Edmund Spenser |
Added to that, I admit, there was the challenge of the thing, like wanting to climb a particular hill-- all the more attractive and enticing because it is a landmark.
I gave up a little way into the second book, and I decided that I was never going to try again. (Although, who knows...?) C.S. Lewis wrote very interestingly of the themes and ideas under the surface, but it was the surface itself I found tedious. In writing, physical description is the thing I find most boring, and this poem is packed with it. Descriptions of physical combat are something else I find boring, and the book is also packed with these. (Just like The Iliad, which I finished but probably shouldn't have.)
However, two passages lodged in my mind. One was a description of the Seven Deadly Sins, embodied as characters. (The Fairy Queen is an allegory, or a quasi-allegory.)
The other was just the opposite. The hero of the beginning of the book is the Red Cross Knight, and in Canto Ten he goes to a 'house of holiness' to recover and to do penance for his sins. Considering this is a poem dripping with all sorts of gorgeousness and finery and ceremony, (and also with a great deal of foullness and ugliness), the sudden change towards the austere and clean and humble is very striking. He is led by Una, his fair lady.
Arrived
there, the dore they find fast lockt;
For it was
warely watched night and day,
For feare of
many foes: but when they knockt,
The Porter
opened unto them streight way:
He was an
aged syre, all hory gray,
With lookes
full lowly cast, and gate full slow,
Wont on a
staffe his feeble steps to stay,
Hight
Humiltà . They passe in stouping low;
For streight
and narrow was the way which he did show.
Each goodly
thing is hardest to begin,
But entred
in a spacious court they see,
Both plaine,
and pleasant to be walked in,
Where them
does meete a francklin faire and free,
And
entertaines with comely courteous glee,
His name was
Zele, that him right well became,
For in his
speeches and behaviour hee
Did labour
lively to expresse the same,
And gladly
did them guide, till to the Hall they came.
There
fairely them receives a gentle Squire,
Of milde
demeanure, and rare courtesie,
Right
cleanly clad in comely sad attire;
In word and
deede that shew'd great modestie,
And knew his
good to all of each degree,
Hight
Reverence. He them with speeches meet
Does faire
entreat; no courting nicetie,
But simple
true, and eke unfained sweet,
As might
become a Squire so great persons to greet.
And
afterwards them to his Dame he leades,
That aged
Dame, the Ladie of the place:
Who all this
while was busy at her beades:
Which doen,
she up arose with seemely grace,
And toward
them full matronely did pace.
Where when
that fairest Una she beheld,
Whom well
she knew to spring from heavenly race,
Her hart
with joy unwonted inly sweld,
As feeling
wondrous comfort in her weaker eld.
And her
embracing said, O happie earth,
Whereon thy
innocent feet doe ever tread,
Most
vertuous virgin borne of heavenly berth,
That, to
redeeme thy woefull parents head,
From
tyrant’s rage, and ever dying dread,
Hast wandred
through the world now long a day
Yet ceasest
not thy weary soles to lead
What grace
hath thee now hither brought this way?
Or doen thy
feeble feet unweeting hither stray?
Strange
thing it is an errant knight to see
Here in this
place, or any other wight,
That hither
turnes his steps. So few there bee
That chose
the narrow path, or seeke the right:
All keepe
the broad high way, and take delight
With many
rather for to go astray,
And be
partakers of their evill plight,
Then with a
few to walke the rightest way;
O foolish
men, why haste ye to your owne decay?
The whole canto can be found here.
I find this all very beautiful. What strikes me most is how counter-intuitive it is. I have heard the claim that all religions and all systems of morality are pretty much the same, and that human nature is pretty much the same everywhere and always. I don't agree with this. The Christian ideal, at least, seems to me very distinctive in its celebration of so many of the things which we are naturally inclined to see as undesirable.
Whatever Spenser's personal guilt or failings, he is obviously holding the Christian ideal up here not simply as a starry ideal, or a standard to which we direct ourselves in a vague kind of way, or the province of a few specially holy people, but the expected business of the hero of a story-- like courage and pluck and initiative in the hero of a modern thriller.
I have to admit that it takes Christianity to make the Christian ideals compelling to me, even as ideals. It's one thing having chivalry towards the poor, or the sick, or the simple. It's one thing accepting deprivation with graciousness and stoicism. But the Christian notion that these things are admirable in themselves is something that would, in my view, be almost impossible to really believe unless it had the backing of a whole religious tradition.
However, once you have seen the beauty of humility, chastity, meekness, forgiveness, and so forth-- in the lives of the saints, for instance-- it becomes real and unforgettable.
"Dammit, there's sugar in this!" |
I must also, once again, quote Chesterton:
White is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. When, so to speak, your pencil grows red-hot, it draws roses; when it grows white-hot, it draws stars. And one of the two or three defiant verities of the best religious morality, of real Christianity, for example, is exactly this same thing; the chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a colour. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel, or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen. Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.
For many years, in Christian Europe, warring and vastly rich nobles decorated their castles with depictions of hermits, saints and momento mori. They had personal chapels and chaplains to preach to them the virtues of peace, forgiveness, meekness, poverty and charity. Many find this hypocritical and absurd. I don't. I find it admirable.
Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, with a momento mori |
I find the momento mori particularly fascinating. We live in an era when life expectancy is high and the danger of fatal sickness or violent death is comparatively low. To our way of thinking, medievals and early moderns lived dangerous and deprived lives, and might have been forgiven for trying to enjoy life while they could. But that's not how they viewed it. They thought they were in too much danger of forgetting mortality and being seduced by the pleasures of the world and the moment.
But why do I find such comfort in looking at momento mori pictures, and why do I feel that they are the very opposite of morbid?
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