Inklings Forever Volume 9 A Collection of Essays Presented at the Ninth Frances White Ewbank Colloquium on C.S. Lewis & Article 19 Friends 5-29-2014 "The airF y Way of Writing": Spenser's The aF erie Queene and C.S. Lewis's "Habit of Mind" Susan Wendling Follow this and additional works at: https://pillars.taylor.edu/inklings_forever Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, History Commons, Philosophy Commons, and the Religion Commons Recommended Citation Wendling, Susan (2014) ""The airF y Way of Writing": Spenser's The aF erie Queene and C.S. Lewis's "Habit of Mind"," Inklings Forever: Vol. 9 , Article 19. Available at: https://pillars.taylor.edu/inklings_forever/vol9/iss1/19 This Essay is brought to you for free and open access by the Center for the Study of C.S. Lewis & Friends at Pillars at Taylor University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Inklings Forever by an authorized editor of Pillars at Taylor University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INKLINGS FOREVER, Volume IX A Collection of Essays Presented at the Ninth FRANCES WHITE EWBANK COLLOQUIUM on C.S. LEWIS & FRIENDS Taylor University 2014 Upland, Indiana “The Fairy Way of Writing”: Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and C.S. Lewis’s “Habit of Mind” Susan Wendling Wendlng, Susan. “‘The Fairy Way of Writing’: Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and C.S. Lewis’s ‘Habbit of Mind’.” Inklings Forever 9 (2014) www.taylor.edu/cslewis “The Fairy Way of Writing”: Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and C.S. Lewis’s “Habit of Mind” Susan Wendling While readers of C.S. Lewis have adolescence has transcended our modern commonly noted his early love for myths, objections and difficulties: the difficulty with fairy tales and epic poetry, the fullest impact poetic and even archaic language, resistance of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene on Lewis’s to long narrative poems, and finally, the personal worldview as well as on his modern failure to understand how allegory imaginative and professional writings has yet works. Yet, on the most basic level The Faerie to be noted. Since “learning about Spenser Queene offers adventure. To quote Doris leads us into Lewis’s inner life” (1), let’s begin Myers: by reviewing briefly the responses of Lewis to this longest epic poem in the English . Its premise is that before Prince language. With his lifelong love of Spenser Arthur became king he made an established, we can then examine two key extended journey to Fairyland, a components embodied in The Faerie Queene parallel world . ruled by Gloriana, itself: 1) its ancient neoplatonic worldview the fairy queen. In The Faerie with its fusion of classical images of Nature Queene Arthur was supposed to with the poet’s imagination; and 2) its use of accomplish great deeds for Gloriana, the Celtic “Faerie” realm to symbolize the deeds somehow related to those of highest spiritual significance of mere historic twelve other knights. As Britain. After exploring these two aspects of allegory, its premise is that each The Faerie Queene we can more readily see knight’s adventures set forth one of how Spenser’s “habit of mind” was utilized by the twelve virtues . (3). Lewis in his own imaginative writings, as well as in his literary criticism and his philosophy Let us now hear Lewis’s own middle- of Myth. aged voice in 1941 in an essay “On Reading The Faerie Queene”: LEWIS’S RESPONSES TO SPENSER In a letter to his boyhood friend, Beyond all doubt it is best to have Arthur Greeves, Lewis writes that after made one’s first acquaintance with reading the poem on weekends for about six Spenser in a very large—and, months, he has “at last come to the end of the preferably, illustrated—edition of Faerie Queene: and though I say ‘at last,’ I The Faerie Queene, on a wet day, almost wish he had lived to write six books between the ages of twelve and more as he hoped to do—so much have I sixteen; . those who have had this enjoyed it” (2). This reveals that Lewis in his good fortune . .will never have lost “The Fairy Way of Writing” · Susan Wendling touch with the poet. His great book NEOPLATONIC THOUGHT IN THE FAERIE will have accompanied them year by QUEENE year . To them I need not speak; At the conclusion of his essay Edmund the problem is how to find Spenser, 1552-99, Lewis tries to explain to his substitutes for their slowly ripened readers how Spenser writes “primarily as a habit of mind . (4). (Protestant) Christian and secondarily as a Platonist” (7). Lewis then states that “both Lewis goes on to describe the poem’s systems are united with one another and cut “medieval” beauties: off from some—not all—modern thought by their conviction that Nature . is not the only . What he [Spenser] had always thing that exists. .Christians and Platonists liked was the Middle Ages as he both believe in an‘other’ world” (8). When imagined them to have been and as the poet, through his imagination, aspires for they survived in his time in the that “other world” which is the Source of all pageant, the morality play, and the Beauty (the “First Fair”), he produces “beauty metrical romance. [thus] he was making beautiful old rhyme” which is called enabled to produce a tale more “golden and sweet” by Lewis in his OHEL solemn, more redolent of the past, volume. Quoting Sidney, a “dazzling” more venerable, than any real contemporary of Spenser, Lewis reminds that medieval romance—to deny, in his “the poet, unlike the historian, is not ‘captiued own person, the breach between the to the trueth of a foolish world’ but can Middle Ages and the Renaissance . ‘deliuer a golden’”(9). Speaking against our (5). modern tendency to subjectivize “influences” or “inspiration,” Lewis reminds as well that in These quotes from Lewis himself the sixteenth century the “pneumatology” of reveal the various elements of The Faerie the prevailing ancient “spiritual cosmology” Queene summed up by Gene Edward Veith: required the word “genius” to be understood “Here was golden language, allegory and literally as “an objective, created, personal romance. Here too was the appeal of fairy being” (10). Thus, the poet does indeed call tales and a self-contained fantasy world, all down fire from heaven to make this “foolish” bound together in an imaginatively realized though lovely world “more lovelie” (11). Christianity” (6). In other words, growing up Perhaps thinking of Spenser’s allegories of with Spenser provided Lewis with a model of the Virtues in The Faerie Queene, he tells us thought, a “habit of mind” which was that the poet’s aim is both ethical and fundamentally syncretistic. Lewis thus aesthetic: “But this is part of the loveliness, learned from Spenser that just as the poet for virtue is lovely, not merely obligatory; a taught lessons of moral truth through images celestial mistress, not a categorical of great beauty, he could likewise in his own imperative” (12). In discussing “the endless imaginative writings both enchant and quest” on which Spenser sent his hero Arthur, instruct. Before we consider further Lewis defends the utter reality of such quests evidences of Lewis’s Spenserian “habit of in Neoplatonic terms reminiscent of his own mind,” however, we need to hear what Lewis descriptions of Sehnsucht: “To a Christian himself has to say about Spenser’s fusion of Platonist these formless longings would both Christian thought and Platonic thought. logically appear as among the sanest and This philosophical syncretism is known as most fruitful experiences we have; for their “Neoplatonism” and is much beloved by object really exists and really draws us to Lewis. itself” [italics added] (13). Another aspect of Spenser’s Elizabethan Neoplatonism, pointed out by Dame Frances Yates, a leading Renaissance “The Fairy Way of Writing” · Susan Wendling scholar, is the fusion of cosmic, astral themes alien sensibility by way of romantic allegory, with its moral allegory of the virtues being Lewis shows, is to enter a universe charged celebrated in each of the books of The Faerie with meaning and mystery, where every fact Queene. The complexity and beauty of these of existence carries multi-leveled symbolic fusions are revealed allegorically, of course, depths” (15). but remain philosophically Neoplatonic: Keeping in mind that most scholars do see Lewis as a “Neoplatonist Christian” (16), . the planetary themes of the poem perhaps a specific example should here be should be seen as arranged . .in an cited. The reference—of the spiritual reality order deliberately selected to behind the image of Venus--occurs in his express the idea and purpose of the commentary on the Arthurian poetry of his poem, the presentation of an ideal close friend Charles Williams, specifically, his portrait of a religious and moral poem The Calling of Taliessin. Lewis identifies leader, of Queen Elizabeth I . .That the figure of Nimue, the “mother of making,” portrait has a variegated planetary as “that energy which reproduces on earth a and angelic colouring. Lighted by a pattern derived from ‘the third heaven,’ i.e. Sun of Christian religion and from the sphere of Venus, the sphere of Christian Charity (Book I), it Divine Love” (17). Continuing, he notes that includes red glints of Martial what resides in the third heaven is called by firmness (Book II). The white Williams “the feeling intellect.” Carefully Chastity of the Moon (Book III) differentiating Wordsworth’s understanding expresses the purity of the Virgin of the feeling intellect as being a subjective Queen’s reform. Mercury (Book IV) state in human minds, Williams is, according includes all colours and can to Lewis: reconcile opposites with spiritual alchemy.