C.S. Lewis at Poets’ Corner
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“was one of the first explorers of the human heart, and is therefore rightly to be numbered among the fathers of the novel of sentiment.”15
In his treatment of the great medieval English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, Lewis was similarly able to recognize the present in the past and the past in the present in ways that frankly make many other critics look out of their depth. For example, he gets the character of Pandarus in Chaucer’s Troilus 13. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, 29.
14. Ibid., 30.
15. Ibid., 29.
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and Criseyde absolutely right. According to many modern readers, Chaucer’s Pandarus is already what the figure of the pander has now become: a sleazy go-between, who is in cahoots with another man to ensnare an innocent woman. Traces of that degeneration are already visible in the Pandarus of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, and there is plenty of literary criticism that represents Chaucer’s Pandarus as a similarly dubious character. Here, by refreshing contrast, is Lewis’s description:
Pandarus is exactly the opposite of his niece. He is, above all, a practical man, the man who “gets things done.” . . . Everyone has
met the modern equivalent of Pandarus. When you are in the
hands of such a man you can travel first class through the length
and breadth of England on a third-class ticket; policemen and
gamekeepers will fade away before you, placated yet unbribed;
noble first-floor bedrooms will open for you in hotels that have
sworn they are absolutely full; and drinks will be forthcoming at
hours when the rest of the world goes thirsty.16
The characterization that Lewis develops so exuberantly in this passage depends on imagining Pandarus in the familiar setting of present-day England (though, of course, there are no more third-class train tickets and only a few gamekeepers left), and this thought-experiment again illustrates his particular strength: Lewis was able to relate to medieval stories with the same uncomplicated directness as we relate to the normal world around us. Insights of this kind only come about when a critic perceives the world around him in terms of the books he has just read, sees traces of Pandarus in his practical friend who can fix any situation, and, vice versa, sees glimpses of friends and acquaintances in the fictional characters in the books he is reading. And surely that is what reading should be all about: relating the story to your life and your life to the story, and finding both life and books enriched in the process.
About Criseyde, too, Lewis is sympathetic, though when discussing
her he offers a prediction which time has disproved: “those who have followed Chaucer most closely in his devout study of her, will best understand Criseyde. There have always been those who dislike her; and as more women take up the study of English literature she is likely to find ever less mercy.”17
Lewis’s supposition that hostile misinterpretations of Criseyde would increase in proportion with the increasing numbers of women choosing to study English literature at university is perhaps due to an assumption that women would be harder on their own sex; but, whatever his thinking was, 16. Ibid., 190.
17. Ibid., 182.
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his prediction has not come true. It is in fact poor diffident Troilus who has found less and less sympathy with modern readers, men and women alike, as younger generations of readers find it harder and harder to sympathize with his honourable trepidation before the woman he loves.
If there is a recurrent weakness in The Allegory of Love, I think it is that, in his critical evaluation of allegories, Lewis set too much store by the coherence of the story. I mean coherence in two ways. First, as is clear from both his criticism and his own fictional writing, C. S. Lewis liked a good story, with a beginning, middle, and end; and he is invariably harsh on allegories that do not offer much by way of story or unity of action. About The Assembly of Ladies, which ends very inconclusively, he has this to say: Taken as an allegory, it is as silly a poem as a man could find in a year’s reading. A number of ladies are summoned to a “coun-sayl” at the court of Lady Loyalty; they arrive and present their
petitions; Loyalty postpones her answer till her next “parliment”
and the dreamer wakes. As a story, and still more as an allegori-
cal story, this is clearly of no value.18
Although some later critics would agree with this,19 I think that The Assembly is actually a very interesting allegory,20 and the inconclusiveness of the story seems to me to be an important part of its meaning. The psychological reality that lies behind the allegorical fiction is that the lady who wrote The Assembly (stylized as the “I” of the poem) felt that she had a legitimate griev-ance, and so it makes good allegorical sense that in the story she goes to appeal to “Loyalty” (the word also meant “fairness,” “equity” in Middle English), just as it makes sense for Loyalty to grant the justness of her complaint.
But although Loyalty is on her side, for Fairness is fair, life is often unfair, and the deferral of any “open remedy” (723) for the lady—come back later, says “Loyalty,” and you will find out “how ye shul be releved” (724)—makes the allegorical point that having right on our side is no guarantee that things will be also be put right.
Chaucer’s Complaint unto Pity fares no better in Lewis’s judgement, again because it lacks a good story. The story, such as it is, is of a lover who sets out to complain to Lady Pity, but when he gets to her she turns out to be “dead and buried in a heart.” Several allegorical characters surround her 18. Ibid., 249.
19. See, for example, Pearsall (ed.), The Floure and the Leafe and The Assembly of Ladies, 52–53. Subsequent references to The Assembly of Ladies are to this edition.
20. I discuss the poem’s merits at greater length in “Fifteenth-Century Chaucerian Visions,” in A Companion to Fifteenth-Century Poetry, ed. Boffey and Edwards, 143–56.
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hearse; they show no grief, but are allied in their determination to frustrate the lover’s cause:
Aboute hir herse ther stoden lustely,
Withouten any woo as thought me,
Bounte parfyt, wel armed and richely,
And fresshe Beaute, Lust, and Jolyte,
Assured Maner, Youthe and Honeste,
Wisdom, Estaat, Drede, and Governaunce,
Confedred both by bonde and alliaunce.
A compleynt had I, written in myn hond,
For to have put to Pite as a bille;
But when I al this company ther fond,
That rather wolden al my cause spille
Then do me helpe, I held my pleynte stille,
For to that folk, withouten any fayle,
Withouten Pitee ther may no bille availe.
Then leve I al these vertues, sauf Pite,
Kepynge the corps as ye have herd me seyn,
Confedred alle by bond of Cruelte
And ben assented when I shal be sleyn.
And I have put my complaynt up ageyn,
For to my foes my bille I dar not schewe . . . . (36-55)21
This, according to Lewis, “illustrate[s] the use of personification allegory at its lowest level—the most faint and frigid result of the popularity of allegory.
Not only do the allegorical figures fail to interact, as in a true allegory; they even fail to be pictorial; they become a mere catalogue”;22 and he goes on to cite some lines from the first stanza of the above-quoted extract to prove it.
Again, I disagree. The art of self-reflexive allegory of the kind Chaucer is here writing lies in the constant awareness that the personifications in the fiction are at the same time abstract nouns.23 From this perspective, it is surely nonsense to complain, as Lewis does, that the lady’s personified virtues “become a mere catalogue,” for that is what they were to start with; and Chaucer wittily bares the device when
the “I” says he will “leve al these vertues, sauf Pite.” In the fictional story that should mean he will now leave 21. Cited from The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Benson.
22. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, 167.
23. This paragraph draws on Putter, “Chaucer’s Complaint unto Pity and the Insights of Allegory,” in Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature, ed. Cannon and Nolan, 166–81.
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these “persons,” apart from Pity, behind him; but the logical impossibility of leaving them but not Pity, when these personifications are supposed to be gathered around her corpse, signals that what is really being dismissed is all the qualities conventionally attributed to the lady (a topos here as useless to the poet as to the lover), not a group of people. It is likewise nonsensical to expect abstractions to “interact” with the poet: we do not in real life “interact” with abstract ideas as we interact with people; and the point of allegory, even Lewis’s action-packed true allegory, is really to indicate our relationship or disposition towards ideals (whether we like them or not, are close to achieving them or not, and so on). And Chaucer’s allegory does that very well. For example, because “Beauty,” “Wisdom” and their ilk are excellent things in a lady, they naturally figure as “vertues,” but because these same virtues make the lady harder to attain—indeed impossible to attain without Pity (which represents the lady’s generous renunciation of her superiority vis-à-vis her suitor)—they are also the lover’s enemies, his “foes,” who have ganged up against him and condemn him to a certain death. Similarly, the apparent contradiction between their allegorical role as public mourners and their continued cheerfulness, as they stand “lustely” around her hearse, makes good allegorical sense. A lady’s beauty, youthfulness, charm, etc., are in no way diminished by her lack of pity. It is only the lover who suffers from that, and so in the allegory it is only he who seems to notice that Pity is dead.
In addition to wanting allegorical stories to be coherent in their own right, Lewis also demanded a good fit between the allegorical fiction and the non-allegorical truths encoded by that fiction. The first fully developed Christian personification allegory, Prudentius’ Psychomachia (circa A.D.
400), which represents the struggle of good and evil in the human soul in the allegorical guise of a battle between personified vices and virtues, comes under attack from Lewis because of the incongruity of the allegorical action and the moral point. He thought that the conceit of a pilgrimage or a journey would have offered a much better analogy for the dynamic life of the human soul:
The journey has its ups and downs, its pleasant resting-places
enjoyed for a night and then abandoned, its unexpected meet-
ings, its rumours of dangers ahead, and, above all, the sense
of its goal, at first far distant and dimly heard of, but growing
nearer at every turn of the road. Now this represents far more
truly than any combat in a champ clos the perennial strangeness, the adventurousness, and the sinuous forward movement of the
inner life. . . . But there is another and more mechanical defect
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in the pitched battle. . . . It arises from the fact that fighting is an activity that is not proper to most of the virtues.24
Good allegorists in Lewis’s view are writers who choose and develop their allegorical fiction so as to achieve a harmonious match between vehicle and tenor. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, which Lewis had in mind when developing the analogy of human life as a journey, is an example of an allegory that Lewis admired for precisely those reasons. But, of course, there is always a creative tension between vehicle and tenor in allegory, and Lewis is too unkind on allegorists who, rather than minimizing such tension, draw attention to the incongruities between the non-allegorical message and the allegorical fiction in which this message has been cloaked. That Prudentius is an allegorist of this type becomes clear as soon as he launches into his fable of a pitched battle. Faith is the first combatant to step forward, ready to take her on her fearsome opponent, “Worship-of-the-Old-Gods”:
Faith first takes the field to face the doubtful chances of battle, her rough dress disordered, her shoulders bare, her hair un-trimmed, her arms exposed . . . .25
If we had the Latin original before us, we would be reading this in dactylic hexameter, the metre of Virgil’s Aeneid, and would be even more conscious of the mismatch between what the fictional story promises (“let battle begin”) and what it actually delivers (an unkempt woman). Yet surely this is what Prudentius wanted. “Where’s the gear?” his readers are meant to wonder. “Why is this warrior not properly armed? And why a woman?” To ask such questions is to realize that it is often an apparent incoherence in the allegorical narrative that leads us to the non-allegorical truth: true faith is not a warrior but a feminine noun ( fides), and faith (lower case) means faith in God, not faith in armour, which is why Faith (upper case) surprisingly features as a woman who has no interest in personal tidiness or in armour.
I would therefore see Prudentius not as someone who gets his wires crossed because he is working with the wrong allegorical plotlines, but rather as a poet who was consciously striving to subordinate the epic mode and its ethos to Christian morality.26 Nor do I think that he had a “deficiency in humour,”27 as Lewis thought. There is, for instance, a fine moment of comic 24. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, 69.
25. Quotations are from the prose translation of Prudentius’ Psychomachia by Thomson, in Prudentius, 2 vols, vol. 1.
26. For a similar view see Smith, Prudentius’ Psychomachia: A Re-Examination.
27. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, 69.
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absurdity when Pride ( Superbia) tries to humiliate her opponents by presenting them as effeminate and socially inferior:
Are ye not ashamed, ye poor creatures ( miseri), to challenge famous captains with troops of low degree, to take the sword
against a race of proud distinction?28
The funny thing is that this invective against “unmanly sloth”29 is spoken by a woman to women, though Pride is so absorbed by her epic harangue that she forgets herself and speaks “man-to-men” ( miseri is masculine plural). It is also funny that this hyper-masculine virago, dressed in full epic regalia, comes to a decidedly un-heroic end by falling into a ditch dug by Deceit, her own ally. If Prudentius had indeed tried to reconcile Virgilian epic with Christian doctrine, Lewis’s criticism of his Psychomachia would have been justified, but in my view he was consciously playing off the conventions and expectations of his allegorical fiction against less martially based Christian morals—in this case, the morals that deceit is ultimately self-deceiving and that pride comes before the fall.
Perhaps the best-known example of an allegorical poet who set little store by the coherence of his fictional story is William Langland, and what I have said about the kind of allegory that C. S. Lewis liked and disliked readily explains what he found to dislike about Langland: “he is confused and monotonous, and hardly makes his poetry into a poem.”30 What Lewis found lacking in Langland is narrative coherence, though, to be fair to Lewis (and Langland), he also recognized that Langland was capable of achieving poetic heights that were beyond even Chaucer’s reach.
Of course, whether we agree with his verdict on Langland or not may in the end come down to individual taste—and to whether or not we share Lewis’s taste for allegories that not only tell good stories but also manage to keep the allegorical fiction moving in tandem with the signification of non-allegorical propositions, without sacrificing one to the other. My main criticism of The Allegory of Love is that Lewis had little positive to say about allegories that do not attempt to work in this way. The allegories I have mentioned— The Assembly of Ladies, Chaucer’s Complaint unto Pity, Prudentius’
Psychomachia, and, last but not le
ast, Langland’s Piers Plowman— all use moments of incoherence in the allegory (a non-sequitur in the allegorical story, or an obvious mismatch between vehicle and tenor) as ways of generating meaning and insight.
28. Psychomachia, 313 (lines 206–7 in the Latin).
29. Ibid., 295.
30. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, 161.
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Of course, this criticism is not intended to put readers off The Allegory of Love. On the contrary, I hope it will serve as an antidote to a response (or rather the lack of responsiveness) to his literary criticism that is now much more common among medievalists, many of whom regard it as very out-of-date. It is certainly true that there are more recent books on medieval love allegory, but we are not necessarily going to learn more from books just because they were written by people who happen to be closer to us in time. I began my discussion of The Allegory of Love with Lewis’s view that the “itch for ‘revival,’ that refusal to leave any corpse ungalvanized . . . is one of the distressing accidents of modern scholarship.” I will finish it by saying that another “distressing accident of modern scholarship” is the notion that there is special merit in being “up-to-date.” Lewis would, I am sure, have agreed with me on this point. In his Screwtape Letters, first published in 1942, the senior devil Screwtape gloats to a junior disciple over having finally produced an intellectual climate where the wisdom of older generations is ignored by modern ones:
Only the learned read old books and we have now so dealt with
the learned that they are of all men the least likely to acquire
wisdom by being so. We have done this by inculcating the His-
torical Point of View. The Historical Point of View, put briefly,
means that when a learned man is presented with any statement
by an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether
it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and