119 The Fifteenth-Century Heroic Line

It is a commonplace of literary history that English metre is bad from the age of Chaucer to the age of Surrey. At one time this was popularly attributed to the changing state of the language, and specially to the loss of that final e on which the syllabic pattern of Chaucer's verse seems to depend. But this is an explanation which presupposes part of the phenomenon to be explained. If a man understands a metre he can fit it to the language he hears spoken in his own time: if he cannot do so, that means he does not understand it; just as, if a boy cannot repeat a geometrical proof when the master has changed the letters or turned the figure upside down, we know that he has not understood it. The master's change of the letters may, indeed, be described as the cause of the boy's failure in his lesson, but it is a cause that can become operative only on one condition - the boy's prior failure to understand the proof. In the same way, linguistic change can produce metrical chaos only on condition that the poets were already deaf to metre when the change overtook them. If they had clearly grasped a metrical Form they could have applied it unchanged to the changing Matter of language, as we, who understand the Form of Shakespeare's verse, do not, like Shakespeare, put motion where a trisyllable is required. If the explanation of fifteenth-and early sixteenth-century verse is to be found at all, it must not be sought in the history of the language.

We often speak carelessly as if 'metre' in general were bad in this period; but we are usually thinking only of the lines which we try to read as decasyllabics. The octosyllabics even of Lydgate are good enough; so are the carols and other lyrics, and so, in its way, is the loose ballad metre of Gamelyn and Beryn. Even in Wyatt the stumblingblocks occur far more often in what seem to be decasyllabics than in his lyric metres. I say 'what seem to be decasyllabics' because that is precisely the point on which we must not begin by begging the question. In the following discussion I shall give the arbitrary name 'Fifteenth-Century Heroic' to the line which we find in The Temple of Glas, The Pastime of Pleasure, Barclay's Eclogues, Wyatt's Complaint upon Love to Reason, and, in general, all those poems which appear at first sight to attempt the decasyllabic line without success. The question I propose is whether the Fifteenth-Century Heroic is, in fact, an attempt at our decasyllable; and, if it is not, what else it may be.

At the outset we shall do well to remind ourselves that the modem decasyllable, as we have known it from Spenser to Bridges, is a very strange metre. In the first place it has an uneven number of beats, thus differing from the ancient hexameter, the Kalevala metre, and the old Germanic alliterative line. In the second place - and perhaps in consequence of this - it has no medial break, thus differing from the hexameter, the alliterative line, the Fourteener, and the Fourteener's ancestor, the line of Ormulum. This second characteristic is obscured by the unfortunate practice of calling any pause in a decasyllabic line its caesura, and thus suggesting that it is, like the ancient caesura, a metrical fact. It is nothing of the sort. It can occur anywhere the poet chooses and need not occur at all, and is therefore no part of the pattern, though it may be a very important part of the poet's handling of the pattern so as to move passion or delight. It is a rhetorical and syntactical fact, not a metrical fact. Hence Milton rightly tells us that 'musical delight' consists on the one hand 'in apt numbers' and, on the other, in 'the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another' (Note: Note on 'The Verse' prefixed to Paradise Lost ) - that is, on the shifting relations between the metrical pattern (the 'numbers') and the rhetorical or syntactical units which are fitted into it. The very fact that the latter can be varied at will proves that they are not part of the pattern. To 'draw out variously' the true metrical caesura of the hexameter does not lead to 'musical delight'; it leads, or led, only to the birch - and rightly as far as metrical science is concerned.

Now the result of these two characteristics is that the decasyllabic line stands at a much farther remove than almost any other metre from the natural modes of rhythmical human behaviour, whether in song or dance or shout. One's feet trip it instinctively to a hexameter or an octosyllabic. The Kalevala metre, if not handled with great discretion, pounds in our ear like a heart-beat. A half-line of Anglo-Saxon verse, once metrically understood, can hardly be heard, even by the inner ear, as anything but what it is. But the decasyllable is no such thing. In all good metre, no doubt, there should be some degree of discrepancy, some room for play, between the pattern (the noise the words pretend to make) and the natural pronunciation: but the decasyllabic outstrips all others in the discrepancy it allows and even demands. The octosyllabic can do wonders in this direction by a skilful use of long words, but it cannot avoid many lines of the type 'The wynd was good, the Schip was yare', (Note: Gower, Confessio Amantis , V, 3299) in which the metrical pattern coincides exactly with the real, or with any imaginable, pronunciation. Compared with the decasyllable, which is all art and spirit, it remains mere nature. But the decasyllabic, even if it wishes, can hardly impose its rhythm in this way. Even 'The singing masons building roofs of gold' (Note: Henry V, I, ii, 198) hints a tiny difference between the ideal pattern and the real speech-rhythm-'building' counts for a shade more ideally than it does in natural reading. The ease with which our prose admits 'blank verse lines', and the difficulty which many find in detecting them, are further proofs of the same fact. Hence all poetry in this metre has to be read with what we may call 'double audition'.

Most of us have been so trained to this that we are now hardly conscious of it - though it is very significant that a generation is growing up which has already begun to lose the trick. We do not usually notice that the line 'While other animals unactive range' (P.L., iv, 62i) is pure Beowulf if we attend solely to the speechrhythm; the first half being the C type with two disyllabic lifts, the second, type B. While other animals is, from this point of view, own brother to se Þe waeter-egesan (Beow., 1260), and unactive range to be waepned-men (1284). Still less do we notice the converse - how many admirable decasyllables we could dig out of Beowulf if we started with the assumption that it was a blundering attempt at our familiar modern line: as,

Swaese gesiÞas swa he selfa baed. (29)

Gewat ða neosian syÞðan niht becom. (115)

In Caines cynne Þone cwealm gewraec. (107)

But perhaps the truth can be put in its clearest light by an experiment. Read

I have given no man of my fruit to eat,

I trod the grapes, I have drunken the wine.

Had you eaten and drunken and found it Sweet,

This wild new growth of the corn and vine;

and now read this:

I comfort few and many I torment,

Where one is spared a thousand more are spent;

I have trodden many down beneath my feet,

I have given no man of my fruit to eat.

I conjecture that you have read the last line of my second example differently from the opening line of my first: yet as mere language, separated from the ideal pattern, they are identical. And this, let us notice in passing, is a strong and beautiful example of Aristotle's doctrine that the whole is 'naturally prior' to its parts.

The modem decasyllabic, then, is a metre which demands from those who are to write or read it a power of 'double audition' which must be the growth of long training and for which nothing in their previous poetical experience had prepared the Englishmen of Chaucer's time. If this is so, two questions arise: (1) Is it probable that Chaucer himself had caught the music of the modern decasyllabic and intended his countrymen to hear this music in his own verse? (2) Even if Chaucer did so intend, is it at all probable that they would have understood him? The first question I leave for the present unanswered.

To the second question only one consideration prevents me from answering 'No' at once. It may be urged that though the line of ten syllables was new in England it was old in France, and that French examples would have prepared the ears of Chaucer's educated audience to understand the music of the modern decasyllabic. This argument would be strong if the French ten-syllable line had, in fact, run to the same tune as our modern - that is, spenserian-decasyllabic. But it does not. The French verse of Chaucer's immediate predecessors had parted company with stress-accent as a metrical element and was, in that respect, the same as French verse in the nineteenth century. A single line from Deschamps Angleterre, d'elle ce nom s'applique

(Note: 'Ballade adressée à Geoffroy Chaucer, en lui envoyant ses ouvrages', OEuvres Complète de Eustache Deschamps, vol. ii, Société des Ancien, Textes Francais (Paris, 1880), line 15 (p. 139)) should be enough to convince us. Here we have no 'drumming decasyllabon' but a mere ten syllables. If Chaucer was in fact introducing the tune of Spenser, Milton, and Tennyson, then he was introducing a new thing for which French poetry furnished only a hint, and to which French poetry would hardly at all have opened the ears of his contemporaries. Italian poetry would have helped them a great deal more: but we have not yet evidence that many of them knew it.

It seems to me, then, that we must answer the second question in the negative. If Chaucer meant his lines to be read as the modern scholar reads them, it is extremely likely that he was disappointed. Indeed, having begun his greatest poem with

Whân that Aprille with his shôures sote,

he was asking a good deal if he expected readers bred on the alliterative line, the octosyllabic, the Horn metre, and the metre of Gamelyn, to see at once that the poem was to go to the pattern of 'The singing masons building roofs of gold'.

Thus far we have argued a priori. It remains to he seen what Chaucer's successors actually did. In the interests of clarity I am going to give a purely static account of the Fifteenth-Century Heroic as I conceive it to be, neglecting for the present the history of its rise and its various modifications.

I believe that the modern reader can learn this metre most easily from William Allingham's 'The Fairies' (number 769 in the Oxford Book of English Verse). (Note: Number 776 in the new, enlarged edition (1939).) This poem is printed in short lines which may equally well be treated as half-lines. I have never heard of any one who called it unmetrical or found a difficulty in reading it: but as soon as we attempt a metrical analysis we find ourselves in trouble. The first four lines, Up the airy mountain,

Down the rushy glen,

We daren't go a-hunting

For fear of little men,

can be treated as lines of three stresses, the first two in falling, the last two in rising, rhythm. But the fifth ('Wee folk, good folk') can equally well be treated as two stresses. Yet we do not feel that the metre has changed either here or in such lines as 'High on the hill-top' and 'For seven years long'. (Note: 'The Fairies', iii, 1; v, 2) We may solve our problem in two ways. We can say that all the lines have three beats and explain away the apparent dimeters, pleading that the strong pause in 'Wee folk, good folk' compensates for a missing stress, that years carries a stress in 'For sev'n years long', and on a phantasmal or theoretical stress in 'High on the hill-top'. On the other hand, we may say that all the lines have two full stresses and no more - the first syllable of airy being weaker than up or than the first syllable of mountain - but that they admit a third half stress, like the D and E types in Anglo-Saxon verse. If we adopt the second explanation we may notice that the rhythm of daedcene monn is very close to that of 'All night awake' and '(The) Old King sits'. (Note: 'The Fairies' ii, 8; iii, 2) In the meantime, however, without awaiting a decision on the metrical problem, we have enjoyed the poem. We want a definition of what we have enjoyed that does not prejudge the ultimate metrical problem. I suggest the following: a long line divided by a sharp medial break into two half-lines, each half-line containing not less than two or more than three stresses, and most half-lines hovering between two and three stresses in a manner analogous to the Anglo-Saxon types D and E. When the scheme is thus stated in the abstract, we are at first tempted to say that something so vague as this cannot be called a metre at all: but against this I set the fact 'The Fairies' is felt to be metrical by every reader. Indeed its metre is not even an unfamiliar one. We heard something like it before we could read in 'Péase pudding hot' and 'Old Mother Slipper-Slapper'. We read something like it not many years since in Mr de la Mare's 'All That's Past'. (Note CSLewis: Here the ideal norm seems to be 3 beats in the first half-line and 2 in the second ('Where snow sleeps cold beneath the azure skies'). But we also find in the first half-line only 2 beats ('Sing such a history') and 2 1/2 ('Very old are the woods') and, in the second, what I take to be 3 ('Oh, no man knows'). It will be noticed that if we lineate the poem in whole lines these make rough decasyllabics, though the reader who treated them simply as such would be missing the real quality of the poem. Cf, in the same poet, 'Song of the Mad Prince', 'Jim Jay', and 'Some One'.) We find it in the famous carol He câm also stylle

Þere his moder was

As déw in aprille,

Þat fallyt on Þe gras. (Note: Entitled 'The Maiden Makeles' in Religious Lyrics of the XVth Century, ed. Carleton Brown (Oxford, 1939), lines 7-8 p. 119))

If such a metre is admitted, we may proceed to note that it must every now and then yield lines which can be read as decasyllables and which certainly will be read as such by any reader who starts with the assumption that the poem is attempting to be decasyllabic. Thus from 'The Fairies' we can get

Some in the reeds of the black mountain lake

With frogs for their watch-dogs all night awake (Note: ii, 5)

and from the carol

I syng of a myden Þat is makeles...

Moder and mayden was neuer non but che. (Note: 'The Maiden Makele', Op. cit., lines I, 9)

It will also tend to produce lines that can be read as loose 'anapaestic' four-beats if we start with a misunderstanding. Thus in Allingham's poem,

They stole little Bridget for seven years long. (Note: 'The Fairies', v, 1)

if so read, poems in this metre will seem to consist of some decasyllables, some 'anapaestic' four-beats, and some floundering lines that are neither one nor the other: but that is just what many of the 'bad' poems between Chaucer and Spenser sound like. Thus in the Assembly of Gods we can read as very stumbling decasyllables His shete from his body down he let fall,

And on a rewde maner he salutyd all the rout,

With a bold voyse carpyng wordys stout

But he spake all holow as hit had be oon

Had spoke in another world Þat had woo begoon. (437)

But the result is extremely ugly and the slurring of rewde in the second line is jaw-breaking. I think it more probable that the poet meant us to read,

His shete from his body

Down he let fall,

And on a rewde maner

He salutyd all the rout,

With a bold voyse

Carpying wordys stout

But he spake all holow,

As hit had be oon

Had spoke in another world

Þat had woo begoon.

Even this may not seem very melodious to modem ears and With a bold voice still gives trouble: but I believe it can be carried off by a reader who is thinking in terms of the nursery-rhyme metre which I am suggesting and who puts a strong accent on with and bold. The last four half-lines, in their new dress, seem to me good. Applying the same treatment to Barclay's second Egloge (697 et seq.) we get

Then call for the priest

When I refuse to drinke,

This ale brewed Bently,

It maketh me to winke.

Thou sayest tru'e Cornix,

Beleue me, by the rood

No hand is so sure

That can alway make good,

But talke of the court

If thou haste any more,

Set downe the bottle,

Saue some licour in store.

Nothing will make Barclay a good poet; but I submit that such merits as this passage has will disappear if we give it back the usual lineation, and try to read it as decasyllabic verse. In the same way we can get a modicum of beauty out of Elyot's

The blode becometh wanne, the eien firye bright,

Like Gorgon the monstre appierynge in the nyght

(Boke named Me Gouernour, II, vi)

by setting it to the country dance of

The blode becometh wanne,

The eien firye bright,

Like Gorgon the monstre

Appierynge in the nyght.

And who would wish to stretch again on the bed of Procrustes these lines from Hawes?

These daunces truely

Musyke hath me tought

To lute or daunce,

But it auayled nought;

For the fyre kyndled

And waxed more and more,

The dauncynge blewe it

With her beaute clere.

My hert sekened

And began waxe sore;

A mynute VI houres,

And VI houres a yere,

I thought it was,

So heuy was my chere.

But yet for to couer

My grete loue aright,

The outwarde countenauce

I made gladde and light. (Pastime of Pleasure, 1595 et seq.)

A natural objection to my hypothesis may take the form of the question, 'Is there any verse, however decasyllabic, which could not, if we chose, be read as you want us to read Hawes and Barclay?' I must freely confess that there is very little decasyllabic verse which cannot be tortured into what I call the Fifteenth-Century Heroic. From the very nature of the decasyllable on the one hand and the Fifteenth-Century Heroic on the other, it must, on my view, follow that either metre will yield many lines which could occur in the other: indeed this fact is a necessary part of my case. But there remains a difference between lines which 'can, if we choose', be 'tortured' into the Fifteenth-Century Heroic and lines which can be read better and more naturally in that metre than in the decasyllabic. I think 'His shete from his body - doun he let fall' a true Fifteenth-Century Heroic not because it can be read thus but because this reading seems to me more natural, pleasing, and probable than 'His shete from his body down he let fall', and because the neighbouring line 'And on a rewde maner he salutyd all the rout' is quite intolerable as a decasyllabic. Conversely, I do not read Pope's line as 'A mighty maze! but not without a plan', (Note: An Essay on Man, Ep. 1, 6) though it would be possible to do so, because the alternative 'A mighty maze but not without a plan' seems more probable and pleasing, and also because the neighbouring line 'of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar' (Note: Ibid., I, 12) is clearly a very good decasyllable and would be atrocious as

Of all who blindly creep,

Or sightless soar.

Once again we meet Aristotle. The metre of a poem does not result from the metre of individual lines; it is the whole which determines the parts.

The distinction between what is best read according to my hypothesis and what can only be tortured into it must, of course, be applied to the late medieval poets whom we are now considering. I do not claim that all can be read as Fifteenth-Century Heroics. I find that The Assembly of Gods is my best example and that most of Hoccleve will not fit in at all. Such a line as No wight with me, in the, my sone, hath part' (Note CSLewis: Lamentation of the Green Tree, 16) would have to be 'murdered' if we tried to force it in.

At this point no one will forget Hoccleve's own statement that he was the friend and pupil of Chaucer. (Note CSLewis: Regement of Princes, 1960, 2077) Have we here a real proof of this discipleship and, with it, a proof that Chaucer was writing true decasyllabics but that the tradition (for reasons I have suggested) was very soon lost?

My answer to this question is little more than a guess. There are lines in Chaucer which read much more naturally as Fifteenth-Century Heroics: 'Whan Zéphirus eék wîth his swéte bréeth', (Note CSLewis: C. T., A 5) or 'Bût a governour Wyly and wys'. (Note CSLewis: C. T., B 3130) His licences at the middle of the line may not be incompatible with the true decasyllabic movement; but his habit of knocking off the initial unaccented syllable is so foreign to that movement that I question whether any decasyllabic poet from Surrey to the present day has dreamed of imitating it, though the corresponding licence in octosyllabics ('Towered cities please us then') is so common and natural that we hardly notice it. On the other hand, there are hundreds of lines in Chaucer that demand pure decasyllabic reading - 'God woot no lussheburgyes payen ye', (Note CSLewis: C.T.,B 3152) &c. And the pleasure which not a few generations have now had in Chaucer thus read is strong, though not conclusive, evidence that they have read him correctly.

Chaucer could not transport the rhythm of the French decasyllable directly into English, for that metre, being unaccentual, has no rhythm in the English sense. You cannot export snakes from Iceland. (Note: Iceland or Ireland? I am inclined to think Lewis meant the latter, referring to the well-known fact that there are no snakes in Ireland as they traditionally were driven out by St Patrick. On the other hand, Lewis was knowledgeable of Icelandic sagas and history and would have known that there are no snakes in Iceland either. Although we might think that Ireland would add more force to his statement, it is not certain that he thought so. I have examined Lewis's copy of Essays and Studies in which this essay first appeared: he made several corrections in it, but he did not change Iceland to Ireland.) Chaucer had run against this difficulty very early in his career when he was translating the Roman de la Rose and had sometimes adopted the desperate solution of writing English verses which have the right number of syllables and ignore accent. Such lines as

With a threde basting my slevis (104)

And litel coude of norture (179)

Upon any worthy man falle (255)

would seem metrical to a Frenchman: to us they are not verse at all. When, in his maturity, he began to naturalize the ten-syllabled line he did not repeat this blunder. What exactly he did I doubt if we shall ever know; but it seems likely to me that he attempted a compromise. On the one hand, he followed the French in having (usually) ten syllables in a line, and sometimes he had five full stresses, thus attaining the modern decasyllabic tune. But the other tune - that which I have attempted to describe - was running in his head and he allowed it to intrude; he even welcomed it by having many strong medial pauses, by admitting hypermetrical syllables at the pause, and, above all, by sometimes dropping the unaccented first syllable of the whole line and thus forcing the first half-line into a more native rhythm. Such compromise was possible because, as all my examples show, the one metre slips easily into the other. I suspect that his verse was a precarious balance of different metrical forces. He himself knew how to read it aloud; but perhaps, even from the first, few others could read it exactly as he wished. Hoccleve and some of the poets of the Chauceriana may have learned the art, but in Lydgate the strong medial pause and the essentially undecasyllabic movement ('trows and wood and malencolik') are already normal, and the fact that we usually have nine or ten syllables makes little difference. (Note CSLewis: Lydgate's often-quoted admission that he took no heed 'nouther of shorte nor longe' is quite irrelevant to any discussion of his metre. To neglect 'short and long' in English verse either means nothing or means 'to make no distinction between accented and unaccented syllables'. If this were what Lydgate had done, we should find his verse either merely syllabic (like the lines quoted above from Chauoer's Romaunt of the Rose) or else tending to force metrical accents on to weak syllables. In fact, however, we find him comparatively heedless of the number of syllables and generally attentive to stress. His statement about 'shorte and longe' is therefore merely a piece of conventional medieval self-depreciation and throws no light whatsoever on his practice.) In the poets who follow, down to, and partly including, Wyatt, the number of syllables ceases to matter and the rough metre which I call the Fifteenth-Century Heroic is established.

A glance at the earlier history of English verse will perhaps render my theory more acceptable. The starting-point of that history, and the key to some of its mysteries, is the alliterative metre of Beowulf and Pseudo-Caedmon. This consists of two sharply divided half-lines, of which each has normally two stresses. But what are called the D and E types of half-line show an all-important variation; they have two and a half-two full stresses and one medium stress. From the decay of the alliterative metre the metre of La3amon's Brut is engendered. In the Brut the type with two stresses ('Hors and Héngest') is retained, and so, unless my ear plays me false, is a type with two and a half ('And Haéngest swiðe faeire'); (Note: La3amon, Brut, ed. Frederic Madden (3 vol., London, 1847), line 14061 (of MS Cotton Caligula A ix)) but we also find - and doubtless as a development of the old two and a half - a type with three full stresses - 'Þa queð Hingest to Þan kinge'. (Note: Ibid., 14077) The total result is that the formula for La3amon's metre is 'Two, or two-and-a-half, or three'.

Two different developments then follow. In King Horn, on the one hand, we find the type with three stresses erected into the norm, though lines that seem to have only two are still occasionally permitted ('Þe héued of wénte', (Note: King Horn, ed. Joseph Hall (Oxford, 1901), line 610 (of MS Gg. 4.27.2)) 'Réynild mi do3ter' (Note: Ibid., 903)). But in 'On God Ureisun' liberty is still allowed between two and three. Thus we can have two stresses in the first half and two in the second:

Pleieð and swéieð and singeð bitwéonen. (Note: 'On God Ureisun of Ure Lefdi' in Old English Homilies and Homiletic Treasures, ed. Richard Morris, vols. xxix-xxxiv, first series, Early English Text Society (Oxford, 1868), line 28 (p. 193))

Or three in the first, and two in the second:

Cristes milde moder séynte Marie. (Note: Ibid., line I (p. 191))

Or three in both:

Mi lif and mi tohope min heale mid iwisse. (Note: Ibid., line 6 (p. 191))

Traces of similar variability can be found in the Middle English Bestiary and in the Proverbs of Alfred; and it has never been denied that in the later developments of the alliterative metre itself, in Gawain and the Green Knight for example, three-stressed and two-stressed types occur side by side in the first half of the line. If this background to Chaucer's metrical activities be remembered, and if it be also remembered that the French decasyllabic, being unaccented, was no metre at all to English ears, the hypothesis which I advance about the true nature of his verse will not be judged very improbable. Nor is it unlikely, if such a native rhythm were allowed a footing in Chaucer, that in his successors it would rebel, and rebel successfully, against its foreign and syllabic master, thus giving the Fifteenth-Century Heroic.

When this also begins to decline, the Elizabethans, attending to one only of its many variations, try to read it as the rough four-beat line which Gascoigne apparently attributes to Chaucer and which Spenser uses in his February eclogue. To that tune Chaucer was read for centuries, and to such reading, perhaps, we owe the heavy overemphasis which the older critics laid on his comic elements, since these best survived such treatment. Then came the beginnings of modern scholarship and the discovery of final -e. Critics whose ears had been trained on the Greek iambic and the modern decasyllable then learned to read the verse of Chaucer as if it were that of Milton or Pope. What could not be so read was quarantined as 'licence' or emended, and the metre of Chaucer's successors was dismissed as a blundering attempt at pure decasyllabics. But all this time the rhythm of the Fifteenth-Century Heroic had continued a humble existence in popular lyric and nursery rhyme: it had, perhaps, contributed in some degree to our choice of the Italian decasyllable as our principal metre; it had started from hiding to delight even learned readers in The Shepherds Sirena; and it survived to produce a few poems 'choice and light' in modern times. It is this survival which has now enabled us - if my theory is true - to recover the metrical history of the later Middle Ages in England.

120 THE FOUNDING OF THE OXFORD SOCRATIC CLUB

(Note 1 This is Lewis's Preface to the first Socratic Digest, vol. I (Oxford, 1942-943). What is not mentioned here is the very important fact that Lewis was the Society's President from the time of its first meeting until he went to Cambridge in 1954)

Like a quietly efficient nurse arriving in a house confused by illness, or like the new general arriving at the siege of Ismail in Byron's Don Juan, our Chairman (Note Miss Stella Aldwinckle, who is still Chairman) broke in (if she will pardon the word) during the autumn of 1941 on that welter of discussion which even in wartime makes up five-eighths of the night life of the Oxford undergraduate. By stages which must have been very swift (for I cannot remember them), we found that a new society had been formed, that it was attempting the difficult programme of meeting once a week (Note the first meeting was in Somerville College, Oxford, on the 26th January 1942), that it was actually carrying this programme out, that its numbers were increasing, and that neither foul weather nor crowded rooms (they were lucky who found seats even on the floor) would reduce the size of the meetings. This was the Socratic Club. Socrates had exhorted men to 'follow the argument wherever it led them' : the Club came into existence to apply his principle to one particular subject-matter - the pros and cons of the Christian Religion.

It is a little remarkable that, to the best of my knowledge, no society had ever before been formed for such a purpose.

There had been plenty of organizations that were explicitly Christian - the S.C.M. (Note The Student Christian Movement), the Ark (Note An Oxford Christian society), the O.U.C.H. (Note Oxford University Church Union), the O.I.C.C.U. (Note Oxford Intercollegiate Christian Union, now called The Christian Union) and there had been plenty of others, scientific or political, which were, if not explicitly, yet profoundly antiChristian in outlook. The question about Christianity arose, no doubt, often enough in private conversation, and cast its shadow over the aesthetic or philosophical debates in many societies: but an arena specially devoted to the conflict between Christian and unbeliever was a novelty. Its value from a merely cultural point of view is very great. In any fairly large and talkative community such as a university there is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together into coteries where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form of rumour that the outsiders say thus and thus. The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by group hostility. Each group hears not the best, but the worst, that the other group can say. In the Socratic all this was changed. Here a man could get the case for Christianity without all the paraphernalia of pietism and the case against it without the irrelevant sansculottisme of our common anti-God weeklies. At the very least we helped to civilize one another; sometimes we ventured to hope that if our Athenian patron were allowed to be present, unseen, at our meetings he might not have found the atmosphere wholly alien.

We also learned, in those motley - and usually stifling - assemblies where English boys fresh from public schools rubbed shoulders with elderly European Gelehrten in exile, almost any type of opinion might turn up. Everyone found how little he had known about everyone else. We of the Christian party discovered that the weight of the sceptical attack did not always come where we expected it; our opponents had to correct what seemed to us their almost bottomless ignorance of the Faith they supposed themselves to be rejecting.

It is (theoretically) a difficulty in the British Constitution that the Speaker of the House of Commons must himself be a member of one of the Parties. There is a similar difficulty about the Socratic. Those who founded it do not for one moment pretend to be neutral. It was the Christians who constructed the arena and issued the challenge. It will therefore always be possible for the lower (the less Athenian) type of unbeliever to regard the whole thing as a cunningly - or not even so very cunningly - disguised form of propaganda. The Athenian type, if he had this objection to make, would put it in a paper and read that paper to the Socratic itself. He would be welcome to do so - though I doubt whether he would have the stomach if he knew with what pains and toil the committee has scoured Who's Who to find intelligent atheists who had leisure or zeal to come and propagate their creed. But when all is said and done, the answer to any such suspicion lies deeper. It is not here that the honesty of the Socratic comes in. We never claimed to be impartial. But argument is. It has a life of its own. No man can tell where it will go. We expose ourselves, and the weakest of our party, to your fire no less than you are exposed to ours. Worse still, we expose ourselves to the recoil from our own shots; for if I may trust my personal experience no doctrine is, for the moment, dimmer to the eye of faith than that which a man has just successfully defended. The arena is common to both parties and cannot finally be cheated; in it you risk nothing, and we risk all.

Others may have quite a different objection to our proceedings. They may protest that intellectual discussion can neither build Christianity nor destroy it. They may feel that religion is too sacred to be thus bandied to and fro in public debate, too sacred to be talked of - almost, perhaps, too sacred for anything to be done with it at all. Clearly, the Christian members of the Socratic think differently. They know that intellectual assent is not faith, but they do not believe that religion is only 'what a man does with his solitude'. Or, if it is, then they care nothing for 'religion' and all for Christianity. Christianity is not merely what a man does with his solitude. It is not even what God does with His solitude. It tells of God descending into the coarse publicity of history and there enacting what can - and must - be talked about.

121 THE FUNERAL OF A GREAT MYTH

There are some mistakes which humanity has made and repented so often that there is now really no excuse for making them again. One of these is the injustice which every age does to its predecessor; for example, the ignorant contempt which the Humanists (even good Humanists like Sir Thomas More) felt for medieval philosophy or Romantics (even good Romantics like Keats) felt for eighteenth-century poetry. Each time all this 'reaction' and resentment has to be punished and unsaid: it is a wasteful performance. It is tempting to try whether we, at least, cannot avoid it. Why should we not give our predecessors a fair and filial dismissal?

Such, at all events, is the attempt I am going to make in this paper. I come to bury the great Myth of the nineteenth and early twentieth Century; but also to praise it. I am going to pronounce a funeral oration.

By this great Myth I mean that picture of reality which resulted during the period under consideration, not logically but imaginatively, from some of the more striking and (so to speak) marketable theories of the real scientists. I have heard this Myth called 'Wellsianity'. The name is a good one in so far as it does justice to the share which a great imaginative writer bore in building it up. But it is not satisfactory. It suggests, as we shall see, an error about the date at which the Myth became dominant; and it also suggests that the Myth affected only the 'middle-brow' mind. In fact it is as much behind Bridges' Testament of Beauty as it is behind the work of Wells. It dominates minds as different as those of Professor Alexander and Walt Disney. It is implicit in nearly every modern article on politics, sociology, and ethics.

I call it a Myth because it is, as I have said, the imaginative and not the logical result of what is vaguely called 'modern science'. Strictly speaking, there is, I confess, no such thing as 'modern science'. There are only particular sciences, all in a stage of rapid change, and sometimes inconsistent with one another. What the Myth uses is a selection from the scientific theories - a selection made at first, and modified afterwards, in obedience to imaginative and emotional needs. It is the work of the folk imagination, moved by its natural appetite for an impressive unity. It therefore treats its data with great freedom - selecting, slurring, expurgating, and adding at will.

The central idea of the Myth is what its believers would call 'Evolution' or 'Development' or 'Emergence', just as the central idea in the myth of Adonis is Death and Rebirth. I do not mean that the doctrine of Evolution as held by practising biologists is a Myth. It may be shown, by later biologists, to be a less satisfactory hypothesis than was hoped fifty years ago. But that does not amount to being a Myth. It is a genuine scientific hypothesis. But we must sharply distinguish between Evolution as a biological theorem and popular Evolutionism or Developmentalism which is certainly a Myth. Before proceeding to describe it and (which is my chief business) to pronounce its eulogy, I had better make clear its mythical character.

We have, first of all, the evidence of chronology. If popular Evolutionism were (as it imagines itself to be) not a Myth but the intellectually legitimate result of the scientific theorem on the public mind, it would arise after that theorem had become widely known. We should have the theorem known first of all to a few, then adopted by all the scientists, then spreading to all men of general education, then beginning to affect poetry and the arts, and so finally percolating to the mass of the people. In fact, however, we find something quite different. The clearest and finest poetical expressions of the Myth come before the Origin of Species was published (1859) and long before it had established itself as scientific orthodoxy. There had, to be sure, been hints and germs of the theory in scientific circles before 1859. But if the mythopoeic poets were at all infected by those germs they must have been very up-to-date indeed, very predisposed to catch the infection. Almost before the scientists spoke. certainly before they spoke clearly, imagination was ripe for it.

The finest expression of the Myth in English does not come from Bridges, nor from Shaw, nor from Wells, nor from Olaf Stapledon. It is this:

As Heaven and Earth are fairer, fairer far

Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chief;

And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth

In form and shape compact and beautiful,

In will, in action free, companionship,

And thousand other signs of purer life;

So on our heels a fresh perfection treads,

A power more strong in beauty, born of us,

And fated to excel us, as we pass

In glory that old Darkness.

Thus Oceanus, in Keats's Hyperion, nearly forty years before the Origin of the Species. And on the continent we have the Nibelung's Ring. Coming, as I do, to bury but also to praise the receding age, I will by no means join in the modern depreciation of Wagner. He may, for all I know, have been a bad man. He may (though I shall never believe it) have been a bad musician. But as a mythopoeic poet he is incomparable. The tragedy of the Evolutionary Myth has never been more nobly expressed than in his Wotan: its heady raptures never more irresistibly than in Siegfried. That he himself knew quite well what he was writing about can be seen from his letter to August Rockel in 1854. 'The progress of the whole drama shows the necessity of recognizing and submitting to the change, the diversity, the multiplicity, the eternal novelty, of the Real. Wotan rises to the tragic height of willing his own downfall. This is all we have to learn from the history of Man - to will the necessary and ourselves to bring it to pass.'

If Shaw's Back to Methuselah were really, as he supposed, the work of a prophet or a pioneer ushering in the reign of a new Myth, its predominantly comic tone and its genera(ly low emotional temperature would be inexplicable. It is admirable fun: but not thus are new epochs brought to birth. The ease with which he plays with the Myth shows that the Myth is fully digested and already senile. Shaw is the Lucian or the Snorri of this mythology: to find its Aeschylus or its Elder Edda you must go back to Keats and Wagner.

That, then, is the first proof that popular Evolution is a Myth. In making it Imagination runs ahead of scientific evidence. 'The prophetic soul of the big world' was already pregnant with the Myth: if science had not met the imaginative need, science would not have been so popular. But probably every age gets, within certain limits, the science it desires.

In the second place we have internal evidence. Popular Evolutionism or Developmentalism differs in content from the Evolution of the real biologists. To the biologist Evolution is a hypothesis. It covers more of the facts than any other hypothesis at present on the market and is therefore to be accepted unless, or until, some new supposal can be shown to cover still more facts with even fewer assumptions. At least, that is what I think most biologists would say. Professor D.M.S. Watson, it is true, would not go so far. According to him Evolution 'is accepted by zoologists not because it has been observed to occur or... can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible'. (Watson, quoted in Nineteenth Century (April 1943), 'Science and the B.B.C.') This would mean that the sole ground for believing it is not empirical but metaphysical - the dogma of an amateur metaphysician who finds 'special creation' incredible. But I do not think it has really come to that. Most biologists have a more robust belief in Evolution than Professor Watson. But it is certainly a hypothesis. In the Myth, however, there is nothing hypothetical about it: it is basic fact: or, to speak more strictly, such distinctions do not exist on the mythical level at all. There are more important differences to follow.

In the science, Evolution is a theory about changes: in the Myth it is a fact about improvements. Thus a real scientist like Professor J.B.S. Haldane is at pains to point out that popular ideas of Evolution lay a wholly unjustified emphasis on those changes which have rendered creatures (by human standards) 'better' or more interesting. He adds: 'We are therefore inclined to regard progress as the rule in evolution. Actually it is the exception, and for every case of it there are ten of degeneration.' But the Myth simply expurgates the ten cases of degeneration. In the popular mind the word 'Evolution' conjures up a picture of things moving 'onwards and upwards', and of nothing else whatsoever. And it might have been predicted that it would do so. Already, before science had spoken, the mythical imagination knew the kind of 'Evolution' it wanted. It wanted the Keatian and Wagnerian kind: the gods superseding the Titans, and the young, joyous, careless, amorous Siegfried superseding the care-worn, anxious, treaty-entangled Wotan. If science offers any instances to satisfy that demand, they will be eagerly accepted. If it offers any instances that frustrate it, they will simply be ignored.

Again, for the scientist Evolution is a purely biological theorem. It takes over organic life on this planet as a going concern and tries to explain certain changes within that field. It makes no cosmic statements, no metaphysical statements, no eschatological statements. Granted that we now have minds we can trust, granted that organic life came to exist, it tries to explain, say, how a species that once had wings came to lose them. It explains this by the negative effect of environment operating on small variations. It does not in itself explain the origin of organic life, nor of the variations, nor does it discuss the origin and validity of reason. It may well tell you how the brain, 'through which reason now operates, arose, but that is a different matter. Still less does it even attempt to tell you how the universe as a whole arose, or what it is, or whither it is tending. But the Myth knows none of these reticences. Having first turned what was a theory of change into a theory of improvement, it then makes this a cosmic theory. Not merely terrestrial organisms but everything is moving 'upwards and onwards'. Reason has 'evolved' out of instinct, virtue out of complexes, poetry out of erotic howls and grunts, civilization out of savagery, the organic out of inorganic, the solar system out of some sidereal soup or traffic block. And conversely, reason, virtue, art and civilization as we now know them are only the crude or embryonic beginnings of far better things - perhaps Deity itself in the remote future. For in the Myth, 'Evolution' (as the Myth understands it) is the formula of all existence. To exist means to be moving from the status of 'almost zero' to the status of 'almost infinity'. To those brought up on the Myth nothing seems more normal, more natural, more plausible, than that chaos should turn into order, death into life, ignorance into knowledge. And with this we reach the full-blown Myth. It is one of the most moving and satisfying world dramas which have ever been imagined.

The drama proper is preceded (do no forget the Rheingold here) by the most austere of all preludes; the infinite void and matter endlessly, aimlessly moving to bring forth it knows not what. Then by some millionth, millionth chance - what tragic irony! - the conditions at one point of space and time bubble up into that tiny fermentation which we call organic life. At first everything seems to be against the infant hero of our drama; just as everything always was against the seventh son or illused stepdaughter in a fairy tale. But life somehow wins through. With incalculable sufferings (the Sorrows of the Volsungs were nothing to it), against all but insuperable obstacles, it spreads, it breeds, it complicates itself; from the amoeba up to the reptile, up to the mammal. Life (here comes our first climax) 'wantons as in her prime'. This is the age of monsters: dragons prowl the earth, devour one another, and die. Then the old irresistible theme of the Younger Son or the Ugly Duckling is repeated. As the weak, tiny spark of life herself began amidst the beasts that are far larger and stronger than he, there comes forth a little, naked, shivering, cowering biped, shuffling, not yet fully erect, promising nothing: the product of another millionth, millionth chance. His name in this Myth is Man: elsewhere he has been the young Beowulf whom men at first thought a dastard, or the stripling David armed only with a sling against mail-clad Goliath, or Jack the Giant-Killer himself, or even Hop-o'-my-Thumb. He thrives. He begins killing his giants. He becomes the Cave Man with his flints and his club, muttering and growling over his enemies' bones, almost a brute yet somehow able to invent art, pottery, language, weapons, cookery and nearly everything else (his name in another story is Robinson Crusoe), dragging his screaming mate by her hair (I do not exactly know why), tearing his children to pieces in fierce jealousy until they are old enough to tear him, and cowering before the terrible gods whom he has invented in his own image.

But these were only growing pains. In the next act he has become true Man. He learns to master Nature. Science arises and dissipates the superstitions of his infancy. More and more he becomes the controller of his own fate. Passing hastily over the historical period (in it the upward and onward movement gets in places a little indistinct, but it is a mere nothing by the time-scale we are using) we follow our hero on into the future. See him in the last act, though not the last scene, of this great mystery. A race of demigods now rule the planet (in some versions, the galaxy). Eugenics have made certain that only demigods will now be born: psychoanalysis that none of them shall lose or smirch his divinity: economics that they shall have to hand all that demigods require. Man has ascended his throne. Man has become God. All is a blaze of glory. And now, mark well the final stroke of mythopoeic genius. It is only the more debased versions of the Myth that end here. For to end here is a little pathetic, even a little vulgar. If we stopped at this point the story would lack the highest grandeur. Therefore, in the best versions, the last scene reverses all. Arthur died: Siegfried died: Roland died at Roncesvaux. Dusk steals darkly over the gods. All this time we have forgotten Mordred, Hagen, Ganilon. All this time Nature, the old enemy who only seemed to be defeated, has been gnawing away, silently, unceasingly, out of the reach of human power. The Sun will cool - all suns will cool - the whole universe will run down. Life (every form of life) will be banished without hope of return from every cubic inch of infinite space. All ends in nothingness. 'Universal darkness covers all.' True to the shape of Elizabethan tragedy, the hero has swiftly fallen from the glory to which he slowly climbed: we are dismissed 'in calm of mind, all passion spent'. It is indeed much better than an Elizabethan tragedy, for it has a more complete finality. It brings us to the end not of a story, but of all possible stories: enden sah ich die Welt.

I grew up believing in this Myth and I have felt - I still feel - its almost perfect grandeur. Let no one say we are an unimaginative age: neither the Greeks nor the Norsemen ever invented a better story. Even to the present day, in certain moods, I could almost find it in my heart to wish that it was not mythical, but true. (Note: In a paper read to the Oxford Socratic Club on 'Is Theology Poetry?'. Lewis admits that if Christian Theology were only a myth he would not find even it as attractive as the Myth considered in this paper: Christianity offers the attraction neither of optimism nor of pessimism. It represents the life of the universe as being very like the mortal life of men on this planet - "of a mingled yarn, good and ill together." The Socratic Digest ( 1945).) And yet, how could it be?

What makes it impossible that it should be true is not so much the lack of evidence for this or that scene in the drama or the fatal self-contradiction which runs right through it. The Myth cannot even get going without accepting a good deal from the real sciences. And the real sciences cannot be accepted for a moment unless rational inferences are valid: for every science claims to be a series of inferences from observed facts. It is only by such inferences that you can reach your nebulae and protoplasm and dinosaurs and sub-men and cave-men at all. Unless you start by believing that reality in the remotest space and the remotest time rigidly obeys the laws of logic, you can have no ground for believing in any astronomy, any biology, any palaeontology, any archaeology. To reach the positions held by the real scientists - which are then taken over by the Myth - you must - in fact, treat reason as an absolute. But at the same time the Myth asks me to believe that reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of a mindless process at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. The content of the Myth thus knocks from under me the only ground on which I could possibly believe the Myth to be true. If my own mind is a product of the irrational - if what seem my clearest reasonings are only the way in which a creature conditioned as I am is bound to feel - how shall I trust my mind when it tells me about Evolution? They say in effect 'I will prove that what you call a proof is only the result of mental habits which result from heredity which results from biochemistry which results from physics.' But this is the same as saying: 'I will prove that proofs are irrational': more succinctly, 'I will prove that there are no proofs': The fact that some people of scientific education cannot by any effort be taught to see the difficulty, confirms one's suspicion that we here touch a radical disease in their whole style of thought. But the man who does see it, is compelled to reject as mythical the cosmology in which most of us were brought up. That it has embedded in it many true particulars I do not doubt: but in its entirety, it simply will not do. Whatever the real universe may turn out to be like, it can't be like that.

I have been speaking hitherto of this Myth as of a thing to be buried because I believe that its dominance is already over; in the sense that what seem to me to be the most vigorous movements of contemporary thought point away from it. Physics (a discipline less easily mythological) is replacing biology as the science par excellence in the mind of the plain man. The whole philosophy of Becoming has been vigorously challenged by the American 'Humanists'. The revival of theology has attained proportions that have to be reckoned with. The Romantic poetry and music in which popular Evolutionism found their natural counterpart are going out of fashion. But of course a Myth does not die in a day. We may expect that this Myth, when driven from cultured circles, will long retain its hold on the masses, and even when abandoned by them will continue for centuries to haunt our language. Those who wish to attack it must beware of despising it. There are deep reasons for its popularity.

The basic idea of the Myth - that small or chaotic or feeble things perpetually turn themselves into large, strong, ordered things - may, at first sight, seem a very odd one. We have never actually seen a pile of rubble turning itself into a house. But this odd idea commends itself to the imagination by the help of what seem to be two instances of it within everyone's knowledge. Everyone has seen individual organisms doing it. Acorns become oaks, grubs become insects, eggs become birds, every man was once an embryo. And secondly - which weighs very much in the popular mind during a machine age - everyone has seen Evolution really happening in the history of machines. We all remember when locomotives were smaller and less efficient than they are now. These two apparent instances are quite enough to convince the imagination that Evolution in a cosmic sense is the most natural thing in the world. It is true that reason cannot here agree with imagination. These apparent instances are not really instances of Evolution at all. The oak comes indeed from the acorn, but then the acorn was dropped by an earlier oak. Every man began with the union of an ovum and a spermatozoon, but the ovum and the spermatozoon came from two fully developed human beings. The modern express engine came from the Rocket: but the Rocket came, not from something under and more elementary than itself but from something much more developed and highly organized - the mind of a man, and a man of genius. Modern art may have 'developed' from savage art. But then the very first picture of all did not 'evolve' itself: it came from something overwhelmingly greater than itself, from the mind of that man who by seeing for the first time that marks on a flat surface could be made to look like animals and men, proved himself to excel in sheer blinding genius any of the artists who have succeeded him. It may be true that if we trace back any existing civilization to its beginnings we shall find those beginnings crude and savage: but then when you look closer you usually find that these beginnings themselves come from a wreck of some earlier civilization. In other words, the apparent instances of, or analogies to, Evolution which impress the folk imagination, operate by fixing our attention on one half of the process. What we actually see all round us is a double process - the perfect 'dropping' an imperfect seed which in its turn develops to perfection. By concentrating exclusively on the record or upward movement in this cycle we seem to see 'evolution'. I am not in the least denying that organisms on this planet may have 'evolved'. But if we are to be guided by the analogy of Nature as we now know her, it would be reasonable to suppose that this evolutionary process was the second half of a long pattern - that the crude beginnings of life on this planet have themselves been dropped' there by a full and perfect life. The analogy may be mistaken. Perhaps Nature was once different. Perhaps the universe as a whole is quite different from those parts of it which fall under our observation. But if that is so, if there was once a dead universe which somehow made itself alive, if there was absolutely original savagery which raised itself by its own shoulder strap into civilization, then we ought to recognize that things of this sort happen no longer, that the world we are being asked to believe in is radically unlike the world we experience. In other words, all the immediate plausibility of the Myth has vanished. But it has vanished only because we have been thinking it will remain plausible to the imagination, and it is imagination which makes the Myth: it takes over from rational thought only what it finds convenient.

Another source of strength in the Myth is what the psychologists would call its 'ambivalence'. It gratifies equally two opposite tendencies of the mind, the tendency to denigration and the tendency to flattery. In the Myth everything is becoming everything else: in fact everything is everything else at an earlier or later stage of development - the later stages being always the better. This means that if you are feeling like Mencken you can 'debunk' all the respectable things by pointing out that they are 'merely' elaborations of the disreputable things. Love is 'merely' an elaboration of lust, virtue merely an elaboration of instinct, and so forth. On the one hand it also means that if you are feeling what the people call 'idealistic' you can regard all the nasty things (in yourself or your party or your nation) as being 'merely' the undeveloped forms of all the nice things: vice is only undeveloped virtue, egoism only undeveloped altruism, a little more education will set everything right.

The Myth also soothes the old wounds of our childhood. Without going as far as Freud we may yet well admit that every man has an old grudge against his father and his first teacher. The process of being brought up, however well it is done, cannot fail to offend. How pleasing, therefore, to abandon the old idea of 'descent' from our concocters in favour of the new idea of 'evolution' or 'emergence': to feel that we have risen from them as a flower from the earth, that we transcend them as Keats' gods transcended the Titans. One then gets a kind of cosmic excuse for regarding one's father as a muddling old Mima and his claims upon our gratitude or respect as an insufferable stamenlied. 'Out of the way, old fool: it is we who know to forge Nothung!'

The Myth also pleases those who want to sell things to us. In the old days, a man had a family carriage built for him when he got married and expected it to last all his life. Such a frame of mind would hardly suit modern manufacturers. But popular Evolutionism suits them exactly. Nothing ought to last. They want you to have a new car, a new radio set, a new everything every year. The new model must always be superseding the old. Madam would like the latest fashion. For this is evolution, this is development, this the way the universe itself is going: and 'sales-resistance' is the sin against the Holy Ghost, the elan vital.

Finally, modern politics would be impossible without the Myth. It arose in the Revolutionary period. But for the political ideals of that period it would never have been accepted. That explains why the Myth concentrates on Haldane's one case of biological 'progress' and ignores his ten cases of 'degeneration'. If the cases of degeneration were kept in mind it would be impossible not to see that any given change in society is at least as likely to destroy the liberties and amenities we already have as to add new ones: that the danger of slipping back is at least as great as the chance of getting on: that a prudent society must spend at least as much energy on conserving what it has as on improvement. A clear knowledge of these truisms would be fatal both to the political Left and to the political Right of modern times. The Myth obscures that knowledge. Great parties have a vested interest in maintaining the Myth. We must therefore expect that it will survive in the popular press (including the ostensibly comic press) long after it has been expelled from educated circles. In Russia, where it has been built into the state religion, it may survive for centuries: for it has great allies, Its friends are propaganda, party cries, and bilge, and Man's incorrigible mind.

But that is not the note on which I would wish to end. The Myth has all these discreditable allies: but we should be far astray if we thought it had no others. As I have tried to show it has better allies too. It appeals to the same innocent and permanent needs in us which welcome Jack the Giant Killer. It gives us almost everything the imagination craves - irony, heroism, vastness, unity in multiplicity, and a tragic close. It appeals to every part of me except my reason. That is why those of us who feel that the Myth is already dead for us must not make the mistake of trying to 'debunk' it in the wrong way. We must not fancy that we are securing the modern world from something grim and dry, something that starves the soul. The contrary is the truth. It is our painful duty to wake the world from an enchantment. The real universe is probably in many respects less poetical, certainly less tidy and unified, than they had supposed. Man's role in it is less heroic. The danger that really hangs over him is perhaps entirely lacking in true tragic dignity. It is only in the last resort, and after all lesser poetries have been renounced and imagination sternly subjected to intellect, that we shall be able to offer them any compensation for what we intend to take away from them. That is why in the meantime we must treat the Myth with respect. It was all (on a certain level) nonsense: but a man would be a dull dog if he could not feel the thrill and charm of it. For my own part. though I believe it no longer. I shall always enjoy it as I enjoy other myths. I shall keep my Cave-Man where I keep Balder and Helen and the Argonauts: and there often revisit him.

122 THE GENESIS OF A MEDIEVAL BOOK

In this chapter I shall first consider two early medieval texts and then say something about a remarkable characteristic which they have in common. They illustrate it all the more clearly because they are, in every other respect, extremely different. The one is a poem, the other a tract; the first full of heroic action and open air, the second entirely subjective and allegorical. Yet both can be shown to have come into existence by the same sort of process. It is a process wholly foreign to modern literature, but normal in the literature of the Middle Ages. It is almost the first thing we must grow used to and allow for in our medieval reading.

1. LA3AMON'S 'BRUT'

It is easy to explain why La3amon's Brut has few readers. The only text (Note: Ed. F. Madden, 3 vols. 1847. The reader who has no access to this edition can nevertheless learn a good deal about the Brut from the (undated) Everyman volume Arthurian Chronicles by Eugene Mason which contains a close prose translation of Brut 12802-28651 (from the usurpation of Vortigern to the last battle of Arthur) and of the corresponding part of Wace's Geste . [Since Lewis wrote this the first volume of a complete new edition of the Brut , edited by G. L. Brook and R. F. Leslie for the E.E.T.S., has been published (1963). At the same time, Selections from La3amon’s Brut', edited by G. L. Brook with an Introduction by C. S. Lewis, appeared in the Clarendon Medieval and Tudor Series. - W.H.) is almost unobtainable; the poem is long; much of its matter is dull. But there are very good reasons for overcoming these obstacles. One is that La3amon is much easier than most Middle English poetry: far easier than Dunbar or Pearl or Gawain, yet not flattering the beginner, as Chaucer does, with a deceptive appearance of easiness. But secondly - and this is the reason most to my mind - the Brut is well worth our attention in its own right. The dull passages are a legacy from its known sources; its vividness, fire, and grandeur, are new. And sometimes - rarely, I admit - it reveals, in a flash, imaginative power beyond the reach of any Middle English poet whatever.

As everyone knows, the ultimate source of La3amon's subject-matter is Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (1147). It was a foundation quite unworthy of the structure raised upon. it. Geoffrey is of course important for the historians of the Arthurian Legend; but since the interest of those historians has seldom lain chiefly in literature, they have not always remembered to tell us that he is an author of mediocre talent and no taste. In the Arthurian parts of his work the lion's share falls to the insufferable rigmarole of Merlin's prophecies and to the foreign conquests of Arthur. The latter are, of course, at once the least historical and the least mythical thing about Arthur. If there was a real Arthur he did not conquer Rome. If the story has roots in Celtic Paganism, this campaign is not one of them. It is fiction. And what fiction! We can suspend our disbelief in an occasional giant or enchantress. They have friends in our subconscious and in our earliest memories; imagination can easily suppose that the real world has room for them. But vast military operations scrawled over the whole map of Europe and excluded by all the history we know are a different matter. We cannot suspend our disbelief. We don't even want to. The annals of senseless and monotonously successful aggression are dreary enough reading even when true; when blatantly, stupidly false, they are unendurable. Whether Geoffrey intended all this stuff as political propaganda for our continental empire or merely as a sop to national vanity, we neither know nor care. It is either way deplorable, and it is what Geoffrey chiefly wants to tell us about Arthur. He has of course included better things, but his own contribution is a mere disfigurement. The decided contempt which it gives me for Geoffrey has the paradoxical effect of making me readier to believe that the Historia is filled with valuable deposits of tradition, both legendary and historical. Wherever I meet anything that I think good as story or probable as history (and I meet both fairly often) I feel sure that Geoffrey did not make it up.

After Geoffrey came Wace, the Norman, who was born in Jersey and made Canon of Bayeux by Henry II. He died, perhaps, about 1175. He is remembered by everyone for his account of Taillefer riding before William the Bastard's army at Senlac and singing the Song of Roland; this comes in his Roman de Rou. In 1155 he retold Geoffrey's matter in octosyllabics as the Geste des Bretons, which we, following the manuscripts, know as the Roman de Brut. He certainly did not regard himself as a writer of what we should call romance. His attitude to his material is rather that of an historian to an unreliable, yet by no means worthless, document. He thinks it is partly true, partly false. He is anxious to avoid errors. He has even been at the pains of investigating a fountain in Broceliande where the fays were said to appear, and his comment (in the Roman de Rou) on the negative result of the experiment is well known: Wonders I sought but I found none; a fool I returned, a fool I went.' But in another way he is not in the least like a historian. He feels perfectly free to touch up his original, describing, as if he had been an eyewitness, scenes he never saw and supplying vivid details from his own imagination.

After Wace, La3amon, whose Brut was probably written before 1207. He tells us he was priest at Ernle3e (now King's Arnley) on the Severn. It com him on mode, (Note: 11) came into his head, to relate the noble deeds and origin of the Engle. He travelled far and wide (Note: Whether only in England or also abroad, his language (29) does not make clear. The delightful passage on muglinges (29593-9) suggests that he had visited the continent and been twitted on coming from an island where men have tails.) and secured these books as his sources: the 'English book' made by Bede (i.e. the Anglo-Saxon version of the Ecclesiastical History), a book by 'Seint Albin and the feire Austin', and a book by a 'French Clerk' called Wace. (Note: 11-41) The second item in this catalogue is puzzling. It is generally taken to be Bede's Latin original of the very same book which, in Anglo-Saxon, makes La3amon's first item. I find it difficult to be content with this theory, but the question is not very important since La3amon actually makes extremely little use of Bede in any shape or form. Wace is the only one of his three authors who really counts. Perhaps when the poet mentioned all three books in his poems - for those days, and for a man in his humble station, they were a costly library, which he leofliche bi-heold (Note: Lovingly beheld, 47.) he expected to use them much more than he actually did.

But we cannot next proceed, as we used to do with Chaucer and Il Filostrato, to get a text of Wace, collate it with the English Brut, and thus try to isolate La3amon's original work. It is generally accepted that La3amon worked from a redaction of Wace, contaminated by other versions of the story. And it seems clear to me, as to others, that he was in touch with real Welsh or (less often) English traditions. Thus he knows, and could not learn from Wace, the name of Arthur's helmet Goswhit (21147) and his shield Pridwen (21152), and of the smith Griffin who made his spear (23783). In a passage peculiar to himself (13562-90) he gives to the Pict who murdered King Constance the name Gille Callæt, which is unknown to both Wace and Geoffrey. It is too good a name for a Pict to have been invented by a writer so unphilological as La3amon, who elsewhere cheerfully gives the names Ethelbald and AElfwald to two 'Britons' who revolted against 'Gracien'. The passage in which he does so (12253 seq.) is also significant. No one else relates this revolt; but La3amon's very clear localization of it in East Anglia - no county patriotism would tempt him thither - suggests that a historical tradition of some far later rebellion may underlie it. There are, too, places where La3amon unexpectedly agrees with Geoffrey against Wace. At 1275 his þritti dawes confirms Geoffrey's figure, and our text of Wace reads trois jors . This might be a mere accident. More importantly, at 14050 La3amon and Geoffrey both tell us that Lindesey was the fief given by Vortigern to Hengest, and Wace - in our textus receptus - does not. Since La3amon is generally thought to have made no use of Geoffrey, and certainly does not mention him, this passage suggests a source, probably British, common to both. It is certainly difficult not to suppose Welsh poetry behind the following prophecy about Arthur: Of him scullen gleomen godliche singen.

Of his breosten scullen æten adela scopes.

Scullen of his blode beornes beon drunke. (Note: Of him shall minstrels sing finely. Of his breast noble poets shall eat; on his blood, heroes be drunk. (N.B. My line-numbering is that of Madden, who prints, and numbers, each half-line as a line.) Ed.note: La3amon's Brut is extant in two manuscripts, Cotton Caligula A ix and Cotton Otho C xiii, both of which are printed in Madden's edition. Lewis is following Cotton Caligula A ix and writes two half-lines as one. Lewis, obviously, wanted the text to be as readable as possible and, besides departing from a few scribal conventions (such as expanding the contractions), supplies his own punctuation of the text. Because of this, I have followed the present-day usage of beginning each new sentence with a capital letter.) (18856-61) Geoffrey, doubtless from the same source, had said 'His deeds will be meat to their tellers', (Note: Actus ejus cibus erit narrantibus (vii, 3).) but La3amon gives more.

We thus know neither what (exactly) La3amon’s MS of Wace contained nor from what other sources, oral or written, he supplemented it. I believe, myself, that many, or even most, of those passages peculiar to the English Brut which I shall mention are in fact La3amon’s own. But I mist not assume this. In order to avoid committing myself I shall therefore speak no more of La3amon but simply of the Brut, of the text itself. Who, or how many people, or in what proportions each, made it what it is, is a question I cannot answer. This inability of course frustrates our curiosity as scholars, and it puts out of use our characteristically modern critical habits. There is no question here of finding the single author, totally responsible for his work of art, and expressing his unique personality through it. But this frustration is instructive, and it is fortunate that the text which meets us at the very threshold of Middle English poetry should so clearly render the modern approach impossible. If criticism cannot do without the clear separation of one work from another and the clear unity of the individual author with the individual text, then criticism of medieval literature is impossible.

The metre of the Brut has often been described and I shall not deal with it at length. Sometimes for a line or so it conforms to classical Anglo-Saxon pattern:

ædela inwurden,

wihte wal-kempen, on heora wider-winnan. (Note: To be valiant - tough death-warriors - against their enemies) (776-8)

At the opposite extreme we get

He makede swulc grid, he makede swulc frid

monien la3en gode, þe lond swudden stode. (Note: He made such peace, he made such order, many good laws, that thereafter the land was steady) (4254-7)

Internal rhyme had appeared in Maldon and was (like consonance) regular in certain Old Norse metres: the real novelty is the absence of alliteration. To an ear trained on Beowulf, a text which oscillates thus may at first be as repulsive as 'monkish hexameters' were to the Humanists. But one grows reconciled to it in the end; and not, I think, only because one's standards have been lowered by habituation. The types of classical Old English half-line are, after all blocks of pure speech rhythm. So are the half-lines of the Brut 's new rhymed (or consonanced, or assonanced) lines. Hence they lie down together not uncomfortably. There is no real parallel to the jarring effect we should get if affairs were suddenly introduced among elegiacs or octosyllabics amid blank verse. There is, too, a tendency for one norm or the other to predominate over fairly long stretches. Battle-pieces, appropriately, often keep close to the old metre. The new, often used for pathetic, derisive or gnomic comment, has its own rustic pungency. Notice its effect in the following where it comes after two lines of fairly pure alliterative verse:

And 3if þu him abidest he þe wule binden,

quellen þine leoden and þi lond a3en'.

Ofte wes Ardure wa; neuere wurse þene pa. (20379-84) (Note: And if you await him he will make you prisoner, kill your people, and hold your land.' Often had Arthur been in woe; never worse than at that moment.)

If the Brut is only partially Anglo-Saxon in metre, it is almost wholly so in style. Expressions that recall the old poets meet us at every turn: Godes wider-saka (1808; of Gogmagog), mid orde and mid egge (5202), sæwerie (6205), weorld-scome (8323), gumene æIder (12178). (Note: God's enemy. With point and edge. Sea-weary. World-shame. Lord of men.) If they are not always exact reproductions, this makes them more interesting. It shows that the poet is not merely imitating, as Claudian, say, imitated the Augustans, but working in a live tradition. Hence his resemblance to his predecessors is not limited to vocabulary. Arthur's prayer, with its accumulation of more or less synonymous phrases (almost kenningar), comes in the very accents of Hrothgar: Lauerd drihten crist, domes waldende,

midelarde mund, monnen froure,

þurh þine admode wil, walden ænglen.

Let þu mi sweuen to selpen iturnen. (Note: Lord, master, Christ, prince of glory, protection of middle earth, comfort of men, by thy gracious will, prince of angels. Make thou my dream turn to good.) (25567-74)

The Brut is Anglo-Saxon in style for the best reason: because it is Anglo-Saxon in temper. Its outlook, its most recurrent emotions, its sense of values, all belong to the old order.

This brings us to an instructive paradox. In the opening lines the Brut promises to tell the history of the Engle (13): actually it tells that of the Britons when they had been conquered, killed, and dispossessed. Even if the word Engle is merely a careless slip, it is bad symbol of what is to follow. This poem, while Anglo-Saxon in style and temper, is wholly British in its conscious sympathies. For those Germanic invaders who were La3amon's real ancestors and whose language he wrote, the Brut has hardly a good word to say. They are treacherous, heathen hounds. Best deal with them as Aldolf did with Hengest when he swiped off his head, gave good burial after his own heathen fashion (for he was after all a brave fighter) and then bad for þere sæule þat hire neuere sæl neore.

(Note: Prayed for his soul that bliss should never come to it.)

We may suspect that the Brut's view of the English invaders against whom Arthur fought has been much coloured by memories of a far more recent invasion. At l. 7116, significantly, it speaks of the Norrnans coming to England mid heore nid crafte. (Note: With their evil strength (or cunning)) But no such explanation for its British partialities is really needed. Centuries later when we no longer had cause to hate the Normans we still somehow accepted the Britons (as represented by Geoffrey) for our ancestors and delighted in this supposed link with Arthur, Cassibelaune, Brennes, and the Trojans. The consciousness of race, or (if you prefer) the illusion of race, seems hardly to have existed. Nor is race much use to us as critics. If there was a historical Arthur he was probably a Roman. His legend is Celtic in origin. The particular handling of it which we are now considering is the adaptation thoroughly Anglo-Saxon in spirit, of a Norman poem. Its later dissemination is the work of French poets and romancers. Its modern developments are almost exclusively English and American. We should use a very misleading metaphor if we said the legend had a Celtic kernel'; for, when he hath the kernel eate, who does not throw away the shell?' If we threw away what is not Celtic we should have left something other than the Arthurian legend which has really mattered.

From what has already been said it will be obvious that the Brut is a very different poem from Wace's Geste as we have it, and must have been very different from any redaction of Wace which we can imagine. The mere language determines this. Feollen þa fæie (Note: The fated ones fell (14038 et passim).) has a ring which nothing could have in French octosyllabics. The habitual images and attitudes of the English poem add another difference. An angel, or that early aviator King Bladud, has, not wings, but a federhome (Note : Feather-jacket or swanskin.) (2874, 25871). Heroes may speak of their exploits in the devout manner of Beowulf himself: godd hit me iude þat ich hine igripen habben (Note: God granted me that I have caught him.) (16249). Characters give one another a great deal of advice, sometimes, as may be thought, portentously, but sometimes, as in the old poetry, with magnificent weight Nu þu ært al ane of adele þine cunne.

Ah ne hope þu to ræde of heom þat ligged dede.

Ah þenc of þe seoluen. Seolden þe beod 3iueþe;

for selde he aswint þe to him seolue þenched.

(Note: Now thou alone art left of thy noble kindred. But hope not to get counsel from those that lie dead, but take heed to thyself. Good will befall thee. For seldom he fails who takes heed to himself.) (17934-41)

But the differences go far beyond this kind of thing. The Brut is much more archaic and unsophisticated than the Geste. One can easily believe that Wace was familiar with real, contemporary courts and camps. But the Brut sees all its battles in terms of the heroic past. Strategical features are blurred or omitted. Instead, we get the war-hedge standing like a grey wood (Note: 16371), faces turning pale, many a grey-haired warrior hewn with sword (Note: 4161, 4166-7), broad-bladed spears broken and cloven shields (Note: 5185-6) Heowen hardliche hælmes gullen,

falewede feldes of fæie blode.

And þa hedene saulen helle isohten.

(Note: They hewed hardily, helms resounded, fields were discoloured with fated blood, as the souls of heathens set out for hell) (18316-21)

It paints its courts in equally old-fashioned colours. In the Geste as we have it the Roman ambassadors are true diplomats, elderly men, well-dressed, carrying olive branches, walking slowly and behaving with much dignity. In the Brut they are

þeines ohte mid palle bi-þehte.

Hæ3e here-kempen, heh3e men on wepne.

(Note: Valiant thanes, clad in pall, high battle-warriors, high men with weapons.) (24741-4)

The Norman gaiety and lightness do not get into the Brut at all. There is a striking example a few lines later when Arthur consults with his lords about his answer to the Romans. It is a delightful scene in Wace. The King holds his council in a stone keep called the Giant's Tower. As they go up its spiral stair, Cador, who was a man of jokes, calls out merrily to Arthur who happens to be in front of him. This threat from Rome, he says, is welcome. We have had far too much peace lately. It softens a man. It encourages the young bachelors to spend too much time dressing, with an eye to the ladies. Gawain, overhearing this, says Cador need not bother his head about the young men. Peace after war is very pleasant. So is love. Bright eyes teach chivalry. Thus they jested. Now turn to the Brut, 24883-972. First, by a tiny touch, it alters the whole lighting. It cannot mention the tower without adding An ald stanene weorc; sti6e men hit wurhten. (Note: An old stone work; tough men made it.) (24885-6)

With this characteristically Beowulfian glance at the remoter past everything becomes at once darker, graver, more wintry. There is no prattle on the stairs. When everyone is seated in his place, Cador rises and expresses his view about the corrupting influence of peace in a set speech, seriously. Then Walwain wra66ede hine swide. (Note: Was very angry (24951)) His praise of peace has nothing to do with ladies' eyes God is gri6 and god is fri6 þe freoliche þer halde6 wi6,

and godd sulf hit makede þurh his godd-cunde(Note: Good is peace and good is quiet for him who uses them nobly; and God Himself made it through His Deity.) (24957-60)

and there is nothing sportive about his disagreement with Cador. It is a real strife, a flit (24966), and Arthur, as if he knew that swords might be out in a minute, has to cry out

Sitte adun swi6e, mine cnihte alle.

And ælc bi his lifen luste mine worden.

(Note: Sit down, I tell you, my knights all. Let each, on his life, hear what I shall say. (A literal translation of swi6e is impossible in Modern English.)) (24969-72)

Equally instructive are the different eulogies which the Geste and the Brut give of Arthur. In Wace he is one of Love's lovers. He founded those courtesies which courts have followed since. He lived in great state and splendour. In the Brut, he wes þan 3ungen for fader, þan alden for frouer (Note: To the young he was a father, to the old a comforter.) (19936-7). Thus everywhere the Brut is heavier, more serious, more plangent than its Norman counterpart. Provided that we carefully define for ourselves the sense in which we are using the word, we may say that it is more barbaric and less civilized.

We must not misunderstand this. It has to be admitted that the Brut at one point (22841 seq.) introduces an atrocity of which Wace and Geoffrey are innocent. But it was something done in hot blood. In general the Brut is a kinder work than the Geste. It is both fiercer and more tender. The Norman courtesy can be callous, the Norman lightness can be cynical; the Brut is, at bottom, more sensitive. Its favourite heroes, if rough-hewn, remember the sufferings of common men. Its Brennes, as soon as he has conquered Rome, starts repairing the war damage, prevents a massacre, forbids plunder, and summons back the refugees (flæmen) with the assurance that they shall have peace and live under the laws of their own country (5938-69). Its Vortimer, at his accession, undertakes to emancipate all slaves (14852). Its Arthur resolves that if he conquers France, Auere ælche ærmen mon þe æ6 scal iwur6en,

and wurchen ic wulle muchel godes wille.

(Note: Always every poor man shall find his lot the easier, and I mean to do great God's will.) (23741-44)

It may, no doubt, be suspected that the sympathies of the Brut here reflect the humble condition of its author. But they are not confined to the poor. It dwells lovingly on Arthur's discharge of his veteran knights when he bade them go with joy and repent their sins, never carrying weapons more, but living the rest of their days religiously. (Note: 24115-24.) It extends even to Pagans - provided, of course, they are not Saxons - as in its lament for Julius Caesar

Wale þat eæuere ei sucche mon in to eælde sculde gan.

(Note: Well-away that every any such man had to go in to Hell! (taking helle from Otho MS)) (7223-4)

(28) And to the Caesar whom it thus laments it independently attributes courtesy and chivalry in his treatment of the captured Cassibelaune (8942 seq.). It alone shows us Ygærne, in private, sorrowing for the lives which Uther's love for her will cost (18616 seq.). Its conceptions are sometimes finer than those of Wace. Androgeus, though a traitor fighting against Cassibelaune, warns his men to take the king alive and give him no wound, 'for he is my lord and kinsman’ (8605).

Another distinction of the Brut is its love for the supernatural. It knows that a fairy smith, on aluisc smi6, made Arthur's byrnie (21131). Wace, following Geoffrey, had peopled Loch Lomond with prophetic eagles; the Brut adds

uniuele þinge.

þat water is unimete brade; nikeres þer badie6 inne,

þer is æluene plo3e in atteliche pole. (Note: Unchancy things. The water is immensely wide; nikeres (aquatic monsters) therein, there is play of elves in the dreadful pool.) (21744-8)

Of another strange water it adds alfene hine dulfen, elves drug it (21998). It interpolates the statement that as soon as Arthur came on earth elves took and enchanted the child and gave him their gifts (19253 seq.). It could have learned from the Geste that Arthur his last battle was carried to Avalon for the healing of his wounds and that the Britons still look for his return thence. The Brut likes the passage so well that it reproduces it twice (23067 seq., 28610-41), making us much surer than Wace had done that Avalon is a fairy country, since Arthur is taken thither by Argante the queen', the fairest of all elves'. Let us notice, however, that the Brut 's marvels are not all Celtic. The fairy smith was called Wygar. The nikeres and their pool might have come straight out of Beowulf. And the word I have translated elves' has to do duty both for the fées of continental tradition and for our own more formidable ylfe .

So far I have been speaking of differences between the Brut and the Geste which are not necessarily differences of poetic merit. Except in the scene between Cador and Gawain, where the Geste is in my opinion superior, a man might reasonably prefer either. Certainly if a Gigadibs could have existed among the Normans and had deigned (and been able) to read the Brut he would truly have said that it 'lacked contemporaneity'. I now turn to those of its peculiarities which seem to me to be also superiorities.

First of all, it might have been written by someone who had read Aristotle and learned that a narrative poet ought to speak as much as possible through the mouths of his characters and as little as possible through his own. Again and again where our text of Wace merely says that people issued such and such orders, or had such and such disputes, or gave one another such and such news, the Brut sets them talking. I should say there was twenty or even thirty times as much dialogue in it as in the Geste ; besides prayers, soliloquies, and the like. It is often extremely vigorous. Arthur's speech (20825-98) after the submission of Childric is a good example.

But of course the author (or authors) of the Brut did not need to have read Aristotle. This reiterated use of the dramatic method is part and parcel of the general intensity with which it grasps all that it treats. It is far more committed, more engaged, closer to its matter, than the Geste. It shows us happening what the Geste often merely records. It knows how everyone looked and behaved: how Corineus, after his great speech on the ingratitude of Locrin, brought down his axe and shattered the stone the King stood on (2311); how Godlac, on hearing of his mistress's marriage, swooned in his chair and the courtiers threw cold well-water on his face (4516 seq.); how Pantolaus and his crew must have appeared after their long voyage, with their tattered clothes and their indifference to decency (6271 seq .). No one who has ever watched for the return of the fishing fleet after bad weather will miss the graphic reality of the following, where the two vikings watch the storm-tossed fleet of Ursula coming in:

And swa heo leien i þan æit-londe and ise3en þat weder stronge;

ise3en scipen an and an, while ma, while nan,

þeonne feowere þenne fiue...

(Note: And thus they lay in the island and saw the wild weather; saw ships - one - and one -sometimes more - sometimes none - then four - then five.) (12033-7)

The Brut's certainty as to what you would have seen if you had been present creates character. We are perhaps told of too many people

þeo hit up bræc hit wes god þat he spec -

(Note: When it came out, what he said was good.) (5431-2 et passim)

though it certainly brings vividly before us a certain type of slow starter. Far more interesting is the process whereby Merlin - little more than a name in the Geste - becomes impressive in the Brut. In both texts he tells Uther how to get the monoliths for Stonehenge. This is a mere necessity of the plot. The Brut adds þus seiden Mærlin and seo66en he sæt stille

alse þeh he wolde of worlden iwiten.

(Note: Thus said Merlin and then sat still as though he were going out of the world.) (17232-5)

He is liable to such stillnesses. On another occasion, having been asked a question, he

sæt him stille longe ane stunde,

swulc he mid sweuene swunke ful swi6e.

Heo seiden þe hit ise3en mid heore a3en æ3en

þat ofte he hine wende swulc hit a wurem weore. .

(Note: Sat still for a long time as though he were labouring hard with a dream. Eyewitnesses said that he often turned the way a snake would.) (17906-13)

Whether this is how wizards (what we'd call mediums) really behave, I don't know, but I think the passage would carry immediate conviction even without the line I have italicized. It is, however, the real masterpiece. Here is another. After Uther's death Wace merely tells us that the bishops and barons sent a message to Arthur calling upon him to be King. Tantamne rem tam negligenter? The Brut tells us how three bishops and seven knights sought the youth out (he was only fifteen) in Britanny, and gives their speech. Then

Ar6ur sæt ful stille.

ænne stunde he wes blac and on heuwe swi6e wak;

ane while he wes reod and reousede on heorte.

þa hit alles up brac hit wes god þat he spac.

þus him sæide þer riht Ar6ur þe a6ele cniht,

'Lauerd crist, godes sune, beon us nu a fultume,

þat ich mote on life goddes la3en halden.'

(Note: Arthur sat very quiet. Now he was pale and very drained of colour; now he grew red and was moved at heart. When it all came out, what he said was good. Thus in that place spoke Anhur the good knight: 'Lord Christ, Son of God, help us that while I live I may keep God's laws.') (19887-99)

It will be noticed that in all these quotations there is hardly anything that could be called poetical adornment. I doubt whether the poet was thinking about poetry; it sounds more as if his only object were to make sure that we should see exactly what he had imagined. We may even doubt how far he knew that he was working from imagination. But the Brut can be good in a different vein. I spoke a while back of its close adherence to the Anglo-Saxon type of poetry. But in one important way it departs from that type. The simile was almost (not quite) unknown to the Anglo-Saxon poets. It is frequent in the Brut . Some of its similes are short and easily found. Troops muster thick as the falling hail, alse ha3el þe ualle63 (14517 et passim ); Ridwathlan rushes on his enemies as a pode or whirlwind, carrying a dust-cloud, falls in a field (27645); at an angry meeting many a stout Briton had beres leches, boar's looks (22281-2); or (less obviously) an army advances as if all the earth would catch fire' (20643-4). But besides these we find similes of the Homeric or 'long-tailed' type; fittingly, since the Brut is, in its manner and temper though not in its art, the most Homeric poem in English. One would much like to know where its long-tailed similes come from. If they had any literary model it has been fully assimilated; they do not read at all like the stanza-long, laboured similes in which Spenser thought he was being Virgilian. They smell of real country and first-hand observation. As here:

Up bræid Ar6ur his sceld foren to his breosten

and he gon to rusien swa þe runie wulf

þenne he cume6 of holte bi-honged mid snawe

and þenche6 to biten swulc deor swa him like6.

(Note: Arthur hitched up his shield before his breast and began to rush like the howling (?) wolf when it comes, all hung with snow, out of the wood, and means to get its teeth into any beast that pleases it.) (20120-7)

A moment later - for, as in Homer, and more than in Virgil, the similes tend to bunch - he tells his men that their enemies will fly

swa þe hæ3e wude

þenne wind wode weie6 hine mid mæine -

(Note: As the tall wood when the mad wind tosses it with its strength.) (20135-7)

and after that comes the longer and more complex simile of the crane flying broken-winged from the hawks to be met among the reeds by hounds, so that neither land nor water will now save it, for the hour of the noble bird (kinewur6e fo3el) is come (20163-75). That of the goat pursued by the wolf (21301-15) is too long to be quoted. It is remarkable for being, at the end, mortised back into the main narrative (I think Homer never does this) by Arthur's triumphant cry that he himself is the wolf and Colgrim the goat (21315).

It will be noticed that all these come from the Arthurian section of the Brut, and it is there, I believe, that its addition to, and transformations of, any possible source we know, are most continuous. Our text of Wace reads, in comparison, like an epitome; it gives a skeleton: nearly all the flesh is supplied by the Brut. This is of course most obvious in the very long and frequent passages which have no analogue at all in the French; but it is no less instructively seen where the two texts are close. In the following, where Merlin's mother tells how he was begotten, I have italicized what is peculiar to the Brut .

þa ich wes an uore fiftene 3ere,

þa wunede ich on bure, on wunsele mine,

maidene mid me, wundre ane uæire.

þenne ich wæs on bedde iswaued mid soft mine slepen,

þenne com (me)* biuoren þa fæirest þing þat wes iboren,

swulc hit weore a muchel cniht al of golde idiht.

þis ich isæh on sweuene alche niht on slepe;

þis þing glad me biuoren and glitene on golde.

Ofte hit me custe, ofte hit me clupte. . .

(Note: When I was, long since, fifteen years old, then I lived in my bower, in my chamber of delight, my maidens with me, wonderfully fair. When I was in bed, plunged in my soft sleep, then there came before me the loveliest thing ever born - like a tall knight all decked with gold. This I saw in dream each night in my sleep. This thing moved before me and glimmered in gold. Often it kissed me, often embraced me.) (Editor’s Note: This word added by Lewis.)) (15700-17)

It will be apparent how much the Brut has shaded and softened and beautified the story, making it both more credible and more tolerable. The young princess is put in her right setting, with her wunsele and her maids: the image of sheltered royal girlhood - sheltered, at least from all merely human lovers - is built up. Her own experience is all dim, half a dream, something between sleep and waking. And the daemon is the loveliest thing ever born.

But I have kept to the end two touches that seem to me proofs of yet higher power. One turns on two words. We are twice told of a storm at sea, that the waves were like 'burning towns' (or villages): alse tunes (Editor’s Note: Lewis is here correcting Madden's edition, which reads al se cunes.) per burnen (4578), tunes swulcke þer burnen (11978). It may be the phrase of a longshoreman rather than a sailor; waves out at sea are less likely to give this particular appearance. But I do not think I shall ever again see a breaker coming in against the wind without remembering the burning towns. The image, so far as I know, never occurs before or after the Brut . It embodies a quality of eye and imagination which I believe we never meet in Langland, Chaucer or Cower. My other example is more complex. Arthur, exulting over the Saxon rout, looks down on the Avon and sees

Hu lige6 i þan stræme stelene fisces

mid sweorde bi-georede; heore sund is awemmed,

heore scalen wleote6 swulc gold-fa3e sceldes,

per fleote6 heore spiten swulc hit spæren weoren.

(Note: How steel fishes lie in the stream, girt with sword; their swimming is spoiled, their scales float like gold-bright shields, their fins drift there as if it were spears.) (21323-30)

Coleridge and Wordsworth would have made this the text for a full dissertation on the esemplastic faculty. First, the imagination turns the mail-clad, hence silvery-gleaming, dead into fishes. Then, assuming the fishes as a basis, by way of a simile within a simile, it half turns them back into knights, comparing the wooden shields and spear-shafts (which would of course leave the bodies on the river bed and float on the surface) to scales and fins. And it does this not as the romantic imagination might, for its own sake, but under the influence of a strong, bitter, and probable passion.

↑ Back to top