* J. Seznec, La Survivance des dieux antiques (London, 1940), trans. B. F. Sessions (Kingsport, Tennessee, 1953), p. 3.

 

* New York, 1920.

 

* A delicious passage in Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, trans. E. F. M. Benecke (London, 1895), p. 241, contrasts the Middle Ages with ‘more normal periods of history’.

 

* G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History (London, 1944), p. 92.

 

* Etymologiarum, ed. W. M. Lindsay (2 vols. Oxford, 1911), V, xxxix.

 

* It is not certain that either process, seen (if we could see it) sub specie aeternitatis, would be more important than it appears to the historian of culture. The amount of Christian (that is, of penitent and regenerate) life in an age, as distinct from ‘Christian Civilization’, is not to be judged by mortals.

 

* De Descriptione Graec. II, xxxvii.

 

* ‘A Cooking Egg’, Essays in Criticism, vol. III (July 1953), pp. 345–57.

 

* In music we have pieces which demand more talent in the performer than in the composer. Why should there not come a period when the art of writing poetry stands lower than the art of reading it? Of course rival readings would then cease to be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ and become more and less brilliant ‘performances’.

 

* On their identity see Comparetti, Virgilio nel Medio Evo, ed. G. Pasquali (Firenze, 1943), p. xxii. I owe this reference to Mr C. G. Hardie.

 

* As my examples show, such misinterpretations may themselves produce results which have imaginative value. If there had been no Romantic distortion of the Middle Ages, we should have no Eve of St Agnes. There is room both for an appreciation of the imagined past and an awareness of its difference from the real past; but if we want only the former, why come to a university? (The subject deserves much fuller treatment than I give it here.)

 

* A Collection of several Philosophical Writings (Cambridge, 1662).

 

* That two or more consonants make the syllable long is not a metrical rule but a phonetic fact; that they make the preceding vowel long, as some say, is neither a rule nor a fact, but false.

 

* -NG in English usually represents a single consonant (G nasalized), but sometimes it represents this consonant followed by a pure G in addition. Hence the first syllable is short in singer, ringer: long in linger, finger.

 

* Or, of course, two syllables whereof the first is short. The rules for ‘compensating elements’ are, in this respect, identical with the rules for Lifts.

 

* Alliteration on second lift of the first half. The orthographic w in wreathèd has, of course, no metrical function.

 

* Cf., Malory, V, ch. 8.

 

* ary being the compensating element in the Dip.

 

* The c in necessity, being an s in pronunciation, carries the first alliteration.

 

* 2 in my pronunciation because I pronounce forehead so as to rhyme with horrid. In the alternative pronunciation (which is now heard even among educated speakers) it would be C 1.

 

* Viz. William George Dodd, Courtly Love in Chaucer and Gower (Boston, 1913).

 

* C.T., I 1086.

 

* Conf. Am., VIII, 2941–58.

 

* Viz. Lancelot, 369–81, 2844–61; Yvain, 6001 et seq., 2639 et seq.; Cligès, 5855 et seq.

 

* The Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. XII (1926), pp. 95–113.

 

* Poetr. Nov., 224–5.

 

* Canterbury Tales, B 2125.

 

* Ibid., A 798.

 

* Regement of Princes, 1963 et seq.

 

* This might equally well have been treated above in our rhetorical section. The instructed reader will recognize that a final distinction between doctrinal and rhetorical aspects is not possible in the Middle Ages.

 

* C.T., F 762.

 

* Cf. C.T., I 140–55.

 

* From another point of view Pandarus can be regarded as the Vekke of the Romance of the Rose (cf. Thessala in Cligès) taken out of allegory into drama and changed in sex, so as to ‘double’ the rôles of Vekke and Frend.

 

* Zeitschrift für Deutsches Alterthum, vii, pp. 160 et seq.

 

* Andreas Capellanus, De Arte Honeste Amandi, ed. Trojel (Copenhagen, 1892), i, 6 D2 (pp. 91–108).

 

* Ibid., i, 6 A (p. 28).

 

* De Arte Honeste Amandi, i, 4 (p. 10).

 

* Lancelot, 4670, 4734 et seq.

 

* Vita Nuova, III.

 

* Romance of the Rose, 1329 (Chaucer’s).

 

* Argonautica, III, 275 et seq.

 

* Cligès, 460; cf. 770.

 

* Romance of the Rose, 1330 et seq.; 1715 et seq.

 

* Sid. Apoll., Carm., XI, 61.

 

* Ennodius, Carm., I, iv, 57.

 

* Ibid., 84.

 

* VI, i.

 

* Cligès, 682, 241.

 

* A particularly instructive comparison could be drawn between the Chaucerian Criseyde’s determination to yield, yet to seem to yield by force and deception, and Bialacoil’s behaviour. Romance of the Rose, 12607–88: specially 12682, 12683.

 

* Cf. II, 1023 et seq.

 

* Lascelles Abercrombie, ‘A Plea for the Liberty of Interpreting’, The Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. XVI, Annual Shakespeare Lecture, 1930 (1930).

 

* Here the ideal norm seems to be 3 beats in the first half-line and 2 in the second (‘Where snów sleeps cóld beneáth the ázure skíes’). But we also find in the first half-line only 2 beats (‘Sing such a hístory’) and 21/2 (‘Vèry óld are the wóods’) and, in the second, what I take to be 3 (‘Óh, nó man knóws’). It will be noticed that if we lineate the poem in whole lines these make rough decasyllabics, though the reader who treated them simply as such would be missing the real quality of the poem. Cf., in the same poet, ‘Song of the Mad Prince’, ‘Jim Jay’, and ‘Some one’.

 

* Lamentation of the Green Tree, 16.

 

* Regement of Princes, 1960, 2077.

 

* C.T., A 5.

 

* C.T., B 3130.

 

* C.T., B 3152.

 

* Lydgate’s often-quoted admission that he took no heed ‘nouther of shorte nor longe’ is quite irrelevant to any discussion of his metre. To neglect ‘short and long’ in English verse either means nothing or means ‘to make no distinction between accented and unaccented syllables’. If this were what Lydgate had done, we should find his verse either merely syllabic (like the lines quoted above from Chaucer’s Romaunt of the Rose) or else tending to force metrical accents on to weak syllables. In fact, however, we find him comparatively heedless of the number of syllables and generally attentive to stress. His statement about ‘shorte and longe’ is therefore merely a piece of conventional medieval self-depreciation and throws no light whatsoever on his practice.

 

* 21st and the 30th.

 

* Q. 1601, III, i.

 

* ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, I, i.

 

* The Broken Heart, IV, iv.

 

* III, iii, 131.

 

* Cf., of course, Bergson’s analysis of this scene in Le Rire.

 

* Hamlet, V, ii, 232–8. I think the last clause is best explained by the assumption that Shakespeare had come across Seneca’s Nihil perdis ex tuo tempore, nam quod relinquis alienum est (Epist. lxix).

 

* Those who object to ‘emotive terms’ in criticism may prefer to read ‘ . . . used by an accomplished poet to produce an attitude relevant not directly to outer experience but to the central nucleus of the total attitude-and-belief-feeling system’. It must not be supposed, however, that the present writer’s theory of either knowledge or value would permit him, in the long run, to accept the restatement.

 

* In this we have been anticipated. See Emma, ch. 25: ‘I know what worthy people they are. Perry tells me that Mr Cole never touches malt liquor. You would not think it to look at him, but he is bilious—Mr Cole is very bilious.’

 

* The restatement of this in terms acceptable to the Richardian school (for whom all poetry equally is addressed to the nervous system) should present no difficulty. For them it will be a distinction between parts, or functions, of the system.

 

* The superficial simplicity here is obvious; the deeper ambiguity becomes evident if we ask whether Lipsydrion is an object of detestation or of nostalgic affection.

 

* De Sublimitate, IX.

 

* Confessions, VI, v.

 

* Ibid.

 

* Eruditionis Didascalicae, VI, iii.

 

* Eruditionis Didascalicae, VI, iii.

 

* Ibid., IV, i.

 

* Ibid., V, ii.

 

* Summa Theologica, Quaest. I, Art. IX.

 

* Ibid.

 

* Poetics, V, iii.

 

* A treatice upon the passion, in The Workes (London, 1557), p. 1397, D–E.

 

* ‘The Parable of the Wicked Mammon’, in Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of the Holy Scriptures, ed. H. Walter (Cambridge, 1848), p. 59.

 

* Conf., VI, v; Eruditionis Didascalicae, IV, i. See also Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. 3, Sect. 4, Mem. 2, Subs. 6 (London, 1907, pp. 728–729), ‘Blasphemous thoughts . . . the Scripture [fosters], rude, harsh, immethodical.’

 

* ‘The Obedience of a Christian Man’, op. cit., ed. Walter, p. 309.

 

* ‘The Parable of the Wicked Mammon’, op. cit., ed. Walter, pp. 100, 102.

 

* ‘A Pathway into the Holy Scripture’, op. cit., ed. Walter, p. 21.

 

* ‘The Obedience of a Christian Man’, p. 161.

 

* Ibid., pp. 148, 149.

 

* ‘The Parable of the Wicked Mammon’, p. 58.

 

* ‘The Obedience of a Christian Man’, p. 296.

 

* ‘A Pathway into the Holy Scripture’, p. 9.

 

* ‘The Obedience of a Christian Man’, p. 136.

 

* An Answer to Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue, ed. H. Walter (Cambridge, 1850), p. 49.

 

* The Iliad of Homer, Translated by Mr. Pope (London, 1715), p. [xxxviii].

 

* Ibid., p. [xlvi].

 

* 23 March 1783.

 

* De Tradendis Disciplinis, IV.

 

* Ibid., III.

 

* Pope, Essay on Criticism, 692.

 

* Telluris Theoria Sacra, I, ix.

 

* Ibid., X.

 

* On Roman feeling about these matters, see Cicero’s Ad Fam. IX, 22, and Quintilian, VIII, 3.

 

* ‘An Essay upon Poetry’, 24 et seq. Quoted in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. J. E. Spingarn (Oxford, 1957), vol. II, p. 288. The ‘late convert’ is no doubt Rochester.

 

* Essais, III, v.

 

* Jane Austen (Cambridge, 1936), p. 33.

 

* T. S. Eliot, ‘John Dryden’, Selected Essays (London, 1932), p. 295.

 

* Eliot, op. cit., p. 296.

 

* Eliot, op. cit., p. 297.

 

* Eliot, op. cit., p. 297.

 

* It will be noticed that even if the premisses were true, the inference is invalid. A similar paralogism has occurred about Mr Housman (of course, since his death) in the form, ‘Kipling is bad. Some lines of Housman are like some lines of Kipling. Therefore Housman is bad.’

 

* That is, nothing more in the usual strain. For a reprint of Political Justice (a book very difficult to find) I am all agog: it is not likely to be so dull as our critical tradition proclaims.

 

* Eliot, ‘Dante’, op. cit., p. 237.

 

* Ibid., p. 244.

 

* Ibid., p. 250.

 

* Ibid.

 

* Written in the reign of Edward VIII (1936).

 

* Of these Middlemarch is perhaps the finest.

 

* Some poems could not, on internal evidence alone, be distinguished from Christian work.

 

* Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (London, 1928), p. 140.

 

* I have learned since that I misunderstood him, but as my Isagoge is meant for pure illustration, not proof, I have thought it no dishonesty to let the example stand.

 

* See his Principles of Literary Criticism, ch. 24.

 

* Another example, more venial, but perhaps even clearer, of such vulgarity, occurs when Dryden renders Quare agite, o tectis, iuvenes, succedite nostris (Aen. I, 627), ‘Enter, my noble guest, and you shall find, If not a costly welcome, yet a kind.’ The descent here is to the ‘genteel’. Cf. Gavin Douglas’s excellent version of the same line.

 

* See Practical Criticism (1929), p. 257. I am sorry to have to mention in this context an admission whose candour deserves so much imitation and a critic whose works are almost the necessary starting-point for all future literary theory. But the point is very important, and magis amica veritas.

 

* A full treatment of the subject broached in this essay would demand consideration of the historical theory that there is some peculiarity in our own age really producing an unprecedented cleavage between the Few and the Many, and imposing on popular taste the need of veritable conversion. My own view is that such a situation exists, but that the Highbrow-Lowbrow distinction is one of the things that have helped to produce it. If the people have never shown less taste for good books, it is also true that those capable of writing good books have seldom taken less pains to please the people, or, indeed, so freely insulted them. There are members of the intelligentsia at present (some of them socialists) who cannot speak of their cultural inferiors except in accents of passionate hatred and contempt. Certainly it is fatal to approach this or any other quarrel with the assumption that all the faults are on one side: and just as certainly, in all quarrels the task of conciliation belongs jure divino to the more reasonable of the two disputants.

 

* Adonais, 283.

 

* Paradise Lost, VI, 866.

 

* Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis, trans. Joan Riviere (London, 4th impression, 1933), p. 314.

 

* Ibid.

 

* Freud, p. 89.

 

* Freud, op. cit., pp. 125 et seq.

 

* Freud, op. cit., p. 134.

 

* ‘Mind and the Earth’, Contributions to Analytical Psychology, trans. H. G. and C. F. Baynes (London, 1928), pp. 27 et seq.

 

* Jung, op. cit., p. 108.

 

* Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry. Psychological Studies of Imagination (London: Oxford University Press, 1934).

 

* The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. E. Vinaver (Oxford, 1947), i, 161 (Bk. IV, 18), iii, 1216–20 (Bk. XX, 21–2).

 

* ‘The Origin of the Grail Legends’, Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1959), pp. 274–94, esp. p. 287.

 

* R. S. Loomis, “Literary History and Literary Criticism: A Critique of C. S. Lewis,” The Modern Language Review, vol. LX (October 1965), p. 282.

 

* J. Speirs, Medieval English Poetry. The Non-Chaucerian Tradition (London, 1957), pp. 218 ff.

 

* Medieval English Poetry, p. 117.

 

* ‘The Dolorous Stroke’, Medium ævum, XXV (1957), 175–80.

 

* Medieval English Poetry, p. 117.

 

* Ibid., pp. 23–4.

 

* Lady Flavia Anderson, The Ancient Secret (London, 1953).

 

* Medieval English Poetry, p. 117.

 

* Ibid., p. 63.

 

* Medieval English Poetry, op. cit., p. 24.