Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, page 15
We are meant then to look on Sir Gawain, after his last confession, as clear in conscience, and so able as much as any other brave and pious man (if not as much as a saint) to support himself in the expectation of death with the thought of God’s ultimate protection of the righteous. This implies not only that he has survived the lady’s temptations, but that his whole adventure and tryst are for him righteous, or at least justified and lawful. We now see the great importance of the description in the First Fit of the way in which Sir Gawain became involved in the affair, and the purpose of the remarkable criticisms of King Arthur voiced in the court (in the Second Fit, stanza 29). In these ways Gawain is shown to have become imperilled not out of nobelay, nor because of any fantastic custom or vainglorious vow, nor because of pride in prowess or rating himself as the best knight of his Order – all the possible motives that from a strictly moral point of view might make the whole affair for him foolish or reprehensible, a mere wilful risk or waste of life for no sufficient cause. The wilfulness and the pride are cast on the King; Gawain is involved out of humility, and as a matter of duty to his king and kinsman.
We can imagine indeed the author inserting this curious passage after reflexion. After making Gawain’s conduct in his adventure the subject of moral analysis on a serious plane, he would see that in that case the adventure must be for Gawain praiseworthy, as judged on the same level. In fact the author has taken this story, or blend of stories, with all its improbabilities, its lack of secure rational motives, and its incoherence, and endeavoured to make it the machinery by which a virtuous man is involved in a mortal peril which it is noble, or at least proper (not wrong or silly), for him to face; and is thus drawn into consequent temptations which he does not wilfully or wittingly incur. And in the end he survives all with plain moral weapons. The Pentangle is thus seen to replace the Gryphon on Gawain’s shield as part of a deliberate plan throughout – throughout the final version which we have, at any rate. That plan, and that choice and emphasis, must be recognized.
It is another question whether this treatment is either justified, or artistically successful. For myself, I would say that the criticism of Arthur, and the making of Gawain a proxy of the king with wholly humble and unselfish motives, is for this poem33 necessary, and successful, and realistic.The Pentangle is justified, and only unsuccessful (at least to my taste, and to that I suppose of many of my period) because it is ‘pedantic’, very fourteenth-century, almost Chaucerian, in its pedantry indeed, and over long and elaborate, and (most of all) because it proved too difficult for the author’s skill with the alliterative verse that he uses. The treatment of the Girdle, hesitating between belief and disregard, is reasonably successful, if one does not scrutinize this matter too closely. A degree of belief in it is necessary for the last temptation-scene; and it proves the only effective bait that the lady has for her traps, thus leading to the one ‘flaw’ (on the lowest plane of ‘playing the game’) which makes the actual conduct of Gawain and his near-perfection so much more credible than the mathematical perfection of the Pentangle.
But this belief, or hope, must be played down at the beginning of the last Fit, even if it were in a mere romance unconcerned with moral issues, for confidence in the Girdle would even in such a tale spoil the last scenes. The weakness of the Girdle, as a talisman able (or believed able) to defend a man from wounds, is inherent. Actually this weakness is less glaring than it might be, precisely because of the seriousness of the author and the piety which he has ascribed to his pattern of knights; for the disregard of the talisman at the crisis is more credible in such a character as the Gawain of this poem than in a mere adventurer. And yet I regret, not the flaw in Gawain, not that the lady found one little bait for her victim, but that the poet could not think of anything else which Gawain might have accepted and been induced to conceal, and yet one which would not have affected his view of his perilous tryst. But I cannot think of one; so that such criticism, kesting such cavillacioun, is idle.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight remains the best conceived and shaped narrative poem of the Fourteenth Century, indeed of the Middle Age, in English, with one exception only. It has a rival, a claimant to equality not superiority, in Chaucer’s masterpiece Troilus and Criseyde. That is larger, longer, more intricate, and perhaps more subtle, though no wiser or more perceptive, and certainly less noble. And both these poems deal, from different angles, with the problems that so much occupied the English mind: the relations of Courtesy and Love with morality and Christian morals and the Eternal Law.
Notes
1 Of this name pentangle he is the first recorded user in the vernacular, the only user indeed in Middle English. Yet he claims that the English call it everywhere the Endless Knot. This much at least may be said: the lack of record must be accidental, for the form that he uses, penta(u)ngel, is one that shows already clear traces of popular use, being altered from the correct learned pentaculum by association with ‘angle’. Moreover, though much concerned with the symbolism, he speaks as if his audience could visualize the shape of the figure.
2 The attempt to describe the complex figure and its symbolism was actually too much even for our poet’s considerable skill with the long alliterative line. In any case, since part of its significance was the interrelation of religious faith, piety, and courtesy in human relations, the attempt to enumerate ‘virtues’ brings out the arbitrariness of their division and their individual names at any one time, and the constant flux of the meaning of these names (such as pité or fraunchyse) from age to age.
3 And why the pentangle is proper to that prince so noble
I intend now to tell you, though it may tarry my story.
(27.623–4)
4 Though actually it has, I think, tended to be over-elaborated in criticism. One point only has been neglected, as far as my knowledge goes: the author has taken care to show that the lord himself in person, not the hunt generally, slew and obtained the waith that he surrendered to Gawain. This is of course clear in the cases of the boar and the fox. But even in the first hunt it is indicated: ‘When the sun began to slope he had slain such a number / of does and other deer one might doubt it were true’ (53.1321–2). But (since there appear to have been no other persons of rank at the hunt) the lord of the castle is probably the best of 1325, who supervises the cutting up of his own selected ‘quarry’. In this case didden of 1327 is one of the many errors of the MS, with plural substituted for singular according to the immediate suggestion of a context not wholly clear to the copyist. It was the lord who chose the fattest of his own ‘kill’ and gave orders for their proper dressing ready for the presentation of his venysoun (1375). This may seem a minute point, and remote from the things that are here being considered, but it is, I believe, related to the topic of lewté and keeping one’s word which is to be examined.
5 Unless perhaps in the minds of those with too much literary experience. Yet evenxc they must realise that we are supposed to see things with Gawain’s eyes, and sense the air with his senses, and he has plainly no suspicions.
6 I mean, if we had posed the author with this question, he would have had an answer, for he had thought the whole thing out, especially all that had a moral aspect; and I think that his answer would have been, in the idiom of his time, the one that I am trying to give.
7 His resistance thus actually redounds all the more to his credit, for he is unaware of any peril save that of ‘sin’, and he resists on plain moral grounds, unaided by the fear of magic powers or even of discovery.
8 The text as typed had: ‘could not attain. Or would not. For this [is] a mode of making felt the real tension that one should feel in a narrative of moral struggle.’ When ‘could not attain’ was changed to ‘could hardly attain’ the following sentence was bracketed as if for exclusion. [Ed.]
9 This statement is the author’s. On this matter see the Preface. [Ed.]
10 Written in pencil on the typescript: ‘a sacrifice he is not yet prepared to make’ – to be placed either at the end of the sentence or after ‘without breaking his word’. [Ed.]
11 A cad and a boor.
12 The reference is to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight edited by Sir Israel Gollancz, Early English Text Society 1940, p. 123, note to line 1880. [Ed.]
13 And one, it may be added, who beyond any real doubt also wrote Pearl, not to mention Purity and Patience.
14 Since the effectiveness of confession is wholly dependent on the dispositions of the penitent, and no words of the priest can remedy bad intentions, or the wilful concealment of recollected sin.
15 I do not assert, of course, that a genuine compact, even in sport, has never any moral implications, and never involves any obligations. But I do mean that in the author’s view ‘Christmas games’ such as those played by the lord and Gawain are not of that order. To that point I will return.
16 That Gawain appends to synne a consideration that makes the sin more heinous or odious, the treachery of a guest to his host, is both ethically sound, and true to character. It is also very proper to this poem which is concerned with loyalty on every plane. Here we find Gawain rejecting a disloyalty that would really have been sinful, so that we may view the lack of loyalty of which he is after accused in its proper scale.
17 So Chaucer reports of his perfit gentil knight that he neuer yet no vileinye ne sayde … unto no maner wight; and later defends himself speciously against a charge of vileinye (precisely low and coarse speech) that might be levelled against his ignoble tales and characters.
18 Whether he would have called the lady’s invitation vileinye is another matter. The actions of the lord and lady are not in fact judged at all. It is only Gawain’s conduct, as the representative of Courtesy and Piety, that is scrutinized. The deeds and words of others are in the main used solely to provide the situations in which his character and behaviour will be exhibited.
19 Which he later expiates, in the same spirit, by telling everyone.
20 Though we might feel, if we were disposed to subject this fairy-tale detail to a scrutiny it is hardly substantial enough to bear, that a kiss cannot be paid away, and at any rate if its source is not named, then a wife’s kiss cannot rightly be said to have been surrendered to the husband. But even this point has not been unnoted by the author. The two feinted blows may have been boute scape (94.2353), as far as Gawain’s flesh went, but they were painful to endure. The Green Knight (or Sir Bertilak) does not seem to have felt that taking kisses from his wife was a matter entirely negligible, even if ‘courtesy’ was the reason for their acceptance.
21 In the ordinary mundane senses. If our author also wrote the Pearl (as seems to me certain), he has complicated matters, for those who wish to consider his mind and views as a whole, by there using ‘courtesy’ in a more elevated sense: the manners not of earthly courts, but of the Court of Heaven; the Divine Generosity and Grace, and the unalloyed humility and charity of the Blessed; the spirit, that is, from which even mundane ‘courtesy’ must proceed, if it is to be alive and sincere, and also pure. There is probably a trace of this to be seen in the conjunction of clannes and cortaysye (28.653) in the ‘fifth five’ of the Pentangle which is concerned with virtue in human relationships.
22 This may appear at first to be a blemish, even if the only serious blemish in this poem. It is indeed, I think, put into a form hardly suitable to Gawain, so that it reads rather more like a sentence of auctor, a piece of clerkly pedantry. But fundamentally it is in character, true to the general character of Gawain as depicted, and credible to his ‘reaction’ at the particular moment. Gawain always tends to go a little further than the case requires. He only needs to say: many greater men than I have been deceived by women, so there is some excuse for me. He need not proceed to say that it would be vastly to men’s profit if they could love women and yet never trust them at all. But he does. And that is not only very like this Gawain, but not unnatural in any ‘courtier’ whose very courtesy and pride in it has been made the means of exposing him to shame. Let it be a mere game and pretence, then! he cries – at that moment.
23 Though one may reflect that his near-perfection would not have been attained unless he had set before himself as an ideal the absolute or mathematical perfection symbolized by the Pentangle.
24 The more charitable, the wider often the divergence, as may be seen in the self-stern saints.
25 By the word kynde in the original the author may intend Gawain’s natural character; but the less introspective sense ‘my sort’, the proper behaviour of members of his order (knights), is perhaps better.
26 The order is probably not significant (nor strictly possible), except the reservation of the Girdle to the last.
27 Not always so strong a word as now, however, when the association with ‘treason’ and ‘traitor’ (originally unconnected) has made it applicable only to acts of great baseness and serious injury.
28 Unless she herself obeys some higher law than herself or than ‘love’.
29 In my father’s translation of Pearl these lines are rendered:
Grace enow may the man receive
Who sins anew, if he repent;
But craving it he must sigh and grieve
And abide what pains are consequent. [Ed.]
30 Chaucer, The Squire’s Tale, lines 95–6. The passage in which these lines occur was (in part) the basis for my father’s view, mentioned at the beginning of this lecture (p. 111), that Chaucer knew Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. [Ed.]
31 Though God’s instrument could indeed be the Girdle, in a world where such things were possible, and lawful.
32 It is an interesting point, which cannot have been unintended on the part of the poet, that the belt for which Gawain broke the rules of his game, and so made the only flaw in the perfection of his conduct on all levels, was never in fact of any use to him at all, not even as a hope.
33 It might be regarded as regrettable in Arthurian Romance as a whole. Personally I do not think that belittling of the King (as sumquat childgered, and the like) does that any good at all.
PEARL
When Pearl was first read in modern times it was accepted as what it purports to be, an elegy on the death of a child, the poet’s daughter. The personal interpretation was first questioned in 1904 by W. H. Schofield, who argued that the maiden of the poem was an allegorical figure of a kind usual in medieval vision literature, an abstraction representing ‘clean maidenhood’. His view was not generally accepted, but it proved the starting-point of a long debate between the defenders of the older view and the exponents of other theories: that the whole poem is an allegory, though each interpreter has given it a different meaning; or that it is no more than a theological treatise in verse. Much space would be required to rehearse this debate, even in brief summary, and the labour would be unprofitable; but it has not been entirely wasted, for much learning has gone into it, and study has deepened the appreciation of the poem and brought out more clearly the allegorical and symbolical elements that it certainly includes.
A clear distinction between ‘allegory’ and ‘symbolism’ may be difficult to maintain, but it is proper, or at least useful, to limit allegory to narrative, to an account (however short) of events; and symbolism to the use of visible signs or things to represent other things or ideas. Pearls were a symbol of purity that especially appealed to the imagination of the Middle Ages (and notably of the fourteenth century); but this does not make a person who wears pearls, or even one who is called Pearl, or Margaret, into an allegorical figure. To be an ‘allegory’ a poem must as a whole, and with fair consistency, describe in other terms some event or process; its entire narrative and all its significant details should cohere and work together to this end. There are minor allegories within Pearl; the parable of the workers in the vineyard (stanzas 42–49) is a self-contained allegory; and the opening stanzas of the poem, where the pearl slips from the poet’s hand through the grass to the ground, is an allegory in little of the child’s death and burial. But an allegorical description of an event does not make that event itself allegorical. And this initial use is only one of the many applications of the pearl symbol, intelligible if the reference of the poem is personal, incoherent if one seeks for total allegory. For there are a number of precise details in Pearl that cannot be subordinated to any general allegorical interpretation, and these details are of special importance since they relate to the central figure, the maiden of the vision, in whom, if anywhere, the allegory should be concentrated and without disturbance.
The basis of criticism, then, must be the references to the child or maiden, and to her relations with the dreamer; and no good reason has ever been found for regarding these as anything but statements of ‘fact’: the real experiences that lie at the foundation of the poem.
When the dreamer first sees the maiden in the paradisal garden, he says (stanza 21):
‘Art þou my perle þat I haf playned,
Regretted by myn one on nyʓte?
Much longeyng haf I for þe layned
Syþen into gresse þou my aglyʓte.
This explains for us the minor allegory of the opening stanzas and reveals that the pearl he lost was a maid-child who died. For the maiden of the vision accepts the identification, and herself refers to her death in stanza 64. In stanza 35 she says she was at that time very young, and the dreamer himself in stanza 41 tells us that she was not yet two years old and had not yet learned her creed or prayers. The whole theological argument that follows assumes the infancy of the child when she left this world.
The actual relationship of the child in the world to the dreamer is referred to in stanza 20: when he first espied her in his vision he recognized her; he knew her well, he had seen her before (stanza 14); and so now beholding her visible on the farther bank of the stream he was the happiest man ‘from here to Greece’, for
