Chapter 6 - Allegory As the Dominant Form

Chapter 6 - Allegory As the Dominant Form

LYDGATE. THE CHAUCERIANA. MINOR ALLEGORIES. THE NEW ALLEGORY

I

In many periods the historian of literature discovers a dominant literary form, such as the blood tragedy among the Elizabethans, or satire in the eighteenth century, or the novel of sentiment and manners in the last age or in our own. During the years between Chaucer’s death and the poetry of Wyatt allegory becomes such a dominant form and suffers all the vicissitudes to which dominant forms are exposed. For it must be noticed that such dominance is not necessarily good for the form that enjoys it. When every one feels it natural to attempt the same kind of writing, that kind is in danger. Its characteristics are formalized. A stereotyped monotony, unnoticed by contemporaries but cruelly apparent to posterity, begins to pervade it. Thus, even in times that I can still remember, the threadbare motives of the novel were not nearly so obvious as they now threaten to become. The monotony of Augustan satire, on the other hand, is easily felt; that of Italianate blank-verse tragedy more easily still; and that of late medieval allegory unescapably and with resentment. In the second place, a dominant form tends to attract to itself writers whose talents would have fitted them much better for work of some other kind. Thus the retired Cowper writes satire in the eighteenth century; or in the nineteenth a mystic and natural symbolist like George Macdonald is seduced into writing novels. Thus in the fifteenth and sixteenth century we have the Assembly of Ladies written by a poet who has no better vocation to allegory than that of fashion. And thirdly—which is more disastrous—a dominant form attracts to itself those who ought not to have written at all; it becomes a kind of trap or drain towards which bad work moves by a certain ‘kindly enclyning’. Youthful vanity and dullness, determined to write, will almost certainly write in the dominant form of their epoch. It is the operation of this law which has given later medieval allegory—and hence allegory in general—a bad name. A recognition of the law will perhaps liberate our critical faculties to distinguish between good and bad work—between the poetic use and the fashionable abuse.

But there is yet another ‘accident’ to which dominant forms are liable, and it is one which much concerns the historian. Often, though not always, we can detect under the apparent sameness of such productions the burgeoning of new forms, and find that a tradition which seemed most strictly bound to the past is big with the promise, or the threat, of the future. I half suspect that such a process is going on about us while I write: that the novel, which we saw becoming so biographical in works like Sinister Street and so preoccupied with period in works like The Forsyte Saga, is even now transforming itself—has transformed itself, in the work of Strachey and M. Maurois and Mr. Herbert Read—into the imaginative biography, a genuinely new form standing at the same distance from biography proper as the Chronicle play stands from the ‘just’ history. Our earlier literature, however, provides us with a more certain example. In our Augustan period we find a form which has not yet been named and which is only less dominant than satire. I mean the long Treatise Poem (if I may risk the invention of a name where one is badly needed) as practised by Thomson, Armstrong, Young, Akenside, Cowper, and the like. Here we have a form which begins by being little more than a revival of the ancient ‘didactic’ poem. It becomes widely dominant, attaches to itself a great quantity of inferior work, admits great variations, tends now to the most practical didacticism and now to disjointed reflection and ‘enthusiastic’ monologue: and all the while it is preparing the way for a really new and valuable thing, for The Excursion, The Prelude, and the Testament of Beauty. It is therefore unwise to neglect the adventures of a dominant form, for in so doing we run the risk of misunderstanding its successors. There are few absolute beginnings in literary history, but there is endless transformation. Some of the allegories with which this chapter will be concerned are, perhaps, mere continuations of the past; but others look to the future, and all alike tell us something of taste and sentiment in the period which produced them. The story is a complex one. In order to understand it, we must divide it, and here, with some reluctance, I will abandon a chronological arrangement. Lydgate’s Pilgrimage of the Life of Man may have been written before La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and if I wrote as an annalist I should deal with it among the Chauceriana. But it belongs to a totally different order and illustrates another, and far more important, metamorphosis of the dominant form. I shall not scruple, therefore, to reserve it for treatment along with the work of Hawes and Douglas in the last of the groups into which I am dividing the subject. It must be understood from the outset that the sameness of these later allegories is deceptive. Under the common name of allegory things of quite different natures are concealed.

II

Before approaching the allegories themselves, however, there is a question which ought to be faced. In the Confessio Amantis we found naturalistic presentation of the lover’s life in many places emerging from the allegory, and in Troilus we found allegory abandoned altogether in favour of a direct delineation of love. For Chaucer (and in a less degree for Gower) the long allegorical discipline has done its work. If this interpretation is correct, we might well hope to find among their successors both the impulse and the power to paint the inner world without the help of allegory. It would be too much, indeed, to demand, as of right, a copious and brilliant production of unallegorical subjective poetry. If we have fallen on an age poor in genius, it will be more likely that this new impulse and new power will continue, in its timidity, to manifest itself in the guise of allegory—a guise which will henceforth be a defect because it is unnecessary. But one or two unambiguous attempts in the direction I have suggested would be a welcome confirmation of our view. Fortunately they are to hand.

The first of them, as the reader will have guessed, is The Kingis Quair. The importance of this poem does not lie in the fact that it introduced the Chaucerian manner into Scotland. Its importance lies in the fact that it is a new kind of poem—a longish narrative poem about love which is not allegorical, which is not even, like Troilus, a romance of lovers who lived long ago, but the literal story of a passion felt by the author for a real woman. It is true that the poem contains a dream, and even an allegorical dream; but the difference between a dream framed in a literal story and an allegorical story framed in a dream is of considerable importance. What makes the novelty even more surprising is the fact that the author seems to be well aware of what he is doing. Careless reading has obscured the fact that the poem opens with what is really a literary preface. The author, after reading Boethius too late at night, falls into a meditation upon Fortune, and reflects

In tender youth how sche was first my fo,

And eft my frende . . .

and well he might, if, as the story tells us, he was once a solitary prisoner, and is now a free man and an accepted lover. It is at this point that a brilliantly original idea occurred to him, a novelty that struck with such unpredicted resonance on his mind that the easiest imaginative projection sufficed to identify it with the matin bell striking that same moment in the objective world. As he says

        me thocht the bell

Said to me, Tell on man quhat thee befell.

In our own language, the author, who had long desired to write but spent much ink and paper ‘to lyte effect’, had suddenly perceived that his own story, even as it stood in real life, might pass without disguise into poetry. He had heard the same voice that called Sidney ‘Fool!’, bidding him ‘Look in thy heart and write’; and making a cross in his old manuscript to distinguish the new dispensation from all his previous attempts, he sat down to write what most emphatically deserves to be called ‘sum newe thing’. The authorship of the poem has been disputed, but the dispute need not concern us. Whether the story is taken from the poet’s life or from the life of another, the originality of thus telling it at all remains. It is true that the inspiration fails before the end, but the poem is full of beauty and the passage in which the lady is seen from the window is at least as good as its analogue in the Knights Tale. The differences between the two are significant. When Palamon sees Emelye his hue becomes ‘pale and deedly on to see’, and he complains that he has a hurt ‘that wol his bane be’. The Scottish poet, in the same predicament, is equally ‘abaisit’, but he explains that it is because his

            wittis all

Were so overcome with plesance and delyte.

Again, though both lovers become equally the captives of their ladies, it is only the Scot who says

sudaynly my hert became hir thrall

For ever, of free wyll.

In this beautiful oxymoron we see how nature has taught the poet to feel and to express both sides of the complex experience where Chaucer wrote in a tradition that invited him to see only one of them. And so also, even where the two poets approximate most, Palamon cries merely ‘as though he stongen were unto the herte’, and the image is one of pain; the later prisoner says

            anon astert

The blude of all my body to my hert

recording with singular fidelity that first sense of shock which is common to all vivid emotions as they arise and which transcends the common antithesis of pain and pleasure. In a word, Chaucer for the moment is not looking beyond the lachrymose and dejecting aspects of love which the tradition has made so familiar; the Scottish poet, here far more realistic, telling ‘what him befell’, recalls us to the essential geniality, the rejuvenating and health-giving virtues of awakened passion, and having thus first presented them directly, goes on to give them that symbolic expression which they demand, in his lyrical address to the nightingale,

        lo here thy golden houre

That worth were hale all thy lives laboure.

Chaucer himself, and all medieval love poets, had excelled in painting the peace and solempne festivity of fruition: but it needed this later and minor poet to remind us that Aphrodite even in her first appearance, when all the future is dark and the present unsatisfied, is still the golden, the laughter-loving goddess. Such is the reward of his literalism, his Scotch fidelity to the hard fact. And this fidelity has another, perhaps a stranger, result. As love-longing becomes more cheerful it also becomes more moral. His Aphrodite loves laughter, but she is a temperate, nay a christened, Aphrodite. There is no question in his poem of adultery, and no trace of the traditional bias against marriage. On the contrary, Venus refers the poet to Minerva, and Minerva will not help him without the assurance that his love is grounded in God’s law and set ‘in cristin wise’.

About the absolute merits of this little poem we are at liberty to disagree; but we must not misunderstand its historical importance. In it the poetry of marriage at last emerges from the traditional poetry of adultery; and the literal narrative of a contemporary wooing emerges from romance and allegory. It is the first modern book of love.

The other production which I wish to mention in this context is, in a way, more interesting precisely because it is not concerned with love at all. I am referring to the earlier parts—especially the first sixteen stanzas—of Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes. Here we have a description, much infected with allegory but still unallegorical, of a sleepless night. The cause of Hoccleve’s insomnia is by no means erotic: it is what we call Worry, and what Hoccleve calls simply Thought. Hoccleve’s means are small and uncertain and he does not see how he is going to make both ends meet. Now it is doubtless impossible to prove that Hoccleve could not have written this passage unless the erotic allegories had been written first; but I question whether any reader who comes to it after studying the subject matter of the last few chapters will fail to detect some influence. For if we may make a distinction between writing about one’s poverty and writing about the state of mind which reflection on one’s poverty produces, then certainly Hoccleve does the second. He analyses the state of his emotions during that wakeful night just as the love poets had analysed the state of the sleepless lover; and Thought personified—as he might be in any erotic allegory—is recognized as the immediate enemy, while the objective circumstances which give rise to Thought are thrust into the background. The result, however it came about, is a piece of very powerful writing; and every one, unhappily, must recognize its truth. The ‘troubly dremes, drempt al in wakynge’, and the grim generalization (so curiously anticipating Keats)

Who so that thoghty is, is wo be-gon,

deserve to be better known. But there are finer things than these. What balm for all our anxieties there is in the beggar’s invitation to the anxious man, to ‘Walke at large out of thi prisoun’! And though it may seem absurd to mention Aeschylus in connexion with Hoccleve, could Aeschylus himself have written much better of Thought than thus?

        That fretynge Adversarie

Myn herte made to hym tributarie

In sowkynge of the fresschest of my blod.

Do not the lines cry out to be re-clothed in sesquipedalian iambics?

III

As a poet of courtly love Lydgate bears a double character. In his style, and in the construction of his poems, he is the pupil of Chaucer. His conception of poetical language, and sometimes his achievement, are based on that way of writing whose slow, triumphant development within Chaucer’s own work occupied us in a previous chapter. In this respect Lydgate claims a place in the high central tradition of our poetry and at times (I fear I cannot say often) he makes good the claim.

And with thy stremes canst every thing discerne

Thurugh hevenli fire of love that is eterne . . .

Redresse of sorrow, o Cithéria . . .

A world of beaute compassid in her face

Whos persant loke doth thurugh min herte race . . .

Such passages are on the main line of development that runs from Chaucer to Spenser, and beyond him to Milton, to Pope, and to the Romantics. In his conception of allegory, again, Lydgate hardly modifies the practice of Machault and Chaucer. He is rather inclined to go back behind Chaucer, or at least to go back to Chaucer’s earliest work. He uses allegory merely as a frame-work for effusions which are unallegorical or which, at the most, reintroduce allegory only in the form of rhetorical personifications. The amorous complaint, or letter, or prayer, is the form in which he is really most at home. Thus in the Black Knight the spring morning and the bird-haunted garden serve only to introduce the Knight’s soliloquy which constitutes the real body of the poem. In the Flour of Curtesye they are merely the setting for the poet’s letter. In both poems, indeed, it might be argued that there is no allegory at all: the landscapes probably have a significacio in fact, but it is unimportant and uncertain. In the Temple of Glas, again, we are brought ‘ful fer in wildirness’ to a ‘craggy roche like ise ifrore’, not mainly that we may witness an allegorical action but that we may hear the long soliloquies and conversations of the Lady, the Lover, and the Goddess. And Lydgate was wise to concentrate on these; for nothing is more striking in this poem than the superiority of the stanzaic speeches and dialogues over the poet’s own narration in couplets. Nearly all that is of value is in the former. No doubt with Lydgate, as with most minor poets, the choice of a metre almost determines the quality of the work: the couplet offers no obstacle to his fatal garrulity (the first sentence of the poem lasts for nine, and the third for eighteen, lines) while the stanza compels him to ‘grow to a point’. But the difference of metre goes with a difference in content. The slow building up and decoration, niche by niche, of a rhetorical structure, brings out what is best in the poet.

But in his conception of love Lydgate is more modern than Chaucer: he ranks with the author of the Kingis Quair as one who helped to make the old, wild Provençal tradition more possible and more English. In the Black Knight, I confess, he has a conceit sufficiently outrageous, when he says of Vulcan, that is, of Venus’ lawful husband, that

The foule chorl had many nightes glade

Wher Mars, her worthy knight, her trewe man,

To finde mercy, comfort noon he can.

Cuckolds have often been ridiculed; but it seems very hard that they should be thus scolded as well. The passage, however, is far from being typical of Lydgate, and in the Temple of Glas we are moving towards a less wilful conception. In this poem it is easy to miss the importance of the passage where the unhappily married, and those who have been forced into the cloister as children, complain piteously to Venus. It seems natural to us that these two classes of people should complain. But Marie de Champagne would have laughed and so would Andreas. Lydgate regards the matrimonial, or the celibate, vow as a cruel obstacle to the course of true love; but in the original tradition such vows, and the breach of such vows, were so far taken for granted that married people and clerks, or even nuns (in the Concilium) were the typical lovers. Plainly, when we reach this passage, we have turned a rather important corner. But the poet does not again speak so clearly, and as we proceed we find interesting ambiguities. The heroine of the poem is certainly married, and not married to her lover; and so far the tradition is preserved. But then her marriage is the heroine’s chief grievance (it had not troubled Guinevere) and seems to be regarded as an insurmountable obstacle to her desires,

My thoght goth forth, my body is behind.

When Venus replies to this complaint, she promises that the Lady will one day possess her lover ‘in honest maner without offencioun’. I am not sure what Lydgate means by this. He may mean no more than that time and place will so agree that the Lady can fulfil the code of courtly love without detection and therefore without objective ‘dishonour’; but equally he may mean that she can remarry. No less ambiguous is Venus’ charge to the lover:

But understandeth that al her cherishing

Shal ben groundid upon honeste,

That no wight shal thurugh evil compassing

Demen amys of hir in no degree;

For neither merci, routhe, ne pite

She shal not have, ne take of the non hede

Ferther then longith to hir womanhede.

We are even left in doubt as to the conclusion of the whole story. When Venus has finally brought the two lovers together, the Lady warns the knight,

Unto the time that Venus list provide

To shape a wai for oure hertes ease,

Both ye and I mekeli most abide.

But what are they waiting for Venus to do? That they are waiting is apparent, for they merely kiss and praise the relevant deities, and there is no suggestion that their love is consummated. The most natural explanation certainly is that they are ‘meekly abiding’ until Venus ‘shapes a way’ not to adultery but to marriage. As the euphemism goes, ‘something may happen’ to the undesirable husband,

For men by laiser passen many a mile,

And oft also aftir a dropping mone

The weddir clereth.

It may well be that Lydgate himself was not quite certain how his story ended; but the uncertainty itself would be significant.

In the poem as a whole this new direction of the sentiment produces an increase of pathos. The lot of the unhappily married becomes more significant for poetry if they assume that the marriage vow must be kept; and the heroine of the Temple, even through the medium of Lydgate’s imperfect art, moves me more than Chrétien’s Guinevere. And when Lydgate pleads, in lines I have already mentioned, for the young girls forced into marriage to mend their father’s estates, and for the yet younger and more deeply wronged oblates, snatched from the nursery to the cloister for the good of their fathers’ souls,

In wide copis perfection to feine

And shew the contrari oitward of her hert,

he rises to true poetry. Probably no reader comes upon the opening words of this passage (‘I herd othir crie’) without remembering the voces vagitus et ingens in Virgil’s hell, or without reflecting that Lydgate all too probably spoke from his own memory of the secret tears and homesickness of monastic childhood.

Lydgate’s best work lies outside his allegories of courtly love, and some of it we shall happily have occasion to study before the end of the chapter. But I cannot forbear, though it carries us for a moment outside our subject, to remind the reader how much better Lydgate can be, even as a love poet, than these slight allegories suggest. It is hard to find in Chaucer so near an approach to the lyrical cry as we find in these neglected lines:

And as I stoode myself alloone upon the Nuwe Yere night,

I prayed unto the frosty moone, with her pale light,

To go and recomaunde me unto my lady dere.

And erly on the next morrowe, kneling in my cloos

I preyed eke the shene sonne, the houre whane he aroos,

    To goon also and sey the same in his bemys clere.

IV

The little anthology of love poems by obscure or unknown authors, which the old editions included with the work of Chaucer, has had a curious fate. There is a great deal of chance in literary history. If these poems had never been associated with the name of Chaucer, if they had slumbered in manuscript until the last century and then been released only to the half-waking existence conferred by some learned society’s publication, it is doubtful whether the historians would now treat them more kindly than the known works of Lydgate and Hawes. An accident—or something not unlike an accident—has scattered a knowledge of them broadcast, and thus secured for them the justice which is not done to other poems of the same kind and the same age. Thus Milton does not disdain to borrow a phrase from the Flour of Courtesye and a conceit from the Cuckoo and the Nightingale: thus Dryden, Wordsworth, and Keats translate or praise poems vastly inferior to Reson and Sensualite or the Palice of Honour. Favour intrudes itself even into the text and format of the books. Lydgate is sent to press with all his imperfections on his head, his margin defiled with jocular (and erroneous) scholia, and his text ugly with diacritics: the Flower and the Leaf is cleansed ‘by sheer editing’ (in Saintsbury’s phrase) from its metrical and grammatical blemishes and printed on a clean page. With such adventitious aids it is not surprising that a poem should outstrip in popular estimation works at least as good as itself. It is high time that criticism should redress the balance. It is not, perhaps, to be desired that we should admire the ‘Chauceriana’ less; but we must discount the accidental element in their fame in order to admire some other allegories more. The best of these favoured pieces deserve their popularity, and the whole collection is a charming formal garden, on a small scale, where lovers of antique sentiment do well to linger. But it contains none of the greatest work in this kind, and it contains little promise for the future.

The Cuckoo and the Nightingale is perhaps the earliest of these poems. It is a bird debate of the familiar kind, written in an unsual rhyme scheme, and pleasantly full of country sights and sounds. The vernal love-longing,

    that bringeth into hertes remembraunce

A maner ese, medled with grevaunce.

is well expressed. The reader will notice that the precision and felicity of the last line are of a kind as proper to prose as to verse. This is no reproach, for poetry is not necessarily at its best when it is most unlike the other harmony; but it serves to distinguish this author’s talent from Chaucer’s. We find in him neither the merits nor the defects of the high style. Despite his airy subject he remains, as a stylist, on the ground: he has not caught from Chaucer the new richness and sweetness of speech, and the effect is usually that of one who talks and not of one who sings.

This quality—I hardly call it a defect—is well brought out by the contrast between the author of the Cuckoo poem and the author of La Belle Dame Sans Mercy. The very first lines of the latter,

Half in a dreme, not fully wel awaked,

The golden sleep me wrapped under his wing

give us at once what we have missed in the Cuckoo and the Nightingale, and give it triumphantly; and they also introduce us at once to the real importance of the Belle Dame. It is as an admirable exercise in poetical style (and I use the word ‘exercise’ in no derogatory sense) that this poem concerns us. It is a translation from the French of Chartier, and the content is of no great significance. It is not an allegory, but a poem in which some preliminary adventures lead up to a long dialogue between a lover and his mistress—the merciless and immovable mistress who gives her name to the poem. The theme suggests the sentiment of the piece, which consists in a continued emphasis on what I venture to call (but ‘let rude ears be absent’) the masochistic element in the attitude of the courtly lover. The author is not morbid; he remains everywhere within the bounds of the healthy and normal, but he is playing with shades of feeling which need very little more encouragement to pass those bounds and to become a recognizable perversion. Certainly his picture of the mistress, though well suited to this turn in the sentiment, is poetry, not pathology, and deserves to be quoted:

In her fayled nothing, as I could gesse,

O wyse nor other, prevy nor apert.

A garnison she was of al goodnesse

To make a frounter for a lovers hert—

Right yong and fresshe, a woman ful covert,

Assured wel her port and eke her chere,

Wel at her ese, withouten wo or smert,

Al underneth the standard of Daungere.

But however we define the sentiment, it would be misleading to regard it as the main thing in the poem. The main thing is the dialectic of the conversation between the lady and her lover, and it is doubtless on the subtlety of her answers, and on the recurrent intellectual suspense between each question and each answer, that Chartier chiefly relied for keeping up the interest of his readers. To us, who have separated our sentimental and our intellectual games so widely, it is not very interesting; and unfortunately it is in these passages that the English translator breaks down. I am not sure that he was a perfect master of the original; and certainly his version of the dialogue contains obscurities. But of English his command is perfect; and throughout the poem—but specially in the earlier stanzas before the dialogue begins—we see an essentially second-rate theme redeemed by sheer good writing. We have to reconsider our whole conception of the culture of the fifteenth century when we read such an accomplished stanza as the following:

To make good chere, right sore himself he payned

And outwardly he fayned greet gladnesse;

To singe also by force he was constrayned

For no plesaunce, but very shamfastnesse;

For the complaynt of his most hevinesse

Com to his voice alwey without request,

Lyk as the soune of birdes doth expresse

Whan they sing loude in frith or in forest.

In this, as in the previous extract, it will be seen that we have to deal not with mere writing in stanzas, but with that very different thing, really stanzaic writing. The last line is felt throughout the whole grave minuet which words and sense go through in order to reach it; and when it comes, there is a full close for ear and mind, and a concluding tableau for the inner eye. The thing is difficult to do, and even Chaucer and Spenser do not always succeed. There are single lines, too, in the poem, which tempt me to quotation; but its real quality lies, not in occasional ‘beauties’ that can be pencilled, but in its aureum flumen—the rich, even, melodious continuity of the whole.

The Flower and the Leaf—a much later work by an unknown hand—belongs to a different world. Its author is less accomplished and more original, and the poem is, in some respects, of more historical importance. It represents, in a very mild form, that fusion of the courtly and the homiletic allegory of which there will be more to say in a later section. The story is probably familiar to every reader. The author—who represents herself as a woman, and must therefore be assumed to be a woman, by the principle of Occam’s razor—wanders into a forest where she witnesses the revels of two parties of mysterious beings, who are distinguished as the company of the Leaf and the company of the Flower. The latter are afflicted by excessive heat and violent showers, while the former remain in comfort under the shade of a ‘fair laurer’. When the storm is over, the servants of the Leaf, cool, dry, and comfortable, offer hospitality to the wet and blistered followers of the Flower, and prescribe ‘plesaunt salades’

For to refresh their greet unkindly heet.

Finally an unnamed lady (who is rather artlessly introduced) explains to the authoress the meaning of the vision. The Queen of the Leaf was Diana, and the Queen of the Flower, Flora. Their two companies consisted entirely of ghosts—the ghosts of virgins, true lovers, and valiant knights following Diana, while Flora’s retinue consisted of those who had loved idleness and found no better occupation than ‘for to hunt and hawke and pley in medes’. This is the surprising conclusion of a poem which began with all the air of an allegory of courtly love. From the courtly tradition it has borrowed the idea of an exercitus mortuorum. From the same source it has borrowed the conception of a future reward and punishment which have no connexion with Christian eschatology. But then it allots these rewards and punishments on a purely moral basis: there is no hell for cruel beauties, and if true lovers are rewarded they are rewarded along with virgins. Love and valour and virginity find themselves ranged together and opposed to idleness, frivolity, and inconstancy. The antithesis is purely moral, and the morality is that of modern life. At the core of this little poem—which looks, at first sight, so like La Belle Dame or the Parlement of Foules—we find a moral allegory on the lines of the choice of Hercules, a little psychomachia of Virtue and Vice. It is, in fact, a hybrid—a moral allegory wearing the dress of the Rose tradition. It is not, indeed, probable that the authoress is consciously drawing upon the homiletic allegory; and perhaps she is not conscious, either, of any call to reform the erotic tradition. One suspects that she knows the more perverse expressions of the latter to be ‘only poetry’ and is not interested: while the fierce monotony, the unreal black and white, in which the contemporary pulpit painted the bellum intestinum leaves her respectfully unmoved. ‘She was ful mesurable, as wemen be.’ She allegorizes a world she knows: a world in which the more terrifying virtues and vices do not appear, but in which, nevertheless, she is conscious of a better and a worse, a protective leaf and a soon withering flower. As a moralist she stands nearer to Addison than to Deguileville. She too would enlist fancy and fashion on the side of virtue—a virtue pictured in such homely, urbane, and practicable colours as startlingly anticipate our eighteenth-century Whig literature. Hence, though she deals with the moral choice, her treatment of it ‘turns all to favour and to prettiness’. Only the most lenient virtues and the most pardonable vices appear, and the contention between them is one of courtesy. It ends with the Virtues inviting the Vices to a picnic and helping them to dry their clothes. In all this we may, if we please, detect a ladylike ignorance of the heights and depths: nor will I plead (though the thing is arguable) that the behaviour of these Virtues is, in a sense, more worthy, because more Christian, than that of Deguileville’s Gracedieu. I do not pretend that the authoress was thinking on so grave a level. But if she does not look very deep, at least she looks with her own eyes: she allegorizes life as it appears to comfortably circumstanced people of good breeding and good will, and not as any convention, homiletic or erotic, would have it appear. If she cannot claim wisdom, she has a great deal of good sense and good humour, and is guided by them to write a poem more original than she herself, perhaps, suspected. A similar merit, and a similar limitation, appear in her execution. Her language is fresh and genuine, but never reaches the last felicity. She describes what interests her, selecting rather by temperament than by art; and she finds considerable difficulty in getting the right number of syllables into each line.

The Assembly of Ladies is also put into the mouth of a woman, and critics, anxious to economize hypotheses, have suggested that it is by the same hand as the Flower and the Leaf. If this is true—a question which we shall probably never be able to answer—she was a remarkable woman; for the Assembly represents a wholly different, and, in some ways, a not less interesting modification of the tradition. Taken as an allegory, it is as silly a poem as a man could find in a year’s reading. A number of ladies are summoned to a ‘counsayl’ at the court of Lady Loyalty; they arrive and present their petitions; Loyalty postpones her answer till her next ‘parliment’ and the dreamer wakes. As a story, and still more as an allegorical story, this is clearly of no value. The poem belongs to that class in which the allegorical pretence is assumed only at the bidding of fashion. What the writer really wants to describe is no inner drama with loyalty as its heroine, but the stir and bustle of an actual court, the whispered consultations, the putting on of clothes, and the important comings and goings. She is moved, by a purely naturalistic impulse, to present the detail of everyday life; and if her poem were not hampered by being still attached—as with an umbilical cord—to the allegorical form, it would be an admirable picture of manners. Indeed, if only the first four stanzas survived, we might now be lamenting the lost Jane Austen of the fifteenth century. They read exactly like the beginning of a novel in verse; and in them we have the rare privilege of listening to an ordinary conversation, as opposed to a wooing, between a well-bred man and woman of that age. The dialogue is admirable, and perhaps better than Chaucer’s earliest attempts. Nor does this realism fail when the lady begins to tell her dream. We soon forget that it is a dream, or an allegory. The messenger from the court of Loyalty delivers her summons and is already departing when she turns back to say ‘I forgot: you must all come in blue’. The heroine, arriving at the court, begs one of the ladies in waiting ‘helpe her on with her aray’. An official stands her friend, pulls wires on her behalf, and tells her whose ear she must gain. A cry goes down the presence chamber, ‘Voyd bak the press up to the wal’. The waking from the dream is eminently natural; and so is the conclusion of the whole poem,

Now go, farwel! for they call after me.

We cannot call the piece satisfactory as a whole: for the fatal discrepancy between the real and the professed intention is felt at every turn. To read it is to learn why some critics hate allegory; for here the significacio is—what some suppose it to be in all allegories—a chilling and irrelevant addition to the story. But the detail of the poem shows powers akin to genius, and reveals to us that much neglected law of literary history—that potential genius can never become actual unless it finds or makes the Form which it requires. ‘Materia appetit formam ut virum femina.’ In the Assembly a great deal of good ‘matter’—kindly satire, lively dialogue, a shrewd eye—remains fruitless.

V

The reader will have observed that all the Chauceriana, with the possible exception of the Flower and the Leaf, display a weakening of the genuinely allegorical impulse. The trappings of allegory are retained but the true interest of the poets lies elsewhere, sometimes in satire, sometimes in amorous dialectic, and often in mere rhetoric and style. Before we can proceed to the true allegories of this period in which the impulse is by no means decadent and is indeed preparing itself to pass on to the new triumphs of The Faerie Queene, there are a number of other poems to be considered which fall into the same class with the Chauceriana.

Dunbar is, perhaps, the first completely professional poet in our history. Versatile to the point of virtuosity, he practises every form from satiric pornogram to devotional lyric and is equally at home in the boisteous language of his alliterative pieces, the aureation of his allegories, and the middle style of his ordinary lyrical poems. His content is everywhere as central and obvious, as platitudinous if you will, as that of Horace; but like Horace he is such a master of his craft that we ask nothing more. His allegories are not of historical importance. They have no purpose in the world but to give pleasure, and they have given it abundantly to many generations. The Thistle and the Rose is an allegorical epithalamion after the manner of Chaucer’s Parlement, though any comparison between the two is rather unfair to Dunbar. Into the Parlement Chaucer has put the whole of his early strength and made a paradise of tenderness and fun and sublimated sensuality. Dunbar’s poem does not aspire to be more than a festal exhibition of fine language adding a new touch of magnificence to a royal wedding and strictly comparable to the court dresses of its first hearers. As such it is a brilliant success, but it yields to the Golden Targe. In the Targe the language is more splendid, the stanza more adapted to support such splendour, and the images more dazzling. To notice the abundance of such words as ‘crystalline’, ‘silver’, ‘sperkis’, ‘twinkling’, and the like is to indicate sufficiently the quality of the poem. And this peculiar brightness, as of enamel or illumination, which we find long before in Gawain and Perle and again in Douglas, is worth noticing because it is the final cause of the whole aureate style—the success which enables us to understand the aims of all the poets who did not succeed. And when the thing is successful it silences all a priori objections (such as the Wordsworthian heresy) against artificial diction: when the thing is well done, it gives a kind of pleasure that could be given in no other way. From our own point of view the poem might almost be classified as a radical allegory. It has an intelligible allegoric action: the poet’s mind, though long defended by reason, becomes at last the prisoner of beauty. But this action is so slight and degenerates so often into a mere catalogue of personifications (which is the only serious fault of the Targe) that we are right to neglect it. The real significance of the poem lies elsewhere: in it we see the allegorical form adapted to purposes of pure decoration, as the Pastoral form was adapted by Pope or the elegiac by Matthew Arnold—we might add, by Milton. For this also is one of the things that happens to a dominant form.

A much less happy example of such decorative allegory occurs in Skelton’s Garland of Laurel. That Skelton could write genuine allegory when he chose we know from the admirable Bouge of Court. The purely satirical content of this poem puts it outside my province; and I suppose that no reader has forgotten the vividness of its characters or its nightmare crescendo from guilelessness to suspicion, from suspicion to acute nervousness, and thence to panic and awakening. The experience of a young man during those painful years in which he first discovers that he has entered a profession whose motto is Dog eat Dog, could hardly be better described. But the Garland is not, in this sense, an allegory at all. Allegory in it is merely a pretext or a succedaneum—a blank wall on which tapestries of various kinds may be hung. Of such ‘tapestries’ the lyrics are of course the loveliest; but there are good things even in the Rhyme Royal stanzas, as this, of Phoebus embracing Daphne:

        the tre as he did take

Betwene his armes, he felt her body quake.

In Dunbar and Skelton the decay of true allegory is redeemed by beauties of another kind—beauties so great that we forgive the false form of the poems for their sake. But in the work of William Nevill we reach the nadir of the whole genre. The Castell of Pleasure illustrates the unhappy operation of a dominant form in making mediocrity vocal. The author was a very dull young man; but he might have carried the secret to the grave with him if the whole recipe for making poems of this kind had not lain so fatally easy to his hand. The plot of the poem is a debate between Beauty, Pity, Disdain, and Desire framed in a dream journey to a castle of Pleasure. The ingredients are familiar, but this would not prevent the dish being palatable; the real trouble is that the cook is naught. The debate might have represented—like the dialogue of Pity, Shame, and Danger in the Roman—a real psychological process in the heart of the heroine, or, failing that, might at least have had the dialectical charm of the Belle Dame Sans Merci. But Nevill makes it predominantly juristic, and most of the arguments are not even tolerable conceits. The only good turn is the unexpected thesis of Pity that love of effeccyon (that is of passion and psycho-physical ‘affinity’) is really more stable than love grounded upon condicyons—as we should say, on community of tastes and interests, and companionship. The journey to the Castle, again, in better hands might have proved full of beauty and wonder; but in Nevill we get only one good picture,

I was ascendynge a goodly mountayne

About the whiche the sonne over eche syde did shyne,

Whereof the coulour made my herte ryght fayne

To se the golden valeyes bothe fayre and playne . . .

—where the landscape, though not the metre, is alive. The thought—for even William Nevill will have his thoughts—is banal. He, too, is aware of a choice between the life of love and another life, and the poem is prefaced by a dialogue between the author and the printer on this very subject, to which we return later at the gate of the castle. The alternative is that between love and money. In the prologue he is afraid (or his publisher is afraid) that the public will be more interested in books telling them how to make a fortune than in books of love: at the gate of the castle he finds twin inscriptions in letters of ‘golde’ and ‘yndye blewe’ informing him that he must here choose between the road to worldly wealth and that to ‘beauties hygh estate’. The reader will remember how the authoress of the Flower and the Leaf had softened the old stern theme of the psychomachia into a gentle play between the mildest virtues and the most venial faults. Nevill’s choice—which he does not hesitate to compare with the choice of Hercules—illustrates the merely bathetic side of the same process. Her antithesis was, at worst, pretty and unimportant: his is irredeemably commonplace and yet by no means universally valid. The two together are a timely reminder how far we have travelled from the real Middle Ages. The great and true antitheses with which the older poets were concerned—the eternal conflict between Venus and Diana or Venus and Reason, or the subtle discrimination, possible only to a civilized society, between Venus and Cupid—these have sunk out of sight. Something of magnanimity and something (in the deeper sense) of realism seems to be lost as the Middle Ages draw to a close: a great tide of the prosaic and the commonplace seems to be rising and carrying old landmarks away. We may, if we please, describe it as a return to nature, but only if we remember that ‘spiritual’ and ‘civil’, as well as ‘artificial’, are the opposites of ‘natural’. And even if mere nature is to be endured when she is humble and naïve, as she is in the ballads, or even as she is in the Flower and the Leaf, nature pretentiously tricked out in the robes originally devised for rarified and arduous sentiment, is intolerable. The earlier poets used allegory to explore worlds of new, subtle, and noble feeling, under the guidance of clear and masculine thought: profound realities are always visible while we read them. But who can endure letters of gold and azure over a castle-gate to symbolize a worthy young blockhead’s decision between the richer and the prettier of two neighbouring heiresses?

For indeed this is all that Nevill means. The love which he celebrates is a perfectly respectable love, ending in marriage, and opposed to the acquisition of a competence only by accident, if at all. It is this, indeed, which constitutes his chief interest for us as historians: we must place him along with Lydgate, King James, and Hawes, as an indication of the way the wind is blowing. In one respect he goes farther than they. He does not hesitate to show us the reversal of the lovers’ relations which marriage will effect, by which the ‘servant’ becomes the master.

I wyll moreouer be subdued to your correccyon

Yf it like you to mary me and haue me to your wyfe.

It is remarkable that this change in the real theme leaves unchanged certain characteristics of the old love poetry which, logically speaking, ought henceforth to disappear. Thus Nevill warns lovers to be ‘secret’, not noticing that there is now nothing to be secret about. Thus, again, he ends, after awakening from his dream, on a note of disillusion and quotes omnia vanitas. He does not repent, for he has nothing to repent of; but I cannot help suspecting behind this passage the influence of the old palinode, as in Chrétien, Chaucer, or Gower—as I suspect it also behind the far better close of the Pastime of Pleasure. What was originally a moral necessity is becoming a structural characteristic.

I have spoken hardly of Nevill, and it would be unfair to conclude without mentioning his merits. These are not to be found in his style, which varies between excessive aureation (‘precyous pryncesse of preelecte pulcrytude’ or the like) and the verbose, shuffling, pseudo-logical or legal prolixity which the earlier Chaucer found it so hard to escape from. His merits are two. The less important is a dash of that graphic power which we detected in the Assembly of Ladies: the comings and goings on the poet’s way to the presence of Beaute are sometimes lively enough. But his real strength, such as it is, lies in his eye for natural appearances, and this sometimes sets us wondering what he might have done if he had lived in an age of descriptive poetry. The best passage, though it has been quoted before, is still so little known as to deserve transcription:

The nyght drewe nye, the daye was at a syde.

My herte was hevy, I much desyred rest

Whan without confort alone I dyd abyde,

Seynge the shadowes fall frome the hylles in the west.

Eche byrde under boughe drewe nye to theyr nest;

The chymneys frome ferre began to smoke;

Eche housholder went about to lodge his gest;

The storke, ferynge stormes, toke the chymney for a cloke.

Eche chambre and chyst were soone put under locke;

Curfew was ronge, lyghtes were set up in haste.

They that were without for lodgynge did knocke. . . .

And here a man would willingly break off and conceal the fact that Nevill, having written this, sees fit to conclude the paragraph with the line—

Which were playne precedentes the daye was clerely paste.

We are accustomed to anonymity in medieval poetry, but few poems are so deeply anonymous as the Court of Love. Its style and metre are not those of any known period in our literature; and it is difficult to guess who this author was or when he wrote a poem which scans perfectly provided you make every final -e mute and also sound the -e in every plural and genitive in -es. Fortunately it is not part of my undertaking tantas componere lites; but even the content of the poem presents us with similar problems. When the poet explains that Nuns, Hermits, and Friars are among the courtiers of Love—for ‘there is non excepcion made’—we seem to be back in the ages before Lydgate and King James and Nevill; but then the language of the poem suggests a date so much later that we wonder whether the author can really know the old tradition; whether it is not more probable that he writes from a Protestant dislike of celibacy. So, again, the pedantic enumeration of Love’s twenty statutes carries us back to the world of Andreas, and the beautiful matins and lauds sung by the birds at the end of the poem belong to an early stage of the tradition; but the name, and perhaps the character, of ‘little Philobone’, sound more modern. Most probably we have here to do with a poet who had read widely in the literature of courtly love, with the detachment of one studying a mode that has almost passed away, and who then used a whimsical eclecticism in building up his own poem, which is predominantly satiric. It is a lively piece, full of movement and gaiety; and once at least it strikes the note of rapture:

O bright Regina, who made thee so fair?

Who made thy colour vermelet and white?

Where woneth that god? How far above the air?

—Great was his craft and great was his delight.

In the story which we are now following that event—or rather that complex of heterogeneous events—which are known as the Renaissance, are not a landmark of primary importance. Metrical and stylistic technique are altered and, in a way, vastly improved; but the big alteration in the sentiment of erotic allegory took place earlier, and in its structure or formula much remained unchanged. If we turn to Barnaby Googe’s Cupido Conquered (printed among his Eglogs in 1563) we shall be struck by its complete fidelity to the oldest models in this kind. It has a spring morning and a wood full of singing birds: a god appearing in a dream, a flight through the air, an allegorical House where Diana keeps her court, and a psychomachy between her forces and those of Cupid. There is nothing in the content of the poem to show that it was not written in the fourteenth, or even the thirteenth, century. The language and metre alone reveal the date. Both are competent and at times something more than competent, as in the couplet

And warlike tunes began to dash

    Themselves against the skyes.

We have definitely escaped from the worst diseases of the later Middle Ages, from verses that will not scan and sentences that will not construe. But it would be an error to regard this transition as an unqualified blessing. Compared with Dunbar or Douglas, or the author of the Belle Dame Sans Merci, Googe writes like a schoolboy: his work presupposes a coarser and more commonplace audience than theirs and a far less delicate feeling for language. His very competence smells somewhat of the gradus:

Let not our weryed hartes sustaine

    Suche wrongfull Tyranie;

Quench quickly now the fyrie flames

    Of open injury.

And if he is thus naïve beside the most accomplished of his predecessors, on the other hand he has none of the inner voice, the brooding solemnity, the ardour and compassion which redeem so many unsuccessful lines in Lydgate and Hawes. For evil, as well as for good, the medieval ἄπειρον has been subjugated. The trouble in Googe, as in so many of the early Elizabethans, is his satisfied insensibility. A much better attempt in the same kind, Alexander Montgomerie’s Cherry and the Slae, dates from the last twenty years of the century. As an allegory it is more tedious than Googe’s poem; but it is saved by its scenery, its reiterated imagery of rushing water, and even more by its beautiful stanza. In Montgomerie we seem to hear the scrape of the fiddle and the beat of dancing on the turf: in Googe, the ticking of a metronome.

VI

Hitherto I have been following the story of a death, or something as near a death as we ever reach in the history of literary kinds; and the reader may pardonably feel that this particular form of allegory—the form which descends from poets like Machault and Chartier—has taken an unconscionable time to die. It is with relief that I turn to that much more interesting branch of my subject which concerns the vital development of allegory in our period, the transformation by which we pass from the Romance of the Rose to works within measurable distance of The Faerie Queene. In order to understand this transformation we must pick up a thread in the story which was dropped several centuries (or, from our point of view, several chapters) ago. It will be remembered that allegory originally disengaged itself as a literary form under the pressure of a strongly ethical interest. Virtues and Vices were its first dramatis personae, and the moral conflict its first theme. The oldest kind of allegory is the moral or homiletic allegory. Our own study abandoned the history of homiletic allegory as soon as erotic allegory had detached itself from it and produced the Roman de la Rose; and ever since then we have been following the sub-species, erotic allegory, alone. It is now time to remember that the same age which saw the rise of the Roman saw also a rich development of the homiletic kind in such works as the Songe d’ Enfer, the Voie de Paradis, and the Tornoiement Antecrist. On allegory of this kind, though it was the parent stem, it was natural that the Roman itself should exercise an influence. Great allegories of the moral type were produced by moralizing poets in answer to the libertinism of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun; but to answer is to be influenced. Personifications and themes from the culprit work were naturally borrowed by the works that reproved it: they appeared in order to be rebuked, but they appeared. And thus insensibly a new kind of allegory arises. To set Virtue and Venus in action within a single poem is also to transcend the narrowness both of the strictly homiletic and the strictly erotic allegory, and to come a step nearer to a free allegorical treatment of life in general; and with this enlarging of the subject-matter there comes inevitably a complication and variety which were lacking before. A closed battle-field served Prudentius, and a closed garden Guillaume de Lorris. But if the hero is to be subjected to the appeals both of the false gods and the true, some sort of visionary geography at once becomes necessary, and some amount of journeying. And when a poet has reached this stage it is impossible that he should not begin to incorporate into his allegory certain elements from the romances where the journey with adventures is already the norm; and before he has finished he will find himself making an imaginary country whose allegorical pretext justifies it in being rather more imaginary than the countries in romance, being grounded not in Britain or France or even Alexander’s East but in the much wider and more indefinite realities of inner experience. Once again, as long before in Claudian, allegory liberates the mind for free excursions into the merely imaginable: a ‘world of fine fabling’ becomes accessible and we are in sight of The Faerie Queene.

It will be noticed that this account of the matter distinguishes two things: the homiletic allegory pure and simple, and the homiletic allegory influenced by, and usually hostile to, the Romance of the Rose. The homiletic type in its purity is represented in England by the Assembly of Gods—an allegory so purely moral that it hardly falls within the scope of this book. It may be briefly described as a psychomachia with trimmings. These trimmings—the complex fable in which the battle of Virtue and Vice is set—are by no means without merit. The visit of Attropos to the assembled gods faintly anticipates the ascent of Mutabilitie in Spenser’s poem; and the final agreement of the Rational and Sensitive souls in their common fear of Death is well conceived. The execution displays most of the typical vices of second-rate medieval literature; the phrase is prolix, the language undistinguished, catalogues and commonplaces are frequent. Yet some of the characters are painted lively enough; and if we may bring out by a typographical device the real nature of the rhythm (which is that of Pease pudding hot!) the following may please:

So thedyr came Diana

    Caried in a carre,

To make her compleynt

    As I told you all;

And so did Neptunus

    That doth both make and marre,

Walewyng with his wawës

    And tombling as a ball.

Or the entry of Vice—

On a gliding serpent

    Riding a great pas,

Formed like a dragon,

    Scalyd hard as glas;

Whose mouth flamëd

    Feere without fayll,

—Wingis had hit serpentine

    And a long tayll.

Such merits as the work has, turn mainly on this kind of vivacity. The strife between moral personifications has something of the stir of a real battle. The battle-field is described, almost in the Anglo-Saxon spirit, as the place ‘where sorrow should awake’; the Vices cry ‘On in Pluto name! On, and all is oure’; Vertew, coming to succour his men

Caused hem be mery

    That long afore had mornyd,

and as he advances ‘his pepyll set up a gret shout. . . . A Vertew! A Vertew!’ This manly strain helps us to forgive the clumsy, honest poet; who was certainly not Lydgate if we judge by his metre.

The Court of Sapience, though it should be mentioned here, is not so pure an example. Indeed it comes into this class at all only because of its introductory digression. The core of the poem is a modest little encyclopedia in verse which covers jewellery, physics, botany, the liberal arts, and elementary religious knowledge. One is reminded of a sampler; and the author, who may well have been young, seems to have written more for his own pleasure than for that of any reader. But such is the influence of the dominant form that he has seen fit to connect his catalogues on the thin thread of narrative provided by a visionary meeting with Sapience and a journey to her house; and this again gives rise to the matter of his first book where Sapience describes the greatest feat she has performed—that of devising the means to man’s Redemption. This passage is homiletic allegory; and, what is more, it is certainly good, arguably great, poetry. The allegory is not original; and the theology turns on a crudely ‘substitutional’ view of the Atonement. But this does not prevent the poet from rising at this point to almost mythopoeic heights. The whole of the first Book should be familiar to every English lover of poetry. Langland himself has nothing more sublimely imagined than the scene in which Peace turns away from Heaven to voluntary exile, or better expressed than her valediction:

Farewell Mercy, farewell thy piteous grace,

So wellaway that vengeance shall prevayle:

Farewell the beamyd lyght of hevyns place,

Unto mankinde thou mayst no more avayle;

The pure derknesse of hell thee doth assayle.

O lyght in vaine! . . . the clyps hath thee incluse,

Man was thy lord, now man is thy refuse.

O Seraphin, yeve up thyne armony,

O Cherubin, thy glory do away,

O ye Thronys, late be all melody,

Your Jerarchy disteyned is for ay.

Your maisteresse, see, in what aray

She lyth in soune, ylorene with debate.

—Farewell, farewell, pure household desolate.

To remember what Dryden, and even Milton, have made of similar themes, is to have a measure of this old poet’s tenderness and majesty. And in this same book he gives a beautiful illustration of the homiletic allegory’s debt to the poets of courtly love. Our Lord is imagined as a knight who takes Mercy for His lady, and promises her (surely an exquisite transmutation of the old knightly and heroic bēōt),

Full manfully I shall my payne comport

And thynke on you as on my own lady.

And when His adventure is achieved, He returns to her with the words,

Have here yowre man; do wyth him what ye lyst.

This introductory allegory, I confess, is the only reason for mentioning The Court of Sapience at this point; but I find it hard to leave. There is something in the hero’s journeyings with Sapience among the flowers and trees and precious stones which defies analysis. It is very absurd that a critic should (apparently) be found who thought that Milton’s description of Eden owed something to this obscure poem; absurd, yet after all significant. For I must confess that more than once as I progressed slowly through these brightly coloured and indistinctly shaped landscapes, half pleased and half tired with the names of Asteryte, Charbuncle, Crisopras, and Auripigment (or else of dolphin, cokadryll, efemeron, or coryaundre, plantane, and amomum)—more than once I found myself reminded of Milton. It is very unlikely that the explanation lies in any real similarity of poetic art: it is of Milton’s theme, not of his style, that we are reminded. He wrote of Paradise; but the old poet seems rather to have written in Paradise, to be himself paradisal in his piety, his cheerful gravity, his childlike love of matter. For the rest, he uses a moderate degree of aureation and has some talent for what Dryden called the ‘turn’; he can contrive a conceit; and save in some incorrigibly scientific passages he is hardly ever prosaic.

From such homiletic allegories I must now turn to those which illustrate the fusion of the homiletic and the courtly types. This stage in the history of our subject is represented by the two great allegories which Lydgate translated from the French, the Pelerinage de la Vie Humaine and Les Echecs Amoureux. Both are of great importance, and the second, though almost universally neglected, is a delight.

Deguileville’s Pelerinage was an early fourteenth-century poem, somewhat longer than the Roman de la Rose. When I speak of it as a ‘fusion’ of the two kinds of allegory, I do not mean that there is any fusion of erotic and moral sympathies in the author’s mind. His intention is purely homiletic, and the fusion is a purely artistic one. But on this level it is well marked. A student of homiletics might take it for an ordinary versified sermon, employing the common allegorical method of the pulpit, and borrowing from the erotic convention. A student of courtly allegory might equally well take it for a true scion of the Rose badly inoculated with homiletics.

Its homiletic characteristics are obvious. The author is not only more anxious to teach than to delight, but also more anxious to teach by direct statement and exhortation than by poetic suggestion. Hence his narrative, especially in the earlier parts of his poem, often stands still while long passages of unmitigated doctrine are uttered by such characters as Grace Dieu and reason. The positions advanced are those of an orthodox monastic of that age. The degrees of humility are cited from Benedict and Bernard. Heresy is condemned, and the fact that she will

Hardyd with obstynacye

Continue til the ffyre be hoot

is mentioned without qualm. The voluntary poverty of monks is praised in a passage of real beauty; but we also learn that monasteries lose their wealth only as a punishment for corruption. Ordinary poverty, on the other hand, seems to have lost its gospel blessing, and we hear only of Poverte Impacyent, figured as a foul, old woman unfit to appear among the lady Virtues. Religioun, in the technical sense, is the only ark of safety in the troubled sea of the present world. The founders of monastic life are pictured as powerful friends who help their clients ‘by ful gret subtylyte’ to climb into heaven over the wall, or pull them up by ropes, while ordinary people have to take their chance of being admitted at the gate. The author was far from foreseeing a famous chapter in The Water Babies.

But the influence of the Roman is equally marked. It is explicitly mentioned for reprobation—for the Pilgrimage is a religious counterblast to the profane allegory—but the author has also learned from his adversary. His picture of Reason descending from her high tower, and again of Reason offering herself to the Dreamer as his paramour, recall famous passages in the Romance. More important, both to the critic and to the historian, is the figure of Nature, to whom Deguileville allots perhaps the most obviously beautiful lines in his poem:

I make alday thinges newe,

The olde refresshing of her hewe.

The erthe I clothe yer by yer,

And refresshe hym of hys cher

Wyth many colour of delyte,

Blewh and grene, red and whyt,

At pryme temps, with many a flour,

And al the soyl, thorgh my favour

Ys clad of newe; medwe and pleyn . . .

The bromys with ther golden floure,

That winter made with his shour

Nakyd and bare, dedly of hewe

With levys I kan clothe hem newe;

And of the feld the lyllyes ffayre.

The origins of this speech are obvious. But Deguileville by no means leaves the goddess Natura as he found her; and for the most part his treatment of her, if less beautiful than this, is more original. His conception of religion is fierce, colourless, and sincere. He is more concerned to exclude than to draw in; and one of the most important parts of his poem is the debate in which Grace Dieu overthrows first Nature, and then the human reason, which is represented by Aristotle. Natura thus becomes one of the enemies, and Deguileville sets about her in a manner which is sufficiently surprising. Her antiquity, which had charmed poets as long ago as Claudian’s day—vultu longaeva decoro—is shamelessly twisted into a charge against her. As Grace Dieu drily observes

            ye wite wel

Offte sithe ryot and age

Putte folkys in dotage,

and the rest of her speech is in keeping with the taunt. She rates Nature without mercy, extorts her abject submission, and sends her away with a harsh warning to mind her own business and not to repeat her impertinence. Since the subject under discussion is the miracle of the sacrament, the allegorical intention is obvious, and perhaps unexceptionable. But what is interesting is the poet’s handling of it. He is entirely in agreement with Grace Dieu and represents Nature, at her first entry, as a mere bustling and scolding old woman. The comic effect of the passage is almost certainly intended, for the homiletic tradition by no means excludes buffoonery, and, after all, the poet is attacking the Romance of the Rose and wishes to blacken one of its heroines:

And thanne anon upon the pleyn

I sawh a lady of gret age

The which gan holden hir passage

Towardys Grace Dieu in soth,

And of her port irous and wroth,

And her handys eek of pride

Sturdily she sette a syde . . .

She was redy for to strive,

For anger did her herte ryve

Atweyne.

The conception is ignoble, and perhaps absurd; and I am inclined to distrust that species of respect for the spiritual order which bases itself on contempt for the natural. Deguileville’s doctrine that the soul is ‘buried quyk’ in the body looks back, in the long run, to pagan rather than to Christian sources; and is of a piece with his assertion that nature herself, as opposed to sin, ordained that flesh and spirit should be at strife. After this we are not surprised to learn that Music is born of Pride and is inimical to virtue. But these are questions of doctrine, and they should not blind us to the vigour of his execution. His picture of Nature is alive.

It is harder to defend the structural vices of the poem. Its theme is substantially the same as that of the Pilgrim’s Progress, and every comparison between the two serves but to emphasize the greatness of Bunyan and the weakness of Deguileville. Bunyan opens with a picture which prints itself upon the eye like a flash of lightning; and in a few pages he has his pilgrim started upon a journey as enchanting as any in romance. In Deguileville, of the twenty-four thousand odd lines which make up the poem, ten thousand have already passed before the pilgrim is allowed to set out. This monstrous delay is occupied by instruction and preparation, and is allegorical only in so far as much of it is put into the mouths of personifications. It is not true allegory, and might as well have been uttered by the poet in his own person. His characters, like those whom Aristotle condemns, utter ‘not what the tale, but what the poet, desires’. And even when we are at last launched upon the spiritual journey, we travel towards an anticlimax. The pilgrim is kidnapped, dragged in the mire, bound, beaten, and left clinging to a rock in the midst of the sea: it is here that Grace Dieu appears as the deus ex machina and takes him on board her ship of ‘religioun’. With this rescue the poem ought to have ended. Unfortunately the poet continues to describe the pilgrim’s career after his rescue, and makes it plain that the ship is unseaworthy and the rescue ineffective. The ship may bear him to a Cistercian ‘castle’; but what awaits him there is rough handling from Envy and her crew, who succeed in breaking all his limbs, which is more than the vices of the outer world ever did to him. Since all associations of human beings are imperfect, this picture of cloistered intrigue and corruption may not be a very strong practical argument against monasticism as an institution; but it is a fatal aesthetic argument against monasticism as the climax of a poem.

In the technique of allegory Deguileville is in places the worst writer with whom the present study will have to deal. Nothing is easier or more vulgar than to make allegories, if we are content with purely conceptual equivalences and do not care whether the product will satisfy imagination as well. But when they are made they are monstrosities, and of such monstrosities the Pilgrimage is guilty. Penance is represented with a besom in her mouth, or the Pilgrim is made to pluck out his eyes and put them in his ears. When we read such things, we can almost excuse the last century of criticism for rejecting allegory root and branch as a mere disease of literature; but if we persevere we shall find even in Deguileville passages that restore our faith. The Pilgrim, newly clad in the armour of righteousness, finds that

Yt heng so hevy on my bak

I wolde fayn have lett yt be.

and presently complains, from the interior of his suffocating panoply:

Myn helm hath rafft me my syyng

And take away ek myn heryng . . .

Thes glovys binde me so sore,

That I may weryn hem no more

With her pinching to be bounde.

Finally he is allowed to have his armour carried behind him in a cart while he himself walks free, in the hope—a hope which, of course, deceives him—that he will find time to put it on when the enemy appears. The difference between embracing an ideal and acquiring a habit may seem to some (I am not among them) too obvious a point to justify this elaborate treatment. But it is by no means certain that any literal statement could bring it so vividly home to us. Certainly the sense of restraint, the belief that after all there must be an easier way, and the protesting misery, without which no man wins a good habit either in moral virtue or in a mechanic art, could hardly be better expressed than in the image of this comic, pathetic, all too human pilgrim and his armour. Nor does it stand alone. The vision of the crucifixion of the flesh, and the figure of Tribulation with his two commissions, one from God and one from Satan, are proper, and moving, employments of the allegorical method.

The poet is so fierce and gloomy a man that we should look in vain in his work for any presentation either of the beauty of holiness or of the pleasures of sin. The severity of the one and the foulness of the other are his natural subjects, and the only relief he allows us is his grim humour. It is, indeed, on this limitation that the quality of his poetry depends: for he also has something of his own—a flavour or an atmosphere which is recognizable, though by no means ever present. The reader who wishes to taste this flavour, to know, as we say, ‘what Deguileville is like’, should read the central portion of the poem, where the Pilgrim contends with the seven deadly sins and the Devil himself. Here he will find no Spenserian seductions on the one hand, and no Miltonic loftiness on the other. He will meet Venus, not in her youth and beauty, but old and crone-like and masked, riding on a sow. Venus and Gluttony together will knock him down and drag him in the mire, tied to that sow’s tail. Pride will come to their aid, not ‘tricked and frounced’ as she is wont in other allegories, but as a hag riding pick-a-back on Flattery her subject-hag, and both ‘ful owgly of ther syht’. The Pilgrim lies helpless while the whole chorus of witches—aged, obscene shapes, all female and all monstrous—stand over him and plot his death. Nothing is more characteristic of Deguileville’s imagination than his continued insistence on the old age of these nightmare shapes. Well may he exclaim:

Allas! what hap have I or grace!

All they that I meet in this place

Ben olde, echon.

There is no effort to illustrate the subtleties of evil; but there lies over the whole passage a heavy squalor, a strangeness without glamour, and a disordered variety which somehow contrives to be monotonous. We have no doubt of the author’s desperate sincerity. But there is power also in his unrelieved picture of evil, of bewildered degradation, of nausea. Milton’s or Dante’s hell, superior as they are by innumerable degrees in art, yet do not come so near to the worst we can imagine. There we have grandeur, fortitude, even beauty; but Deguileville’s vision is of the last evil—of something almost omnipotent yet wholly mean; an ultimate deformity. From this point of view (though of course from no other), if I had to mention a modern poet who affects us in something the same way as the blackest parts of Deguileville, I think I should choose Mr. Eliot.

How far such a passage redounds to the credit of the poet may be doubted. We cannot help wondering whether he knew how well he was writing. We may suspect that his very faults helped him as much as his art; that the squalor and the disorder are as much those of Deguileville as of his subject. But though we raise such questions, we cannot answer them. The state of mind which his work produces in us is all that we can record, for the state of the poet’s mind can never be known.

The poem is unpleasant to read, not only because of its monstrous length and imperfect art, but because of the repellent and suffocating nature of its content. Yet in a way it is freer than the Romance of the Rose, in so far as the moral point of view is an abstraction less rigid than the erotic. It brings in more of our experience. And this widening in the allegorical subject is reflected in the literal content of the story. Dark as the world of the Pilgrimage is, it is at least a world in which we can go to seek adventures. We are not confined endlessly to the garden: the road and the resting-places, woods, seas, ships, and islands, distant cities and wayside meetings—these are the great contribution of Deguileville’s poem.

It is, nevertheless, with heartfelt relief that we turn to Les Échecs Amoureux, or, as Lydgate’s version is called, Reason and Sensuality. A better antidote to Deguileville could hardly be devised, for here, while we find once more the new variety of incident and increased romanticism of plot which are proper to the fused allegory, we find also what the reader who has just finished the Pilgrimage so badly needs—sunshine and charity.

The story is as follows. As the poet lies between sleep and waking on a spring morning, Nature in all her brightness appears before him, filling his bedchamber with the smell of amber and rose, and thus addresses him: ‘Arise and betake yourself to virtuous activity. Prove all my works and see if there be any flaw in them—yet all this beauty was made for you alone. Be worthy, Man, of your dominion.’ And he asks, ‘Where shall I go?’ ‘Learn,’ says Nature, ‘that there are two roads. The road of Reason, beginning in the east, runs westward all about the world and so returns again to the east; but that of sense rises in the west, and though it leads eastward, to the west it comes again at last. To follow the first of these is the prerogative of man who alone among the beasts

            hath intelligence

To make his wit to encline

To knowe things that be divine,

Lasting, and perpetual,

Hevenly and espirituel,

Of heven and of the firmament

And of every element;

Whos wit is so clere yfounde,

So perfyt pleynly and profounde

That he perceth erthe and hevene

And fer above the sterris sevene.’

With these words the goddess vanishes, and the dreamer rises and goes out into the spring morning, where he soon loses his way. So indeed does the author, and wantons in descriptions which might be called prolix if the theme itself, the relaxed and boundless sweetness of vernal nature ‘wilde above rule or art’, did not condone and invite delay. The thing, so often well done in medieval poetry, has never been done better, and the reader pauses gladly to notice how

The freshnes of the clere welles

That fro the mountes were descended,

Which ne mighte be amended,

Made the colde silver stremes

To shine ageyn the sonne bemes;

The rivers with a soote soune

That be the wallys ronne doune . . .

It seems but natural, not only to those who love Plato but to those who love poetry also, that the young man, so solicited by ear and eye, should forget the high pre-natal charge of Natura,

That al my lyf which passed was

Was clene out of my remembraunce.

As he wandered, four celestial shapes approached him. Mercury was the leader, who came on an errand from Jove, presenting Minerva, Juno, and Venus for his judgement, as once he had done to Paris. Though Minerva offered him wisdom and Juno wealth, he gave the prize to Venus, and forthwith found himself alone with her; for Pallas and Juno incontinently vanished, and Mercury, observing with a shrug that ‘al this worlde goth the same trace’, shook his wings and was off. What follows marks well the difference between a purely decorative allegory and an allegorical picture of real life. Venus is ready enough to promise the youth a mistress as fair as Helen, but the youth remembers Nature’s bidding sufficiently to be uncomfortable. As he explains to Venus, he is not quite his own man. He has promised Nature to travel by the road of reason and to fly sensuality. But he would not disoblige Venus either,

And for that I am lothe toffende

To you or hir by displesaunce,

I hang as yet in ballaunce.

—an admission which leaves to Venus the obvious reply that she is Nature’s most intimate friend and indispensable ally, and that no question of divided loyalties need arise. In the end the dreamer becomes ‘her man’, and the reader begins to feel some apprehension lest once again the commandments of Love are to be enumerated. But the poet knows better. His Venus, instead of commandments, has good news of a far country to deliver, and tells him of the goal to which he must set out—the garden of her two sons, Cupid and Deduit. The passage is interesting as an interpenetration of courtly and homiletic allegory, with the happiest results. The lover, like the Christian, becomes a traveller, and Love’s garden, like the Celestial City, comes at the end of his story instead of the beginning. Before she leaves him, Venus fixes the right direction by pointing out to him the battlemented tops of Cupid’s castle in the distance—a graphic touch not unworthy of Bunyan.

The young man has not gone far on his journey before he enters a large forest; a place ‘wonder fair and delytable’ where the tall trees send forth a wholesome smell and golden fruit hangs beneath their unwithering foliage. It is the home of Diana, who at first refuses to speak to him because he is Venus’ servant, but presently relents and warns him of the dangers of his enterprise. ‘You have been duped by that goddess’, she says, ‘whose very name means venom,

For thou hast noon experience

Of hir large conscience!

The garden to which she is leading you is full of perilous sirens, and of beds more enchanted “than was the bed of Launcelot”. There are trees yonder whose shadow kills a man, and wells where he can drown like Narcissus. Turn back. Enter it not,

But abyde and make arest

Her with me in my forest

Which hath plentevous largesse

Of beaute and of fairenesse;

For shortly through my providence

Her is noon inconvenience,

No maner fraude, deceyt, nor wrong

Compassyd by Sirens songe . . .

And ther thou shalt no welles fynde

But that be holsom of her kynde,

The water of hem is so perfyte

Who drinketh most hath most profyte.

Eke in thys forest vertuous

No man taketh hede of Vulcanus.’

The Diana of this poet is a complex, as well as a gracious figure, of closer kin to Spenser’s Belphoebe than to the abstract ‘Chastity’ of the pulpit. Virginity, indeed, is her profession; but she can also praise faithful loves, and it is part of her complaint against Venus that love nowadays is not as it was when Arthur reigned, when famous warriors loved gentlewomen of high degree ‘nat but for trouthe and honeste’, and for their sakes put life in jeopardy in ‘many unkouth straunge place’. Yet her Hesperean forest, in the poet’s main intention, probably symbolizes the conventual life, and his hero condemns it as being, for all its beauty, too ‘contemplatyfe’. If so, it is a lesson in allegory to compare this representation of ‘religioun’ with that of Deguileville. There we have a castle, in which we meet such characters as Lady Lesson and Wilful Poverte: here, a pagan goddess, with bow and quiver, stands in glittering attire amidst a forest out of fairyland, and discourses upon heroes of old romance. In the prosaic sense it is obvious that Deguileville’s picture is very like the thing symbolized, while that in Reason and Sensuality is, in the same sense, not like it at all. But if we look deeper, if we attend, as in poetry we always should attend, not to the objects mentioned in the passage but to its quality and atmosphere, its immediate flavour, so to speak, upon imagination’s palate, we see that Deguileville has effected nothing, where his rival has called up for us the eternal appeal of virginity, retirement, and contemplation. The one deals with a doctrine, a superficies; the other with a spiritual solid.

To the speech of Diana the traveller retorts by quoting Nature’s original command ‘go, se the world’, and will not heed the reply that he has misunderstood it. The phrase is happily chosen, for it is made clear that the young man wishes to ‘see the world’ in many senses. As this poet’s Diana is something more than chastity, so his hero is more than an abstract lover. He is obstinate youth in all its aspects, and love, though his chief, is not his sole, preoccupation. He feels the thirst that Marlowe’s heroes were to feel, and longs for

            the knowleching

Of the heven and his meving

And also of the salte see,

And eke what thing it mighte be,

Why the flood, as clerkys telle

Folweth with his wawes felle,

And after that the ebbes sone

Folweth the concours of the Mone.

His final rejection of Diana, when, beaten out of all his guards yet impenitent, he determines to see the garden of Deduit for himself, is expressed in terms exquisitely natural:

    Thogh yt were as mortal

As horryble and foule also

As is the paleys of Pluto,

And as ful of blak derkenesse,

Of sorwe, and of wrechchidnesse,

Yet finaly, how ever it bee

I shal assayen and go see . . .

    It semeth a maner destiny.

The verse (which, after all, is Lydgate’s) may halt, and perhaps the images are ready made; but the psychology is excellent.

At this profession of invincible secularity, Diana ‘took the thykke of the forest’ and was seen no more. The hero, full of ‘joy and plesaunce’ continued his journey to the walls of the happy garden, where the poet pauses to praise the Romance of the Rose as an incomparable work of ‘philosophie’ and ‘profounde poetrie’. The figures on the Wall, the portress, and the beauties of the garden are described, and the rest of the poem, so far as Lydgate has translated it, is occupied with an allegorical game of chess. The poem at this stage is still readable, but the inspiration of the earlier parts has disappeared. There is much satire on women here, which depends on the simple device of attributing to them all those virtues which tradition notoriously denies them; whether it is Lydgate or another who made assurance doubly sure by adding cujus contrarium est verum in the margin, I have not been at the pains to inquire.

This poem, in its truncated English form, is one of the most beautiful and important pieces produced between Chaucer’s work and Spenser’s. The historian will notice that it represents a far fuller and happier fusion of the moral and the courtly allegory than Deguileville. The author is no partisan; he gives us a balanced, even a detached, picture of the mingled yarn of human experience. The allegory, in his hands, is beginning to forget its origins in the pulpit and the courts of Love, and to feel its way towards the treatment of ‘general nature’. The aesthetic critic may care nothing for tendencies and influences; but he too should remember the poem, for the unearthly freshness of Diana’s forest, and for the shining and exuberant vitality of those early passages where the earth

    made him faire and fresh of hewe

As a mayde in hir beaute

That shal of newe wedded be,

and perhaps even more for the lofty platonizings in this description of Nature’s robe,

    Ther was wrought in portreyture

The resemblaunce and the figure

Of alle that unto God obeyes,

And exemplarie of ydeyes

Full longe aforn or they weren wrought

Compassed in divine thought;

For this Lady, freshest of hewe,

Werketh ever and forgeth newe

Day and night in her entent

Weving in her garnement

Thinges divers ful habounde,

That she be nat naked founde.

The vis medicatrix of Nature herself has passed into the poet’s imagination. He pipes as if he would never be old, and his lines are a sovereign antidote either to Renaissance fever or modern discouragement.

In both these poems we trace the beginnings of a new kind of allegory. When I say that this impulse is continued in the work of such poets as Hawes and Douglas, I do not mean that I can prove an ‘influence’ or draw up a list of ‘parallels’. It is not a question of a literary school, of models and imitations, but of an unconscious tendency, given no doubt in the whole state of mind at that period rather than in its literary ideals, whereof all these later allegories are in varying degree symptomatic. So in our own days, the growing popularity of the imaginative and satirical biography depends less on literary discipleship to Strachey than on a widely spread attitude of whimsical scepticism towards established reputations—an attitude whose causes are perhaps outside literature altogether.

The first of these authors with whom I shall deal is Stephen Hawes; and Hawes for our purpose means the Pastime of Pleasure and the Example of Virtue. The Pastime is a difficult work to judge. Read it conscientiously from cover to cover, and you will conclude that it is the heaviest of tasks; but then from such a reading something will cling to your memory—odd lines, odd scenes, a peculiar flavour—till you are driven back to it, to find that its faults are just as grievous as you first supposed but that its merits are greater. No poem gives us the impression of so wide a gap between its actual achievement and the thing it might have been. There is a kind of floating poetry in the author’s mind but not in his grasp. He seems ever on the point of becoming much better than he actually is. Nor is it very wonderful that this should be so, for Hawes, stumblingly and half consciously is trying to write a new kind of poem. He himself believes that he is trying to revive an old kind: the praise of Lydgate is often on his lips, and he deplores the direction in which poetry is moving in his own time:

They fayne no fables pleasaunt and coverte

But spend their tyme in vainfull vanyte

    Makynge balades of fervent amite.

Like Caxton, he wishes to revive the ‘floure of chyvalry which ‘hath be longe decayed’. But this illusion, whereby the mind posits in the past the desired thing which is really still in the future, is not unnatural, and its working explains the early history of Romanticism in the eighteenth century, when men like Walpole and Macpherson not only sought, but even invented, in the past, faint images of the poetry which was really to be written in the nineteenth century. The combination of allegory on the large scale and chivalrous romance which Hawes wants to revive, could not be revived because it had not existed. There had been some approach to it in Deguileville: but Hawes carries it much further, and we shall not find the thing in perfection till we reach The Faerie Queene. Hawes in the meantime moves about in worlds not realized. He has very little art and his poem is dark and tortuous, but a fitful wind of inspiration stirs in the darkness. He so misunderstands the original of allegory that he thinks its purpose is to hide the subject—‘to blowe out a fume’ are his own words; but one of the reasons why he thinks so is his native and by no means unpoetic bent for the indefinite and the allusive—in a word for the romantic vague. Before his pilgrim finishes his journey and wins La Bell Pucell we have that journey so frequently predicted that all suspense is lost; but then suspense is no part of his aim, and this constant pressure of the remote and unattained—this continual hinting and casting forward (ripae ulterioris amore)—is of the very nature of one kind of romance.

    By the way there ly in wayte

Gyauntes grete dyffygured of nature—

But behonde them a grate see there is

Beyonde which see there is a goodly lande

Moost full of fruyte, replete with Joye and bliss—

Of ryght fyne golde appereth all the sande.

So speaks Lady Fame to the youthful Graunde Amour, and the lines are good poetry because they lead the mind on and open the doors of the imagination: and good allegory, because to be young and to look forward is, after all, very like hearing what Graunde Amour heard. And if the same journey is foretold again a couple of hundred lines later—this time the hero sees it pictured on a wall—even this has its own sense of mysterious fatality and its own truth to life. As we proceed the allegory becomes more difficult. I have not been able to find the significacio in the repeated partings of the hero and heroine, and perhaps there is none. Perhaps Hawes himself would have been neither able nor willing to throw much light on the deeper obscurities of his poem. He loves darkness and strangeness, ‘fatall fictions,’ as he says, and ‘clowdy fygures’ for their own sake; he is a dreamer and a mutterer, dazed by the unruly content of his own imagination, a poet (in his way) as possessed as Blake. It is at once his strength and his weakness that he writes under a kind of compulsion. Hence the prolixity and frequent longueurs of his narrative, but hence also the memorable pictures, whether homely or fantastic, which sometimes start up and render this dreariness almost ‘a visionary dreariness’.

I sawe come rydynge in a valaye ferre

A goodly lady envyroned aboute

With tongues of fyre as bryght as ony sterre.

        I came to a dale.

Beholdynge Phebus declynynge low and pale,

With my grehoundes in the fayre twylight

I sate me downe,

    And on his noddle derkely flamynge

Was sette Saturne pale as ony leed.

Eternity in a fayre whyte vesture. . . .

    We came unto a manoyr place

Moted aboute under a wood syde.

‘Alight’, she sayd, ‘For by right longe space

In payne and wo you dyde ever abyde;

—After an ebbe there cometh a flowynge tyde.’

Indeed, all the resting places on the journey of Graunde Amour are good; and all the roadside twilights and dawns,

Whan the lytell byrdes swetely dyde synge

Laudes to theyr maker erly in the mornynge.

Much that he describes does not interest us, but he describes nothing that he has not seen, whether with the inner or the outer eye. He has noticed the morning sky coloured like curds, and the ‘bypaths so full of pleasaunce,’ the little images of gold moved with the wind on the top of the tower of Doctryne, and the sun shining, as a man wakes, in the mirror of a strange bedroom. Some medieval writers have little feeling for the difference between combat with a man and combat with a monster; but when the three-headed giant crosses the path of Graunde Amour

My greyhoundes leped and my stede dyde sterte,

and he is as meticulous as Spenser in telling us how many cartloads the giant’s corpse measured. So clear is his vision, so perfect his poetic faith in his own world, that the poem ought to be good; but his incapacity to select, his stumbling metre, and his long delay in the tower of Doctryne, have condemned him to not undeserved obscurity.

The Pastime is not exclusively an allegory of love, but of life as a whole, with special emphasis on love, education, and death. The educational sections in which Hawes vainly endeavours to rival the allegorico-encyclopaedic work of Martianus Capella or Jean de Meun, are the dullest part of the poem. With the possible exception of the fine passage on grammar

(By worde the worlde was made oryginally:

The Hye King sayde: it was made incontinent).

none of his presentation of the liberal arts deserves to be re-read. Much more interesting is his treatment of love. No poet whom we have considered is more homely—if you insist, more Victorian—than Hawes, in the context which he imagines for the passion. Not only does Graunde Amour look forward to marriage as the only conceivable form of success: he even hesitates over the inequality in wealth between himself and his mistress, and is reassured by Counseyle (who here fills the role of Frend, or Pandarus) that ‘she hath ynoughe . . . for you both’. The Lady, on her part, answers to his suit that she is ‘sore kept under’ by her ‘frendes’ who ‘wolde with me be wrothe’ if they heard of his proposal. This is the work-day world with a vengeance, and it might seem that we were within easy distance of the commonplace of Nevill; but then the Lady’s very fear that her relatives will lead her ‘to a ferre nacyon’ (ferre is a key-word in Hawes) and his answering promise that he will follow

And for your sake become adventurous

are essentially romantic. And if Hawes is prosaic in the context of his love, on the subjective side he is all on fire, ‘wrapped,’ as he says, in a ‘brennynge chayne’. He is far indeed from the unambiguous desire of Guillaume de Lorris, or the heroical passion of Troilus: the fire of his love is a dim fire, charged with sentiment and imagination, a thing much more ambiguous and brooding, in a word more romantic, than that of older love poetry. It is a cloudy ecstasy, love veritably in a mist, a dream or a glamour and none the less for that reason a reality; and he writes of it lines which are irreplaceable in the sense that no other poet has struck just the same note.

She commaunded her mynstrelles ryght anone to play

Mamours, the swete and the gentyll daunce.

With La Belle Pucell, that was fayre and gaye,

She me recommaunded with all pleasaunce

To daunce true mesures without varyaunce.

O Lorde God! how glad than was I

So for to daunce with my swete lady!—

For the fyre kyndled and waxed more and more,

The dauncing blewe it with her beaute clere.

My hert sekened and began waxe sore;

A mynute six houres, and six houres a yere

I thought it was.

But it is Hawes’ treatment of his third theme, the theme of death, which is most remarkable. Critics have been found to whom it is merely ridiculous that a narrative written in the first person should continue after the narrator is dead and thus permit him to describe his own decease. But the convention whereby the dead are allowed to speak, or the living to assume the person of the dead, is surely not a very difficult one: the Greek anthology, and the first country churchyard you turn into, will supply precedent. And if you object that dead men do not really talk—and I can see no other objection—you will be well advised to study any subject rather than poetry, where the naïve realist can never succeed. So much suspension of disbelief as this device demands, is our debt to every poet; and to Hawes, for a special reason, the debt is very easily paid. For even from the outset—perhaps because his imagination is so earnest and his conscious skill so weak—the good passages have had this peculiar quality, that they seem to come from nowhere, to be a disembodied voice, not always a perfectly articulate voice, coming to us out of a darkness; so that when, at last, it comes to us admittedly from the grave, it at once compels belief.

O mortall folk, you may beholde and se

How I lye here, somtyme a myghty knyght.

The ende of Joye and all prosperite

Is dethe at last through his course and myght;

After the day there cometh the derke nyght,

For though the day be never so longe

At last the belles ryngeth to evensonge.

Every one knows this stanza: but few know that it comes at the end of a dirge sung by the Seven Deadly Sins in which the reiteration of a single phrase (‘erthe of erthe’) has all the brutal insistence of a bell heard from within the church, and that dirge and epitaph together are merely the starting-point for one of the most nobly conceived passages in any allegory. For when his hero lies dead and the poem might be expected to end, Hawes does a most surprising thing; he rolls up curtain after curtain of his cosmos, as the successive backcloths roll up in the transformation scenes of the old pantomime, or as the planes of time disclose themselves in Mr. Dunne’s serial universe. Remembrance has hardly finished the epitaph over the grave of Graunde Amour when Dame Fame enters the temple to enroll him among the Worthies, and to conclude with her vaunt

Infenyte I am. Nothing can me mate.

and here again we suppose we are at the end: it is a familiar consolation at the funerals of great men. But no—on the heels of Fame comes another shape, the same on whose ‘noddle’ the dark flame of Saturn was set, and whom we quickly recognize by the horology in his left hand, and who proclaims himself,

Shall not I, Time, dystroye bothe se and lande,

The sonne and mone and the sterres alle?

But Time is wiser than Fame and boasts less, and comes confessedly but as the usher of Eternity—Eternity who ends the poem, appearing in her white vesture and triple crown,

Of heaven quene and hell empres.

If the execution of this whole passage had been equal to the conception, it would have been among the great places of medieval poetry. It is not; but we must still say (more reasonably I hope than Goethe said of another poem) ‘how nobly it was all planned’.

His other allegory, The Example of Virtue, for some reason lacks the faint, peculiar appeal of the Pastime. It is a simpler and shorter poem in which Youth, after some good adventures, but also after assisting at a very dull débat between Nature, Fortune, Hardiness and Wisdom, changes his name to Virtue and marries Cleanness. Perhaps the most interesting character in the poem is this lady’s father, the King of Love. His name prepares us for a picture of Cupid and Cupid’s court: but the old Cupid could hardly have had Chastity for his daughter. And as we approach his castle and find that we are cut off from it by a swift river spanned with the traditional perilous bridge—‘not half so broad as a house ridge, and that this bridge bears the legend

No man this bridge may overgo

But he be pure without negligence

And stedfast in God’s belief also.

we begin to doubt whether he is not meant for the King of Love in a very different sense. Cleanness appears on the far side of the river encouraging the hero much after the style of Perl. But when at last we meet the King,

(At the upper end of the hall above

He sat still and did not remove,

Girded with willows),

he turns out to be very like Cupid after all—blind, winged, naked, and armed. But when he tells the wooer that none shall have his daughter’s hand who does not ‘scomfit the dragon with heads three’, (which are the World, the Flesh, and the Devil), and when the wooer arms himself for this adventure in the Pauline armour of a Christian man, then again we are thrown back on some celestial Cupid. The truth is that we have reached a point at which Hawes does almost unconsciously what Dante or Thomas Usk did by an arduous conceit; the sort of unification or ambiguity (it is not a mere critic’s business to decide) on which Spenser’s sixty-eighth sonnet is based, has already become natural.

Two passages in the poem are memorable. The first is the poet’s shocking interview with Nature:

Methought she was of marvellous beauty

Till that Discretion led me behind,

Where that I saw all the privity

Of her work and human kind;

And at her back I did then find

Of cruel Death a doleful image.

This is not merely a conventional exercise in late medieval gloom, for in the same passage the poet forces us to attend also to Nature’s beauty and fecundity.

        a fair goddess

All things creating by her business

and working ‘withouten rest or recreation. Either side of the picture, alone, would be a commonplace; the synthesis of the two awakes a much deeper response. The second passage is a lovely example of the convincingness of Hawes. After a night journey in a great wilderness the traveller finds himself in a desolate place full of wild beasts. Any allegorist might have done this, but perhaps only Hawes, or only one of those far greater poets who share Hawes’ matter-of-fact faith in their imaginary worlds, would have added that he knew by the sweet smell that there was a panther somewhere near.

Gavin Douglas is so much of an individual, and so much more of an artist than Hawes, that I do him some wrong in citing him as the illustration of a general tendency at all. But though his allegories are distinctly his own and need no historical significance to recommend them to the lover of poetry, they have in common with their period the widened scope and the increasing imaginative liberty. Their great distinction is the artistic control, the disciplined splendour of style, the proportion and balance, in which the medieval Scottish writers so often excel the English. King Hart, especially, is an admirably ordered little work which ought to rejoice the heart of a French critic. Its content represents the fusion of erotic and homiletic allegory to perfection. The real theme is that of Youth and Age, and the fable tells how the Soul, long captive to beauty and pleasure, is at last awakened by age, deserted by the brisk companions of its youth, forced to return to its own long-abandoned dwelling-place, and finally defeated by death. The poem thus has an obvious affinity with the Confessio Amantis, and a more recondite and subtle affinity with Beowulf—which is well brought out when the poet, describing the foul water of Corruption in the moat of King Hart’s castle which is rising and lapping upward ‘gre by gre’ against the walls, adds the fact that

        thai within maid sa grit melody

That for thair reird thay micht nocht heir the sound.

It is, of course, a theme which easily becomes platitudinous; but good allegory (next to the style of Johnson) is the best way of reviving to our imaginations the grim or delightful truths which platitude conceals, and the whole of this poem marches impressively, in the words of a later poet,

To the small sound of Time’s drum in the heart.

As in Beowulf, the end is felt from the beginning, and the very brightness of the first stanza gives us the disquieting sense of weather that will not last:

So semlie was he set his folk amang

That he no dout had of misaventure,

—So proudly wes he polist, plane and pure

With youthheid and his lustie levis grene,

So fair, so freshe, so liklie to endure—

The adventures of King Hart during his long sojourn in the castle of the Lady Pleasance are good radical allegory of love, and truer to the original Rose pattern than anything we have met since the fourteenth century. Hart and his companions are thrown into a dungeon with Danger for their jailer, and there

Full oft thai kan vpone Dame Pietie cry,

‘Fair thing, cum doun a quhyle and with vs speik!’

and it is only when Danger sleeps that Pity is able to grant their request, and thus to make Hart in the end the master of his captor. But the whole of this traditional passage is new-coloured because it is set between Hart’s gay, unsuspecting youth in his own castle and the hour when Age arrives:

Ane auld gude man befoir the yet was sene

Apone one steid that raid full easelie.

He rappit at the yet but courtaslie,

Yit at the straik the grit dungeon can din

The contrast between the gentle knocking (the small sound of Time’s drum) and its appalling repercussions is a fine specimen of the complex appeal of good allegory. Without its significacio, taken as a purely magical event in a romance, it is already the kind of contrast that calls to something deeply lodged in our imagination, and is always potent, whether for laughable or horrifying effects, when used on the stage. Add the significacio, by remembering the vast emotional disturbances which that small sound has sometimes produced in your own experience, and its potency is doubled: and then go on to remember (as poetry of this kind will force you to do) the innumerable experiences of quite different kinds in which the same small knocking without produces the same convulsions within, and you will find that this seemingly facile piece of allegory is a symbol of almost endless application, to use which is to come as near as our minds can to the concrete experience of a universal. The same may be said of the scene in which Hart returns to his own deserted castle. How well the image fits the experience of coming back to a man’s own interests and earliest bent of nature after the long constraint imposed by some passion! But the passion need not be love, the return need not be repentance; the symbol, consciously intended for one kind of return, fits all, and gives in concreto a characteristic of our life so fundamental that if you try to conceive it (instead of imagining it) it will escape you by its very abstraction. King Hart is not a good poem for a sick or sorry man to read, but if any one dismisses it as a frigid or conventional work he must have little feeling for reality. It strikes home where the screaming exaggerations of Blair (dare I add, of Donne?) on the same theme, go harmlessly over our heads.

The Palice of Honour is a much more elaborate, and also a more cheerful, poem. The theme, if I have understood it aright, may be expressed in Milton’s words (Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil, &c.) and the poet would set before us the mild paradox that so seemingly mundane a good as Honour can be conferred in its true form only by God and enjoyed only in eternity. The Anagnorisis, so to speak, of the allegory, comes at the moment when the palace of Honour, long heard of and sought for, turns out to be the dwelling-place of God; and the whole point of this passage depends, oddly enough, on the language Douglas used. When the pilgrim is allowed to peep through the keyhole of Honour’s hall (like the page at the ‘whummil bore’ in the ballad) he sees, seated bright amidst the almost unbearable brightness of the place ‘ane god omnipotent’; modern English, compelled to choose between the rendering one God and a god, inevitably destroys the careful equivocation, a kind of intellectual pun, on which the force of the original depends.

This conceit, though perhaps not very profound, is the nerve of the whole allegory, and it is enough to show that the Palice, even from the strictly allegorical point of view, is by no means contemptible. But unless the significacio throughout has escaped me, the poem as a whole illustrates the furthest point yet reached in the liberation of fantasy from its allegorical justification. Douglas is no dreamer like Hawes, for he is not the servant of his dream, and he writes with a clear head and a learned and practised pen; but what he describes is sheer wonderland, a phantasmagoria of dazzling lights and eldritch glooms, whose real raison d’être is not their allegorical meaning, but their immediate appeal to the imagination. The success of the poem depends on his poet’s privilege of being awake and asleep at the same time, drawing on the dreaming mind for his material without for one moment losing his power of selection or the matter-of-fact realism which compels our acceptance. In the midst of the ominous wood he tells us that ‘the stichling of a mouse out of presence’ would have terrified him. Caught by Venus’ courtiers, and mindful of other goddesses who have punished their victims by turning them into beasts, he tells us how

    Oft I wald my hand behald to se

Gif it alterit, and oft my visage graip.

The horses ‘shynand for sweit as they had been anoynt’, the sea-nymphs ‘dryand thair yallow hair’, and the Muses ‘yonder, bissie as the beis’ in their garden, are admirable examples of this mixed fantasy and realism. But this liveliness is never allowed, as it sometimes is in Chaucer, to extinguish mystery and glamour. The very opening of the dream (‘Out of the air come ane impressioun’) is an invitation to enchantment. The howling wilderness beside the river, where the fish ‘yelland as elvis shoutid’, into which the poet wakes in his dream, may represent the dangers and desolation of man’s birth into the world of nature; or again, it may not. But who cares? To miss such a point in the Romance of the Rose would be to miss nearly all; but in this poem the shouting fish and the wood full of decaying trees and ‘quhissilling wind’ really exist in their own right. The weird energy of the description—rattling with broad Scots words of the boisteous style—and the careful contrast between this and the spring morning described in the Prologue, satisfy us completely. The inconsequence of the figures hithering and thithering as the narrative proceeds hits off exactly the sense of freedom combined with uneasiness which is proper to such dreams; and the sense of space, almost of infinity, which they bring, is well evoked by the words which Sinon and Achitophel shout over their shoulders to the poet as they pass,

To the Palice of Honour all thay go;

—Is situat from hence liggis ten hunder,

Our horsis oft or we be thair will founder.

A dew! we may na langer heir remane.

The catalogues, no doubt, are an obstacle to the modern reader’s enjoyment: but such obstacles will be found in all works outside our own period—slaughters in Homer, ritual in Ovid, vocal gymnastics in the old operas, which time has dulled for us. Their most profitable use is when they set us speculating which features in contemporary masterpieces are likely soonest to become similar deadweight.

Douglas, in one sense, is not nearly so close to Spenser as Hawes is. The quality of his fancy is at once brighter and more terrifying. He is ‘eldritch’ where Spenser uses a solemn gloom, and full of hard light where Spenser is voluptuous. The whole difference between the air of Edinburgh and the air of Southern Ireland divides them. But if we are classifying by degrees of merit, then doubtless the Palice is much nearer to The Faerie Queene than Hawes’ work is to either.

The chapter would be incomplete without some reference to a follower of Douglas, John Rolland. His Court of Venus, printed in 1575, is a book which has had few readers. Its ‘haltand verse’ (which the author twice acknowledges) and its excessively dull prologue, are likely to deter any student who is not supported by some historical interest. To recover, at this time of day, the taste for its peculiarly Scottish and medieval blend of gallantry, satire, fantasy, and pedantry is all but impossible; and a full enjoyment of it presupposes that familiarity with legal technicalities which was for so long an essential part of Scottish culture. Our best chance of approaching it with sympathy is to imagine how the Baron of Bradwardine might have enjoyed it: for if the Baron, why not Scott?—and from Scott it is no long journey to ourselves. As an allegory it is nearer to Guillaume de Lorris than to Machault or Chartier in so far as the core of it is an allegorical action and not a mere complaint. It opens indeed with a debate, such as we have learned to dread, between Esperance and Desperance; but this only leads up to the moment at which Esperance faints at the arguments of his companion and thus exposes the latter to the wrath of Venus. The goddess appears, revives her champion, and on the advice of her ‘greit advocat’ Themis instructs Nemesis to serve Desperance with a summons. The second book is occupied with Desperance’s attempts to get counsel to defend him and his final success in retaining Vesta. The third and fourth give us the trial, in which he is convicted but finally pardoned and re-converted to the service of Venus. The allegory is coherent and reasonable, but even this abstract is enough to show that it is slight: and if the poem, despite its faults, has a certain interest, this is once more because the interest lies in other things for which the allegory is only the pretext. The first of these is the realistic presentation, in some degree satiric, of the contemporary legal world; and in this respect the Court of Venus is a close parallel to the Assembly of Ladies. The passage in which Nemesis presents poor Desperance with his summons is lively and obviously true to life. He wants a copy of it for his own use: and Nemesis would be quite prepared to give him one gratis if he were not

            repugnant

To Venus Quene and to hir court obstant.

As it is, he can have one only by paying for it: and they fail to agree on the price. The trial scene is naturally more difficult to a layman: but all of us can relish Vesta’s objections to the jury, and still more the picture of the jury retiring ‘Richt stupefact cause the mater was hie’. When they got to their room,

First doun they kest Moyses Pentateuchon

With his storyis, and Paralipomenon

and so forth for twenty-five lines.

The other interest I should venture, once again, to call that of romance, if the word were less ambiguous. The presence of this element in Rolland is much less certain than in Douglas and Hawes, and many readers might deny it altogether. Perhaps fantasy or extravaganza would be a better word. Certainly, by whatever name we call it, there is something in Rolland’s second book which brings us near sometimes to The Faerie Queene and sometimes to The Water Babies or to Alice in Wonderland. Here, as in Douglas, we have a widening and deepening of the allegorical terrain—a tendency, still faint, but recognizable, to shift the interest from the personifications to the whole world in which such people and such adventures are plausible. The second book of the Court of Venus is, as it were, a land with an air of its own which we remember, and which we should recognize if we met it again in a dream or in another book. What complicates the issue—though it also improves the book as literature—is the fact that in this passage the interest which I am finding it so hard to define is inextricably mixed with the other satiric and realistic interest. Desperance successively applies for legal assistance to the Seven Wise Men, the Nine Muses, the Nine Worthies, the Ten Sibillais, the Three Fates (or ‘weird sisteris’ as Rolland calls them), the Three Graces, and Vesta. The deepening despair of the unfortunate suitor and the cold comfort with which each of these authorities, except the last, sends him on to the next, make a picture which every one can recognize. This is what happens when poverty or unpopularity seeks assistance against enemies whose star is in the ascendant: every one drops his business like a hot potato. Equally true, and more entertaining, is the picture of Desperance hesitating outside the door of the Nine Worthies—whose very aspect terrifies him—and almost deciding to pretend that he has come on some quite different errand:

Best is to say I am ane chirurgiane . . .

Best is to say that I covet service.

But in one of the old allegories all these different figures would have appeared as they were required with no more sense of distance or wandering than we have on a chessboard. In Rolland we are never allowed to forget the journeys in between,

Throw Mos and Myre and mony hie Montane,

Half wo begone allone all solitair

Throw wildernes in woddis and greit dangeir.

We are even made to feel the passage of time and to watch the traveller, who was in good point enough when first we met him, becoming

Daglit in weit—richt claggid was his weid

In stormis fell and weder contagious,

In frost and snaw.

In the end these journeys cease to be mere connecting links. One of them extends itself to some eighty lines, and these lines breathe a spirit quite unknown to the old allegory, and take us to the Caucasus ‘most heich in Scithia’ and ‘excandidate with snawis fell’, where the sun is above the horizon for twenty hours out of the twenty-four. There the traveller lies down to sleep upon ‘ane merbill stone’ and receives comfort in a dream, and wakes to lament: but afterwards meets the sender of the dream.

For the rest, Rolland is a very minor poet. He has a command of that pungent vigour which we find in all the Scottish writers of the Middle Ages; and the conclusion of his poem, where he unexpectedly introduces himself at the feast in Venus’ court and identifies himself with Eild—thus becoming one of the personifications in his own allegory—is, so far as I know, original and is certainly very effective. Nor must it be supposed, because I have here dwelt on other aspects of his work, that he is deficient in truly allegorical power. The tournament in the fourth book, when once its significacio has been seen, can hardly be quoted without indecorum, but it is a masterpiece: for it is a very good realistic description of a tournament, and yet at the same time a close parallel to the real subject. I do not expect to make many converts to Rolland: and I myself have not obeyed his request that the poem should be read more than once.

For anis reading oft tyme it garris authoris

Incur reprufe be wrong Interpretouris.

But authors not obviously better than he, who write in easier language and more popular forms, are daily read for pleasure and mildly praised in books of criticism. Certainly there is real poetry in the words of Desperance as he hears the song of the Muses:

God! gif it war my fortoun, than said he,

My fatall weird and als my destenie,

I war convert into the may Echo

That I micht bruik this greit quotidian joy.

↑ Back to top