6. Denis de Rougemont, Poetry and Society and Claude Chavasse, The Bride of Christ
For the present writer to criticize Mr Belgion as a translator from the French would be impertinent, so we may proceed at once to consider his original. M. de Rougemont's book consists of a moral thesis coupled with an historical thesis. As they are of very unequal value, the purpose of this review is to deter readers either from neglecting the moral because they perceived the weakness of the historical, or from debauching their sense of evidence by accepting M. de Rougemont's history because they approve his ethics; that is, to counteract the effect of the exciting sentences with which Messrs Faber and Faber have adorned the jacket of the English version.
The historical thesis is that the earliest medieval literature of Courtly Love was not really an expression of sexual passion at all, but the exoteric and symbolic expression of a wish for death and pain, itself the product of a widespread pagan Eros-mysticism, mediated to the Provençal poets through the Catharist heresy. The very best that can be said for this theory is that it is not formally impossible. The fatal principle of the author's method is quite frankly stated on p. 109 of the French text (though not, oddly enough, on the corresponding p. 122 of the English). It is that, since the Cathari were suppressed, documents are naturally lacking, and in their absence toutes les hypothèses sont permises. In fact, no hypothesis is permissible except that which covers the facts with the fewest possible assumptions, and M. de Rougement is falling into what I call the Gyges Fallacy (If there were an invisible man in the room it would look empty – The room does look empty. Therefore there is an invisible man in it).
He lays enormous stress on certain unmotivated partings of the lovers in the Tristan romance; but loss of motivation easily occurs in stories through misunderstandings of the original, and the vast superstructure which M. de Rougemont builds is at the mercy of Occam's razor. He traces the lover's dislike of dawn in the Provençal Alba to some Manichean doctrine of the duel between Day and Night – which would make Ovid a Manichean. When a lover prefers his mistress to the Papal and the Imperial thrones, this seems to M. de Rougemont ‘to display the unmistakable demeanour of negative mysticism’ (p. 103); but the same argument would find the via negativa in the song from the Misanthrope (j'aime mieux ma mie) or even in the English ‘I have a thirst I wouldn't sell for a thousand pounds.’ The whole argument is maintained only by the continual predisposition to suppose every bush a bear.
But there is an even deeper objection. The author bases his thesis time after time on the existence of delays and obstacles in all love stories, which, for him, illustrate a secret desire for suffering and death, in seeming oblivion of the fact that delays and obstacles play an equally important part in stories that have nothing to do with love – in Treasure Island or the Philoctetes or Beowulf. The total absence from M. de Rougemont's thought of any general theory of story as such leads him to mete hard measure to story-tellers. If they end unhappily, that is a death-wish. If, after delays and obstacles, we reach a happy ending, this is a compromise between the ‘romantic’ and the ‘middle-class’ wishes (p. 238). The author hardly seems aware that the formula ‘obstacles followed by a happy ending’ includes the Odyssey, Aeneid, Gierusalemme Liberata, Tempest, Pilgrim's Progress and nearly every märchen in the world; indeed, he seems unaware of the very existence of literature which is not erotic.
Nevertheless this book is indispensable. Its moral thesis can easily be separated from its historical, provided that we do not equate origins with values. Romantic passion may, or may not, have originated as M. de Rougemont maintains. But God can bring so much good out of evil, and Satan so much evil out of good, that to know its origins would help us little in estimating its present value. On this problem M. de Rougemont writes one of the most cleansing and penetrating sermons I have read for a long time, and maintains with eloquence the incompatibility between the Christian conception of marriage and the modern notion according to which every marriage must have ‘falling in love’ as its efficient, and world ‘happiness’ as its final, cause. An English reader, bred on Patmore, Chesterton, and Mr Charles Williams, may sometimes wonder whether Romanticism has not a greater internal power of shedding its own errors than M. de Rougemont supposes; but all of us need to learn, almost daily, that Eros ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god (p. 321).
Mr Chavasse's short book – I wished it longer – traces the Nuptial Idea in theology from Old Testament times down to Alexander Cruden. Its main theological thesis, which I am too ignorant to criticize, is that the true conception of the Church as Bride has been largely obscured by misconceptions which assign that high position to the individual Christian soul or to the Blessed Virgin; but that it was recovered in its purity by the Anglican Reformation. An extremely interesting Appendix, entitled ‘The Marriage in the Mission Field’, discusses how far the Hieros gamos found in many contemporary mythologies can be used as a preparation for the true Nuptial Idea, but will be dangerous to pagans who, like the Hindoos, already have the idea of the soul bride. Mr Chavasse seems to me to have successfully avoided the dangers inherent in his subject and produced an edifying book.