Love and the Middle Ages
TIIE title is not a description of the book but of the excellent mediaeval works which it expounds and places in their long historical background ; curious how one's heart sinks on sup- posing a modern specimen ; what the romantics could read as wild and fascinating needs now to be praised as exact and important. The book is learned, witty, and sensible, and makes one ashamed of not having read its material ; in the first flush of renewed admiration for the Romance of the Rose I tried to read the Chaucerian version. But it is intolerable. Far better to read Mr. Lewis and his admirable quotations, and recognise that these works were developing a method Which is still normal and living, and frankly admit that there are great pleasures not our own.
The book starts with vast and vague claims for its theme. There have been " three or four real changes of human senti- ment " in history, and one was the discovery of " courtly love " in eleventh-century Provence ; compared to this the Renaissance was " a mere ripple " ; only because of this, the American film is now a surprise to the oriental. Certainly something important happened, and Mr. Lewis might have found a narrow enough definition to make the troubadours unique. But he had only to open the Tale of Genji to find the practice of courtly love in full blast in tenth-century Japan ; it came, and it soon went, with the conditions for it ; and it comes rather when women are mutilated and imprisoned than when they are free. The main troubadour theory, the com- parison of a noble successful love to the vision of God, could not well be pushed further into Buddhism than by the mutual suicides who still expect a Buddhist heaven ; in Islamic poetry it could and did appear fully, and earlier than the troubadours. One does not need to claim Moslem influence (never adequately disproved) to refute this idea that love was discovered like matches, only once, which Mr. -Lewis has to support by calling. Catullus an exhibitionist and hiding the Song of , Solomon. Mr. Lewis is rather bitter about " the modern reader," that vulgar fool looking for excitement, and it seems fair to point out the journalism of his first pages.
Indeed he oversimplifies the allegories, too, but that is to our gain if it makes them readable. Before expounding the Romance of the Rose he produces various butts to make it seem easy, readers for instance " who had never noticed that the fountain- of Narcissus represented the heroine's eyes." The fifteenth-century scholiast Molinet is then called crude, and he too had not noticed this point, preferring to combine in the Well the fountain of Wisdom, with Truth at the bottom, and that of Love, either _divine or " vain " enough to destroy Narcissus, and again, by .stressing the Overhanging pinetree as the Cross, that of grace and piety in the water from tint side of Christ. But Mr. Lewis is making a real point, and no doubt Molinet could have produced a literal and a Freudian meaning if he chose. You have only to hold both the image itself and its most sensible interpretation, then read slowly and let fancy play. You then read the only known love-story (as Mr. Lewis. shows very well) which understands its heroine profoundly and never mentions her. But I cannot do this ; the whole excitement of the slow poem was in gradual partial discovery ; and even a simple-minded modern reader will start discovering from some wrong place. It is the rare case of a thing that one can see was very good and yet cannot enjoy.
This point about the Well seems important, because Molinet states what Mr. Lewis leaves out ; the Well is wisdom and the crystal in it that reflects the whole garden is the just person who includes everything in himself. The idea that love is a means to latozcledge is already clear in the poem of Bernart of Ventadorn, from which Mr. Lewis quotes a verse to prove that the well only meant eyes—the lady has stolen the whole world " into her " mirror full of power." Cavalcanti is perhaps the first to theorise in verse about this, but it is one of the few Provencal ideas that Europe still plays with, and incidentally just what might have been learned from the Arabs. (The Koran explicitly states, after providing houris in heaven as a powerful allegory, that they will be neglected because men will prefer the vision of God ; this is exactly the position of Aquinas about the pleasures of heaven, except that love is given the highest place among things neglected.) The other side of the Provencal position, the lady actually in control of the drawing-room, was alive enough among the Byzantines ; what one would like to know is how far the Provencal mixture was a crucial cause of later sentiment. Were Eloise and Abelard busily modelling themselves on trouba- dours ? And I suspect another hole in his account around the allegory of triumph. We are told that Hawes, one of the last figures in the book, " did a most surprising thing " ; after the death of his Lover he describes successive triumphs of Fame, Time and Eternity, and Mr. Lewis has an interested foot-note about Sir Thomas More's father's pictures. Of course, this is simply Petrarch's Trionfi in order, and for that matter the stuff of many mediaeval pageants ; when Mr. Lewis feels an obscure triumph in the apparently depressing close of many allegories he is noting a variant of this stock form.
Such complaints as I can make are only an agreement about the interest of the topic. Mr. Lewis is excellent on the essential point of allegory, and on its growth in Silver Latin, as against the gods, because of a new consciousness of an inner world of moral struggle, so that it was the basis of psychology and gave St. Augustine tropes that no one has dared call unreal. But the real use of the book for a general reader I think lies else- where ; it gives an effective account of works whose beauty and reality for us we need to recognise, and yet which, in all willingness, nobody who simply likes a good book can read.
WILLIAM Esirsosi.
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