For this perfect soul Nature now forms a beautiful body. Concord unites the two, and a new man is formed, perfect and free from flaw. Chastity and guardian Modesty endow him with their gifts; Reason adds his, and Honesty. These Logic follows, with her gift of skill in argument; Rhetoric brings her stores, then Arithmetic, next Music, next Geometry, next Astronomy;[146] while Theology and Piety are not behind with theirs; and to these Faith joins her gifts of fidelity and truth. Last of all comes Nobility, Fortune’s daughter. But because she has nothing of her own to give, and must receive all from her mother, she betakes herself to Fortune’s house of splendid mutability. What will Fortune give? The two return to Nature’s palace, and Fortune’s magnificence is proffered by her daughter; but Reason, standing by, will allow only a measured acceptance.[147]
The report of this richly endowed creature reached Alecto. Raging she summoned her pests, the chiefs of Tartarus, doers of ill, masters of every sin—Injury, Fraud, Perjury, Theft, Rapine, Fury and Anger, Hate, Discord, Strife, Disease and Melancholy, Lust, Wantonness and Need, Fear and Old Age. She roused them with a harangue: their rule is threatened by this upstart Creature, whom Parent Nature has prepared for war; but what can his untried imbecility do against them in arms?
All clamour assent, and in a tumult of rage make ready for the strife. The hostile ranks approach. The first attack is made by Folly (Stultitia) and her comrades, Sloth, Gaming, Idle Jesting, Ease and Sleep. But faithful Virtues protect the constant youth against these foes. Next Discord leads its mutinous band, but only to defeat. Onslaughts follow from Poverty, next from Ill-Repute, from Old Age and Disease. Then Grieving advances, and is overthrown by Laughter. More deadly still are the attacks of Venus and Lust; then Excess and Wantonness take up the fray; and at the end Impiety and Fraud and Avarice. But still the man conquers with the aid of his Virtues ever true.
The fight is over. The Virtues triumph and receive their Kingdoms; Vice succumbs; Love reigns instead of Discord; the man is blessed; and the earth, adorned with flowers in a new spring of youth, brings forth abundance. The Poet sums up his poem’s teaching: From God must everything begin and in Him end. But our genius may not stand inert; ours is the strife as well, according to our strength and faculty. Let the mind attach itself to the things which are and do not pass, even as Plato sings, from things of sense reaching on ever to the grades Angelic and Olympus’s steeps. Then it shall behold the universal praise of God and the true ascription of all good to Him. He in himself is perfect, Part and likewise Whole, and everywhere uncircumscribed. Nothing has power in itself, but all would fall to nothing, did He close the flux of hidden power.
Alanus, a good Christian Doctor, is also an eclectic in his thought. A consistent system is hardly to be drawn from his poem. It suggests Christ. But its hero is not the God-man of the Incarnation. Its figures are semi-pagan. The virtue Faith, for example, is the Fides, the Good Faith, of the antique Roman, though it is the Christian virtue Faith as well. In language the poem is antique; its verse has vigorous flow; its imagery lacks neither beauty nor sublimity. It is in fact a poem, a creation, having a scheme and unity of its own, although the author borrows continually. Martianus Capella is there and Dionysius the Areopagite; there also is the Psychomachia of Prudentius and its progeny of symbolic battles between the Virtues and the Vices.[148] Yet Alanus has achieved; for he has woven his material into a real poem and has reared his own lofty allegory. His work is another grand example of mediaeval symbolism.
Thus we see the ceaseless sweep of allegory through men’s minds. They felt and thought and dreamed in allegories; and also spent their dry ingenuity on allegorical constructions. It was reserved for one supreme poet to create, out of this atmosphere, a supreme poem which is as complete an allegory as the Anticlaudianus. But the Divina Commedia has also the power of its human realities of actually experienced pain and joy, and hate and love. Compared with it, the Anticlaudianus betrays the vapourings of monk and doctor, imaginative indeed, but thin. The author’s feet were not planted on the earth of human life.
But the Middle Ages did not demand that allegory should have its feet planted on the earth, so long as its head nodded high among the clouds—or its sentiments wandered sweetly in fancy’s gardens. In one of these dwelt that lovely Rose, whose Roman once had vogue. In structure the Roman de la rose is an allegory from the beginning of the first part by De Lorris to the very end of that encyclopaedic sequel added by De Meun. The story is well known.[149] One may recall the fact that in De Lorris’s poem and De Meun’s sequel every quality and circumstance of Love’s sentiment and fortunes are figured in allegorical personifications—all the lover’s hopes and fears and the wavering chances of his quest.
In this respect the poem is the courtly and romantic counterpart of such a philosophical or religious allegory as the Anticlaudianus. Personifications of the arts and sciences, the vices and virtues, current since the time of Prudentius’s Psychomachia and Capella’s Nuptials of Philology, were all in the Anticlaudianus, while in the Roman de la rose figure their secular and romantic kin: in De Lorris’s part, Love, Fair-Welcome, Danger, Reason, Franchise, Pity, Courtesy, Shame, Fear, Idleness, Jealousy, Wicked-Tongue; then, with De Meun, others besides: Richesse, False-Seeming, Hypocrisy, Nature, and Genius.[150] The figures of the Roman de la rose have diverse antecedents scattered through the entire store of knowledge and classic literature possessed by the Middle Ages; perhaps their immediate source of inspiration was the scheme of courtly love which the mediaeval imagination elaborated and revelled in.[151] The poem of De Lorris was a veritable romantic allegory. De Meun, in his sequel, rather plays with the allegorical form, which he continues; it has become a frame for his stores of learning, his knowledge of the world, his views of life, his wit and satire, and his great literary and poetic gifts. Yet it ends in a regular Psychomachia, in which Love’s barons are hard beset by all the foes of Love’s delight, though Love has its will at last.