Pleasure, Controversy, Scholarship
By JOHN WAIN
THIS author* is of course well known, as a controversialist —indeed my view is that the death of George Orwell left Mr. Lewis standing alone as our major controversial author—and while controversialists are common enough in the world of letters, they do not usually get asked to contribute to a ' safe ' academic series like the Oxford History of English Literature. So it is important to begin by saying that the controversial nature of the book does not make it any the less helpful as a literary history. The chief functions of a literary history are fulfilled : the names are strung together, the historical and biographical information is given, and the bibliography shows us how to sot about more detailed study. What is more, the book is a very pleasurable one to read. Mr. Lewis is today the only major critic of English literature who makes a principle of telling us which authors he thinks we shall enjoy: this may not sound much, but most dons have moved a long way from any recognition that literature is some- thing that people used to read for fun. Mr. Lewis, now as always, writes as if inviting us to a feast; not in the take-it-or- leave-it Saintsbury way, but always giving his reasons, and frequently warning us to stay away from this or that boring_ writer who is only included because the Oxford History can't leave him out. He quotes, for instance, a few good things from one William Warner, and adds, ' But no one should be deceived by these quotations into reading Warner.' This is sense; pleasure is a major motive in reading anything, and if the fact is tactfully suppressed by mast academics, that is because they don't enjoy their work and ought really to say so. This is all I have to say about the literary qualities of the book, but I assure you that the whole review could easily be given over to praising its wit, its pure and strong prose (what they used to call ' nervous '), and the general high spirits of the performance. Mr. Lewis is the virtuoso of literary history; he is like a violinist who makes up his own cadenzas. I must now turn to the elements in the book that make it controversial. These, as everyone will know, are in the parts which treat of the concept of the ' Renaissance.' Mr. Lewis Is, broadly speaking, ' against' the Renaissance, in the sense that he thinks its importance as a factor in causing things has been exaggerated. What he is attacking is the view, common for the last three centuries, that the Renaissance was a great ' liberation ' to which we Owe.Everything. Mr. Lewis claims that this estimate of the Renaissance achievement is simply their own valuation of themselves, which we have not yet got rid of, and that in fact the period witnessed (whether or not it ' caused ') as many deaths as it did births. Certainly the Renaissance, on its literary side, stands for the acceleration of classical studies, the rejection of the Middle Ages, the dis- crediting of scholastic philosophy; and Mr. Lewis, however he looks at these things, cannot see that they did any good to the English literary mind. If ' E.K.' was a typical humanist (and he was), then we can only be glad that Spenser paid no attention to him, because if he had there would have been no Faerie Queene. Most good writing in the sixteenth century came from men who either opposed, or ignored, the doctrines of humanism; whose resuscitation of Ciceronian Latin was an 'archaising movement' which, if it did anything, killed Latin as the vigorops Esperanto of the Western world by making it too high-falutin; whose hatred of the Middle Ages led them to brush aside a profusion of great legend; whose stylistic studies of classical literature put a blight on it for everyone else—a blight we have not removed to this day. The humanists— so runs the argument—can take no credit for the reflorescence of English literature in the Nineties of the century, save that of having failed to prevent it.
* The Oxford History of English Literature. Vol. III: The Sixteenth Century (excluding Drama). By C. S. Lewis. (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 30s.) rtall this view controversial, but I do not think there will be many apoplectic seizures over it; it is unusual in its whole- heartedness rather than in its general drift. After all, nobody, as far as I know, ever did say that the New Learning had an immediately good influence on English imaginative literature. J. R. Green in the 1870s said quite bluntly that The over- powering influence of the new models both of thought and style . . . was at first felt only as a fresh check to the dreams of any revival of English poetry or prose,' and seemed to think that the New Learning was a good thing only for politics, not for art. Still, he does go on to say that Insensibly . . . the influences of the Renascence fertilised the intellectual soil of England for the rich harvest that was to come,' and I take it this is what Mr. Lewis is denying. Some will think his position extreme, but after all it would be hard to make out a case that the humanists either talked much sense about literature. or bequeathed a useful tradition to their descendants. if the literary taste, in his own language, of the average classical scholar is anything to go by, it appears very likely that the whole tradition is off the rails. On the whole it is rather a relief not to have to pretend to admire the humanists as men of letters; one is then free to admire them the more, as Mr. Lewis does, for their real achievements, which were technical; they were like electricians wiring the house so that everyone could get a better light, and it is a pity that they were also consulted about the architecture. It was in exploits like Lorenzo Valla's exposure of the donation of Constantine' that the humanists really did something to deserve being talked about. And one has a sneaking affection for them, in spite of their frequent pedantries and absurdities, because humanism, like the modern. analytical criticism of literature, was a Revolt of the Hacks: the grammarians had always been the least important teachers in the mediaeval universities, and now they suddenly became the most important; a splendid upheaval. Their counterparts today are the teachers of English ': barely tolerated twenty years ago, and now suddenly carrying the whole central weight.
I have over-simplified, of course, and also left out 'Mr. Lewis's very interesting treatment of Puritanism and the Reformation. On the side of the book that can more precisely be described as literary criticism, I hardly know where to start: inopem me copia fecit. Perhaps the most balanced and just section is that on Elizabethan satire (a good corrective to Allen Tate's essay), the most original—suggesting a new attitude—that on Shakespeare's sonnets, and the most provoca- tive, that on Spenser. I select the last. Mr. Lewis, living through the period which has seen Spenser take his first real toss, has always been very keen on helping him up again; some- times this has involved him in being less than fair to the very real objections that can be made. In this book he does not launch any broadsides, probably not having space for them, but gives the Faerie Queene the best possible hand-up by explain- ing its essential structure and showing US what to look for. These pages sent me back to the poem, and certainly it is by no means bad, but I felt Mr. Lewis was going a little far in claiming that Spenser is bound to be popular with anyone who has any feeling for the English tradition. Among those who sharei, or still share, the culture for which he wrote, and which he helped to create, there is no dispute about his great- ness.' But now 'His world has ended and his fame may end with it.' So if you don't like him you must be one of the modern barbarians. But come now, there must always have been readers who found the dreadful silliness and perfunctori- ness of parts of the Faerie Queene a barrier to their enjoyment. Ben Jon ion's comment that Spenser writ no language' was very fair; a poet who deafens himself to the actual phrasing and cadence of the living tongue, as it is spoken round him. has put himself right back on scratch. Again, the modern Spenserian is in a paradoxical position; Spenser owed his first great vogue to the romantic' taste of the mid-eighteenth century, and then to the rather swooning admiration of the early nineteenth, and the reasons for which they liked him are now regarded by Spenser's defenders as inadmissible. He was
not included in William London's Catalogue of the Most Vendible Books in England (1658), and the first eighteenth-century edition, that of Hughes in 1715, took thirty-five years to reach a second edition. After that, admittedly, the thing got going, but it is always worth remembering that Spenser owed his boost to the people who thought that, for instance, Ossian was as good as Homer. Even Macaulay, at the height of the boom, remarked, 'Few and weary are the readers who are in at the death of the Blatant Beast,' thus revealing that he personally hadn't got as far as finding out that the Blatant Beast does not die. Altogether, this view of Spenser is one that no one would think of in relation to an author who really had worn well, such as Shakespeare.
But speaking 'of wearing well, I for one feel quite positive that this book will be read, and will deserve to be read, by a lot of people for a long time.
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