The Allegory of Love by C. S. Lewis

You thought I'd forgotten this, didn't you?
Wrong! I was just working through a scholarly book that required some serious reflection and contemplation.

"The Allegory of Love" is a critical journey through the poetry of the Middle Ages, tracing a common theme of something called courtly love. This seems like a very dry thing for a summer reading list. I have deeply enjoyed this book, though, because it's by C. S. Lewis. There are a few of you who are about to say "You would have thought it was lame if the name on the cover was different". I contend that I would not have thought it was lame for the very simple reason that I would not have attempted it at all if the name on the cover was different.

Allow me to digress briefly into why C. S. Lewis is the best writer of all time (to me). He writes with a clear, candid style that has a natural rhythm and freshness which suits the novel and the scholarly treatise equally well. He has an ability to make a thought take solid form and once it is out in front of me on the page, I always wonder how I didn't think of it quite like that before. He also has an immense knowledge of this particular subject and just burbles out quotations from obscure sources (all properly cited, of course, and all is right in the world). And somehow he takes what would easily be a topic for a very dull upper-year literature course and makes it seem as important as a train schedule and as interesting as The Matrix was the first time you saw it.
The digression is complete.

Courtly love, that is, the idea that happiness is accessible through successful romantic attachment, came about quite unexpectedly in the early 11th century. To our generation, it seems to have been the topic of all really interesting written and musical art since time immemorial. Lewis traces the germination and evolution of this idea through the poets of the Middle Ages. He shows how the feudal relationship of master and peasant created a mould for romantic feelings to be shaped into a feudal servitude. He shows later how the art of allegory (using a literal story to tell an inner, imaginitive one) was used by poets who lacked the imaginative vocabulary to speak their hearts. Lewis writes, of these early sentimental writers

We are apt to take it for granted that a poet has at his command, besides the actual world and the world of his own religion, a third world of myth and fancy... Such were the three worlds which Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton were born to. London and Warwick, Heaven and Hell, Fairyland and Prospero's island. But the triple heritage is a late conquest. Go back to the beginnings of any literature and you will not find it.

 The poets, therefore, used the deities of a long-deceased culture to express their emotional experiences and fantasies, as Lewis writes

The old gods, when they ceased to be gods, might so easily have been suppressed as devils... only their allegorical use, prepared by slow developments within paganism itself, saved them, as in a temporary tomb, for the day when they could wake in the beauty of acknowledged myth and thus provide modern Europe with its third world of romantic imagining.

This new system of using allegories and references to the Greek and Roman pantheons allows the poets to explore and express this new sentiment, romantic love, outside the confines of the morality of their own religious beliefs. Even though these two concepts of love had been spawned and nurtured independently, the interaction and conflict between the courtly love and the divine love continue to colour many great literary works throughout the era. As poets build off the works of others, the form for expressing the inner world changes and allegories become obsolete, but not before giving us the great works of Chaucer and Mallory, and much later the allegorical method was changed into the practice of symbolism (they are definitely different things). And just like that, the modern human has the words and means of expressing their inner life every bit as clearly as they express their literal, physical one.

It is silly of me to try and give you a short-form of this book, which is already itself a condensation of the largest literary experiment ever undertaken. What I will say is that Lewis works indefatigably to give due credit to the poets who had "the power which welds raw masses of experience into a whole", although they may have been overlooked by modern readers. His respect for the poet as a species is infectious, and catches me up in an inherited awe for the skills of those artists. His respect is not given undeservedly, though, as is evident from his discussion on the poet Alanus ab Insulis, who had a style Lewis disliked

Those who have read [the poem] to the end - a small company - and those only, can understand how speedily amused contempt turns into contempt without amusement, and how even contempt at last settles into something not far removed from a rankling personal hatred of the author.

All told, I'd say this is far and away the best literary criticism I've ever read, and is a far sight better than a few of the novels I have already attempted this summer. I'll leave you with one final quote from the book, because it is so quotable. This is in reference to Geoffry Chaucer's great love poem, "Trolius"

The end of Trolius is the great example in our literature of pathos pure and unrelieved. All is to be endured and nothing is to be done. The species of suffering is one familiar to us all, as the sufferings of Lear and Oedipus are not. All men have waited with ever-decreasing hope, day after day, for someone or something that does not come, and would willingly forget the experience... We turn, for relief, to the titanic passions and heroic deaths of tragedy, because they are sublime and remote, and hence endurable...

Up next: Vengeance by George Jonas