Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature

by C. S. Lewis

  One thing will have been noticed in all these examples, and has already been alluded to. They are all the kind of similes which a philosopher could use in prose, and some of them may come from Dante’s philosophic sources. If we want to find parallels to them in verse we must go to Lucretius rather than Virgil. Their presence in Dante is to be connected with what I have already said about the multiple function he performs. They are there, in the first place perhaps, because he is writing as the vulgarisateur of the best thought of his time—acting as a medieval Jeans or Eddington no less than a medieval Wells, Wordsworth, Milton and Hopkins.

  There is, therefore, a sense in which they are less poetical than the similes of Virgil. Virgil’s similes are always poetical in the negative or exclusive sense that they could not exist outside poetry. Vulcan and the old woman are united by a thread which would be simply ridiculous in prose. For that reason a man’s reaction to Virgil or Milton is in some ways a better test of his poetical aptitude than his reaction to Dante. There is so much besides poetry in Dante that anyone but a fool can enjoy him in some way or other, whereas a poem like Lycidas is merely poetry and therefore utterly detestable to the rather large class of critics who have a secret dislike of poetry but get along pretty well by dealing with poets, politics, private lives, and ‘delineation of character’. But we must not think that because Virgil is more poetical in the negative sense, he is therefore more poetical simpliciter. That is what I call the fallacy of maximum differentiation. A thing is most itself, in the sense of being most recognizable, when it is most unlike everything else: but this does not mean that it is then in its best state. If you want to find out whether whisky is a spirit, you may take some neat whisky and apply a lighted match to it: but if you want a drink you may prefer to mix it with soda water. I do not think the best poetry is that which contains the fewest elements proper to prose. I think the greatest prose and poetry are least unlike each other, and that Dante has proved it. When he is most poetical he says most precisely what he really means in the prose sense of the verb to mean.

  This has many curious results. It means, among other things, that he is the most translatable of the poets—not, probably, that he entrusts less wealth than others to the music of the words and the nuance of the phrase but that he entrusts more than others to the ‘plain sense’. It is hard for a translator to ruin the great passages in Dante as every translation ruins Virgil. And it has a still more important and baffling consequence, which I find it hard to express save by a paradox. I think Dante’s poetry, on the whole, the greatest of all the poetry I have read: yet when it is at its highest pitch of excellence, I hardly feel that Dante has very much to do. There is a curious feeling that the great poem is writing itself, or at most, that the tiny figure of the poet is merely giving the gentlest guiding touch, here and there, to energies which, for the most part, spontaneously group themselves and perform the delicate evolutions which make up the Comedy. When the ascent from one sphere to the next is compared to progress in virtue, the last thing I am inclined to do is to exclaim ‘How did he think of that?’; given the metaphysics (which are not his own) and the physics (which are Ptolemy’s) and the scheme of an ascent to Heaven (which is from Cicero, Martianus Capella, and Alanus), it seems almost as if this simile must occur, and that the inexhaustible potency of such a passage demanded nothing more from the poet than that he should not meddle nor spoil it, that he should let it take its course and then write down what had happened as well as he could. The very nature of his universe seems to fill his key words—words such as love, light, up, down, high, low, sun, star and earth—with such a wealth of significance that their mere mention, at those points where the literal narrative requires them, becomes solid poetry ‘more gold than gold’ without more ado. And so, by a long way round, we come back to Homer. For in his world too, a world very different from Dante’s, the mere direct description of what happened: how they launched a ship or went to bed—seems also to turn into poetry, of its own accord. I do not mean for a moment that Homer and Dante are not great poets: rather I draw the conclusion that the highest reach of the whole poetic art turns out to be a kind of abdication, and is attained when the whole image of the world the poet sees has entered so deeply into his mind that henceforth he has only to get himself out of the way, to let the seas roll and the mountains shake their leaves or the light shine and the spheres revolve, and all this will be poetry, not things you write poetry about. Dare I confess that after Dante even Shakespeare seems to me a little factitious? It almost sounds as if he were ‘just making it up’. But one cannot feel that about Dante even when one has stopped reading him. For whereas Lear’s suggestion about smiting flat the thick rotundity of the earth has no existence outside the play, the great passages in Dante have a reality which our prosaic mind, as well as our poetic, can bite upon. They don’t fade as you come awake. They can stand daylight. We are made to dream while keeping awake at the same time. Orpheus can look back and take as long a stare as he pleases: this Eurydice will not vanish.

  CHAPTER 5

  IMAGERY IN THE LAST ELEVEN CANTOS OF DANTE’S COMEDY

  This study will doubly lack the charm of novelty: for the method is not my own and the subject is closely akin to one that I have treated before in the presence of this society. My previous study was on Dante’s similes. My present theme is narrower in so far as I confine myself to the last eleven cantos, but wider because it is not limited to similes. I use the word Imagery to cover Metaphor, even those metaphors which lurk in a single word and of which neither poet nor reader need always be explicitly conscious, and even some which may be suspected of being, in the philological sense, nearly ‘dead’. That is, we include every appeal to the imagined exercise of the five senses, always excepting those images which are directly represented as parts of Dante’s story and which would appear on the screen if anyone (which God forbid) made a film of it. Thus roratelo alquanto, ‘bedew him a little’, in XXIV, 8 is a specimen of the Imagery we shall be studying: but the Empyrean itself, or Beatrice herself, is not. The method is that which Dr Caroline Spurgeon has applied to Shakespeare.* The aim is to surprise the imagination of the poet in its more secret workings, to disengage that incessant orchestration which accompanies his drama and which, though it may escape notice while our attention is fixed on the stage, probably contributes in the highest degree to the total effect.

  From such an examination one might hope to gain in knowledge of two distinct but very closely connected subjects. On the one hand, one might hope to learn many things about Dante, and perhaps some which he did not know himself. We should discover to what ideas his mind most habitually recurred, his likes and dislikes, his semi-conscious associations. Our results would be psychological. On the other hand, we might hope to learn what these images, however they came into Dante’s mind, do to the mind of the reader while he reads the poem and how they contribute to its effect. This second knowledge would be aesthetic: we should be learning how poetry operates. In her work on Shakespeare Dr Spurgeon was primarily interested in Shakespeare’s psychology. In this paper I am primarily interested in Dante’s poetry.

  Even if my interests did not lead me away from the psychological to the aesthetic, my ignorance would. One of the most important distinctions for the psychological student would be that between imagery new-minted by the poet and imagery that is traditional. When a man uses traditional imagery he reveals little (I do not say nothing) of his idiosyncrasy. That the Paradiso speaks of the Church as the Bride (sposa) does not tell us much about Dante. Thus, to take a less obvious instance, in XXIV, 102 we read of miracles as works

  a che natura

  Non scaldò ferro mai, nè battè incude.

  Nature’s smithy will appear less important for the psychological student when he remembers that it had appeared in Alanus. But it will not be depreciated for the aesthetic student. Wherever the image came from, it has arrived in our minds, and acts upon us. I do not say that from this second point of view the disti
nction between traditional and novel loses all importance, and in what follows I shall point out (as far as my knowledge allows me) the traditional images. The more traditional they are, the less they affect us: but if we are sensitive readers their effect will never sink to zero. I shall of course often fail to recognize what is traditional. That error, which would be fatal in a psychological study, will, I trust, be merely an impoverishment in mine.

  But inevitably in trying to distinguish my approach from Dr Spurgeon’s I seem to claim a neater distinction between them than really exists. How the psychological and the aesthetic, not to mention the traditional and the novel, are actually blended can be seen from an example. In XXV, 38 Dante is half way through a viva voce examination by three Apostles, when one of them, St James, addresses to him some words of encouragement. As a result

  io levai gli occhi ai monti,

  Che gl’incurvaron pria col troppo pondo.

  There is here a double act of the imagination. First the Apostles are compared to mountains (probably with aid from a traditional allegorization of the psalm that Dante quotes). Then the majesty of the mountains (or of the Apostles, for they are momentarily one) which weighs upon the soul is equated with an actual weight which bends the bearer double. In most minds the aesthetic and the psychological conclusions will follow simultaneously. He makes us go through that imaginative transference whereby a mountain mass seems to crush us with its weight, and at the same moment we perceive that he was a man who looked at mountains in that way. Nor do I think that any reader of the Comedy will fail to ask ‘Where, in an earlier canto, did we meet the image of intolerable weight?’, and then to remember the Proud doubled beneath their loads on the first terrace of Purgatory: and how Dante continued to feel that weight in memory after he had left the first terrace (Purgatorio, XIII, 136 et seq.) and how he tells us that this was the punishment he feared for himself. That is, he judged Pride to be his besetting sin and therefore attached to its punishment sensations to which his imagination was very alive. But with that, we are fully embarked on psychology. For our study it is enough to notice how immensely venerable the Apostles have become first by the mountain image and then by the image of weight which, as it were, grows from it. No direct praise of their wisdom or sanctity could have made us respect them half so much.

  Before beginning my analysis I should perhaps raise one problem. Some of the images which I shall mention are offered to us by a single word and that word comes at the end of a line: in other words the rhyme requires it. How far does that reduce its significance? It is true that Italian is a language rich in rhymes and Italian poets are less likely than English to be driven to an otherwise unsuitable word for the sake of its sound. It is also true that facility in rhyming, far from requiring the genius of Dante, is something which mere practice must infallibly bestow on anyone whatever who has made as many rhyming verses as Dante had done before he wrote the Paradiso. There is nothing mysterious about this. There are a certain number of rhyming words in the language as there are a certain number of books in a room: habituation will teach a man quickly to lay his hand on any rhyme as it will enable him to lay his hand on any book in his own library. On the other hand, the number of rhyming words in a language cannot be increased at will, except by comic coinages: and therefore, at a given moment the best poet may be as out of pocket as the worst. The word at the end of one line may be too good to give up, and yet there may be few rhymes to it. It may be worth keeping even at the cost of a slightly strained rhyme lower down. A place where some will suspect this is XXVII, 83–4

  il lito

  Nel qual si fece Europa dolce carco.

  I myself do not think carco creaks: I leave it to the society. But clearly, the psychologist who was following out the significance in Dante’s sensibility of that idea of weight which we have just touched on, would have to decide whether the periphrasis in fece carco came in because Dante thought of Europa’s ride in terms of weight, or solely for the sake of rhyme, or for both reasons. For the aesthetic analyst the problem is different. What matters to him is not whether a given rhyme was in fact forced or not but whether it seems to the reader to be forced and therefore tends to be unconsciously discounted. For if so, it contributes less to the effect of the poem upon our minds.

  The smallest class is images of Smell. Of these I find only two certain instances. I have excluded inebriate dagli odori at XXX, 67 because I am not sure whether it is imagery at all in our sense. The flowers are to be imagined as having real scent. Even if it were admitted we should still have only three, and one of them (odor di lode, XXX, 126) highly traditional. One might have expected that a poem about Heaven would be full of aromatic imagery. In fact it is there only by implication. There are flowers: and the angels, if I may use the expression, buzz like bees over the eternal Rose in canto XXXI. That makes us supply the olfactory images for ourselves. And what the reader is made to do for himself has a particular importance in literature. Hence the cynical dictum that chaste is the most erotically suggestive of all adjectives is not so wide of the mark, and cool evokes the idea of summer.

  The Sea, in its own right, furnishes only two images. I say ‘in its own right’ because it is used in XXXI, 73–5

  Da quella region, che più su tuona,

  Occhio mortale alcun tanto non dista,

  Qualunque in mare più giù s’abbandona

  but only as a measure of distance, and is again implied in the image of Fortune turning the ship (XXVII, 145). In neither of these does it seem to be used for its own marine quality. In the two instances where it is so used it symbolizes evil: the mar dell’ amor torto (XXVI, 62) and the onde of cupidigia (XXVII, 121). Even when we remember the mar sì crudele of Purgatorio, 1, 3, it would be foolish to conclude that Dante habitually thought of the sea with dislike. The beautiful seascapes with which the Purgatorio opens would sufficiently prove the contrary. In the eleven cantos which I am studying it happens to appear only as something one has to be pulled out of and is in both places associated with the verb trarre. The core of the image is rescue from drowning, and this is no doubt a potent imagination for all humanity. It would not appear in a poem written by a fish.

  Another class which contains only two items is that of images drawn from the Student’s life, and they will occur at once to everyone’s mind: the bachelor preparing for his disputation in XXIV, 46, and the forward pupil in XXV, 64. Both arise so directly out of the narrative that, however humorously and affectionately touched, they hardly amount to imagery in the sense that here concerns us.