I - The Seven Liberal Arts

I - The Seven Liberal Arts

In tenui labor.

VIRGIL

We have already seen that all below the Moon is mutable and contingent. We have also seen that each of the celestial spheres is guided by an Intelligence. Since Earth does not move and therefore needs no guidance, it was not generally felt that an Intelligence need be assigned to her. It was left, so far as I know, for Dante to make the brilliant suggestion that she has one after all and, that this terrestrial Intelligence is none other than Fortune. Fortune, to be sure, does not steer the Earth through an orbit; she fulfils the office of an Intelligence in the mode proper to a stationary globe. God, says Dante, who gave the heavens their guides ‘so that every part communicates splendour to every other, equitably distributing light, likewise ordained a general minister and guide to worldly splendours; one who should from time to time transfer these deceptive benefits from one nation or stock to another in a fashion which no human wisdom can prevent. That is why one people rules while another grows weak.’ For this she is much abused by mortal tongues, ‘but she is blessed and never hears them. Happy among the other primal creatures, she turns her sphere and rejoices in her bliss.’ Ordinarily Fortune has a wheel; by making it a sphere Dante emphasises the new rank he has given her.

This is the ripe fruit of the Boethian doctrine. That contingency should reign in the fallen world below the Moon is not itself a contingent fact. Since worldly splendours are deceptive, it is fit that they should circulate. The pond must be continually stirred or it will become pestilential. The angel who stirs it rejoices in this action as the heavenly spheres rejoice in theirs.

The conception that the rise and fall of empires depends not on desert, nor on any ‘trend’ in the total evolution of humanity, but simply on the irresistible rough justice of Fortune, giving all their turns, did not pass away with the Middle Ages. ‘All cannot be happy at once,’ says Thomas Browne, ‘for, because the glory of one state depends upon the ruins of another, there is a revolution and vicissitude of their greatness.’ We shall have to return to this point when we come to the medieval view of history.

Physically considered, the Earth is a globe; all the authors of the high Middle Ages are agreed on this. In the earlier ‘Dark’ Ages, as indeed in the nineteenth century, we can find Flat-earthers. Lecky, whose purpose demanded some denigration of the past, has gleefully dug out of the sixth century Cosmas Indicopleustes who believed the Earth to be a flat parallelogram. But on Lecky’s own showing Cosmas wrote partly to refute, in the supposed interests of religion, a prevalent, contrary view which believed in the Antipodes. Isidore gives Earth the shape of a wheel (XIV, ii, 1). And Snorre Sturlason thinks of it as the ‘world-disc’ or heimskringla—the first word, and hence the title, of his great saga. But Snorre writes from within the Norse enclave which was almost a separate culture, rich in native genius but half cut off from the Mediterranean legacy which the rest of Europe enjoyed.

The implications of a spherical Earth were fully grasped. What we call gravitation—for the medievals ‘kindly enclyning’—was a matter of common knowledge. Vincent of Beauvais expounds it by asking what would happen if there were a hole bored through the globe of Earth so that there was a free passage from the one sky to the other, and someone dropped a stone down it. He answers that it would come to rest at the centre. Temperature and momentum, I understand, would lead to a different result in fact, but Vincent is clearly right in principle. Mandeville in his Voiage and Travaile teaches the same truth more ingenuously: ‘from what part of the earth that men dwell, either above or beneath, it seemeth always to them that dwell that they go more right than any other folk. And right as it seemeth to us that they be under us, right so it seemeth to them that we be under them’ (XX). The most vivid presentation is by Dante, in a passage which shows that intense realising power which in the medieval imagination oddly co-exists with its feebleness in matters of scale. In Inferno, XXXIV, the two travellers find the shaggy and gigantic Lucifer at the absolute centre of the Earth, embedded up to his waist in ice. The only way they can continue their journey is by climbing down his sides—there is plenty of hair to hold on by—and squeezing through the hole in the ice and so coming to his feet. But they find that though it is down to his waist, it is up to his feet. As Virgil tells Dante, they have passed the point towards which all heavy objects move (70–111). It is the first ‘science-fiction effect’ in literature.

The erroneous notion that the medievals were Flat-earthers was common enough till recently. It might have two sources. One is that medieval maps, such as the great thirteenth-century mappemounde in Hereford cathedral, represent the Earth as a circle, which is what men would do if they believed it to be a disc. But what would men do if, knowing it was a globe and wishing to represent it in two dimensions, they had not yet mastered the late and difficult art of projection? Fortunately we need not answer this question. There is no reason to suppose that the mappemounde represents the whole surface of the Earth. The theory of the Four Zones taught that the equatorial region was too hot for life. The other hemisphere of the Earth was to us wholly inaccessible. You could write science-fiction about it, but not geography. There could be no question of including it in a map. The mappemounde depicts the hemisphere we live in.

The second reason for the error might be that we find in medieval literature references to the world’s end. Often these are as vague as similar references in our own time. But they may be more precise, as when, in a geographical passage, Gower says

Fro that into the worldes ende

Estward, Asie it is.

(VII, 568–9.)

But the same explanation might cover both this and the Hereford map. The ‘world’ of man, the only world that can ever concern us, may end where our hemisphere ends.

A glance at the Hereford mappemounde suggests that thirteenth-century Englishmen were almost totally ignorant of geography. But they cannot have been anything like so ignorant as the cartographer appears to be. For one thing the British Isles themselves are one of the most ludicrously erroneous parts of his map. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of those who looked at it when it was new, must at least have known that Scotland and England were not separate islands; the blue bonnets had come over the border too often to permit any such illusion. And secondly, medieval man was by no means a static animal. Kings, armies, prelates, diplomats, merchants, and wandering scholars were continually on the move. Thanks to the popularity of pilgrimages even women, and women of the middle class, went far afield; witness the Wife of Bath and Margery Kempe. A practical knowledge of geography must have been pretty widely diffused. But it did not, I suspect, exist in the form of maps or even of map-like visual images. It would be an affair of winds to be waited for, landmarks to be picked up, capes to be doubled, this or that road to be taken at a fork. I doubt whether the maker of the mappemounde would have been at all disquieted to learn that many an illiterate sea-captain knew enough to refute his map in a dozen places. I doubt whether the sea-captain would have attempted to use his superior knowledge for any such purpose. A map of the whole hemisphere on so small a scale could never have been intended to have any practical use. The cartographer wished to make a rich jewel embodying the noble art of cosmography, with the Earthly Paradise marked as an island at the extreme Eastern edge (the East is at the top in this as in other medieval maps) and Jerusalem appropriately in the centre. Sailors themselves may have looked at it with admiration and delight. They were not going to steer by it.

A great deal of medieval geography is, none the less, merely romantic. Mandeville is an extreme example; but soberer authors are also concerned to fix the site of Paradise. The tradition which places it in the remote East seems to go back to a Jewish romance about Alexander, written before 500, and Latinised in the twelfth century as the Iter ad Paradisum. This may underlie the mappemounde, and Gower (VII, 570), and also Mandeville who puts it beyond Prester John’s country, beyond Taprobane (Ceylon), beyond the Dark Country (xxxiii). A later view puts it in Abyssinia; as Richard Eden says ‘in the East side of Afrike beneath the red sea dwelleth the great and mighty Emperour and Christian King Prester John . . . in this province are many exceeding high mountains upon the which is said to be the earthly paradise’. Sometimes the rumour of a secret and delectable place on those mountains takes another form. Peter Heylin in his Cosmography (1652) says ‘the hill of Amara is a day’s journey high, on the top whereof are thirty-four palaces in which the younger sons of the Emperour are continually enclosed’. Milton, whose imagination absorbed like a sponge, combined both traditions in his ‘Mount Amara’ ‘where Abassin kings their issue guard . . . by some suppos’d True Paradise’ (P.L. IV, 280 sq.). Amara is used by Johnson for the Happy Valley in Rasselas. If it also suggested, as I suspect it did, Coleridge’s ‘Mount Abora’, this remote mountain has deserved strangely well of English readers.

Side by side with these stories, however, the geographical knowledge of the medievals extended further East than we always remember. The Crusades, mercantile voyages, and pilgrimages—at some periods a highly organised industry—had opened the Levant. Franciscan missionaries had visited the Great Khan in 1246 and in 1254, when the meeting was at Karakorum. Nicolo and Maffeo Polo came to Kublai’s court at Pekin in 1266; their more famous nephew Marco long resided there, returning in 1291. But the foundation of the Ming dynasty in 1368 largely put an end to such intercourse.

Marco Polo’s great Travels (1295) is easily accessible and should be on everyone’s shelves. At one point it has an interesting connection with our literature. Marco describes the Gobi desert as a place so haunted by evil spirits that travellers who lag behind ‘until the caravan is no longer in sight’ will be called to by their names and in some well-known voice. But if they follow the call they will be lost and perish (I, xxxvi). This also passes into Milton and becomes those

airy tongues that syllable men’s names

On Sands and Shores and desert wildernesses.

(Comus, 208–9.)

An interesting attempt has recently been made to show that some real knowledge of the Atlantic islands and even of America lies behind the legend of St Brendan. But we need not discuss the case for this theory since, even if such knowledge existed, it has no general influence on the medieval mind. Explorers sailed west to find rich Cathay. If they had known that a huge, uncivilised continent lay between, they would probably not have sailed at all.

Compared with medieval Theology, philosophy, astronomy, or architecture, medieval zoology strikes us as childish; such zoology, at least, as they most often put into books. For, as there was a practical geography which had nothing to do with the mappemounde, so there was a practical zoology which had nothing to do with the Bestiaries. The percentage of the population who knew a great deal about certain animals must have been far larger in medieval than in modern England. It could not have been otherwise in a society where everyone who could be was a horseman, hunter, and hawker, and everyone else a trapper, fisher, cowman, shepherd, swineherd, goose-girl, henwife, or beekeeper. A good medievalist (A. J. Carlyle) once said in my hearing, ‘The typical Knight of the Middle Ages was far more interested in pigs than in tournaments’. But all this first-hand knowledge appears very seldom in the texts. When it does—when, for example, the poet of Gawain assumes in his audience a familiarity with the anatomy of the deer (1325 sq.)—the laugh turns not against the Middle Ages but against ourselves. Such passages, however, are rare. The written zoology of their period is mainly a mass of cock-and-bull stories about creatures the authors had never seen, and often about creatures that never existed.

The merit of having invented, or the disgrace of having first believed, these fancies does not belong to the medievals. They are usually handing on what they received from the ancients. Aristotle, indeed, had laid the foundations of a genuinely scientific zoology; if he had been known first and followed exclusively we might have had no Bestiaries. But this was not what happened. From Herodotus down, the classics are full of travellers’ tales about strange beasts and birds; tales too intriguing to be easily rejected. Aelian (second century B.C.) and the elder Pliny are storehouses of such matters. The medieval failure to distinguish between writers of wholly different kinds was also at work. Phaedrus (first century A.D.) was, in intention, merely writing Aesopic fables. But his dragon (IV, xx)—a creature born under evil stars, dis iratis natus, and doomed to guard against others the treasure it cannot use itself—would seem to be the ancestor of all those dragons whom we think so Germanic when we meet them in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse. The image proved so potent an archetype that it engendered belief, and, even when belief faded, men were unwilling to let it go. In two thousand years western humanity has neither got tired of it nor improved it. Beowulf’s dragon and Wagner’s dragon are unmistakably the dragon of Phaedrus. (The Chinese dragon, I understand, is different.)

Many conductors, no doubt, not all of them now discoverable, helped to transmit such lore to the Middle Ages. Isidore is one of the most easily accessible. In him, moreover, we can see actually at work the process by which the pseudo-zoology grew up. His sections on the Horse are particularly instructive.

‘Horses can scent battle; they are incited to war by the sound of the trumpet’ (XII, i, 43). A highly lyrical passage from Job (xxxix. 19–25) is here being turned into a proposition in natural history. But we may not be quite out of touch with observation. Experienced cavalry chargers, especially stallions, probably do behave in some such way. We reach a further stage when Isidore tells us that the adder (aspis), to protect herself against snake-charmers, lies down and presses one ear to the ground and curls her tail round to stop up the other (XII, iv, 12)—patently a prosaic conversion into pseudo-science of the metaphor about the adder who ‘stoppeth her ear’ in Ps. lviii. 4–5.

‘Horses shed tears on the death of their masters’ (XII, i, 43). I take it the ultimate source is Iliad, XVII, 426 sq., filtered to Isidore through Aeneid, XI, 90.

‘Hence’ (i.e. from this human trait in horses) ‘in Centaurs the nature of horse and man is mixed’ (ibid.). Here we have a timid attempt at rationalisation.

Then, in XII, i, 44–60, we plunge into matter of a very different sort. This long passage is all about the marks of a good horse, both in build and colour, and about breeds and breeding, and the like. This sounds to me as if some of it were really learned in the stable, as if grooms and dealers here replaced the literary auctores.

When auctores come into play, Isidore makes no kind of differentiation between them. The Bible, Cicero, Horace, Ovid, Martial, Pliny, Juvenal, and Lucan (the latter chiefly on snakes) all have for him exactly the same sort of authority. Yet his credulity has limits. He denies that weasels conceive by the mouth and bear by the ear (XII, iii, 3), and rejects the many-headed hydra as fabulosus (ibid. iv, 23).

One of the most remarkable things about Isidore is that he draws no morals from his beasts and gives them no allegorical interpretations. He says the Pelican revives its young by its own blood (XII, vii, 26) but draws no such parallel between this and the life-giving death of Christ as was later to produced the tremendous Pie Pelicane. He tells us, from unnamed ‘writers on the nature of animals’ (XII, ii, 13) that the unicorn is a beast too strong for any hunter to take; but if you set a virgin before him he loses all his ferocity, lays down his head in her lap, and sleeps. Then we can kill him. It is hard to believe that any Christian can think for long about this exquisite myth without seeing in it an allegory of the Incarnation and Crucifixion. Yet Isidore makes no such suggestion.

The sort of interpretation which Isidore omits became the chief interest of pseudo-zoologists in the Middle Ages. The best remembered specimen is the author whom Chaucer calls Physiologus in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale (B 4459); really Theobald who was Abbot of Monte Cassino from 1022 to 1035 and wrote Physiologus de Naturis XII Animalium. But he was not the first, and certainly not the best, of his kind. The animal poems in the Exeter Book are older. The Phoenix in its earlier parts is paraphrased from Lactantius; the moralitas which the Anglo-Saxon poet added to this is thought to be based on St Ambrose and Bede; the Panther and Whale, on an older Physiologus in Latin. As literature they are very much better than Theobald’s work. Thus both the Anglo-Saxon and Theobald make the whale a type of the Devil. Sailors, says Theobald, mistake him for a promontory, land on him, and light a fire. Excusably, he dives and they are drowned. In the Anglo-Saxon they mistake him, more plausibly, for an island and he dives, not because he can feel the fire but through malice. The relief of the storm-tossed men on landing is vividly imagined: ‘when the brute, skilled in ruses, perceives that the voyagers are fully settled and have pitched their tent, glad of fair weather, then of a sudden at all adventure down he goes into the salt flood’ (19–27).

It is rather surprising to find the Siren, wrongly identified with the Mermaid, among Theobald’s beasts. This way of classifying creatures that might otherwise claim to be Longaevi was not, I think, common in the Middle Ages. I have found it much later in Athanasius Kircher, who holds that such quasi- or semi-human forms are merely brutes (rationis expertia) whose resemblance to man is no more significant than that of the Mandrake. ‘Or’, he adds in happy ignorance of later biology, ‘that of the monkey.’

It is even odder that Theobald should ignore the two creatures which we should have supposed the most fitted for his purpose: the Pelican and the Phoenix. But it is of a piece with the whole quality of his work. Either he had no imagination or an imagination whose wavelength evades us. I cannot face the weariness of going through his items one by one. Whatever he has to say is said better in the vernacular Bestiaries.

These animal stories, like those of the Fairies, set us wondering how much was actually believed. Home-dwellers in an unscientific age will believe almost anything about foreign parts; but who could have believed, and how, what the Bestiaries told them about eagles, foxes, or stags? We can only guess at the answer. I am inclined to think that an absence of vocal and clearly held disbelief was commoner than a firm positive conviction. Most of those who helped either by speech or writing to keep the pseudo-zoology in circulation were not really concerned, one way or the other, with the question of fact; just as today the public speaker who warns me not to hide my head in the sand like an ostrich, is not really thinking, and does not want me to think, about ostriches. The moralitas is what matters. You need to ‘know’ these ‘facts’ in order to read the poets or take part in polite conversation. Hence, as Bacon said, ‘if an untruth in nature be once on foot . . . by reason of the use of the opinion in similitudes and ornaments of speech, it is never called down’. For to most men, as Browne puts it in Vulgar Errors ‘a piece of Rhetorick is a sufficient argument of Logick; an Apologue of Esop, beyond a syllogysme in Barbara; parables than propositions, and proverbs more powerful than demonstrations’ (I, iii). In the Middle Ages, and indeed later, we must add another source of credulity. If, as Platonism taught—nor would Browne himself have dissented—the visible world is made after an invisible pattern, if things below the Moon are all derived from things above her, the expectation that an anagogical or moral sense will have been built into the nature and behaviour of the creatures would not be a priori unreasonable. To us an account of animal behaviour would seem improbable if it suggested too obvious a moral. Not so to them. Their premises were different.

Man is a rational animal, and therefore a composite being, partly akin to the angels who are rational but—on the later, scholastic view—not animal, and partly akin to the beasts which are animal but not rational. This gives us one of the senses in which he is the ‘little world’ or microcosm. Every mode of being in the whole universe contributes to him; he is a cross-section of being. As Gregory the Great (540–604) says, ‘because man has existence (esse) in common with stones, life with trees, and understanding (discernere) with angels, he is rightly called by the name of the world’. This is almost exactly reproduced by Alanus, Jean de Meung, and Gower.

Rational Soul, which gives man his peculiar position, is not the only kind of soul. There are also Sensitive Soul and Vegetable Soul. The powers of Vegetable Soul are nutrition, growth and propagation. It alone is present in plants. Sensitive Soul, which we find in animals, has these powers but has sentience in addition. It thus includes and goes beyond Vegetable Soul, so that a beast can be said to have two levels of soul, Sensitive and Vegetable, or a double soul, or even—though misleadingly—two souls. Rational Soul similarly includes Vegetable and Sensitive, and adds reason. As Trevisa (1398), translating the thirteenth-century De Proprietatibus Rerum of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, puts it, there are ‘thre manere soulis . . . vegetabilis that geveth lif and no feling, sensibilis that geveth lif and feling and nat resoun, racionalis that geveth lif, feling, and resoun’. The poets sometimes allow themselves to talk as if man had, not a three-storied soul, but three souls. Donne, claiming that the Vegetable Soul by which he grows, the Sensitive Soul by which he sees, and the Rational Soul by which he understands, are all equally delighted in the beloved, says,

    all my souls bee

Emparadis’d in you (in Whom alone

I understand, and grow, and see).

(A Valediction of My Name, 25.)

But this is merely a trope. Donne knows he has only one soul, which, being Rational, includes the Sensitive and the Vegetable.

The Rational Soul is sometimes called simply ‘Reason’, and the Sensitive Soul simply ‘Sensuality’. This is the sense of these words when the Parson in Chaucer says, ‘God sholde have lordschipe over reson, and reson over sensualite, and sensualite over the body of man’ (I. 262).

All three kinds of soul are immaterial. The soul—as we should say, the ‘life’—of a tree or herb is not a part of it which could be found by dissection; nor is a man’s Rational Soul in that sense a ‘part’ of the man. And all soul, like every other substance, is created by God. The peculiarity of Rational Soul is that it is created in each case by the immediate act of God, whereas other things mostly come into existence by developments and transmutations within the total created order. Genesis ii. 7 is no doubt the source for this; but Plato had also set the creation of man apart from creation in general.

The soul’s turning to God is often treated in the poets as a returning and therefore one more instance of ‘kindly enclyning’. Hence Chaucer’s ‘Repeireth hoom from worldly vanitee’ in Troilus, V, 1837, or Deguileville’s

To Him of verray ryht certeyn

Thou must resorte and tourne ageyn

As by moeving natural.

(Pilgrimage, trans. Lydgate, 12,262 sq.)

Such passages perhaps reflect nothing more than the doctrine of man’s special and immediate creation by God; but it is hard to be sure. The doctrine of pre-existence (in some better world than this) was firmly rejected in the scholastic age. The ‘inconvenience’ of making the Rational Soul begin to exist only when the body begins to exist and also holding that it existed after the body’s death, was palliated by the reminder that death—one of those ‘two things that were never made’—had no place in the original creation. It is not the soul’s nature to leave the body; rather, the body (disnatured by the Fall) deserts the soul. But in the Seminal Period and the earlier Middle Ages the Platonic belief that we had lived before we were incarnate on earth, still hung in the air. Chalcidius had preserved what Plato says about this in Phaedrus 245a. He had also preserved Timaeus 35a and 41d. These very difficult passages may not really imply the pre-existence of the individual soul, but they could easily be thought to do so. Origen held that all those souls which now animate human bodies were created at the same time as the angels and had long existed before their terrestrial birth. Even St Augustine, in a passage quoted by Aquinas, entertains, subject to revision, the view that Adam’s soul was already in existence while his body still ‘slept in its causes’. The full Platonic doctrine seems to be implied—with what philosophic seriousness I do not know—by Bernardus Silvestris when Noys sees in Heaven countless souls weeping because they will soon have to descend from that splendor into these glooms.

At the Renaissance the recovery of the Platonic corpus and the revival of Platonism re-awoke the doctrine. It is taken with full seriousness by Ficino and, later, by Henry More. Whether Spenser in the Hymne of Beautie (197 sq.) or in the Garden of Adonis (F.Q. III, vi, 33) has more than a poetic half-belief in it, may be doubted. Thomas Browne, not venturing on the doctrine, would gladly retain the flavour of it: ‘though it looks but like an imaginary kind of existency to be before we are’, yet to have pre-existed eternally in the divine foreknowledge ‘is somewhat more than a non-entity’ (Christian Morals). Vaughan’s Retreate and even Wordsworth’s Ode have been diversely interpreted. Only with the late nineteenth century and the Theosophists does pre-existence—now envisaged as the ‘wisdomn of the East’—recover a foothold in Europe.

We have noticed that the term angels sometimes covers all the aetherial beings and is sometimes restricted to the lowest of their nine species. In the same way the word reason sometimes means Rational Soul, and sometimes means the lower of the two faculties which Rational Soul exercises. These are Intellectus and Ratio.

Intellectus is the higher, so that if we call it ‘understanding’, the Coleridgean distinction which puts ‘reason’ above ‘understanding’ inverts the traditional order. Boethius, it will be remembered, distinguishes intelligentia from ratio; the former being enjoyed in its perfection by angels. Intellectus is that in man which approximates most nearly to angelic intelligentia; it is in fact obumbrata intelligentia, clouded intelligence, or a shadow of intelligence. Its relation to reason is thus described by Aquinas: ‘intellect (intelligere) is the simple (i.e. indivisible, uncompounded) grasp of an intelligible truth, whereas reasoning (ratiocinari) is the progression towards an intelligible truth by going from one understood (intellecto) point to another. The difference between them is thus like the difference between rest and motion or between possession and acquisition’ (Ia, LXXIX, art. 8). We are enjoying intellectus when we ‘just see’ a self-evident truth; we are exercising ratio when we proceed step by step to prove a truth which is not self-evident. A cognitive life in which all truth can be simply ‘seen’ would be the life of an intelligentia, an angel. A life of unmitigated ratio where nothing was simply ‘seen’ and all had to be proved, would presumably be impossible; for nothing can be proved if nothing is self-evident. Man’s mental life is spent in laboriously connecting those frequent, but momentary, flashes of intelligentia which constitute intellectus.

When ratio is used with this precision and distinguished from intellectus, it is, I take it, very much what we mean by ‘reason’ today; that is, as Johnson defines it, ‘The power by which man deduces one proposition from another, or proceeds from premises to consequences’. But, having so defined it, he gives as his first example, from Hooker, ‘Reason is the director of man’s will, discovering in action what is good’. There would seem to be a startling discrepancy between the example and the definition. No doubt, if A is good for its own sake, we may discover by reasoning that, since B is the means to A, therefore B would be a good thing to do. But by what sort of deduction, and from what sort of premises, could we reach the proposition ‘A is good for its own sake’? This must be accepted from some other source before the reasoning can begin; a source which has been variously identified—with ‘conscience’ (conceived as the Voice of God), with some moral ‘sense’ or ‘taste’, with an emotion (‘a good heart’), with the standards of one’s social group, with the super-ego.

Yet nearly all moralists before the eighteenth century regarded Reason as the organ of morality. The moral conflict was depicted as one between Passion and Reason, not between Passion and ‘conscience’, or ‘duty’, or ‘goodness’. Prospero, in forgiving his enemies, declares that he is siding, not with his charity or mercy, but with ‘his nobler reason’ (Tempest, V, i, 26). The explanation is that nearly all of them believed the fundamental moral maxims were intellectually grasped. If they had been using the strict medieval distinction, they would have made morality an affair not of ratio but of intellectus. This distinction, however, even in the Middle Ages, was used only by philosophers, and did not affect popular or poetic language. On that level Reason means Rational Soul. Moral imperatives therefore were uttered by Reason, though, in the stricter terminology, reasoning about moral questions doubtless received all her premises from Intellect—just as geometry is an affair of Reason, though it depends on axioms which cannot be reached by reasoning.

Johnson, in the passage quoted from his Dictionary, is for once confused. He wrote when the older ethical view was in rapid decline and the meaning of the word reason consequently in rapid change. The eighteenth century witnessed a revolt against the doctrine that moral judgements are wholly, or primarily, or at all, rational. Even Butler in the Sermons (1726) gave the role which had once been Reason’s to ‘Reflection or Conscience’. Others handed the normative function over to a moral ‘sentiment’ or ‘taste’. In Fielding the source of good conduct is good feeling, and the claims of Reason to be that source are ridiculed in the person of Mr Square. Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling (1771) carried this process further. In Wordsworth ‘the heart’ can be favourably contrasted with ‘the head’. In some nineteenth-century fiction one particular system of feelings, the domestic affections, seem not only to inspire but to constitute morality. The linguistic result of this process was to narrow the meaning of the word reason. From meaning (in all but the most philosophical contexts) the whole Rational Soul, both intellectus and ratio, it shrank to meaning merely ‘the power by which man deduces one proposition from another’. This change had begun in Johnson’s time. He inadvertently defines the word in its newer and narrower sense, and immediately illustrates it in that which was older and larger.

The belief that to recognise a duty was to perceive a truth—not because you had a good heart but because you were an intellectual being—had roots in antiquity. Plato preserved the Socratic idea that morality was an affair of knowledge; bad men were bad because they did not know what was good. Aristotle, while attacking this view and giving an important place to upbringing and habituation, still made ‘right reason’ (ὀρθὸς λόγος) essential to good conduct. The Stoics believed in a Natural Law which all rational men, in virtue of their rationality, saw to be binding on them. St Paul has a curious function in this story. His statement in Romans (ii. 14 sq.) that there is a law ‘written in the hearts’ even of Gentiles who do not know ‘the law’, is in full conformity with the Stoic conception, and would for centuries be so understood. Nor, during those centuries, would the word hearts have had merely emotional associations. The Hebrew word which St Paul represents by καρδία would be more nearly translated ‘Mind’; and in Latin, one who is cordatus is not a man of feeling but a man of sense. But later, when fewer people thought in Latin, and the new ethics of feeling were coming into fashion, this Pauline use of hearts may well have seemed to support the novelty.

The importance of all this for our own purpose is that nearly every reference to Reason in the old poets will be in some measure misread if we have in mind only ‘the power by which man deduces one proposition from another’. One of the most moving passages in Guillaume de Lorris’ part of the Romance of the Rose (5813 sq.) is that where Reason, Reason the beautiful, a gracious lady, a humbled goddess, deigns to plead with the lover as a celestial mistress, a rival to his earthly love. This is frigid if Reason were only what Johnson made her. You cannot turn a calculating machine into a goddess. But Raison la bele is ‘no such cold thing’. She is not even Wordsworth’s personified Duty; not even—though this brings us nearer—the personified virtue of Aristotle’s ode, ‘for whose virgin beauty men will die’ (σᾶς πέρι, παρθένε, μορϕᾶς). She is intelligentia obumbrata, the shadow of angelic nature in man. So again in Shakespeare’s Lucrece we need to know fully who the ‘spotted princess’ (719–28) is: Tarquin’s Reason, rightful sovereign of his soul, now maculate. Many references to Reason in Paradise Lost need the same gloss. It is true that we still have in our modern use of ‘reasonable’ a survival of the old sense, for when we complain that a selfish man is unreasonable we do not mean that he is guilty of a non sequitur or an undistributed middle. But it is far too humdrum and jejune to recall much of the old association.

The Sensitive Soul has ten Senses or Wits, five of which are ‘outward’ and five ‘inward’. The Outward Senses or Wits are what we call the Five Senses today: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Sometimes the inward five are called simply Wits, and the outward five simply Senses, as in Shakespeare’s

But my five wits nor my five senses can

Dissuade one foolish heart from loving thee.

(Sonnet CXLI.)

The inward Wits are memory, estimation, imagination, phantasy, and common wit (or common sense). Of these, memory calls for no comment.

Estimation, or (Vis) Aestimativa, covers much of what is now covered by the word instinct. Albertus Magnus, whom I follow throughout this passage, tells us in his De Anima that it is Estimation which enables a cow to pick out her own calf from a crowd of calves or teaches an animal to fly from its natural enemy. Estimation detects the practical, the biological, significance of things, their intentiones (II, iv). Chaucer is referring to it, though not by name, when he says

     naturelly a beast desyreth flee

Fro his contrarie if he may it see,

Though he never erst had seyn it with his ye.

(Nun’s Priest’s Tale B, 4469.)

The distinction between Phantasy and Imagination—(vis) phantastica and (vis) imaginativa—is not so simple. Phantasy is the higher of the two; here Coleridge has once more turned the nomenclature upside down. To the best of my knowledge no medieval author mentions either faculty as a characteristic of poets. If they had been given to talking about poets in that way at all—they usually talk only of their language or their learning—I think they would have used invention where we use imagination. According to Albertus, Imagination merely retains what has been perceived, and Phantasy deals with this componendo et dividendo, separating and uniting. I do not understand why boni imaginativi should tend, as he says they do, to be good at mathematics. Can this mean that paper was too precious to be wasted on rough figures and you geometrised, so far as possible, with figures merely held before the mind’s eye? But I doubt it; there was always sand.

This psychological account of Phantasy and Imagination does not, in any case, cover popular usage in the vernacular. Albertus warns us that Phantastica is called cogitativa by the vulgar; that is, they say they are ‘thinking’ about something when in reality they are playing with mental images of it, componendo et dividendo. If he had known English he would probably have been interested to learn that in it an almost opposite fate had overtaken the word imagination (or imaginatyf which, as an ellipsis of vis imaginativa, often means the same thing). For in English Imagination meant, not merely the retention of things perceived, but ‘having in mind’ or ‘thinking about’, or ‘taking into account’ in the largest and loosest sense. Langland’s Ymaginatyf, having explained that he is vis imaginativa, goes on to say

          idel was I nevere,

And many times have moeved thee to think on thin ende.

(Piers Plowman, B XII, 1.)

Whether the dreamer’s end is his death or his lot in the next world, it is certainly not something of which he had any percepts to retain. Ymaginatyf means ‘I have often reminded you that you must die’. So in Berners’ Froissart: ‘King Peter, seeing himself thus beset round with his enemies, was in great imagination’ (I, 242); that is, he had plenty on his mind. Chaucer says of Arveragus, coming home to his wife,

Nothing list him to been imaginatyf

If any wight had spoke, whil he was oute,

To hire of love.

(Franklin’s Tale, F 1094.)

No doubt the activity which Arveragus abstained from, like that which was forced upon King Peter, would be accompanied by what we call imagination, and plenty of it. But I do not think either writer has that especially in view. Chaucer means that Arveragus wasn’t one ‘to get ideas into his head’.

Common Sense (or Wit) as a term in medieval psychology must not be confused either with communis sensus (the common opinion of mankind) or with ‘common sense’ as gumption or elementary rationality—a much later usage. Albertus gives it two functions: (a) ‘It judges of the operation of a sense so that when we see, we know we are seeing’; (b) it puts together the data given by the five senses, or Outward Wits, so that we can say an orange is sweet or one orange is sweeter than another. Burton, centuries later, says ‘this common sense is the judge or moderator of the rest, by whom we discern all differences of objects; for by mine eye I do not know that I see, or by mine ear that I hear, but by my common sense’. Common sense is that which turns mere sensations into coherent consciousness of myself as subject in a world of objects. It is very close to what some call Apperception and what Coleridge called Primary Imagination. The difficulty of becoming aware of it arises from the fact that we are never without it except in states which cannot, for that very reason, be fully remembered. Partial anaesthesia, when we have sentience without full consciousness, is one of them. Sidney describes another in the Arcadia when he says that two knights in the heat of battle could ignore their gashes, ‘wrath and courage barring the common sense from bringing any message of their case to the mind’ (1590, III, 18).

There is no need to write a separate section on the Vegetable Soul. It is responsible for all the unconscious, involuntary processes in our organism: for growth, secretion, nutrition, and reproduction. As regards the two last, this does not mean that eating or sexual intercourse is unconscious or involuntary. It is the unconscious and involuntary processes set up by these acts which belong to Vegetable Soul.

No Model yet devised has made a satisfactory unity between our actual experience of sensation or thought or emotion and any available account of the corporeal processes which they are held to involve. We experience, say, a chain of reasoning; thoughts, which are ‘about’ or ‘refer to’ something other than themselves, are linked together by the logical relation of grounds and consequents. Physiology resolves this into a sequence of cerebral events. But physical events, as such, cannot in any intelligible sense be said to be ‘about’ or to ‘refer to’ anything. And they must be linked to one another not as grounds and consequents but as causes and effects—a relation so irrelevant to the logical linkage that it is just as perfectly illustrated by the sequence of a maniac’s thoughts as by the sequence of a rational man’s. The chasm between the two points of view is so abrupt that desperate remedies have been adopted. Berkeleyan idealists have denied the physical process; extreme Behaviourists, the mental.

This perennial problem presented itself to the medieval thinker in two forms.

(1) How can the soul, conceived as an immaterial substance, act upon matter at all? Obviously it cannot act as one body acts upon another. Whether this way of putting the question differs at bottom from the way I have put it in the preceding paragraph might be debated.

(2) ‘It is not possible to passe from one extreme to another but by a meane.’ This is the old maxim from Timaeus 31b–c which so multiplied Triads in Apuleius, Chalcidius, pseudo-Dionysius, and Alanus. This deep-seated principle would probably have moved the medievals to put something in between soul and body even if the psycho-physical question did not in all periods offer us the raw edge that I have indicated. And this principle made it certain in advance that their method of coping with the raw edge would be to supply a tertium quid.

This tertium quid, this phantom liaison-officer between body and soul, was called Spirit or (more often) the spirits. It must be understood that this sense does not at all overlap with the sense which enables us to speak of angels or devils or ghosts as ‘spirits’. To pass from the one meaning to the other would be merely to make a pun.

The spirits were supposed to be just sufficiently material for them to act upon the body, but so very fine and attenuated that they could be acted upon by the wholly immaterial soul. They were, putting it bluntly, to be like the aether of nineteenth-century physics, which, for all I could ever learn of it, was to be and not to be matter. This doctrine of the spirits seems to me the least reputable feature in the Medieval Model. If the tertium quid is matter at all (what have density and rarity to do with it?) both ends of the bridge rest on one side of the chasm; if not, both rest on the other.

Spirits, then, are the ‘subtle gumphus’ required by Plato and Alanus to keep body and soul together, or as Donne says, ‘the subtile knot which makes us man’. They arise—we still speak of our spirits rising—from the blood like an exhalation; in Milton’s language ‘like gentle breaths from rivers pure’ (Paradise Lost, IV, 804). Bartholomaeus Anglicus in the De Proprietatibus (thirteenth century), Englished by Trevisa, gives the following account of them. From blood, seething in the liver, there arises a ‘smoke’. This, being ‘pured’, becomes Natural Spirit, which moves the blood and ‘sendeth it about into all the limbs’. Entering the head, this Natural Spirit undergoes a further refinement—is ‘more pured’—and so turns into Vital Spirit, which ‘worketh in the artery veins the pulses of life’. Some of it enters the brain where it is once more ‘made subtle’ and becomes Animal Spirit. Of this, some is distributed to the ‘limbs of feeling’ (the organs of sensation); some remains in the ‘dens’ of the brain to serve as the vehicle of the Inward Wits; flowing out at the back of the skull into the spinal marrow, it provides for voluntary movement (III, xxii). This Animal Spirit is the immediate organ of the Rational Soul through which alone she acts when incarnate. ‘We may not believe’, adds Bartholomaeus, ‘that this spirit is man’s reasonable soul, but more soothly, as saith Austin, the car thereof and proper instrument. For by means of such a spirit the soul is joined to the body.’ For Bartholomaeus’ triad of Natural, Vital, and Animal Spirits, other accounts substitute Vital, Animal, and Intellectual. But, however classified, the Spirits have always the same function. As Timothy Bright says in his Treatise of Melancholy (1586), they are ‘a true love knot to couple heaven and earth together; yea, a more divine nature than the heavens with a base clod of earth’, so that the soul is ‘not fettered with the bodie, as certaine Philosophers have taken it, but handfasted therewith by that golden claspe of the spirit’.

The Spirits also enable us to give an account of insanity without having to say—which would have been felt as a contradiction in terms—that Rational Soul herself can lose her rationality. As Bartholomaeus says in the same place, when the Spirits are impaired, the ‘accord’ of body and soul is resolved, so that the Rational Soul ‘is let’ (hindered) of all its ‘works in the body, as it is seen in them that be amazed, and mad men and frantic’. The appropriate Spirit being out of order, Rational Soul has no purchase on the material body.

Intellectuales spiritus, Intellectual Spirits, can by ellipsis become ‘intellectuals’ and even, presumably by confusion, ‘intellects’. Hence Johnson in Rambler, 95, speaks of a man’s ‘intellects’ being ‘disturbed’, or Lamb writes your fear for Hartley’s intellectuals is just’.

We have seen from Bartholomaeus that the Spirits can be localised in different parts of the body. Hence it is not unreasonable that some of the functions which the soul exercises by means of them can also be localised. In the passage I have already quoted he assigns Common Wit and ‘the virtue imaginative’ to the ‘foremost den’ or frontal cavity of the head, understanding to the ‘middle den’, and memory to the hindmost. Readers of the Faerie Queene will remember that Spenser, though omitting Common Wit, similarly locates imagination (Phantastes) in the front, reason in the middle, and memory at the back back (II, ix, 44 sq.). It is to this central ‘den’ that Lady Macbeth refers when she speaks of the ‘receipt (receptacle) of reason’ (I, vii, 66).

The human body gives us another sense in which man can be called a microcosm, for it, like the world, is built out of the four contraries. In the great world, it will be remembered, these combine to form the elements—fire, air, water, earth. But in our bodies they combine to form the Humours. Hot and Moist make Blood; Hot and Dry, Choler; Cold and Moist, Phlegm; Cold and Dry, Melancholy. Popular language, however, does not always observe the distinction between Humours made of Contraries within us and Elements made of Contraries without us. When Marlowe in Tamburlaine (869) says ‘Nature that fram’d us of four elements’ or Shakespeare speaks of the ‘elements’ being perfectly mixed in Brutus (Julius Caesar, V, V, 73), they are using ‘elements’ to mean either Humours or Contraries.

The proportion in which the Humours are blended differs from one man to another and constitutes his complexio or temperamentum, his combination or mixture. This explains the odd fact that in modern English ‘to lose one’s temper’ and ‘to show one’s temper’ are synonymous expressions. If you have a good temperamentum you may momentarily lose it when you are angry. If you have a bad one, you may ‘show it’ when anger puts you off your guard. For the same reason a man who is often angry has a bad temperamentum or is ‘ill-tempered’. Such expressions led careless speakers to think that temper meant simply anger, and this finally became its commonest sense. But so much of the old usage survives that flying ‘into’ a temper and being put ‘out of’ temper now co-exist as synonyms.

Though the proportion of the Humours is perhaps never exactly the same in any two individuals, the complexions can obviously be grouped into four main types according to the Humour that predominates in each. One of the symptoms of a man’s complexion is his colouring; that is, his ‘complexion’ in the modern sense. But I do not think the word ever had that sense in Middle English. Their word for what we call ‘complexion’ was rode; as in the Miller’s Tale, ‘his rode was reed, his eyen greye as goos’ (A 3317).

Where Blood predominates we have the Sanguine Complexion. This is the best of the four, for Blood is especially ‘natures friend’ (Squire’s Tale, F 353). Sir Thomas Elyot in his Castle of Health (1534) enumerates as the signs of the Sanguine man ‘visage white and ruddy . . . sleep much . . . dremes of blouddy things or things pleasant . . . angry shortly’. The dreams, I take it, are not of wounds and strife so much as of blood-red colours. The ‘pleasant’ things are what we should call ‘merry’. The Sanguine man’s anger is easily roused but shortlived; he is a trifle peppery, but not sullen or vindictive. Chaucer’s Franklin, a text-book case of this Complexion, could give his cook a sound rating, but he had obviously a good heart. Shakespeare’s Beatrice—she too could be ‘angry shortly’—was probably Sanguine. The Sanguine man is plump, cheerful, and hopeful. A fifteenth-century manuscript symbolises this complexion by a man and a woman richly dressed, playing on stringed instruments in a flowery place.

The Choleric man is tall and lean. Chaucer’s Reeve was ‘a sclendre colerik man’, and his legs were ‘ful longe . . . and ful lene’ (A 587 sq.). Like the Sanguine, he is easily moved to anger; so that Chantecleer, who suffers from a ‘superfluitee . . . of rede colera’ (B 5117–18), will even start a quarrel with laxatives in general—‘I hem defye, I love hem nevere a del’ (B 4348). But, unlike the Sanguine, the Choleric are vindictive. The Reeve pays the Miller out for his story, and the peasants on his own manor feared him as they feared death (A 605). Cholerics dream of thunder and of bright, dangerous things, like arrows and fire, as Peretelote knows (B 4120). The same manuscript that I mentioned above shows, for its symbol of the Choleric Complexion, a man holding a woman by the hair and beating her with a club. Choleric children are now described (by their mothers) as ‘highly strung’.

Elyot’s symptoms of the Melancholy Complexion run: ‘leane . . . moche watch (i.e. he is a bad sleeper) . . . dreames fearful . . . stiff in opinions . . . anger long and fretting’. Hamlet diagnoses himself as melancholy (II, ii, 640), refers to his bad dreams (ibid. 264), and is an extreme example of ‘anger long and fretting’. He may be lean too; for ‘fat’ in V, ii, 298 probably means ‘all in a muck sweat’. Today I think we should describe the Melancholy man as a neurotic. I mean, the Melancholy man of the Middle Ages. The sense of the word melancholy was changing in the sixteenth century and began often to mean either simply ‘sad’ or else ‘reflective, thoughtful, introverted’. Thus in the poem prefixed to Burton’s Anatomy ‘melancholy’ seems to be simply reverie, endlessly indulged in solitude, with all its pains but also with all its pleasures, the waking dreams of fear-fulfilment and wish-fulfilment alike. In Dürer’s picture Malencolia is apparently the studious, withdrawn, and meditative life.

The Phlegmatic is perhaps the worst of all the Complexions. Elyot gives as the signs of it ‘fatnesse . . . colour white . . . sleepe superfluous (i.e. in excess) . . . dremes of things watery or of fish . . . slownesse . . . dulnesse of lerning . . . smallness of courage’. The Phlegmatic boy or girl, fat, pale, sluggish, dull, is the despair of parents and teachers; by others, either made a butt or simply unnoticed. The text-book case is the first Mrs Milton, if, as we suspect, her husband was thinking of her when in the Doctrine and Discipline he commiserated the man who ‘shall find himself bound fast . . . to an image of earth and phlegm’ (I, 5). Mary Bennet in Pride and Prejudice was probably a Phlegmatic.

Like the Planets, the Complexions need to be lived with imaginatively, not merely learned as concepts. They do not exactly correspond to any psychological classification we have been taught to make. But most of those we know (except ourselves) will illustrate one or other of the four tolerably well.

In addition to this permanent predominance of some one Humour in each individual, there is also a daily rhythmic variation which gives each of the four a temporary predominance in all of us. Blood is dominant from midnight till 6 a.m.; Choler, from then till noon; Melancholy, from noon till 6 p.m.; then Phlegm till midnight. (All this, it should be remembered, is geared for people who got up and went to bed far earlier than we.) Sleep, in the Squire’s Tale, warned people to go to bed at the right time ‘for blood was in his dominacioun’ (F 347). The technical term domination can be jokingly extended to things other than Humours, as when the Manciple says of the Cook ‘drink hath dominacioun upon this man’ (H 57). This small witticism is often lost on modern readers.

It has sometimes been said that Christianity inherited from Judaism and imposed on the Western world a new conception of history. To the Greeks, we are told, the historical process was a meaningless flux or cyclic reiteration. Significance was to be sought not in the world of becoming but in that of being, not in history but in metaphysics, mathematics, and theology. Hence Greek historians wrote of such past actions—the Persian or the Peloponnesian War, or the lives of great men—as have a unity in themselves, and were seldom curious to trace from its beginnings the development of a people or a state. History, in a word, was not for them a story with a plot. The Hebrews, on the other hand, saw their whole past as a revelation of the purposes of Jahweh. Christianity, going on from there, makes world-history in its entirety a single, transcendentally significant, story with a well-defined plot pivoted on Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Judgement.

On this view the differentia of Christian historiography ought to be what I call Historicism; the belief that by studying the past we can learn not only historical but metahistorical or transcendental truth. When Novalis called history ‘an evangel’, when Hegel saw in it the progressive self-manifestation of absolute spirit, when Carlyle spoke of it as ‘a book of revelations’, they were Historicists. Keats’s Oceanus speaks as a Historicist when he claims to discern an

          eternal law

That first in beauty should be first in might.

In reality, the best medieval historians, like the best historians in other periods, are seldom Historicists.

The suggested antithesis between Pagan and Christian conceptions of history is certainly overdrawn. Not all Pagans were Greeks. The Norse gods, unlike the Olympians, are continuously involved in a tragic and tragically significant temporal process. Eddaic theology, no less than Hebraic, makes cosmic history a story with a plot; an irreversible story marching deathward to the drumbeat of omens and prophecies. Nor were the Romans much less inveterate Historicists than the Jews. How Rome came to be and to be great was the theme of most historians and of all pre-Virgilian epic. What Virgil puts forward in a mythical form is precisely meta-history. The whole mundane process, the fata Jovis, are in labour to bring forth the endless and dedicated empire of Rome.

Christian Historicism also exists; as in St Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, Orosius’ History against the Pagans, or Dante’s De Monarchia. But the two first were written to answer, and the third to baptise, a Pagan Historicism which was already in existence. The elementary Historicism which sees divine judgements in all disasters—the beaten side always deserved their beating—or the still more elementary sort which holds that everything is, and always was, going to the dogs—is not uncommon. Wulfstan’s sermo ad Anglos illustrates both. Some German historians in the twelfth century are Historicists of a more thorough-going kind. The extreme example is Joachim of Flora (ob. 1202). But he was not a Historian; rather, as was said, ‘a dabbler in the future’—it is, indeed, that period in which radical Historicists often feel most at home. But the chroniclers who have contributed most to our knowledge of medieval history, or who have proved the most permanently attractive, were not of this kind.

No doubt all history in the last resort must be held by Christians to be a story with a divine plot. But not all Christian historiographers feel it their business to take much notice of that. For it is, as known to men, only an overall plot, like the rise and fall of Arthur in Malory or the loves of Roger and Bradamant in Ariosto. Like them, it is festooned with a huge wealth of subordinate stories, each of which has itself a beginning, a middle, and an end, but which do not in the aggregate display any single trend in the world depicted. These can be told for their own sake. They need not, perhaps cannot, be related to the central theological story of the human race. Indeed, the medieval conception of Fortune tends to discourage attempts at a ‘philosophy of history’. If most events happen because Fortune is turning her wheel, ‘rejoicing in her bliss’, and giving everyone his turn, the ground is cut from under the feet of a Hegel, a Carlyle, a Spengler, a Marxist, and even a Macaulay. As W. P. Ker said, ‘The interest of history was too great and varied to be ruled by the formulas of Orosius; the chroniclers generally find their own points of view, and these in many cases, fortunately, are not those of the preacher’.

Medieval historians, even when we have ruled out the radical Historicists, are a mixed collection. Some of them—Matthew Paris, for example, and perhaps Snorre—have the scientific approach and are critical of their sources. But they are not on that account especially important for our present purpose. We are concerned with the picture of the past, and the attitude to the past, as these existed in the mind of literary authors and their audience. The imagined past as part of the Model is the quarry we pursue.

John Barbour (ob. 1395) at the beginning of his Bruce sets out what he thinks the true reasons for studying history. Stories, even when untrue, give pleasure. But, if so, true stories well told (‘said on gud maner’), ought to give a double pleasure; pleasure in the ‘carpying’, the narrative as such, and pleasure in learning what really happened (‘the thing rycht as it wes’). And thirdly, it is only fair to record the deeds of great men, for they deserve fame—‘suld weill have prys’ (I, 1–36). Historiography has then three functions: to entertain our imagination, to gratify our curiosity, and to discharge a debt we owe our ancestors. Joinville’s Chronicle of St Louis, being a saint’s life, concentrates on the third function—it is written ‘in honour of this true saint’—but also fulfils the other two. Froissart (I, Prol.) approaches his work in much the same spirit as Barbour. He writes in order that ‘honourable and noble adventures of feats of arms . . . should notably be enregistered and put in perpetual memory’. And such a record will give ‘pastance’ and ‘pleasure’. He adds—a point omitted by Barbour—that it will also furnish ‘ensample’. By this he does not mean those ‘lessons of history’ which can be drawn from the success or failure of previous statesmanship or strategy. He means that by reading of valiant deeds ‘the prewe and hardy may have ensample to encourage them’.

It is to be noticed that the approach we find in these historians differs not at all from that of authors whose matter we regard as wholly legendary. The author of the fourteenth-century Troy book, the Geste Hystoriale, begins very much as Barbour does. He writes to preserve the ‘aunters’ of noble ancestors which are now ‘almost out of mind’. He hopes that ‘old stories of brave men who were in high place may be a solas’ to those who learn them from writers who knew the fact at first hand (wist it in dede). He goes on to enumerate his sources, explaining why Homer is unreliable. Lydgate in his Troy Book (1412) says that great conquerouris would by now have lost their due fame if reliable auctours, whom he is using, had not preserved for us ‘the verrie trewe corn’ of fact separated from the chaff of fiction,

For in her hand they hilde for a staf

The trouthe only.

(Prologue, 152.)

They could not have been flatterers, for they wrote after the death of the heroes whom they celebrated, and no one flatters the dead (184 sq.). Even Caxton, it will be remembered, though leaving us free to doubt some things in the prose Morte, professes to have been convinced by argument of Arthur’s historicity. And his emphasis on the ‘exemplary’ value of the book might, as we have seen, stand on the first page of any chronicle.

In more sophisticated ages we are familiar with the grave quasi-factual devices which some authors use to bestow verisimilitude on narratives which everyone knows for fiction; the sober mendacities of Defoe or Swift, the polyglot array of documents at the beginning of She. But I cannot believe that the medieval authors were playing that game. The very words story and history had not yet been desynonymised. Even Elizabethan chroniclers still begin the history of our island with Brut and his Trojans.

It follows that the distinction between history and fiction cannot, in its modern clarity, be applied to medieval books or to the spirit in which they were read. It is by no means necessary to suppose that Chaucer’s contemporaries believed the tale of Troy or Thebes as we believe in the Napoleonic Wars; but neither did they disbelieve them as we disbelieve a novel.

Two passages, one from the father of history and one from Milton, who was perhaps the last historian of the old kind, seem to me to throw light on the question. ‘It is my duty’, says Herodotus, ‘to record what has been told, but not always to believe it. This applies to my whole book’ (VII, 152). Now Milton, in his History of Britain (the italics are mine): ‘That which hath received approbation from so many, I have chosen not to omit. Certain or uncertain, be that upon the credit of those whom I must follow; so far as keeps aloof from impossible and absurd, attested by ancient writers from books more ancient, I refuse not, as the due and proper subject of story.’

Herodotus and Milton both disclaim any fundamental responsibility: if the earlier auctours have lied, on their own head be it. We may indeed expurgate the ‘impossible and absurd’. But this does not mean what will be found absurd after considering all the evidence afresh as if one were the first explorer, as if no ‘story’ had been already established. It means what is prima facie absurd by the standards of one’s own age. Chaucer may well have believed all the miracles in Nicholas Trivet’s story of Constance; what struck him as absurd was that a sensible man like Alla would have committed such a faux pas as to make a child his messenger to the Emperor. Accordingly, he corrects it (B 1086–92). But the italicised words are the really illuminating ones. So far from having failed in his duty by handing on the existing ‘story’ (with minor expurgations) instead of producing a new and better grounded ‘story’ of his own, the historian has done what historians are there to do. For precisely this is ‘the true and proper subject of story’. This is what history is for. The medieval purchaser of a manuscript which purported to give the British or Trojan story did not want some individual clerk’s opinions about the past, presumptuously setting themselves up against what ‘hath received approbation from many’. At that rate there would soon be as many versions of the story as there were chroniclers. He wanted (as Milton thinks he is entitled to have) the established Model of the past; tinkered a little here and there, but substantially the same. This was what was useful—for conversation, for poets, for ‘ensamples’.

I am inclined to think that most of those who read ‘historial’ works about Troy, Alexander, Arthur, or Charlemagne, believed their matter to be in the main true. But I feel much more certain that they did not believe it to be false. I feel surest of all that the question of belief or disbelief was seldom uppermost in their minds. That, if it was anyone’s business, was not theirs. Their business was to learn the story. If its veracity were questioned they would feel that the burden of disproof lay wholly with the critic. Till that moment arrived (and it did not arrive often) the story had, by long prescription, a status in the common imagination indistinguishable—at any rate, not distinguished—from that of fact. Everyone ‘knew’—as we all ‘know’ how the ostrich hides her head in the sand—that the past contained Nine Worthies: three Pagans (Hector, Alexander, and Julius Caesar); three Jews (Joshua, David, and Judas Maccabaeus); and three Christians (Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon). Everyone ‘knew’ we were descended from the Trojans—as we all ‘know’ how Alfred burned the cakes and Nelson put the telescope to his blind eye. As the spaces above us were filled with daemons, angels, influences, and intelligences, so the centuries behind us were filled with shining and ordered figures, with the deeds of Hector and Roland, with the splendours of Charlemagne, Arthur, Priam, and Solomon.

It must be remembered throughout that the texts we should now call historical differed in outlook and narrative texture from those we should call fictions far less than a modern ‘history’ differs from a modern novel. Medieval historians dealt hardly at all with the impersonal. Social or economic conditions and national characteristics come in only by accident or when they are required to explain something in the narrative. The chronicles, like the legends, are about individuals; their valour or villainy, their memorable sayings, their good or bad luck. Hence a modern finds those of the Dark Ages suspiciously epic and those of the High Middle Ages suspiciously romantic. Perhaps the suspicion is not always justified. The elements of epic and romance, like those of economic and social history, exist at all times in the real world; and historians, even in dealing with contemporary events, will pick out those elements which the habitual bent of their imagination has conditioned them to notice. Perhaps past or future ages might wonder at the predominance of the impersonal in some modern histories; might even ask, ‘But were there no people at that time?’ Even the turns of expression may be the same in chronicle and romance. Or dit le conte (‘now tells the tale’) will be found in Froissart (I, iv).

All medieval narratives about the past are equally lacking in the sense of period. For us the past is, before all else, a ‘costume play’. From our earliest picture-books we learn the difference in clothes, weapons, furniture and architecture. We cannot remember in our lives any historical knowledge earlier than this. This superficial (and often inaccurate) characterisation of different ages helps far more than we suspect towards our later and subtler discriminations between them. It is difficult to think ourselves back into the minds of men for whom it did not exist. And in the Middle Ages, and long after, it did not. It was known that Adam went naked till he fell. After that, they pictured the whole past in terms of their own age. So indeed did the Elizabethans. So did Milton; he never doubted that ‘capon and white broth’ would have been as familiar to Christ and the disciples as to himself. It is doubtful whether the sense of period is much older than the Waverley novels. It is hardly present in Gibbon. Walpole’s Otranto, which would not now deceive school-children, could hope, not quite vainly, to deceive the public of 1765. Where even the most obvious and superficial distinctions between one century (or millennium) and another were ignored, the profounder differences of temper and mental climate were naturally not dreamed of. Authors may profess to know that things in Arthur’s day or Hector’s were not quite as in their own time, but the picture they actually paint belies the profession. Chaucer in a flash of astonishing insight acknowledges that in old Troy the language and procedure of courtship may have differed from those of his own day (Troilus, II, 22 sq.). But it is only a flash; momentary. The manners, the fighting, the religious services, the very traffic-regulations of his Trojans, are fourteenth-century. It was this happy ignorance that gave the medieval carver or poet his power of touching into vivid life every ‘historial’ matter he took in hand. It also helped to exclude Historicism. For us, areas of the past are qualitatively distinguished. Anachronisms are therefore not merely errors; they offend like discords in music or inappropriate flavours in a dish. But when Isidore, at the threshold of the Middle Ages, divides all history into six aetates (V, xxxix) there is nothing qualitative about them. They are not phases in an evolution or acts in a drama; they are merely convenient chronological blocks. They tempt him to no speculation about the future. Having brought the sixth aetas down to his own time, he ends with the statement that the remainder of this aetas is known only to God.

The nearest we get to a widespread ‘philosophy of history’ in the Middle Ages is, as I have said, the frequent assertion that things were once better than they are now. As we read in Wulfstan’s sermon: ‘The world hurries on (is on ofste) . . . and speeds to its end . . . thus, for men’s sins it must worsen day by day.’ It was long ago, said Gower, that the world stood ‘in all his welthe’ (Prologue, 95). Love is not now as it was in Arthur’s time, said Chrétien in the opening lines of Yvain. Malory agreed (XVIII, 25). Yet I do not find that in reading either chronicle or romance we really get an impression of gloom. The emphasis usually falls on the past splendour rather than on the subsequent decline. Medieval and nineteenth-century man agreed that their present was no very admirable age; not to be compared (said one) with the glory that was, not to be compared (said the other) with the glory that is still to come. The odd thing is that the first view seems to have bred on the whole a more cheerful temper. Historically as well as cosmically, medieval man stood at the foot of a stairway; looking up, he felt delight. The backward, like the upward, glance exhilarated him with a majestic spectacle, and humility was rewarded with the pleasures of admiration. And, thanks to his deficiency in the sense of period, that packed and gorgeous past was far more immediate to him than the dark and bestial past could ever be to a Lecky or a Wells. It differed from the present only by being better. Hector was like any other knight, only braver. The saints looked down on one’s spiritual life, the kings, sages, and warriors on one’s secular life, the great lovers of old on one’s own amours, to foster, encourage, and instruct. There were friends, ancestors, patrons in every age. One had one’s place, however modest, in a great succession; one need be neither proud nor lonely.

To give an educational curriculum a place in the Model of the universe may at first seem an absurdity; and it would be an absurdity if the medievals had felt about it as we feel about the ‘subjects’ in a syllabus today. But the syllabus was regarded as immutable; the number seven is numinous; the Liberal Arts, by long prescription, had achieved a status not unlike that of nature herself. The Arts, no less than the Virtues and Vices, were personified. Grammar, with her birch, still sits looking down on the cloisters of Magdalen. Dante in the Convivio most carefully mortises the Arts into the cosmic framework. Rhetoric, for example, corresponds to Venus; for one reason, because she is ‘the loveliest of all other disciplines’, soavissima di tutte le altre scienze. Arithmetic is like Sol; for as he gives light to all the other stars so she gives light to all other sciences, and as our eyes are dazzled by his light so our intelligence is baffled by the infinity of numbers. And so of the rest (II, xiii).

Everyone knows that the Arts are Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, and Astronomy. And almost everyone has met the mnemonic couplet

Gram loquitur, Dia verba docet, Rhet verba colorat,

Mus canit, Ar numerat, Geo ponderat, Ast colit astra.

The first three constitute the Trivium or threefold way; the last four, the Quadrivium.

‘Grammar talks’, as the couplet says; or, as Isidore defines her, ‘Grammar is the skill of speech’ (I, i). That is, she teaches us Latin. But we must not imagine that to learn grammar merely corresponded to what we should now call having a ‘classical’ education, or even to becoming a ‘Humanist’ in the Renaissance sense. Latin was still the living Esperanto of the western world and great works were still being written in it. It was the language par excellence, so that the very word Latin—lœden in Anglo-Saxon and leden in Middle English—came to mean language. Canace in the Squire’s Tale by means of her magic ring

     understood wel everything

That any foul may in his ledene seyn.

(F 435.)

Italian Latino is used by Petrarch in the same sense. An interpreter is a Latiner, whence the name Latimer. But while Grammar was thus restricted to a single tongue, in another way it sometimes extended far beyond the realm it claims today. It had done so for centuries. Quintilian suggests literatura as the proper translation of Greek grammatike (II, i), and literatura, though it does not mean ‘literature’, included a good deal more than literacy. It included all that is required for ‘making up’ a ‘set book’: syntax, etymology, prosody, and the explanation of allusions. Isidore makes even history a department of Grammar (I, xli–xliv). He would have described the book I am now writing as a book of Grammar. Scholarship is perhaps our nearest equivalent. In popular usage Grammatica or Grammaria slid into the vague sense of learning in general; and since learning is usually an object both of respect and suspicion to the masses, grammar, in the form grammary comes to mean magic. Thus in the ballad of King Estmere, ‘My mother was a western woman learned in grammarye’. And from grammary, by a familiar sound-change, comes glamour—a word whose associations with grammar and even with magic have now been annihilated by the beauty-specialists.

The invention of this art was traditionally ascribed to Carmente or Carmentis, the daughter of King Evander. The real authorities were Aelius Donatus (fourth century) and Priscianus (fifth and sixth). One’s well-thumbed manuscript of Donatus was one’s donat or donet, which by an easy transference comes to mean the ‘primer’ or ‘rudiments’ of any subject whatever. Covetyse in Piers Plowman says ‘ich drow me among drapers my donet to lerne’—my first steps in sharp practice (C VII, 215).

Dialectic in the couplet ‘teaches words’; an obscure saying. What is really meant is that, having learned from grammar how to talk, we must learn from Dialectic how to talk sense, to argue, to prove and disprove. The medieval foundation of this art was at first an Isagoge or Introduction to Aristotle written by Porphyry and translated into Latin by Boethius. This is in intention merely a work on Logic. But everyone who has tried to teach mere Logic knows how difficult it is, especially with an intelligent pupil, to avoid raising questions which force us into metaphysics. Porphyry’s little treatise raises them too and, in accordance with its limited purpose, leaves them unsolved. This methodological limitation was mistaken for a state of doubt, and the doubt was then attributed not to Porphyry but to Boethius. Hence the rhyme:

Assidet Boethius stupens de hac lite,

Audiens quid hic et hic asserat perite,

Et quid cui faveat non discernit rite;

Non praesumit solvere litem definite.

Two warnings may be useful to some; others, I hope, will pardon them.

(1) ‘Dialectic’ in the modern Marxist sense is here a red herring—Hegelian in origin. It must be completely set aside when we speak of ancient or medieval Dialectic. This means simply the art of disputation. It has nothing to do with the dynamic of history.

(2) Dialectic is concerned with proving. In the Middle Ages there are three kinds of proof; from Reason, from Authority, and from Experience. We establish a geometrical truth by Reason; a historical truth, by Authority, by auctours. We learn by experience that oysters do or do not agree with us. But the words which Middle English uses to express this trichotomy might sometimes deceive us. Often they are clear enough, as when the Wife of Bath says

Experience, though noun auctoritee

Were in this world, were right ynough to me

To speke of wo that is in marriage.

(D I.)

But unfortunately the word experience is not always used for the third type of proof. The variants are two. To learn by experience may be to feel; or, more misleading, knowledge by experience may be preve (that is, proof). Thus Chaucer opens his Legend of Phillis by saying that the maxim ‘wikked frute cometh of a wikked tree’ can be learned not only from authority but ‘by preve’; that is, empirically. In the Hous of Fame the eagle says that the poet can ‘fele’ the theory of sound which he has just enunciated (826). In the Knight’s Tale the line ‘Ne who most felingly speketh of love’ (A 2203) sounds very modern. But to ‘speak feelingly’ probably means to speak from first-hand experience. No doubt those who did so might also be expected to speak ‘with most feeling’ in our sense; but lexically, I question whether felingly in Middle English could mean ‘emotionally’.

Everything that we should now call criticism belonged either to Grammar or to Rhetoric. The Grammarian explained a poet’s metre and allusions: the Rhetorician dealt with structure and style. Neither had anything to say about the point of view or the individual sensibility, the majesty or piquancy or pathos or humour, which structure and style embody. Hence poets are nearly always praised on purely stylistic grounds. Virgil is for Dante the poet who taught him his bello stilo (Inferno, I, 86). Petrarch in the Clerk’s Prologue is for Chaucer the man who illuminated all Italy with his ‘rethoryke swete’ (E 31). Chaucer in the Book of Thebes is for Lydgate the ‘flour’ of poets in Britain by his ‘excellence in rethorike and in eloquence’ (Prologue, 40). All Chaucer’s medieval successors speak of him in this way. You could not discover from their eulogies that he had ever presented a lifelike character or told a merry tale.

The ancient teachers of Rhetoric addressed their precepts to orators in an age when public speaking was an indispensable skill for every public man—even for a general in the field—and for every private man if he got involved in litigation. Rhetoric was then not so much the loveliest (soavissima) as the most practical of the arts. By the Middle Ages it has become literary. Its precepts are addressed quite as much to poets as to advocates. There is no antithesis, indeed no distinction, between Rhetoric and Poetry. I think the Rhetoricians always have in view a pupil whose medium will be Latin, but their work also affected vernacular practice.

Chaucer’s apostrophe to ‘Gaufred, dere mayster souverain’ in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale (B 4537) has kept alive the memory of Geoffrey de Vinsauf who ‘flourished’ about 1200 and wrote the Nova Poetria; a work whose value lies in its extreme naivety.

He divides Ordo (which some call Dispositio) into two kinds, Natural and Artificial. The Natural follows the King of Hearts’ advice by beginning at the beginning. The Artificial is of three kinds. You can begin at the end (as in the Oedipus Rex or a play by Ibsen); or in the middle (like Virgil and Spenser); or with a Sententia or Exemplum. Chaucer begins with a Sententia or maxim in the Parlement, the Hous of Fame, the Prologue to the Legend, the Legend of Phillis, and the Prioress’s Tale. I cannot remember that he ever begins with an Exemplum, but no one needs to be reminded how frequent they are in his work. The Franklin’s Tale is held up from line 1367 to line 1456 by a procession of them, and Troilus had good reason to say to Pandarus

What knowe I of the Quene Niobee?

Lat be thyne olde ensaumples I thee preye.

(I, 759.)

Here Geoffrey is dealing with a real problem, which we have all faced though few of us would pose it so bluntly. The Natural Order will not always serve. And the plan of beginning with a Sententia, or with something like it, is still an unlaid ghost. It ‘walks’ in that fatal opening paragraph with which schoolboys are apparently taught to begin their essays.

On Amplificatio he is almost embarrassing. He calls the various methods of ‘amplifying’ your piece, quite frankly, morae (delays); as if the art of literature consisted in learning how to say much when you have little to say. That, I suspect, was how he really regarded it. But this means not that the morae he recommends are all necessarily bad but that he misunderstands—I do not profess to understand it fully myself—their real function.

One kind of mora is Expolitio. Its formula is ‘Let the same thing be disguised by variety of form; be different yet the same’—

          multiplice forma

Dissimuletur idem; varius sis et tamen idem.

It sounds dreadful. But it is not so in the Psalms, nor in

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight

And burned is Apollo’s laurel bough.

Less successful is

When clouds are seen wise men put on their cloaks;

When great leaves fall then winter is at hand;

When the sun sets who does not look for night?

Untimely storms make men expect a dearth.

(Richard III, II, iii, 32 sq.)

Another is Circumlocutio. ‘In order to lengthen the work don’t call things by their names’ (Longius ut sit opus ne ponas nomina rerum). Thus Dante calls dawn ‘Old Tithonus’ bedfellow’, la concubina di Titone antico, in the Purgatorio (IX, 1), or Chaucer at the opening of Troilus, III, instead of ‘O Venus’ writes

O blisful light of which the bemes clere

Adorneth at the thridde hevene faire,

O sonnes lief, O Joves daughter dere,

Pleasaunce of love, O goodly debonaire . . . .

But the most important of all the morae is Diversio or Digression. Nearly all of us, when we first began reading medieval poetry, got the impression that the poets were unable to keep to the point. We may even have thought that they were drifting with the stream of consciousness. The revived study of medieval Rhetoric—a welcome novelty in twentieth-century medievalism—puts an end to that idea. For good or ill the digressiveness of the medieval writers is the product not of nature but of art. The second part of the Romance of the Rose depends on Digressions in the same degree, if not in the same way, as Tristram Shandy. It has even been suggested that the peculiar narrative technique of the romances and of their Renaissance successors, the interwoven stories that so incessantly cross and interrupt one another, may be simply one more application of the digressive principle and an offshoot of Rhetoric.

This theory, which I do not myself fully accept, has at any rate the merit of replacing the Digressions recommended by Geoffrey in their proper context. They can be regarded as an expression of the same impulse we see at work in much medieval architecture and decoration. We may call it the love of the labyrinthine; the tendency to offer to the mind or the eye something that cannot be taken in at a glance, something that at first looks planless though all is planned. Everything leads to everything else, but by very intricate paths. At every point the question ‘How did we get here?’ arises, but there is always an answer. Professor Gunn has done much towards enabling us to recover the taste by which such a structure could be enjoyed in literature; which could feel that the main subject, in throwing off so many digressions, which themselves throw off subordinate digressions, showed the ramifying energy of a strong tree, glorious with plenitude.

The other morae are Apostropha and Descriptio, which call for no comment.

On Ornatus, stylistic ornament, Geoffrey has a remarkable piece of advice: ‘Do not always let a word remain in its natural position’ (noli semper concedere verbo In proprio residere loco). What lies behind this is the practice of authors like Apuleius; in an inflected language such as Latin there is hardly any limit to the possible dislocations of idiomatic word-order. Yet Chaucer can go a long way in English, and so skilfully that we may not always be aware of it:

The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen

That was the King Priamus’ sone of Troye,

In loving how his aventures fellen

Fro wo to wele and after out of ioye,

My purpose is . . . .

(Troilus, I, 1 sq).

It goes down easily enough; but at no period of the English language would such a sentence have been possible in conversation. Nor was Chaucer the last poet to practise this nice derangement.

Two morals may possibly be drawn: (1) that the word-order in high medieval poetry can never, of itself, be evidence for that of the spoken language; and (2) that where a peculiarity of the order looks to us like a desperate concession to the demands of metre, this may not always be so.

How to end your composition, as well as how to begin it, was a problem. Matthew of Vendôme in his Ars Versificatoria (late twelfth century) suggests five methods.

One is per epilogum, that is per recapitulationem sententiae, by summing up the ‘sentence’ or moral of the whole. Chaucer thus ends the Tales of the Miller, the Reeve, and the Physician.

Another is by asking someone to amend your work; as Chaucer asks Gower at the end of Troilus (V, 1856).

The third is per veniae petitionem, by asking indulgence for your deficiencies. Gower uses this method in the Confessio (VIII, 3062, 1st version) and Hawes in the Pastime of Pleasure (5796).

The fourth is with a vaunt, per ostensionem gloriae. The classical precedent is Horace’s exegi monumentum. Few, if any, medieval vernacular poets were bold enough to follow it.

Finally, you can end with the praise of God. Chaucer combines this with the second method in Troilus (V, 1863).

The Rhetorical precepts can be seen working at full blast in the Phisicien’s Tale. Here is the analysis.

1–4

Story

5–29

Descriptio

Prosopopoea

30–71

Descriptio

72–92

Apostropha

93–104

Apostropha

105–239

Story

240–244

Exemplum

245–276

Story

277–286

per recapitulationem sententiae

It works out at about ten lines of Amplification to every sixteen of narrative. The Manciple’s Tale is equally rhetorical; in the Pardoner’s, digression is used in a way that moderns find easier to enjoy.

The four Quadrivial Arts must here be summarily dismissed. Of Astronomy something has been said in an earlier chapter. On the vast and rewarding subject of medieval Music the reader must seek guides who are better qualified than I; and Geometry, naturally, makes little impact on literature. It is, however, worth remembering that Arithmetic acquired during the Middle Ages an invaluable new tool—the so-called ‘Arabic’ numerals. The system is really of Indian origin and dates from the fifth century, but it reached the West through the work of the ninth-century mathematician Ben Musa, known as Al-Khowarazmi. A curious little eddy of errors and legends resulted. ‘Al-Khowarazmi’ (the man from Khawarazm) suggests an abstract noun algorism, later augrim, which means calculation. Hence ‘figures of augrim’ in the Ancrene Wisse. Then, to account for the word algorism, a mathematical sage Algus is invented, so that the Roman de la Rose speaks of

Algus, Euclidees, Tholomees.

(16,373.)

But in line 12,994 Algus had become Argus; in which form he slips into the Book of the Duchess—‘Argus the noble countour’.

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