The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature

  idel was I nevere,

  And many times have moeved thee to think on thin ende.

  (Piers Plowman, B XII, 1.)

  Whether the dreamer’s end is his death or his lot in the next world, it is certainly not something of which he had any percepts to retain. Ymaginatyf means ‘I have often reminded you that you must die’. So in Berners’ Froissart: ‘King Peter, seeing himself thus beset round with his enemies, was in great imagination’ (I, 242); that is, he had plenty on his mind. Chaucer says of Arveragus, coming home to his wife,

  Nothing list him to been imaginatyf

  If any wight had spoke, whil he was oute,

  To hire of love.

  (Franklin’s Tale, F 1094.)

  No doubt the activity which Arveragus abstained from, like that which was forced upon King Peter, would be accompanied by what we call imagination, and plenty of it. But I do not think either writer has that especially in view. Chaucer means that Arveragus wasn’t one ‘to get ideas into his head’.

  Common Sense (or Wit) as a term in medieval psychology must not be confused either with communis sensus (the common opinion of mankind) or with ‘common sense’ as gumption or elementary rationality—a much later usage. Albertus gives it two functions: (a) ‘It judges of the operation of a sense so that when we see, we know we are seeing’; (b) it puts together the data given by the five senses, or Outward Wits, so that we can say an orange is sweet or one orange is sweeter than another. Burton, centuries later, says ‘this common sense is the judge or moderator of the rest, by whom we discern all differences of objects; for by mine eye I do not know that I see, or by mine ear that I hear, but by my common sense’.23 Common sense is that which turns mere sensations into coherent consciousness of myself as subject in a world of objects. It is very close to what some call Apperception and what Coleridge called Primary Imagination. The difficulty of becoming aware of it arises from the fact that we are never without it except in states which cannot, for that very reason, be fully remembered. Partial anaesthesia, when we have sentience without full consciousness, is one of them. Sidney describes another in the Arcadia when he says that two knights in the heat of battle could ignore their gashes, ‘wrath and courage barring the common sense from bringing any message of their case to the mind’ (1590, III, 18).

  There is no need to write a separate section on the Vegetable Soul. It is responsible for all the unconscious, involuntary processes in our organism: for growth, secretion, nutrition, and reproduction. As regards the two last, this does not mean that eating or sexual intercourse is unconscious or involuntary. It is the unconscious and involuntary processes set up by these acts which belong to Vegetable Soul.

  F. SOUL AND BODY

  No Model yet devised has made a satisfactory unity between our actual experience of sensation or thought or emotion and any available account of the corporeal processes which they are held to involve. We experience, say, a chain of reasoning; thoughts, which are ‘about’ or ‘refer to’ something other than themselves, are linked together by the logical relation of grounds and consequents. Physiology resolves this into a sequence of cerebral events. But physical events, as such, cannot in any intelligible sense be said to be ‘about’ or to ‘refer to’ anything. And they must be linked to one another not as grounds and consequents but as causes and effects—a relation so irrelevant to the logical linkage that it is just as perfectly illustrated by the sequence of a maniac’s thoughts as by the sequence of a rational man’s. The chasm between the two points of view is so abrupt that desperate remedies have been adopted. Berkeleyan idealists have denied the physical process; extreme Behaviourists, the mental.

  This perennial problem presented itself to the medieval thinker in two forms.

  (1) How can the soul, conceived as an immaterial substance, act upon matter at all? Obviously it cannot act as one body acts upon another. Whether this way of putting the question differs at bottom from the way I have put it in the preceding paragraph might be debated.

  (2) ‘It is not possible to passe from one extreme to another but by a meane.’24 This is the old maxim from Timaeus 31b–c which so multiplied Triads in Apuleius, Chalcidius, pseudo-Dionysius, and Alanus. This deep-seated principle would probably have moved the medievals to put something in between soul and body even if the psycho-physical question did not in all periods offer us the raw edge that I have indicated. And this principle made it certain in advance that their method of coping with the raw edge would be to supply a tertium quid.

  This tertium quid, this phantom liaison-officer between body and soul, was called Spirit or (more often) the spirits. It must be understood that this sense does not at all overlap with the sense which enables us to speak of angels or devils or ghosts as ‘spirits’. To pass from the one meaning to the other would be merely to make a pun.

  The spirits were supposed to be just sufficiently material for them to act upon the body, but so very fine and attenuated that they could be acted upon by the wholly immaterial soul. They were, putting it bluntly, to be like the aether of nineteenth-century physics, which, for all I could ever learn of it, was to be and not to be matter. This doctrine of the spirits seems to me the least reputable feature in the Medieval Model. If the tertium quid is matter at all (what have density and rarity to do with it?) both ends of the bridge rest on one side of the chasm; if not, both rest on the other.

  Spirits, then, are the ‘subtle gumphus’25 required by Plato and Alanus to keep body and soul together, or as Donne says, ‘the subtile knot which makes us man’.26 They arise—we still speak of our spirits rising—from the blood like an exhalation; in Milton’s language ‘like gentle breaths from rivers pure’ (Paradise Lost, IV, 804). Bartholomaeus Anglicus in the De Proprietatibus (thirteenth century), Englished by Trevisa, gives the following account of them. From blood, seething in the liver, there arises a ‘smoke’. This, being ‘pured’, becomes Natural Spirit, which moves the blood and ‘sendeth it about into all the limbs’. Entering the head, this Natural Spirit undergoes a further refinement—is ‘more pured’—and so turns into Vital Spirit, which ‘worketh in the artery veins the pulses of life’. Some of it enters the brain where it is once more ‘made subtle’ and becomes Animal Spirit. Of this, some is distributed to the ‘limbs of feeling’ (the organs of sensation); some remains in the ‘dens’ of the brain to serve as the vehicle of the Inward Wits; flowing out at the back of the skull into the spinal marrow, it provides for voluntary movement (III, xxii). This Animal Spirit is the immediate organ of the Rational Soul through which alone she acts when incarnate. ‘We may not believe’, adds Bartholomaeus, ‘that this spirit is man’s reasonable soul, but more soothly, as saith Austin, the car thereof and proper instrument. For by means of such a spirit the soul is joined to the body.’ For Bartholomaeus’ triad of Natural, Vital, and Animal Spirits, other accounts substitute Vital, Animal, and Intellectual.27 But, however classified, the Spirits have always the same function. As Timothy Bright says in his Treatise of Melancholy28 (1586), they are ‘a true love knot to couple heaven and earth together; yea, a more divine nature than the heavens with a base clod of earth’, so that the soul is ‘not fettered with the bodie, as certaine Philosophers have taken it, but handfasted therewith by that golden claspe of the spirit’.

  The Spirits also enable us to give an account of insanity without having to say—which would have been felt as a contradiction in terms—that Rational Soul herself can lose her rationality. As Bartholomaeus says in the same place, when the Spirits are impaired, the ‘accord’ of body and soul is resolved, so that the Rational Soul ‘is let’ (hindered) of all its ‘works in the body, as it is seen in them that be amazed, and mad men and frantic’. The appropriate Spirit being out of order, Rational Soul has no purchase on the material body.

  Intellectuales spiritus, Intellectual Spirits, can by ellipsis become ‘intellectuals’ and even, presumably by confusion, ‘intellects’. Hence Johnson in Rambler, 95, speaks of a man’s ‘intellects’ being ‘distur
bed’, or Lamb writes your fear for Hartley’s intellectuals is just’.29

  We have seen from Bartholomaeus that the Spirits can be localised in different parts of the body. Hence it is not unreasonable that some of the functions which the soul exercises by means of them can also be localised. In the passage I have already quoted he assigns Common Wit and ‘the virtue imaginative’ to the ‘foremost den’ or frontal cavity of the head, understanding to the ‘middle den’, and memory to the hindmost. Readers of the Faerie Queene will remember that Spenser, though omitting Common Wit, similarly locates imagination (Phantastes) in the front, reason in the middle, and memory at the back back (II, ix, 44 sq.). It is to this central ‘den’ that Lady Macbeth refers when she speaks of the ‘receipt (receptacle) of reason’ (I, vii, 66).

  G. THE HUMAN BODY

  The human body gives us another sense in which man can be called a microcosm, for it, like the world, is built out of the four contraries. In the great world, it will be remembered, these combine to form the elements—fire, air, water, earth. But in our bodies they combine to form the Humours. Hot and Moist make Blood; Hot and Dry, Choler; Cold and Moist, Phlegm; Cold and Dry, Melancholy. Popular language, however, does not always observe the distinction between Humours made of Contraries within us and Elements made of Contraries without us. When Marlowe in Tamburlaine (869) says ‘Nature that fram’d us of four elements’ or Shakespeare speaks of the ‘elements’ being perfectly mixed in Brutus (Julius Caesar, V, V, 73), they are using ‘elements’ to mean either Humours or Contraries.

  The proportion in which the Humours are blended differs from one man to another and constitutes his complexio or temperamentum, his combination or mixture. This explains the odd fact that in modern English ‘to lose one’s temper’ and ‘to show one’s temper’ are synonymous expressions. If you have a good temperamentum you may momentarily lose it when you are angry. If you have a bad one, you may ‘show it’ when anger puts you off your guard. For the same reason a man who is often angry has a bad temperamentum or is ‘ill-tempered’. Such expressions led careless speakers to think that temper meant simply anger, and this finally became its commonest sense. But so much of the old usage survives that flying ‘into’ a temper and being put ‘out of’ temper now co-exist as synonyms.

  Though the proportion of the Humours is perhaps never exactly the same in any two individuals, the complexions can obviously be grouped into four main types according to the Humour that predominates in each. One of the symptoms of a man’s complexion is his colouring; that is, his ‘complexion’ in the modern sense. But I do not think the word ever had that sense in Middle English. Their word for what we call ‘complexion’ was rode; as in the Miller’s Tale, ‘his rode was reed, his eyen greye as goos’ (A 3317).

  Where Blood predominates we have the Sanguine Complexion. This is the best of the four, for Blood is especially ‘natures friend’ (Squire’s Tale, F 353). Sir Thomas Elyot in his Castle of Health (1534) enumerates as the signs of the Sanguine man ‘visage white and ruddy . . . sleep much . . . dremes of blouddy things or things pleasant . . . angry shortly’. The dreams, I take it, are not of wounds and strife so much as of blood-red colours. The ‘pleasant’ things are what we should call ‘merry’. The Sanguine man’s anger is easily roused but shortlived; he is a trifle peppery, but not sullen or vindictive. Chaucer’s Franklin, a text-book case of this Complexion, could give his cook a sound rating,30 but he had obviously a good heart. Shakespeare’s Beatrice—she too could be ‘angry shortly’—was probably Sanguine. The Sanguine man is plump, cheerful, and hopeful. A fifteenth-century manuscript31 symbolises this complexion by a man and a woman richly dressed, playing on stringed instruments in a flowery place.

  The Choleric man is tall and lean. Chaucer’s Reeve was ‘a sclendre colerik man’, and his legs were ‘ful longe . . . and ful lene’ (A 587 sq.). Like the Sanguine, he is easily moved to anger; so that Chantecleer, who suffers from a ‘superfluitee . . . of rede colera’ (B 5117–18), will even start a quarrel with laxatives in general—‘I hem defye, I love hem nevere a del’ (B 4348). But, unlike the Sanguine, the Choleric are vindictive. The Reeve pays the Miller out for his story, and the peasants on his own manor feared him as they feared death (A 605). Cholerics dream of thunder and of bright, dangerous things, like arrows and fire, as Peretelote knows (B 4120). The same manuscript that I mentioned above shows, for its symbol of the Choleric Complexion, a man holding a woman by the hair and beating her with a club. Choleric children are now described (by their mothers) as ‘highly strung’.

  Elyot’s symptoms of the Melancholy Complexion run: ‘leane . . . moche watch (i.e. he is a bad sleeper) . . . dreames fearful . . . stiff in opinions . . . anger long and fretting’. Hamlet diagnoses himself as melancholy (II, ii, 640), refers to his bad dreams32 (ibid. 264), and is an extreme example of ‘anger long and fretting’. He may be lean too; for ‘fat’ in V, ii, 298 probably means ‘all in a muck sweat’. Today I think we should describe the Melancholy man as a neurotic. I mean, the Melancholy man of the Middle Ages. The sense of the word melancholy was changing in the sixteenth century and began often to mean either simply ‘sad’ or else ‘reflective, thoughtful, introverted’. Thus in the poem prefixed to Burton’s Anatomy ‘melancholy’ seems to be simply reverie, endlessly indulged in solitude, with all its pains but also with all its pleasures, the waking dreams of fear-fulfilment and wish-fulfilment alike. In Dürer’s picture Malencolia is apparently the studious, withdrawn, and meditative life.

  The Phlegmatic is perhaps the worst of all the Complexions. Elyot gives as the signs of it ‘fatnesse . . . colour white . . . sleepe superfluous (i.e. in excess) . . . dremes of things watery or of fish . . . slownesse . . . dulnesse of lerning . . . smallness of courage’. The Phlegmatic boy or girl, fat, pale, sluggish, dull, is the despair of parents and teachers; by others, either made a butt or simply unnoticed. The text-book case is the first Mrs Milton, if, as we suspect, her husband was thinking of her when in the Doctrine and Discipline he commiserated the man who ‘shall find himself bound fast . . . to an image of earth and phlegm’ (I, 5). Mary Bennet in Pride and Prejudice was probably a Phlegmatic.

  Like the Planets, the Complexions need to be lived with imaginatively, not merely learned as concepts. They do not exactly correspond to any psychological classification we have been taught to make. But most of those we know (except ourselves) will illustrate one or other of the four tolerably well.

  In addition to this permanent predominance of some one Humour in each individual, there is also a daily rhythmic variation which gives each of the four a temporary predominance in all of us. Blood is dominant from midnight till 6 a.m.; Choler, from then till noon; Melancholy, from noon till 6 p.m.; then Phlegm till midnight. (All this, it should be remembered, is geared for people who got up and went to bed far earlier than we.) Sleep, in the Squire’s Tale, warned people to go to bed at the right time ‘for blood was in his dominacioun’ (F 347). The technical term domination can be jokingly extended to things other than Humours, as when the Manciple says of the Cook ‘drink hath dominacioun upon this man’ (H 57). This small witticism is often lost on modern readers.

  H. THE HUMAN PAST

  It has sometimes been said that Christianity inherited from Judaism and imposed on the Western world a new conception of history. To the Greeks, we are told, the historical process was a meaningless flux or cyclic reiteration. Significance was to be sought not in the world of becoming but in that of being, not in history but in metaphysics, mathematics, and theology. Hence Greek historians wrote of such past actions—the Persian or the Peloponnesian War, or the lives of great men—as have a unity in themselves, and were seldom curious to trace from its beginnings the development of a people or a state. History, in a word, was not for them a story with a plot. The Hebrews, on the other hand, saw their whole past as a revelation of the purposes of Jahweh. Christianity, going on from there, makes world-history in its entirety a single, transcendentally significant, story wi
th a well-defined plot pivoted on Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Judgement.

  On this view the differentia of Christian historiography ought to be what I call Historicism; the belief that by studying the past we can learn not only historical but metahistorical or transcendental truth. When Novalis called history ‘an evangel’, when Hegel saw in it the progressive self-manifestation of absolute spirit, when Carlyle spoke of it as ‘a book of revelations’, they were Historicists. Keats’s Oceanus speaks as a Historicist when he claims to discern an

  eternal law

  That first in beauty should be first in might.

  In reality, the best medieval historians, like the best historians in other periods, are seldom Historicists.

  The suggested antithesis between Pagan and Christian conceptions of history is certainly overdrawn. Not all Pagans were Greeks. The Norse gods, unlike the Olympians, are continuously involved in a tragic and tragically significant temporal process. Eddaic theology, no less than Hebraic, makes cosmic history a story with a plot; an irreversible story marching deathward to the drumbeat of omens and prophecies. Nor were the Romans much less inveterate Historicists than the Jews. How Rome came to be and to be great was the theme of most historians and of all pre-Virgilian epic. What Virgil puts forward in a mythical form is precisely meta-history. The whole mundane process, the fata Jovis, are in labour to bring forth the endless and dedicated empire of Rome.

  Christian Historicism also exists; as in St Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, Orosius’ History against the Pagans, or Dante’s De Monarchia. But the two first were written to answer, and the third to baptise, a Pagan Historicism which was already in existence. The elementary Historicism which sees divine judgements in all disasters—the beaten side always deserved their beating—or the still more elementary sort which holds that everything is, and always was, going to the dogs—is not uncommon. Wulfstan’s sermo ad Anglos illustrates both. Some German historians in the twelfth century are Historicists of a more thorough-going kind. The extreme example is Joachim of Flora (ob. 1202). But he was not a Historian; rather, as was said, ‘a dabbler in the future’33—it is, indeed, that period in which radical Historicists often feel most at home. But the chroniclers who have contributed most to our knowledge of medieval history, or who have proved the most permanently attractive, were not of this kind.