And just as the planets are not merely present in the Testament of Cresseid but woven into the plot, so in the buildings the cosmological material is sometimes woven into what we may call the plot of a building. One might at first suppose that the constellations depicted on the cupola above the altar in the old sacristy of San Lorenzo at Florence were mere decoration; but they are in the right positions for 9 July 1422 when the altar was consecrated.7 In the Farnesina Palace they are arranged to suit the birth-day of Chigi for whom the work was done.8 And the Salone at Padua is apparently designed so that at each sunrise the beams will fall on the Sign in which Sol would then ride.
The lost art of Pageant loved to re-state similar themes. And it has lately been shown that many Renaissance pictures which were once thought purely fanciful are loaded, and almost overloaded, with philosophy.9
Here, as at the outset of this book, we see a striking yet deceptive parallel between medieval and savage behaviour. This labour to reproduce in earthly mimicry the great operations of nature10 looks very like the savage’s attempt to control or encourage such operations by imitating them—to bring rain by making a noise as like a thunderstorm as a man with a stick and a tom-tom can achieve. But medieval and Renaissance credulity ran in the opposite direction. Men were far less prone to think they could control the translunary forces than to think that those forces controlled them. Astrological determinism, not imitative magic, was the real danger.
The simplest explanation is, I believe, the true one. Poets and other artists depicted these things because their minds loved to dwell on them. Other ages have not had a Model so universally accepted as theirs, so imaginable, and so satisfying to the imagination. Marcus Aurelius11 wished that men would love the universe as a man can love his own city. I believe that something like this was really possible in the period I am discussing. At least, fairly like it. The medieval and Renaissance delight in the universe was, I think, more spontaneous and aesthetic, less laden with conscience and resignation, than anything the Stoical emperor had in mind. It was, though not in any Wordsworthian sense, a ‘love of nature’.
Merely to imitate or to comment on the human life around us was therefore not felt to be the sole function of the arts. The labours of men appear on Achilles’ shield in Homer for their own sake. In the Mutability cantos or the Salone they appear not only for their own sake but also because of their relation to the months, and therefore to the Zodiac, and therefore to the whole natural order. This does not at all mean that where Homer was disinterested the later artist was didactic. It means that where Homer rejoiced in the particulars the later artist rejoiced also in that great imagined structure which gave them all their place. Every particular fact and story became more interesting and more pleasurable if, by being properly fitted in, it carried one’s mind back to the Model as a whole.
If I am right, the man of genius then found himself in a situation very different from that of his modern successor. Such a man today often, perhaps usually, feels himself confronted with a reality whose significance he cannot know, or a reality that has no significance; or even a reality such that the very question whether it has a meaning is itself a meaningless question. It is for him, by his own sensibility, to discover a meaning, or, out of his own subjectivity, to give a meaning—or at least a shape—to what in itself had neither. But the Model universe of our ancestors had a built-in significance. And that in two senses; as having ‘significant form’ (it is an admirable design) and as a manifestation of the wisdom and goodness that created it. There was no question of waking it into beauty or life. Ours, most emphatically, was not the wedding garment, nor the shroud. The achieved perfection was already there. The only difficulty was to make an adequate response.
This, if accepted, will perhaps go far to explain some characteristics of medieval literature.
It may, for example, explain both its most typical vice and its most typical virtue. The typical vice, as we all know, is dulness; sheer, unabashed, prolonged dulness, where the author does not seem to be even trying to interest us. The South English Legendary or Ormulum or parts of Hoccleve are good examples. One sees how the belief in a world of built-in significance encourages this. The writer feels everything to be so interesting in itself that there is no need for him to make it so. The story, however badly told, will still be worth telling; the truths, however badly stated, still worth stating. He expects the subject to do for him nearly everything he ought to do himself. Outside literature we can still see this state of mind at work. On the lowest intellectual level, people who find any one subject entirely engrossing are apt to think that any reference to it, of whatever quality, must have some value. Pious people on that level appear to think that the quotation of any scriptural text, or any line from a hymn, or even any noise made by a harmonium, is an edifying sermon or a cogent apologetic. Less pious people on the same level, dull clowns, seem to think that they have achieved either a voluptuous or a comic effect—I am not sure which is intended—by chalking up a single indecent word on a wall. The presence of a Model whose significance is ‘given’ is likewise no unmixed blessing.
And yet, I believe, it is also connected with the characteristic virtue of good medieval work. What this is, anyone can feel if he turns from the narrative verse of, say, Chapman or Keats to the best parts of Marie de France or Gower. What will strike him at once is the absence of strain. In the Elizabethan or Romantic examples we feel that the poet has done a great deal of work; in the medieval, we are at first hardly aware of a poet at all. The writing is so limpid and effortless that the story seems to be telling itself. You would think, till you tried, that anyone could do the like. But in reality no story tells itself. Art is at work. But it is the art of people who, no less than the bad medieval authors, have a complete confidence in the intrinsic value of their matter. The telling is for the sake of the tale; in Chapman or Keats we feel that the tale is valued only as an opportunity for the lavish and highly individual treatment. We feel the same difference on turning from Sidney’s Arcadia to Malory’s Morte, or from a battle in Drayton to one in LaƷamon. I am not suggesting a preference, for both ways of writing can be good; I am only underlining a difference.
With this attitude goes the characteristically medieval type of imagination.12 It is not a transforming imagination like Wordsworth’s or a penetrative imagination like Shakespeare’s. It is a realising imagination. Macaulay noted in Dante the extremely factual word-painting; the details, the comparisons, designed at whatever cost of dignity to make sure that we see exactly what he saw. Now Dante in this is typically medieval. The Middle Ages are unrivalled, till we reach quite modern times, in the sheer foreground fact, the ‘close-up’. I mean things like the little dog’s behaviour in the Book of the Duchess; or ‘So stant Custance and looketh hire aboute’; or, of Constance again, ‘ever she prayeth hire child to hold his pees’; or, when Arcite and Palamon met for the combat, ‘Tho chaungen gan the colour in hir face’; or the reluctance of the ladies-in-waiting to handle Griselda’s clothes. But not by any means only in Chaucer. I mean the young Arthur turning alternately pale and red in LaƷamon, or Merlin twisting like a snake in his prophetic trance; and Jonah in Patience going into the whale’s mouth ‘like a mote at a minster door’; and in Malory all the practical and financial detail and even Guenever’s recognisable cough; or the fairy bakers rubbing the paste off their fingers in Huon; or Henryson’s ineffective mouse running up and down the river bank with many a ‘pitous peep’. We even see the Almighty ‘laughing His heart sore’ at the old alewife in Kynd Kittok. This sort of vividness is now part of every novelist’s stock-in-trade; a tool of our rhetoric, often used to excess so that it hides rather than reveals the action. But the medievals had hardly any models for it, and it was long before they had many successors.13
Two negative conditions made it possible: their freedom both from the pseudo-classical standard of decorum and from the sense of period. But the efficient cause surely was their devout attention to their matt
er and their confidence in it. They are not trying to heighten it or transform it. It possesses them wholly. Their eyes and ears are steadily fixed upon it, and so—perhaps hardly aware how much they are inventing—they see and hear what the event must have been like.
Admittedly, there is in some of their writing much ornament and even, as may be thought, affectation; especially when they use Latin. But it is, and not in a necessarily pejorative sense, superficial. The author’s basic attitude remains free from strain or posturing. He rubricates and aureates to honour a theme which for him, and by common consent, ought to be honoured. He is not at all doing the sort of thing that Donne did when he built a poem (and a good one) out of the thesis—in cold prose it is mere raving—that the death of Elizabeth Drury was a more or less cosmic catastrophe. A medieval poet, wrongly but not unintelligibly, would have thought that silly. When Dunbar heavily gilds his verse it is to celebrate the Nativity or, at least, a royal marriage. He wears ceremonial robes because he is taking part in a ceremony. He is not ‘stunting’.
When we meet bad poetry in different traditions, poetry that claims more for itself and its poet, we may say that we can ‘see through it’. The rubble can be detected through the stucco. But the glory of the best medieval work often consists precisely in the fact that we see through it; it is a pure transparency.
One curious characteristic remains to be noticed. Many of the vivid close-ups are original additions to works which are not, as a whole, original. It is astonishing how often this occurs. One is tempted to say that almost the typical activity of the medieval author consists in touching up something that was already there; as Chaucer touched up Boccaccio, as Malory touched up French prose romances which themselves touched up earlier romances in verse, as LaƷamon works over Wace, who works over Geoffrey, who works over no one knows what. We are inclined to wonder how men could be at once so original that they handled no predecessor without pouring new life into him, and so unoriginal that they seldom did anything completely new. The predecessor is usually much more than a ‘source’ in the sense in which an Italian novel may be the source of a Shakespearian play. Shakespeare takes a few bones from the novel’s plot and flings the rest to well-deserved oblivion. Round those bones he builds a new work whose purport, atmosphere, and language have really nothing in common with his original. Chaucer’s Troilus stands in a very different relation to the Filostrato.
If an artist made alterations in someone else’s picture which covered about a third of the canvas, we should deceive ourselves in trying by mere measurements to assess the contribution of each painter to the total effect. For the work done by every mass and colour in the new patches will be affected through and through by the parts of the original which still remain; and in them every mass and colour will similarly be affected by the new patches. We should have to think of the total result chemically rather than arithmetically. It is like that when Chaucer works over Boccaccio. No line, however closely translated, will do exactly what it did in the Italian once Chaucer has made his additions. No line in those additions but depends for much of its effect on the translated lines which precede and follow it. The poem as we now have it cannot be attributed to a single author. Still less can the work we call Malory’s.
It follows that the book-author unit, basic for modern criticism, must often be abandoned when we are dealing with medieval literature. Some books—if I may use a comparison I have used elsewhere—must be regarded more as we regard those cathedrals where work of many different periods is mixed and produces a total effect, admirable indeed but never foreseen nor intended by any one of the successive builders. Many generations, each in its own spirit and its own style, have contributed to the story of Arthur. It is misleading to think of Malory as an author in our modern sense and throw all the earlier work into the category of ‘sources’. He is merely the last builder, doing a few demolitions here and adding a few features there. They cannot make the work his as Vanity Fair is Thackeray’s.
It would have been impossible for men to work in this way if they had had anything like our conception of literary property. But it would also have been impossible unless their idea of literature had differed from ours on a deeper level. Far from feigning originality, as a modern plagiarist would, they are apt to conceal it. They sometimes profess to be deriving something from their auctour at the very moment when they are departing from him. It cannot be a joke. What is funny about it? And who but a scholar could see the point if it were? They are behaving more like a historian who misrepresents the documents because he feels sure that things must have happened in a certain way. They are anxious to convince others, perhaps to half-convince themselves, that they are not merely ‘making things up’. For the aim is not self-expression or ‘creation’; it is to hand on the ‘historical’ matter worthily; not worthily of your own genius or of the poetic art but of the matter itself.
I doubt if they would have understood our demand for originality or valued those works in their own age which were original any the more on that account. If you had asked LaƷamon or Chaucer ‘Why do you not make up a brand-new story of your own?’ I think they might have replied (in effect) ‘Surely we are not yet reduced to that?’ Spin something out of one’s own head when the world teems with so many noble deeds, wholesome examples, pitiful tragedies, strange adventures, and merry jests which have never yet been set forth quite so well as they deserve? The originality which we regard as a sign of wealth might have seemed to them a confession of poverty. Why make things for oneself like the lonely Robinson Crusoe when there is riches all about you to be had for the taking? The modern artist often does not think the riches is there. He is the alchemist who must turn base metal into gold. It makes a radical difference.
And the paradox is that it is just this abdication of originality which brings out the originality they really possess. The more devout and concentrated Chaucer’s gaze on the Filostrato becomes, or Malory’s on the ‘French Book’, the more real the scenes and people become to them. That reality forces them presently to see and hear, hence to set down, at first a little more, and then a good deal more, than their book has actually told them. They are thus never more indebted to their auctour than when they are adding to him. If they had been less rapt by what they read they would have reproduced him more faithfully. We should think it ‘cheek’, an unpardonable liberty, half to translate and half to re-write another man’s work. But Chaucer and Malory were not thinking of their auctour’s claims. They were thinking—the auctour’s success lay in making them think—about Troilus or Launcelot.
As we have already seen,14 the very awareness that their auctour wrote fiction and that their additions to him were further fiction seems to have been dim and wavering. Historians, from Herodotus to Milton, handed the responsibility for truth over to their sources; conversely, writers of Troy Books talk as if they were historians who had weighed their authorities. Even Chaucer does not praise Homer for his ‘feyninge’ but blames him for lying, like the Greek partisan he was (Hous of Fame, III, 1477–9), and puts him in the same class with Josephus (1430–81). I do not suppose that Chaucer and, say, LaƷamon both had exactly the same attitude to their material. But I doubt if either, like the modern novelist, felt that he was ‘creative’ or thought that his source had been so. And I think the majority15 of the audience, then as now, could hardly conceive the activity of invention at all. It is said that people pointed out Dante in the street not as the man who made the Comedy but as the man who had been in Hell. Even today there are those (some of them critics) who believe every novel and even every lyric to be autobiographical. A man who lacks invention himself does not easily attribute it to others. Perhaps in the Middle Ages those who had it did not easily attribute it to themselves.
The most surprising thing in the Hous of Fame is that the poets (with one historian) are present not because they are famous but to support the fame of their subjects. Josephus in that House ‘bar upon his shuldres hye’ the fame of Jewry (III, 1435–6); Home
r, with many such colleagues as Dares and Guido, that of Troy (1455–80); Virgil, that of Aeneas (1485). The medievals were, indeed, fully conscious (Dante especially)16 that poets not only gave but also won fame. But in the last resort it is the fame they give—the fame of Aeneas, not of Virgil—that really matters. That Edward King should now be remembered at all only because he gave occasion to Lycidas would perhaps have seemed to them a strange inversion. If Milton had been by their standards a successful poet he would now be remembered for ‘bearing up’ the fame of Edward King.
When Pope re-wrote the Hous of Fame as his Temple of Fame he quietly altered this passage. The poets are in his Temple because they have won fame. Between Chaucer’s time and his the arts had become conscious of what is now regarded as their true status. Since his time they have become even more so. One almost foresees the day when they may be conscious of little else.
Hence we may, with proper precautions, regard a certain humility as the overall characteristic of medieval art. Of the art; not always of the artists. Self-esteem may arise within any occupation at any period. A chef, a surgeon, or a scholar, may be proud, even to arrogance, of his skill; but his skill is confessedly the means to an end beyond itself, and the status of the skill depends wholly on the dignity or necessity of that end. I think it was then like that with all the arts. Literature exists to teach what is useful, to honour what deserves honour, to appreciate what is delightful. The useful, honourable, and delightful things are superior to it: it exists for their sake; its own use, honour, or delightfulness is derivative from theirs. In that sense the art is humble even when the artists are proud; proud of their proficiency in the art, but not making for the art itself the high Renaissance or Romantic claims. Perhaps they might not all have fully agreed with the statement that poetry is infima inter omnes doctrinas.17 But it awoke no such hurricane of protest as it would awake today.