The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (29 page)

French poets, in the eleventh century, discovered or invented, or were the first to express, that romantic species of passion which English poets were still writing about in the nineteenth. They effected a change which has left no corner of our ethics, our imagination, or our daily life untouched, and they erected impassable barriers between us and the classical past or the oriental present. Compared with this revolution the Renaissance is a mere ripple on the surface of literature.

Yet it was not romantic love as we conceive of it today that the troubadours and poets of the high Middle Ages celebrated. Rather, Lewis points out, it was
fin’ amor
(pure love), a highly specialized form of passion, ascetical in the extremes of self-abasement and disciplined courtesy it demanded, cultlike in its ardent devotion, and, since medieval marriage was, according to Lewis, an affair of property and inheritance, not of the heart, strictly confined to adulterous love.

The object of
fin’ amor
, then, is essentially unlawful and unattainable, even if fleetingly enjoyed.
Fin’ amor
, one can’t help notice, approaches everything Lewis meant by Joy: that delicious sharp pang of pure desiring, desiring what cannot be possessed, that leads beyond the narrow confines of the self. Did Lewis, too, think that joy could not be found in married life? It would be reasonable to suspect so, given his domestic situation; yet the whole point of
The Allegory of Love
is to show how
fin’ amor
came at last, in Spenser, to be translated to the sphere of married life. The revolution that began in adultery ended in Christian domesticity.

Courtly love was, according to Lewis, a genuine
novum
, irreducible to historical or sociological terms. The sudden increase of landless knights attached to the isolated castle where a powerful lady and her damsels held sway was a favorable condition for this development, not an adequate cause. The medieval cult of the Blessed Virgin was more likely a beneficiary than a source of the new religion of love. Classical love poetry contributed material but not did shape the essential vision of courtly love; and early Christianity did not foresee it. Thus in
The Allegory of Love
, Lewis rejected the determinism of history, much as in later apologetic books like
Miracles
he would reject the determinism of scientific naturalism. New things can happen, Lewis insists; there can be miracles of literary as of moral history. One reads him as a literary scholar, only to be brought up short by the realization that he is making a philosophical as well as a historical argument.

Readers of
The Allegory of Love
have sometimes questioned whether Lewis underestimated the rhetorical character of courtly love literature. Was “courtly love” (the expression was coined by Gaston Paris, a nineteenth-century scholar of Arthurian romances) actually felt and practiced by knights and ladies? Or was it merely a stylish literary invention, decked out in allegorical finery? Lewis was inclined to grant the justice of both views: yes, it was a literary phenomenon, but one that afforded a real window into medieval souls. Why could it not be both at once?

The modern reader is predisposed to regard allegorical language as artificial, arbitrary, and insufficiently introspective to provide real insight into the experience of medieval lovers. The personification of abstract qualities, mother’s milk to medieval writers, came to seem alien and repugnant to modern thought. But Lewis loved nothing more than the chance to defend ways of thinking that moderns find alien and repugnant. Hence, with a degree of exaggeration, he insists that allegory belongs to “the very nature of thought and language.” It is a fragment of the perennial language, signaling immaterial feelings by material images that remain constant across the ages and around the world: heaven images the highest good, dark caverns image evil, life is a journey, reason the unconquered sun, conscience a voice. “To ask how these married pairs of sensibles and insensibles first came together would be great folly; the real question, is how they ever came apart.”

Owen Barfield had given Lewis a way of answering this question: rejection of allegory is a symptom of estrangement from the poetic roots of our own everyday language. The irony is that allegory is inescapable: the modern Freudian psychodrama of ego, superego, and id is as artificial an allegory as one can find in any medieval mystery play. Moreover, the allegorical personification of abstract qualities and ideals reflected a moral psychology that, in Lewis’s opinion, was more robust, demanding, objective, and exhilarating than the shapeless and chronically unfinished self-project of modern psychologies. Allegory did become artificial, Lewis concedes, after Spenser, and it is the debased, contrived form of allegory that for so long gave it a bad name. But allegory before Spenser, and allegory in the hands of Spenser, is another matter altogether. Spenser is the true hero of
The Allegory of Love
: the Christian poet who celebrated “life’s golden tree” so vividly “that it is difficult not to fancy that our bodily, no less than our mental, health is refreshed by reading him”; the love poet who transfigured
fin’ amor
into a communion to which married couples could aspire; the Renaissance poet who perfected medieval allegory before its decline into a “literary toy.”

Allegory, then, is something disenchanted moderns need to know better, but it is not, Lewis intimates, quite as revelatory as symbol or myth. “There is nothing ‘mystical’ or mysterious about medieval allegory; the poets know quite clearly what they are about and are well aware that the figures which they present to us are fictions. Symbolism is a mode of thought, but allegory is a mode of expression.” Allegory is a lower form in that “the allegorist leaves the given—his own passions—to talk of that which is confessedly less real, which is a fiction. The symbolist leaves the given to find that which is more real.” The distinction, reminiscent of Coleridge, was rather forced, however; in a 1940 letter, Lewis said it was one of the parts of
The Allegory of Love
with which he felt dissatisfied
.
While Tolkien would insist to his last breath on the strict separation of the allegorical from the mythopoeic imagination, Lewis was willing to accept that these genres can be difficult to define with precision and often come mixed.

The Allegory of Love
is a brilliant literary double helix: it tells the history of courtly love and the history of allegory by turns, revolving around a shared axis. Either history would have been a tour de force on its own; entwined together, the book irritated some as much as it impressed other scholarly reviewers. In an early review (April 1937) in
Speculum
, the American medieval studies journal, Howard Patch, a medievalist teaching at Smith College, acknowledged that the book “affords excellent reading,” but could not endorse it: “If his work lacks permanent importance it is because his light touch has at times led him into extravagant statement.” The same month, the University of Manchester philologist G. L. Brook, writing in The
Modern Language Review
, called
The Allegory of Love
“undoubtedly one of the best books on mediaeval literature ever published in this country,” and a few months later, Kathleen Tillotson, a scholar of Victorian literature, told readers of
The Review of English Studies
that “it is rarely that we meet with a work of literary criticism of such manifest and general importance as this. No one could read it without seeing all literature a little differently for ever after.” She concluded that “Mr. Lewis is a critic alive at all points and wearing his learning like a plumed hat. His book, in addition to its other virtues, celebrates the marriage of
Philologia
and Mercury, too long divided”—by which she meant the marriage of the warring disciplines of philology and literary interpretation, or lang. and lit.

The intense labors of this seven-year period also appeared later in the 1944 Clark Lectures and the
OHEL
volume (discussed below), as well as in the posthumously published
Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature
and
The Discarded Image
. Taking these works together, one sees the lineaments of Lewis’s entire scholarly project—which was nothing less than to give an account, at once historical and spiritual, of Europe’s Christian literary imagination, from its Latin beginnings to its vernacular allegories and romances and its secular spin-offs, and to defend, against modernist prejudices, its enduring significance; to unlearn what we thought we knew about medieval poetry, morality, and science; to overcome the intellectual inhibitions that prevent us from enjoying literature both ancient and modern, on its own terms and for its own sake; to celebrate old books as a means of recovering the roots of Western culture; to savor, within those old books, those elements least congenial to modern prejudices, overcoming even a justified dislike of rhetorical artifice, “for surely to be indulgent to mere fashion in other periods, and merciless to it in our own, is the first step we can make out of the prison of the Zeitgeist?” If Spenser was, as Lewis suggests, “something between the last of the medieval poets and the first of the romantic medievalists,” then Lewis, with
The Allegory of Love
, was emerging as the last of the romantic medievalists. He was convinced that it needed only the effort of looking through medieval eyes for us to see a meaningful, humanly habitable, ordered universe—a universe that is truly a cosmos rather than a chaos or a trackless waste; he was convinced that poetry and imaginative literature were a means of keeping alive, by transposing to a new key, the aesthetic and moral sensibilities endangered by a crude scientific positivism.

Checkmate

If Lewis was an agnostic while writing
The Allegory of Love
, by the time it was published he was a Christian and an allegorist in his own right. It was almost inevitable. Not only the poetry that made the subject of the “Prolegomena” lectures and
The Allegory of Love
, but almost all his leisure reading—from George Herbert’s rapturous poems to G. K. Chesterton’s exuberant history,
The Everlasting Man
—conspired to give him a mental landscape bedecked with symbols and images, even doctrines, of the faith. The balance of Western thought, he was beginning to realize, tilted heavily toward Christianity. His own history followed the same ineluctable curve. The movement along this arc had taken several years, as he moved from Joy as an end in itself, to Joy as a sign of something beyond, to the idealism of Bradley with its impersonal Absolute. But no one with Lewis’s romantic yearnings rests content for long with the impersonal Absolute, even under the pseudonym of Spirit. A metaphysical solution that precludes all devotion, all worship—who can lose his heart to such a heartless answer? All the writers he most admired, Lewis notes (Plato, the medieval romancers, Johnson, Milton), and all the friends he most admired (Barfield, Tolkien, Coghill) believed in a personal God. He tells us, in
Surprised by Joy
, that the turning point came in 1929 during a bus ride up Headington Hill, when he realized that he had to choose: “I became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out.” He let that something—which soon proved to be a Someone—in, knowing as he did so that he was turning his back, or kicking apart, the great atheist/agnostic edifice, built of theorizing and prejudices, proofs and hatreds, fear and ambition, that he had constructed over so many years:

I was to be allowed to play at philosophy no longer. It might, as I say, still be true that my “Spirit” differed in some way from “the God of popular religion.” My Adversary waived the point. It sank into utter unimportance. He would not argue about it. He only said, “I am the Lord”; “I am that I am”; “I am” … You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed; perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

This passage has been taken by most biographers as the gospel truth about Lewis’s journey toward the Gospel; it has achieved the status of a classic conversion testimony. But it should be noted that the conversion Lewis describing is to “theism,” not yet to full-blown Christianity. And there is a problem about dates; for in the February following the Trinity (i.e., spring) term of 1929, Lewis wrote Barfield that “terrible things are happening to me. The ‘Spirit’ or ‘Real I’ is showing an alarming tendency to become much more personal and is taking the offensive, and behaving just like God. You’d better come on Monday at the latest or I may have entered a monastery.” On this evidence, it would appear that Lewis was still on the fence. A revised dating suggested by Alister McGrath would place Lewis’s conversion to theism in the Trinity term of 1930.

Then, too, God as the “Adversary” who makes “moves” and achieves “checkmate” reminds one much, perhaps a bit too much, of Francis Thompson’s “Hound of Heaven” (“I fled Him, down the nights and down the days / I fled Him, down the arches of the years”). Thompson’s descriptions of himself—“of all man’s clotted clay the dingiest clot” and a “strange piteous futile thing”—are first cousins to Lewis’s self-accounting on the eve of his conversion, as “a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds.” Self-deprecation is the appropriate response of any new convert, as he matches his stained soul against the purity of God; but Lewis was a well-read man. There is no direct evidence that he knew Thompson’s poem, but it appeared in
The
Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse
(1917); Tolkien, as early as 1914, had lauded Thompson and his work during a talk to the Exeter College Essay Club, and it is certainly possible that he and Lewis discussed the poem.