19. A sacred poem: Charles Williams, Taliessin Through Logres
The only reason for reading a difficult poem is some assurance that it contains goodness great enough to outweigh the evil of its difficulty. For Mr Williams’ Taliessin I have such assurance, partly from his previous works, and partly from what the poem itself discloses even at a first reading.
It makes me see things: snow that ‘falls over brick and prickle’, a star ‘that rode by through the round window in the sky of Camelot’, a bucket from a well that as ‘a round plane of water rose shining in the sun’; or even ‘the source of all stone, The rigid tornado, the schism and first strife of primeval rock with itself.’ It also delights my ear. The result of its clashing accents is as if we were being continually thrown up or kept off the ground; no verse is, in the Greek sense of the word, more meteorous. I tremble to call Mr Williams Pindaric lest I should rouse associations of Cowley and Dryden. But Pindar is the poet I think of in reading Taliessin, with its combination of jagged weight and soaring movement, its ability to narrate while remaining lyric, and (above all) its prevailing quality of glory – its blaze.
Of the difficulties some are legitimate, some not. When Mr Williams uses ‘who fly the porphyry stair’ to mean those who fly up, or ascend, not those who shun or avoid, the stair, he is disobeying the language. In the ‘background’ which his poem assumes he is sometimes guilty of a little ‘privatism’; but in the main he demands of us familiarity with books which we certainly ought to know – the Bible, Malory's Morte d’Arthur, the Decline and Fall. It is also desirable to have read his own essay He Came Down from Heaven: indeed, three doctrines from that book are so worked into the texture of the poem that they had better be restated here.
I. The Fall. Genesis means what it says. Man, knowing nothing but good, aspired to know good and evil. This was indeed to know ‘as gods’, for God knows not only the good He has made but all unrealized possibilities, including those that are evil. Hence in the poem –
This knowledge man desired, asking himself in Paradise –
But man's knowledge is by experience, not by ‘pure intelligence.’ To know evil means, for him, to experience it. And since all being is good, this means to experience good as evil. Thus for fallen man his heaven-built body becomes an obscenity, and virtue a law fruitful of death, and God Himself ‘the headless Emperor’ the anti-God. ‘The feet of creation walk backward.’
II. ‘The Theology of Romantic Love.’ Mr Williams combines two positions not often held together. On the one hand, he is with Blake and Lawrence in glorification of the body. Caucasia, which represents its least honourable area, is thus celebrated:
On the other hand, Mr Williams reaffirms the amatory doctrine of the Vita Nuova with complete conviction.
III. ‘Substitution’ or ‘exchange.’ Anselm was right in holding a substitutional, but not in holding a ‘forensic’, doctrine of the Atonement. Vicariousness depends on no ‘transaction’ or ‘legal fiction’, being the most familiar thing in the world, a fact of daily experience. The taunt ‘He saved others; himself he cannot save’ is a definition of the Kingdom. What some thought most fantastic in the author's greatest romance (Descent into Hell) is serious.
The type of substitution in the poem is Percivale's sister, who in Malory (XVI, xi) ‘bled a dish full of blood to heal a lady, wherefore she died.’ The parody of substitution is money, the liberated symbol which becomes perilously autonomous: ‘small crowns, small dragons’, ‘the long file of whose snouts crosses the empire.’
The greatest, but also the most legitimate, of Taliessin's difficulties lies in its symbolism. I define the difference between Allegory and Symbolism thus: in Allegory the images stand for concepts (giant Despair, Mr Legality), in Symbolism for something the poet has experienced but which he has not reduced, perhaps cannot reduce, to a concept. Allegory can always be translated back into the concepts: the ‘meaning’ of a symbolical work cannot be stated in conceptual language because it is too concrete. The thing meant by the poet has probably met him in a variety of situations, and therefore, if we try to treat his work as allegory, we always find that each image has too many ‘meanings.’ The procedure is not, however, useless, provided that we do not take it for more than a scaffolding to our real reading of the poem. Let us apply it to Mr Williams’ central symbol, Byzantium.
(1) The actual Byzantine Empire ruling its ‘themes’ or provinces by the Acts, the Pandect, and the Code, which issue from the presence chamber at the top of the porphyry stair where ‘the lions roar that stand in the Byzantine glory.’ These Acts, written in ‘Greek minuscula’, are translated into ‘all the dialects.’ Logothetes run down the stairs, chariots go ‘clattering’ out of Byzantium to bear missives to the whole empire. Outside the empire we have Broceliande in the west, Islam in the south, to the north mere ‘mammoth and bear.’ Eastward the world fades away into the utterly unknown, the inverted, the antipodes – P’O-Lu. It is supposed, unhistorically, that Britain was part of the Byzantine Empire.
(2) Man. But the diagram on the endleaf must not be taken too seriously. It works well for ‘the breasts of intellego and credo’ in the University of Paris, and for the ‘Italian “hands”’ – the operative and manipulative organs used in bridge-building, agriculture, and the celebration of the Eucharist (‘the heart-breaking manual acts of the Pope’). Jerusalem is in the genitals because the author follows the tradition that Jerusalem is on the site of Paradise, a place of generation and regeneration. But the position of Byzantium itself at the navel, though appropriate enough, is not to be stressed. Byzantium, when distinguished from the whole empire, is the total Man or Person as opposed to his members. Thus energy arising from the loins but humanized in the 
γεμονικόν is ‘stuff of Caucasia fashioned in Byzantium.’ In fact, Byzantium might as well be the head as the navel: the location of Logres at the head is best disregarded. Logres is mainly the here and now, middle-earth, the scene of the poet's action. It must be remembered that the endleaf is a fanciful comment on the poem, not a ‘key.’
(3) Order, discipline, civilization. When we meet a slave in the stocks and another whose back is scarred by ‘the hazel's stripes’, Mr Williams is not showing us the ‘reverse side’ of Camelot's glory. For those slaves the stocks and the rod are a good – the appearance of law proper to their stage of development. When Taliessin awaits the moment to charge at Mount Badon, he sees Virgil ‘civilized centuries away’ seeking ‘for the invention of the City by the phrase.’ Identifying that imposition of form upon matter with his own imposition of the King's will upon the barbarians, ‘he fetched the pen of his spear from its bearer’, and as he advanced, ‘the Æneid's beaked lines swooped on Actium.’ (A German professor said to me a year ago ‘The last war was a war between Homer and Virgil – and Virgil was on your side.’)
(4) The Divine Order, ‘the army of unalterable law.’ Hence –
The Emperor is God. The Logothetes translating the Acts (‘phenomenally abating’ them ‘to kinds and kindreds’) represent what Plato has told us in Republic 476 (
ν 
καστον ε
ναι, τ
δ
τ
ν πράξεων κ.τ.λ. κοινωνί
. . . πολλά φαίνεσθαι). The Presence Chamber, approached by the porphyry stair, is the all-explanatory Beatific Vision.
Treated as an allegory, Byzantium is all these things and more. If anyone asks, ‘Why does he not say what he means?’ or ‘How am I to know which he means in each place?’ we must reply that the poet has not started with concepts like ‘Man’ or ‘Order.’ He started with a something in his experience, characterized by glory, but also by a strict or mathematic quality – something that meets him in the life of a great jurist (see Many Dimensions), in the gesture of a policeman on point duty (see The Greater Trumps), in the orderly conduct of a publishing house (see the Dedication to Taliessin), and also in the human body, and in all that he knows and believes in the Divine Order. Byzantium is not a communal fancy-dress for half a dozen concepts: it is an imaginative net to catch that single, utterly concrete constituent of experience which has no name and which we come to know by using the symbol Byzantium. In so far as the poem succeeds we shall find ourselves recognizing ‘Byzantium’, henceforth in all sorts of hitherto unrelated experiences of our own.
The choice of Byzantium depends principally on the fact that we think of the Byzantiune Empire as something splendid and exotic, but also stiff, formalized, hierarchical; and this union of qualities does justice to the union of glory and severity in Mr Williams’ vision. This is essential. His celebration of the human body, for example, has nothing to do with the gulfs of unmediated feeling. He teaches a ‘doctrine of Euclidean love’: anatomists and drawing-masters are better teachers of the body's importance than psycho-analysts. It is ‘the accurate flash’ of Iseult's eyes and the perception that, in her, ‘curves of golden life define the straightness of a perfect line’ by which Palomides is ravished. The hazel wands which make good rods for barbarian backs are also measuring-rods. With them the long roads of the empire are measured out so that in wooded Logres ‘the nuts of the uncut hazel fall Down the cut hazel's way.’ Virgil is painted on the wall of the presence chamber handing down to Taliessin ‘a shoot of hazel – the hexameter, the decasyllabic line.’ At the crowning of Arthur this πέρας or mesura is seen riding in peaceful triumph on its opposite:
With this passage I have raised the question of what lies beyond Byzantium, and this reminds me that other symbols have to be considered. Mr Williams’ map marks the road to P’O-Lu in the east, but not the road to Broceliande, which as we learn from the text, lies west of Britain. P’O-Lu we know – the antipodes where the ‘headless Emperor moves on an inarticulate sea’ where ‘the Roman hands’, ‘the substantial instruments of being’, are lost. Broceliande is more difficult. It is divided from P’O-Lu by the width of the whole map, but in a round world East and West meet. Out of it comes Merlin and into it he returns. Nimue lives there. Crude beings, unformed energies, ‘unthumbed shapes of apes’, grow there and stream out of it. It is not evil;
Broceliande is rather like ‘the mothers’ in Faust, the cave of Demogorgon in Shelley, the ‘abyss’ in Böhme's theosophy. The theologian, tolerating no ultimate dualism, must determine, if he can, the relation of Broceliande to the Emperor; but for the imagination it must generally, I expect, where it is not ignored, be felt as something outside the empire, or meeting the empire only at some coincidentia oppositorum which is off the map. At all events the world of the poem would be incomplete without it.
Merlin comes nearest of all Mr Williams’ figures to allegory. He is called ‘time's metre’, and even ‘time.’ Yet he is more than a mere ‘Father Time’ with an hour glass. He assists at the birth of Galahad (a type of Christ), and ‘the force of the worlds’ is in him. He is operative history, the mover, that which brings things to pass. He is the relentless obstacle to the fulfilment of Arthur's fantasies. Conjuring ‘at the height of the thin night air of Quinquagesima’ when Galahad was born, he sees, in vision, the King ‘dreaming of a red grail in an ivory Logres’: but –
It will be seen that Arthur is by no means the hero of the poem. Mr Williams’ argument is the Fall and the Redemption in Logres. Logres falls partly through the evil and contradiction inherent in every human order as such, partly through the actual sins of its leaders. The first is made clearest in the section entitled ‘The King's Coins’ – ‘What can be saved without order? and how order? . . . What without coinage or with coinage can be saved?’ For the second the author follows those episodes in Malory which are more significant than Malory saw. He connects the two tragedies of ignorance, Balin's fratricide and Arthur's incest, in a passage of extraordinary power. He makes good use of a heavenly irony in the old story (I think Professor Vinaver first did justice to it) whereby Lancelot, having sinned through love, offends against the code of love to his own shame but by that offence begets Galahad the redeemer. The birth of Galahad is the crisis of the poem. At the moment of his birth the tide turned:
There is only one section in this poem which, in my opinion, sinks below the general level, and that is ‘The Coming of Galahad’ (not to be confused with the magnificent birth-story, ‘The Son of Lancelot’), in which the obscurities are to me impenetrable and the style is dangerously near a mannerism. For the rest, the poem has greatness enough to justify the intensive study it exacts. It shows its greatness, in Pascal's words, not by being ‘at an extremity’, but by being simultaneously ‘at two extremities and filling all the spaces between.’ The material may be called, in more senses than one, ‘romantic’; the technique is modern both for good and evil – for evil in the obscurities it tolerates, for good in the fresh, harsh energy of its unstaled diction and the headlight sharpness of its vision. Mr Williams does not need by any deprecatory gestures to dissociate his Arthurianism from that of Morris and Tennyson. Some readers who think of the story solely in ‘Victorian’ terms may prove incurable: but in reality there is a passion in Mr Williams’ very rhythms that forbids him to sink to mere ‘charm.’ But we must also avoid a misunderstanding in the opposite direction, a ‘modernist’ misunderstanding. Mr Williams can be harsh, he can talk of ‘jakes and latrines’, and of other things which would once have been thought prosaic. But the precise differentia of his genius lies in offering us something much less usual. He has got all necessary ‘disillusionment’ over before the poem begins, so that no more need be said on that well-worn theme, and we can proceed at once to something positive. We find throughout an understanding of health, of discipline, and (above all) of courtesy, which are rare at the present time. No poem expresses more clarity or less indulgence.
But perhaps its greatest gift to us is what I have called the quality of Glory. The thing is new, but can only be indicated by reference to those old things which are least unlike it. I have already mentioned Pindar, and I am prepared to maintain, without one moment forgetting Wordsworth and Gray, that the third piece in Taliessin (the ‘Vision of the Empire’) is the first real example in English of ‘the greater ode.’ If this comparison proves unhelpful to some readers, I would refer them to the Archangels’ song from the Prologue in Heaven to Faust and tell them that in Mr Williams they will find something of its golden, noonday vitality.
But what finally convinced me that he has written a great poem was a transformation which my judgement underwent in reading it. I liked its ‘flavour’ from the first, but found it so idiosyncratic that I thought the book might be what Lamb called a ‘favourite’, a thing not for all days or all palates, like Tristram Shandy or the Arcadia. But as I went on I found bit after bit of my ‘real world’ falling into its place within the poem. I found pair after pair of opposites harmoniously reconciled. I began to see that what had seemed a deliciously private universe was the common universe after all: that this apparently romantic and even wilful poem was really ‘classic’ and central. I do not think this can happen in a minor work. And I think, to compare great things with small, that in this respect the poem bears a significant resemblance to the Faith it celebrates. The entrance is not very big, not very obvious, but recognizably made for all kinds of men; but, once inside, there is room for everybody, food for most diverse stomachs, medicine for many different diseases.