by Michael Ward
what phase in the writer’s development, or in the general history
of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (especially by the learned
man’s own colleagues), and what the general course of criticism
on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the “present
state of the question.” To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge—to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour—this would be
rejected as unutterably simple-minded.31
The “Historical Point of View” is more entrenched than ever in the academic study of English literature, and Screwtape can be proud of what has been achieved since Lewis wrote these words. His own relationship to literature, on the other hand, was always invigorated by the question, “Is any of it true?” In The Four Loves he offered an oblique self-criticism of The Allegory of Love: he had been wrong, he says, to think of courtly love (or Courtly 31. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 150–51.
138
part four—cambridge conference
Love with capitals, as it features in The Allegory of Love) as an artificial code, with curious conventions (the lover is sleepless, imagines his lady is far superior, and so on); for when very late in life he himself fell in love he found himself acting out this same code like a latter-day Troilus.32 The lovesickness described in the “old books” was true, after all. Making medieval literature a meaningful part of your life means asking yourself the question, “Is any of it true?” and as The Four Loves shows, C. S. Lewis continued to do that even when he was no longer writing about “old books.” Now that he has himself become an “ancient writer” and his views no longer pertain to “the present state of the question,” he deserves to be read by people who are willing to ask the same question of his literary criticism.
32. Lewis, The Four Loves, 127.
12
C. S. Lewis as Medievalist
Helen Cooper 1
C. S. Lewis’s principal job, and his official employment, was as an academic, and in particular as a medievalist. Most of the important things about him as a medievalist were, moreover, said by Lewis himself in his inaugural lecture as the first Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge, entitled De Descriptione Temporum, “on periodisation.”2 He delivered that lecture on 29 November 1954, almost exactly sixty years ago.
It is tempting just to quote it in full, as it says everything about why the Middle Ages were so important to Lewis, and indeed why that era should be so important to us too. Not the least aspect of its importance was that, for Lewis, cultural history did not divide into the four periods that we now assume in the West, those of the classical, the medieval, the Renaissance or early modern, and the modern (the postmodern had not yet been invented); but into three. Those were the classical, which laid the ground for the next period; that next period, which embraced everything from the fall of Rome to the late eighteenth century; and finally, the modern, which Lewis defined as running from the early nineteenth century to his own present, with all its massive and distinctive cultural changes. He summed up these three ages as 1. Dr. Helen Cooper is Emeritus Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge, having held that Chair from 2004–14. She is the author of many books, including Shakespeare and the Medieval World (2010) and The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2004).
2. Published by Cambridge University Press in 1955. Now available in Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge University Press), initially published in 1969 and reissued, along with several other C.U.P. Lewis titles, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his death in 2013.
139
140
part four—cambridge conference
pre-Christian, Christian, and post-Christian, with the biggest break coming between the last two.
That three-period division of cultural history made him the perfect candidate for Cambridge’s Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English when it was established earlier that year. It was only the second established professorship in English in the university, and it was indeed established with him in mind—for hardly anyone else, certainly no one of his stature, worked with equal assurance or learning across what were generally taken, and indeed are still widely taken, to be distinct periods. For Lewis, however, the medieval and the Renaissance were not separate periods, but a single one; and so to speak of Lewis as a medievalist is inseparable from speaking about him as an early modernist, though I suspect he would have reacted strongly against the term.
“Early modern” insists on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as precursors of the modern world. Lewis insisted, on the basis of his deep knowledge, that those centuries were an extension of the thought world of the Middle Ages. He demonstrated that in publications alike on medieval and later literature, on Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and perhaps most of all in what many people, myself included, think of as the best of his books, The Discarded Image (1964), which is about how people of that single era imagined their world and their cosmos—a vast subject brilliantly distilled.
It is still, fifty years on, the best introduction to the subject there is.
The roots of Lewis’s interests were, however, more recognizably what we would call medieval, in Norse myths. From a very young age, these were epitomised for him in lines from Longfellow’s translation of Esaias Tegnér’s Drapa:
I heard a voice that cried
“Balder the beautiful
Is dead, is dead!”
And through the misty air
Passed like the mournful cry
Of sunward-sailing cranes.3
The passage did not have an immediate effect, but it came back to him with the force of an epiphany when he was thirteen, and reading a coloured supplement of the periodical The Bookman for December 1911, which also contained Arthur Rackham’s illustrations to a translation of Richard Wag-ner’s Siegfried and The Twilight of the Gods. The lines gave him a sudden idea 3. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 17.
cooper—c. s. lewis as medievalist
141
of “Northernness”: gave him, in his own words, a sense of “a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity. . . . I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country.”4 They gave him, in fact, a very different kind of experience from how most schoolboys of his generation first encountered the medieval. That was much more likely to be grounded in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, the late fifteenth-century assemblage of stories of King Arthur and his knights that has shaped almost all English Arthuriana down to the present day. The great explorer, adventurer, and political fixer Lawrence of Arabia, who was born ten years before Lewis, carried a copy of Malory around the Middle East with him, by bicycle or by camel.
Lewis first encountered the legends of Arthur when he was about
eight, not however in Malory, but in Mark Twain’s spoof A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court. He did not find Malory until he was sixteen, but then it made a deep impression on him, and for a while it became his
“favourite reading.”5 Malory’s influence is evident in his work for some years. He wrote, for instance, a poem, now lost, on Merlin and the enchant-ress Nimue, and another, which survives, on “Lancelot.”6 These do however owe much more to English nineteenth-century poetry, not least Tennyson’s, than to Malory. Lewis was trying to write fin-de-siècle despondent mood music in the age of Eliot’s modernist Waste Land—despondency such as is evident in the line “A dim disquiet of defeated men.” He also wrote a prose romance, “The Quest of Bleheris,” which features an antihero on a futile quest for a “deathless forever.” It was an attempt to write a medieval romance from a modern perspective, but he left it unfinished and unpublished, and no one has ever
suggested he should have done otherwise. He was, however, very excited by Eugène Vinaver’s edition of the only surviving manuscript of the Morte Darthur after its discovery in 1934, and that led to a game he played with his friend Owen Barfield in which they acted as solicitors in an adultery law case brought by King Mark against Sir Tristram. He put Arthurian material to a different kind of use in his science fantasy novel That Hideous Strength, in which he puts forward the idea that the world could be redeemed through Merlin and the Fisher King if only medieval Christian values could be recovered. And he deploys Malory in a different way again in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in the closing section on the hunting of the (very Arthurian) White Stag, where he shifts his style from his own modern English to something modelled directly on Malory, 4. Ibid., 18; and see also Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide, 5–7.
5. Tolhurst, “Beyond the Wardrobe: C. S. Lewis as Closet Arthurian.”
6. Lewis, Narrative Poems, 91–101.
142
part four—cambridge conference
with a series of short sentences typically introduced by “and” or “so,” and a thoroughly fifteenth-century vocabulary:
And they had not hunted long before they had a sight of him.
And he led them a great pace over rough and smooth and
through thick and thin. . . . And they saw the stag enter into a
thicket where their horses could not follow. . . . So they alighted and tied their horses to trees and went on into the thick wood
on foot. And as soon as they had entered it Queen Susan said,
“Fair friends, here is a great marvel, for I seem to see a tree
of iron.”
“Madam,” said King Edmund, “if you look well upon it you
shall see it is a pillar of iron with a lantern set on the top thereof.
. . . I know not how it is, but this lamp on the post worketh upon me strangely. It runs in my mind that I have seen the like before; as it were in a dream, or in the dream of a dream.”
“Sir,” answered they all, “it is even so with us also.”
“And more,” said Queen Lucy, “for it will not go out of my
mind that if we pass this post and lantern either we shall find
strange adventures or else some great change of our fortunes.”
. . .
“Wherefore by my counsel [said Queen Susan] we shall
lightly return to our horses and follow this White Stag no
further.”
“Madam,” said King Peter, “therein I pray thee to have
me excused. For never since we four were Kings and Queens
in Narnia have we set our hands to any high matter, as battles,
quests, feats of arms, acts of justice, and the like, and then given over; but always what we have taken in hand, the same we have
achieved.” . . .
“If ye will all have it so, let us go on and take the adventure
that shall fall to us.”7
The last phrase in particular is pure Malory.
His imagination was, however, rapidly enlarged by wider reading, classical as well as medieval. The early notes he made for the plot of what in due course became The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” include a sick king who needs the blood of a boy in order to be cured, a motif adapted from the Arthurian Grail Quest;8 but when he actually came to write the book, that plot element was superseded by his later reading, in particular of the Odyssey of Homer and the medieval Voyage of St. Brendan, a wonderful account 7. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, 167–69.
8. Hooper, Companion, 5.
cooper—c. s. lewis as medievalist
143
of an early Irish saint’s voyage to the “land of promise,” calling (like Odys-seus) at strange islands along the way.
Very clearly, the appeal of these stories for Lewis was overwhelmingly imaginative, not intellectual; and we need to start from that imaginative appeal, as he did, if we are to understand him as a medievalist, for reasons summed up best at the end of his Experiment in Criticism, on why and how we should read:
We seek an enlargement of our being. . . . We want to see with
other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with
other hearts, as well as with our own.9
The task of the good critic, as he saw it, was to enable that seeing and imagining and feeling; and that is what all his critical work aims at doing, whether it was intended for fellow scholars or students. That was why he took lecturing so seriously: many of his published scholarly books are in fact collections of his lectures— The Discarded Image, Spenser’s Images of Life, A Preface to Paradise Lost; even his sixteenth-century volume is subtitled as
“the completion” of a lecture series, as we shall see. He was by all accounts a remarkable lecturer.
That emphasis, though, perhaps explains another feature of his published works. The most cursory look at them, whether they were originally written as lectures or not, shows up their scarcity of footnotes. His learning is evident on every page, but it is designed to enlighten at first hearing, not to encourage citation-hunting. He is very free with allusions to or quotations from primary sources, but he rarely supplies references or cites other critics. He writes with a minimal use of terms of technical jargon (much of our own theoretical vocabulary had not indeed been invented then); his scholarship arises simply from the fact that he had read huge amounts of primary material, and had it all in the front of his mind. His writings therefore give the impression, which is not altogether wrong, of being directly spun off from his immersion in literature. Yet his earliest quasi-academic paper on the Middle Ages was on the subject of “feudalism as a product of social forces”10—not what we might have expected, but a reminder of the kind of wider knowledge he had beyond literature alone.
Lewis went on to build not just on Malory and the Arthurian legends, but on the classics, both Greek and Latin, and on classical philosophy. He had studied Classics (“Greats”) for his undergraduate degree at University College Oxford, followed up by a second degree in English; and he then 9. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, 137.
10. Bennett, The Humane Medievalist, reprinted in Critical Thought Series 1: Critical Essays on C. S. Lewis, ed. Watson, 56.
144
part four—cambridge conference
spent a year teaching philosophy there before being elected to a Fellowship at Magdalen. He was thus able to bring to bear on his critical writings not just Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton, but the philosophers and theologians of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Tertullian and Hugh of St. Victor, Humphrey Gilbert and Vives and Vida and Scaliger, and dozens of others of increasing unfamiliarity. He enlarged his imagination through theirs, in ways that made him uniquely qualified to talk about them, and which he saw as essential to understanding them. When the young A. S.
Byatt, now a much respected novelist, went up to him after a lecture to express her interest in continuing the kind of work he had been doing in his Allegory of Love, he told her, “You will of course have to learn Greek.”11
That unique range of knowledge, that belief in the need for reading to be a process of learning to share a writer’s imagination, was what he emphasised in his inaugural lecture, in a plea for the reinstatement of what he called “Old Western culture”: the almost-lost knowledge of, and sensitivity to, those pre-Christian and Christian eras. A key part of the argument of that lecture was that religion of any kind was what really made the difference between cultures and periods. To quote him again:
Christians and Pagans had far more in common with each other
than either has with a post-Christian. The gap between those
who worship different gods is not so wide as that between those
who worship and those who do not. The Pagan and Christian
ages alike are ages of . . . the externalized and enacted idea; the sacrifice, the games, the triumph, the ritua
l drama, the Mass, the tournament, the masque, the pageant, the epithalamium, and
with them the ritual and symbolic costumes . . . crown of wild
olive, royal crown, coronet, judge’s robes, knight’s spurs, herald’s tabard, coat-armour, priestly vestment, religious habit—for every rank, trade, or occasion its visible sign.12
To understand all that, he needed to respond to those cultures—that culture—with his whole imagination, to live inside it as “his own country,”
in ways that scholarship alone could not reach; and he believed that he had achieved that. He used the analogy of a dinosaur, which just by virtue of living in its own skin could reveal to us things about dinosaurs that palae-ontologists never could; or of a native Athenian, who if he came back to life could tell us things about his culture that no modern scholars could grasp, even if he did so unwittingly, since he knew it from the inside. He concludes his lecture:
11. Quoted by Leith, “C. S. Lewis’s Literary Legacy,” The Guardian.
12. Lewis, De Descriptione, 7–8.
cooper—c. s. lewis as medievalist
145
I stand before you somewhat as that Athenian might stand. I
read as a native texts that you must read as foreigners. . . . Who can be proud of speaking fluently his mother tongue or knowing
his way about his father’s house? It is my settled conviction that in order to read Old Western literature aright you must suspend
most of the responses and unlearn most of the habits you have
acquired in reading modern literature. And because this is the
judgement of a native . . . , where I fail as a critic, I may yet be useful as a specimen. I would even dare to go further. Speaking
not only for myself but for all other Old Western men whom
you may meet, I would say, use your specimens while you can.
There are not going to be many more dinosaurs.13
In an article published three months later, Graham Hough, another
lecturer in English at Cambridge, described the reaction to that inaugural lecture. Some in the audience, he records, had loved it; but the whole thing had been delivered with Lewis’s customary forcefulness, and Lewis was, as Hough noted, “one of the dwindling race of dons . . . whose every utterance seems to arouse a powerful reaction, either of approval or indignation.”14