Laura Miller (34 page)

According to
Biographia Literaria,
imagination “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.” Fancy, by contrast, only rearranges preestablished “fixities and definites,” and is really no more than a “mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space.” It is the difference between rearranging the furniture in your mind and building it from scratch. “So by these standards,” Wolfe wrote in his e-mail to me, “you could make an argument that Tolkien inventing a new world and language that is not a direct mirror or allegory, is a better representative of Coleridge’s ‘imagination’ than Lewis, who employed Christian allegorical elements and familiar figures from myth and folklore in a way that more or less equates with ‘fancy.’”    

Here we come to one aspect of the Romantic creed that Lewis found myopic: the cult of individual genius and its corollary preoccupation with originality. Lewis knew that the high valuation placed on artistic novelty was itself fairly recent. The writers he studied regarded new material and ideas as precarious; far better to found your text on established
authorities,
as the great writers of the past were called. But contrary to what a modern reader might conclude, Lewis believed that this attitude didn’t necessarily reduce the work of medieval writers to the mere parroting or imitation of other authors.

When Chaucer “works over” a poem by Boccaccio, Lewis writes in
The Discarded Image,
his delightful book on the medieval mind, “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.” As he saw it, the miracle of medieval literature was that its great writers, without attempting to do anything unprecedented, and in the act of what appeared to be no more than touching up some venerable source, nevertheless transfigured their material: “they handled no predecessor without pouring new life into him.”

Lewis took the defense of the Middle Ages as the great cause of his academic career.
The Allegory of Love
aimed to unlock the riddles of the medieval romances for modern scholars, and the same could be said of his critical magnum opus,
English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama,
a volume in
The Oxford History of English Literature
series (semiaffectionately nicknamed
OHEL
). Lewis described the supreme English poet of the 1500s, Edmund Spenser, as “neo-Medieval.” What was good about English literature in the sixteenth century, Lewis firmly believed, had its roots in the worldview, the style, and the tastes of the Middle Ages.

The brilliance of the Renaissance (if by “Renaissance” we mean the revival of classical forms of art, literature, and philosophy in Europe beginning in Italy in the fifteenth century), Lewis felt, was not just overrated, but possibly nonexistent. “My line,” he wrote to a colleague, “is to
define
the Renaissance as ‘an imaginary entity responsible for anything a modern writer happens to approve in the 15th or 16th century.’” According to then current intellectual fashion, whatever the modern observer liked — such as Dante, a poet Lewis considered completely medieval — would be chalked up to a manifestation of the Renaissance; everything unappealing would be labeled as typical of the Middle Ages.

Like most students, I was taught to think of the years between the fifth and the fifteenth centuries as the Dark Ages. Historians have by now virtually abandoned that term, and even when it was more commonly used, it was meant to describe only the period before the eleventh century; the “darkness” refers to the lack of contemporary historical records from those years. But from the perspective of my Renaissance-adulating sixth-grade teacher and our social studies textbook, the metaphorical shadow fell over all of the Middle Ages. Those were ignorant and backward times as far as we were concerned, and not worth much attention. Perhaps this was true of, say, the visual arts in Italy. But, as Lewis observes in
OHEL,
it doesn’t make much sense to regard the bulk of sixteenth-century English literature as a major improvement on Chaucer.

It would also be a mistake, he insists, to give too much credit for the flowering of Elizabethan literature in the late 1500s to “humanism.” The English humanists — those thinkers who read, taught, and emulated classical authors — were, in Lewis’s opinion, far more influenced by Latin than by Greek (which in any case most of them barely knew). And that influence was not necessarily salubrious. The English writers of the early sixteenth century made the mistake of attempting to mimic Latin prose and verse styles in their own language. This was a bad idea, partly because Latin is inflected and English is not, and it led to stiff, drab writing.

If only the humanists had been as familiar with Greek as many people seemed to think they were! Then their writing might have escaped this Latinate deadliness; Lewis felt that it was impossible to be “marmoreal” in Greek. Latin, alas, permits endless pomposity. “The desire [among early sixteenth-century British writers] was for order and discipline, weight, and decorum,” Lewis writes in
OHEL,
and this affectation produced prose and verse that was ponderous, artificial, and abstract. “Nothing is light, or tender or fresh” in the literature of the early 1500s, he complains. “All the authors write like elderly men.”

Only when English writers got over their aspirations to classical dignity did English literature recover, and when it did, “fantasy, conceit, paradox, color, incantation” returned. Spenser and Philip Sidney brought back these qualities by taking up that quintessentially medieval form, the romance, in
The Faerie Queene
and
Arcadia.
Even Shakespeare’s vitality as a dramatist, Lewis insisted, was tapped from popular art forms that had survived from the Middle Ages, unsullied by the fashions of the lettered classes. The literary rebirth in the Elizabethan era occurred, he argued, not because of classicism, but in spite of it. It happened because the great artists of the period revived the inherently medieval flavor of English, a language that is particular, intimate, diverse, and lively, rather than grand and abstract. Few English writers could successfully reproduce the stately gravitas of Latin verse (only Milton ever excelled at it, Lewis felt), and as long as they kept trying, they generated nothing but bad poetry and the rationales to justify it. “The more we look into the question,” he wrote, “the harder we shall find it to believe that humanism had any power of encouraging, or any wish to encourage, the literature that actually arose” under Elizabeth I.

With this unconventional argument, Lewis completely reversed the commonly held view of the Middle Ages as a cultural lull, and placed them at the center of the English imagination and sensibility. If modern readers have difficulty appreciating this truth, he felt, it’s because our world is so different from that one; we have to learn to imaginatively project ourselves into the medieval universe in order to read medieval books properly. Doing this requires more than just picturing a life without combustion engines or penicillin; you have to slip into the consciousness of someone with an entirely different conception of the cosmos. And you can’t just think your way into it by, say, intermittently reminding yourself that the author you’re reading believed that the planets are embedded in a series of nested crystal spheres and play music as they revolve. You had to try to
feel
what that world felt like to that man or woman. “The recipe for such realization is not the study of books,” Lewis wrote. “You must go out on a starry night and walk about for half an hour trying to see the sky in terms of the old cosmology.”

Lewis regarded the medieval model of the universe as a great collective work of art and science, a conceptual cathedral built of the thoughts and words of many people. Not all of these were Christians by any means; the medievals respected the classical philosophers they knew about almost as much as they revered scripture, and even the “barbarians” (that is, nonclassical pagans) had some influence. “The Model,” as Lewis refers to it, was both beautiful to contemplate and reassuring to inhabit; everything had its proper place in a perfectly ordered hierarchy proceeding from unformed matter at the bottom of the scale to God at the pinnacle. All things were known, or at least knowable; all ideas could be made to fit into the whole, which was one reason why innovation for its own sake seemed superfluous.

If Lewis himself couldn’t entirely believe in this “finite” yet melodious universe, he felt its attraction. “The ‘space’ of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie,” he wrote; “the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony. . . . This explains why all sense of the pathless, the baffling, and the utterly alien — all agoraphobia — is so markedly absent from medieval poetry when it leads us, as so often, into the sky.”

The medieval universe, however, was also extremely intricate. The angelic population alone consists of three hierarchies of beings, divided into three species apiece, each with its own name, duties, and native powers. This complexity was yet another result of the incorrigible bookishness of the time, compounded by the sheer credulity of medieval scholars whenever dealing with venerable texts. “They find it hard to believe that anything an old
auctour
has said is simply untrue,” Lewis observed drily. If it was written down, it had to be correct, and therefore must be accommodated into the model.

As a result, medieval intellectuals devoted themselves not only to compiling, but also to reconciling the whole, diverse panoply of known printed information, pagan and Christian, much of it seemingly incompatible. This task called for great feats of imaginative metaphysics. The medievals’ conception of astronomy may be the most eloquent example of their ability, à la Lewis Carroll’s White Queen, to believe several impossible things before breakfast. They regarded the stars as physical objects
and
as supernatural intelligent beings bearing the names of pagan gods (although ultimately emanations of, and subordinate to, the Supreme God)
and
as disembodied forces, exerting great influence over human affairs — all at the same time. It’s easy to see why allegory became the signature literary form of the period.

It was to help readers grasp this convoluted system that Lewis wrote
The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature.
He conceived of this long essay (or short book) as a Baedeker to the past, intended for readers who, like cultivated travelers, prefer to visit a foreign country with some sense of what “those ways of life, those churches, those vineyards, mean to the natives.” Ideally, reading is a kind of collaboration: the more a reader brings to the book, the more he has to contribute to the experience and the richer it will be. In another text with similar ambitions,
A Preface to Paradise Lost,
Lewis remarked that while Milton’s poetry is often compared to organ music, “it might be more helpful to regard the reader as the organ and Milton as the organist. It is on us he plays, if we will let him.” No musician can play well on a faulty or inadequate instrument; the ideal reader responds to the work on every octave it sounds.

It’s difficult for moderns like ourselves, steeped in the Romantic veneration of individuality, to think of the closed, structured medieval universe and the period’s slavish veneration of “authorities” as anything but conformist and oppressive. But, as the writers of sonnets often claim, artistic constraints can be paradoxically liberating. In this case, Lewis argued, they steered writers away from pretense and hot air. When you choose from a list of presanctioned subjects and themes, you need not justify the material as important or worthy; it supplies all the required weight on its own. As a result, the best authors of the Middle Ages wrote humbly, clearly, gracefully, unself-consciously. “The glory of the best medieval work,” Lewis wrote, “often consists precisely in the fact that we see through it; it is a pure transparency.”

Not coincidentally, this sounds very much like Neil Gaiman’s description of what he likes about Lewis’s prose: “It’s clean, it’s beautiful, it makes sense,” he told me. “It doesn’t do anything but what it’s meant to do.” When I finally found my way to Lewis’s criticism, I discovered that it had the same clarity as his children’s fiction (a genre in which lucid writing is required). Even Lewis’s great detractor, Philip Pullman, aspires to the same, very English, ideal of a transparent style: novelists like James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov, he told me, write books in which “a lot of the interest and sometimes all the interest, is in the surface of the prose [but] my main interest is in the things that you can see through the window of the prose.”

The great beauty Lewis found in medieval literature lies in its effortless integration of precise, modest detail — the “homely,” as he and Arthur Greeves called it — with the vast, comprehensive grandeur of the medieval cosmos. In such a scheme, every small thing — the fall of a sparrow, as Hamlet put it — plays its own, essential part. To demonstrate this, Lewis liked to pluck plainspoken, endearing little touches of realism out of old poems and hold them up to the light for his readers’ admiration. One of his favorites was the moment in Chaucer’s “Summoner’s Tale” when the itinerant Friar John pauses to “droof awey the cat” before sitting down on a patron’s bench. Lewis was also fond of the passage in Layamon’s
Brut,
a Middle English poem about the history of Britain, in which the fifteen-year-old Arthur is told by a party of Britons first that his father is dead and then that he must assume the throne; they observe the prince sitting “full still; / one while he was wan, and in hue exceeding pale; one while he was red.”