Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature

by C. S. Lewis

  Spenser wrote primarily as a (Protestant) Christian and secondarily as a Platonist. Both systems are united with one another and cut off from some—not all—modern thought by their conviction that Nature, the totality of phenomena in space and time, is not the only thing that exists: is, indeed, the least important thing. Christians and Platonists both believe in an ‘other’ world. They differ, at least in emphasis, when they describe the relations between that other world and Nature. For a Platonist the contrast is usually that between an original and a copy, between the real and the merely apparent, between the clear and the confused: for a Christian, between the eternal and the temporary, or the perfect and the partially spoiled. The essential attitude of Platonism is aspiration or longing: the human soul, imprisoned in the shadowy, unreal world of Nature, stretches out its hands and struggles towards the beauty and reality of that which lies (as Plato says) ‘on the other side of existence’. Shelley’s phrase ‘the desire of the moth for the star’ sums it up. In Christianity, however, the human soul is not the seeker but the sought: it is God who seeks, who descends from the other world to find and heal Man; the parable about the Good Shepherd looking for and finding the lost sheep sums it up. Whether in the long run there is any flat contradiction between the two pictures need not be discussed here. It is certainly possible to combine and interchange them for a considerable time without finding a contradiction, and this is what Spenser does. The Christian picture dominates the first two Books: divine grace, in the person of Una, is constantly helping St George out of his difficulties, and an angel is sent down to preserve Guyon. On the other hand the central story of the whole poem was to have been Platonic: I say ‘was to have been’ because Spenser did not live to finish it. In the fragment that we have, Prince Arthur is always seeking for ‘Gloriana’. He knows almost nothing about her. When the beautiful Florimell flashes past him in the forest, he at once pursues her: she might be Gloriana (III, iv, 54). He has seen the real Gloriana only in a dream (I, ix, 13 ff.). This is a picture of the soul, as in Platonism, endlessly seeking that perfect beauty of which it has some dim premonition but which cannot be found—only shadows and blurred images of it—in the realm of Nature. This enables us to see what Spenser means when he says that Gloriana is ‘Glory’. In his many-levelled poetry ‘Glory’ is the divine glory or splendour which the Christian soul will not only see but share in Heaven; it is the glory of that real and perfect world which the Platonist is seeking; it is also, in so far as Arthur is a knight-errant in a romance of chivalry, ‘Glory’ in the sense of fame or honour. To add that it is also in some sense and at some moments Queen Elizabeth seems to us a profane and silly anti-climax. But we are not to suppose that Elizabeth appeared to Spenser as she does to us or even as she did to contemporaries who really knew her; and we must understand that her royal office had an importance for him which it could have for no modern. For monarchy, like everything else in this world, had its chief value in being the shadow or reflexion of something in that other and more real world. Every earthly court was an imitation, however imperfect, of the Divine Court. Its splendour and order had a poetic, religious, and metaphysical appeal which had nothing to do with snobbery—a ritual appeal. Spenser would have understood the ancient Chinese idea that the function of the Emperor was to reproduce on earth the ‘Order of Heaven’. His view was consistent, as we have seen, with the clearest insight into the corruptions of actual court life.

  CHAPTER 10

  ON READING THE FAERIE QUEENE

  Beyond all doubt it is best to have made one’s first acquaintance with Spenser in a very large—and, preferably, illustrated—edition of The Faerie Queene, on a wet day, between the ages of twelve and sixteen; and if, even at that age, certain of the names aroused unidentified memories of some still earlier, some almost prehistoric, commerce with a selection of ‘Stories from Spenser’, heard before we could read, so much the better. But those who have had this good fortune are not likely to be reading the following extracts. They will never have lost touch with the poet. His great book will have accompanied them year by year and grown up with them as books do: to the youthful appreciation of mere wonder-tale they will have added a critically sensuous enjoyment of the melodious stanza, to both these a historical understanding of its significance in English poetry as a whole, and an ever-increasing perception of its wisdom. To them I need not speak; the problem is rather how to find substitutes for their slowly ripened habit of mind which may enable a mature reader to enter the Spenserian world for the first time: to do for him, in a few minutes, what they have done for themselves in many years.

  It must be admitted that this is impossible, but on the following lines an effort may be made. Our imaginary child began with The Faerie Queene, and the mature reader must do the same. Passages from Spenser’s other works appear, quite rightly, in the following pages, and it would certainly be a pity not to know the Epithalamion: but it must never be forgotten that he stands or falls by his great poetic romance, and if you do not like it and yet believe that you like Spenser you are probably deceiving yourself. Secondly, there is that large edition and that wet day. It is not, perhaps, absolutely necessary to have a large edition in fact; but it is imperative that you should think of The Faerie Queene as a book suitable for reading in a heavy volume, at a table—a book to which limp leather is insulting—a massy, antique story with a blackletter flavour about it—a book for devout, prolonged, and leisurely perusal. The illustrations (real or imagined) raise a problem. There are fantastic palaces and voluptuous nudes in Spenser which seem to ask for Tintoretto or Correggio or Claude: but there are also, and more abundantly, wicket-gates and ugly fiends and stiffly bearded elders which we would rather see in woodcuts—such violent, unforgettable little cuts as Wordsworth mentions in The Excursion. This double need for two quite different kinds of picture is characteristic. There is a renaissance element in The Faerie Queene—a gorgeous, luxurious, Italianate, and florid element: but this is not the basis of it. All this new growth sprouts out of an old, gnarled wood, and, as in very early spring, mists it over in places without concealing it. The cloth of gold is an occasional decoration: most of the coat is homespun. And it is best to begin with a taste for homespun, accepting the cloth of gold when it comes but by no means depending on it for your pleasure, or you will be disappointed—to keep your Faerie Queene on the same shelf with Bunyan and Malory and The Seven Champions and even with Jack the Giant-Killer, rather than with Hero and Leander or Venus and Adonis. For this is the paradox of Spenser’s poem; it is not really medieval—no medieval romance is very like it—yet everyone who has really enjoyed it, from the Wartons down, has enjoyed it as the very consummation of the Middle Ages, the quintessence of ‘the blackletter flavour’.

  It came about in this way. Spenser’s friends wanted him to be in the Movement, to be an extreme Puritan and a servile classicist, which were the two fashionable things at Cambridge in his day. Under their tutelage he produced the pretentious, and (to tell the truth) nearly worthless, Shepheards Calendar. But even in it he was straining at the tether, and his friend E.K. had to write pretty sharp cautionary notes on ‘Ladies of the Lake’ and ‘friendly fairies’, hinting that the poet had approached much too nearly to the medieval and the papistical—things as shocking to the fierce young intellectuals of that day as the bourgeois and the Victorian are to their descendants in our own. But Spenser, in his great work, went back to what he had always liked, and took all his renaissance accomplishments with him. What he had always liked was the Middle Ages as he imagined them to have been and as they survived in his time in the pageant, the morality play, and the metrical romance. They were real survivals, yet they smelled already a little archaic: they had already, for Spenser himself, a touch of the black-letter flavour. He thus became something between the last of the medieval poets and the first of the romantic medievalists; he was enabled to produce a tale more solemn, more redolent of the past, more venerable, than any real medieval romance—to deny, in his
own person, the breach between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and to hand on to succeeding generations a poetic symbol of the former whose charms have proved inexhaustible.

  It will be remembered that we attributed to our ideal reader—along with the wet day, the large volume, and the unjaded appetite of boyhood—a haunting memory that he has met all these knights and ladies, all these monsters and enchanters, somewhere before. What corresponds to this in the experience of the mature reader is the consciousness of Spenser’s moral allegory. Critics differ as regards the degree of attention which we must pay to it. It may not be necessary for all readers at all stages of the narrative to know exactly what the poet means, but it is emphatically necessary that they should surrender themselves to the sense of some dim significance in the background—that they should feel themselves to be moving in regions ‘where more is meant than meets the ear’. Even if this feeling were only an illusion, it would be an essential part of the whole poetic illusion intended. The present writer, however, thinks that it is nothing of the sort: that Spenser’s beautiful or alarming visions do truly embody, in forms as unsophisticated as those of our pantomime fairies and devils, though incomparably more potent, moral and psychological realities of the utmost simplicity and profundity. Certainly they are, at their best, as Mr Yeats says of the figures in Spenser’s House of Busirane, ‘so visionary, so full of ghostly midnight animation, that one is persuaded that they had some strange purpose and did truly appear in just that way’.

  CHAPTER 11

  NEOPLATONISM IN THE POETRY OF SPENSER1

  The thesis of this important book is that Spenser knew (and cared) much less about Neoplatonism and even about Plato than many of his critics believe, and that numerous interpretations of his work which their belief has led them to advance are chimerical.

  Dr Ellrodt brings rare qualifications to his task. A very wide and careful reading of Spenserian criticism and of texts relevant to Spenser in many languages is almost the least of them. His deep insight into, and sympathy with, Spenser’s cast of mind is less usual. Better still, he is refreshingly free from that deadly outlook (so incident to Quellenforschung) which treats a poet as a mere conduit pipe through which ‘motifs’ and ‘influences’ pass by some energy of their own. Spenser always remains for him a concrete human being writing a particular poem in which much will be begotten by the ‘necessities of subject matter’ (pp. 18–19). Best of all, he has that wide and balanced erudition which so many literary specialists lack today; he never sees evidence of Pantheism, Platonism, or Calvinism in gnomae which are really the commonplaces of all Western Christendom.

  In his Introduction he lays a firm foundation by distinguishing three things. (1) The diffused and Christianized Platonism which descends to the Middle Ages through St Augustine, Boethius, Macrobius, Chalcidius, Pseudo-Dionysius and many others. (2) The ‘seething mass’ (p. 9) of theosophy which men like Ficino, Pico, and Abrabanel got, or thought they were getting, out of Zoroaster, Orphism, Plato, Plotinus, Porphyry, and the Hermetica. (3) A more courtly, erotic, and aesthetic Platonism such as we find in the trattati d’amore: not always to be very sharply distinguished from Petrarchism, which in its turn shades off imperceptibly into dolce stil nuovo and thence into amour courtois.

  The author’s contention is that while the first of these is often influential, and the third sometimes, on Spenser, the influence of the second (to which alone he gives the title Neoplatonism) can hardly be detected with certainty anywhere outside some sonnets in the Amoretti and the Foure Hymnes.

  Dr Ellrodt then turns to chronology; and, believing all four hymns to be late, he necessarily believes that Spenser lied when he attributed the first two to ‘the greener times of his youth’. The argument here is close and weighty and cannot be dealt with in the space at my disposal. But this is the less to be regretted since, as the author clearly sees, the dating he accepts is not really necessary to his main position. He, like us, could conceive a process opposite to that which he thinks more probable. Spenser might have begun with a short-lived enthusiasm for the Florentines and written the first two hymns with the accuracy of a neophite. The lack of demonstrably Neoplatonic echoes in the rest of his work would then represent, not (as in Dr Ellrodt’s picture) a period when he was still ignorant of their system, but a period in which he learned to sit to it more and more loosely. The exigencies of romantic narrative and (perhaps still more) the experience of real love for a real woman might well have worn away all the sharp, and therefore recognizable, features, leaving only what he had fully digested and turned to his own use. For the digested is usually the unrecognizable. It is the contents of a man’s stomach rather than the analysis of his blood, that show you what he has been eating.

  But even in the Hymnes themselves Dr Ellrodt finds the strictly Neoplatonic elements to be less, and less important, than some suppose. He justly stresses the Ovidian, medieval, and Petrarchan strains in the first two. He points out that the myth of Poros and Penia (HL, 52–3) is dismissed in two lines with no hint of the metaphysical significance it had for Ficino (or even for Plato himself). Spenser’s Venus (HL, 62–73) can only loosely be equated with the celestial Venus of the Neoplatonists; their characteristic theosophy of graded emanations is never mentioned. The account of Love’s cosmic operations (HL, 78 seq.) needs no other source than Timaeus interprete Chalcidio, 28–9; or if it did, Dr Ellrodt might consider Boethius’s De Cons. II Metr. 8, or even Chaucer’s Troilus, III, 1744–64. More important still, the ‘eternitie’ (HL, 104) sought by Spenser’s lover has nothing to do with the fruition of intelligible Beauty, being (as in Epithalamion, 418 seq.) the eternal life in heaven of the children he hopes to beget. For the goal of the love which Spenser here celebrates is lawful, carnal fruition within marriage (HL, 280–93). By orthodox Neoplatonists fruition was either repudiated or coldly conceded. Even Abrabanel and Varchi, who approve it more warmly, feel obliged (as Donne felt) to defend it; Spenser, like a Shakespearian lover, takes it for granted. This, the unbridgeable gap between him and true Neoplatonism, makes any ascent of the Platonic ladder impossible in the Hymnes. In HB the contrast between the love of corporeal and that of archetypal beauty is replaced by a far homelier contrast between ‘disloiall lust’ and ‘loiall love’ (170, 176). The relation between the first and second pair of hymns, therefore, is not and cannot be one of progression; rather, as the author well says, the two pairs form a diptych. In the ‘heavenly’ hymns we do not go on through and beyond the love of woman; we make an absolutely fresh start from the ground floor with the beauties of nature. The earthly loves are not treated as the first step of an ascent now to be made. They are set aside as ‘vaine’ and ‘follies’ (HHL, 15, 12) in the light of something sheerly other than themselves. There is no attempt to say with Donne ‘the admiring her my mind did whett to seek thee, God’; we are much closer to si quis venit ad me et non odit . . . uxorem. The attitude is similar to that which Dr Ellrodt sees in the ultimate rejection of Cleopolis for the New Jerusalem and of the knight’s adventures for the hermit’s cell (pp. 208–9). For the rest, we have Christianity poetized by a mere colouring of Neoplatonism. Where Spenser comes nearest to the Florentines he never clearly crosses the frontier. He will attribute fertility to the self-love of the First Fair; but for him this does not produce a mere emanation, it begets co-equal Deity (HHL, 29 seq.).