33. Ruth Mohl, The Three Estates in Medieval and Renaissance Literature
‘We are familiar’, says Miss Mohl on her first page, ‘with such forms as the love allegory, the metrical romance, the pastoral or the beast epic. A pattern no less characteristic . . . has hitherto escaped thorough treatment’. This pattern is later (p. 5) defined as ‘the verse or prose catalogues of the classes of society and their “defections”’, and these, we are told, ‘were regarded in their own day as a distinct literary form’. This is a promising enterprise. No department of literary history is more fruitful than the study of extinct forms, in so far as such study enables us to understand what our ancestors liked and why, and silences that kind of criticism which concentrates on those features of the old texts which were, to their writers, quite unessential.
At the same time no study is more difficult. It is not easy to get inside the skin of men long dead, and I find indications in Miss Mohl's work of a frame of mind especially unpropitious to the operation. When we read that ‘even in his own day, Athens was more democratic than Aristotle's philosophy of government, and he was already considerably behind the times’ (p. 11, italics mine), we become uneasy. And our fears are confirmed on p. 339, where the author speaks of ‘a medieval conception that is now wholly lost: namely that every individual soul is of equal value in the eyes of the Deity and that all inequalities and injustices and sufferings in this world are blotted out in the next’.
As Miss Mohl is not writing modern history, it does not perhaps greatly matter than she has been misinformed as to the total loss of this conception: what is serious, as arguing historical error, is the use of the word ‘medieval’ as a synonym for ‘Christian’, or (even if we regard the first part of her ‘conception’) for ‘Stoical’ as well.
It must be admitted, then, that Miss Mohl lacks certain qualifications for a sympathetic reconstruction of the past. To this she may well reply that her aim was less ambitious. She describes more than she explains and explains more than she criticizes: hers is the modest, though laudably laborious, task of mere observation and record; and on this level she has done a great deal of work. I have learned from her much that I am glad to know. The value of the book is to be sought less in its main theme than in the facts that arise by the way: for Miss Mohl interprets the ‘form’ she set out to study, so very liberally that it almost disappears, and we are left in some doubt as to its very existence.
At the outset it has to be admitted that the definition ‘catalogues of classes’ is too narrow; for women are one of the items of most of the catalogues. On p. 43 the Roman de Miserere is introduced not because it is, but because it contains, a catalogue of estates. As we proceed we find more and more space devoted to texts whose only relevance is that they somewhere or other contain a list of, or even a reference to, the classes of society.
A section headed ‘Lydgate's use of the Form’ (pp. 110 et seq., italics mine) opens with a list of purely incidental references to ‘statis’ from the Troy Book. Passages on Death and Fortune are quoted because the authors mention all ‘estates’ as being equally their prey. Lyndsay's description of Hell is quoted, and Henryson's is not, because Lyndsay, in his list of the damned, adds ‘commoun pepill’ to the Kings and Prelates whom he found in Henryson. More and Elyot are discussed at length. The Book of Precedence, John Russell's Boke of Nurture, and the like are liberally quoted: but the author does not show that they have more claim to illustrate her ‘form’ than the Guide to Whipsnade has to illustrate the Beast Epic.
It is easy to be too severe on such catholicity. The utility of research books is, to speak frankly, a matter of chance. The man who seeks them out in libraries is always following some trail of his own: and who knows what may, or may not, be useful to him? But Miss Mohl's procedure, if it does not destroy her book, at least raises the question whether what she is pursuing is really a Form at all. Is she contributing to the history of literary kinds or to the history of political thought? If to the latter, we can justify many of her quotations, which do illustrate a common matter, though they fail to illustrate a common form. We can justify the space devoted to More and Elyot. But if More and Elyot deserve seven pages, why is Aquinas dismissed in as many lines?
If, on the other hand, Miss Mohl is writing the literary history of a Form, it cannot be denied that we hear surprisingly little of that form in her pages, and surprisingly much of a certain body of ideas, occurring now in verse, now in prose, now in débat and now in allegory, sometimes in satire and sometimes in serious political propaganda, and illustrating more often than not no literary phenomenon except the medieval love of catalogue.
Some points of detail are open to criticism. ‘Works, ed. Henry Davis, London, 1861, II, 49’ is an unusual and inconvenient way of directing us to a passage in Plato. Gower's Confessio Amantis is not, as Miss Mohl states on p. 106, ‘a series of love stories’. In a passage quoted by Miss Mohl on p. 124, with no sign of disapproval, we read that ‘they’ (sc. Cessoles and his translators) ‘had no more doubt as to the divine right of the monarch, than the Thibetan has of the divine right of the grand lama’. If so, Cessoles and his translators stood almost alone in the Middle Ages. On p. 28 Miss Mohl tells us with admirable caution that ‘it has been assumed’ that Gower was a merchant: it is the more disappointing that by p. 63 he has become, with no tinge of doubt, ‘Gower the self-made man’, to explain – what needs no explanation – his use of the locus communis on our common descent from Adam.
On p. 329, after referring to Gower's doctrine that ‘constellacion’ is not to blame for the state of the world (Conf. Am. Prol. 529 et seq), Miss Mohl proceeds, ‘Though Gower thinks so little of the stars as an excuse . . . Spenser, in the late sixteenth century, reasserts their influence in much the same way that the Middle Ages did’. I very much doubt the suggested antithesis.
In the first place Astrology neither began nor ended with the Middle Ages. In the second place, within the Middle Ages themselves, Gower does not stand alone in rejecting rigid astrological determinism (cf. Roman de la Rose 17070 et seq.). Finally, Spenser is not speaking, like Gower, of influencia planetarum, but of the general secular movement of the Heaven as a whole, which he had read about in the Somnium Scipionis.
Miss Mohl writes throughout in an easy and agreeable manner and is quite free from the pseudo-scientific jargon which literary research work seems to encourage. In the difficult art of writing abstracts of diffuse medieval texts without extreme dullness she is unusually successful.