with its creation and guidance by a wholly good Being come from Boethius waiting in prison to be beaten to death and from St Augustine meditating on the sack of Rome. The present state of the world is normal; it was the last century that was the abnormality.

This drives us to ask why so many generations rejected Dualism. Not, assuredly, because they were unfamiliar with suffering; and not because its obvious prima facie plausibility escaped them. It is more likely that they saw its two fatal difficulties, the one metaphysical, and the other moral.

The metaphysical difficulty is this. The two Powers, the good and the evil, do not explain each other. Neither Ormuzd nor Ahriman can claim to be the Ultimate. More ultimate than either of them is the inexplicable fact of their being there together. Neither of them chose this tête-à-tête. Each of them, therefore, is conditioned - finds himself willy-nilly in a situation; and either that situation itself, or some unknown force which produced that situation, is the real Ultimate. Dualism has not yet reached the ground of being. You cannot accept two conditioned and mutually independent beings as the self-grounded, self-comprehending Absolute. On the level of picture-thinking this difficulty is symbolised by our inability to think of Ormuzd and Ahriman without smuggling in the idea of a common space in which they can be together and thus confessing that we are not yet dealing with the source of the universe but only with two members contained in it. Dualism is a truncated metaphysic.

The moral difficulty is that Dualism gives evil a positive, substantive, self-consistent nature, like that of good. If this were true, if Ahriman existed in his own right no less than Ormuzd, what could we mean by calling Ormuzd good except that we happened to prefer him. In what sense can the one party be said to be right and the other wrong? If evil has the same kind of reality as good, the same autonomy and completeness, our allegiance to good becomes the arbitrarily chosen loyalty of a partisan. A sound theory of value demands something different. It demands that good should be original and evil a mere perversion; that good should be the tree and evil the ivy; that good should be able to see all round evil (as when sane men understand lunacy) while evil cannot retaliate in kind; that good should be able to exist on its own while evil requires the good on which it is parasitic in order to continue its parasitic existence.

The consequences of neglecting this are serious. It means believing that bad men like badness as such, in the same way in which good men like goodness. At first this denial of any common nature between us and our enemies seems gratifying. We call them fiends and feel that we need not forgive them. But, in reality, along with the power to forgive, we have lost the power to condemn. If a taste for cruelty and a taste for kindness were equally ultimate and basic, by what common standard could the one reprove the other? In reality, cruelty does not come from desiring evil as such, but from perverted sexuality, inordinate resentment, or lawless ambition and avarice. That is precisely why it can be judged and condemned from the standpoint of innocent sexuality, righteous anger, and ordinate acquisitiveness. The master can correct a boy's sums because they are blunders in arithmetic - in the same arithmetic which he does and does better. If they were not even attempts at arithmetic - if they were not in the arithmetical world at all - they could not be arithmetical mistakes.

Good and evil, then, are not on all fours. Badness is not even bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Ormuzd and Ahriman cannot be equals. In the long run, Ormuzd must be original and Ahriman derivative. The first hazy idea of devil must, if we begin to think, be analysed into the more precise ideas of 'fallen' and 'rebel' angel. But only in the long run. Christianity can go much further with the Dualist than Dr Joad's article seems to suggest. There was never any question of tracing all evil to man; in fact, the New Testament has a good deal more to say about dark superhuman powers than about the fall of Adam. As far as this world is concerned, a Christian can share most of the Zoroastrian outlook; we all live between the 'fell, incensed points' (Note: Shakespeare, Hamlet, V, ii, 60) of Michael and Satan. The difference between the Christian and the Dualist is that the Christian thinks one stage further and sees that if Michael is really in the right and Satan really in the wrong this must mean that they stand in two different relations to somebody or something far further back, to the ultimate ground of reality itself. All this of course has been watered down in modern times by the theologians, who are afraid of 'mythology', but those who are prepared to reinstate Ormuzd and Ahriman are presumably not squeamish on that score.

Dualism can be a manly creed. In the Norse form ('The giants will beat the gods in the end, but I am on the side of the gods.') it is nobler by many degrees than most philosophies of the moment. But it is only a half-way house. Thinking along these lines you can avoid Monotheism, and remain a Dualist, only by refusing to follow your thoughts home. To revive Dualism would be a real step backwards and a bad omen (though not the worst possible) for civilization.