Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature

by C. S. Lewis

  It must, however, be remembered that the anthropological ascesis is not the only way of dealing with ferlies (whether in romances or elsewhere). Some readers find their responses liberated by Jung’s Theory of Archetypes. Others, I believe, find it helpful to see in every epic or romance the vestiges of real history. Those who cannot take the Grail for what (in the romances) it purports to be, find that they can take it either as something out of the collective unconscious, or as something out of Celtic paganism, or as a prehistoric burning-glass.10 The distribution of these views does not confirm one’s first suspicion that what is common to them all is simply a dislike of Christianity. Rather, they all supply the modern reader with apparently rational grounds for feeling that ‘more is meant than meets the ear’, that there is a great deal ‘behind’ the ferly, that he is surprising a secret. Thus the sense of mystery which the ferly, unaided, would evoke in the mind of an older reader, but which in the modern is inhibited, is released. He is no longer afraid of being taken in. He allows himself to feel the wonder and excitement which the old poet or romancer, I believe, intended to produce, because a sop has been given to his intellect and he now believes that his reactions can be defended on extra-literary grounds. For this purpose all three approaches can probably be equally useful. Since they are not mutually contradictory, they may even be usefully combined.

  But their utility, as psychological preparatives for ‘softening up’ the reader and restoring ‘his lapsed powers’, is one thing. Their truth in fact, or their power, if true, of really explaining the way the ferlies affect us, is quite another. If I cannot accept any of them myself, this is certainly not because they are repulsive to me. Rather the reverse. (I was overjoyed when, as an undergraduate, I believed, erroneously, that brun as an epithet for swords was a survival from the Bronze Age.) My difficulties are of another sort.

  We must distinguish two propositions. A. That a myth bequeaths to the ferlies which descend from it a power to move us. B. That the idea of a ferly’s being thus descended from a myth increases our receptiveness so that we are moved when we read of the ferly. In A the myth within the ferly works on us by its own power, as a drug mixed with our food may work. In B it is rather as if the knowledge or belief that something was mixed with our food produced a certain reaction by suggestion; as if a sensitive person were to vomit on hearing that the stew he had eaten contained human flesh, though human flesh is not in its own nature an emetic. Now if we take A, I have the following difficulty. The myth or rite does not always (it may sometimes) seem to me superior or equal in interest to the romancer’s ferly. The cauldron of the Celtic underworld seems to me a good deal less interesting than the Grail. The tests and ordeals—often nasty enough—through which savages, like schoolboys, put their juniors interest me less than the testing of Gawain in Gawain and the Green Knight. In tracing the ferly’s imaginative potency to such origins you are therefore asking me to believe that something which moves me much is enabled to do so by the help of something which moves me little or not at all. If after swallowing a quadruple whisky I said ‘I’m afraid I’m rather drunk’, and you replied ‘That’s because, while you weren’t looking, someone put half a teaspoonful of Lager beer into it’, I do not think your theory would be at all plausible. At this stage we may adopt a modified form of the A theory. We may say ‘No. It is not the myth, simply by being the myth it is, that makes the ferly potent. What the myth does is to modify the way in which the romancer tells it; and that in turn modifies the way in which you read it.’ This is a great improvement; not least because, in explaining a literary effect, it does allow something to the activity of a literary artist. The mythical origin is held (even if they did not know about it) to have modified the romancers’ treatment because ‘they surely inherited with such episodes something of the traditional attitude of reverence towards them’.11 But does traditional reverence for his theme always compel, or enable, a writer to move us thus, or only sometimes? If always, why are all the hymns and patriotic songs not more impressive? For we surely know that the hymnodists had a traditional reverence for Christianity, and the patriotic poets for England, quite as well (to put it mildly) as we know the attitude of the medieval poets to the things they wrote about. If, on the other hand, traditional reverence produces these happy results on some occasions but not on others, there must be some cause for the difference. And that cause the A theory does not seem to supply. It might after all be a literary cause. The impressiveness of the ferlies in a good romance might depend not on the source from which the author received his materials, nor on his reverence for them (if he had any), but on his worth as an author.

  I turn with pleasure to the B theory which, I feel sure, is the true one. As Mr Speirs significantly says, after reading Miss Weston and Professor Loomis and others, he ‘certainly notices things in the romances that one might, or would, have missed’.12 This can hardly mean that certain objects or episodes were simply ‘blacked out’ when he read the romances before he had studied the anthropologists. If it did (but the supposal is injurious to so diligent a critic), it’s no great wonder that a careful reading of any book gets more out of it than a skimming. I take it he means that the anthropological preparation caused him to dwell more seriously on the ferlies, to open his sensibility for moment and significance in details which he might otherwise have regarded as trivial. If so, then the mere fact of mythical origins, which of course was a fact (if at all) long before Miss Weston or Professor Loomis or anyone else thought about it, clearly gave the ferlies no power to stir his imagination; it was his believing, and thinking about, the fact which did the good. In other words, this is not like the drug mixed in the food: it is like the effect of being told ‘you have eaten human flesh’.

  Unfortunately the power of such a statement to produce nausea in a sensitive person would not in the least depend on its being true. It is enough that he should believe it. In the same way, all the beneficial effects produced on our reading of the romances by a belief in the process ‘from ritual to romance’ would operate equally well if that belief were false. Indeed, not even a belief is required. The mere surmise will do. It is the same with the Jungian archetypes, and with the (euhemeristic) theory of buried history. You only have to say ‘Perhaps . . . who knows?’ Perhaps, behind this odd detail in the romance there opens a dark backward and abysm of time—who knows if this is only a veil which hides immemorial paganism, with all its ecstasies and horrors—how if this were the unobtrusive mouth of a shaft by which I can descend (ibant obscuri) to the true underworld, the living darkness, of the collective human psyche? Anyone but a dull clod is moved by such conjectures. If we believe that the disguise is intentional of course the pleasure is increased. We have penetrated a mystery, undergone an initiation.*

  But the very thing which perhaps makes such beliefs so acceptable to some (the surmises we can all enjoy) is just what awakes my scepticism. What we are doing when we thus feel excitement, wonder, and even awe at the idea of such hidden depths behind myths or romances seems to me far too like what goes on in the myths and romances themselves. I do not mean like it in being untrue; I mean like it in quality. We are wandering in a tangled forest of anthropology as the knights wander in a literal forest. We are going down to dark ancient things like Orpheus or Aeneas. We have to depend on cryptic signs, are confronted with what would be meaningless unless The Golden Bough (or Merlin or a hermit) explained it. Above all, anything may turn out to be far more important than it looks. I enjoy this, but the enjoyment is suspiciously like that I get from the myths and romances themselves. Jung’s theory of myth is as exciting as a good myth and in the same way. Mr Speirs’s analysis of a romance is for me itself romantic. But I have an idea that the true analysis of a thing ought not to be so like the thing itself. I should not expect a true theory of the comic to be itself funny. Of such theories one feels, for the first moment, ‘This is just what we wanted’. And so, in one sense, it is. It is just what our emotions craved; a licence to prolong and perha
ps to intensify the very mood which, in some of us, the romance or myth had already aroused and, in others, was beginning to arouse until the inhibitions stepped in—to be deliciously dispelled by this apparently scientific sanction. But whether it is in another sense ‘just what we wanted’, whether it satisfies our intellectual desire, as psychologists, to understand our experience, or as critics to diagnose the art by which an author evoked it—that is a different matter. I remain open to conviction but so far unconvinced.

  A satisfactory theory of ferlies and their effect is, I believe, still to seek. I suspect that it will not succeed unless it fulfils two conditions. In the first place, it will have to be sure it has exhausted the possibilities of purely literary diagnosis before it looks further afield. A comparison of ferlies which do, and those which do not, succeed, will be involved. We shall have to try to discover whether narrative structure, or language, or preparation, or the total atmosphere of the work in which they occur, or the immediate content of the ferlies themselves, has usually most to do with it. But literary art can never be solely responsible for the effect of literature, for literature can never be pure like music. It has to be ‘about’ something, and the things it is ‘about’ bring their own real-life quality into the work. If roses did not smell sweet Guillaume de Lorris could never have used a rose to symbolize his heroine’s love. An onion would not do instead. The second condition, therefore, is that the theory should deeply study the ferlies as things (in a sense) in the real world. Probably such things do not occur. But if no one in real life had either seen, or thought he saw, or accepted on hearsay, or dreaded, or hoped for, any such things, the poet and romancer could do nothing with them. As anthropologists we may want to know how belief in them originated. But it will illuminate the literary problem more if we can imagine what it would feel like to witness, or to think we had witnessed, or merely to believe in, the things. What it would feel like, and why.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE GENESIS OF A MEDIEVAL BOOK

  In this chapter I shall first consider two early medieval texts and then say something about a remarkable characteristic which they have in common. They illustrate it all the more clearly because they are, in every other respect, extremely different. The one is a poem, the other a tract; the first full of heroic action and open air, the second entirely subjective and allegorical. Yet both can be shown to have come into existence by the same sort of process. It is a process wholly foreign to modern literature, but normal in the literature of the Middle Ages. It is almost the first thing we must grow used to and allow for in our medieval reading.

  1. LAƷAMON’S BRUT

  It is easy to explain why Laʒamon’s Brut has few readers. The only text1 is almost unobtainable; the poem is long; much of its matter is dull. But there are very good reasons for overcoming these obstacles. One is that Laʒamon is much easier than most Middle English poetry: far easier than Dunbar or Pearl or Gawain, yet not flattering the beginner, as Chaucer does, with a deceptive appearance of easiness. But secondly—and this is the reason most to my mind—the Brut is well worth our attention in its own right. The dull passages are a legacy from its known sources; its vividness, fire, and grandeur, are new. And sometimes—rarely, I admit—it reveals, in a flash, imaginative power beyond the reach of any Middle English poet whatever.

  As everyone knows, the ultimate source of Laʒamon’s subject-matter is Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (1147). It was a foundation quite unworthy of the structure raised upon it. Geoffrey is of course important for the historians of the Arthurian Legend; but since the interest of those historians has seldom lain chiefly in literature, they have not always remembered to tell us that he is an author of mediocre talent and no taste. In the Arthurian parts of his work the lion’s share falls to the insufferable rigmarole of Merlin’s prophecies and to the foreign conquests of Arthur. The latter are, of course, at once the least historical and the least mythical thing about Arthur. If there was a real Arthur he did not conquer Rome. If the story has roots in Celtic Paganism, this campaign is not one of them. It is fiction. And what fiction! We can suspend our disbelief in an occasional giant or enchantress. They have friends in our subconscious and in our earliest memories; imagination can easily suppose that the real world has room for them. But vast military operations scrawled over the whole map of Europe and excluded by all the history we know are a different matter. We cannot suspend our disbelief. We don’t even want to. The annals of senseless and monotonously successful aggression are dreary enough reading even when true; when blatantly, stupidly false, they are unendurable. Whether Geoffrey intended all this stuff as political propaganda for our continental empire or merely as a sop to national vanity, we neither know nor care. It is either way deplorable, and it is what Geoffrey chiefly wants to tell us about Arthur. He has of course included better things, but his own contribution is a mere disfigurement. The decided contempt which it gives me for Geoffrey has the paradoxical effect of making me readier to believe that the Historia is filled with valuable deposits of tradition, both legendary and historical. Wherever I meet anything that I think good as story or probable as history (and I meet both fairly often) I feel sure that Geoffrey did not make it up.

  After Geoffrey came Wace, the Norman, who was born in Jersey and made Canon of Bayeux by Henry II. He died, perhaps, about 1175. He is remembered by everyone for his account of Taillefer riding before William the Bastard’s army at Senlac and singing the Song of Roland; this comes in his Roman de Rou. In 1155 he retold Geoffrey’s matter in octosyllabics as the Geste des Bretons, which we, following the manuscripts, know as the Roman de Brut. He certainly did not regard himself as a writer of what we should call romance. His attitude to his material is rather that of a historian to an unreliable, yet by no means worthless, document. He thinks it is partly true, partly false. He is anxious to avoid errors. He has even been at the pains of investigating a fountain in Broceliande where the fays were said to appear, and his comment (in the Roman de Rou) on the negative result of the experiment is well known: ‘Wonders I sought but I found none; a fool I returned, a fool I went.’ But in another way he is not in the least like a historian. He feels perfectly free to touch up his original, describing, as if he had been an eyewitness, scenes he never saw and supplying vivid details from his own imagination.

  After Wace, Laʒamon, whose Brut was probably written before 1207. He tells us he was priest at Ernleʒe (now King’s Arnley) on the Severn. It com him on mode,2 came into his head, to relate the noble deeds and origin of the Engle. He travelled far and wide3 and secured these books as his sources: the ‘English book’ made by Bede (i.e. the Anglo-Saxon version of the Ecclesiastical History), a book by ‘Seint Albin and the feire Austin’, and a book by a ‘French Clerk’ called Wace.4 The second item in this catalogue is puzzling. It is generally taken to be Bede’s Latin original of the very same book which, in Anglo-Saxon, makes Laʒamon’s first item. I find it difficult to be content with this theory, but the question is not very important since Laʒamon actually makes extremely little use of Bede in any shape or form. Wace is the only one of his three authors who really counts. Perhaps when the poet mentioned all three books in his poems—for those days, and for a man in his humble station, they were a costly library, which he leofliche bi-heold5—he expected to use them much more than he actually did.

  But we cannot next proceed, as we used to do with Chaucer and Il Filostrato, to get a text of Wace, collate it with the English Brut, and thus try to isolate Laʒamon’s original work. It is generally accepted that Laʒamon worked from a redaction of Wace, contaminated by other versions of the story. And it seems clear to me, as to others, that he was in touch with real Welsh or (less often) English traditions. Thus he knows, and could not learn from Wace, the name of Arthur’s helmet Goswhit (21147) and his shield Pridwen (21152), and of the smith Griffin who made his spear (23783). In a passage peculiar to himself (13562–90) he gives to the Pict who murdered King Constance the name Gille Callæt, wh
ich is unknown to both Wace and Geoffrey. It is too good a name for a Pict to have been invented by a writer so unphilological as Laʒamon, who elsewhere cheerfully gives the names Ethelbald and Ælfwald to two ‘Britons’ who revolted against ‘Gracien’. The passage in which he does so (12253 seq.) is also significant. No one else relates this revolt; but Laʒamon’s very clear localization of it in East Anglia—no county patriotism would tempt him thither—suggests that a historical tradition of some far later rebellion may underlie it. There are, too, places where Laʒamon unexpectedly agrees with Geoffrey against Wace. At 1275 his pritti dawes confirms Geoffrey’s figure, and our text of Wace reads trois jors. This might be a mere accident. More importantly, at 14050 Laʒamon and Geoffrey both tell us that Lindesey was the fief given by Vortigern to Hengest, and Wace—in our textus receptus—does not. Since Laʒamon is generally thought to have made no use of Geoffrey, and certainly does not mention him, this passage suggests a source, probably British, common to both. It is certainly difficult not to suppose Welsh poetry behind the following prophecy about Arthur: