Chapter 2 - The Genesis of a Medieval Book
In this chapter I shall first consider two early medieval texts and then say something about a remarkable characteristic which they have in common. They illustrate it all the more clearly because they are, in every other respect, extremely different. The one is a poem, the other a tract; the first full of heroic action and open air, the second entirely subjective and allegorical. Yet both can be shown to have come into existence by the same sort of process. It is a process wholly foreign to modern literature, but normal in the literature of the Middle Ages. It is almost the first thing we must grow used to and allow for in our medieval reading.
1. LAƷAMON’S BRUT
It is easy to explain why Laʒamon’s Brut has few readers. The only text is almost unobtainable; the poem is long; much of its matter is dull. But there are very good reasons for overcoming these obstacles. One is that Laʒamon is much easier than most Middle English poetry: far easier than Dunbar or Pearl or Gawain, yet not flattering the beginner, as Chaucer does, with a deceptive appearance of easiness. But secondly—and this is the reason most to my mind—the Brut is well worth our attention in its own right. The dull passages are a legacy from its known sources; its vividness, fire, and grandeur, are new. And sometimes—rarely, I admit—it reveals, in a flash, imaginative power beyond the reach of any Middle English poet whatever.
As everyone knows, the ultimate source of Laʒamon’s subject-matter is Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (1147). It was a foundation quite unworthy of the structure raised upon it. Geoffrey is of course important for the historians of the Arthurian Legend; but since the interest of those historians has seldom lain chiefly in literature, they have not always remembered to tell us that he is an author of mediocre talent and no taste. In the Arthurian parts of his work the lion’s share falls to the insufferable rigmarole of Merlin’s prophecies and to the foreign conquests of Arthur. The latter are, of course, at once the least historical and the least mythical thing about Arthur. If there was a real Arthur he did not conquer Rome. If the story has roots in Celtic Paganism, this campaign is not one of them. It is fiction. And what fiction! We can suspend our disbelief in an occasional giant or enchantress. They have friends in our subconscious and in our earliest memories; imagination can easily suppose that the real world has room for them. But vast military operations scrawled over the whole map of Europe and excluded by all the history we know are a different matter. We cannot suspend our disbelief. We don’t even want to. The annals of senseless and monotonously successful aggression are dreary enough reading even when true; when blatantly, stupidly false, they are unendurable. Whether Geoffrey intended all this stuff as political propaganda for our continental empire or merely as a sop to national vanity, we neither know nor care. It is either way deplorable, and it is what Geoffrey chiefly wants to tell us about Arthur. He has of course included better things, but his own contribution is a mere disfigurement. The decided contempt which it gives me for Geoffrey has the paradoxical effect of making me readier to believe that the Historia is filled with valuable deposits of tradition, both legendary and historical. Wherever I meet anything that I think good as story or probable as history (and I meet both fairly often) I feel sure that Geoffrey did not make it up.
After Geoffrey came Wace, the Norman, who was born in Jersey and made Canon of Bayeux by Henry II. He died, perhaps, about 1175. He is remembered by everyone for his account of Taillefer riding before William the Bastard’s army at Senlac and singing the Song of Roland; this comes in his Roman de Rou. In 1155 he retold Geoffrey’s matter in octosyllabics as the Geste des Bretons, which we, following the manuscripts, know as the Roman de Brut. He certainly did not regard himself as a writer of what we should call romance. His attitude to his material is rather that of a historian to an unreliable, yet by no means worthless, document. He thinks it is partly true, partly false. He is anxious to avoid errors. He has even been at the pains of investigating a fountain in Broceliande where the fays were said to appear, and his comment (in the Roman de Rou) on the negative result of the experiment is well known: ‘Wonders I sought but I found none; a fool I returned, a fool I went.’ But in another way he is not in the least like a historian. He feels perfectly free to touch up his original, describing, as if he had been an eyewitness, scenes he never saw and supplying vivid details from his own imagination.
After Wace, Laʒamon, whose Brut was probably written before 1207. He tells us he was priest at Ernleʒe (now King’s Arnley) on the Severn. It com him on mode, came into his head, to relate the noble deeds and origin of the Engle. He travelled far and wide and secured these books as his sources: the ‘English book’ made by Bede (i.e. the Anglo-Saxon version of the Ecclesiastical History), a book by ‘Seint Albin and the feire Austin’, and a book by a ‘French Clerk’ called Wace. The second item in this catalogue is puzzling. It is generally taken to be Bede’s Latin original of the very same book which, in Anglo-Saxon, makes Laʒamon’s first item. I find it difficult to be content with this theory, but the question is not very important since Laʒamon actually makes extremely little use of Bede in any shape or form. Wace is the only one of his three authors who really counts. Perhaps when the poet mentioned all three books in his poems—for those days, and for a man in his humble station, they were a costly library, which he leofliche bi-heold—he expected to use them much more than he actually did.
But we cannot next proceed, as we used to do with Chaucer and Il Filostrato, to get a text of Wace, collate it with the English Brut, and thus try to isolate Laʒamon’s original work. It is generally accepted that Laʒamon worked from a redaction of Wace, contaminated by other versions of the story. And it seems clear to me, as to others, that he was in touch with real Welsh or (less often) English traditions. Thus he knows, and could not learn from Wace, the name of Arthur’s helmet Goswhit (21147) and his shield Pridwen (21152), and of the smith Griffin who made his spear (23783). In a passage peculiar to himself (13562–90) he gives to the Pict who murdered King Constance the name Gille Callæt, which is unknown to both Wace and Geoffrey. It is too good a name for a Pict to have been invented by a writer so unphilological as Laʒamon, who elsewhere cheerfully gives the names Ethelbald and Ælfwald to two ‘Britons’ who revolted against ‘Gracien’. The passage in which he does so (12253 seq.) is also significant. No one else relates this revolt; but Laʒamon’s very clear localization of it in East Anglia—no county patriotism would tempt him thither—suggests that a historical tradition of some far later rebellion may underlie it. There are, too, places where Laʒamon unexpectedly agrees with Geoffrey against Wace. At 1275 his pritti dawes confirms Geoffrey’s figure, and our text of Wace reads trois jors. This might be a mere accident. More importantly, at 14050 Laʒamon and Geoffrey both tell us that Lindesey was the fief given by Vortigern to Hengest, and Wace—in our textus receptus—does not. Since Laʒamon is generally thought to have made no use of Geoffrey, and certainly does not mention him, this passage suggests a source, probably British, common to both. It is certainly difficult not to suppose Welsh poetry behind the following prophecy about Arthur:
Of him scullen gleomen godliche singen.
Of his breosten scullen æten aðela scopes.
Scullen of his blode beornes beon drunke.
(18856–61)
Geoffrey, doubtless from the same source, had said ‘His deeds will be meat to their tellers’, but Laʒamon gives more.
We thus know neither what (exactly) Laʒamon’s MS of Wace contained nor from what other sources, oral or written, he supplemented it. I believe, myself, that many, or even most, of those passages peculiar to the English Brut which I shall mention are in fact Laʒamon’s own. But I must not assume this. In order to avoid committing myself I shall therefore speak no more of Laʒamon but simply of the Brut, of the text itself. Who, or how many people, or in what proportions each, made it what it is, is a question I cannot answer. This inability of course frustrates our curiosity as scholars, and it puts out of use our characteristically modern critical habits. There is no question here of finding the single author, totally responsible for his work of art, and expressing his unique personality through it. But this frustration is instructive, and it is fortunate that the text which meets us at the very threshold of Middle English poetry should so clearly render the modern approach impossible. If criticism cannot do without the clear separation of one work from another and the clear unity of the individual author with the individual text, then criticism of medieval literature is impossible.
The metre of the Brut has often been described and I shall not deal with it at length. Sometimes for a line or so it conforms to the classical Anglo-Saxon pattern:
æðela inwurðen,
wihte wal-kempen, on heora wiðer-winnan.
(76–8)
At the opposite extreme we get
He makede swulc grið, he makede swulc frið
monien laʒen gode, þe lond swuððen stode.
(4254–7)
Internal rhyme had appeared in Maldon and was (like consonance) regular in certain Old Norse metres: the real novelty is the absence of alliteration. To an ear trained on Beowulf, a text which oscillates thus may at first be as repulsive as ‘monkish hexameters’ were to the Humanists. But one grows reconciled to it in the end; and not, I think, only because one’s standards have been lowered by habituation. The types of classical Old English half-line are, after all, blocks of pure speech rhythm. So are the half-lines of the Brut’s new rhymed (or consonanced, or assonanced) lines. Hence they lie down together not uncomfortably. There is no real parallel to the jarring effect we should get if alcaics were suddenly introduced among elegiacs or octosyllabics amid blank verse. There is, too, a tendency for one norm or the other to predominate over fairly long stretches. Battle-pieces, appropriately, often keep close to the old metre. The new, often used for pathetic, derisive or gnomic comment, has its own rustic pungency. Notice its effect in the following where it comes after two lines of fairly pure alliterative verse:
‘. . .
And ʒif þu him abidest he þe wule binden,
quellen þine leoden and þi lond aʒen’.
Ofte wes Arðure wa; neuere wurse þene þa.
(20379–84)
If the Brut is only partially Anglo-Saxon in metre, it is almost wholly so in style. Expressions that recall the old poets meet us at every turn: Godes wiðer-saka (1808; of Gogmagog), mid orde and mid egge (5202), sæ-werie (6205), weorld-scome (8323), gumene ælder (12178). If they are not always exact reproductions, this makes them more interesting. It shows that the poet is not merely imitating, as Claudian, say, imitated the Augustans, but working in a live tradition. Hence his resemblance to his predecessors is not limited to vocabulary. Arthur’s prayer, with its accumulation of more or less synonymous phrases (almost kenningar), comes in the very accents of Hrothgar:
Lauerd drihten crist, domes waldende,
midelarde mund, monnen froure,
þurh þine aðmode wil, walden ænglen.
Let þu mi sweuen to selþen iturnen.
(25567–74)
The Brut is Anglo-Saxon in style for the best reason: because it is Anglo-Saxon in temper. Its outlook, its most recurrent emotions, its sense of values, all belong to the old order.
This brings us to an instructive paradox. In the opening lines the Brut promises to tell the history of the Engle (13): actually it tells that of the Britons when they had been conquered, killed, and dispossessed. Even if the word Engle is merely a careless slip, it is no bad symbol of what is to follow. This poem, while Anglo-Saxon in style and temper, is wholly British in its conscious sympathies. For those Germanic invaders who were Laʒamon’s real ancestors and whose language he wrote, the Brut has hardly a good word to say. They are treacherous, heathen hounds. Best deal with them as Aldolf did with Hengest when he swiped off his head, gave him good burial after his own heathen fashion (for he was after all a brave fighter) and then
bad for þere sæule þat hire neuere sæl neore.
(16723–4)
We may suspect that the Brut’s view of the English invaders against whom Arthur fought has been much coloured by memories of a far more recent invasion. At l. 7116, significantly, it speaks of the Normans coming to England mid heore nið crafte. But no such explanation for its British partialities is really needed. Centuries later when we no longer had cause to hate the Normans we still somehow accepted the Britons (as represented by Geoffrey) for our ancestors and delighted in this supposed link with Arthur, Cassibelaune, Brennes, and the Trojans. The consciousness of race, or (if you prefer) the illusion of race, seems hardly to have existed. Nor is race much use to us as critics. If there was a historical Arthur he was probably a Roman. His legend is Celtic in origin. The particular handling of it which we are now considering is the adaptation, thoroughly Anglo-Saxon in spirit, of a Norman poem. Its later dissemination is the work of French poets and romancers. Its modern developments are almost exclusively English and American. We should use a very misleading metaphor if we said the legend had a Celtic ‘kernel’; ‘for, when he hath the kernel eate, who does not throw away the shell?’ If we threw away what is not Celtic we should have left something other than the Arthurian legend which has really mattered.
From what has already been said it will be obvious that the Brut is a very different poem from Wace’s Geste as we have it, and must have been very different from any redaction of Wace which we can imagine. The mere language determines this. Feollen þa fæie has a ring which nothing could have in French octosyllabics. The habitual images and attitudes of the English poem add another difference. An angel, or that early aviator King Bladud, has, not wings, but a feðerhome (2874, 25871). Heroes may speak of their exploits in the devout manner of Beowulf himself: godd hit me iuðe þat ich hine igripen habben (16549). Characters give one another a great deal of advice, sometimes, as may be thought, portentously, but sometimes, as in the old poetry, with magnificent weight—
Nu þu ært al ane of aðele þine cunne.
Ah ne hope þu to ræde of heom þat liggeð dede.
Ah þenc of þe seoluen. Seolðen þe beoð ʒiueþe;
for selde he aswint þe to him seolue þencheð.
(17934–41)
But the differences go far beyond this kind of thing. The Brut is much more archaic and unsophisticated than the Geste. One can easily believe that Wace was familiar with real, contemporary courts and camps. But the Brut sees all its battles in terms of the heroic past. Strategical features are blurred or omitted. Instead, we get the warhedge standing like a grey wood, faces turning pale, many a grey-haired warrior hewn with sword, broad-bladed spears broken and cloven shields—
Heowen hardliche hælmes gullen,
falewede feldes of fæie blode.
And þa heðene saulen helle isohten.
(18316–21)
It paints its courts in equally old-fashioned colours. In the Geste as we have it the Roman ambassadors are true diplomats, elderly men, well-dressed, carrying olive branches, walking slowly and behaving with much dignity. In the Brut they are
þeines ohte mid palle bi-þehte.
Hæʒe here-kempen, hehʒe men on wepne.
(24741–4)
The Norman gaiety and lightness do not get into the Brut at all. There is a striking example a few lines later when Arthur consults with his lords about his answer to the Romans. It is a delightful scene in Wace. The King holds his council in a stone keep called the Giant’s Tower. As they go up its spiral stair, Oador, who was a man of jokes, calls out merrily to Arthur who happens to be in front of him. This threat from Rome, he says, is welcome. We have had far too much peace lately. It softens a man. It encourages the young bachelors to spend too much time dressing, with an eye to the ladies. Gawain, overhearing this, says Cador need not bother his head about the young men. Peace after war is very pleasant. So is love. Bright eyes teach chivalry. Thus they jested. Now turn to the Brut, 24883–972. First, by a tiny touch, it alters the whole lighting. It cannot mention the tower without adding
An ald stanene weorc; stiðe men hit wurhten.
(24885–6)
With this characteristically Beowulfian glance at the remoter past everything becomes at once darker, graver, more wintry. There is no prattle on the stairs. When everyone is seated in his place, Cador rises and expresses his view about the corrupting influence of peace in a set speech, seriously. Then Walwain wraððede hine swide. His praise of peace has nothing to do with ladies’ eyes—
God is grið and god is frið þe freoliche þer haldeð wið,
and godd sulf hit makede þurh his godd-cunde—
(24957–60)
and there is nothing sportive about his disagreement with Cador. It is a real strife, a flit (24966), and Arthur, as if he knew that swords might be out in a minute, has to cry out
Sitte adun swiðe, mine cnihte alle.
And ælc bi his lifen luste mine worden.
(24969–72)
Equally instructive are the different eulogies which the Geste and the Brut give of Arthur. In Wace he is one of Love’s lovers. He founded those courtesies which courts have followed since. He lived in great state and splendour. In the Brut, he wes þan ʒungen for fader, þan alden for frouer (19936–7). Thus everywhere the Brut is heavier, more serious, more plangent than its Norman counterpart. Provided that we carefully define for ourselves the sense in which we are using the word, we may say that it is more barbaric and less civilized.
We must not misunderstand this. It has to be admitted that the Brut at one point (22841 seq.) introduces an atrocity of which Wace and Geoffrey are innocent. But it was something done in hot blood. In general the Brut is a kinder work than the Geste. It is both fiercer and more tender. The Norman courtesy can be callous, the Norman lightness can be cynical; the Brut is, at bottom, more sensitive. Its favourite heroes, if rough-hewn, remember the sufferings of common men. Its Brennes, as soon as he has conquered Rome, starts repairing the war damage, prevents a massacre, forbids plunder, and summons back the refugees (flæmen) with the assurance that they shall have peace and live under the laws of their own country (5938–69). Its Vortimer, at his accession, undertakes to emancipate all slaves (14852). Its Arthur resolves that if he conquers France,
Auere ælche ærmen mon þe æð scal iwurðen,
and wurchen ic wulle muchel godes wille.
(23741–4)
It may, no doubt, be suspected that the sympathies of the Brut here reflect the humble condition of its author. But they are not confined to the poor. It dwells lovingly on Arthur’s discharge of his veteran knights when he bade them go with joy and repent their sins, never carrying weapons more, but living the rest of their days religiously. It extends even to Pagans—provided, of course, they are not Saxons—as in its lament for Julius Caesar
Wale þat eæuere ei sucche mon in to eælde sculde gan.
(7223–4)
And to the Caesar whom it thus laments it independently attributes courtesy and chivalry in his treatment of the captured Cassibelaune (8942 seq.). It alone shows us Ygærne, in private, sorrowing for the lives which Uther’s love for her will cost (18616 seq.). Its conceptions are sometimes finer than those of Wace. Androgeus, though a traitor fighting against Cassibelaune, warns his men to take the king alive and give him no wound, ‘for he is my lord and kinsman’ (8605).
Another distinction of the Brut is its love for the supernatural. It knows that a fairy smith, on aluisc smið, made Arthur’s byrnie (21131). Wace, following Geoffrey, had peopled Loch Lomond with prophetic eagles; the Brut adds
uniuele þinge.
Þat water is unimete brade; nikeres þer badieð inne,
þer is æluene ploʒe in atteliche pole.
(21744–8)
Of another strange water it adds alfene hine dulfen, elves dug it (21998). It interpolates the statement that as soon as Arthur came on earth elves took and enchanted the child and gave him their gifts (19253 seq.). It could have learned from the Geste that Arthur after his last battle was carried to Avalon for the healing of his wounds and that the Britons still look for his return thence. The Brut likes the passage so well that it reproduces it twice (23067 seq., 28610–41), making us much surer than Wace had done that Avalon is a fairy country, since Arthur is taken thither by Argante ‘the queen’, ‘the fairest of all elves’. Let us notice, however, that the Brut’s marvels are not all Celtic. The fairy smith was called Wygar. The nikeres and their pool might have come straight out of Beowulf. And the word I have translated ‘elves’ has to do duty both for the fées of continental tradition and for our own more formidable ylfe.
So far I have been speaking of differences between the Brut and the Geste which are not necessarily differences of poetic merit. Except in the scene between Cador and Gawain, where the Geste is in my opinion superior, a man might reasonably prefer either. Certainly if a Gigadibs could have existed among the Normans and had deigned (and been able) to read the Brut he would truly have said that it ‘lacked contemporaneity’. I now turn to those of its peculiarities which seem to me to be also superiorities.
First of all, it might have been written by someone who had read Aristotle and learned that a narrative poet ought to speak as much as possible through the mouths of his characters and as little as possible through his own. Again and again where our text of Wace merely says that people issued such and such orders, or had such and such disputes, or gave one another such and such news, the Brut sets them talking. I should say there was twenty or even thirty times as much dialogue in it as in the Geste; besides prayers, soliloquies, and the like. It is often extremely vigorous. Arthur’s speech (20825–98) after the submission of Childric is a good example.
But of course the author (or authors) of the Brut did not need to have read Aristotle. This reiterated use of the dramatic method is part and parcel of the general intensity with which it grasps all that it treats. It is far more committed, more engaged, closer to its matter, than the Geste. It shows us happening what the Geste often merely records. It knows how everyone looked and behaved: how Corineus, after his great speech on the ingratitude of Locrin, brought down his axe and shattered the stone the King stood on (2311); how Godlac, on hearing of his mistress’s marriage, swooned in his chair and the courtiers threw cold well-water on his face (4516 seq.); how Pantolaus and his crew must have appeared after their long voyage, with their tattered clothes and their indifference to decency (6271 seq.). No one who has ever watched for the return of the fishing fleet after bad weather will miss the graphic reality of the following, where the two vikings watch the storm-tossed fleet of Ursula coming in:
And swa heo leien i þan æit-londe and iseʒen þat weder stronge;
iseʒen scipen an and an, while ma, while nan,
þeonne feowere þenne fiue. . . .
(12033–7)
The Brut’s certainty as to what you would have seen if you had been present creates character. We are perhaps told of too many people
Þeo hit up bræc hit wes god þat he spec—
(5431–2 et passim)
though it certainly brings vividly before us a certain type of slow starter. Far more interesting is the process whereby Merlin—little more than a name in the Geste—becomes impressive in the Brut. In both texts he tells Uther how to get the monoliths for Stonehenge. This is a mere necessity of the plot. The Brut adds
Þus seiden Mærlin and seoððen he sæt stille
alse þeh he wolde of worlden iwiten.
(17232–5)
He is liable to such stillnesses. On another occasion, having been asked a question, he
sæt him stille longe ane stunde,
swulc he mid sweuene swunke ful swiðe.
Heo seiden þe hit iseʒen mid heore aʒen æʒen
þat ofte he hine wende swulc hit a wurem weore. . . .
(17906–13)
Whether this is how wizards (what we’d call mediums) really behave, I don’t know, but I think the passage would carry immediate conviction even without the line I have italicized. It is, however, the real masterpiece. Here is another. After Uther’s death Wace merely tells us that the bishops and barons sent a message to Arthur calling upon him to be King. Tantamne rem tam negligenter? The Brut tells us how three bishops and seven knights sought the youth out (he was only fifteen) in Britanny, and gives their speech. Then
Arður sæt ful stille.
Ænne stunde he wes blac and on heuwe swið wak;
ane while he wes reod and reousede on heorte.
Þa hit alles up brac hit wes god þat he spac.
Þus him sæide þer riht Arður þe aðele cniht,
‘Lauerd crist, godes sune, beon us nu a fultume,
þat ich mote on life goddes laʒen halden.’
(19887–99)
It will be noticed that in all these quotations there is hardly anything that could be called poetical adornment. I doubt whether the poet was thinking about poetry; it sounds more as if his only object were to make sure that we should see exactly what he had imagined. We may even doubt how far he knew that he was working from imagination. But the Brut can be good in a different vein. I spoke a while back of its close adherence to the Anglo-Saxon type of poetry. But in one important way it departs from that type. The simile was almost (not quite) unknown to the Anglo-Saxon poets. It is frequent in the Brut. Some of its similes are short and easily found. Troops muster thick as the falling hail, alse haʒel þe ualleð (14517 et passim): Ridwathlan rushes on his enemies as a þode or whirlwind, carrying a dust-cloud, falls in a field (27645); at an angry meeting many a stout Briton had beres leches, boar’s looks (22281–2); or (less obviously) an army advances ‘as if all the earth would catch fire’ (20643–4). But besides these we find similes of the Homeric or ‘long-tailed’ type; fittingly, since the Brut is, in its manner and temper though not in its art, the most Homeric poem in English. One would much like to know where its long-tailed similes come from. If they had any literary model it has been fully assimilated; they do not read at all like the stanza-long, laboured similes in which Spenser thought he was being Virgilian. They smell of real country and first-hand observation. As here:
Up bræid Arður his sceld foren to his breosten
and he gon to rusien swa þe runie wulf
þenne he cumeð of holte bi-honged mid snawe
and þencheð to biten swulc deor swa him likeð.
(20120–7)
A moment later—for, as in Homer, and more than in Virgil, the similes tend to bunch—he tells his men that their enemies will fly
swa þe hæʒe wude
þenne wind wode weieð hine mid mæine—
(20135–7)
and after that comes the longer and more complex simile of the crane flying broken-winged from the hawks to be met among the reeds by hounds, so that neither land nor water will now save it, for the hour of the noble bird (kinewurðe foʒel) is come (20163–75). That of the goat pursued by the wolf (21301–15) is too long to be quoted. It is remarkable for being, at the end, mortised back into the main narrative (I think Homer never does this) by Arthur’s triumphant cry that he himself is the wolf and Colgrim the goat (21315).
It will be noticed that all these come from the Arthurian section of the Brut, and it is there, I believe, that its addition to, and transformations of, any possible source we know, are most continuous. Our text of Wace reads, in comparison, like an epitome; it gives a skeleton: nearly all the flesh is supplied by the Brut. This is of course most obvious in the very long and frequent passages which have no analogue at all in the French; but it is no less instructively seen where the two texts are close. In the following, where Merlin’s mother tells how he was begotten, I have italicized what is peculiar to the Brut.
Þa ich wes an uore fiftene ʒere,
þa wunede ich on bure, on wunsele mine,
maidene mid me, wundre ane uæire.
Þenne ich wæs on bedde iswaued mid soft mine slepen,
Þenne com [me] biuoren þa fæirest þing þat wes iboren,
swulc hit weore a muchel cniht al of golde idiht.
Þis ich isæh on sweuene alche niht on slepe;
þis þing glad me biuoren and glitene on golde.
Ofte hit me custe, ofte hit me clupte. . . .
(15700–17)
It will be apparent how much the Brut has shaded and softened and beautified the story, making it both more credible and more tolerable. The young princess is put in her right setting, with her wunsele and her maids: the image of sheltered royal girlhood—sheltered, at least, from all merely human lovers—is built up. Her own experience is all dim, half a dream, something between sleep and waking. And the daemon is the loveliest thing ever born.
But I have kept to the end two touches that seem to me proofs of yet higher power. One turns on two words. We are twice told, of a storm at sea, that the waves were like ‘burning towns’ (or villages): alse tunes þer burnen (4578), tunes swulche þer burnen (11978). It may be the phrase of a longshoreman rather than a sailor; waves out at sea are less likely to give this particular appearance. But I do not think I shall ever again see a breaker coming in against the wind without remembering the burning towns. The image, so far as I know, never occurs before or after the Brut. It embodies a quality of eye and imagination which I believe we never meet in Langland, Chaucer or Gower. My other example is more complex. Arthur, exulting over the Saxon rout, looks down on the Avon and sees
Hu ligeð i þan stræme stelene fisces
mid sweorde bi-georede; heore sund is awemmed,
heore scalen wleoteð swulc gold-faʒe sceldes,
þer fleoteð heore spiten swulc hit spæren weoren.
(21323–30)
Coleridge and Wordsworth would have made this the text for a full dissertation on the esemplastic faculty. First, the imagination turns the mail-clad, hence silvery-gleaming, dead into fishes. Then, assuming the fishes as a basis, by way of a simile within a simile, it half turns them back into knights, comparing the wooden shields and spear-shafts (which would of course leave the bodies on the river bed and float on the surface) to scales and fins. And it does this not as the romantic imagination might, for its own sake, but under the influence of a strong, bitter, and probable passion.
2. SAWLES WARDE
I now turn to the early thirteenth-century Sawles Warde. Its history begins with a well-known passage in the New Testament: ‘If the master of the house knew at what time the thief was going to come he would no doubt keep watch and not allow his house to be broken into.’ This passage is then used as the peg on which to hang an allegory in chapters 13–15 of a Latin prose treatise De Anima, possibly by Hugo of St Victor (1096–1146). It is at once twisted into an almost entirely new meaning. In Our Lord’s saying the ‘thief’ had represented Himself, and the unknown hour was the date of the Second Coming and the Day of Judgement. In the De Anima, however, the principalis fur, the master thief, is the Devil, supported by a gang of Vices, and what the master of the house (the soul) has to keep watch against is temptation. It is unbelievable that the Latin author misunderstood or forgot or did not reverence the sense of the original. He obviously feels perfectly free to transform it in any way that suits his purpose, provided that, thus transformed, it is still orthodox and edifying. Very possibly he regarded himself as choosing one, instead of another, from among its multiple senses. In his allegory the master of the house is Animus. He rules, with the aid of Prudentia, Fortitudo, Temperantia, and Justitia, a familia of thoughts, senses, and volitions. Prudentia, as door-keeper, admits a messenger called Timor Mortis who describes the pains of Hell. His words move the virtues to several wholesome resolutions. Then comes another messenger called Amor vitae aeternae et Desiderium coelestis patriae, who, of course, describes the joys of Heaven. The author concludes by drawing, in few words, the obvious moral.
On this modest text an English Johan, of whom we know nothing except that he asks our prayers for his soul, gets to work. He produces something considerably longer than his original, and it cannot, by our standards, be classified either as a new book or as a translation. At the very outset he quotes the Dominical words from Matt. xxiv. 43; the Latin had quoted them from Luke xii. 39. It is hard to see any reason for this change and I suspect that Johan did not even know he had made it. He gives Wit (his equivalent for animus) a silly wife called Wil. It is she who sets the whole familia wrong if she is not carefully watched. The four virtues are daughters of God. Meað (Temperantia) is described as teaching meosure which is the middle point between two evils (49)—the ‘golden middle way between much and little’ (184). This scrap of Aristotle’s ethical system had not occurred in the Latin. Nor had the clear Virgilian echo at 124, where the first visitant says of the torments of Hell, as the Sibyl had said of the same subject, that he would not tell all though he had a thousand tongues of steel and spoke till they were all worn out (cf. Aeneid, VI, 625). Thus what Johan adds to his original is not necessarily original itself. His loathsomely vivid account of the reptilian horrors in Hell goes far beyond anything in the De Anima, but is indebted to earlier vision literature.
But while Johan is ready to use anything that comes to hand, he also uses continuously—perhaps does not know that he is using, and cannot help using—his own imagination. The De Anima is not very imaginative; at point after point Johan touches it into life. In the Latin Timor Mortis is not described at all. In Johan, ‘he is let in and looked at very hard by them all, for lank he is and lean and his face deathlike and pale and of a strange colour. Every hair seems to be standing erect on his head’ (62–5). He gives his name not as Fear of Death but simply as Fear (68)—a change which, for me at any rate, makes him far more formidable. He tells how the devils will one day bring to us books in which all our sins are written; it is Johan who adds ‘in black, small letters’. We learn how the damned, as in Milton, will be hurried from the extreme of heat to that of cold; Johan adds ‘And they never know which of these two feels (puncheð) the worse’ (110–11). He adds (not without precedent) that if there were no other pains in Hell the very sight of the devils, their faces, their voices, the torrent of insult (schenðlac) that they utter, would be torment enough (131–5). He rises at last into an apostrophe, all his own, which I should weaken by modernizing: O helle, deaðes hus, wununge of wanunge of grure ant of granunge, heatel ham, ant heard wan of alle wontreaðes, buri of bale ant bold of eauereuch bitternesse, þu laðest lont of alle, þu dorc stude . . . (138–41). Such a passage may have originated the fancy—for I think it is nothing more—that Sawles Warde is intended as verse, not prose.
Of the second messenger we learn from the Latin only that he is pulcher et hilaris: in Johan we see Deaðes Sonde actually entering and greeting the master with laughing cheer, and the whole house shining and gleaming with the light that comes from him (227–30). Later, when he is describing Heaven, a small change makes, if I may trust my own reactions, a big difference. The Latin said that the sweet smell of those regions ‘surpasses all kinds of perfumes’. Johan says ‘A man could live forever in the sweetness of it’ (298–9). The first leaves our imagination in the barber’s shop: the second suggests another world.
I believe any fair reader will find Sawles Warde a sappy and lively little work. As often, we must be careful to get the right view of what seem to be, or actually are, its naïveties. When Johan says that the blessed will behold God nebbe to nebbe (318), the daring and homely quality which we find in his words probably did not exist for him. He is simply translating the Pauline facie ad faciem (I Cor. xiii. 12) and might have been hard put to it to find any other rendering. Later (298–300) he tells us that God remains seated as He receives the prayers of all other saints, but stands up when addressed by the virgins. We may smile with pleasure and rejoice to find that not only the Prince of Darkness is a gentleman; or we may say, as someone said to me, that it is ‘a pleasant piece of silliness’. Both reactions perhaps miss the point. It is possible to disagree with, even to hold for ‘silliness’, the medieval exaltation of virginity as the supreme virtue. But granted that exaltation, Johan’s image is a good symbol. If he had met a real anthropomorphist, I expect he would have been quite able to explain that God was incorporeal and therefore would not really sit down or stand up. It would not, of course, follow that in the heat of composition he consciously attended to this.
3
It will be clear that Laʒamon is not the author of the Brut, nor Johan of Sawles Warde, in the sense in which Jane Austen is the author of Persuasion. On the other hand, neither is simply a translator. Nor is it quite satisfactory to regard Wace (in whatever text) and the De Anima as their ‘sources’ if by a ‘source’ we mean something that stands to their work as a novella or a Plutarchan Life stands to a play by Shakespeare. They are not changing the genre nor the structural outlines. The truth is that these Middle English texts have come into existence by a process which is quite foreign to modern literature. The scholar’s ideal of accuracy in translation, the historian’s ideal of fidelity to a document, and the artist’s ideal of originality, are all alike absent from the minds of Laʒamon and Johan. In one way they seem enslaved to their originals; it never occurs to them to break these up and melt the slivers down and forge out of them an essentially new work. But in another way their treatment of them is very cavalier. They do not hesitate to supplement them from their own knowledge and, still more, from their own imagination—touching them up, bringing them more fully to life. The impulse to do this is obviously irrepressible; I get the impression that it is not always fully conscious or voluntary. In that way it might even be true that they are sometimes most indebted to the originals where they most improve them; that the more completely they are carried away by the story or the doctrine, the more of their own they mix with it. I think we can understand this in the light of those occasions when we have remembered a good passage from a book as being even better than it was. We look it up, perhaps in order to quote it; and find that what we had seemed to remember as the master touch was never there at all. We have added it. But it was the vitality of the passage which enabled, and forced, us to do so. The author’s imagination has fertilized ours. Similarly, perhaps, it is just because Wace’s narrative has taken complete possession of Laʒamon’s mind that he sees—and may even believe that it was Wace who showed him—Arthur’s changes of colour when they came to offer him the crown.
Now even the student who has only begun his medieval reading will have met already some instances of this very curious relation between a Middle English text and an original. His attention will almost certainly have been drawn to Chaucer’s handling of Boccaccio, whether in The Knights Tale or the Troilus; perhaps also to Malory’s handling of his ‘French book’. But he will be very mistaken if he thinks he has been learning something merely about Chaucer or Malory. He must understand how typical, in this respect, they are. Their procedure is, if not the universal, at any rate the normal, medieval procedure. The characteristic activity of the medieval—perhaps especially the Middle English—author is precisely ‘touching up’ something that was already there. And this something may itself be the ‘touching up’ of something earlier: as we see in the sequence Geoffrey—Wace—Laʒamon. The beginning of this process—if it had a beginning any more definite than daylight has each morning—is often lost to us. Hence we might equally well call our medieval authors the most unoriginal or the most original of men. They are so unoriginal that they hardly ever attempt to write anything unless someone has written it before. They are so rebelliously and insistently original that they can hardly reproduce a page of any older work without transforming it by their own intensely visual and emotional imagination, turning the abstract into the concrete, quickening the static into turbulent movement, flooding whatever was colourless with scarlet and gold. They can no more leave their originals intact than we can leave our own earlier drafts intact when we fair-copy them. We always tinker and (as we hope) improve. But in the Middle Ages you did that as cheerfully to other people’s work as to your own. And the tinkering very often really improved them.
In my opinion all criticism should be of books, not of authors. But when we are treating the Middle Ages it often must be. For many of the texts there is no one human being who can really be called the author in the full sense. You may sometimes be able to pick out the bits added by the last writer and separate them from those which were already there in the text he touched up. You may decide that his are the best bits. But of course this does not make him responsible for that complex organization which the whole book now is. If a great painter adds a few square feet (or even inches) of his own work to the canvas of a good, but less good, artist, he certainly modifies everything else that the picture contains; but then everything else modifies what he has added. His own work, if he really is a master, presupposes all the rest, is calculated to improve this picture. It would not improve any other. For the total result we cannot exclusively thank either painter. So for the Brut we cannot exclusively thank Laʒamon; nor Chaucer for the Troilus. In other words, what we may call ‘the Author-Book unit’ will not always work for the Middle Ages. Sometimes we begin to doubt whether even the Book is the unit; when we are presented with something constantly retold, which never remains exactly the same in the retellings yet never becomes wholly new, it is hard to say where one Book ends and another begins.
The Ballad, which is such a troublesome phenomenon to those who approach it with the modern idea of single authorship in their minds, can thus be seen as no more than an extreme instance of that ‘shared authorship’—shared is a safer word than communal—which was widespread in the Middle Ages. The Prologue and Links in the Canterbury Tales are probably not an instance at all. The Troilus and the prose Morte are good, central examples.
Those who find this state of affairs repellent may be reminded that we tolerate it quite easily in another art. A cathedral often contains Saxon, Norman, Early English and Perpendicular work. The effect of the whole may be deeply satisfying. Yet we have no one artist to thank for it. None of the successive architects foresaw or intended it. One suspects indeed that most of these would have prevented it if they could, that each generation left the work of its predecessors standing only because funds for demolition and total rebuilding in the new style were not forthcoming. It may be difficult, according to some theories, to call the cathedral as we now have it a ‘work of art’. But it is certainly not a work of nature (though nature has by now added some beauties and destroyed others). It is the work of men, though not of a man. We may find it helpful to regard some medieval literature as we regard such cathedrals. Indeed the books may be in one way easier to accept than the buildings. Each reviser may improve or correct (and of course misunderstand) his predecessor. But at least he is not, as the architects may have been, in revolt against him. The shared authorship is more voluntarily shared.
But while this often makes criticism of authors impossible it leaves criticism of books untouched. The text before us, however it came into existence, must be allowed to work on us in its own way and must be judged on its own merits. I agree whole-heartedly with a recent critic that ‘it is what is made of the “story”, how it is realized, the kind of significance it is made to bear, what the poem totally communicates or does, that is our object’. As historians, as critics of authors, we may want to know whether some simile in the Brut came first from Wace or Laʒamon; whether some speech in Troilus came first from Boccaccio or Chaucer. But as readers we are concerned only to receive, as critics of books we are concerned only to diagnose and evaluate, what this simile or speech contributes to the whole ‘communicating and doing’ of the work before us. And while we are reading or criticizing we must be on our guard against a certain elliptical mode of expression which may be legitimate for some other purpose but is deadly for us. We must not say that the Grail ‘is’ a Celtic cauldron of plenty, or that Malory’s Gawain ‘is’ a solar deity, or that the land of Gome in Chrestien’s Lancelot ‘is’ the world of the dead. Within a given story any object, person, or place is neither more nor less nor other than what that story effectively shows it to be. The ingredients of one story cannot ‘be’ anything in another story, for they are not in it at all. These supposedly identical ingredients are the abstract products of analysis. Within concrete literary experiences we never meet them.