Magic and wonder in literature (cont.)
Part 2 of John Erskine's essay by the same name from *The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent*
Of this kind of magic it is easy to find illustrations in medieval literature. Certain well-known French lays of the twelfth or thirteenth century picture just such an irresponsible, accidental world as we usually ascribe to primitive man. In one story a fair lady is shut up in a tower, that she may not see her lover. As she is bemoaning her fate, a magnificent eagle flies through the narrow window, and lighting on the chamber floor, turns into a handsome young man, her persevering suitor. In another story a fair lady is imprisoned, and her true knight, instead of coming himself in a magic disguise, sends to her a wonderful swan, which flies back and forth between the two, carrying always a letter beneath his plumage. In another story a man confides to his wife that during his frequent absences from home he turns himself into a were-wolf, and she straightway contrives that the next time he shall not resume his human form. Here are such transformations as we glanced at in pre-Homeric legend, but no attempt at the Homeric expurgation is here, unless the swan in the second story be such. Far from desiring any expurgation, the medieval audience may have been glad enough that literature should not give an accurate account of their life. They may have liked mystery for its own sake, as there is little reason to think primitive man ever did. Their faculty of wonder, we know, they exercised in contemplating the world to come; if, as we suspect, they rejoiced in this present life also with an almost renaissance paganism, at least they rejoiced surreptitiously. It is incredible that they did not recognize as magic such episodes as we have just summarized; and if this material was as frankly magical to them as it now seems to us, it is a fact of some importance that the middle ages left us few pictures of the world as it was actually seen. We are sometimes told that in those unlucky centuries the Church imposed miracles and legends on secular ignorance. Whether or not those centuries were unlucky, a reading of these secular stories suggests wonder that more miracles and legends were not imposed on the Church.
But however the twelfth century may have understood its literature, there is little doubt that the fourteenth century liked a certain class of stories which must have been recognized as false to experience. I refer to those tales of reckless or scandalous love—merry tales, as the Elizabethan translators would call them—such as Boccaccio included in a part of his famous collection. Their real immorality is not often observed, nor is it obvious in any single story; but when one reflects on all such stories as a class, whether in the Decameron or in other collections, the amazing thing is that though they picture villainy, cruelty, and treachery, they picture no effects of villainy, cruelty, or treachery; their escapades continue to be merry; there is no hint of possible tragedy for man nor of pity for woman. To be sure, the medieval story-teller does chronicle sorrow, and he does treat womanhood sympathetically, but never when dealing with such themes as we are thinking of. Patient Griselda is a medieval heroine; Tess of the D'Urbervilles is not. The middle ages, moreover, defined tragedy as a fall from good fortune to bad, and comedy as a rise from bad fortune to good; doubtless God punished the wicked and rewarded the righteous, but in His own miraculous way, not in the inherent consequences of a moral choice. It is only by the caprice of her husband that Griselda is rewarded; to a dramatic imagination she seems not so much rewarded as tortured.
In the Renaissance there was a conception of virtue which carried with it a belief, if not in a miraculous world in general, at least in a special magic or talisman for the individual. To the Greek mind a virtue was a state, a condition between two extremes, and Renaissance philosophers, piously accepting Aristotle's terms, continued to speak of virtue as a mean. But the imaginative literature of the Renaissance, in which we get the less academic account of life, has a tendency to speak of virtue, not as a quality or condition, but as a thing, to be acquired and possessed. The Renaissance man is not courageous—she has courage; the Renaissance woman is not beautiful—she has beauty. Whether this idea of virtue brought about the belief in a magic or talisman, or whether the belief in a magic, helped by Platonic ideas, brought about this conception of virtue, it is at least clear that beauty, courage, friendship, or any other virtue, is often treated in Renaissance literature as a magical instrument, like the enchanted spears and shields of medieval romance. In the Provencal tradition beauty was such a magic. The story of Aucassin and Nicolete, which though medieval in date is renaissance in spirit, tells how Nicolete passed by the door where a pilgrim lay sick, and the sight of her made him a well man. In the Faerie Queene, when Artegal is jousting with Britomart, he happens to strike off the front of her helmet. Her divine beauty causes his sword to fall powerless, and he is taken captive. In Paradise Lost, when the serpent approaches to tempt Eve, her loveliness renders the devil, for one moment, stupidly good.
Nicolete and Britomart had a permanent magic; Eve's beauty was effective only for a moment. Milton was skeptical of magic, not only because he came late in the Renaissance, but because he had an unusual intellect, and a mathematician's sense for order. In him the tradition of virtue as a talisman or miraculous instrument temporarily died out. For example, chivalry had fostered a belief in the magic of being right, the magic on which the institution of judicial combat was founded. He who had the right in any encounter must of necessity prevail. This institution was accepted throughout Spenser's Faerie Queene; unless they had first committed a sin or fallen into an error, the good champions could not be overcome by the powers of evil. We remember, in passing, how Scott accommodated this large faith to modern skepticism, killing off the Templar by a stroke of apoplexy just in time to save Ivanhoe. It might have been thought that Shakspere, who was closer than most men to the realities of experience, would have taken the edge off the miracle, as Scott did; but in As You Like It Orlando, having a just cause, is able to throw the professional wrestler. It remained for Milton to reject magic. To see how far he advanced beyond Spenser, for example, we have but to imagine how Spenser would have written Comus. The heroine of the poem, another Britomart, possessing the heavenly virtue of chastity, would have been armed against the spells of the sorcerer. All that Milton claims in the end, though he starts out bravely, is that the lady's soul was unharmed, though Comus did enchant her body. This concession is larger than at first might appear, for it contradicts the fine boast of the elder brother, who in the poem speaks for Milton—
"Against the threats
Of malice or of sorcery, or that power
Which erring men call chance, this I hold firm:
Virtue may be assailed, but never hurt.
Surprised by unjust force, but not enthralled.
Yet virtue is enthralled, and it is the grace of heaven, not the lady's innocence, that releases her. In Paradise Lost Milton still clings, poet-like, to the magic of beauty, but the magic of being right he gives over, preferring to read man's fortunes dramatically, as the inevitable result of his choice among fixed laws. He holds to the dramatic attitude in Sampson Agonistes, although he does represent the giant's strength as still residing in his hair. This survival of primitive magic, however, is only figurative, a symbol of moral power lost and regained. Having given his allegiance to what he believed was a righteous cause, and having seen that cause collapse, Milton could but agree with Sir Thomas Browne, that a man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.
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