Dialectic in the couplet ‘teaches words’; an obscure saying. What is really meant is that, having learned from grammar how to talk, we must learn from Dialectic how to talk sense, to argue, to prove and disprove. The medieval foundation of this art was at first an Isagoge or Introduction to Aristotle written by Porphyry and translated into Latin by Boethius. This is in intention merely a work on Logic. But everyone who has tried to teach mere Logic knows how difficult it is, especially with an intelligent pupil, to avoid raising questions which force us into metaphysics. Porphyry’s little treatise raises them too and, in accordance with its limited purpose, leaves them unsolved. This methodological limitation was mistaken for a state of doubt, and the doubt was then attributed not to Porphyry but to Boethius. Hence the rhyme:
Assidet Boethius stupens de hac lite,
Audiens quid hic et hic asserat perite,
Et quid cui faveat non discernit rite;
Non praesumit solvere litem definite.39
Two warnings may be useful to some; others, I hope, will pardon them.
(1) ‘Dialectic’ in the modern Marxist sense is here a red herring—Hegelian in origin. It must be completely set aside when we speak of ancient or medieval Dialectic. This means simply the art of disputation. It has nothing to do with the dynamic of history.
(2) Dialectic is concerned with proving. In the Middle Ages there are three kinds of proof; from Reason, from Authority, and from Experience. We establish a geometrical truth by Reason; a historical truth, by Authority, by auctours. We learn by experience that oysters do or do not agree with us. But the words which Middle English uses to express this trichotomy might sometimes deceive us. Often they are clear enough, as when the Wife of Bath says
Experience, though noun auctoritee
Were in this world, were right ynough to me
To speke of wo that is in marriage.
(D I.)
But unfortunately the word experience is not always used for the third type of proof. The variants are two. To learn by experience may be to feel; or, more misleading, knowledge by experience may be preve (that is, proof). Thus Chaucer opens his Legend of Phillis by saying that the maxim ‘wikked frute cometh of a wikked tree’ can be learned not only from authority but ‘by preve’; that is, empirically. In the Hous of Fame the eagle says that the poet can ‘fele’ the theory of sound which he has just enunciated (826). In the Knight’s Tale the line ‘Ne who most felingly speketh of love’ (A 2203) sounds very modern. But to ‘speak feelingly’ probably means to speak from first-hand experience. No doubt those who did so might also be expected to speak ‘with most feeling’ in our sense; but lexically, I question whether felingly in Middle English could mean ‘emotionally’.
Everything that we should now call criticism belonged either to Grammar or to Rhetoric. The Grammarian explained a poet’s metre and allusions: the Rhetorician dealt with structure and style. Neither had anything to say about the point of view or the individual sensibility, the majesty or piquancy or pathos or humour, which structure and style embody. Hence poets are nearly always praised on purely stylistic grounds. Virgil is for Dante the poet who taught him his bello stilo (Inferno, I, 86). Petrarch in the Clerk’s Prologue is for Chaucer the man who illuminated all Italy with his ‘rethoryke swete’ (E 31). Chaucer in the Book of Thebes is for Lydgate the ‘flour’ of poets in Britain by his ‘excellence in rethorike and in eloquence’ (Prologue, 40). All Chaucer’s medieval successors speak of him in this way. You could not discover from their eulogies that he had ever presented a lifelike character or told a merry tale.
The ancient teachers of Rhetoric addressed their precepts to orators in an age when public speaking was an indispensable skill for every public man—even for a general in the field—and for every private man if he got involved in litigation. Rhetoric was then not so much the loveliest (soavissima) as the most practical of the arts. By the Middle Ages it has become literary. Its precepts are addressed quite as much to poets as to advocates. There is no antithesis, indeed no distinction, between Rhetoric and Poetry. I think the Rhetoricians always have in view a pupil whose medium will be Latin, but their work also affected vernacular practice.
Chaucer’s apostrophe to ‘Gaufred, dere mayster souverain’ in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale (B 4537) has kept alive the memory of Geoffrey de Vinsauf who ‘flourished’ about 1200 and wrote the Nova Poetria;40 a work whose value lies in its extreme naivety.
He divides Ordo (which some call Dispositio) into two kinds, Natural and Artificial.41 The Natural follows the King of Hearts’ advice by beginning at the beginning. The Artificial is of three kinds. You can begin at the end (as in the Oedipus Rex or a play by Ibsen); or in the middle (like Virgil and Spenser); or with a Sententia or Exemplum. Chaucer begins with a Sententia or maxim in the Parlement, the Hous of Fame, the Prologue to the Legend, the Legend of Phillis, and the Prioress’s Tale. I cannot remember that he ever begins with an Exemplum, but no one needs to be reminded how frequent they are in his work. The Franklin’s Tale is held up from line 1367 to line 1456 by a procession of them, and Troilus had good reason to say to Pandarus
What knowe I of the Quene Niobee?
Lat be thyne olde ensaumples I thee preye.
(I, 759.)
Here Geoffrey is dealing with a real problem, which we have all faced though few of us would pose it so bluntly. The Natural Order will not always serve. And the plan of beginning with a Sententia, or with something like it, is still an unlaid ghost. It ‘walks’ in that fatal opening paragraph with which schoolboys are apparently taught to begin their essays.
On Amplificatio42 he is almost embarrassing. He calls the various methods of ‘amplifying’ your piece, quite frankly, morae (delays); as if the art of literature consisted in learning how to say much when you have little to say. That, I suspect, was how he really regarded it. But this means not that the morae he recommends are all necessarily bad but that he misunderstands—I do not profess to understand it fully myself—their real function.
One kind of mora is Expolitio. Its formula is ‘Let the same thing be disguised by variety of form; be different yet the same’—
multiplice forma
Dissimuletur idem; varius sis et tamen idem.
It sounds dreadful. But it is not so in the Psalms, nor in
Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight
And burned is Apollo’s laurel bough.
Less successful is
When clouds are seen wise men put on their cloaks;
When great leaves fall then winter is at hand;
When the sun sets who does not look for night?
Untimely storms make men expect a dearth.
(Richard III, II, iii, 32 sq.)
Another is Circumlocutio. ‘In order to lengthen the work don’t call things by their names’ (Longius ut sit opus ne ponas nomina rerum). Thus Dante calls dawn ‘Old Tithonus’ bedfellow’, la concubina di Titone antico, in the Purgatorio (IX, 1), or Chaucer at the opening of Troilus, III, instead of ‘O Venus’ writes
O blisful light of which the bemes clere
Adorneth at the thridde hevene faire,
O sonnes lief, O Joves daughter dere,
Pleasaunce of love, O goodly debonaire . . . .
But the most important of all the morae is Diversio or Digression. Nearly all of us, when we first began reading medieval poetry, got the impression that the poets were unable to keep to the point. We may even have thought that they were drifting with the stream of consciousness. The revived study of medieval Rhetoric—a welcome novelty in twentieth-century medievalism—puts an end to that idea. For good or ill the digressiveness of the medieval writers is the product not of nature but of art. The second part of the Romance of the Rose depends on Digressions in the same degree, if not in the same way, as Tristram Shandy. It has even been suggested43 that the peculiar narrative technique of the romances and of their Renaissance successors, the interwoven stories that so incessantly cross and interrupt one anot
her, may be simply one more application of the digressive principle and an offshoot of Rhetoric.
This theory, which I do not myself fully accept, has at any rate the merit of replacing the Digressions recommended by Geoffrey in their proper context. They can be regarded as an expression of the same impulse we see at work in much medieval architecture and decoration. We may call it the love of the labyrinthine; the tendency to offer to the mind or the eye something that cannot be taken in at a glance, something that at first looks planless though all is planned. Everything leads to everything else, but by very intricate paths. At every point the question ‘How did we get here?’ arises, but there is always an answer. Professor Gunn44 has done much towards enabling us to recover the taste by which such a structure could be enjoyed in literature; which could feel that the main subject, in throwing off so many digressions, which themselves throw off subordinate digressions, showed the ramifying energy of a strong tree, glorious with plenitude.
The other morae are Apostropha and Descriptio, which call for no comment.
On Ornatus, stylistic ornament, Geoffrey has a remarkable piece of advice: ‘Do not always let a word remain in its natural position’ (noli semper concedere verbo In proprio residere loco). What lies behind this is the practice of authors like Apuleius; in an inflected language such as Latin there is hardly any limit to the possible dislocations of idiomatic word-order. Yet Chaucer can go a long way in English, and so skilfully that we may not always be aware of it:
The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen
That was the King Priamus’ sone of Troye,
In loving how his aventures fellen
Fro wo to wele and after out of ioye,
My purpose is . . . .
(Troilus, I, 1 sq).
It goes down easily enough; but at no period of the English language would such a sentence have been possible in conversation. Nor was Chaucer the last poet to practise this nice derangement.
Two morals may possibly be drawn: (1) that the word-order in high medieval poetry can never, of itself, be evidence for that of the spoken language; and (2) that where a peculiarity of the order looks to us like a desperate concession to the demands of metre, this may not always be so.
How to end your composition, as well as how to begin it, was a problem. Matthew of Vendôme in his Ars Versificatoria45 (late twelfth century) suggests five methods.46
One is per epilogum, that is per recapitulationem sententiae, by summing up the ‘sentence’ or moral of the whole. Chaucer thus ends the Tales of the Miller, the Reeve, and the Physician.
Another is by asking someone to amend your work; as Chaucer asks Gower at the end of Troilus (V, 1856).
The third is per veniae petitionem, by asking indulgence for your deficiencies. Gower uses this method in the Confessio (VIII, 3062, 1st version) and Hawes in the Pastime of Pleasure (5796).
The fourth is with a vaunt, per ostensionem gloriae. The classical precedent is Horace’s exegi monumentum. Few, if any, medieval vernacular poets were bold enough to follow it.
Finally, you can end with the praise of God. Chaucer combines this with the second method in Troilus (V, 1863).
The Rhetorical precepts can be seen working at full blast in the Phisicien’s Tale. Here is the analysis.
1–4 Story
5–29 Descriptio interrupted by Prosopopoea of Nature
30–71 Descriptio resumed
72–92 Apostropha to governesses
93–104 Apostropha to parents
105–239 Story
240–244 Exemplum of Jephthah’s daughter
245–276 Story
277–286 Ending per recapitulationem sententiae
It works out at about ten lines of Amplification to every sixteen of narrative. The Manciple’s Tale is equally rhetorical; in the Pardoner’s, digression is used in a way that moderns find easier to enjoy.
The four Quadrivial Arts must here be summarily dismissed. Of Astronomy something has been said in an earlier chapter. On the vast and rewarding subject of medieval Music the reader must seek guides who are better qualified than I;47 and Geometry, naturally, makes little impact on literature. It is, however, worth remembering that Arithmetic acquired during the Middle Ages an invaluable new tool—the so-called ‘Arabic’ numerals. The system is really of Indian origin and dates from the fifth century, but it reached the West through the work of the ninth-century mathematician Ben Musa, known as Al-Khowarazmi. A curious little eddy of errors and legends resulted. ‘Al-Khowarazmi’ (the man from Khawarazm) suggests an abstract noun algorism, later augrim, which means calculation. Hence ‘figures of augrim’ in the Ancrene Wisse. Then, to account for the word algorism, a mathematical sage Algus is invented, so that the Roman de la Rose speaks of
Algus, Euclidees, Tholomees.
(16,373.)
But in line 12,994 Algus had become Argus; in which form he slips into the Book of the Duchess—‘Argus the noble countour’.
CHAPTER 8
THE INFLUENCE OF THE MODEL
At sight of all this World beheld so faire.
MILTON
No one who has read the higher kinds of medieval and Renaissance poetry has failed to notice the amount of solid instruction—of science, philosophy, or history—that they carry. Sometimes, as in the Divine Comedy or Lyndsay’s Dreme or Spenser’s Mutability cantos, the theme is so chosen that it permits and invites such matter. Sometimes such matter is organically connected with a theme which, by our standards, seems well able to have dispensed with it; as the character and influence of the planets are worked into the Knight’s Tale or the Testament of Cresseid. It may also seem to us to be ‘dragged in by the heels’ where, I believe, the medieval author would have felt it to be wholly relevant. When the poet of Gawain begins with the fall of Troy he is not merely padding. He is obeying the principle of ‘a place for everything and everything in its right place’; fitting Gawain through Arthur and Arthur through Brut and Brut through Troy into the total ‘historial’ Model. The commonest method, however, is by digression; such digressions as we find in the Roman de la Rose on Fortune (4837–5070), on free will (17,101–778), on true nobility (18,589–896), on the function and limitations of Nature (15,891–16,974), on the merely derivative immortality of gods or angels (19,063–112). In places readers may disagree as to how far a piece of cosmology or metaphysics constitutes a digression. The long dramatisation (in a Christianised form) of Aristotle’s distinction between Nature and the realm above her which occupies Deguileville’s Pèlerinage from line 3344 to line 3936 (of Lydgate’s version) may be thought relevant. And some think that the treatment of free will in Troilus, V, is no digression.
The simplest form in which this tendency expresses itself is mere catalogue. We have in Bernardus catalogues of Hierarchies, stars, mountains, beasts, rivers, woods, vegetables, fish, and birds (I Metr. III); in the Hous of Fame, of musicians (III, 1201 sq.); in the Franklin’s Tale, of virtuous women (F 1367 sq.); in the King’s Quair, of beasts (st. 155–7); in the Temple of Glas, of famous lovers (55 sq.); in Henryson’s Trial of the Fox, of beasts (Fables, 881 sq.); in the Court of Sapience, stones (953 sq.), fish (1198 sq.), flowers (1282 sq.), trees (1374 sq.), birds and beasts (1387 sq.). In Douglas’ Palice of Honour we have sages, lovers, Muses, mountains, rivers, and ‘nobill men and women both of scripture and gentyll stories’. The whole plan of Petrarch’s Trionfi seems to be devised for the purpose of admitting as many catalogues as possible.
At first one suspects pedantry, but that can hardly be the true explanation. Much, though not all, of the knowledge was too common to reflect any particular distinction on an author. Henryson might expect, and justly, to be admired for describing the characters of the planets so vividly; hardly for knowing them. The same objection holds against the view which I took when, years ago, I first dealt with medieval literature. I thought that in an age when books were few and the intellectual appetite sharp-set, any knowledge might be welcome in any context. But this does not explain w
hy the authors so gladly present knowledge which most of their audience must have possessed. One gets the impression that medieval people, like Professor Tolkien’s Hobbits, enjoyed books which told them what they already knew.
Another explanation might be based in Rhetoric. Rhetoric recommended morae—delays or padding. Does all this science and ‘story’ come in simply longius ut sit opus, ‘that the work may be longer’? But this perhaps overlooks the fact that Rhetoric explains the formal, not the material, characteristic. That is, it may tell you to digress; not what to put into your digressions. It may approve Common Places; it can hardly decide what shall achieve the status of a Common Place. From reading Dr Curtius1 on the locus amoenus, that pleasant woodland scene at which so many poets tried their hand, an unwary reader might get a wrong impression (which naturally I do not attribute to Dr Curtius himself). He might think that Rhetoric accounted not only for the treatment of this Common Place but for the popularity that made it common. But Rhetoric is no such closed system. It is Nature—the character of shifting light and shade, of trees and running water and a gentle breeze, and their effect on human nerves and emotions—which caused the locus to be amoenus, and only therefore to be communis. In the same way, if all the catalogues and digressions are filled with a certain sort of matter, this must be because writers and their audience liked it. Digression need not deal with the large, permanent features of the universe unless you want. The long-tailed similes in Homer or the ‘episodes’ in Thomson usually do not. They are more often ‘vignettes’.
Again, the Rhetorical explanation could hardly be extended to cover the visible arts, where we are met with the same phenomenon. They also continually re-state what was believed about the universe. I have already mentioned2 the cupola above Chigi’s tomb which magnificently re-states the Boethian doctrine of Providence and Destiny. It does not stand alone. The planets look down from the capitals in the Doge’s palace, each surrounded by his ‘children’, by the mortals who exhibit his influence.3 At Florence they meet us again, strangely disguised by the influence of Saracenic iconography, in Santa Maria del Fiore;4 and again in Santa Maria Novella, paired off, after the manner of the Convivio, with the Seven Liberal Arts.5 The Salone (Palazzo della Ragione) at Padua6 is, in a different art, a close parallel to Spenser’s Mutability cantos. We have the planets, their children, the Zodiacal signs, the Apostles, and the labours of men all arranged under their appropriate months.