Chapter 2 - Allegory
‘Veramente li teologi questo senso prendono altrimenti che li poeti.’
DANTE
I
In the last chapter we traced the growth of the sentiment of courtly love down to a point at which that sentiment was already beginning to express itself by means of allegory. It now remains to consider independently the history of the allegorical method, and for this purpose we must return to classical antiquity. In our new inquiry, however, there is no question of finding and no possibility of imagining, the ultimate origins. Allegory, in some sense, belongs not to medieval man but to man, or even to mind, in general. It is of the very nature of thought and language to represent what is immaterial in picturable terms. What is good or happy has always been high like the heavens and bright like the sun. Evil and misery were deep and dark from the first. Pain is black in Homer, and goodness is a middle point for Alfred no less than for Aristotle. To ask how these married pairs of sensibles and insensibles first came together would be great folly; the real question is how they ever came apart, and to answer that question is beyond the province of the mere historian. Our task is less ambitious. We have to inquire how something always latent in human speech becomes, in addition, explicit in the structure of whole poems; and how poems of that kind come to enjoy an unusual popularity in the Middle Ages.
It is possible to limit our scope even farther. This fundamental equivalence between the immaterial and the material may be used by the mind in two ways, and we need here be concerned with only one of them. On the one hand you can start with an immaterial fact, such as the passions which you actually experience, and can then invent visibilia to express them. If you are hesitating between an angry retort and a soft answer, you can express your state of mind by inventing a person called Ira with a torch and letting her contend with another invented person called Patientia. This is allegory, and it is with this alone that we have to deal. But there is another way of using the equivalence, which is almost the opposite of allegory, and which I would call sacramentalism or symbolism. If our passions, being immaterial, can be copied by material inventions, then it is possible that our material world in its turn is the copy of an invisible world. As the god Amor and his figurative garden are to the actual passions of men, so perhaps we ourselves and our ‘real’ world are to something else. The attempt to read that something else through its sensible imitations, to see the archtype in the copy, is what I mean by symbolism or sacramentalism. It is, in fine, ‘the philosophy of Hermes that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein, as in a portrait, things are not truly but in equivocal shapes, as they counterfeit some real substance in that invisible fabrick’. The difference between the two can hardly be exaggerated. The allegorist leaves the given—his own passions—to talk of that which is confessedly less real, which is a fiction. The symbolist leaves the given to find that which is more real. To put the difference in another way, for the symbolist it is we who are the allegory. We are the ‘frigid personifications’; the heavens above us are the ‘shadowy abstractions’; the world which we mistake for reality is the flat outline of that which elsewhere veritably is in all the round of its unimaginable dimensions.
The distinction is important because the two things, though closely intertwined, have different histories and different values for literature. Symbolism comes to us from Greece. It makes its first effective appearance in European thought with the dialogues of Plato. The Sun is the copy of the Good. Time is the moving image of eternity. All visible things exist just in so far as they succeed in imitating the Forms. Neither the lack of manuscripts nor the poverty of Greek scholarship prevented the Middle Ages from absorbing this doctrine. It is not my business here to trace in detail the lines of its descent; and perhaps it would be idle to look for particular sources. The diffused Platonism, or Neoplatonism—if there is a difference—of Augustine, of the pseudo-Dionysius, of Macrobius, of the divine popularizer Boethius, provided the very atmosphere in which the new world awoke. How thoroughly the spirit of symbolism was absorbed by full-grown medieval thought may be seen in the writings of Hugo of St. Victor. For Hugo, the material element in the Christian ritual is no mere concession to our sensuous weakness and has nothing arbitrary about it. On the contrary there are three conditions necessary for any sacrament, and of these three the positive ordinance of God is only the second. The first is the pre-existing similitudo between the material element and the spiritual reality. Water, ex naturali qualitate, was an image of the grace of the Holy Ghost even before the sacrament of baptism was ordained. Quod videtur in imagine sacramentum est. On the literary side the chief monuments of the symbolical idea, in the Middle Ages, are the Bestiaries; and I should distrust the judgement of the critic who was unaware of their strange poetry, or who did not feel it to be wholly different in kind from that of the allegories. But of course the poetry of symbolism does not find its greatest expression in the Middle Ages at all, but rather in the time of the romantics; and this, again, is significant of the profound difference that separates it from allegory.
I labour the antithesis because ardent but uncorrected lovers of medieval poetry are easily tempted to forget it. Not unnaturally they prefer symbol to allegory; and when an allegory pleases them, they are therefore anxious to pretend that it is not allegory but symbol. It seems chilling to be told that Amor in the Vita Nuova is only a personification; we would willingly believe that Dante, like a modern romantic, feels himself to be reaching after some transcendental reality which the forms of discursive thought cannot contain. It is quite certain, however, that Dante feels nothing of the kind; and to put an end to such misconceptions once and for all, we had better turn to Dante’s own words. They will have the added advantage of giving us our first clue to the history of allegory.
‘You may be surprised’, says Dante, ‘that I speak of love as if it were a thing that could exist by itself; and not only as if it were an intelligent substance, but even as if it were a corporeal substance. Now this, according to the truth, is false. For love has not, like a substance, an existence of its own, but is only an accident occurring in a substance.’ However the personification is to be defended, it is clear that Dante has no thought of pretending that it is more than a personification. It is, as he says himself a moment later, figura o colore rettorico, a piece of technique, a weapon in the armoury of ῥητορική. As such it is naturally defended by an appeal to literary precedent. In Latin poetry, he observes, ‘many accidents speak as if they were substances and men’; and that would be for Dante a sufficient defence if he did not find it necessary—such was the formalism of the age—to prove at some length that riming in the vernacular (dire per rima) did really correspond to versifying in Latin (dire per versi), and that the rimer might therefore justly claim all those licences which were already conceded to the versifier. He must not, however, use them arbitrarily; he must have a reason, and it must even be ‘the sort of reason that could be explained in prose’. ‘It would be a great disgrace’, Dante adds, ‘to a man, if he should rime matters under figure and rhetorical colouring, and then, when he was asked, could not strip off that vesture and show the true sense.’
The great allegorist’s firm thinking leaves no room for misunderstanding. There is nothing ‘mystical’ or mysterious about medieval allegory; the poets know quite clearly what they are about and are well aware that the figures which they present to us are fictions. Symbolism is a mode of thought, but allegory is a mode of expression. It belongs to the form of poetry, more than to its content, and it is learned from the practice of the ancients. If Dante is right—and he almost certainly is—we must begin the history of allegory with the personifications in classical Latin poetry.
II
The function of personification has been laid down by Johnson. ‘Fame tells a tale or Victory hovers over a general or perches on a standard; but Fame and Victory can do no more.’ This is entirely true of the personifications in our own ‘classical’ poets; and if in later Roman poetry such figures found that they could do many things besides perching and hovering, this is because they meant, from the beginning, something more to the Roman than to Gray and Collins. Roman religion begins with the worship of things that seem to us to be mere abstractions; it goes on to build temples to deities like Fides, Concordia, Mens, and Salus. Conversely, names which seem to us to be the names of concrete deities can be used in contexts where we can only use an abstract noun—aequo marte, per veneris res, and the like. This usage is not particularly late, for it is found in Ennius; nor particularly poetical, for it is found in Caesar. Taking these two facts together, we are forced to the conclusion that a distinction which is fundamental for us—the distinction, namely, between an abstract universal and a living spirit—was only vaguely and intermittently present to the Roman mind. Nor need we despair of recovering, for a moment, this point of view, if we remember the strange border-line position which a notion such as ‘Nature’ occupies to-day in the mind of an imaginative and unphilosophical person who has read many books of popularized science. It is something more than a personification and less than a myth, and ready to be either or both as the stress of argument demands. This confusion (if it is a confusion) is not the same as allegory; indeed it is largely cleared up before the great age of allegory arrives. But its presence in the personifications and deities of the Augustans qualified them for those changes which they afterwards underwent, and was the condition—though not, of course, the cause—of that drift towards allegory which can be seen in post-Virgilian poetry.
I find this drift towards allegory, in its early stages, well illustrated in the Thebaid of Statius. I do not know whether its personifications are more numerous than those of the Aeneid or not, for I have not counted them. The question is not one of arithmetic; it is not the number of the personifications that matters, but the way in which they are used and the changing relations between personification and mythology. For in the Thebaid there is a double process at work. On the one hand, the gods are becoming more and more like mere personifications; on the other, the personifications are beginning to trespass farther and farther beyond the boundaries which Johnson assigns them. The first process can be seen in the treatment of Mars. Statius has a good deal to say about Mars, but the place which he finds for him in the story is not a genuinely mythological place—such, for example, as Juno’s place in the Aeneid. Juno has a mythological reason for disliking the Trojans. She is still brooding over the spretae injuria formae. She has personal motives for her conduct, and those motives can be explained by the earlier history which is presupposed in the poem. If Mars were to be introduced in the Theban war in the same mythological fashion, we should expect to find him interfering on one side or the other for some intelligible personal motive: he might be provided with an old grudge against the Thebans, or he might be the ancestor of some prominent combatant. In the Thebaid, however, he has no such motive. Indeed he does not act independently at all. He is simply summoned by Jupiter; and it is equally significant that Jupiter commands him, not to interfere in the war, but simply and solely to stir it up.
Thee let them all desire, headlong to thee
Vow hand and heart: snatch them from slow delay
And break their treaties.
This is, in effect, precisely what he does—‘enamours of himself their quivering souls’. In other words, he does nothing which the personification War (or Bellona) might not do equally well.
His business is not to influence wars, but to inspire them; he is in fact ‘an accident occurring in a substance’, the martial or pugnacious spirit as it exists in the mind now of one nation, and now of another, at the bidding of Fate. It is quite in accordance with the allegorical nature of the Statian Mars that he should not be present at the councils of Jupiter, but should have to be summoned. ‘War’ or ‘Bellicosity’ is not itself Fate: it is one of the instruments of Fate, to be called up in the minds of men when Fate requires. This is well brought out in the seventh book, where Jupiter, finding his previous employment of Mars—that is, his previous dose of martial ardour—insufficient to stimulate the combatants, sends Mercury to rouse Mars a second time. For this purpose Mercury has to go to Thrace and to find Mars at home, and here we have the fully developed ‘House’ of an allegorical being, in the sense in which we speak of the ‘House’ of Fame, or of Pride.
Here he beheld, Mars’ home, the leafless woods
’Neath Haemus crags, and shuddered as he saw,
Beset with thousand Phrensies, his dread house . . .
Fit sentries guard it: from the portal leaps
Passion insane, blind Wrong, and Angers red.
It is equally characteristic that Mars, who was out when Mercury arrived, should suddenly appear ‘fair-attired In gore Hyrcanian’ and so terrible that Jove himself would have felt reverence if he had been present. In the same way when Jupiter had summoned him for the first time, he had been found ‘wasting the Getic and Bistonian cities’. In other words, Mars is ‘discovered raging’ when the curtain rises and before he has any reason to rage. Naturally; for when War is not raging he does not exist. It is his esse to rage. But that is not the nature of a genuinely mythological figure. The Homeric Ares has many interests besides war. Poseidon has a life and character of his own apart from his quarrel with Odysseus. The esse of Juno is not exhausted in her opposition to the Trojans.
The same thing strikes us in Statius’ description of the attendants of Bacchus; and this is all the more remarkable because Bacchus is elsewhere used by him, not as an allegorical, but as a romantic figure. He is the Ismeno of the poem who delays the invading army by his enchantments. Yet in spite of this, when the poet gives us a full-length description of Bacchus he seems to forget both his own romance and the materials with which Greek mythology would so readily have supplied him. We expect Silenus and his ass: what we get is
Nor less inflamed his followers, Madness, Wrath,
Valour and Fear and drunken Zeal succeed,
All staggering, like their lord, with steps unsure.
Bacchus has become merely Drunkenness personified, and a medieval poet would have put just such companions—with the exception of Virtus—as followers in the train of Gula. The astonishing appearance of Pallas in the second book, where Pallas is undisguisedly a state of Tydeus’ mind, is yet another example of the same tendency; and it is a useful critical exercise to compare this with the corresponding passage in the Iliad.
But the twilight of the gods is the mid-morning of the personifications. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is to be found in the tenth book. The oracles have just announced that Thebes can be saved only by a human sacrifice; and it is quite in accordance with the epic tradition that a supernatural being should descend, should put on the disguise of a familiar mortal, and in that form appear to the young Menoeceus where he is fighting at the gate, there to warn him of the heroic destiny that awaits him and to urge him to seize it. But who that knows only his Virgil and his Homer would have expected this part to be played, not by Pallas or Mercury or Apollo, but by the personification Virtus? We must not call this frigid. Virtus too had her temples, and if Statius employs her rather than the Olympians as the machine for one of the gravest and most affecting passages in his poem, this is because she is to him a deity more serious and, in a sense, more real than all the Graeco-Roman pantheon. Indeed, if we do not understand this gravity in his personifications, if we do not see that his Olympians come nearest to mere machinery and his personifications nearest to real imaginative expression, we shall have missed the whole significance of his work. His Juno is a mere scold; his Bacchus an irrelevant magician. It is when he comes to speak of Clementia that we find something like real religious emotion.
An altar midst the city rose
Which none of all the mightier gods can claim,
Mild Mercy’s seat, hallow’d continually
By suppliant sorrow, never thence repulsed—
To ask is to obtain.
Yet with all this—and the point is crucial—there is no pretence that Clementia is other than a state of mind; ‘the mind and heart of man her chosen haunt’, says Statius; and the same might be said of all his gods. They are all things that live and die in the inner world of the soul, all ‘accidents occurring in a substance’; but it is those which are most confessedly so, which drag after them the least train of irrelevant mythological association, that engage his deepest reverence and evoke his best poetry. If there is anything in the whole poem which is serious, which is struck out from the author’s real sense of life, it is surely the words with which Pietas begins her speech:
Why didst thou make me, Sovran Nature? Why
Create me to oppose the cruel will
Of mortals, and oft-times immortals too?
—words in which one can almost see the faded gods of mythology being shouldered aside between those potent abstractions Pietas and Natura—Pite and Kind as they are called in the centuries that follow. But Pietas is not content merely to complain; and here we approach the core of Statius’ poem. A few hundred lines before the speech of Pietas, Tisiphone and Megaera—themselves scarcely less allegorical than she—have met to consummate the horrors of the Theban war by promoting a single combat between the brothers Polynices and Eteocles. ‘It shall be done’, cry the Furies.
Though Piety, though gentle Faith forbid,
They shall be conquer’d!
If this stood alone it might pass for ordinary rhetoric, and the reader who felt himself, in this suggested conflict of the fiends and the virtues, reminded of the theme of the Psychomachia, might be suspected of whimsicality. But what the Furies prophesy actually comes to pass; Pietas is introduced for no other purpose than that she should descend to the field of battle, not primarily to influence the brothers—though she does that too—but to meet Megaera and Tisiphone face to face. She is, indeed, defeated, and flies at a blow from the torch and serpents of her adversaries; but in that moment, while the human (and Olympian) action of the poem stays suspended and the personified good and evil of the human soul contend, not through their human representatives, but, face to face, with each other, lies the germ of all the allegorical poetry. Here already in the pagan poet we have in no ambiguous form the favourite theme of the Middle Ages—the battle of the virtues and the vices, the Psychomachia, the bellum intestinum, the Holy War. Nor is this passage merely an irrelevant decoration in the Thebaid. The climax of the whole poem is the coming of Theseus, and the consequent cutting away of all the tangled foulness of Thebes. This is told rapidly, as it ought to be; not, as a modern critic thinks, because the poet is tired and perfunctory, but because it is essential that we should have the impression, not of new wars following upon the old, but of awaking from nightmare, of sudden quiet after storm, of a single sword-stroke ending for ever the abominations. But brief as he is, Statius finds time to put the significance of his Theseus beyond mistake. His war is a holy war: his victory wipes out the momentary defeat of Pietas. For Theseus, like Pietas herself, claims Natura as his patron, and sees the struggle as a Psychomachia.
Comrades, defenders of the laws of Earth
And universal covenant, be your minds
Worthy the task! on whose cause gods and men
Smile, and our captain Nature, and the realms
Of mute Avernus. On the other side
For Thebes the snaky-headed sisters raise
Their standard and the Spirits of Vengeance come.
And this point of view, which is assuredly that of the poet, is not peculiar to Theseus. It is what is expected of him; and the spokesman of the Argive widows, in first invoking his assistance, had appealed in the very words of Pietas to Princeps Natura.
I am not, of course, contending that the Thebaid is so grave a poem as these quotations would suggest. It stands, indeed, at about the same distance from true epic seriousness as the Gerusalemme Liberata, though, to be sure, the Latin poem is journeying away from the epic while the Italian is returning to it. Much of the charm of Statius depends on his deliberate departure from the heroic tension, his quest of graceful and romantic variation; he is a pioneer in that art of interweaving to which later literature owes so many wilful beauties, and his fourth and fifth books are a kind of early draft of the Orlando Furioso. There are many reasons for that popularity which our modern classical tradition—a charming mistress but a bad master—finds so hard to understand. But it does not matter for our present purpose exactly how serious we take the Thebaid to be. The important thing is that just in so far as it is serious, so far it is tending to be allegorical. Whatever in it is serious is in the nature of a Psychomachia. The theme of its noblest passages could almost be described in words adapted from Dante—literaliter bellum Thebanum; allegorice Homo. Its gods are only abstractions and its abstractions, though confessedly belonging to the inner world, are almost gods.
III
We have touched already on those characteristics in Roman religion which rendered possible this double movement. Conditions, however, are not causes. It remains to discover, if we can, the process by which the fading of the gods and the apotheosis of the abstractions actually came about. To some extent, no doubt, such a process was likely to occur with the mere decline of creative literary power. Rhetoric is the readiest substitute for poetry, and rhetoric loves personification; while, on the other hand, the uninspired use of the pantheon as mere epic machinery is pretty sure to bring to the surface any element of abstraction which is already latent in them. But this sort of explanation will not carry us so far as is often supposed. It depends on a serious exaggeration of the faults of silver Latin literature; it fails to account for the real poetry that breathes in some of the most allegorical passages of Statius; and it fails still more conspicuously to explain the charm which allegory continued to exercise on the following centuries. The truth is that neither of these two developments was a merely literary phenomenon: few literary phenomena are. Both spring from the whole mental life of the period in question; both reflect the spirit of those centuries of moral and religious experiment from which Christianity finally emerged victorious.
The twilight of the gods—to take this aspect first—must not be supposed to be in any sense a result of Christianity. It is already far advanced in Statius, and Statius, as a poet, but feebly reflects what philosophy had done long before him. It represents, in fact, the modus vivendi between monotheism and mythology. Monotheism should not be regarded as the rival of polytheism, but rather as its maturity. Where you find polytheism, combined with any speculative power and any leisure for speculation, monotheism will sooner or later arise as a natural development. The principle, I understand, is well illustrated in the history of Indian religion. Behind the gods arises the One, and the gods as well as the men are only his dreams. That is one way of disposing of the Many. European thought did not follow the same path, but it was faced with the same problem. The best minds embrace monotheism. What is to be done with the gods of the popular religion? The answer—or at least that form of the answer which concerns us most—was given by the Stoics. ‘Deus pertinens per naturam cuiusque rei, per terras Ceres, per maria Neptunus, alii per alia, poterunt intelligi’—where the very construction Deus poterunt hits off the corresponding state of mind to a nicety. The gods are to be aspects, manifestations, temporary or partial embodiments of the single power. They are, in fact, personifications of the abstracted attributes of the One. We must cease to repine at the gods of Statius as if they were the arbitrary blunders of an individual poet. They are a necessary stage in the life of ancient religion and the poet, in attempting to depict them, is giving expression to the deepest experience of his age. It is his mythological treatment of Bacchus which is purely literary and derivative; it is his allegorical treatment of Bacchus and of Mars which is alive. The same clue enables us to understand his Princeps Natura; for this ‘Nature’, to whom Pietas can appeal over the heads of men and gods, is no other than that One in whose light the Olympians are beginning to look pale. She is the Whole (or God, or Nature, or Cosmus) of the Stoics; the φύσις of Marcus Aurelius, the Natura of Seneca; the ancestress of Alanus’ Natura and Chaucer’s Kinde.
The allegorization of the pantheon is thus seen to depend on causes that go beyond merely literary history; and the same may be said of the flourishing of the personifications. They also depend upon a profound change in the mind of antiquity; but this time it is a change of moral experience rather than of thought. A ready way of indicating its nature—for I have foresworn any attempt to explain its causes—will be to remind the modern student of a certain surprise which he probably felt when he first read the Ethics of Aristotle. For us moderns the essence of the moral life seems to lie in the antithesis between duty and inclination. Special moral theories may attempt to resolve it, and some of ‘our late fantasticks’ may try to look round it or over it; but it remains, nevertheless, the experience from which we all start. All our serious imaginative work, when it touches morals, paints a conflict: all practical moralists sing to battle or give hints about the appropriate strategy. Take away the concept of ‘temptation’ and nearly all that we say or think about good and evil would vanish into thin air. But when we first opened our Aristotle, we found to our astonishment that this inner conflict was for him so little of the essence of the moral life, that he tended to thrust it into a corner and treat it almost as a special case—that of the άκρατής. The really good man, in Aristotle’s view, is not tempted. Where we incline to think that ‘good thews inforced with pains’ are more praiseworthy than mere goodness of disposition, Aristotle coolly remarks that the man who is temperate at a cost is profligate: the really temperate man abstains because he likes abstaining. The ease and pleasure with which good acts are done, the absence of moral ‘effort’ is for him the symptom of virtue.
Now when we turn to the moralists who lived under the Roman Empire, all this is changed. I do not know whether they were better or worse than the contemporaries of Aristotle; but they were certainly more conscious of a difficulty in being good. ‘Fight the good fight’—how oddly the words would sound in the Ethics! Under the Empire, they are on every moralist’s lips. The examples which could be drawn from the writings of St. Paul alone would be enough to prove a far-reaching change. But the phenomenon is by no means a result of Christianity, however much Christianity may have done to deepen and perpetuate it. Here again, as in the case of monotheism, we have to do with a characteristic, not of Christianity alone, but of the whole period from which the Christian empire emerged. We must not attribute solely to the precipitate that which was already present in the solution. ‘The life of every man is a soldier’s service’, writes Epictetus, ‘and that long and various’. ‘For we also must be soldiers,’ says Seneca, ‘and in a campaign where there is no intermission and no rest.’ Or again, in words more closely reminiscent of the New Testament, ‘let us also conquer all things. For our prize is not a crown nor a palm nor a herald calling silence to cry our name, but virtue, and strength of mind, and peace.’ Nor are these conflicts, for Seneca, merely an accident of the moral life; they are its essence. He can describe (none better) the dewy freshness of the golden age, but he closes his account with a corrective. Its children were not Stoic saints (sapientes). They were innocent because they knew no evil, but innocence is not goodness. Even divine Nature, even in her prime, cannot make virtue a gift; ars est bonum fieri.
The first step, then, towards understanding the role which the abstractions play in Statius and in his successors is to remark that the men of that age, if they had not discovered the moral conflict, had at least discovered in it a new importance. They were vividly aware, as the Greeks had not been, of the divided will, the bellum intestinum. The new state of mind can be studied almost equally well in Seneca, in St. Paul, in Epictetus, in Marcus Aurelius, and in Tertullian.
But to be thus conscious of the divided will is necessarily to turn the mind in upon itself. Whether it is the introspection which reveals the division, or whether the division, having first revealed itself in the experience of actual moral failure, provokes the introspection, need not here be decided. Whatever the causal order may be, it is plain that to fight against ‘Temptation’ is also to explore the inner world; and it is scarcely less plain that to do so is to be already on the verge of allegory. We cannot speak, perhaps we can hardly think, of an ‘inner conflict’ without a metaphor; and every metaphor is an allegory in little. And as the conflict becomes more and more important, it is inevitable that these metaphors should expand and coalesce, and finally turn into the fully-fledged allegorical poem. It would be a misunderstanding to suggest that there is another and better way of representing that inner world, and that we have found it in the novel and the drama. The gaze turned inward with a moral purpose does not discover character. No man is a ‘character’ to himself, and least of all while he thinks of good and evil. Character is what he has to produce; within he finds only the raw material, the passions and emotions which contend for mastery. That unitary ‘soul’ or ‘personality’ which interests the novelist is for him merely the arena in which the combatants meet: it is to the combatants—those ‘accidents occurring in a substance’—that he must attend. Nor will he long attend to them—specially if he has had a Roman training in the schools of rhetoric—without giving them their Hegelian ‘hands and feet’. For such a man allegory will be no frigid form. It is idle to tell him that something with which he has been at death-grips for the last twenty-four hours is an ‘abstraction’; and if we could be free, for a little, of our own Zeitgeist, we might confess that it is not very much more abstract than that ‘self’ or ‘personality’ on whose rock-bottom unity we rest so secure and of which we would so much rather hear him talk.
The explanation which I have just given of the allegorical tendency does not, of course, exclude the acknowledgement of other, subsidiary, causes. Such were pretty certainly at work. The sheer momentum which the rhetorical machine had gathered from several centuries’ running counts for something. Again, the habit of applying allegorical interpretation to ancient texts naturally encouraged fresh allegorical constructions, and this method was freely practised by both pagans and Christians. During a period of religious controversy it is, indeed, the most obvious way of tuning primitive documents to meet the ethical or polemical demands of the moment. The Stoics, apart from their general doctrine of the gods as manifestations of the One, were always ready to explain particular myths by allegory. Saturn eating his children could be harmlessly interpreted as Time ‘bearing all his sons away’. Jove could be hoc sublime candens embracing the inner aer which was Juno. During the pagan revival which Christianity later provoked in the bosom of its enemy, the largest claims were made for this method by the patrons of the old religion. Allegory would solve all difficulties, and it would be found that ancient myth and modern philosophy were only two vestures for the same doctrine. On the Judaic and Christian side the same expedient was used. Philo Judaeus in the first century takes over from Rabbinical tradition this method of interpreting the Hebrew scriptures; and the doctrine of the hidden senses of the Bible passes from Origen and the Alexandrians to the West and is handed down by such writers as Hilary of Poitiers and Ambrose. It is, however, extremely probable that any help which this method of exegesis lent to the original allegory was amply repaid: when allegory becomes a man’s natural mode of expression it is inevitable that he will find more and more allegory in the ancient authors whom he respects. What is not to be thought of is that the mere practice of allegorical interpretation or the mere impetus of rhetoric, by themselves, could have imposed an ‘allegorical period’ on the literature that followed. They were influential; but we must ask why they were influential. The answer, I believe, is to be found in that need for allegory which much deeper causes had produced. The root of this need as we have seen is twofold; on the one hand, the gods sink into personifications; on the other, a widespread moral revolution forces men to personify their passions.
In the writers who lead up to Prudentius we can see this second process—the emergence of mental facts into allegory—steadily at work. A few pages ago I quoted passages from Seneca to show the kind of moral experience which separates him from Aristotle; but it was impossible to choose passages which did not at the same time illustrate how naturally such experience expressed itself in metaphors—and in just those metaphors, borrowed from the battle-field and the arena, which are the basis of the later allegory. The list might have been greatly increased. The pleasures are to be fought down (debellandae). We must watch more carefully than the soldiers in an ordinary war, for if we once let the enemy (Pleasure) slip through, she will drag a host of other enemies after her. Or again, we are engaged in a lawsuit which must be pursued sine modo and sine fine for our adversary also is endless and immoderate. Our appetites are lying in wait for us, to strangle us like the thieves in Egypt. Life is a journey wherein we shall often be weary; at one place we shall lose a fellow traveller, at another be afraid. One is reminded of the Pilgrim’s Progress, and there is nothing whimsical about the association. It is perception of a real similarity, based on a common cause. Evidences of the same personifying tendency, in an even more advanced form, meet us from an unexpected quarter. If Apuleius is to be trusted, the stage of the second century already tolerated such characters as Terror and Metus. From Tertullian the industry of a French scholar has collected the most significant passages for our purpose. One of them is sufficiently remarkable. Patience is represented as sitting calm and peaceful, her stainless brow unwrinkled by grief or anger; and yet she ‘shakes her head at the devil and laughs a threatening laugh’. This is very odd behaviour for Patience; but the author’s inability to represent even this mild virtue except in conflict proves how deeply the idea of the bellum intestinum has entered into his mind. The same feeling inspires the more famous passage at the end of his De Spectaculis: ‘If you must have gladiators’, says Tertullian, ‘then behold Shamelessness hurled down by Chastity, Perfidy slain by Faith, and Cruelty crushed by Pity’.
But perhaps there is no writer who admits us so intimately into the heart of that age as Augustine. Sometimes he does so by accident, as when he comments on the fact—to him, apparently, remarkable—that Ambrose, when reading to himself, read silently. You could see his eyes moving, but you could hear nothing. In such a passage one has the solemn privilege of being present at the birth of a new world. Behind us is that almost unimaginable period, so relentlessly objective that in it even ‘reading’ (in our sense) did not yet exist. The book was still a λόγος, a speech; thinking was still διαλέγεσθαι, talking. Before us is our own world, the world of the printed or written page, and of the solitary reader who is accustomed to pass hours in the silent society of mental images evoked by written characters. This is a new light, and a better one than we have yet had, on that turning inward which I have tried to describe. It is the very moment of a transition more important, I would suggest, than any that is commonly recorded in our works of ‘history’. But it is seldom that Augustine is so unconscious as in this statement; more often he conveys to us a vivid sense of the delighted and horrified wonder with which he is consciously exploring the new inner world—
His ibi me rebus quaedam divina voluptas
Percipit atque horror.
‘I myself comprehend not all the thing I am.’ He is lost and bewildered. Every new path in this country excites his curiosity and his awe. Why did he rob the pear tree? Why does tragedy please? He worries such problems as a dog worries a bone. He wanders hither and thither in his own mind and speaks the very language of a traveller.
‘Climbing up, therefore, step by step to Him that made me, I will pass beyond this faculty of my nature and come to the fields and wide pavilions of the Memory’ . . .
‘Great is the power of Memory, Lord; an astonishment, a deep and boundless manifold. Yet this also is mind and I am this. What am I, Lord? What is my kind? Even a life that changes and hath many modes and cannot in any wise be measured. The fields, the caves, the dens of Memory cannot be counted; their fulness cannot be counted nor the kinds of things counted that fill them. . . . I force my way in amidst them, even as far as my power reaches, and nowhere find an end.’
Such a passage, if not allegorical itself, paints vividly for us the experiences of the age in which allegory was born—experiences strangely analogous to those of the beginner in modern psychology. And though Augustine writes no full-length allegory, he pushes his imagery elsewhere a little farther in the allegorical direction. He also must talk of soldiers and of a road; and in the great scene of his conversion, the temptations—here none will dare to call them abstractions—step forth in bodily form.
‘Trifles of trifles and very vanities which I had made my mistresses now held me back and plucked me by my carnal robe, whispering me, “Will you turn us away? Shall the moment come when you must part from us for ever? Shall the moment come when this—and this—will be forbidden you for ever?” . . . And now I hearkened to them with less than half myself. No longer did they gainsay me openly nor look me in the face, but came as it were behind me whispering and plucking at my robe as I went away; holding me back while I yet delayed to tear myself from them, to shake them off, to leap whither I was called—tyrannous custom asking me the while, “Is it possible, think you, to live without them”?’
IV
The historian is not at liberty to dispose his fable as he would wish. If, in fact, the mountains travailed and a mouse was born, his narrative must be content with the anticlimax. Such an anticlimax has to be faced when we reach the fully-fledged allegorical poem, the Psychomachia of Prudentius. It is unworthy of the great utterances which lead up to it and explain its existence. Indeed, if those utterances did not reveal more clearly than the poem itself the nature of the experience which is behind it, its lasting popularity and influence would be mysterious. In their light both are intelligible. When the demand is very strong a poor thing in the way of supply will be greedily embraced. Thus the intense desire of the eighteenth century for literature of a certain kind led them to accept MacPherson’s Ossian; thus, it is legitimate to suppose, certain contemporary works owe their reputation to the public desire for a new movement. What we long to see we readily believe that we have seen. If there is any safe generalization in literary history it is this: that the desire for a certain kind of product does not necessarily beget the power to produce it, while it does tend to beget the illusion that it has been produced. From this point of view we can see that it is possible to overrate the importance of the Psychomachia. If Prudentius had not written it, another would. It is a symptom rather than a source.
But we must not misunderstand its genesis. It has been supposed that Prudentius wrote as a propagandist, inspired by motives wholly irrelevant to poetry; that his aim was to provide educated Christians with something less dangerous in subject-matter than Virgil, while possessing all the charm of the epic manner and machinery; and that it was for this he chose the battle of the virtues and the vices. That some such intention was present in his mind as a subsidiary motive is, indeed, extremely probable. He is certainly very Virgilian; and he certainly carries out Tertullian’s recipe for a ‘sublimation’ of the gladiatorial taste.
Chance led the stone, shattering the ways of breath
To mingle lips with palate; the rent tongue,
With gory gobbets and the wreck of teeth
Dashed inward, stuff’d the lacerated throat.
That is as ‘really horrid’ as the Ovidian battle of the Centaurs and the Lapithae. But to suppose that Prudentius, or any of his contemporaries, needed such extraneous motives to guide him to the theme of a psychomachia is to misread the whole history of that age. Nor do I think that Prudentius had before him as his only model the brief hint in the De Spectaculis. When he writes thus of Libido attacking Pudicitia,
On comes the foe and bears a torch of pine
Instinct with burning sulphur, and intends
To assail with fire and dash with noisome smoke
Her modest eyes and face.
it does not seem to me fanciful to suppose that he remembered the similar attack suffered by Pietas in the Thebaid, where the Fury
came on and while she shunned
That sight, withdrawing far her modest face,
Pressed home the more with hissing snakes and aim’d
The torch.
It is true, as I said before, that the Psychomachia is not a good poem: if it were indeed the result of some purely unpoetic purpose it could hardly be worse. But there are many ways in which poetry can go wrong and an impurity in the intention is only one of them. The Psychomachia fails, partly because Prudentius is naturally a lyrical and reflective poet—there is some fine, cloudly grandeur in the Hamartigenia—to whom the epic manner comes with difficulty, and partly for a deeper reason. While it is true that the bellum intestinum is the root of all allegory, it is no less true that only the crudest allegory will represent it by a pitched battle. The abstractions owe their life to the inner conflict; but when once they have come to life, the poet must fetch a compass and dispose his fiction more artfully if he is to succeed. Seneca, with his imagery of life as a journey, was nearer to the mark than Prudentius; for Seneca outlined the theme of the Pilgrim’s Progress, and the Pilgrim’s Progress is a better book than the Holy War. It is not hard to see why this should be so. The journey has its ups and downs, its pleasant resting-places enjoyed for a night and then abandoned, its unexpected meetings, its rumours of dangers ahead, and, above all, the sense of its goal, at first far distant and dimly heard of, but growing nearer at every turn of the road. Now this represents far more truly than any combat in a champ clos the perennial strangeness, the adventurousness, and the sinuous forward movement of the inner life. It needs the long road and mountain prospects of the fable to match the ἄπειρον within. But there is another and more mechanical defect in the pitched battle, and this is one which already appears in Tertullian’s description of Patience. It arises from the fact that fighting is an activity that is not proper to most of the virtues. Courage can fight, and perhaps we can make a shift with Faith. But how is Patience to rage in battle? How is Mercy to strike down her foes, or Humility to triumph over them when fallen? Prudentius is almost everywhere embarrassed by this difficulty, and his attempts to solve it are failures because they betray his deficiency in humour. When Patientia, having provided herself with an excellent suit of armour (provida nam virtus), stands stock-still in the middle of a furious encounter and allows the darts of Ira to rattle harmlessly off her breastplate and the sword of Ira to break upon her helmet, we may approve the moral but we smile at the picture; and when Ira, having spent all her weapons, proceeds, as it were in a pet, to commit suicide, we are reminded irresistibly of the Tale of a Tub. The meeting between Superbia and Mens Humilis is almost equally unhappy. Superbia, on her horse, ‘quem pelle leonis Texerat et validos villis oneraverat armos’, rushes upon the virtue whom she has taunted in vain for nearly fifty lines, and falls head over heels into the pitfall which her own ally Fraus had dug shortly before the armies engaged. The moment has now come when Humility must triumph and yet remain humble. The unhappy poet, torn between the epic formula and the allegorical meaning, can only explain that she triumphs modestly:
Uplifts her face
With moderated cheer, and civil looks
Tempering her joy.
Os quoque parce Erigit—nothing could suggest more vividly the smirk of a persevering governess who has finally succeeded in getting a small boy into trouble with his father. In the end Spes has to come to the assistance of Mens Humilis, to dispatch the fallen enemy, and to uplift over her body the bēotword which epic usage demands.
Of the seven combats described, that between Luxuria and Sobrietas is perhaps the best. It should be noticed that Prudentius’ seven champions do not exactly correspond with the familiar list of the seven deadly sins in later writers. Luxuria, in the medieval sense, does not appear at all—Prudentius’ Libido is unnatural vice—and the sin which here bears her name is a kind of blend of Gula and Superbia. She is, in fact, something very like ‘luxury’ in the modern meaning of the word—the sin of the profiteer—and Amor, with Jocus and Petulantia, is still an unimportant attendant in her train. Yet it is Luxuria who of all the enemies comes nearest to success and lends the combat a faint colour of dramatic interest. The onset of the drunken champion, weakening the line of virtues with the fragrance that breathes from her car, is feelingly described. There is merit, too, and a kind that might escape modern attention, in the Δολωνεία of Avaritia who steals among the virtues disguised as Frugality
that the white pretended robe
May veil the lurking fury, and beneath
‘Care for our children’ (honourable style)
Hide theft and rapine and close-hoarded spoil.
The psychology of this may not seem to us profound nor hard to come by; but we must try to read these things as if the novelty were still upon them, and we must remember how rarely we find in classical literature any adequate recognition of the great fact of self-deception. An age that piques itself, as our does, on detecting the veiled egoism beneath the smooth masks of conventional virtues should not be slow to praise the admirable pioneer work which was done in this kind by the allegorists.
But it is only when Prudentius turns away from the actual fighting that his allegory begins to convince us. There are two passages near the end of the Psychomachia which are worth all the rest. The first comes when the celestial army returns within its lines after the defeat of Avarice. There is a loosening of belts, a sudden silence of trumpets, swords are returned to their sheaths, and as the dust of battle settles on the plain the blue sky once more becomes visible.
Bless’d Concord gives the word and bids recall
The conquering eagles to their tented camp.
The generals mount the tribunal in the midst of the camp and prepare to address the troops. The word is passed through the ranks:
From all the lines th’ assembling army hastes . . .
The tents, with canvas brail’d, thrown open wide
Discover all within, lest any there
Should snore obscure.
All this belongs to a different world from the outworn rags and tatters of the heroic tradition. It is given with the vividness of something seen. We can all but hear the voices shouting ‘Show a leg—show a leg’. Here, as in all those other military metaphors, whether of the Christian or of the pagan moralists, we are reminded of the lasting impression which the discipline and circumstance of the legions made upon all the nations of the empire; and, if we are wise, we are set pondering on the far-reaching consequences which that impression had for the imagination. We must never forget that the medieval Latin for a knight is miles; that the conception of earthly knighthood and that of the angelic knighthood (militia) are sometimes connected; and that both pre-suppose the discipline of the real Roman army. It is doubtful whether the whole ideal world of chivalry could have existed unless the legions had existed first; for by their aid both the Germanic comitatus and the Hebrew God ‘of hosts’ were touched to new issues. The second passage is only a single sentence; but it comes from the heart and reveals in a flash the real genesis of the poem.
War rages, horrid war
Even in our bones; our double nature sounds
With armèd discord.
It was no prosaic desire for innocent epic that moved Prudentius to write, and his contemporaries to read, the Psychomachia. It was their daily and hourly experience of the non simplex natura.
The further history of the genre which Prudentius here invented is no small part of the history of medieval literature; but for the moment it is time to return to the other side of our subject—the ever-deepening twilight of the gods. The steady decline of mythology into allegory can be traced in three writers of whom the first—Claudian—is Prudentius’ contemporary. It is true that Claudian might be cited equally well to illustrate the theme of the bellum intestinum; and the riot of personifications in his work is the answer to any theory which attributes the Psychomachia to some individual and specifically Christian purpose on the part of Prudentius. For Claudian, just as for the religious poet, allegorical conflict is the natural method of dealing with psychology. Thus, when he wishes to describe the moral excellences of Stilicho, he can do so only by telling us that in Stilicho the virtues have defeated the vices:
He puts to flight the spirits importunate
That hell sends from her monster-teeming gate.
We have travelled far indeed from the classic serenity of Aristotle; even a good man, even in a panegyric, can now be good only as the result of a successful psychomachy. To the same class belongs the visit of Astraea to Manlius Theodorus, and the flyting of Megaera and Justitia. But it would be foolish to emphasize this side of Claudian. We do not suspect in him any great depth of moral experience; he is in this merely symptomatic and follows, as a court poet must, the fashions of the moment. But this same lightness and shallowness in Claudian enables him to become, in another respect, a herald and pioneer. There are two passages in his poetry which are full of the promise of the Middle Ages. The first comes in the Consulship of Stilicho. We have been long immersed in the virtues and the vices of the hero, and in the rhetoric of the personified nations; then suddenly, at the end of the book, the scene changes. We are shown the cavern of all the years, annorum squalida mater, scarcely approachable by God or man. On the floor the serpent of eternity lies sleeping with his tail in his mouth. Before the entrance sits Nature, vultu longaeva decoro, and the souls of the unborn flit round her; by her side is an old man who writes her decrees in a book. To the threshold of this cave comes Sol; as he alights, Nature rises to greet him. No words are spoken, and we see the two turn back together through the adamantine doors that open unbidden, and pass into the recesses of the cave where the ages of gold, of silver, and of brass lie piled. Those of gold are selected to grace the consulship of Stilicho, and Sol returns with them to his own garden where dews of fire bathe the turf, and his horses, unyoked, clip the grass wet with liquid flame. The allegory here is trite. As allegory it is not worth the space allotted to it; the poet’s aim is decoration. But for that very reason, because he is merely decorating, he is free to rest from the serious purpose of his poem, and to luxuriate in description. The drowsy cavern and the silent figures meeting at its threshold exist, for a moment, in their own right. The allegory is only the pretext. The second passage comes in the Epithalamium for Honorius. In poems of this type it is natural to invoke Venus and Hymen, but Claudian is not content with invocation. Turning his back on the nominal subject of his poem, he carries us away to a mountain in Cyprus which the frosts never whiten and the winds never beat. On the mountain head is a meadow guarded by a hedge of gold, and all within it blooms unsown, zephyro contenta colono. Only the sweetest songbirds live in its copses, where
Each happy tree
Woos and is wooed. Palms nodding from above
Exchange their vows and poplar sighs for love
Of poplar, plane for plane, and whispers low
Of love along the alder thickets go.
There are two fountains here, one sweet, the other bitter, and here live the Amores and Metus and Voluptas. Juventas also is there and he has shut Senium out from the garden. In all this the student of medieval allegory will find the first outline of much that is familiar to him. The two fountains can be paralleled by the single fountain in Andreas Capellanus which is sweet and gracious at its source, but freezing and baleful as it spreads into the region of Humiditas. The hedged garden or park already anticipates the scenery of the Romance of the Rose; and, as in the Romance, Youth is in the garden and Eld is outside. But it is not for this reason only that I have cited the passage. It is because I would willingly begin to show as soon as possible that the decline of the gods, from deity to hypostasis and from hypostasis to decoration, was not, for them nor for us, a history of sheer loss. For decoration may let romance in. The poet is free to invent, beyond the limits of the possible, regions of strangeness and beauty for their own sake. I do not mean, necessarily, that Claudian is a romantic. The question is not so much what these things meant to him as he wrote, but what they meant to later generations, and what they paved the way to. Under the pretext of allegory something else has slipped in, and something so important that the garden in the Romance of the Rose itself is only one of its temporary embodiments—something which, under many names, lurks at the back of most romantic poetry. I mean the ‘other world’ not of religion, but of imagination; the land of longing, the Earthly Paradise, the garden east of the sun and west of the moon. Just as the gods—and their homes—are fading into mere decoration, in the mythological poets of this age, we catch a glimpse of the new life and the new dwellings that poetry will find for them.
The point—which can never be made clear in the sense of being made ‘fool-proof’—will, I trust, become a little clearer before the end of the chapter. Let us turn to Claudian’s fifth-century successor, Sidonius Apollinaris. Here again we find the luxuriance in mythological description for its own sake; and here again the pretext—without which the mythology could hardly gain admission—is allegorical. In many ways Sidonius is far more medieval than Claudian. The graces, or what he conceives to be the graces, of his style are far removed from the classical model; sometimes it is a series of puns (glaucus, glauce, venis—Phoebus ephebus), sometimes a tasteless reduplication of examples which anticipates the worst passages in Alanus. The Cave which he assigns to Venus (of course in an Epithalamium) is intolerably bright with jewels, and anticipates similar dwellings in Gavin Douglas and elsewhere. We even have the typically medieval theme of the proud young man (Bayard-Troilus) tamed by Venus. ‘Gaudemus, nate’, says Venus, ‘rebellem quod vincis’. We have the allegorical ‘houses’. Pallas, in the Epithalamium for Polemius and Araneola, has two of them; one belongs to her as the patroness of wisdom, the other as patroness of needlework. The first is described in terms that might have been used by Lydgate:
Here sit the Seven Wise Men, the source and fount
Of more philosophies than I can count; . . .
Shut out, but near the door, the Cynics are,
But Epicurus Virtue keeps afar.
But, once again, such poetry as Sidonius has does not lie in the significatio of these fictions. It is strange and bright places that he wishes to describe, not moral realities. His best work—niggling, exotic, miniature work it is—is expended on the trappings of the allegory; on the effect of light and water in the Epithalamium Ruricio et Iberiae and on the Triton a few lines farther.
The late epithalamium, indeed, played an important part in saving both the love-lore and the mythology of paganism for Christian poetry. This is rather startlingly illustrated in the work of Ennodius, who lived at the turn of the fifth and sixth centuries. Ennodius was a bishop (like Sidonius), the author of a devotional autobiography and some hymns; but when he comes to write an epithalamium he follows the example of Claudian and Sidonius, in preference to the chaster model of Paulinus Nolensis. He goes, however, beyond his masters, and allegorizes with a boldness and gusto that are somewhat surprising. He begins by striking the genuine May morning note of the later poets:
When young blades shoot and Nature in her bower,
Sits at her work, the world grows warm the while,
And when the sun paints earth with many a flower,
Love, beauty, bravery, all are in his smile.
From this we pass to the picture of Venus playing among the flowers, orbe captivo, and her naked beauty—‘Proditum risit sine nube corpus’—is described. Cupid approaches her with a complaint. ‘We have lost our old empire. Cold virginity possesses the world. Arise! Shake off your sleep.’ His mother replies: ‘We shall be all the stronger for our rest. Let the nations learn that a goddess grows in power when no one thinks of her.’ Their consequent expedition against the proud youth—that is, the bridegroom—and his capture, follow conventional lines. No comment can add anything to the startling significance of this little poem. If the gods had not died into allegory, the Bishop would not have dared to use them; conversely, if he had not had allegorical gods for his mouthpiece, he could scarcely have put the ‘case’ of Venus against asceticism so strongly. I do not mean that it was his intention to put it at all. He had probably in his allegory no purpose but to decorate an occasional copy of verses according to the best models. Yet in so doing he stumbles upon freedom. He is free to wander in fairyland, and he is also free to anticipate the eleventh-century reaction against asceticism. In one of the lines which I have translated—
Discant populi tunc crescere divam
Cum neglecta iacet—
it is as if some mischievous spirit of prophesy took the pen out of his hand and wrote for us the history both of allegory and of courtly love.
It is to the same class of mythological allegory that I would assign the work of another writer, if I felt sure that any classification could hold him; for this universe, which has produced the bee-orchid and the giraffe, has produced nothing stranger than Martianus Capella. Characteristically, we know little of the man. He lived in the ‘blessed city of Elissa’ (he means Carthage), and he wrote when he was old. It is uncertain whether he was a Christian or a pagan. Indeed, the distinction scarcely applies to him; such men do not have beliefs. I have heard the scholar defined as one who has a propensity to collect useless information, and in this sense Martianus is the very type of the scholar. The philosophies of others, the religions of others—back even to the twilight of pre-republican Rome—have all gone into the curiosity shop of his mind. It is not his business to believe or disbelieve them; the wicked old pedant knows a trick worth two of that. He piles them up all round him till there is hardly room for him to sit among them in the middle darkness of the shop; and there he gloats and catalogues, but never dusts them, for even their dust is precious in his eyes. Formally considered, his book De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, is a treatise on the seven liberal arts, set in the framework of an allegorical marriage between Eloquence (Mercury) and Learning (Philologia). But the author deceived himself if he thought that by this framework he was gilding the pill for the benefit of his pupils. On the contrary, it was for himself that the fable was a necessary outlet—a receptacle into which he could work every scrap of erudite lumber and every excruciating quirk of his euphuism which was left over from the seven arts. It enables him, in fact, to lead us wherever he will; and lead us he does, through a chaos beside which the work of Rabelais has unity and that of Mandeville probability. We see Mercury and Virtue visiting the Cirrhaean cave where they find the Fortunes in a melodious grove. The different musical functions of the higher and lower branches are exhaustively treated and the passage looks backward to Tiberianus’ Amnis ibat and forward to the Bower of Bliss. Close to this are the rivers caelitus defluentes, each of which has a different colour and in which the Fortunes are often carried away, with complex allegorical significance. Hence, having first met Apollo with his vessels of iron, of silver, of lead, and of glass, they ascend to heaven (like Scipio, Dante, and Chaucer) and are speeded in their flight by the universal rejoicing of nature—conspiceres totius mundi gaudia convenire. (This passage may have helped Alanus to one of his best scenes.) Arrived in heaven they see the globe in which the gods behold depicted the whole universe tam in specie quam in genere, and we are reminded of Venus’ mirror in the Palice of Honour. From these regions we descend to earth again and visit the bride Philology. Her fears and hesitations about the proposed match allow the author to display his curious knowledge of the various obscurer kinds of augury, until Philology is interrupted by the arrival of the Muses, the Virtues, and Athanasia. The latter compels her to vomit books (like Error in the Faerie Queene) before allowing her to taste the cup of immortality. When these preparations are completed, a second ascent to heaven furnishes an opportunity of cataloguing, and assigning to their proper places, the whole fauna of Martianus’ universe: Di, Caelites, Medioxumi or Daimones (Graeci dicunt ἀπὸ τοῦ Δαήμονας εἶναι), Semidei, Longaevi (such as satyrs), and the rest. A little later we are watching the solar ship, with its cat, its crocodile, and its lion, and its crew of seven sailors. Arrived at her journey’s end, the bride leaps from her floating couch, and sees ‘the immense plains of light and the springtime of the ethereal peace’; but knowing that the true God is beyond all these and far even from the knowledge of the gods—words which may bear a Neoplatonic as well as a Christian interpretation—she prays in silence to the dweller in that intelligible world, and propitiates—mysteriously enough—a fontana virgo.
The De Nuptiis, as is well known, became a text-book in the Middle Ages. Its encyclopaedic character made it invaluable for men who aimed at a universality in knowledge without being able, or perhaps willing, to return to the higher authorities. The fantastical ‘babu’ ornaments of the style were admired. The mixture of fable with grammatical or scientific doctrine was a damnosa hereditas which it bequeathed to the following centuries; Martianus, I take it, must bear the chief responsibility for Hawes’ Tower of Doctrine and Spenser’s House of Alma. He established a disastrous precedent for endlessness and formlessness in literary work. Yet I cannot persuade myself that the Middle Ages were entirely unhappy in their choice of a master. Martianus may have been a bad fairy; but I think he had the fairy blood in him. His building is a palace without design; the passages are tortuous, the rooms disfigured with senseless gilding, ill-ventilated, and horribly crowded with knick-knacks. But the knick-knacks are very curious, very strange; and who will say at what point strangeness begins to turn into beauty? I must confess, too, that I am sufficiently of the author’s kidney to enjoy the faint smell of the secular dust that lies upon them. At every moment we are reminded of something in the far past or something still to come. What is at hand may be dull; but we never lose faith in the richness of the collection as a whole. Anything may come next. We are ‘pleased, like travellers, with seeing more’, and we are not always disappointed. Among all these figurative woods and streams, these wheeling poles and pedantic rituals, these solemn processions and councils of the gods—gods that seem no bigger than marionettes, but stiff with gold and carved with Chinese curiosity—among all these, some at any rate suffer us to forget their doctrinal purpose, and breathe the air of wonderland. I have an idea that if Lamb had known Latin enough to read it, this book might stand higher to-day in our estimation.
But the lasting consequence of all these writers, for the history of imagination, is far more certain than any assessment of their individual merits. In all of them alike, as I hinted above, we see the beginnings of that free creation of the marvellous which first slips in under the cloak of allegory. It is difficult for the modern man of letters to value this quiet revolution as it deserves. We are apt to take it for granted that a poet has at his command, besides the actual world and the world of his own religion, a third world of myth and fancy. The probable, the marvellous-taken-as-fact, the marvellous-known-to-be-fiction—such is the triple equipment of the post-Renaissance poet. Such were the three worlds which Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton were born to. London and Warwick, Heaven and Hell, Fairyland and Prospero’s Island—each has its own laws and its appropriate poetry. But this triple heritage is a late conquest. Go back to the beginnings of any literature and you will not find it. At the beginning the only marvels are the marvels which are taken for fact. The poet has only two of these three worlds. In the fullness of time the third world crept in, but only by a sort of accident. The old gods, when they ceased to be taken as gods, might so easily have been suppressed as devils: that, we know, is what happened to our incalculable loss in the history of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Only their allegorical use, prepared by slow developments within paganism itself, saved them, as in a temporary tomb, for the day when they could wake again in the beauty of acknowledged myth and thus provide modern Europe with its ‘third world’ of romantic imagining. And when they rose they were changed and gave to poetry that which poetry had scarcely had before. Let us be quite certain of this change. The gods—and, of course, I include under this title that whole ‘hemisphere of magic fiction’ which flows indirectly from them—the gods were not to paganism what they are to us. In classical poetry we hear plenty of them as objects of worship, of fear, of hatred; even as comic characters. But pure aesthetic contemplation of their eternity, their remoteness, and their peace, for its own sake, is curiously rare. There is, I think, only the one passage in all Homer; and it is echoed only by Lucretius. But Lucretius was an atheist; and that is precisely why he sees the beauty of the gods. For he himself, in another place, has laid his finger on the secret: it is religio that hides them. No religion, so long as it is believed, can have that kind of beauty which we find in the gods of Titian, of Botticelli, or of our own romantic poets. To this day you cannot make poetry of that sort out of the Christian heaven and hell. The gods must be, as it were, disinfected of belief; the last taint of the sacrifice, and of the urgent practical interest, the selfish prayer, must be washed away from them, before that other divinity can come to light in the imagination. For poetry to spread its wings fully, there must be, besides the believed religion, a marvellous that knows itself as myth. For this to come about, the old marvellous, which once was taken as fact, must be stored up somewhere, not wholly dead, but in a winter sleep, waiting its time. If it is not so stored up, if it is allowed to perish, then the imagination is impoverished. Such a sleeping-place was provided for the gods by allegory. Allegory may seem, at first, to have killed them; but it killed only as the sower kills, for gods, like other creatures, must die to live.
V
In the preceding sections I have tried to explain and to characterize the allegorical legacy which the ancient world on its death-bed bequeathed to the Dark Ages. It is not my purpose to follow in detail the history of that legacy from Martianus Capella to the Romance of the Rose. Some understanding of the seed was necessary for the appreciation of the flower, but we need not follow every winding of the stem. The unexperienced reader must, however, be saved from a misapprehension which our discussion naturally invites. He must not suppose that in passing over the centuries between the sixth and the twelfth we are leaving on one side a series of lengthy allegorical poems in which it would be possible to trace the continuous development of the Psychomachia or the De Nuptiis into the romantic allegory of the Middle Ages. The later allegory with its free, and often ingenious, plot, and its luxuriant poetry, is a genuinely new creation. It owes to antiquity and to the Dark Ages not so much its procedure as the preservation of that atmosphere in which allegory was a natural method. The Dark Ages produced few original allegorical poems on the large scale; but they kept alive the mood which was later to beget such poems, they read and admired the older allegorists, and they constantly employed allegory in the parts, if not in the structure, of their works. Thus it would be odd to class Boethius as an allegorist. On the other hand, his use of personification in the figure of Philosophia raises personification to a new dignity and is worthy to stand beside the Wisdom-literature of the Jews. He himself does not greatly allegorize; he leaves something, and something potent, ready to the hand of later writers. In the same way, his contemporary Fulgentius writes no new allegorical poem, but he does what is perhaps of more importance. In his famous—or notorious—Continentia Vergiliana we see for the first time the method of allegorical explanation applied in thoroughgoing fashion by a Christian grammarian to a pagan poet. The whole story of the Aeneid is interpreted as an allegory of the life of man. Sometimes Fulgentius does little more than harden and render explicit that which is dimly present to the mind of every reader of Virgil in every age. When Aeneas meeting Dido in the shades is made to typify the converted and corrected soul remembering the passions of dead youth, few of us will quarrel with the commentator. We are less pleased when the whole of the first book is treated as a picture of babyhood, and the song of Iopas is equated with the lullaby of our nurse. But the importance of Fulgentius is plain. When once the ancients are read in this way, then to imitate the ancients means to write allegory. Without himself allegorizing Fulgentius creates models for the later allegorist; by a sort of retrospective magic he creates models who lived centuries before his own time. It is true, no doubt, that the Dark Ages sometimes offer us a fully-fledged allegory. Fortunatus in the sixth century continues in his Epithalamium for Brunchild the erotic-mythical allegory of Claudian, Sidonius, and Ennodius. We have the May morning, the archery of Cupid, and his boast to his mother, ‘Mihi vincitur alter Achilles’. Purely religious allegory, of a far more developed type than the Psychomachia, is to be found in the beautiful, but desperately difficult, poem called the Well of Life, which was written by Audradus in the ninth century. The allegorical use of the beast fable was practised—perhaps for the first time—by an unknown poet of the tenth. What is of more consequence than these to the medievalist is the beginning of the floral symbolism and of the allegorical débat, both of which count for much in later poetry. They are to be found united in the very pleasant Contention of the Lily and the Rose by Sedulius Scotus (ninth century). Their strife is ended by the arrival of Spring—‘Tunc Ver florigera iuvenis pausabat in herba’. The claims of the two disputants are thus adjusted in his concluding speech:
O rosa pulchra tace, tua gloria claret in herba
Regia sed nitidis dominentur lilia sceptris—
Tu Rosa martyribus rutilam das stemmate palmam,
Lilia virgineas turbas decorate stolatas.
It is an appealing specimen of that fragile yet awkward prettiness which remains, in spite of our heroic preconceptions, one of the most predominant characteristics both of the Dark and of the Middle Ages.
But while it is natural to draw attention to such things, they do not very directly concern our subject. They do not constitute transitional works midway between the ancient and the medieval allegory. In this matter, as I have said, the Dark Ages held a waiting brief. It is not their complete allegories that count: it is the reiterated, though incidental, use of allegory in sermon and treatise, the repeated appearance of the virtues and vices in art, which steeped the mind of Europe in this mood and so prepared the way for Alanus de Insulis and Guillaume de Lorris. With the decay of civilization the subtleties of St. Augustine were lost: the vivid interest in the inner world, stimulated by the horrors and hopes of Christian eschatology, remained, and drove men, as always, to personification. The Seven (or Eight) Deadly Sins, imagined as persons, became so familiar that at last the believer seems to have lost all power of distinguishing between his allegory and his pneumatology. The Virtues and Vices become as real as the angels and the fiends. Such, at least, is the inference I draw from the vision of an English monk, in the seventh or eighth century—and dreams, in such a matter, are not the worst evidence. This monk—one of a hundred successors of Er and predecessors of Dante—could see all round him, as he left the body, the demons and angels contending for his soul. But mixed with the former were his own sins, whom he recognized by their voices as they cried out, ‘Ego sum cupiditas tua, Ego sum vana gloria’, and the like. On the other side, but smaller—parvae virtutes—his Fasts and his Obedience came to offer him their aid. From these he passes to the flaming river with its narrow bridge and sees the good souls pressing to cross over desiderio alterius ripae. All the actors and all the scenery are on the same plane of reality; and the story, like many others of its kind, may well record an actual dream. Such was once the concreteness of those figures whom our criticism would dismiss as ‘abstractions’.
The twilight of classical antiquity and the Dark Ages, then, had prepared in diverse ways for the great age of allegory. Antiquity had first created the demand and partly supplied it. The Dark Ages, while not adding very remarkably to the supply, had kept alive, and even rendered chronic, the demand. But the poets of courtly love were not the pioneers of the medieval allegory. It came to their hands already revivified by authors of a different stamp, who yet had something in common with them. To these authors—the great philosophical poets of the twelfth century—we must turn before we close the chapter. They are in themselves sufficiently remarkable; and I can at least promise the reader that they constitute the last digression which still divides us from our main theme.
VI
These writers may be described as the poets of the school of Chartres. Their leader, Bernardus Sylvestris, was a scholar in that school, and possibly chancellor; and they are all connected with it by clear lines of intellectual descent. For the reader, and still more for the writer, who is not learned in medieval philosophy, a very brief characterization of this school must suffice. In dealing with the Middle Ages we are often tricked by our imagination. We think of plate armour and Aristotelianism. But the end of the Middle Ages is already in sight when these attractive things appear. And just as the lobster shell of steel gave to the warrior, along with the security, something of the inertia, of the crustacean, so it is possible, without disrespect to that great philosophical panoply in which Dante and Aquinas walked complete, to hint that those who wore it necessarily lost some of the grace and freedom of their forebears. The recovery of Aristotle’s text dates from the second half of the twelfth century: the dominance of his doctrine soon followed. Aristotle is, before all, the philosopher of divisions. His effect on his greatest disciple, as M. Gilson has traced it, was to dig new chasms between God and the world, between human knowledge and reality, between faith and reason. Heaven began, under this dispensation, to seem farther off. The danger of Pantheism grew less: the danger of mechanical Deism came a step nearer. It is almost as if the first, faint shadow of Descartes, or even of ‘our present discontents’ had fallen across the scene. Certainly, something fresh and adventurous, which belonged to the earlier movement, has disappeared. Of that earlier movement the school of Chartres, in the first half of the twelfth century, may perhaps be regarded as the culminating point. The school of Chartres is Platonic, as Platonism was understood in those days, when Chalcidius’ translation of the Timaeus, and the pseudo-Dionysius, were the important texts. It was humane, in both senses of the word. It was a school of naturalism, and this again in the double sense of studying and of reverencing nature. Thus Thierry of Chartres—like some of his Platonic descendants at the Renaissance—will reconcile Genesis and the Timaeus; while in the poets of the school Nature appears, not to be corrected by Grace, but as the goddess and the vicaria of God, herself correcting the unnatural. It goes without saying that in such a school, on the theological side, immanence is more stressed than transcendence; and I have read that by two of its philosophers—Thierry and William of Conches—the Holy Ghost is identified with the Anima Mundi of the Platonists.
I have ventured to use the word ‘great’ of the poets who derive from this school; and great by the ‘historic estimate’ they certainly are: in their influence, great beyond all question. But if I endeavour to rise to any absolute standard of criticism I become aware that the epithet cannot be maintained. Their literary position is, indeed, a peculiar one. If it were ever legitimate to speak of genius hampered by lack—or misdirection—of talent, it would be legitimate in the case of Bernard and his successors. Such a description is nearly meaningless; but even a bad shot may sometimes give us a rough indication of where the target lies. For these poets, in their intention, in the originality of their point of view, above all in their fresh and revelling appreciation of natural beauty, have merits which almost deserve the name of genius. But alas!—in certain periods, to choose the medium is almost to seal the fate of the work. If they had written in the vernacular and so been forced to invent their own style, they might have become not utterly unworthy predecessors of Dante. If they had written in riming Latin verse, or unadorned chronicler’s prose, they would not have lacked a vigour and sweetness of their own. But writing, as they did, in quantitative verse and consciously artistic prose, they inevitably followed the approved models in those forms. The great model was Martianus Capella. I have called him a bad fairy; but in respect of style, it is his badness alone, not his fairyhood, that is evident. Hence, over all the really fine qualities of these poets, lies the loathsome trail of the rhetorician—the infuriating derangement of every sentence from its natural order, the fantastic choice of vocabulary, the anadiplosis, the sententia, and the amplificatio. They are all terribly obedient to the rhetor’s precept varius sis et tamen idem. Their reader must have endless patience and dig deep if he is to find the real merits that lie buried beneath the ‘curious terms’, the ‘fresh colours’, the ‘sugared rhetoric’, and all the other tasteless foolery which corrupts the ‘literary’ Latin of the time, as it was later to corrupt the vernacular. Yet the task is worth attempting; for surely to be indulgent to mere fashion in other periods, and merciless to it in our own, is the first step we can make out of the prison of the Zeitgeist?
The work of Bernardus Sylvestris is entitled De Mundi Universitate sive Megacosmus et Microcosmus. It is written in the alternating metres and proses of Boethius. Its subject is the creation of the world and of man. The classical reader traces in it easily enough the influence of the Timaeus; but there are other influences at work which must be left to the skilled medievalist to determine. It is the story of creation told from the point of view of the created: the female longing of matter to receive the form, not the creative impulse of the Deity, is the moving passion of the work, which thus becomes a curious pendant to the Miltonic handling of the same theme. In adopting such a standpoint it is clear that the author incurs certain dangers. Of necessity he comes perilously near to representing non-existents as petitioners for their own existence. Yet, as a philosopher, he may reply that he is dealing with processes that are not in time at all, and that such a presentation is therefore not more inadequate than another: from the purely literary point of view we may plead in his defence that we, after all, belong to the created ourselves and that the response of the work to the workman is precisely that aspect of creation which comes, by remote analogy, within our experience and is therefore a proper object for the imagination. Nor would such an analogy be foreign to the mind of the author; for the very words in which he describes the longing of matter to be ‘born again’ by the reception of form, must have suggested, then as now, an individual, and specifically Christian, experience:
Lo! Matter, eldest of all things, would fain
Be limited by shape and born again.
I have quoted these words from the speech of Nature with which the book opens. The goddess is addressing Noys (νοῦς) and pleading the cause of matter; the remainder of the book relates in detail the answering of her prayer. That Noys answers it favourably is inevitable; it is the necessity of Reason’s own nature that Reason should work up to her own likeness, as far as may be, even the lowest and most remote effluences of her productivity. Yet Noys replies with a warning that the primeval squalor of the silva cannot be perfectly reformed. Matter is the lowest grade of appearance—the rim of the wheel and farthest from the divine centre. If it could perfectly receive the form it would not be matter. Somewhere in the emanative descent of the divine virtue there must be a lowest point; and this metaphysical necessity is allegorically represented by references to the malignitas and malum of the silva. But the author is not a manichee or even an ascetic, and to press these expressions beyond their metaphorical meaning is to misread the book. For the same reason the aeternae notiones cannot be directly impressed upon the material world; and the first act of Noys is to inform matter with species which are themselves but copies of the eternal Ideas—so that Bernardus, following Plato himself, finds room both for the Platonic and for the Aristotelian type of universal. The next step is to separate the elements, and when this is done, Noys proceeds to generate soul: for the Macrocosm, here as in Plato, is a lively and reasonable animal, whose indwelling spirit comforts and protects it against the elemental catastrophes which would otherwise speedily unmake it again. Having thus, through a long and tortuous chapter of prose, conducted the world to its birth, the author shakes off his metaphysics, and rejoices for some five hundred elegiac verses in the visible and tangible. The Angelic Hierarchies are briefly disposed of. The stars are described in a passage which will fatigue most modern readers, though it might fatigue us less if our education had not left us so ignorant of astronomy. The planets are better, and the mountains better still; but it is among the beasts, the trees, the spices, and the forests that the author is really at home. Among the latter it is pleasant to find, as well as Academe and the Aonium nemus, woods more endeared to the northern fancy,
Briscelim sinus Armoricus, Turonia vastem,
Ardaniam silvam Gallicus orbis habet.
The Earthly Paradise is pleasantly described:
Through happy woods with serpentine meanders
Of ever-varying ways a river wanders;
Now chattering over stones, now gliding round
The roots of trees, it falls with murmuring sound
—A land of streams and flowers, by man possessed
So short a time it scarce could call him Guest.
The ‘procession’ of the beasts is incurably quaint. It is difficult to know how the poet intended us to be affected by such a couplet as the following:
Great-hearted is the horse: the donkey bears
A soul bowed down beneath his load of ears.
Yet his naïvety—a naïvety, of course, eminently compatible with an extreme and conceited artfulness of style—does really enable him to strike a note of fresh and delighted applause which is, in some ways, more suited to the theme than a classical solemnity. I cannot but think that the wonder of creation, the moment at which we can fancy each beast appearing as a new tour de force of Deity—is well expressed in his couplet of the lynx:
Forth comes the lynx to test those streams of light
That flow in him, his miracle of sight.
Before closing the first book, Bernardus, with a sure enough instinct, having refreshed his readers, leads them back again to metaphysics. Into the brightly coloured world at which we have been glancing, time is introduced. But the world is everlasting in time; for its causes are eternal and from them it descends with hierarchical continuity, and, being lively and reasonable, it knows well how to protect itself from harm. Thence the author passes by a natural transition into lofty speculations on the everlasting and the eternal, which are different and yet the same (‘For time in his beginning goeth out from eternity and into the lap of eternity returneth again being weary after his long circuit’), and with these concludes his first book.
The second book opens with a speech of Noys. The world has been made and is very good: it remains to make the little world of Man. But for this task new powers must be invoked; and here the difficulty in Bernard’s conception of Nature begins. Besides Natura there is Physis. Physis has not, like Natura, the entry in the court of Noys: ‘You will find her,’ says Noys, in inferioribus conversantem. Her daughters are Theorica and Practica. The crucial passage for determining the respective parts of Natura and Physis is the scene in which Man is actually created. Natura is equipped for this work with the Tabula Fati which contains ‘eorum quae geruntur series decretis fatalibus circumscripta’. Physis, on the other hand, is given a Liber Recordationis. It deals with matters which are the field of probable conjecture; and these turn out to comprise most of what we should call ‘natural history’. One consults the Liber Recordationis to find out why lions are fierce, and why some plants have their virtue in the root, others in the seed. The Tabula Fati, given to Natura, is apt to mislead a modern until he remembers that the course of history is written in the stars, and that the genius of inorganic nature, the spirit who guides the stars in their courses, would also be, for a medieval writer, the spirit of destiny. Natura, in fact, is a personification of the general order of things, in the largest sense, and has a wider field of action than we should ordinarily attribute to ‘nature’. Physis is less easily understood. The key to her mystery is possibly to be found in Thierry or some such writer; but to seek it at any length would be beyond my undertaking. For a merely literary understanding of Bernardus a vague ‘feel’ of the character of Physis will have to suffice. She is almost ‘organic nature’, the object of biology: she is the reservoir of vital possibilities on which the general ordering of Natura draws: she lives on earth, and in visiting her fruitful garden Natura really descends to ‘the Mothers’. Her two daughters—Theory and Practice—may suggest for a moment that she is also ‘human nature’ developing itself either in the contemplative or the active life; but I do not think that this is what the author intended, and the two daughters represent rather the theoretical and therapeutic sides of the Physicus’ profession. We find Physis in her garden meditating upon the origins and powers of the several ‘natures’, and also on the remedies for diseases. Such, then, is one of the new powers invoked for the making of man. In order to fabricate the organism inhabitable by human mind, the ordering spirit of Nature must invoke those yet unexhausted possibilities of the vital force, which are symbolized as Physis, the earth dweller. But this is not all. Man is to have something more than that mediated impress of the divine idea which rests upon creation as a whole: in him something of immediate divinity is to dwell. Along with Physis, therefore, Urania, the heaven-spirit, must be summoned; and to the dwelling of Urania Natura accordingly sets out. Urania, who is too bright for the eyes of Natura, rises at her approach, and prophesies the high destinies of Man, whose soul, before birth, is to be made acquainted with all the influences of the heaven to which some day she will return:
With me through all the expanse of heaven must go
Man’s soul, and I will make her know
The laws of Fate allowing no repeal
And Fortune’s alterable wheel . . .
Her godlike essence when her body dies
Will seek again those kindred skies.
The two goddesses descend together to the earth in search of Physis. Their journey through the various planetary levels is well described; and once beyond the lunar frontier of air and ether, whence stretches the realm of Summanus, we are in the world of folk-lore. Between earth and moon dwell the ‘airish’ folk, and on the earth’s surface those long-livers who are fairies undisguised, for all their classical names.
‘Wherever-earth is most delightful, be it with grassy ridge or flowery mountain top, wherever it is brightened with streams or robed in woodland greenery, there Silvans, Pans, and Nerei, blameless of conversation, wear out the period of their longer life. Their bodies are of elemental purity: yet these too die, though late, in the season of their dissolution.’
The travellers approach the garden of Granusion, where the air is tempered by ‘the boyhood of the sun’. There, at the coming of Natura, the turf swells and the groves drop new odours; and there Physis is found with her daughters, deep in contemplation of the secret potencies of life, until she is awakened by the face of Urania, seen not directly, but reflected in a well. The three goddesses are ready for the making of man. But the supreme Mind, though it delegates, is not absent, and works itself in its lower agents: ‘such privilege hath omnipresence’. Suddenly, therefore, Noys is visibly among them in the garden, and her voice is heard propounding the nature of Man, in lines which give lofty expression to the humanism of Chartres, and which, if they were written in English blank verse, would be universally hailed as typical of the Renaissance.
He shall be heavenly, earthly; by his care
Shall rule the earth, and reach the heaven by prayer,
For as the diverse sources whence he drew
His being, so himself will still be two; . . .
He shall drag forth to light the causes hid
In secret gloom, though Nature long forbid . . .
To him, unbounded, in all lands, I give
High crown and priesthood over all that live.
Obedient to the word of Noys, the three powers fall to the work. Out of the remnants of the elements, left over from the fashioning of the Macrocosm, the four complexions are made; the Whole Man, to be an image of the mighty world, where God rules in heaven and earth lies below, divided by the aerial and ethereal regions, is made a kind of trinity of head, breast, and loins; and lest the perfect correspondence should be lacking, not only between the two wholes, but between the ruling parts of each, the head also has its threefold subdivision. At last, the five senses are made, and Man is created. Sight comes first, both in order and dignity:
As the world’s eye, the Sun, excels by far
And claims the heaven from every vulgar star,
So doth the eye all other senses quite
Out-go, and the whole man is in the sight.
Touch comes last: even as, among the organs, those of generation come last. It is characteristic of the author, however, that there should be no trace of ascetic contempt for sexuality; and equally characteristic that there should be no ‘romantic’ glorification of it. The hierarchical principle finds room for every fact: there is a place for everything, and everything is in its right place. Everything is less noble than that which stands above it, and more noble than that which stands below: it is only the whole scale of being which is good and fair absolutely. Hence comes the sanity with which Bernardus can speak of these organs; and there is no better way to prove his universal and ‘classical’ quality as a thinker than by comparing with Ovid’s smirkings or with some modern ravings on the same subject the following lines from the conclusion of his allegory:
Pleasant and fitting both their use will be
When time and mode and measure do agree,
Else withering from the root all lives would fail
And that old Chaos o’er the wreck prevail.
Conquerors of Death! they fill each empty place
In Nature and immortalize the race.
Of the literary merits of Bernardus, the reader can judge best by comparing the account I have just given with the equally favourable, but differently directed, account of Miss Waddell, who touches nothing which she does not adorn. That a writer who describes the Timaeus as ‘the driest of the Platonic dialogues’ does not start from a position or a temper very near my own, ought by now to be sufficiently obvious; and a book which pleases two such critics—who are certain, when they err, to err in precisely opposite directions—can hardly fail to have in it some real merit. Its historical importance, and its relevance to our main theme, will be already apparent to most; but the attempt to define them had better wait until we have glanced at its successors. For the moment it will be enough to say that Bernardus, despite those faults of style which he shares—though in a less degree—with his contemporaries, has real freshness and piquancy in some of his descriptions; he can be elevated when his subject raises him, though never for many lines together before some ruinous conceit or ‘boyism’ breaks in; he can respond to, though of course he could not have created, the sublime suggestions of Plato’s most sublime and suggestive work; above all, his mind is whole and balanced. Ascetic theology will not tempt him to forget that the material world is the image of the eternal ideas; but neither will his delight in the world tempt him to forget that it is only an image. The wilfulness of extreme monasticism, and the complementary wilfulness of Chrétien, cannot touch him. The world of Andreas Capellanus was cut in two. On the one side omnis curialitas; on the other, the anger of God. Not so the world of Bernardus. Here at last we find a whole man. Here at last is sense and heartsease and the possibility of growth.
The Anticlaudianus of Alanus ab Insulis is a work in every respect inferior to the De Mundi Universitate, and may be described as nearly worthless except from the historical point of view. From that point of view it is important. It was written to be a kind of pendant to Claudian’s In Rufinum. In that glorified lampoon Claudian had tried to give an original turn to the abuse of an enemy by a setting of the allegorical mythology which was congenial to his age. In the opening of his first book Allecto is introduced lamenting the return of the golden age, and the consequent diminution of her old empire, under Theodosius. An infernal council is summoned and Megaera carries the proposal of entrusting to her nursling Rufinus the championship of the cause of evil. Alanus reverses the idea and describes the creation of a perfect man by Natura as her champion against Allecto; and hence the title anti-Claudian. Since the perfect man, at the end of the poem, proves his mettle in combat against the vices, the poem may be described as a Psychomachia with a lengthy introduction; and Alanus, like Prudentius, probably believed himself to be composing an epic. The work is written throughout in hexameters and always couched in the same monotonous rhetoric. It is a principle with Alanus that whatever is worth saying once is worth saying several times. Thus ‘she thinks about the way to heaven’ becomes
She thinks, inquires, devises, seeks, elects
What way, or path, or road may guide her steps
To high heav’n and the Thunderer’s secret throne.
‘She bids them make a chariot’ becomes
She bids, commands, orders, enjoins, begs one
Of those in Wisdom’s train, with hand and heart
And faith and zeal and sweat and toil to effect
The carriage into being of her carriage.
But no quotation can do justice to the effect of the book as a whole. Those who have read it to the end—a small company—and those only, can understand how speedily amused contempt turns into contempt without amusement, and how even contempt at last settles into something not far removed from a rankling personal hatred of the author. Nor are the vices of the style redeemed, as their much more pardonable counterparts were redeemed in Bernardus, by any real profundity or freshness in the matter. Once or twice, when he is describing external nature, the author shows a trace of real feeling; once or twice, in moral passages, he attains a certain dignity; for the rest this book is one of the melancholy kind that claim our attention solely as influences and as examples of a tendency.
Natura, the story says, once resolved to sum up in a single crowning work all the goodness that lay scattered among her creatures. But her old anvil was worn away and the task beyond her powers. Therefore she called her sisters to council, in her secret place. Thither they came—Concord and Youth, Laughter who clears the clouds of the mind, and Reason who is the measure of good: Honesty, Prudence, Good Faith, and that Virtue par excellence (for she is called Virtus simply).
Who scatters wealth and pours her gifts abroad
Nor lets her treasure basely fust in ease.
Last of all came Nobility. To these Natura opened her heart. In all her works she saw nothing that was wholly blessed. The old stain could not be removed; but still it might be possible to make one work which could redeem the whole, and be the mirror of themselves. In the meantime, they knew that her decrees were scorned by mortals and Tisiphone triumphed on the earth. To this the Virtues replied that such a project showed the divine wisdom of the speaker, but that among themselves there was no power to perform it. Let Prudence and Reason be dispatched to heaven to ask of God a soul for the perfect man. Prudence at first was coy (‘Fluctuat haec, se nolle negat nec velle fatetur’), but Concord overruled her. A chariot was built and to it they yoked the five horses whose names are Sight, Hearing, Smell, Taste, and Touch, and the two virtues ascended in it to heaven, passing as they went, the aerios cives quibus aer carcer. On the brow of the world they met Theology, who unyoked Hearing and setting Prudence on his back—for Reason could come no farther—conducted her to the throne of the Almighty; to whom she offered her prayer, representing the ill treatment which she and her sisters now suffered on earth, and rounding all off with the cogent argument
A neighbour’s house on fire imperils thine.
God then called Noys to bring him an exemplar out of her treasury and impressed its likeness with his seal upon the new soul which he gave to Prudence. She rejoined her sister Reason whom she found waiting at the celestial frontier, and the two returned together to the house of Natura. A perfect body was fashioned and united to the soul gumphis subtilibus, and the Virtues in turn endowed the man with their choicest gifts. Only Nobility could do nothing until he had visited his mother Fortune and secured her goodwill. Meanwhile Fame had carried as far as Hell the tidings of this new creation. Allecto summoned the infernal peers, whose deliberations were so effective that the new man was scarcely living before an army of vices was advancing to attack him. The whole concludes with the psychomachy, and the victory of the perfect man ushers in the golden age.
The importance of this work, whose literary merits I have already denied, is twofold. In the first place it conferred new prestige on the allegorical method, of which it was a specimen more attractive to that age than any of its predecessors. It was the last word in poetic style as style was then understood. It was longer and more encyclopaedic than the Psychomachia. It was a good deal easier and more popular than Bernardus. In the second place, it is significant by reason of its moral content: as a document of the ‘humanism’ of Chartres, as the celebration of a tertium quid between the courtly and the religious conceptions of the good life, it is perhaps more important than the De Mundi Universitate itself. For when we come to examine in detail the perfect man presented by Alanus, we find much that accords ill, by any strict standard, with the theological framework of the poem. The Virtues who are summoned to his making are purely secular virtues. If Fides appears, it is made clear that Fides means ‘good faith’—the virtue that keeps promises and plays fair in friendship—and not ‘Faith’ in the Christian sense. If Pietas appears, Pietas means ‘Pite’ and not piety. And among the virtues we find some whom a very moderate ascetism might exclude from that title altogether, such as Favor (popularity), Risus, and Decus; and others whom no philosophy can treat as virtues at all, such as Copia, Juventus, and Nobilitas. Again, in the psychomachy which concludes the whole we find among the army of the vices such unexpected champions as Pauperies, Infamia, and Senectus: characters very proper to be excluded from the garden of Amor—as ‘Poverte’ and ‘Elde’ are excluded in the Romance of the Rose—but very oddly included among ‘vices’ from the theologian’s point of view. Is it not, then, apparent that Alanus is depicting not so much a perfect man by the standards of the Church as a ‘noble and virtuous gentleman’ according to the standards of chivalry? Is not Alanus, in fine, to be numbered less among the followers of Prudentius than among the predecessors of Castiglione, of Elyot, and of Spenser? We have already seen that he appropriates the common name of Virtus to the typically courtly virtue of Largesse; and the scene in which the Virtues adorn the new man puts the question beyond doubt. He is not complete without Nobilitas, though Nobilitas admittedly depends upon Fortuna. Fides, in words later to be echoed by Guillaume de Lorris, recommends to him the choice of a confidant:
To whom he may entrust his complete self,
Lay bare his mind and speak his perfect will
Showing the secret places of the heart.
—advice much more useful to a gentleman than to a saint. Ratio, in direct defiance of the gospel teaching, recommends to him moderation, not abstinence, as regards the desire for fame:
Not swayed with popular applause, nor yet
Spitting it out, unless it bear the stamp
Of flattery and would purchase wealth for words;
It smacks too much of sour austerity
To scorn all fame.
Modestia, who turns out to be none other than the old Hellenic and Provençal virtue of mesura, actually gives him lessons in deportment, and even in hairdressing:
Let not the hair, too wanton-fine, appear
Like woman’s bravery and belie the man.
Nor too unkempt, lacking its due regard,
Lest that proclaim thee by its tangled shock
In thy fresh years too philosophical.
We do wrong to laugh at such a passage. Once we have decided to describe, not the perfect man, but the perfect gentleman, we cannot stop short of these externals, which are, as a matter of fact, included in the character: a really exhaustive treatise on music must range from aesthetic philosophy to methods of fingering, and the same defence holds good for Castiglione when he doubles the roles of Platonic philosopher and dancing master. But while Alanus thus stands side by side with Castiglione, and indeed fills up the concept of virtue with purely secular and courtly excellences, it is of the essence of his work that he does so with no slightest sense of rebellion or defiance. The courtesy of the Troubadours, of Andreas, of Chrétien, was a truancy. Behind the courtly scale of values rose the unappeasable claims of a totally different and irreconcilable world: it was to this truancy and insecurity that the courtly life owed half its wilful beauty and pathos. But Alanus is equally serious in his theological passages and in his notes on deportment. He acknowledges no breach; for the naturalism of Chartres has given him a tertium quid that can moderate both the rigours of theology and the wantonness of the court. Goodness does not mean asceticism; knighthood does not mean adultery. Both are brought together under the law of Natura who is the vicar of God and essentially good. It is not a question of grace redeeming Nature: it is a question of sin departing from Nature. The position is summed up in the advice given by Honestas to the perfect man:
Let him love Nature who would flee from vice,
Eschew what guilt or naughty will brought forth
And to his breast clasp all that Nature made.
It is in this that the true value of Alanus consists. I do not say he has effected a real reconciliation between the two ideals of the Middle Ages. The rift went deeper than he thought. He assumes, rather than makes, a peace. But he is at least trying to be a whole man, and however the elements of his synthesis may hereafter fall apart, they will retain some mark of their brief union. The courtly ideal is becoming, as Arnold would have said, more ‘possible’, and for that reason more potent: if you will, more insidious. Its long hold upon the vernacular poetry, its adaptability to some future compromise, are now assured.
It is a relief to turn from the Anti-Claudian to its author’s more famous work the De Planctu Naturae, the ‘Plaint of Kind’. Here we are back in the metres and proses of Boethius; and in laying aside the pretentious epic form, Alanus lays aside the most intolerable vices of his style. He is still a fantastic and over-decorated writer; but he is aiming chiefly at sweetness and richness of effect, whereas in the Anti-Claudian he had aimed at grandeur. But sweetness tolerates barbarism as grandeur does not. There can be bizarre luxury, though there is no bizarre grandeur. It is the difference between excess in a sham Gothic railway hotel and excess in a hot house; and every one knows that while the first is a mere burden, the second is pardonable, and even, in some moods, not unpleasing. The Plaint has, moreover, the enormous advantage of being comparatively short. The story may be told in a few words. Nature appears to the author and laments the unnatural vices of humanity; the Virtues come to share their grievance with hers; and Genius is ordered to pronounce an anathema against the offenders. That is the whole matter. The importance of the theme, for our purpose, clearly lies in the advantage to which Nature appears in such a setting; and, with Nature, natural love. The earthly Cupid, after being for ages contrasted with the celestial Cupid, suddenly finds himself in contrast with an infernal Cupid. This time it is his turn to be the respectable character; the righteous indignation is on his side. Such is the inevitable result of Alanus’ choice of subject, and it is the only result. The reader who expects either prurience or prophetic denunciation will be disappointed. There is nothing so cold, so disinterested, as the heart of a stylist; and I believe that Alanus was tempted to this peculiar theme by the endless opportunities which it offered for fantastic grammatical metaphor about the proper relations of masculine and feminine, or subject and predicate in the grammar of Venus. Agreeably with time’s common way of punishing, these conceits are now the author’s chief disgrace; but because, hidden in the rhetorician, there was, after all, a real, though wayward, lover of nature, the Plaint still has a claim on our attention above and beyond its historical significance. As the book is difficult to read, and rather more difficult to buy, I have ventured to translate two passages, both of them elaborations of hints furnished by Bernardus. The first describes the coming of Natura and the ἱερὸς γάμος of the world at her approach:
‘The virgin, as I have before signified, at her first coming forth out of the coasts of the heavenly region into the hovel of the world passible, was borne in a glassy coach, and was drawn of Juno’s own birds, not managed with any yoke, but joined thereto of their proper will and election. A certain man also that with his height overtopped both the virgin and her coach, whose countenance smacked not of vile earthliness but rather of the Godhead’s privity, as though he should succour the insufficiency of her sex feminine, did guide its course with measurable regiment. To the beholding of whose beauty when I had (as it were) drawn together the soldiers of mine eyes, that is, the rays visual; the same, not daring to issue out in the face of so great a majesty, and being blunted with the strokes of his splendour, betook themselves for fear into the tents of mine eyelids. At the coming of the said virgin you would a thought that all the elements, as though they then renewed their kinds, did make festival. The heaven, to lighten (as it were) the maid’s journey with his candles, gave order to his stars that they should shine beyond their wont; wherefore methought the daylight marvelled at their hardihood who durst so insolently be seen in his presence. Phoebus also, putting on a jollier countenance than he was used, poured forth all the riches of his light and made a show of it to meet her; and to his sister (from whom he had taken away the garniture of his beaming), giving her back again the garment of jocundity, he bade that she should run to meet such a queen as was now come among them. The air, putting off his weeping clouds, with serene and friendly cheer smiled upon her where she came, and whereas he was before grieved with the raging of Aquilo, now popularly took his ease in the bosom of Favonius. The birds, moved by a certain kindly inspiration, rejoicing with the plausive playing of their pinions, showed unto the virgin a worshipping countenance. Juno forsooth that before had scorned the kissings of Jupiter, was now with so great joy made drunken, that by a darting prologue of her glances she set her husband on fire for pleasing passages of love. The sea also that before was enraged with stormy waves, at the maid’s coming made an holiday of peace and swore an everlasting calm; for Aeolus, lest they should move their wars (more than civil) in the virgin’s presence, bound in their prisons the tempestuous winds. The fishes, even, swimming up to the eyebrows of the waves, so far forth as the lumpish kind of their sensuality suffered them, foretold by their glad cheer the coming of their lady; and Thetis, being at play with Nereus, bethought her that time to conceive another Achilles. Moreover certain maidens, the greatness of whose beauty was able not only to steal away the reason from a man but to make those in heaven also to forget their deity, coming forth out of places where streams sprang, brought unto her gifts of pigmentary’s nectar, making as they should offer tithes to their newcome queen. And truly, the earth, that before lay stripped, by winter’s robbery, of her garnishments, made shift to borrow from the largesse of the spring a scarlet smock of flowers, lest in the dishonour of her old clouts she might not decently be seen before the virgin.’
Here everything is sophisticated, everything is ‘classical’ and pedantic; but the decorations do not completely obscure the note of delight. The author is intoxicated not only with his style but with his subject; his worst excesses serve only to show how wildly the new love of the visible world ‘wantoned in its prime’, and if we have here a wilderness it is a ‘wilderness of sweets’. The passage may be compared with one of those old tapestries where the richness of the material suggests indoor luxury, but the forms, nearer viewed, reveal, however faintly, the stir and morning airs of a hunting scene. But the Plaint has passages of a more masculine beauty than this, as my next quotation shows:
‘Consider, quoth she, how in this world, as in some noble city, Reason is set up and established by the measurable governance of the commonweal’s majesty. In Heaven, as in the castle of an earthly city, the eternal Emperor eternally hath his throne, from whom eternally goeth forth his edict that the notions of things single be written in the book of his providence. In the Air, that is, in the middle parts of the city, there liveth in arms an heavenly host of angels, the which with delegated service doth diligently exercise its watch over men. And man, truly, as an alien that dwelleth without the city wall, refuseth not his obedience to those angelic knights. Therefore in this commonweal God commandeth, the angel operateth, the man obeyeth. God by commandment maketh man, the angel by operation bringeth him to being, the man by obedience remaketh himself again . . . of the which right ordinate commonweal the likeness is within man also reflected. In the castle of whose head Sapience sitteth and is at rest as an empress, unto whom, as to a goddess, the residue of his powers as half-goddesses do obey. For his power of engin, and his force logical, and his virtue memorial of things passed, having their habitations in divers chambers of his head, are ever busied about their obedience to her. In the heart, forsooth, that is, in the middle parts of the city, Magnanimity hath her house; who having received the order of knighthood under the reign of Wisdom, doth by operation fulfil whatsoever things that governance deliberateth. But the reins, which is as much as to say the parts without the wall, permit a dwelling in the uttermost region of the body to lustful pleasures, which serve the will of Magnanimity, neither dare they set themselves against her commandment. Therefore in this commonweal, Sapience beareth the part of one commanding, Magnanimity hath the likeness of one operating, Lust showeth the image of one obeying.’
The ideas derive, of course, from Bernardus, and ultimately from Plato, but they are set forth with conviction and with dignity, and here, at least, the greatness of the matter keeps the rhetorician within the bounds of mesura. Such a passage shows us how well Alanus might often have written if he had had the fortune to stumble upon better models or the individuality to resist bad ones. As it is, he remains an author in whom there is much more to blame than to praise; but no one who has plodded doggedly through him will wholly regret the time he has spent.
One more poem deserves mention before we leave the Nature-poets of the school of Chartres. This is the Architrenius of Johannes de Altavilla. This long narrative, which is written throughout in hexameters, tells the story of the ‘Arch-mourner’, the youthful Architrenius, who, in mere despair at the wickedness within him and about him, sets out to seek his mother Nature and be healed. His journeys lead him through many places, including the university of Paris and the island of Thule, thus offering the author the opportunity for lavish satiric description, before the wanderer finally meets Nature. The account of the university is said to be of great interest to the social historian, but the work as a whole has little relevance for our special study except in so far as it illustrates the popularity of the personification Natura and gives us an early example of the allegory in the form of a journey—that is, in its best form. But what really matters in the poem is the unusual energy with which the wanderer’s motive is presented. Later, no doubt, the poet may lose himself in garrulity; but in his picture of Architrenius at his setting out he far excels any of his fellow workers in this kind. Suddenly, amid all the gradus work of his hexameters, a living voice begins to speak. Our historical interests are forgotten. Dates no longer concern us. A universal human longing is expressed, and, but for the language, the lines might have been written in any age:
This must I do—go exil’d through the world
And seek for Nature till far hence I find
Her secret dwelling-place; there drag to light
The hidden cause of quarrel, and reknit,
Haply reknit, the long-divided Love.
We have now glanced at the chief writers who descend from the school of Chartres. Their significance has, I trust, been growing clear as we advanced, and a very short summing up will be sufficient. As regards content, the great work which they attempted was to reunite the courtly and the religious ideals. In an age of wilful asceticism and wilful Frauendienst they asserted the wholeness of the nature of man; it is this far more than their prosecution of classical studies, which entitles them to the name of Humanists. What they attempted they did not accomplish. A new system of thought was already at the door; ‘the knots of the love now broken’, which they had striven to re-tie, rapidly came undone again in the hands of their followers. But though they failed fully to reconcile courtesy with religion, they left courtesy in a more reputable, and less precarious, situation. It had gained a new solidity and prestige; and while it could not maintain its footing on the philosophical heights it continued, in the vernacular poetry, to profit by its brief sojourn on those levels. On the side of form, the school of Chartres had set the example of allegory on a large scale, and of allegory that made a genuine advance on the old models. It had enlarged upon the narrowly ethical scheme of Prudentius and shown itself capable of dealing with any subject the author cared to attempt. Finally it had enriched the poetic stock with a score of new figures and fruitful ideas. The Natura of Statius and of Claudian, under the influence of its naturalistic philosophy, had been remade and become a new and appealing character. She, and her companion Genius, continued to fascinate the vernacular poets for many years. Already in the lifetime of Alanus, the Anti-Claudian was being rewritten in French octosyllables. In the following century the impress of the school of Chartres can be traced on almost every page of the allegorical love poetry.