153 Vivisection
153 VIVISECTION
It is the rarest thing in the world to hear a rational discussion of vivisection. Those who disapprove of it are commonly accused ot "sentimentality", and very often their arguments justify the accusation. They paint pictures of pretty little dogs on dissecting tables. But the other side lie open to exactly the same charge. They also often defend the practice by drawing pictures of suffering women and children whose pain can be relieved (we are assured) only by the fruits of vivisection. The one appeal, quite as clearly as the other, is addressed to emotion, to the particular emotion we call pity. And neither appeal proves anything. If the thing is right - and if right at all, it is a duty - then pity for the animal is one of the temptations we must resist in order to perform that duty. If the thing is wrong, then pity for human suffering is precisely the temptation which will most probably lure us into doing that wrong thing. But the real question - whether it is right or wrong - remains meanwhile just where it was.
A rational discussion of this subject begins by inquiring whether pain is, or is not, an evil. If it is not, then the case against vivisection falls. But then so does the case for vivisection. If it is not defended on the ground that it reduces human suffering, on what ground can it be defended? And if pain is not an evil, why should human suffering be reduced? We must therefore assume as a basis for the whole discussion that pain is an evil, otherwise there is nothing to be discussed.
Now if pain is an evil then the infliction of pain, considered in itself, must clearly be an evil act. But there are such things as necessary evils. Some acts which would be bad, simply in themselves, may be excusable and even laudable when they are necessary means to a greater good. In saying that the infliction of pain, simply in itself, is bad, we are not saying that pain ought never to be inflicted. Most of us think that it can rightly be inflicted for a good purpose - as in dentistry or just and reformatory punishment. The point is that it always requires justification. On the man whom we find inflicting pain rests the burden of showing why an act which in itself would be simply bad is, in those particular circumstances, good. If we find a man giving pleasure it is for us to prove (if we criticize him) that his action is wrong. But if we find a man inflicting pain it is for him to prove that his action is right. If he cannot, he is a wicked man.
Now vivisection can only be defended by showing it to be right that one species should suffer in order that another species should be happier. And here we come to the parting of the ways. The Christian defender and the ordinary "scientific" (i.e., naturalistic) defender of vivisection, have to take quite different lines.
The Christian defender, especially in the Latin countries, is very apt to say that we are entitled to do anything we please to animals because they "have no souls". But what does this mean? If it means that animals have no consciousness, then how is this known? They certainly behave as if they had, or at least the higher animals do. I myself am inclined to think that far fewer animals than is supposed have what we should recognize as consciousness. But that is only an opinion. Unless we know on other grounds that vivisection is right we must not take the moral risk of tormenting them on a mere opinion. On the other hand, the statement that they "have no souls" may mean that they have no moral responsibilities and are not immortal. But the absence of "soul" in that sense makes the infliction of pain upon them not easier but harder to justify. For it means that animals cannot deserve pain, nor profit morally by the discipline of pain, nor be recompensed by happiness in another life for suffering in this. Thus all the factors which render pain more tolerable or make it less totally evil in the case of human beings will be lacking in the beasts. "Soullessness", in so far as it is relevant to the question at all, is an argument against vivisection.
The only rational line for the Christian vivisectionist to take is to say that the superiority of man over beast is a real objective fact, guaranteed by Revelation, and that the propriety of sacrificing beast to man is a logical consequence. We are "worth more than many sparrows", (Note: Matthew 10:31) and in saying this we are not merely expressing a natural preference for our own species simply because it is our own but conforming to a hierarchical order created by God and really present in the universe whether any one acknowledges it or not. The position may not be satisfactory. We may fail to see how a benevolent Deity could wish us to draw such conclusions from the hierarchical order He has created. We may find it difficult to formulate a human right of tormenting beasts in terms which would not equally imply an angelic right of tormenting men. And we may feel that though objective superiority is rightly claimed for men, yet that very superiority ought partly to consist in not behaving like a vivisector: that we ought to prove ourselves better than the beasts precisely by the fact of acknowledging duties to them which they do not acknowledge to us. But on all these questions different opinions can be honestly held. If on grounds of our real, divinely ordained, superiority a Christian pathologist thinks it right to vivisect, and does so with scrupulous care to avoid the least dram or scruple of unnecessary pain, in a trembling awe at the responsibility which he assumes, and with a vivid sense of the high mode in which human life must be lived if it is to justify the sacrifices made for it, then (whether we agree with him or not) we can respect his point of view.
But of course the vast majority of vivisectors have no such theological background. They are most of them naturalistic and Darwinian. Now here, surely, we come up against a very alarming fact. The very same people who will most contemptuously brush aside any consideration of animal suffering if it stands in the way of "research" will also, on another context, most vehemently deny that there is any radical difference between man and the other animals. On the naturalistic view the beasts are at bottom just the same sort of thing as ourselves. Man is simply the cleverest of the anthropoids. ALL the grounds on which a Christian might defend vivisection are thus cut from under our feet. We sacrifice other species to our own not because our own has any objective metaphysical privilege over others, but simply because it is ours. It may be very natural to have this loyalty to our own species, but let us hear no more from the naturalists about the "sentimentality" of anti-vivisectionists. If loyalty to our own species, preference for man simply because we are men, is not a sentiment, then what is? It may be a good sentiment or a bad one. But a sentiment it certainly is. Try to base it on logic and see what happens!
But the most sinister thing about modern vivisection is this. If a mere sentiment justifies cruelty, why stop at a sentiment for the whole human race? There is also a sentiment for the white man against the black, for a Herrenvolk against the non-Aryans, for "civilized" or "progressive" peoples against "savages" or "backward" peoples. Finally, for our own country, party or class against others. Once the old Christian idea of a total difference in kind between man and beast has been abandoned, then no argument for experiments on animals can be found which is not also an argument for experiments on inferior men. If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies or capitalists for the same reasons. Indeed, experiments on men have already begun. We all hear that Nazi scientists have done them. We all suspect that our own scientists may begin to do so, in secret, at any moment.
The alarming thing is that the vivisectors have won the first round. In the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries a man was not stamped as a "crank" for protesting against vivisection. Lewis Carroll protested, if I remember his famous letter correctly, on the very same ground which I have just used (Note: "Vivisection as a Sign of the Times", The Works of Lewis Carroll, ed. Roger Lancelyn Green (London, 1965), pp. 1084-92. See also "Some Popular Fallacies about Vivisection", ibid., pp. 1092-1100). Dr Johnson - a man whose mind had as much iron in it as any man's - protested in a note on Cymbeline which is worth quoting in full. In Act I, scene v, the Queen explains to the Doctor that she wants poisons to experiment on "such creatures as We count not worth the hanging-but none human" (Note: Shakespeare, Cymbeline, I, v, 19-20). The Doctor replies: “Your Highness Shall from this practice but make hard your heart.” (Note: Shakespeare, Cymbeline, I, v, 23) Johnson comments: "The thought would probably have been more amplified, had our author lived to be shocked with such experiments as have been published in later times, by a race of men that have practised tortures without pity, and related them without shame, and are yet suffered to erect their heads among human beings." (Note: Johnson on Shakespeare: Essays and Notes Selected and Set Forth with an Introduction by Sir Walter Raleigh (London, 1908), p.181) The words are his, not mine, and in truth we hardly dare in these days to use such calmly stern language. The reason why we do not dare is that the other side has in fact won. And though cruelty even to beasts is an important matter, their victory is symptomatic of matters more important still. The victory of vivisection marks a great advance in the triumph of ruthless, non-moral utilitarianism over the old world of ethical law; a triumph in which we, as well as animals, are already the victims, and of which Dachau and Hiroshima mark the more recent achievements. In justifying cruelty to animals we put ourselves also on the animal level. We choose the jungle and must abide by our choice.
You will notice I have spent no time in discussing what actually goes on in the laboratories. We shall be told, of course, that there is surprisingly little cruelty. That is a question with which, at present, I have nothing to do. We must first decide what should be allowed: after that it is for the police to discover what is already being done.
154 WE HAVE NO 'RIGHT TO HAPPINESS'
After all, said Claire, 'they had a right to happiness. We were discussing something that once happened in our own neighbourhood. Mr A. had deserted Mrs A. and got his divorce in order to marry Mrs B., who had likewise got her divorce in order to marry Mr A. And there was certainly no doubt that Mr A. and Mrs B. were very much in love with one another. If they continued to be in love, and if nothing went wrong with their health or their income, they might reasonably expect to be very happy. It was equally clear that they were not happy with their old partners. Mrs B. had adored her husband at the outset. But then he got smashed up in the war. It was thought he had lost his virility, and it was known that he had lost his job. Life with him was no longer what Mrs B. had bargained for. Poor Mrs A., too. She had lost her looks - and all her liveliness. It might be true, as some said, that she consumed herself by bearing his children and nursing him through the long illness that overshadowed their earlier married life. You mustn't, by the way, imagine that A. was the sort of man who nonchalantly threw a wife away like the peel of an orange he'd sucked dry. Her suicide was a terrible shock to him. We all knew this, for he told us so himself. 'But what could I do?' he said. 'A man has a right to happiness. I had to take my one chance when it came.'
I went away thinking about the concept of a 'right to happiness'.
At first this sounds to me as odd as a right to good luck. For I believe - whatever one school of moralists may say - that we depend for a very great deal of our happiness or misery on circumstances outside all human control. A right to happiness doesn't, for me, make much more sense than a right to be six feet tall, or to have a millionaire for your father, or to get good weather whenever you want to have a picnic. I can understand a right as a freedom guaranteed me by the laws of the society I live in. Thus, I have a right to travel along the public roads because society gives me that freedom; that's what we mean by calling the roads 'public'. I can also understand a right as a claim guaranteed me by the laws, and correlative to an obligation on someone else's part. If I have a right to receive £100 from you, this is another way of saying that you have a duty to pay me £100. If the laws allow Mr A. to desert his wife and seduce his neighbour's wife, then, by definition, Mr A. has a legal right to do so, and we need bring in no talk about 'happiness'.
But of course that was not what Clare meant. She meant that he had not only a legal but a moral right to act as he did. In other words, Clare is - or would be if she thought it out - a classical moralist after the style of Thomas Aquinas, Grotius, Hooker and Locke. She believes that behind the laws of the state there is a Natural Law.
I agree with her. I hold this conception to be basic to all civilization. Without it, the actual laws of the state become an absolute, as in Hegel. They cannot be criticized because there is no norm against which they should be judged.
The ancestry of Clare's maxim, 'They have a right to happiness,' is august. In words that are cherished by all civilized men, but especially by Americans, it has been laid down that one of the rights of man is a right to 'the pursuit of happiness'. And now we get to the real point.
What did the writers of that august declaration mean?
It is quite certain what they did not mean. They did not mean that man was entitled to pursue happiness by any and every means - including, say, murder, rape, robbery, treason and fraud. No society could be built on such a basis. They meant 'to pursue happiness by all awful means", that is, by all means which the Law of Nature eternally sanctions and which the laws of the nation shall sanction.
Admittedly this seems at first to reduce their maxim to the tautology that men (in pursuit of happiness) have a right to do whatever they have a right to do. But tautologies, seen against their proper historical context, are not always barren tautologies. The declaration is primarily a denial of the political principles which long governed Europe: a challenge flung down to the Austrian and Russian empires, to England before the Reform Bills, to Bourbon France. It demands that whatever means of pursuing happiness are lawful for any should be lawful for all; that 'man', not men of some particular caste, class, status or religion, should be free to use them. In a century when this is being unsaid by nation after nation and party after party, let us not call it a barren tautology. But the question as to what means are 'lawful' - what methods of pursuing happiness are either morally permissible by the Law of Nature or should be declared legally permissible by the legislature of a particular nation - remains exactly where it did. And on that question I disagree with Clare. I don't think it is obvious that people have the unlimited 'right to happiness' which she suggests.
For one thing, I believe that Clare, when she says 'happiness', means simply and solely 'sexual happiness'. Partly because women like Clare never use the word 'happiness' in any other sense. But also because I never heard Clare talk about the 'right' to any other kind. She was rather leftist in her politics, and would have been scandalised if anyone had defended the actions of a ruthless man-eating tycoon on the ground that his happiness consisted in making money and he was pursuing his happiness. She was also a rabid teetotaller; I never heard her excuse an alcoholic because he was happy when he was drunk.
A good many of Clare's friends, and especially her female friends, often felt - I've heard them say so - that their own happiness would be perceptibly increased by boxing her ears. I very much doubt if this would have brought her theory of a right to happiness into play.
Clare, in fact, is doing what the whole western world seems to me to have been doing for the last 40-odd years. When I was a youngster, all the progressive people were saying, 'Why all this prudery? Let us treat sex just as we treat all our other impulses.' I was simple-minded enough to believe they meant what they said. I have since discovered that they meant exactly the opposite. They meant that sex was to be treated as no other impulse in our nature has ever been treated by civilized people. All the others, we admit, have to be bridled. Absolute obedience to your instinct for self-preservation is what we call cowardice; to your acquisitive impulse, avarice. Even sleep must be resisted if you're a sentry. But every unkindness and breach of faith seems to be condoned provided that the object aimed at is 'four bare legs in a bed'.
It is like having a morality in which stealing fruit is considered wrong - unless you steal nectarines.
And if you protest against this view you are usually met with chatter about the legitimacy and beauty and sanctity of 'sex' and accused of harbouring some Puritan prejudice against it as something disreputable or shameful. I deny the charge. Foam-born Venus... golden Aphrodite... Our Lady of Cyprus... I never breathed a word against you. If I object to boys who steal my nectarines, must I be supposed to disapprove of nectarines in general? Or even of boys in general? It might, you know, be stealing that I disapproved of.
The real situation is skilfully concealed by saying that the question of Mr A.'s 'right' to desert his wife is one of 'sexual morality'. Robbing an orchard is not an offense against so special morality called 'fruit morality'. It is an offense against honesty. Mr A.'s action is an offense against good faith (to solemn promises), against gratitude (toward one to whom he was deeply indebted) and against common humanity.
Our sexual impulses are thus being put in a position of preposterous privilege. The sexual motive is taken to condone all sorts of behaviour which, if it had any other end in view, would be condemned as merciless, treacherous and unjust.
Now though I see no good reason for giving sex this privilege, I think I see a strong cause. It is this.
It is part of the nature of a strong erotic passion - as distinct from a transient fit of appetite - that it makes more towering promises than any other emotion. No doubt all our desires make promises, but not so impressively. To be in love involves the almost irresistible conviction that one will go on being in love until one dies, and that possession of the beloved will confer, not merely frequent ecstasies, but settled, fruitful, deep-rooted, lifelong happiness. Hence all seems to be at stake. If we miss this chance we shall have lived in vain. At the very thought of such a doom we sink into fathomless depths of self-pity.
Unfortunately these promises are found often to be quite untrue. Every experienced adult knows this to be so as regards all erotic passions (except the one he himself is feeling at the moment). We discount the world-without-end pretensions of our friends' amours easily enough. We know that things sometimes last - and sometimes don't. And when they do last, this is not because they promised at the outset to do so. When two people achieve lasting happiness, this is not solely because they are great lovers but because they are also - I must put it crudely - good people; controlled, loyal, fairminded, mutually adaptable people. If we establish a 'right to (sexual) happiness' which supersedes all the ordinary rules of behaviour, we do so not because of what our passion shows itself to be in experience but because of what it professes to be while we are in the grip of it. Hence, while the bad behaviour is real and works miseries and degradations, the happiness which was the object of the behaviour turns out again and again to be illusory. Everyone (except Mr A. and Mrs B.) knows that Mr A. in a year or so may have the same reason for deserting his new wife as for deserting his old. He will feel again that all is at stake. He will see himself again as the great lover, and his pity for himself will exclude all pity for the woman.
Two further points remain.
One is this. A society in which conjugal infidelity is tolerated must always be in the long run a society adverse to women. Women, whatever a few male songs and satires may say to the contrary, are more naturally monogamous than men; it is a biological necessity. Where promiscuity prevails, they will therefore always be more often the victims than the culprits. Also, domestic happiness is more necessary to them than to us. And the quality by which they most easily hold a man, their beauty, decreases every year after they have come to maturity but this does not happen to those qualities of personality - women don't really care twopence about our looks - by which we hold women. Thus in the ruthless war of promiscuity women are at a double disadvantage. They play for higher stakes and are also more likely to lose. I have no sympathy with moralists who frown at the increasing crudity of female provocativeness. These signs of desperate competition fill me with pity.
Secondly, though the 'right to happiness' is chiefly claimed for the sexual impulse, it seems to me impossible that the matter should stay there. The fatal principle, once allowed in that department, must sooner or later seep through our whole lives. We thus advance toward a state of society in which not only each man but every impulse in each man claims carte blanche. And then, though our technological skill may help us survive a little longer, our civilization will have died at heart, and will - one dare not even add 'unfortunately' - be swept away.
155 WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE OF JESUS CHRIST?
What are we to make of Jesus Christ? This is a question which has, in a sense, a frantically comic side. For the real question is not what are we to make of Christ, but what is He to make of us? The picture of a fly sitting deciding what it is going to make of an elephant has comic elements about it. But perhaps the questioner meant what are we to make of Him in the sense of 'How are we to solve the historical problem set us by the recorded sayings and acts of this Man?' This problem is to reconcile two things. On the one hand you have got the almost generally admitted depth and sanity of His moral teaching, which is not very seriously questioned, even by those who are opposed to Christianity. In fact, I find when I am arguing with very anti-God people that they rather make a point of saying, I am entirely in favour of the moral teaching of Christianity' - and there seems to be a general agreement that in the teaching of this Man and of His immediate followers, moral truth is exhibited at its purest and best. It is not sloppy idealism, it is full of wisdom and shrewdness. The whole thing is realistic, fresh to the highest degree, the product of a sane mind. That is one phenomenon.
The other phenomenon is the quite appalling nature of this Man's theological remarks. You all know what I mean, and I want rather to stress the point that the appalling claim which this Man seems to be making is not merely made at one moment of His career. There is, of course, the one moment which led to His execution. The moment at which the High Priest said to Him, 'Who are you?' 'I am the Anointed, the Son of the uncreated God, and you shall see Me appearing at the end of all history as the judge of the Universe.' But that claim, in fact, does not rest on this one dramatic moment. When you look into His conversation you will find this sort of claim running through the whole thing. For instance, He went about saying to people, 'I forgive your sins.' Now it is quite natural for a man to forgive something you do to him. Thus if somebody cheats me out of £5 it is quite possible and reasonable for me to say, 'Well, I forgive him, we will say no more about it.' What on earth would you say if somebody had done you out of £5 and I said, 'That is all right, I forgive him'? Then there is a curious thing which seems to slip out almost by accident. On one occasion this Man is sitting looking down on Jerusalem from the hill above it and suddenly in comes an extraordinary remark - 'I keep on sending you prophets and wise men.' Nobody comments on it. And yet, quite suddenly, almost incidentally, He is claiming to be the power that all through the centuries is sending wise men and leaders into the world. Here is another curious remark: in almost every religion there are unpleasant observances like fasting. This Man suddenly remarks one day, 'No one need fast while I am here.' Who is this Man who remarks that His mere presence suspends all normal rules? Who is the person who can suddenly tell the School they can have a half-holiday? Sometimes the statements put forward the assumption that He, the Speaker, is completely without sin or fault. This is always the attitude. 'You, to whom I am talking, are all sinners,' and He never remotely suggests that this same reproach can be brought against Him. He says again, 'I am begotten of the One God, before Abraham was, I am, and remember what the words 'I am' were in Hebrew. They were the name of God, which must not be spoken by any human being, the name which it was death to utter.
Well, that is the other side. On the one side clear, definite moral teaching. On the other, claims which, if not true, are those of a megalomaniac, compared with whom Hitler was the most sane and humble of men. There is no half-way house and there is no parallel in other religions. If you had gone to Buddha and asked him 'Are you the son of Bramah?' he would have said, 'My son, you are still in the vale of illusion.' If you had gone to Socrates and asked, 'Are you Zeus?' he would have laughed at you. If you had gone to Mohammed and asked, 'Are you Allah?' he would first have rent his clothes and then cut your head off. If you had asked Confucius, 'Are you Heaven?', I think he would have probably replied, 'Remarks which are not in accordance with nature are in bad taste.' The idea of a great moral teacher saying what Christ said is out of the question. In my opinion, the only person who can say that sort of thing is either God or a complete lunatic suffering from that form of delusion which undermines the whole mind of man. If you think you are a poached egg, when you are looking for a piece of toast to suit you, you may be sane, but if you think you are God, there is no chance for you. We may note in passing that He was never regarded as a mere moral teacher. He did not produce that effect on any of the people who actually met Him. He produced mainly three effects - Hatred - Terror - Adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild approval.- What are we to do about reconciling the two contradictory phenomena? One attempt consists in saying that the Man did not really say these things, but that His followers exaggerated the story, and so the legend grew up that He had said them. This is difficult because His followers were all Jews; that is, they belonged to that Nation which of all others was most convinced that there was only one God - that there could not possibly be another. It is very odd that this horrible invention about a religious leader should grow up among the one people in the whole earth least likely to make such a mistake. On the contrary we get the impression that none of His immediate followers or even of the New Testament writers embraced the doctrine at all easily.
Another point is that on that view you would have to regard the accounts of the Man as being legends. Now, as a literary historian, I am perfectly convinced that whatever else the Gospels are they are not legends. I have read a great deal of legend and I am quite clear that they are not the same sort of thing. They are not artistic enough to be legends. From an imaginative point of view they are clumsy, they don't work up to things properly. Most of the life of Jesus is totally unknown to us, as is the life of anyone else who lived at that time, and no people building up a legend would allow that to be so. Apart from bits of the Platonic dialogues, there are no conversations that I know of in ancient literature like the Fourth Gospel. There is nothing, even in modern literature, until about a hundred years ago when the realistic novel came into existence. In the story of the woman taken in adultery we are told Christ bent down and scribbled in the dust with His finger. Nothing comes of this. No one has ever based any doctrine on it. And the art of inventing little irrelevant details to make an imaginary scene more convincing is a purely modern art. Surely the only explanation of this passage is that the thing really happened? The author put it in simply because he had seen it.
Then we come to the strangest story of all, the story of the Resurrection. It is very necessary to get the story clear. I heard a man say, 'The importance of the Resurrection is that it gives evidence of survival, evidence that the human personality survives death.' On that view what happened to Christ would be what had always happened to all men, the difference being that in Christ's case we were privileged to see it happening. This is certainly not what the earliest Christian writers thought. Something perfectly new in the history of the Universe had happened. Christ had defeated death. The door which had always been locked had for the very first time been forced open. This is something quite distinct from mere ghost-survival. I don't mean that they disbelieved in ghost-survival. On the contrary, they believed in it so firmly that, on more than one occasion, Christ had had to assure them that He was not a ghost. The point is that while believing in survival they yet regarded the Resurrection as something totally different and new. The Resurrection narratives are not a picture of survival after death; they record how a totally new mode of being has arisen in the Universe. Something new had appeared in the Universe: as new as the first coming of organic life. This Man, after death, does not get divided into ghost' and 'corpse'. A new mode of being has arisen. That is the story. What are we going to make of it? The question is, I suppose, whether any hypothesis covers the facts so well as the Christian hypothesis. That hypothesis is that God has come down into the created universe, down to manhood - and come up again, pulling it up with Him. The alternative hypothesis is not legend, nor exaggeration, nor the apparitions of a ghost. It is either lunacy or lies. Unless one can take the second alternative (and I can't) one turns to the Christian theory.
'What are we to make of Christ?' There is no question of what we can make of Him, it is entirely a question of what He intends to make of us. You must accept or reject the story. The things He says are very different from what any other teacher has said. Others say, 'This is the truth about the Universe. This is the way you ought to go,' but He says, 'I am the Truth, and the Way, and the Life.' He says, 'No man can reach absolute reality, except through Me. Try to retain your own life and you will be inevitably ruined. Give yourself away and you will be saved.' He says, 'If you are ashamed of Me, if, when you hear this call, you turn the other way, I also will look the other way when I come again as God without disguise. If anything whatever is keeping you from God and from Me, whatever it is, throw it away. If it is your eye, pull it out. If it is your hand, cut it off. If you put yourself first you will be last. Come to Me everyone who is carrying a heavy load, I will set that right. Your sins, all of them, are wiped out, I can do that. I am Rebirth, I am Life. Eat Me, drink Me, I am your Food. And finally, do not be afraid, I have overcome the whole Universe.' That is the issue.
156 WHAT CHAUCER REALLY DID TO 'IL FILOSTRATO'
A great deal of attention has deservedly been given to the relation between the Book of Troilus and its original, Il Filostrato, and Rossetti's collation (Note: William Michael Rossetti, Chaucer's Troylus and Cryseyde Compared with Boccaccio's Filostrato, Chaucer Society, first series, vols. XLIV and LXV (London, 1875-83)) placed a knowledge of the subject within the reach even of undergraduate inquirers. It is, of course, entirely right and proper that the greater part of this attention has been devoted to such points as specially illustrate the individual genius of Chaucer as a dramatist and a psychologist. But such studies, without any disgrace to themselves, often leave singularly undefined the historical position and affinities of a book; and if pursued intemperately they may leave us with a preposterous picture of the author as that abstraction, a pure individual, bound to no time nor place, or even obeying in the fourteenth century the aesthetics of the twentieth. It is possible that a good deal of misunderstanding still exists, even among instructed people, as to the real significance of the liberties that Chaucer took with his source. M. Legouis, in his study of Chaucer to which we all owe so much, remarks that Chaucer's additions 'implied a wider and more varied conception' than those of Boccaccio; and again 'Chaucer's aim was not like Boccaccio's to paint sentimentality alone, but to reflect life'. (Note: Emile Legouis, Geoffrey Chaucer, trans. L. Lailavoix (London, 1913), p. 134) I do not wish to contradict either statement, but I am convinced that both are capable of conveying a false impression. What follows may be regarded as a cautionary gloss on M. Legouis's text. I shall endeavour to show that the process which Il Filostrato underwent at Chaucer's hands was first and foremost a process of medievalization. One aspect of this process has received some attention from scholars, (Note: Viz . William George Dodd, Courtly Love in Chaucer and Gower (Boston, 1913)) but its importance appears to me to be still insufficiently stressed. In what follows I shall, therefore, restate this aspect in my own terms while endeavouring to replace it in its context.
Chaucer had never heard of a renaissance; and I think it would be difficult to translate either into the English or the Latin of his day our distinction between sentimental or conventional art on the one hand, and art which paints 'Life' - whatever this means - on the other. When first a manuscript beginning with the words Alcun di Giove sogliono il favore came into his hands, he was, no doubt, aware of a difference between its contents and those of certain English and French manuscripts which he had read before. That some of the differences did not please him is apparent from his treatment. We may be sure, however, that he noticed and approved the new use of stanzas, instead of octosyllabic couplets, for narrative. He certainly thought the story a good story; he may even have thought it a story better told than any that he had yet read. But there was also, for Chaucer, a special reason why he should choose this story for his own retelling; and that reason largely determined the alterations that he made.
He was not yet the Chaucer of the Canterbury Tales: he was the grant translateur of the Roman de la Rose, the author of the Book of the Duchesse, and probably of 'many a song and many a lecherous lay'. (Note: C.T., I 1086) In other words he was the great living interpreter in English of l'amour courtois. Even in 1390, when Gower produced the first version of his Confessio Amantis, such faithful interpretation of the love tradition was still regarded as the typical and essential function of Chaucer: he is Venus' 'disciple' and 'poete', with whose 'ditees and songes glade... the lond fulfild is overal'. And Gower still has hopes that Chaucer's existing treatments of Frauendienst are only the preludes to some great 'testament' which will 'sette an ende of alle his werk'. (Note: Conf. Am., VIII, 2941-58) These expectations were, of course, disappointed; and it is possibly to that disappointment, rather than to a hypothetical quarrel (for which only the most ridiculous grounds have been assigned), that we should attribute Gower's removal of this passage from the second text of the Confessio Amantis. It had become apparent that Chaucer was following a different line of development, and the reference made to him by Venus had ceased to be appropriate.
It was, then, as a poet of courtly love that Chaucer approached II Filostrato. There is no sign as yet that he wished to desert the courtly tradition; on the contrary, there is ample evidence that he still regarded himself as its exponent. But the narrative bent of his genius was already urging him, not to desert this tradition, but to pass from its doctrinal treatment (as in the Romance of the Rose) to its narrative treatment. Having preached it, and sung it, he would now exemplify it: he would show the code put into action in the course of a story - without prejudice (as we shall see) to a good deal of doctrine and pointing of the amorous moral by the way. The thing represents a curious return upon itself of literary history. If Chaucer had lived earlier he would, we may be sure, have found just the model that he desired in Chrétien de Troyes. But by Chaucer's time certain elements, which Chrétien had held together in unity, had come apart and taken an independent life. Chrétien had combined, magnificently, the interest of the story, and the interest of erotic doctrine and psychology. His successors had been unable or unwilling to achieve this union. Perhaps, indeed, the two things had to separate in order that each might grow to maturity; and in many of Chrétien's psychological passages one sees the embryonic allegory struggling to be born. (Note: Viz . Lancelot, 369-81, 2844-61; Yvain, 6001 et seq., 2639 et seq.; Cligès, 5855 et seq.) Whatever the reason may be, such a separation took place. The Story sets up on its own in the prose romances - the 'French book' of Malory: the doctrine and psychology set up on their own in the Romance of the Rose. In this situation if a poet arose who accepted the doctrines and also had a narrative genius, then a priori such a poet might be expected to combine again the two elements - now fully grown - which, in their rudimentary form, had lain together in Chrétien. But this is exactly the sort of poet that Chaucer was; and this (as we shall see) is what Chaucer did. The Book of Troilus shows, in fact, the very peculiar literary phenomenon of Chaucer groping back, unknowingly, through the very slightly medieval work of Boccaccio, to the genuinely medieval formula of Chrétien. We may be thankful that Chaucer did not live in the high noon of Chrétien's celebrity; for, if he had, we should probably have lost much of the originality of Troilus. He would have had less motive for altering Chrétien than for altering Boccaccio, and probably would have altered him less.
Approaching II Filostrato from this angle, Chaucer, we may be sure, while feeling the charm of its narrative power, would have found himself, at many passages, uttering the Middle English equivalent of 'This will never do!' In such places he did not hesitate, as he might have said, to amenden and to reducen what was amis in his author. The majority of his modifications are corrections of errors which Boccaccio had committed against the code of courtly love; and modifications of this kind have not been entirely neglected by criticism. It has not, however, been sufficiently observed that these are only part and parcel of a general process of medievalization. They are, indeed, the most instructive part of that process, and even in the present discussion must claim the chief place; but in order to restore them to their proper setting it will be convenient to make a division of the different capacities in which Chaucer approached his original. These will, of course, be found to overlap in the concrete; but that is no reason for not plucking them ideally apart in the interests of clarity.
1. Chaucer approached his work as an 'historial' poet contributing to the story of Troy. I do not mean that he necessarily believed his tale to be wholly or partly a record of fact, but his attitude towards it in this respect is different from Boccaccio's. Boccaccio, we may surmise, wrote for an audience who were beginning to look at poetry in our own way. For them Il Filostrato was mainly, though not entirely, 'a new poem by Boccaccio'. Chaucer wrote for an audience who still looked at poetry in the medieval fashion - a fashion for which the real literary units were 'matters', 'stones', and the like, rather than individual authors. For them the Book of Troilus was partly, though of course only partly, 'a new bit of the Troy story', or even 'a new bit of the matter of Rome'. Hence Chaucer expects them to be interested not only in the personal drama between his little group of characters but in that whole world of story which makes this drama's context: like children looking at a landscape picture and wanting to know what happens to the road after it disappears into the frame. For the same reason they will want to know his authorities. Passages in which Chaucer has departed from his original to meet this demand will easily occur to the memory. Thus, in I, 141 et seq., he excuses himself for not telling us more about the military history of the Trojan war, and adds what is almost a footnote to tell his audience where they can find that missing part of the story-' in Omer, or in Dares, or in Dyte'. Boccaccio had merely sketched in, in the preceding stanza, a general picture of war sufficient to provide the background for his own story - much as a dramatist might put Alarums within in a stage direction: he has in view an audience fully conscious that all this is mere necessary 'setting' or hypothesis. Thus again, in IV, 120 et seq., Chaucer inserts into the speech of Calkas an account of the quarrel between Phebus and Neptunus and Lameadoun. This is not dramatically necessary. All that was needed for Calkas's argument has already been given in lines 111 and 112 (cf Filostrato, IV, XI). The Greek leaders did not need to be told about Laomedon; but Chaucer is not thinking of the Greek leaders; he is thinking of his audience who will gladly learn, or be reminded, of that part of the cycle. At lines 204 et seq. he inserts a note on the later history of Antenor for the same reason. In the fifth book he inserts unnecessarily lines 1464-1510 from the story of Thebes. The spirit in which this is done is aptly expressed in his own words:
And so descendeth doun from gestes olde
To Diomede. (V, 1511)
The whole 'matter of Rome' is still a unity, with a structure and life of its own. That part of it which the poem in hand is treating, which is, so to speak, in focus, must be seen fading gradually away into its 'historial' surroundings. The method is the antithesis of that which produces the 'framed' story of a modern writer: it is a method which romance largely took over from the epic.
II. Chaucer approached his work as a pupil of the rhetoricians and a firm believer in the good, old, and now neglected maxim of Dante: quia omnis qui versificatur suos versus exornare debet in quantum potest. (Note: De Vulgari Eloquentia, II, i, 2 (17), in Le Opere di Dante. Testo Critico della Societa Dantesca Italiana, ed. M. Barbi and others (Firenze, 1921), p. 337) This side of Chaucer's poetry has been illustrated by Mr Manly (Note: John Matthews Manly, Chaucer and the Rhetoricians', The Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. xii (1926), pp. 95-113 (C. S. Lewis)) so well that most readers will not now be in danger of neglecting it. A detailed application of this new study to the Book of Troilus would here detain us too long, but a cursory glance shows that Chaucer found his original too short and proceeded in many places to 'amplify' it. He began by abandoning the device - that of invoking his lady instead of the Muses - whereby Boccaccio had given a lyrical instead of a rhetorical turn to the invocation, and substituted an address to Thesiphone (Filostrato, I, i-v; cf Troilus, I, 1-14). He added at the beginning of his second book an invocation of Cleo and an apology of the usual medieval type, for the defects of his work (ii, 15-21). Almost immediately afterwards he inserted a descriptio of the month of May (an innovation which concerned him as poet of courtly love no less than as rhetorician) which is extremely beautiful and appropriate, but which follows, none the less, conventional lines. The season is fixed by astronomical references, and Proignè and Tereus appear just where we should expect them (ii, 50-60, 64-70). In the third book the scene of the morning parting between the two lovers affords a complicated example of Chaucer's medievalization. In his original (iii, xlii) Chaucer read
Ma poich' e' galli presso al giorno udiro
Cantar, per l'aurora che sorgea.
He proceeded to amplify this, first by the device of circuitio or circumlocutio; galli, with the aid of Alanus de Insulis, became 'the cok, comune astrologer'. Not content with this, he then repeated the sense of that whole phrase by the device expolitio, of which the formula is Multiplice forma Dissimuletur idem; varius sis et tamen idem, (Note C. S. Lewis: Geoffroi de Vinsauf, Poetr. Nov., 224-5) and the theme 'Dawn came 'is varied with Lucifer and Fortuna Major, till it fills a whole stanza (iii, 1415-21). In the next stanza of Boccaccio he found a short speech by Criseida, expressing her sorrow at the parting which dawn necessitated: but this was not enough for him. As poet of love he wanted his alba; as rhetorician he wanted his apostropha. He therefore inserted sixteen lines of address to Night (1427-42), during which he secured the additional advantage, from the medieval point of view, of 'som doctryne' (1429-32). In lines 1452-70 he inserted antiphonally Troilus's alba, for which the only basis in Boccaccio was the line Il giorno che venia maledicendo (iii, xliv). The passage is an object lesson for those who tend to identify the traditional with the dull. Its matter goes back to the ancient sources of medieval love poetry, notably to Ovid, Amores 1, 13, and it has been handled often before, and better handled, by the Provençals. Yet it is responsible for one of the most vivid and beautiful expressions that Chaucer ever used:
A-cursed be thy coming in-to Troye,
For every bore hath oon of thy bright yen! (III, 1452)
A detailed study of the Book of Troilus would reveal this 'rhetoricization', if I may coin an ugly word, as the common quality of many of Chaucer's additions. As examples of apostropha alone I may mention, before leaving this part of the subject, III, 301 et seq. (O tonge), 617 et seq. (But O Fortune), 715 et seq. (O Venus), and 813 et seq. where Chaucer is following Boethius.
III. Chaucer approached his work as a poet of doctryne and sentence. This is a side of his literary character which twentieth-century fashions encourage us to overlook, but, of course, no honest historian can deny it, His contemporaries and immediate successors did not. His own creatures, the pilgrims, regarded mirthe and doctryne, (Note C. S. Lewis: Canterbury Tales, B 2125) or, as it is elsewhere expressed, sentence and solas, (Note C. S. Lewis: Regement of Princes, 1963 et seq.) as the two alternative, and equally welcome, excellences of a story. In the same spirit Hoccleve praises Chaucer as the 'mirour of fructuous entendement' and the universal 'fadir in science' (Note C. S. Lewis: Ibid., A 798) - a passage, by the by, to be recommended to those who are astonished that the fifteenth century should imitate those elements of Chaucer's genius which it enjoyed instead of those which we enjoy. In respect of 'doctryne', then, Chaucer found his original deficient, and 'amended' it. The example which will leap to every one's mind is the Boethian discussion on free will (IV, 946-1078). To Boccaccio, I suspect, this would have seemed as much an excrescence as it does to the modern reader; to the unjaded appetites of Chaucer's audience mere thickness in a wad of manuscript was a merit. If the author was so 'courteous beyond covenant' as to give you an extra bit of 'doctryne' (or of story), who would be so churlish as to refuse it on the pedantic ground of irrelevance? But this passage is only one of many in which Chaucer departs from his original for the sake of giving his readers interesting general knowledge or philosophical doctrine. In III, 1387 et seq., finding Boccaccio's attack upon gli avari a little bare and unsupported, he throws out, as a species of buttress, the exempla of Myda and Crassus. (Note C. S. Lewis: This might equally well have been treated above in our rhetorical section. The instructed reader will recognize that a final distinction between doctrinal and r hetorical aspects is not possible in the Middle Ages.) In the same book he has to deal with the second assignation of Troilus and Criseyde. Boccaccio gave him three stanzas of dialogue (Filostrato, iii, lxvi-lxviii), but Chaucer rejected them and preferred - in curious anticipation of Falstaff's thesis about pitch - to assure his readers, on the authority of 'thise clerkes wyse' (iii, 1691) that 'felicitee' is felicitous, though Troilus and Criseyde enjoyed something better than 'felicitee'. In the same stanza he also intends, I think, an allusion to the sententia that occurs elsewhere in the Franklin's Tale. (Note CSL: C. T., F 762) In IV, 197-203, immediately before his 'historial' insertion about Antenor, he introduces a sentence from Juvenal, partly for its own sake, partly in order that the story of Antenor may thus acquire an exemplary, as well as a 'historial' value. In IV, 323-28 he inserts a passage on the great locus communis of Fortune and her wheel.
In the light of this sententious bias, Chaucer's treatment of Pandarus should be reconsidered, and it is here that a somewhat subtle exercise of the historical imagination becomes necessary. On the one hand, he would be a dull reader, and the victim rather than the pupil of history, who would take all the doctrinal passages in Chaucer seriously: that the speeches of Chauntecleer and Pertelote and of the Wyf of Bath not only are funny by reason of their sententiousness and learning, but are intended to be funny, and funny by that reason, is indisputable. On the other hand, to assume that sententiousness became funny for Chaucer's readers as easily as it becomes funny for us, is to misunderstand the fourteenth century: such an assumption will lead us to the preposterous view that Melibee (or even the Parson's Tale) is a comic work - a view not much mended by Mr Mackail's suggestion that there are some jokes too funny to excite laughter and that Melibee is one of these. A clear recognition that our own age is quite abnormally sensitive to the funny side of sententiousness, to possible hypocrisy, and to dulness, is absolutely necessary for any one who wishes to understand the past. We must face the fact that Chaucer's audience could listen with gravity and interest to edifying matter which would set a modern audience sleeping or sniggering. The application of this to Pandarus is a delicate business. Every reader must interpret Pandarus for himself, and I can only put forward my own interpretation very tentatively. I believe that Pandarus is meant to be a comic character, but not, by many degrees, so broadly comic as he appears to some modern readers. There is, for me, no doubt that Chaucer intended us to smile when he made Troilus exclaim
What knowe I of the quene Niobe?
Lat be thyne olde ensaumples, I thee preye. (I, 759)
But I question if he intended just that sort of smile which we actually give him. For me the fun lies in the fact that poor Troilus says what I have been wishing to say for some time. For Chaucer's hearers the point was a little different. The suddenness of the gap thus revealed between Troilus's state of mind and Pandarus's words cast a faintly ludicrous air on what had gone before: it made the theorizing and the exempla a little funny in retrospect. But it is quite probable that they had not been funny till then: the discourse on contraries (I, 631-44), the exemplum of Paris and Oënone, leading up to the theme 'Physician heal thyself' (652-72), the doctrine of the Mean applied to secrecy in love (687-93), the sentences from Solomon (695) and elsewhere (708), are all of them the sort of thing that can be found in admittedly serious passages, (Note CSL: Cf. C. T., I 140-55) and it may well be that Chaucer 'had it both ways'. His readers were to be, first of all, edified by the doctrine for its own sake, and then (slightly) amused by the contrast between this edification and Troilus's obstinate attitude of the plain man. If this view be accepted it will have the consequence that Chaucer intended an effect of more subtility than that which we ordinarily receive. We get the broadly comic effect - a loquacious and unscrupulous old uncle talks solemn platitude at interminable length. For Chaucer, a textuel man talked excellent doctrine which we enjoy and by which we are edified: but at the same time we see that this 'has its funny side'. Ours is the crude joke of laughing at admitted rubbish: Chaucer's the much more lasting joke of laughing at 'the funny side' of that which, even while we laugh, we admire. To the present writer this reading of Pandarus does not appear doubtful; but it depends to some extent on a mere 'impression' about the quality of the Middle Ages, an impression hard to correct, if it is an error, and hard to teach, if it is a truth. For this reason I do not insist on my interpretation. If, however, it is accepted, many of the speeches of Pandarus which are commonly regarded as having a purely dramatic significance will have to be classed among the examples of Chaucer's doctrinal or sententious insertions. (Note CSL: From another point of view Pandarus can be regarded as the Vekke of the Romance of the Rose (cf. Thessala in Cligès) taken out of allegory into drama and changed in sex, so as to 'double' the rôles of Vekke and Frend.)
IV. Finally, Chaucer approached his work as the poet of courtly love. He not only modified his story so as to make it a more accurate representation in action of the orthodox erotic code, but he also went out of his way to emphasize its didactic element. Andreas Capellanus had given instructions to lovers; Guillaume de Lorris had given instructions veiled and decorated by allegory; Chaucer carries the process a stage further and gives instruction by example in the course of a concrete story. But he does not forget the instructional side of his work. In the following paragraphs I shall sometimes quote parallels to Chaucer's innovations from the earlier love literature, but it must not be thought that I suppose my quotations to represent Chaucer's immediate source.
1. Boccaccio in his induction, after invoking his mistress instead of the Muses, inserts (I, vi) a short request for lovers in general that they will pray for him. The prayer itself is disposed of in a single line
Per me vi prego ch' Amore preghiate.
This is a little more than a conceit, abandoned as soon as it is used: a modern poet could almost do the like. Chaucer devotes four stanzas (I, 21-49) to this prayer. If we make an abstract of both passages, Boccaccio will run 'Pray for me to Love,' while Chaucer will run 'Remember, all lovers, your old unhappiness, and pray, for the unsuccessful, that they may come to solace; for me, that I may be enabled to tell this story; for those in despair, that they may die; for the fortunate, that they may persevere, and please their ladies in such manner as may advance the glory of Love.' The important point here is not so much that Chaucer expands his original, as that he renders it more liturgical: his prayer, with its careful discriminations in intercession for the various recognised stages of the amorous life, and its final reference ad Amoris majorem gloriam, is a collect. Chaucer is emphasising that parody, or imitation, or rivalry - I know not which to call it - of the Christian religion which was inherent in traditional Frauendienst. The thing can be traced back to Ovid's purely ironical worship of Venus and Amor in the De Arte Amatoria. The idea of a love religion is taken up and worked out, though still with equal flippancy, in terms of medieval Christianity, by the twelfth-century poet of the Concilium Romarici Montis , (Note CSL: Zeitschrift fuer Deutsches Alterthum, vii, pp. 160 et seq.) where Love is given Cardinals (female), the power of visitation, and the power of cursing. Andreas Capellanus carried the process a stage further and gave Love the power of distributing reward and punishment after death. But while his hell of cruel beauties (Siccitas), his purgatory of beauties promiscuously kind (Humiditas), and his heaven of true lovers (Amoenitas) (Note CSL: Andreas Capellanus, De Arte Honeste Amandi, ed. Trojel (Copenhagen, 1892), i, 6 D2 (pp 91-108)) can hardly be other than playful, Andreas deals with the love religion much more seriously than the author of the Consilium. The lover's qualification is morum probitas: he must be truthful and modest, a good Catholic, clean in his speech, hospitable, and ready to return good for evil. There is nothing in saeculo bonam which is not derived from love (Note CSL: Ibid. i, 6A (p.28)): it may even be said, in virtue of its severe standard of constancy, to be 'a kind of chastity 'reddit hominem castitatis quasi virtute decoratum . (Note CSL: Ibid. i, 4 (p.10))
In all this we are far removed from the tittering nuns and clerici of the Concilium. In Chrétien, the scene in which Lancelot kneels and adores the bed of Guinevere (as if before a corseynt) (Note CSL: Lancelot, 4670, 4734 et seq .) is, I think, certainly intended to be read seriously: what mental reservations the poet himself had on the whole business is another question. In Dante the love religion has become wholly and unequivocally serious by fusing with the real religion: the distance between the Amor deus omnium quotquot sunt amantium of the Concilium , and the signore di pauroso aspetto of the Vita Nuova, (Note CSLewis: Vita Nuova , III) is the measure of the tradition's real flexibility and universality. It is this quasi-religious element in the content, and this liturgical element in the content, whith Chaucer found lacking in his original at the very opening of the book, and which he supplied. The line
That love hem bringe in hevene to solas (I, 31)
is particularly instructive.
2. In the Temple scene (Chaucer, 1, 155-315, Filostrato, I, xix-xxxii) Chaucer found a stanza which it was very necessary to reducen. It was Boccaccio's twenty-third, in which Troilos, after indulging in his 'cooling card for lovers', mentions that he has himself been singed with that fire, and even hints that he has had his successes; but the pleasures were not worth the pains. The whole passage is a typical example of that Latin spirit which in all ages (except perhaps our own) has made Englishmen a little uncomfortable; the hero must be a lady-killer from the very beginning, or the audience will think him a milksop and a booby. To have abashed, however temporarily, these strutting Latinisms, is not least among the virtues of medieval Frauendienst: and for Chaucer as its poet, this stanza wan emphatically one of those that 'would never do'. He drops it quietly out of its place, and thus brings the course of his story nearer to that of the Romance of the Rose. The parallelism is so far intact. Troilus, an unattached young member of the courtly world, wandering idly about the Temple, is smitten with Love. In the same way the Dreamer having been admitted by Ydelnesse into the garden goes 'Pleying along ful merily' (Note CSLewis: Romance of the Rose, 1329 (Chaucer's)) until he looks in the fatal well. If he had already met Love outside the garden the whole allegory would have to be reconstructed.
3. A few lines lower Chaucer found in his original the words
il quale amor trafisse
Piû ch' alcun altro, pria del tempio uscisse. (I, xxv)
Amor trafisse in Boccaccio is hardly more than an literary variant for 'he fell in love': the allegory has shrunk into a metaphor and even that metaphor is almost unconscious and fossilized. Over such a passage one can imagine Chaucer exclaiming, tantamne rem tam negligenter? He at once goes back through the metaphor to the allegory that begot it, and gives us his own thirtieth stanza (T, 204-10) on the god of Love in anger bending his bow. The image is very ancient and goes back at least as far as Apollonius Rhodius. (Note CSL: Argonautica, III, 275 et seq.) Ovid was probably the intermediary who conveyed it to the Middle Ages. Chrétien uses it, with particular emphasis on Love as the avenger of contempt. (Note CSL: Cligès, 460; cf 770.) But Chaucer need not have gone further to find it than to the Romance of the Rose : (Note CSL: Romance of the Rose, 1330 et seq.; 1715 et seq ) with which, here again, he brings his story into line.
4. But even this was not enough. Boccaccio's Amor trafisse had occurred in a stanza where the author apostrophizes the Cecita' delle mondane menti, and reflects on the familiar contrast between human expectations and the actual course of events. But this general contrast seemed weak to the poet of courtly love: what he wanted was the explicit erotic moral, based on the special contrast between the ubris of the young scoffer and the complete surrender which the offended deity soon afterwards extracted from him. This conception, again, owes much to Ovid; but between Ovid and the Middle Ages comes the later practice of the ancient Epithalamium during the decline of antiquity and the Dark Ages: to which, as I hope to show elsewhere, the system of courtly love as a whole is heavily indebted. Thus in the fifth century Sidonius Apollinaris in an Epithalamium, makes the bridegroom just such another as Troilus: a proud scoffer humbled by Love. Amor brings to Venus the triumphant news
Nova gaudia porto
Felicis praedae, genetrix. Calet ille superbus
Ruricius. (Note CSL: Sid. Apoll., Carm., XI, 61)
Venus replies
gaudemus nate, rebellem
Quod vincis.
In a much stranger poem, by the Bishop Ennodius, it is not the ubris of a single youth, but of the world, that has stung the deities of love into retributive action. Cupid and Venus are introduced deploring the present state of Europe
Frigida consumens multorum possidet artus
Virginitas. (Note CSL: Ennodius, Carm., I, iv, 57)
and Venus meets the situation by a threat that she'll 'larn 'em':
Discant populi tunc crescere diuam,
Cum neglecta iacet. (Note CSL: Ibid., 84)
They conclude by attacking one Maximus and thus bringing about the marriage which the poem was written to celebrate. Venantius Fortunatus, in his Epithalamium for Brunchild reproduces, together with Ennodius's spring morning, Ennodius's boastful Cupid, and makes the god, after an exhibition of his archery, announce to his mother, mihi vincitur alter Achilles. (Note CSL: Venant. Fort., VI, i) In Chrétien the rôle of tamed rebel is transferred to the woman. In Cligès Soredamors confesses that Love has humbled her pride by force, and doubts whether such extorted service will find favour. (Note CSL: Cligès , 682, 241) In strict obedience to this tradition Chaucer inserts his lines 214-31, emphasising the dangers of ubris against Love and the certainty of its ultimate failure; and we may be thankful that he did, since it gives us the lively and touching simile of proude Bayard. Then, mindful of his instructional purpose, he adds four stanzas more (239-66), in which he directly exhorts his readers to avoid the error of Troilus, and that for two reasons: firstly, because Love cannot be resisted (this is the policeman's argument - we may as well 'come quiet'); and secondly because Love is a thing 'so vertuous in kinde'. The second argument, of course, follows traditional lines, and recalls Andreas's theory of Love as the source of all secular virtue.
5. In lines 330-50 Chaucer again returns to Troilus's scoffing - a scoffing this time assumed as a disguise. I do not wish to press the possibility that Chaucer in this passage is attempting, in virtue of his instructional purpose, to stress the lover's virtue of secrecy more than he found it stressed in his original; for Boccaccio, probably for different reasons, does not leave that side of the subject untouched. But it is interesting to note a difference in the content between this scoffing and that of Boccaccio (Filostrato, I, xxi, xxii). Boccaccio's is based on contempt for women, fickle as wind, and heartless. Chaucer's is based on the hardships of love's lay or religion: hardships arising from the uncertainty of the most orthodox observances, which may lead to various kinds of harm and may be taken amiss by the lady. Boccaccio dethrones the deity: Chaucer complains of the severity of the cult. It is the difference between an atheist and a man who humorously insists that he is 'not of religioun'.
6. In the first dialogue between Troilus and Pandarus the difference between Chaucer and his original can best be shown by an abstract. Boccaccio (II, vi-xxviii) would run roughly as follows:
T. Well, if you must know, I am in love. But don't ask me with whom (vi-viii).
P. Why did you not tell me long ago? I could have helped you (ix).
T. What use would you be? Your own suit never succeeded (ix).
P. A man can often guide others better than himself (x).
T. I can't tell you, because it is a relation of yours (xv).
P. A fig for relations! Who is it? (xvi).
T. (after a pause) Criseida (xx).
P. Splendid! Love has fixed your heart in a good place. She is an admirable person. The only trouble is that she is rather pie (onesta): but I'll soon see to that (xxiii). Every woman is amorous at heart: they are only anxious to save their reputations (xxvii). I'll do all I can for you (xxviii).
Chaucer (I, 603-1008) would be more like this:
T. Well, if you must know, I am in love. But don't ask me with whom (603-16).
P. Why did you not tell me long ago? I could have helped you (617-20).
T. What use would you be? Your own suit never succeeded (621-3).
P. A man can often guide others better than himself, as we see from the analogy of the whetstone. Remember the doctrine of contraries, and what Oënone said. As regards secrecy, remember that all virtue is a mean between two extremes (624-700).
T. Do leave me alone (760).
P. If you die, how will she interpret it? Many lovers have served for twenty years without a single kiss. But should they despair? No, they should think it a guerdon even to serve (761-819).
T. (much moved by this argument, 820-6) What shall I do? Fortune is my foe (827-40).
P. Her wheel is always turning. Tell me who your mistress is. If it were my sister, you should have her (841-61).
T. (after a pause) - My sweet foe is Criseyde (870-5).
P. Splendid: Love has fixed your heart in a good place. This ought to gladden you, firstly, because to love such a lady is nothing but good: secondly, because if she has all these virtues, she must have Pity too. You are very fortunate that Love has treated you so well, considering your previous scorn of him. You must repent at once (874-935).
T. (kneeling) Mea Culpa! (936-8).
P. Good. All will now come right. Govern yourself properly: you know that a divided heart can have no grace. I have reasons for being hopeful. No man or woman was ever born who was not apt for love, either natural or celestial: and celestial love is not fitted to Criseyde's years. I will do all I can for you. Love converted you of his goodness. Now that you are converted, you will be as conspicuous among his saints as you formerly were among the sinners against him (939-1008).
In this passage it is safe to say that every single alteration by Chaucer is an alteration in the direction of medievalism. The Whetstone, Oënone, Fortune, and the like we have already discussed: the significance of the remaining innovations may now be briefly indicated. In Boccaccio the reason for Troilus's hesitation in giving the name is Criseida's relationship to Pandaro: and like a flash comes back Pandaro's startling answer. In Chaucer his hesitation is due to the courtly lover's certainty that 'she nil to noon swich wrecche as I be wonne' (777) and that 'ful hard were it to helpen in this cas' (836). Pandaro's original
Se quella ch' ami fosse mia sorella
A mio potere avrai tuo piacer d' ella (II, xvi)
is reproduced in the English, but by removing the words that provoked it in the Italian (È tua parente, xv) Chaucer makes it merely a general protestation of boundless friendship in love, instead of a cynical defiance of scruples already raised (Chaucer, 861). Boccaccio had delighted to bring the purities of family life and the profligacy of his young man about town into collision, and to show the triumph of the latter. Chaucer keeps all the time within the charmed circle of Frauendienst and allows no conflict but that of the lover's hopes and fears. Again, Boccaccio's Pandaro has no argument to use against Troilo's silence, but the argument 'I may help you.' Chaucer's Pandarus, on finding that this argument fails, proceeds to expound the code. The fear of dishonour in the lady's eyes, the duty of humble but not despairing service in the face of all discouragement, and the acceptance of this service as its own reward, form the substance of six stanzas in the English text (lines 768-809): at least, if we accept four lines very characteristically devoted to 'Ticius' and what 'bokes telle' of him. Even more remarkable is the difference between the behaviour of the two Pandars after the lady's name has been disclosed. Boccaccio's, cynical as ever, encourages Troilo by the reflection that female virtue is not really a serious obstacle: Chaucer's makes the virtue of the lady itself the ground for hope - arguing scholastically that the genus of virtue implies that species thereof which is Pitee (897-900). In what follows, Pandarus, while continuing to advise, becomes an adviser of a slightly different sort. He instructs Troilus not so much on his relationship to the Lady as on his relationship to Love. He endeavours to awaken in Troilus a devout sense of his previous sins against that deity (904-30) and is not satisfied without confession (931-8), briefly enumerates the commandments (953-9), and warns his penitent of the dangers of a divided heart.
In establishing such a case as mine, the author who transfers relentlessly to his article all the passages listed in his private notes can expect nothing but weariness from the reader. If I am criticized, I am prepared to produce for my contention many more evidential passages of the same kind. I am prepared to show how many of the beauties introduced by Chaucer, such as the song of Antigone or the riding past of Troilus, are introduced to explain and mitigate and delay the surrender of the heroine, who showed in Boccaccio a facility condemned by the courtly code. (Note CSL: A particularly instructive comparison could be drawn between the Chaucerian Criseyde's determination to yield, yet to seem to yield by force and deception, and Bialacoil's behaviour. Romance of the Rose, 12607-88: specially 12682, 12683) I am prepared to show how Chaucer never forgets his erotically didactic purpose; and how, anticipating criticism as a teacher of love, he guards himself by reminding us that
for to winne love in sondry ages,
In sondry londes, sondry been usages. (Note CSL: Cf II, 1023 et seq.) (II, 27)
But the reader whose stomach is limited would be tired, and he who is interested may safely be left to follow the clue for himself. Only one point, and that a point of principle, remains to be treated in full. Do I, or do I not, lie open to the criticism of Professor Abercrombie's 'Liberty of Interpreting'? (Note CSL: Lascelles Abercrombie, 'A Ples for the Liberty of Interpreting', The Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. xvi, Annual Shakespeare Lecture, 1930 (1930)) The Professor quem honoris causa nomino urges us not to turn from the known effect which an ancient poem has upon us to speculation about the effect which the poet intended it to have. The application of this criticism which may be directed against me would run as follows:
'If Chaucer's Troilus actually produces on us an effect of greater realism and nature and freedom than its original, why should we assume that this effect was accidentally produced in the attempt to conform to an outworn convention?' If the charge is grounded, it is, to my mind, a very grave one. My reply is that such a charge begs the very question which I have most at heart in this paper, and but for which I should regard my analysis as the aimless burrowings of a thesis-monger. I would retort upon my imagined critic with another question. This poem is more lively and of deeper human appeal than its original. I grant it. This poem conforms more closely than its original to the system of courtly love. I claim to prove it. What then is the natural conclusion to draw? Surely, that courtly love itself, in spite of all its shabby origins and pedantic rules, is at bottom more agreeable to those elements in human, or at least in European, nature, which last longest, than the cynical Latin gallantries of Boccaccio? The world of Chrétien, of Guillaume de Lorris, and of Chaucer, is nearer to the world universal, is less of a closed system, than the world of Ovid, of Congreve, of Anatole France.
This is doctrine little palatable to the age in which we live: and it carries with it another doctrine that may seem no less paradoxical - namely, that certain medieval things are more universal, in that sense more classical, can claim more confidently a securus judicat, than certain things of the Renaissance. To make Herod your villain is more human than to make Tamburlaine your hero. The politics of Machiavelli are provincial and temporary beside the doctrine of the jus gentium. The love-lore of Andreas, though a narrow stream, is a stream tending to the universal sea. Its waters move. For real stagnancy and isolation we must turn to the decorative lakes dug out far inland at such a mighty cost by Mr George Moore; to the more popular corporation swimming-baths of Dr Marie Stopes; or to the teeming marshlands of the late D. H. Lawrence, whose depth the wisest knows not and on whose bank the hart gives up his life rather than plunge in:
Þaer maeg nihta gehwaem nið-wundor seon,
Fyr on flode!