Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature
Page 21
It will readily be seen that Genius A counts for much more than Genius B in medieval literature. In Alanus, De Planctu Naturae, the Genius who appears as the priest of Venus to curse unnatural loves is clearly Genius A, who, as the patron of generation and therefore of heterosexuality, has an obvious concern in the matter. He also retains from Bernardus the officium pictoris et figurantis and carries a scroll in his left hand and a pen in his right1 (De Planct. Nat. Pros. ix, p. 517 in Wright’s Anglo-Latin Satirists). From him descend the Genius of the Roman de la Rose and the Genius of the Confessio Amantis—beings whose association with Venus and Nature is perfectly intelligible when once we have learned of the existence of Genius A, though it might perplex a modern reader familiar only with Genius B. It is now time to turn to Spenser, but before doing so we must remind ourselves that Genius B is itself divided into two classes, the good and evil genius: each man apparently having both the one and the other. Natalis Comes (whom Spenser had almost certainly read) in his Mythologiae (IV, iii) writes: crediderunt singulos homines statim atque nati fuissent daemones duos habere, alterum malum, alterum bonum. The two angels of Faustus provide a familiar example. The full scheme, therefore, is:
Genius A God of Generation.
Genius B Second self, individual δαίμων
{I Good. II Bad.
Genius, as I have said, occurs twice in Spenser: in II, xii as the porter of Acrasia, and in III, vi, 32 as the porter of Adonis. The second passage presents no difficulties. It is as clear as can be desired that we have there a portrait of Genius A:
A thousand thousand naked babes attend
About him day and night, which doe require,
That he with fleshly weedes would them attire—
which is just what the god of generation ought to do. The whole passage, as Warton* (ad loc.) points out, is closely connected with the first-century Cebetis Tabula—a popular schoolbook in Spenser’s time, mentioned by Milton as an ‘easy and delightful book of education’.2 In it we find a περίβολος, or enclosure, representing Life, and a crowd of the unborn besieging its gate, which is guarded by a γέρων called Δαίμων. His position at the gate of birth and the scroll (χάρτης) which he holds in his left hand leave us in no doubt that he is Genius A.3 The Genius of the garden of Adonis is the god of generation.
It is at the entry to the Bower of Bliss that the trouble begins. Here we read:
They in that place him Genius did call:
Not that celestiall powre, to whom the care
Of life, and generation of all
That lives, pertaines in charge particulare,
Who wondrous things concerning our welfare,
And straunge phantomes doth let us oft foresee,
And oft of secret ills bids us beware:
That is our Selfe, whom though we do not see,
Yet each doth in him selfe it well perceive to bee.
Therefore a God him sage Antiquity
Did wisely make, and good Agdistes call:
But this same was to that quite contrary,
The foe of life, that good envyes to all,
That secretly doth us procure to fall,
Through guilefull semblaunts, which he makes us see. . . .
What we expect is a contrast between Genius A and Genius B II: for it must be the god of generation who keeps the gate to the garden of Adonis and it must be a man’s evil Genius who ushers him into the garden of Acrasia. What we seem to get is an identification of A and B I, and a contrast between this composite figure and B II. Let us begin with the second stanza. It is certain that the good Agdistes is the good individual Genius (B I), for him must refer to the subject of the last lines of the preceding stanza; it is tolerably certain that Spenser has got the name Agdistes from Natalis Comes (loc. cit.) and from nowhere else—since a further acquaintance with this deity is hardly compatible with the use of the word ‘good’. It is certain again, that the ‘foe of life’ contrasted with Agdistes, is the individual evil Genius: and his activity in ‘procuring us to fall’ by ‘guilefull semblaunts’ is in full accordance with the doctrine of spectra given by Natalis Comes (see Warton’s note). The whole of the second stanza, in fact, is occupied with the contrast between Genius B I (= Agdistes) and Genius B II. What of the first? It looks, as I have said, like an account of Genius A (the powre in charge of life and generation) conflated with Genius B I (our Selfe). This is certainly, I think, how Warton understands the passage, for he begins his quotation from Natalis Comes with the words Dictus est autem Genius, ut placuit Latinis a gignendo, vel quia nobiscum gignatur, vel quia illi procreandorum cura divinitus commissa putaretur. It would seem the obvious conclusion that Spenser in fact did not draw, as Natalis Comes does not draw, the medieval distinction between Genius A and Genius B. Against this conclusion the following considerations, however, may be opposed.
(1) Neither here nor on III, vi, 31 does Warton show himself aware of the medieval double use: he would therefore easily fail to notice it even if it were present.
(2) The proposed interpretation compels us to accept a very odd structure of sentence: the parenthesis beginning at Not that celestiall powre is continued for ten lines, and is quite disproportionate to the original statement in one line.
(3) Why is the individual δαίμων (Genius B I) called a celestiall power? The epithet is not entirely inappropriate to such individual genii, but it is more appropriate to the august ‘Oyarses’ in the sphere of the fixed stars.
(4) How can Genius B possibly be described as providing for the generation of ‘all that lives’? There must be as many genii BB as there are men (twice as many if we include the evil genii) and each of them, at most, can provide only for the generation of his own charge or his own charge’s offspring. I will grant the poetic use of singular for plural: but this will not do. Even if such a collective Genius B (i.e. the sum of all genii BB) can be said to provide for the generation of all human beings, he cannot do so for all that lives. In other words, what is said of Genius in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th lines of the stanza is quite incompatible with what is said of him in the last two lines. The former plainly refer to Genius A, the latter as plainly to Genius B.
I therefore propose a device by which we can make Spenser consistent at once with himself and with the tradition, at the cost of a sentence no more awkward than the Wartonian interpretation attributes to him. It consists in bracketing lines 2, 3, and 4 of this stanza. These lines would then merely serve to warn the reader that we are not talking of Genius A and the whole of the rest of the stanza would refer to Genius B. The difference between my interpretation and Warton’s (or what I suppose to have been Warton’s) can be best brought out by a paraphrase.
Warton’s: They called him Genius (not the good Genius who is our second self and whom the ancients called Agdistes, but on the contrary) the bad and beguiling Genius.
Mine: They called him Genius (not of course Genius A) who is our second self and whom the ancients called Agdistes. But this was the bad and beguiling Genius.
It is needless, I trust, to add that I put forward this suggestion with no claim to certainty. I am certain (by the fourth argument above) that the text as ordinarily punctuated and understood is self-contradictory, and I am certain that the Middle Ages distinguished Genius A from B (or even forgot about B in their concentration on A) as I have described. The application of this distinction to Spenser, and still more the particular mode in which I have applied it, are naturally much more speculative.
CHAPTER 14
A NOTE ON COMUS
The history of Comus may be briefly recapitulated as follows. It was written out by Milton—possibly without a previous rough copy—in the book known to us as the Trinity MS,* some time before Michaelmas night 1634. This version may be conveniently called Trinity α. From Trinity a copy was made, probably by Henry Lawes, still before Michaelmas night 1634. The copying was not very accurately carried out, as the new MS contains fifteen blunders. Some of these show misunderst
anding of the text; thus, in 12 (Yet som there be that by due steps aspire), where Lawes reads with due steps, it seems probable that he took steps to mean ‘paces’ or ‘strides’, where Milton was thinking of degrees in a stair or rungs in a ladder (cf. P.L. VIII, 591). Other errors affect the metre, as, for example, the unfortunate enthroned (for enthron’d) in 11, which has penetrated into too many modern editions. From both these considerations it would appear that the copy—which we call the Bridgewater MS—was made without any careful supervision by the poet. Besides its errors, Bridgewater presents many variations which are intentional: these have long since been explained, and no doubt rightly, as a ‘producer’s’ surgery—the familiar process by which a great poem is whittled into an ‘acting version’. The production took place on Michaelmas night 1634: and the first edition appeared in 1637. Before 1637, however, Milton went over his old MS (Trinity α) and introduced several new readings, thus producing Trinity β. The intermediate position of Bridgewater between Trinity α and Trinity β can easily be shown by the many passages in which Bridgewater preserves a reading, still visible in Trinity, but now erased or marginally corrected. Thus, in 349 Trinity gives lone dungeon with lone altered in favour of sad, which in its turn gives way to close; Bridgewater reads lone. In 384 Trinity originally read:
walks in black vapours, though the noontyde brand
blaze in the summer solstice.
This is then erased, and in the left-hand margin Milton substitutes
benighted walks under ye midday sun
himselfe is his owne dungeon.
Bridgewater preserves the older reading. There are fifteen examples of the same state of affairs; so that in 242, where the words preceding to all heav’ns harmonies are (to me) illegibly erased,1 we can confidently restore them from Bridgewater’s and hold a counterpointe. The edition of 1637, besides several errors (ll. 20, 73, 131, 417, 443), introduces important novelties. But though Milton did not trouble to copy these novelties into his old, and now very ‘un-fair’, Trinity MS, he kept this MS by him, and made certain further alterations in it after he had sent to the press the new version made for the edition of 1637. Thus, in 214, the old Trinity reading, thou flittering angel, is marginally altered to read hovering; but this alteration was made after the edition of 1637, which preserves flittering. The same phenomenon occurs in 956, where the change from are to grow appears marginally in Trinity, but not in 1637. Thus, in addition to Trinity α and β, we have a third stratum in the MS—Trinity γ, represented by two corrections only. In 1645 Comus was again printed in the Poems both English and Latin. The period of serious alterations is now over, but some novelties appear. In 1673 the mask appeared, practically unchanged, in the Poems upon Several Occasions.
In Comus, therefore, we can watch the growth of a poem through the stages:
Trinity α
Trinity β
1637
Trinity γ
1645.
I neglect Bridgewater, whose omissions and rearrangements tell us more of the poet’s patience than of his poethood. Confining myself to the remainder, I propose to draw attention to a certain general characteristic of the revision. It will be best to proceed inductively.
242. Trin. α. Bridg. and hold a counterpointe.
Trin. β. 1637. 1645. 1673. and give resounding grace.
Whether the change here is, or is not, from worse to better, it is certainly from the more striking and remarkable to the more ordinary. The rejected reading is more unexpected: it has that species of ‘originality’, that power of drawing attention to itself, which would attract a ‘metaphysical’, or a modern, poet. For the moment I will confine myself to reminding the reader that this is almost the one rejected reading in Trinity which Milton took the trouble to scratch out illegibly—one might almost say vindictively.
359 et seq. Trin. Bridg.
Peace brother peace
I doe not thinke my sister so to seeke etc.
1637. 1645. 1673.
Peace Brother, be not over-exquisite
To cast the fashion of uncertain evils;
For grant they be so, while they rest unknown,
What need a man forestall his date of grief,
And run to meet what he would most avoid?
Or if they be but false alarms of Fear,
How bitter is such self-delusion?
I do not think my sister so to seek, etc.
Here there can be no question that the alteration is undramatic. The passage on the self-sufficiency of virtue which follows is, in any case, a long and improbable suspension of action; but in Trinity and Bridgewater at least we hasten to it, and, if the main action is delayed, the temperamental conflict between the brothers is given some liveliness by the impatient repetition ‘peace brother peace’. In 1637 even this semblance of drama has disappeared; the Elder Brother lectures rather than argues. Milton is altering his poem so as to make it even less dramatic and more gnomic than it was before.
384. Trin. α. Bridg.
walks in black vapours, though the noontyde brand
blaze in the summer solstice
Trin. β. 1637. 1645. 1673.
Benighted walks under the mid-day Sun;
Himself is his own dungeon.
Both readings appear to me excellent, but with different kinds of excellence. Neither, of course, is a close copy of the speech of real men; but the earlier, with its natural syntax, and its more highly-coloured pictorial quality—which could be made to seem as if it grew while the brother spoke—might well be thrown off by a good actor with an appearance of realism. The second reading is, from the actor’s point of view, vastly inferior. The Latin syntax of ‘benighted walks’ removes it at once to a different plane. ‘Himself is his own dungeon’ is imaginative, but with the moral imagination; there is no picture in it to compare with the blaze of the solstice. Again, the contrast, which the earlier reading makes audible in a ‘though’-clause, is purely intellectual in the later. Milton is moving further from naturalism; exchanging a sweeter for a drier flavour; becoming (in one of the senses of that word) more classical.
409 et seq. Trin. α. Bridg.
secure wthout all doubt or question, no
I could be willing though now i’th darke to trie
a tough encounter wth the shaggiest ruffian
that lurks by hedge or lane of this dead circuit
to have her by my side, though I were sure
she might be free from perill where she is
but where an equall poise of hope & fear, etc.
1637. 1645. 1673.
Secure without all doubt, or controversie:
Yet where an equal poise of hope and fear, etc.
In this passage Trinity α itself is already the correction of a pre-α stage which read Beshrew me but I would instead of I could be willing, and passado instead of encounter. The two most racy, and least Miltonic, expressions, had therefore gone the way of counterpointe in 242, before Lawes made his copy: something of energy and facile ‘point’ had already been sacrificed to the unity of Milton’s style. What remained, however, was still good theatre; the boyish and noble actor, waving his little sword, with his colloquial i’th darke and his picturesque shaggy ruffians and dead circuits, all to be faced in defence of his sister, would to this day be snatched at by any producer anxious to ‘brighten up’ the dialogue at this point. But Milton, as is becoming apparent, did not desire, though he could provide, good theatre. He drops the whole passage. One concession to drama remained: an actor could still make something lively out of without all doubt or question—No! And Milton could have kept this consistently with the omission of the shaggy ruffians. But he did not; once again the final version, secure without all doubt, or controversy, gives the Elder Brother the purely didactic tone. Instead of the dramatic break we have the purely metrical break of a feminine ending.
605. Trin. Bridg. 1637.
monstrous buggs.
1645. 1673.
monstrous forms.