by C. S. Lewis
In most of this Dr Ellrodt seems to me clearly right. Other fortresses of Neoplatonic interpretation remain to be attacked.
The Mutability fragment he admits to be Platonic; but with the diffused and baptized Platonism of the Middle Ages, not with the ‘Platonic Theology’ of the Renaissance. Even its astronomy is medieval. The element of fire is not put out (vi, 7). Mutability never plays what would have been her ace of trumps—the Nova of 1572. The celestial irregularities which she boasts are such as had been observed for centuries. Ficino’s Nature had been an emanation, lower than Mind, lower even than Soul, without volition or consciousness. Spenser’s Nature is a figure far more august. Her descent from the ‘Christian naturalism’ of the Middle Ages is unmistakable. Dr Ellrodt compares the veiling of her face with Jean de Meung’s statement that its beauty ne peut estre d’ome compris (Roman de la Rose, 16248). Far from going beyond medieval Platonism, Spenser recedes from it. He sees the relation between the eternal and the mutable in more Christian and eschatological terms than Boethius. The temporal world for him is not, as it is in the De Consolatione, a perpetual and therefore (on its own level) unimprovable image of the eternal. Change works towards an End (both in the temporal and the teleological senses of that word) which, once achieved, will abolish change in the ‘stedfast rest of all things’ (viii, 2).
Here I agree with Dr Ellrodt in the main but differ from him on some details. I do not understand why he wishes to give to Jove, besides his planetary and Olympian character, that of one who symbolizes the Christian God (p. 68). It is very true that in Spenser, as in Milton and many others, Jove is often Jehovah incognito. But never, I suggest, less so than here. He is powerless to cope with Mutability’s insurrection and did ‘inly grudge’ at her appeal, which he apparently could not disallow, to a higher court (vi, 35). He is as nothing before Nature. If his reply to Mutability (vi, 31–4) sounds like the speech of God, must not the speech (from the throne) of any lawful, just, wise, and beneficent sovereign do the same? The king of gods, the best of planets, the fortuna major, is—like Gloriana—ex officio a vicegerent and ‘idole’ of the Almighty. There is no need to identify Mutability’s father Titan at all rigorously with Satan. It is enough that there should be an analogy; Titan is to Jove as Satan to God.
The parallel between Jean de Meung’s lines and Spenser’s reference to the veiled, because insupportable, countenance of Nature, does not seem so strong to me as to Dr Ellrodt. Jean de Meung uses occupatio, the familiar device of saying that something is too fine to be described or even comprehended. Spenser makes three quite different points: (a) that perhaps Nature is a hermaphrodite; (b) that perhaps her face is too terrible to see and ‘like a Lion’; (c) that perhaps it is too radiant—not to describe, but to ‘indure’ (vii, 5–6). All this suggests to me a different, and deeper, level of ideas from anything in the passage from the Roman. Whatever the sources, we may note some affinities. Cusanus tells us (Doct. Ignorantia, I, 25) that Hermes attributed both sexes to God and that the ancients called God, among many other names, ‘Nature’. In the previous chapter he has told us that in the infinite Unity there is no diversity and ‘man does not differ from lion’. And we can find one possible reason for the veil in Macrobius: (Philosophi) sciunt inimicam esse Naturae apertam nudamque expositionem sui . . . arcana voluit per fabulosa tractari (In Somn. Scip. I, ii, 17).
The garden of Adonis is the most cryptic image in The Faerie Queene and I am not sure that Dr Ellrodt, or any of us, has solved its mystery. I agree with him that it was ‘conceived for Amoret’ (p. 26) and that Ovid, interpreted by Golding, was the germ—or one germ, for surely the Cebetis Tabula ought also to have been mentioned? And no doubt we all agree that the garden is the garden of generation, therefore of sexual love. The ‘weedes that bud and blossome there’ (III, vi, 30) are in Dr Ellrodt’s opinion Forms; not Platonic, archetypal Forms ante rem but the rationes seminales of St Augustine. Since not all these structural plans or schemata have yet been biologically actualized, this has the great advantage of explaining the ‘uncouth formes which none yet ever knew’ (35). They would be the Augustinian creaturae nobis ignotae. But two difficulties remain.
Why does Time ‘mow the flowring herbes and goodly things’ (39) of the garden? Certainly this makes havoc of Dr J. W. Bennett’s claim that the garden is the timeless realm of (Platonic) Forms.* Dr Ellrodt’s solution, if I have understood him, is that Time mows not the rationes seminales but the concrete and corporeal creatures in which—outside the garden, in our world—they are realized. This seems to me a valuable suggestion. As a corollary we might even maintain that it is we, not Spenser, who imagine Time plying his scythe within the garden itself. He destroys its products: but perhaps he destroys them after they have entered this world. Perhaps he ‘flyes about’ here, not there. Or is it conceivable that he mows and is their ‘troubler’ (41) because he brings the inexorable hour that sends them ‘forth to live in mortall state’ (32)? For their birth is of course the beginning of their death.
Stanza 33 is still harder. Dr Ellrodt holds it impossible that so Christian a poet as Spenser can really mean that rational, human souls undergo reincarnation. He suggests that the ‘babes’ (32) must be either ‘seeds’ of human bodies or the vegetable souls of men. As to the first, I do not understand in what sense he uses the word seeds. The second presupposes the existence of vegetable (human) soul in separation from the sensitive and rational. I admit that the poets sometimes talk as if there were not a three-storied soul, but three distinct souls, in man. But I think they speak tropically. A trope is not basis enough for such a passage as this. Above all, neither hypothesis explains the alternative presented in stanza 33. It there appears that these ‘babes’ have two possible destinies; either they will be ‘clad with other hew’ or else ‘sent into the chaungefull world againe’. I fear there is only one system into which this really fits: the (originally Orphic) doctrine which underlies Plutarch’s De Facie, and which, far later, an author so Christian in intention as Henry More set out uncompromisingly in his Immortality of the Soul (III, i, 16). According to this all human souls become aerial daemons after death. But at a later stage some pass on beyond the air, change their aerial for aetherial bodies (‘are clad in other hew’) and are henceforth immutable and blessed; others, rejected, sink back to earth and suffer reincarnation in terrestrial bodies (‘are sent into the chaungefull world againe’). We need not hold that Spenser ‘believed’ this in the same sense that he believed his creed. He might well have said, like Johnson, that what scripture teaches on such matters is certain, and what ‘philosophy’ teaches is probable; at least, probable enough for poetry. This picture is not inconsistent with the Christian doctrine of ultimately unalterable salvation or perdition. It adds to it a doctrine, but not ‘the Romish doctrine’, of Purgatory. It is a permissible speculation. It is, as Plato’s ‘myths’ were to Plato himself, a not unlikely tale.
This is not to say that Spenser’s garden, like Plutarch’s ‘orchard’, must be located between Earth and Moon. The truth is that it cannot be located at all. As a biological fact (sexual generation) it is terrestrial, for it is on earth that Venus as Form-giver concerns herself with reproduction and it is to earth that Venus as planet descends by her influence when she makes us amorous (29). As psychological fact, it is again terrestrial, for we experience the delights of love on earth; that is why Spenser knows the pleasures of the garden ‘by tryall’ (ibid.). But as cosmic or metaphysical fact, as the meeting place of Forms (in whatever sense) and matter, it has no position in space.
There remains the problem of Venus and Adonis themselves. Venus ought to be the Form-giver. She dwells only sometimes on earth. Her native region is ‘the house of goodly formes and faire aspects Whence all the world derives the glorious Features of beautie, and all shapes select’ (12). And Adonis, ‘eterne in mutabilitie’ and ‘transformed oft’ (47), ought to be Matter. But is it tolerable that, in defiance of all tradition, Form should be embodied in the feminine i
mage and Matter in the masculine, and even called ‘the Father of all formes’ (ibid.)?
It is hardly tolerable, yet I believe we must tolerate it. Dr Ellrodt thinks (and so do I) that the Sapience of the fourth Hymn must be identified with the Second Person of the Christian Trinity, the Word. I do not at all agree that this image ‘can shock only the modern mind’ (p. 167). The parallel from a single and audaciously original author (Lady Julian of Norwich) does very little towards palliating the shock. I do not say that this image, if rightly understood, is theologically shocking; it is imaginatively shocking. The intellect can accept it; but on the level of the imagination the masculinity of the Word is almost impregnably entrenched by the sixfold character of Son, Bridegroom, King, Priest, Judge, and Shepherd. Yet all these, apparently, Spenser was prepared to break through. After that, the transference of the sexes between Form and Matter sinks into insignificance.
It is, moreover, most cunningly palliated. The sexual inferiority of Venus to Adonis is heavily compensated by her overwhelming superiority in every other respect. He is mortal (by birth), terrestrial. She comes from above. She is (probably) Paradigma; certainly goddess, planet, fortuna minor. The roles of the sexes are almost reversed in the relation between them. Ordinarily it is the lover who comes to his mistress’s bower. But it is Venus who comes to visit Adonis; occasionally, ‘when she on earth does dwel’ (29). Ordinarily we speak of the male possessing or enjoying the female: but Venus ‘when ever that she will’—he has to wait on her will and leisure—‘possesseth’ Adonis and ‘takes her fill’ of his ‘sweetnesse’ (46). He is the flower and she the bee. I do not know where Spenser has shown more delicate art than when he thus secretly restores the traditional relations of Form and Matter at the very point where he has overtly set them aside.
Dr Ellrodt, on the other hand, equates Adonis with Sol, and produces very good evidence that the equation was sometimes made (pp. 82 seq.). My dissent from him here involves a principle which may reasonably divide Spenserians in their interpretation of many other passages as well as of this. On my view it is not enough that an interpretation should fit the text logically; it must also fit imaginatively and emotionally. Indeed, if we had to choose, I should prefer a logical to an imaginative and emotional incongruity. This principle of mine can be contested: in the meantime, it is the principle I work by. That is why I cannot accept Adonis as Sol: not because the identification fails to work out conceptually, but because Adonis, as we actually meet him in the poetry, ‘feels’ or ‘tastes’ so obstinately un-solar. His garden is on earth (29). It is full of moisture (34). Even within that secret garden he inhabits a still more secret place, a ‘gloomy grove’, a thicket of ‘shadie boughes’ (43) where ‘Phoebus beams’—his own beams, if he were the sun!—can never reach him (44). He is ‘hid from the world’ (46). Sweet gums drip about him (43). I cannot feel with Dr Ellrodt that this place ‘is obviously reminiscent of Mount Olympus’ (p. 86). Its darkness, foliage, dampness, shelter from wind (44), seem to me the antithesis of the shining mountain-top. The statement that the gods ‘thither haunt’ (49) of itself shows that it is not the gods’ home. The verb haunt and the adverb of motion-towards (thither) mean that it is a place they visit; when they descend, either (mythologically) to take a holiday on earth, or (astrologically) in their influence. Dr Ellrodt’s own suggestion (p. 88 n.) that it has anatomical significance (the Mons Veneris) seems inconsistent with his solar theory and far truer to the poetry. I think it is probably right. If so, this is where the profound paradox of Spenser’s manipulation of the sexes in this myth reaches its extreme. Adonis is male; yet the Form-giver, approaching his dim bower, is descending to the womb.
To see this paradox in the clearest light we must remember the fruitful tensions and sensitive ambiguities which characterize Spenser’s attitude to the sexes elsewhere. His explicit statements are those we should expect from a man of his age. He regards ‘soft Silence and submisse Obedience’ as proper to women (IV, x, 51). He condemns the breach of natural hierarchy in Radigund (V, v, 25). This is the doctrinal façade. What moves behind it is rather different. He is haunted by the image of the Hermaphrodite (III, xii, old ending; IV, x, 41; VII, vii, 5). His Una, though touchingly unaware of the fact and, in her own eyes, the humblest of forsaken damsels (I, iii, 7), is in reality superior to St George as Grace is to sinful man (I, viii, 1). Britomart defeats Arthegall in the lists (IV, iv, 44) and rescues him from slavery (V, vii, 37 seq.). And if, as I think, she becomes Isis in her dream (ibid. the ‘crowne of gold’, vii, 13), then Arthegall is to her as the crocodile is to Isis. She is that Equity (3) or ‘clemence’ (22) without which his rough ‘justise’ would be merely salvagesse sans finesse (IV, iv, 39). Thus in a sense she rescues or saves him eternally in the Church of Isis as well as at one moment before the Castle of Radigund. But she too, like Una, acts humbly, like a woman in love, paradisially unaware of her high dignity.
Of The Faerie Queene in general Dr Ellrodt says ‘the scene of the action is on earth’ (p. 58). The court of Gloriana is no realm beyond this world; it is Cleopolis, an ‘earthly frame’ (I, x, 59), utterly distinct from the New Jerusalem. Britomart and Belphoebe are not the two Veneres of Ficino (p. 59). Florimell is not ‘true beauty’ in any Neoplatonic sense (p. 47). Gloriana is not ‘ultimate Platonic truth’ (p. 44). There is not a word about Platonism in the Letter to Raleigh; on the contrary, Spenser says he is writing for those who prefer Xenophon (p. 59).
Much of this is welcome. To make Belphoebe a Venus of any sort is, I think, to misunderstand the whole myth to which she belongs. In it Spenser is pacifying the old medieval débat between Venus and Diana. Diana’s fosterling and the fosterling of Venus are shown to be twin sisters. Both are equally of divine (solar) descent and both immaculately conceived. They are alternative excellences of womanhood between whom there need be no quarrel and no inequality. This and something more—almost, as Cusanus would say, a coincidentia oppositorum—is hinted in their grandmother’s name, Amphisa—‘Both Equal’ or ‘Equally Both’ (III, vi, 4). In more modern terms, they are two archetypes: the Terrible Huntress and the Yielding Bride.
It is doubtful whether Dr Ellrodt’s position is much strengthened by the reference to the Letter. This at so many points flatly contradicts the text that it is flimsy evidence for anything. And the preference for Xenophon concerns his method, not his doctrine. He is valued for teaching rather ‘by example then by rule’.
And has not something of Arthur and Gloriana escaped us? It is very true that their meeting (I, ix, 9–15) is derived from ‘fairy lore’, from Lanval and many other Celtic stories; just as St George’s dragon-fight is derived from many other dragon-fights (p. 52). But that tells us nothing about its meaning. It is also true that Arthur declares himself to have been pricked on by ‘kindly heat’ (I, ix, 9) and subdued by Cupid, ‘that proud avenging boy’ (12). Of course. No one doubts that the story is literaliter erotic. The question whether the erotic images symbolize some supersensuous experience or not remains to be considered on its own merits. (That Gloriana’s relation to Elizabeth I is wholly in abeyance at this point, seems to me certain; otherwise the passage would have endangered Spenser’s ears, perhaps his head.)
Now the episode is peculiar in two ways. First, we are not allowed to decide whether Arthur’s experience was a dream or a reality. At the words ‘me seemed’ (13) it appears to be a dream; the mention of the ‘pressed gras where she had lyen’ (15) sounds as if it were very much more. And secondly, we are not given clearly to understand whether, after this night of ‘goodly glee and lovely blandishment’ (14), the fairy rose (or was dreamed to rise) with her virginity intact.
This double obscurity about both the reality and the result of the concubitus is tolerable only on one condition. Suppose it to be real. You can have a story in which two lovers consummate their love, but you must not leave us in doubt. You can also have a story in which they lay together and abstained. It does not matter whether this or that reader thinks such absti
nence possible in the real world. It will be poetically possible provided this tour de force of chastity is made the main point of the story. What is not tolerable—what is in fact ludicrous—is to pass the thing over as if it were an unimportant detail. Again, you can have a story in which a lover dreams that he has his mistress in his arms. But then the bitter awakening, the disappointment, the realization that it was ‘only a dream’, must be the catastrophe of that story. Spenser’s actual handling is tolerable on one condition only; that we are being shown the sort of experience to which the contrast either between mere ‘blandishment’ and full fruition or between dream and waking does not strictly apply. But the soul’s new-kindled raptures at its first meeting with a transcendental or at least incorporeal object of love, is an experience of that kind. First love of fame, of music, of poetry, of a political ‘cause’, of a vocation, of a virtue, of God, have this character. To what stage or degree of physical intimacy this spiritual ‘embrace’ should precisely be compared is a senseless question: you must not ask whether the Queen of Faerie kept her virginity or not. But to doubt whether it was a dream, whether the whole thing, or part of it, and if so what part, was not ‘only one’s own imagination’, is absolutely inevitable.
Gloriana can therefore be glory, in the sense of fame. But I share Dr Ellrodt’s reluctance to make her merely the fame that grows on mortal soil (p. 52). She is also, I still believe, Glory in a far more religious sense. I think Spenser avails himself of an equivocation in the word glory, as Douglas in his Palice of Honour equivocates with honour.
For Arthur is certainly neither Aristotle’s Magnanimity nor his Magnificence. Dr Ellrodt says that he bears the shield of ‘heavenly grace’ (p. 51). But in scripture the shield is Faith, not Grace; scutum fidei (Eph. vi. 16). And Arthur by uncovering his shield can ‘daunt unequall armies of his foes’ (I, vii, 34). Had Spenser remembered that by Faith the saints of old castra verterunt exterorum (Heb. xi. 34)? And if Spenser believed, as on one level he certainly did, in salvation by Faith, is it of no significance that Arthur’s function in the poem is to save other knights at need? I suspect that Arthur is inter alia the knight of Faith, and Gloriana, inter alia, that glory beyond the world which Faith pursues.
