The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature

  No doubt all history in the last resort must be held by Christians to be a story with a divine plot. But not all Christian historiographers feel it their business to take much notice of that. For it is, as known to men, only an overall plot, like the rise and fall of Arthur in Malory or the loves of Roger and Bradamant in Ariosto. Like them, it is festooned with a huge wealth of subordinate stories, each of which has itself a beginning, a middle, and an end, but which do not in the aggregate display any single trend in the world depicted. These can be told for their own sake. They need not, perhaps cannot, be related to the central theological story of the human race. Indeed, the medieval conception of Fortune tends to discourage attempts at a ‘philosophy of history’. If most events happen because Fortune is turning her wheel, ‘rejoicing in her bliss’, and giving everyone his turn, the ground is cut from under the feet of a Hegel, a Carlyle, a Spengler, a Marxist, and even a Macaulay. As W. P. Ker said, ‘The interest of history was too great and varied to be ruled by the formulas of Orosius; the chroniclers generally find their own points of view, and these in many cases, fortunately, are not those of the preacher’.34

  Medieval historians, even when we have ruled out the radical Historicists, are a mixed collection. Some of them—Matthew Paris, for example, and perhaps Snorre—have the scientific approach and are critical of their sources. But they are not on that account especially important for our present purpose. We are concerned with the picture of the past, and the attitude to the past, as these existed in the mind of literary authors and their audience. The imagined past as part of the Model is the quarry we pursue.

  John Barbour (ob. 1395) at the beginning of his Bruce sets out what he thinks the true reasons for studying history. Stories, even when untrue, give pleasure. But, if so, true stories well told (‘said on gud maner’), ought to give a double pleasure; pleasure in the ‘carpying’, the narrative as such, and pleasure in learning what really happened (‘the thing rycht as it wes’). And thirdly, it is only fair to record the deeds of great men, for they deserve fame—‘suld weill have prys’ (I, 1–36). Historiography has then three functions: to entertain our imagination, to gratify our curiosity, and to discharge a debt we owe our ancestors. Joinville’s Chronicle of St Louis, being a saint’s life, concentrates on the third function—it is written ‘in honour of this true saint’—but also fulfils the other two. Froissart (I, Prol.) approaches his work in much the same spirit as Barbour. He writes in order that ‘honourable and noble adventures of feats of arms . . . should notably be enregistered and put in perpetual memory’. And such a record will give ‘pastance’ and ‘pleasure’. He adds—a point omitted by Barbour—that it will also furnish ‘ensample’. By this he does not mean those ‘lessons of history’ which can be drawn from the success or failure of previous statesmanship or strategy. He means that by reading of valiant deeds ‘the prewe and hardy may have ensample to encourage them’.

  It is to be noticed that the approach we find in these historians differs not at all from that of authors whose matter we regard as wholly legendary. The author of the fourteenth-century Troy book, the Geste Hystoriale, begins very much as Barbour does. He writes to preserve the ‘aunters’ of noble ancestors which are now ‘almost out of mind’. He hopes that ‘old stories of brave men who were in high place may be a solas’ to those who learn them from writers who knew the fact at first hand (wist it in dede). He goes on to enumerate his sources, explaining why Homer is unreliable. Lydgate in his Troy Book (1412) says that great conquerouris would by now have lost their due fame if reliable auctours, whom he is using, had not preserved for us ‘the verrie trewe corn’ of fact separated from the chaff of fiction,

  For in her hand they hilde for a staf

  The trouthe only.

  (Prologue, 152.)

  They could not have been flatterers, for they wrote after the death of the heroes whom they celebrated, and no one flatters the dead (184 sq.). Even Caxton, it will be remembered, though leaving us free to doubt some things in the prose Morte, professes to have been convinced by argument of Arthur’s historicity. And his emphasis on the ‘exemplary’ value of the book might, as we have seen, stand on the first page of any chronicle.

  In more sophisticated ages we are familiar with the grave quasi-factual devices which some authors use to bestow verisimilitude on narratives which everyone knows for fiction; the sober mendacities of Defoe or Swift, the polyglot array of documents at the beginning of She. But I cannot believe that the medieval authors were playing that game. The very words story and history had not yet been desynonymised. Even Elizabethan chroniclers still begin the history of our island with Brut and his Trojans.

  It follows that the distinction between history and fiction cannot, in its modern clarity, be applied to medieval books or to the spirit in which they were read. It is by no means necessary to suppose that Chaucer’s contemporaries believed the tale of Troy or Thebes as we believe in the Napoleonic Wars; but neither did they disbelieve them as we disbelieve a novel.

  Two passages, one from the father of history and one from Milton, who was perhaps the last historian of the old kind, seem to me to throw light on the question. ‘It is my duty’, says Herodotus, ‘to record what has been told, but not always to believe it. This applies to my whole book’ (VII, 152). Now Milton, in his History of Britain35 (the italics are mine): ‘That which hath received approbation from so many, I have chosen not to omit. Certain or uncertain, be that upon the credit of those whom I must follow; so far as keeps aloof from impossible and absurd, attested by ancient writers from books more ancient, I refuse not, as the due and proper subject of story.’

  Herodotus and Milton both disclaim any fundamental responsibility: if the earlier auctours have lied, on their own head be it. We may indeed expurgate the ‘impossible and absurd’. But this does not mean what will be found absurd after considering all the evidence afresh as if one were the first explorer, as if no ‘story’ had been already established. It means what is prima facie absurd by the standards of one’s own age. Chaucer may well have believed all the miracles in Nicholas Trivet’s story of Constance; what struck him as absurd was that a sensible man like Alla would have committed such a faux pas as to make a child his messenger to the Emperor. Accordingly, he corrects it (B 1086–92). But the italicised words are the really illuminating ones. So far from having failed in his duty by handing on the existing ‘story’ (with minor expurgations) instead of producing a new and better grounded ‘story’ of his own, the historian has done what historians are there to do. For precisely this is ‘the true and proper subject of story’. This is what history is for. The medieval purchaser of a manuscript which purported to give the British or Trojan story did not want some individual clerk’s opinions about the past, presumptuously setting themselves up against what ‘hath received approbation from many’. At that rate there would soon be as many versions of the story as there were chroniclers. He wanted (as Milton thinks he is entitled to have) the established Model of the past; tinkered a little here and there, but substantially the same. This was what was useful—for conversation, for poets, for ‘ensamples’.

  I am inclined to think that most of those who read ‘historial’ works about Troy, Alexander, Arthur, or Charlemagne, believed their matter to be in the main true. But I feel much more certain that they did not believe it to be false. I feel surest of all that the question of belief or disbelief was seldom uppermost in their minds. That, if it was anyone’s business, was not theirs. Their business was to learn the story. If its veracity were questioned they would feel that the burden of disproof lay wholly with the critic. Till that moment arrived (and it did not arrive often) the story had, by long prescription, a status in the common imagination indistinguishable—at any rate, not distinguished—from that of fact. Everyone ‘knew’—as we all ‘know’ how the ostrich hides her head in the sand—that the past contained Nine Worthies: three Pagans (Hector, Alexander, and Julius Caesar); three Jews (Joshua, David, and Judas Maccabaeus); an
d three Christians (Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon). Everyone ‘knew’ we were descended from the Trojans—as we all ‘know’ how Alfred burned the cakes and Nelson put the telescope to his blind eye. As the spaces above us were filled with daemons, angels, influences, and intelligences, so the centuries behind us were filled with shining and ordered figures, with the deeds of Hector and Roland, with the splendours of Charlemagne, Arthur, Priam, and Solomon.

  It must be remembered throughout that the texts we should now call historical differed in outlook and narrative texture from those we should call fictions far less than a modern ‘history’ differs from a modern novel. Medieval historians dealt hardly at all with the impersonal. Social or economic conditions and national characteristics come in only by accident or when they are required to explain something in the narrative. The chronicles, like the legends, are about individuals; their valour or villainy, their memorable sayings, their good or bad luck. Hence a modern finds those of the Dark Ages suspiciously epic and those of the High Middle Ages suspiciously romantic. Perhaps the suspicion is not always justified. The elements of epic and romance, like those of economic and social history, exist at all times in the real world; and historians, even in dealing with contemporary events, will pick out those elements which the habitual bent of their imagination has conditioned them to notice. Perhaps past or future ages might wonder at the predominance of the impersonal in some modern histories; might even ask, ‘But were there no people at that time?’ Even the turns of expression may be the same in chronicle and romance. Or dit le conte (‘now tells the tale’) will be found in Froissart (I, iv).

  All medieval narratives about the past are equally lacking in the sense of period. For us the past is, before all else, a ‘costume play’. From our earliest picture-books we learn the difference in clothes, weapons, furniture and architecture. We cannot remember in our lives any historical knowledge earlier than this. This superficial (and often inaccurate) characterisation of different ages helps far more than we suspect towards our later and subtler discriminations between them. It is difficult to think ourselves back into the minds of men for whom it did not exist. And in the Middle Ages, and long after, it did not. It was known that Adam went naked till he fell. After that, they pictured the whole past in terms of their own age. So indeed did the Elizabethans. So did Milton; he never doubted that ‘capon and white broth’ would have been as familiar to Christ and the disciples as to himself.36 It is doubtful whether the sense of period is much older than the Waverley novels. It is hardly present in Gibbon. Walpole’s Otranto, which would not now deceive school-children, could hope, not quite vainly, to deceive the public of 1765. Where even the most obvious and superficial distinctions between one century (or millennium) and another were ignored, the profounder differences of temper and mental climate were naturally not dreamed of. Authors may profess to know that things in Arthur’s day or Hector’s were not quite as in their own time, but the picture they actually paint belies the profession. Chaucer in a flash of astonishing insight acknowledges that in old Troy the language and procedure of courtship may have differed from those of his own day (Troilus, II, 22 sq.). But it is only a flash; momentary. The manners, the fighting, the religious services, the very traffic-regulations of his Trojans, are fourteenth-century. It was this happy ignorance that gave the medieval carver or poet his power of touching into vivid life every ‘historial’ matter he took in hand. It also helped to exclude Historicism. For us, areas of the past are qualitatively distinguished. Anachronisms are therefore not merely errors; they offend like discords in music or inappropriate flavours in a dish. But when Isidore, at the threshold of the Middle Ages, divides all history into six aetates (V, xxxix) there is nothing qualitative about them. They are not phases in an evolution or acts in a drama; they are merely convenient chronological blocks. They tempt him to no speculation about the future. Having brought the sixth aetas down to his own time, he ends with the statement that the remainder of this aetas is known only to God.

  The nearest we get to a widespread ‘philosophy of history’ in the Middle Ages is, as I have said, the frequent assertion that things were once better than they are now. As we read in Wulfstan’s sermon: ‘The world hurries on (is on ofste) . . . and speeds to its end . . . thus, for men’s sins it must worsen day by day.’ It was long ago, said Gower, that the world stood ‘in all his welthe’ (Prologue, 95). Love is not now as it was in Arthur’s time, said Chrétien in the opening lines of Yvain. Malory agreed (XVIII, 25). Yet I do not find that in reading either chronicle or romance we really get an impression of gloom. The emphasis usually falls on the past splendour rather than on the subsequent decline. Medieval and nineteenth-century man agreed that their present was no very admirable age; not to be compared (said one) with the glory that was, not to be compared (said the other) with the glory that is still to come. The odd thing is that the first view seems to have bred on the whole a more cheerful temper. Historically as well as cosmically, medieval man stood at the foot of a stairway; looking up, he felt delight. The backward, like the upward, glance exhilarated him with a majestic spectacle, and humility was rewarded with the pleasures of admiration. And, thanks to his deficiency in the sense of period, that packed and gorgeous past was far more immediate to him than the dark and bestial past could ever be to a Lecky or a Wells. It differed from the present only by being better. Hector was like any other knight, only braver. The saints looked down on one’s spiritual life, the kings, sages, and warriors on one’s secular life, the great lovers of old on one’s own amours, to foster, encourage, and instruct. There were friends, ancestors, patrons in every age. One had one’s place, however modest, in a great succession; one need be neither proud nor lonely.

  I. THE SEVEN LIBERAL ARTS

  To give an educational curriculum a place in the Model of the universe may at first seem an absurdity; and it would be an absurdity if the medievals had felt about it as we feel about the ‘subjects’ in a syllabus today. But the syllabus was regarded as immutable;37 the number seven is numinous; the Liberal Arts, by long prescription, had achieved a status not unlike that of nature herself. The Arts, no less than the Virtues and Vices, were personified. Grammar, with her birch, still sits looking down on the cloisters of Magdalen. Dante in the Convivio most carefully mortises the Arts into the cosmic framework. Rhetoric, for example, corresponds to Venus; for one reason, because she is ‘the loveliest of all other disciplines’, soavissima di tutte le altre scienze. Arithmetic is like Sol; for as he gives light to all the other stars so she gives light to all other sciences, and as our eyes are dazzled by his light so our intelligence is baffled by the infinity of numbers. And so of the rest (II, xiii).

  Everyone knows that the Arts are Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, and Astronomy. And almost everyone has met the mnemonic couplet

  Gram loquitur, Dia verba docet, Rhet verba colorat,

  Mus canit, Ar numerat, Geo ponderat, Ast colit astra.

  The first three constitute the Trivium or threefold way; the last four, the Quadrivium.

  ‘Grammar talks’, as the couplet says; or, as Isidore defines her, ‘Grammar is the skill of speech’ (I, i). That is, she teaches us Latin. But we must not imagine that to learn grammar merely corresponded to what we should now call having a ‘classical’ education, or even to becoming a ‘Humanist’ in the Renaissance sense. Latin was still the living Esperanto of the western world and great works were still being written in it. It was the language par excellence, so that the very word Latin—lœden in Anglo-Saxon and leden in Middle English—came to mean language. Canace in the Squire’s Tale by means of her magic ring

  understood wel everything

  That any foul may in his ledene seyn.

  (F 435.)

  Italian Latino is used by Petrarch in the same sense. An interpreter is a Latiner, whence the name Latimer. But while Grammar was thus restricted to a single tongue, in another way it sometimes extended far beyond the realm it clai
ms today. It had done so for centuries. Quintilian suggests literatura as the proper translation of Greek grammatike (II, i), and literatura, though it does not mean ‘literature’, included a good deal more than literacy. It included all that is required for ‘making up’ a ‘set book’: syntax, etymology, prosody, and the explanation of allusions. Isidore makes even history a department of Grammar (I, xli–xliv). He would have described the book I am now writing as a book of Grammar. Scholarship is perhaps our nearest equivalent. In popular usage Grammatica or Grammaria slid into the vague sense of learning in general; and since learning is usually an object both of respect and suspicion to the masses, grammar, in the form grammary comes to mean magic. Thus in the ballad of King Estmere, ‘My mother was a western woman learned in grammarye’. And from grammary, by a familiar sound-change, comes glamour—a word whose associations with grammar and even with magic have now been annihilated by the beauty-specialists.

  The invention of this art was traditionally ascribed to Carmente or Carmentis,38 the daughter of King Evander. The real authorities were Aelius Donatus (fourth century) and Priscianus (fifth and sixth). One’s well-thumbed manuscript of Donatus was one’s donat or donet, which by an easy transference comes to mean the ‘primer’ or ‘rudiments’ of any subject whatever. Covetyse in Piers Plowman says ‘ich drow me among drapers my donet to lerne’—my first steps in sharp practice (C VII, 215).