“Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy.”
There is a wardrobe in an old room. Picture yourself opening the wardrobe door. You climb inside it, carefully leaving the door cracked open slightly as you push your way back in amongst the antique coats, which smell of dampness and age and silent history. But wait! It is cold underneath you and, as you reach down, you grasp a wet, slushy substance that could only be snow!
As we reach the end of our The Four Loves Read-along, we have so far investigated Affection, Friendship and Romantic Love (the natural loves) but none of these loves are sufficient in and of themselves without another Love to support the feelings and keep them sweet. Lewis now investigates Charity, or Agape (ἀγάπη).
Yes, it’s finally my belated post for Week 4 of The Four Loves Read-along, focussing on Eros! Please read on ….!
Huh? …..
Lewis seems to be saying that we are between angels and animals, Venus is the carnal within Eros but she’s kinda funny so laugh at her or she will extract revenge, Eros is Eros but he cannot be Eros by himself, the husband is the head only if he gives most, rough play in sex can be harmless and wholesome (did I read this correctly … however notice the “can be“), while a person is not usually worshiped, Love is and then the expectations are God-like which cannot be fulfilled and then everyone is resentful and implacable and it all falls apart …. LOL!
And the above summary contain the conclusions come to after a very superficial read of a difficult chapter where, in fact, we have to do WORK to follow Lewis. So here goes …
Let’s begin afresh (please!) with Eros or Romantic L❤️ve …
Again from my The Four Loves Read-along week 2 post I’ve had thoughts brewing. On Marian’s blog, I posted a question that I’ve been musing about and I thought I’d re-post here in case anyone has any enlightening comments on it:
“Were you surprised when Lewis spoke about developing Affection for people one normally would have nothing to do with but circumstances brought them together? I find that nowadays most people choose only people they would want to hang out with. Where have the relationships gone which form in spite of themselves? Has our world changed drastically from Lewis’ world?”
I do think generally that in spite of our outward modern multi-cultural tolerances, that people actually have practically less tolerance towards the differences of people. What do you think?
And here we go with our The Four Loves read-along! Here is the first post. I hope my notes help clarify the start of the book and please feel free to add any comments below. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I found the beginning quite dense and Lewis sometimes a wee bit difficult to follow. I think it will get easier, however, as he begins to examine each type of love.
I’m going to attach some questions to each chapter. You can use these to answer them as a post on your blog, or simply mull them over to understand the reading better. I do hope they help!
What are your ideas about love? Is love an overwhelming romantic feeling? Can it be a decision or a duty? Can you fall out of love? Have you wished for a better understanding of the love of God? Can friends love each other? What about families and our love for them? In English, we use the same word for all these feelings … love …. but the Greeks have different words for these feelings of love and each has its different distinctions. Do you want to learn more? Then please join me in my read-along of C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves for the month of June!
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| Art and Literature (1867) William-Adolphe Bouguereau source Wikiart |
Is there good literature? Is there bad literature? How do we make the determination, and do we even have the criteria to judge? In his essay, Different Tastes in Literature, if Lewis does not directly answer these questions, he at least gives the reader criteria that makes it easier to judge, and challenges us to examine our reading experiences.
First, Lewis investigates the notion of “tastes” and indicates a determination between good and bad literature is complicated by the fact that there are no objective tests. But the error people make is in assuming that people like bad art in the same way that they like good art. Instead, Lewis proposes, bad art does not succeed with anyone.
Lewis defines bad art as very low art, such as novels, and popular music that are read or sung and then forgotten soon after. When it goes out of fashion, it is never thought of afterward.
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| Geniuses of Art (1761) Francois Boucher source Wikiart |
Yet while bad art itself is not so easy to describe, the consumer of bad art is more easily targeted:
“He (or she) may want her weekly ration of fiction very badly indeed, may be miserable if denied it. But he never re-reads. There is no clearer distinction between the literary and the unliterary. It is infallible. The literary man re-reads, other men simply read. A novel once read is to them like yesterday’s newspaper …… It is as if a man said he had once washed, or once slept, or once kissed his wife, or once gone for a walk. Whether the bad poetry is re-read or not …. I do not know. But the very fact that we do not know is significant. It does not creep into the conversation of those who buy it. One never finds two of its lovers capping quotations and settling down to a good evening’s talk about their favourite. So with the bad picture. The purchaser says, no doubt sincerely, that he finds it lovely, sweet, beautiful, charming or (more probably) ‘nice’. But he hangs it where it cannot be seen and never looks at it again.”
With bad art, there is no question of the ‘joy’ that good art brings. “The desire for bad art is the desire bred of habit: like the smoker’s desire for tobacco, more marked by the extreme malaise of denial than by any very strong delight in fruition.”
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| Art Critic Norman Rockwell source Wikiart |
On experiencing good art, it is not like moving from one type to the next, but more like “when you opened the door, to lead to the garden of the Hesperides ….” However, we must not say that some men like good art and some bad, rather that the term “like” is not the proper word for good art, and the response towards good art, has never been produced in bad.
Is it too simple to say that bad art does not ever have the same effect on a person as good art? What about those books that captured our imagination in youth but that we now consider bad? Might this simply mean that the reader’s imagination was superior to the author’s, but lacking both maturity and discernment? In effect, we would not have been enjoying the book for what it was, but for what it was not. But this “mirage” is quite different from the actual liking of bad art. Bad art is “tepid, trivial, marginal, habitual. It does not trouble them, nor haunt them ….. No one cares about bad art in the same way as some care about good.” It is only when we eliminate the bad art that the discussions about the superiority of one work of art to another can have some value.
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| The Disquieting Muses (1916-18) Giorgio di Chirico source Wikiart |
In this essay, Lewis more distinguishes what is not good art than what is, however his insights, as always, are invaluable. We have so little time on this earth. Life comes and goes in the blink of an eye. Don’t we want to be discerning about our literary choices and choose to read works that add perspective, wisdom and purpose to our lives, instead of reading words that pass through us in the blink of an eye? I do.
Deal Me In Challenge #10
For my second poem during National Poetry Month, I read C.S. Lewis’ Narnian Suite.
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| The Giant Antaeus (1868) Gustave Doré source Wikiart |
“Ho, rumble, rumble, rumble, rumble
Rumble drum belaboured.”
The Last Battle was finished in the spring of 1953 but not published until 1956 and Narnian Suite was written in 1953. Perhaps Lewis simply attempted to take the original marching song and expand it. In any case, it’s all speculation at this point; I may come up with some reference to it as I read through Lewis’ letters (yes, three huge volumes with a fourth soon to be published).
Does anyone think that this poem sounds very much like Tolkien’s poems in The Lord of the Rings? I do, but I am reading The Lord of the Rings presently, so perhaps I have that tone lingering in my head.
Normally, I don’t read introductions or commentaries on books or poetry that I plan to read, until after I’ve finished the work. I prefer to experience the art from a point of innocence (or perhaps, ignorance is a better word!), forming my own opinions without influence, even if I struggle with my first read through. However, this time I threw all my ideals to the winds and called for help.
In April I’m reading The Faerie Queene with O, Cirtnecce, Jean, Ruth, and Consoled Reader, and considering the length and complexity of this poem, I confess that it was wiser to admit my complete ineptitude and look for someone who was very familiar with this type of poem and era to give me a little boost. Since C.S. Lewis’ expertise was in Medieval and Renaissance literature, I suspected that he would be a good place to start. His book, Spenser’s Images of Life is a compilation of lectures notes, put together by Alastair Fowler, to give students a deeper insight into The Faerie Queene.
I’m not going to even pretend that I understood half of what Lewis was saying in these lectures/notes, but my lack of understanding emphasizes one of the many things that I respect about the man. He is able to turn on his intellect and produce a brilliantly insightful and stimulating analysis of perhaps the most complex poem in the English language, yet he is also able to let his intellect “idle” and write children’s stories, sci-fi fiction or even a layman-type book such as Mere Christianity. With Spenser’s Images of Life, I had to read it slowly and let it percolate.
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| A Beast (1456) Paolo Uccello source Wikimedia Commons |
Lewis begins by stating that The Faerie Queene is the most difficult poem in the English language, a rather daunting claim for me, as I’m going to be reading it in just over a month. He claims that the poem works on a number of levels and the mistake readers can make is reading it from only one perspective and thinking that is all it has to offer. The simple aspect of the poem is that it’s a moral allegory, in that the story contains a moral, but the poem is more than a narrative, containing images that work on the mind. We must not only read, but see the work.
Lewis believes that Spenser, like Botticelli, accepts “traditional images, he loads them with wisdom from the philosophers and disposes them in divine compositions ……… with a propensity of mingling the Christian and the pagan.” Those of Spenser’s tradition would have regarded ancient poetry as a type of veiled theology, and the mixing of the worlds would not have seemed strange to them. In fact, Lewis believes that “Spenser’s Nature is really an image of God himself.”
Lewis goes into detail about certain aspects of the poem, covering the following topics:
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| Heraldic Chivalry Alphonse Mucha source Wikiart |
The last chapter is particularly interesting as Lewis examines Spenser’s letter to Raleigh about The Faerie Queene and, quite expertly, “prosecutes” his meaning, declaring that most of what he wrote is not supported by the poem itself. Many of Lewis’ arguments make good sense. He proposes that Spenser was not entirely aware of the depths of his own brooding and birth of the poem, that came from his experience with philosophers, poets and iconographers. He also suspects that Spenser might have written the letter with someone at his elbow, massaging his words to make the poem fit classical (and possibly political) expectation.
In any case, this book was helpful as an introduction to the poem, but it will also be handy to read The Faerie Queene with it in hand. Lewis’ points must be better understood in the context and framework of an already developing story, allegory or image. As to what our expectations with regard to the poem should be, Lewis has a very straightforward answer:
“We should expect, then, from Spenser’s poem, a simply fairy-tale pleasure sophisticated by polyphonic technique, a simple ‘moral’ sophisticated by a learned iconography. Moreover, we should expect to find all of these reacting on one another, to produce a work very different from what we are used to. And now it is time to catch hold of one thread of the fabric, and pull…….”
“Beyond all doubt it is best to have made one’s first acquaintance with Spenser in a very large — and, preferably, illustrated — edition of The Faerie Queene, on a wet day, between the ages of twelve and sixteen; and if, even at that age, certain of the names aroused unidentified memories of some still earlier, some almost prehistoric, commerce with a selection of ‘Stories from Spenser’, heard before we could read, so much the better.”
A number of us are going to be reading The Fairie Queene beginning sometime in April and, considering the difficulty of the poem, I decided to do some pre-reading investigation.
Although C.S. Lewis is known for his books on theology, his actual expertise was in Medieval and Renaissance literature. He has a number of essays relating to The Fairie Queene, and when I stumbled on this one, I thought it a perfect beginning.
Lewis writes that the optimal experience with The Faire Queene is created if one reads it between the ages of 10 and 16, with a large illustrated edition and then grow with the work, starting with mere wonder at the story and advancing to a critical appreciation of it, cultivating a relationship with the work that will remain and flourish throughout life. But while advocating this process, Lewis realizes many may come to The Faerie Queene later in life, and he is writing to give guidance to the mature reader with his first experience of this great work.
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| Una and the Lion (c. 1860) William Bell Scott source Wikimedia Commons |
Lewis instructions begin very simply; as the child does, one must begin with The Faerie Queene. Next, even if one does not have a large illustrated edition, one should imagine the book they do have to be a heavy volume that should be read at a table, “a massy, antique story with a blackletter flavour about it — a book for devout, prolonged, and leisurely perusal.” The illustrations would be not only fantastic and beautiful, but also wicked and ugly. While the book is new, it is also old, ancient yet original.
“All this new growth sprouts out of an old, gnarled wood, and, as in very early spring, mists it over in places without concealing it …………. And it is best to begin with a taste for homespun, accepting the cloth of gold when it comes, but by no means depending on it for your pleasure, or you will be disappointed ….”
Lewis reveals that Spenser’s friends wanted him to conform to the Puritan perspective of the time, being only a “servile classicist”, yet his poetry appeared to naturally break out of this mould. After being cautioned by a his friend on touching too closely on papist and medieval themes by his references to “Ladies of the Lake” and “friendly fairies” in his poetry, Spenser remained true to the natural appreciation he harboured for the Middle Ages, and taking “all his renaissance accomplishments with him”, produced The Faerie Queene. In blending the two ages, Spenser in effect “became something between the last of the medieval poets and the first of the romantic medievalists.”
As a child one may have a uncomfortable feeling that one has met many of The Faerie Queene’s characters before, but as a mature reader one has the apprehension to discover the moral allegory within the work. While critics aren’t in agreement as to how much emphasis should be placed on it, it is not necessary to analyze the poet’s exact meaning. Instead we should simply have an impression of regions within the poem that are not always what they seem.
Lewis ends with William Butler Yeat’s quote on Spenser’s House of Busirane, saying that Spenser’s characters are “so visionary, so full of ghostly midnight animation, that one is persuaded tht they had some strange purpose and did truly appear in just that way.”
And so I can now step into Spenser’s world with a little more imagination and expectation. I’ve already been exposed to the world of King Arthur and so I’m looking forward to some more fantastical adventures. And honestly, a few fairies would be very welcome.
