by C. S. Lewis
The reservation inter alia is, however, essential. Arthur is also a knight-errant seeking earthly glory (los, honour) by deeds of arms. We must repress our impulse to present Spenser with an Either-Or. In the modern criticism of modern poetry the principle of Ambiguity is always assumed; all the possible meanings of any one word are supposed to be in some measure operative. On the verbal level such ambiguity was, in my opinion, undreamed of by sixteenth-century poets and their readers. Its place was taken, I suggest, by iconographical ambiguity. It was not felt desirable, much less necessary, when you mentioned, say, Jove, to exclude any of his meanings; the Christian God, the Pagan god, the planet as actually seen, the planet astrologically considered, were all welcome to enrich the figure, by turns or even simultaneously. If more, and more erudite, symbolism than the poet had consciously intended were read into any image, he would not be displeased. If Spenser were a truthful man he might have to agree with Dr Ellrodt that he had never thought of half the allegories his Platonizing critics read into him; whether he would thank Dr Ellrodt for proclaiming the fact is another matter. The closest parallel—it is not a source—to Spenser will I believe be found in the work of the great Italian mythological painters, as Professor Wind2 has now taught us to interpret them. The aim is to load every inch of the canvas or every stanza of the poem with the greatest possible weight of ‘wisdom’, learning, edification, suggestion, solemnity, and ideal beauty. Symbols that are on different levels or come from very different sources are not logically harmonized with great care; they are plastically harmonized in the pictorial design or the narrative flow. The inconsistencies we discover in Spenser are perhaps sometimes offences against a sort of consistency he hardly attempted. We are too apt to say of allegory ‘A is B’ (and therefore not C, D, or E). But the allegorist was really saying ‘A is like B’; therefore quite possibly like C, D, and E as well. Thus B, C, D, and E can change and melt into one another, now this predominant, now that, in the fluidity of the poem. Waves at sea are not less beautiful because you cannot represent them in a contour map.
This technique of dissolving views sets a limit (of which he is aware) to the accuracy of Dr Ellrodt’s own map. To show that many passages do not, as some thought, demand a Neoplatonic interpretation is not the same as showing that they do not admit it. To show that they do not even admit a strict or technical Neoplatonic interpretation is not to show that they owe nothing to the Florentines at all. Dr Ellrodt often disproves a positive; from the nature of the case, and of logic itself, he cannot equally prove a negative. It can be shown that Spenser never accurately or unmistakably pins Venus down to the place the first Venus holds in their theosophy of emanations. It does not follow that she is never for him the Paradigma and does not carry with her something—just so much as he needed and remembered—of her Neoplatonic associations. It is certain that the court of Glorian cannot ‘be’ the archetypal world of Forms. Yet if this place, never actually present in the poem, this so desired place from which nearly everyone has come and to which nearly everyone will return, at some moments suggests another and lovelier world, we need not be sure that the suggestion is wholly unforeseen and fortuitous. If Florimell, lost and bewildered as soon as she leaves that happy realm, and finally captured by the shape-changing Proteus (III, viii), willy-nilly suggests to us the soul lost and imprisoned in the world of matter and change, we cannot be sure that she never suggested this to Spenser. We must not too literally accept the statement that the scene of action is always on earth. Una’s country (I, xi) seems to be at least the Earthly Paradise. Mutability’s journey is up through the spheres. The garden of Adonis is nowhere and everywhere. The Cave of Despair, the Temple of Venus, Mount Acidale, are within us. But what Dr Ellrodt means is true and important. Spenser is primarily the poet of the creatura, the universe.
Chapter XII (‘Spenser’s religious sensibility’) is admirable. Spenser is neither Platonist nor Pantheist nor Puritan. Even his Protestantism is more of the head than of the heart. We must not try to pin him down by such classifications. He himself, through the mouth of Irenius, tells us that he has ‘lyttle . . . to saie of relidgion’, having not ‘bene much conversant in that callinge’ (View, ed. Renwick, 1934, p. 104). Relidgion had better be glossed as ‘technical theology and ecclesiastical polity’. For Spenser was certainly, in his own way, a religious man. And also a religious poet. But the deepest, most spontaneous, and most ubiquitous devotion of that poet goes out to God, not as the One of Plotinus, not as the Calvinists’ predestinator, not even as the Incarnate Redeemer, but as ‘the glad Creator’, the fashioner of flower and forest and river, of excellent trout and pike, of months and seasons, of beautiful women and ‘lovely knights’, of love and marriage, of sun, moon, and planets, of angels, above all of light. He sees the creatures, in Charles William’s phrase, as ‘illustrious with being’.
Not, to be sure, that he is a ‘nature poet’ in the same sense as Wordsworth. He would, in our age, have felt more sympathy with Bergson or even with D. H. Lawrence. His universe dances with energy. In other poets temptation usually summons the will to Titanic action, to the inordinate resolutions of a Tamburlaine, a Faustus, a Macbeth, or a Satan. In Spenser it more often whispers ‘Lie down. Relax. Let go. Indulge the death wish’. Yet he is also more Olympian, more tranquil than a modern vitalist. His universe has the vigour not of a battle but of a dance. Here again the parallel is to be sought in the visual arts. The Faerie Queene is a verbal, as the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua is a plastic, representation of, and hymn to, the cosmos as our ancestors believed it to be. There has been no delight (of that sort) in ‘nature’ since the old cosmology was rejected. No one can respond in just that way to the Einsteinian, or even the Newtonian, universe. To excite and satisfy such love the model must be clearly finite yet unimaginably large; patterned and hierarchical; moved in the last resort by love.
I have stressed fully my dissents from Dr Ellrodt precisely because this book seems to me so valuable: it is the prima facie case for canonization that demands the Devil’s Advocate. I am not certain that I am right and he wrong on any of the disputed points. But I am quite certain that he has often set me right where I had been wrong; and where I was already right he has strengthened my hand.
The Foreword contains apologies for ‘controversial eagerness’ and for any blemishes that may have resulted from writing in a foreign language. The apologies are gracious, but neither was needed. Dr Ellrodt always treats his opponents—in places I am one of them—with courtesy; and it is much to be wished that all British and American scholars wrote English as well as he.
CHAPTER 12
SPENSER’S CRUEL CUPID
Blindfold he was, and in his cruell fist
A mortall bow and arrowes keene did hold,
With which he shot at randon, when him list,
Some headed with sad lead, some with pure gold;
(Ah man beware, how thou those darts behold)
A wounded Dragon under him did ly,
Whose hideous tayle his left foot did enfold,
And with a shaft was shot through either eye,
That no man forth might draw, ne no man remedye.
(F. Q. III, xi, 48)
This stanza provides examples of nearly everything in Spenser which tends to disappoint a modern reader. The movement of the verse is extremely regular: only in the fourth line (‘Some headed with sad lead, some with pure gold’) is the iambic flow disturbed. The image presented appears banal. We have heard a thousand times before that Cupid is blindfold and that he bears arrows. Even the distinction between two kinds of arrows is not new. We have met it in the Roman de la Rose (908 seq.) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (I, 462 seq.). There are no tensions or ambiguities in the language; nothing but literal, sequacious description. The only novelty is the dragon under Cupid’s foot. The only puzzle is the shaft that has put out its eyes, and the curious emphasis (in the last line) on the hopeless character of the injury. It sounds almost as if Spenser were pitying the dra
gon. One does not expect a writer of chivalrous romance to pity dragons.
Such a passage neither demands nor admits the minute verbal explication in which the most vigorous modern criticism excels. There is, however, room for explication of a different sort.
Cupid’s arrows, generally banal, are not banal in Spenser.
In the very frontispiece of his poem he has introduced (I, Proem 3) the loves of Mars and Venus. In the Odyssey those loves were little more than a merry tale; by Spenser’s time they had come to symbolize the victory of beauty over strength and peace over war; concord resolving discord. This is what the story meant to Lucretius and Plutarch; and to Botticelli, in whose picture the profound sleep of Mars and the waking tranquillity of Venus powerfully present ‘the lineaments of gratified desire’—not their desire only but that of all creation. The disarmament of Mars is emphasized by the fact that his arms have become toys for infant fawns to play with. But Spenser adds another detail. He disarms Cupid as well as Mars. It is a Cupid without his ‘deadly Heben bowe’ who inspires the concubitus whereby the goddess Harmony was engendered.
This is not the only place where Cupid is deprived of his weapons.
The Angel in II, viii, 6 is compared not simply to Cupid but to Cupid sporting with the Graces and ‘having laid his cruell bow away’. Cupid is admitted to the House of Alma (II, ix, 34) ‘having from him layd His cruell bow’. Again in the garden of Adonis he takes his pleasure ‘laying his sad darts Aside’ (III, vi, 49).
There are, admittedly, places where his arrows are mentioned in merely rhetorical fashion; as in I, Proem 3 itself or III, ii, 26, or ii, 35, or vi, 23. They colour the language but barely reach the visual imagination. When the arrows are included in, or expressly excluded from, a fully realized image, they are usually significant.
Their mention in the stanza we are considering stamps this Cupid as a particular kind of Cupid.
The bandage on this Cupid’s eyes would be banal if we stopped reading when we had finished the stanza. But it is presently going to leap into meaning. We shall then see the living Cupid—hitherto we have been looking at his statue—equally blindfold at first and then unbinding the bandage to enjoy the sight of Amoret’s torture. At which ‘he much rejoiced in his cruell mind’ and clapped his wings (III, xii, 22). He is blind except to the pleasures of cruelty; to them, gladly attentive.
And what of the dragon? Dragons (or serpents) have various significances. For modern depth-psychology they mean the libido or even the phallus. In some contexts they have meant wisdom. Sometimes, if they have their tails in their mouths, they are the symbol of eternity. But the key to this particular use lies elsewhere. In Alciati’s Emblematum Liber (1531)1 we find the virgin goddess Minerva (or Pallas) pictured with a dragon as her attendant. The verses which follow explain why:
Vera haec effigies innuptae est Palladis: Ejus
Hic draco, qui dominae constitit ante pedes.
Cur divae comes hoc animal? Custodia rerum
Huic data: sic lucos sacraque templa colit.
Innuptas opus est cura asservare puellas
Pervigili; laqueos undique tendit amor.2
A long tradition of dragons as guardians lies behind this. The Golden Fleece was guarded by a dragon, and the dragon which guards buried treasure (say, in Beowulf and the Volsung story) is as old as Phaedrus (IV, xx). More relevant than either is the dragon of the Hesperides. The Hesperides themselves associate it with virginity, and so, more potently and on a deeper level, do the golden apples. For apples often symbolize the female breasts; perhaps, especially, girlish and undeveloped breasts—the pome acerbe, the ‘unripe’ apples, of Ariosto’s Alcina in the Furioso (VII, 14) or those of Philoclea in the Arcadia (1590, I, xiii, 6).
Alciati’s book was so well known that we may be sure that it is, directly or indirectly, the source of Spenser’s blinded dragon. This is the guardian of chastity mutilated in the very organs which qualified it for guardianship. The same function is allotted to the dragon, with the same emphasis on its eyes, by two other English poets. Thus in Jonson,
What earthly spirit but will attempt
To taste the fruite of beauties golden tree,
When leaden sleepe seales up the dragon’s eyes?
(Every Man in his Humor, 1601, III, i, 19)
And in Milton,
But beauty, like the fair Hesperian tree
Laden with blooming gold, had need the guard
Of dragon-watch with unenchanted eye. . . .
(Comus, 393–5)
Without going beyond the single stanza, then, we discover that this Cupid is more particularized than he seemed at the first glance. But let us now go beyond it.
He is made of ‘massy gold’ (stanza 47). Gold of itself could never, I believe, be a symbol of evil to any human poet. But in this particular context Spenser has already contrived to make gold sinister. This statue stands in a room whose walls are covered with tapestries in which
the rich metall lurked privily,
As faining to be hid from envious eye;
Yet here, and there, and every where unawares
It shewd it selfe, and shone unwillingly;
Like a discolourd Snake, whose hidden snares
Through the greene gras his long bright burnisht backe declares.
(28)
Again, if we go forward from the stanza we started with, we discover that this statue is not merely decorative. It is, in the full theological sense, an idol. And its effect on Britomart, through whose eyes we are seeing the whole adventure, is very remarkable. It ‘amazed’ her; she couldn’t stop looking at it; she was ‘dazd’, dazzled and confused, by its extreme brightness.
Britomart, we know, is the Knight of Chastity. But Chastity, as embodied in her, means for Spenser True Love; that is, constant, fertile, monogamic, felicific love. Though she is, during the action of the poem, a virgin, she is much more like a mother-goddess than a virgin goddess. We are never for long allowed to forget that she is to be the ancestress of kings and heroes—
For from thy wombe a famous Progenie
Shall spring, out of the auncient Trojan blood.
(III, iii, 22–3)
It is love, so conceived, that comes to defeat the cruel Cupid, but is momentarily dazzled by his idol.
The conception of such an enmity between Cupid—one kind of Cupid—and True Love is also found in a passage from Sidney where Cupid is banished from (of all places) the marriage bed. In the Epithalamium sung by Dycus we read
But thou foule Cupid syre to lawlesse lust,
Be thou farre hence with thy empoyson’d darte,
Which though of glittring golde, shall heere take rust
Where simple love, which chastnesse doth imparte,
Avoydes thy hurtfull arte.
(The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. W. A. Ringler, Jr.
[Oxford, 1962], p. 92)
The ‘arrows’ of Cupid in the ancient tradition meant, I believe, no more than the sweet-sharp stings of bodily desire. It is clear that they cannot mean this when Spenser or Sidney banishes the arrows from scenes of what they regard as True Love. If they meant that, the absence of the arrows could only mean impotence and frigidity. But in both poets, lawful and unlawful love alike usually seek fruition; are not, in the cant sense, ‘Platonic’.*
CHAPTER 13
GENIUS AND GENIUS
Dr Janet Spens, who has done so much in her Spenser’s Faerie Queene to recall Spenserian criticism to paths unwisely neglected since the seventeenth century, is rightly troubled (p. 22) by the double role of Genius in Spenser’s allegory, as the doorkeeper to Acrasia in II, xii, 47 and to Adonis in III, vi, 31 et seq. There is a mystery about the first of these two passages which I do not believe that I have solved; but the two-edged use of the name Genius, in general, is explicable by his history.
Mr W. Warde Fowler (in his Religious Experience of the Roman People, p. 74) finds the origin of the ‘Genius’ of early Roman belief in the world-wide conceptio
n of a man’s spiritual double or external soul which constitutes his higher self. If this were all, the development of the Genius into a familiar δαίμων such as Socrates enjoyed, and thence (under Christianity) into a guardian angel, and so finally into the poetic self of a poet and into all the familiar modern usages, would be simple enough. But Mr Warde Fowler also tells us that for Roman thought the Genius, or higher self, of the pater-familias was specially connected with his function of carrying on the family: in fact, with the reproductive power. Such a peculiar conception leaves the way open for two different developments according as the emphasis is laid on Genius = higher self in general, or on Genius = reproductive power. And the two developments both occurred.
St Augustine (De Civit. Dei, VII, 13), criticizing Varro, writes as follows: Quid est Genius? ‘Deus,’ inquit [sc. Varro] ‘qui praepositus est ac vim habet omnium rerum gignendarum’ . . . alio loco genium dicit esse uniuscuiusque animum rationalem et ideo esse singulos singulorum. Here we have pretty clearly the two senses developed. Genius A is the universal god or spirit of generation. Genius B is the higher self, familiar, or δαίμων of any individual man. (It will be clear, of course, that while there is only one Genius A, there are as many genii BB as there are human beings.) St Augustine, if I follow his argument rightly, regards the double sense as an inconsistency in Varro and so perhaps it was; but in Martianus Capella two separate beings are described. He is speaking of the infra- solar deities whom he distinguishes from the higher gods: De Nupt. Merc. et Phil. II, 38, 39 G. Sed quoniam unicuique deorum superiorum singuli quique (i.e. of the infra-solar gods) deserviunt, ex illorum arbitrio istorumque comitatu et generalis omnium praesul et specialis singulis mortalibus Genius ammovetur. Here we might be quite sure that the generalis praesul was Genius A (as we are that the other is Genius B), if Martianus said anything about generation. In fact, he makes his praesul provide gerundis omnibus, not gignendis omnibus as we should expect and are tempted to read. But fortunately later authorities leave us in little doubt. In Bernardus Sylvester’s De Mundi Universitate we have a descent from heaven to earth, in which the travellers, on reaching the aplanon, or sphere of fixed stars, are met by a venerable person described as Oyarses et genius in artem et officium pictoris et figurantis addictus (Prosa III ad fin., p. 38 in Barach and Wrobel’s ed., Innsbruck, 1876). His pictorial art consists, we are told, in inscribing the Forms, conceived in heaven, upon the phenomenal world, which is precisely what every instance of reproduction does: that, in fact, is why he is called genius—Genius A. His other name Oyarses, as Professor C. C. J. Webb pointed out to me, must be a corruption of οὐσιάρχης and he had kindly drawn my attention to a passage in Pseudo-Apuleius, Asclepius (XIX), where we find an ‘Ousiarch’ in the sphere of the fixed stars qui diversis speciebus diversas formas facit—though he is not here called Genius. Finally we may note that Isidore (a good witness to the accepted usage of any word) explains Genius exclusively in sense A (Genium autem dicunt quod quasi vim habeat omnium rerum gignendarum seu a gignendis liberis unde et geniales lecti dicebantur a gentibus qui novo marito sternebantur. Etymolog. VIII, xi, 88).
