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Jean de Meun’s Continuation of the Roman…

“Idolatry” in the Middle Ages…

The Myth of Pygmalion in Medieval Commentary…

Pygmalion, Narcissus, and the Dreamer…

     The didactic sententiousness of Jean de Meun’s c. 1277 “continuation” of Guillaume de Lorris’Roman is, if anything, even plainer.  At over 15,000 lines–it swamps the original–, it is too long for anything more than cursory treatment here.  Two sections near the end of the poem are of special relevance, however, to the themes and topoi we have been tracing in these essays:  Jean’s digression on the myth of Pygmalion, and his beautiful description of the “Shepherd’s Park”.

The moral relevance of the myth of Pygmalion to that of Narcissus and, by extension, the plight of the dreamer, will become clear enough.  But before turning to Jean’s paraphrase, it will be useful to preface it with a little medieval sermon on the subject of idolatry.

In medieval symbolism, idolatry means far more than “worshiping graven images”–hardly a problem in the high Middle Ages–but refers, once again, to an attitude of mind.  Robert Holcot, an English friar who was a contemporary of Chaucer, explains the meaning of “idolatry” in his commentary on the  Book of Wisdom.  In connection with the verses, “Give not the power of thy soul to a woman lest she enter upon thy strength, and thou be confounded”, and “Turn away thy face from a woman dressed up, and gaze not upon her beauty”, Holcot explains that the beauty of a woman is a snare (one of the conventional images of lust, as we’ve seen from both Andreas and Guillaume de Lorris) and a false idol, and quotes another verse from Wisdom, “the beginning of fornication is the devising of idols”.  Then he comments, “For it is impossible for a curious and lascivious man associating with these idols not to be corrupted by them; indeed, a man, diligently seeking out and considering in his thought the beauty of women so that he makes idols for himself, necessarily prepares for his own fall” (my emphasis).

An “idol”, therefore, is not always a concrete image, but can be one constructed in the mind, such as the images of feminine beauty that, as we’ve already seen, are set up and fixed in the imaginations of those suffering from the passio of love.

 

Now, the story of Pygmalion is introduced at the point in the poem at which Venus is about to release her arrow at a statue of a woman, sculpted out of silver, and erected in a sort of shrine.  It is noteworthy that Venus is not aiming at a lady, or even at the dreamer’s rose, but at an idol (as one can see from figure 17), which is to say, at the image into which the rose has been turned by the dreamer’s desires.

The poet then compares this image to the statue of Pygmalion, so beautiful that Pygmalion fell desperately–in his case, one would have to say, madly–in love with it.

In the course of his long lamentation, as Jean recounts it, Pygmalion affects to find a certain consolation in comparing himself to Narcissus, who fell in love with “sa propre figure”, just as he has fallen in love with “his own figure”, which at least, unlike Narcissus, he can dress up, kiss, fondle, and even take to bed with him (figure. 19), though his statue remains disappointingly unresponsive.

It is interesting that Pygmalion, in a state which he himself describes repeatedly as “madness”, executes all of the conventional gestures and undergoes all of the obligatory sufferings supposedly enjoined by the “code” of courtly love:  the reversals of mood, the feelings of rejection, and yet the certainty that but a single smile from his lady would repay all his pain, and so on, with the implication that the supposedly “courtly” behaviour of the dreamer is equally unhinged.

Finally, Pygmalion prays to Venus.  In figure 20, one notes that (as this scene was conventionally illustrated in medieval manuscripts of the Roman), both Venus and Pygmalion’s statue are set upon pedestals, and are thus also depicted as idols.

Venus, obligingly, answers Pygmalion’s prayer, so that when he returns to his image, he is astonished by what he finds.  “What is this?”, he asks.  “Have I been deceived.  Am I awake?  No, this must be a dream.  No one has ever seen a vision so beautiful apart from a dream.  How has this marvel occurred?  Is it some phantasm or fiend that has entered my image?”

There can, of course, be no doubt about the relevance of Pygmalion’s delusion to the erotic dream of the speaker in the Roman.  And indeed, just as in the wish-fueled fantasy of the dreamer, Pygmalion’s image obligingly assures him that she is real, and afterwards does all that he longs for.

 

Now, the romantic sensibility has tended to prettify the story of Pygmalion into a fairy tale like those in which the frog always turns into a prince, or an exemplum of the heroic power of art to outdo nature; but neither Jean de Meun nor his audience would have been quite so credulous of, or sentimental about, this supposed miracle.

As Arnulph of Orleans, a twelfth-century commentator on Ovid’s Metanorphoses, explains, “Ovid says the statue of Pygmalion was changed into a living woman.  As a matter of fact, Pygmalion made an ivory statue, and conceiving so irrational a love for it, persuaded himself that it was alive and began to abuse it as though it were a real woman.”  But if Pygmalion became so aroused in pursuit of his fantasy that the pleasure generated by it caused him to lose all reason to the point of convincing himself that the statue had come to life, he was simply doing what Guillaume’s lover did in his own dream when he imagined his rose lying naked in bed beside him.

 

At the end of his re-telling of the Pygmalion myth, Jean de Meun apologizes for his long digression from the narrative, adding, “However, you shall see what all this means before my tale has reached an end.”  Like Pygmalion, the dreamer too has created an “image”, an idol in the mind such as those described by Holcot, which is warmed and animated by the flame of his own runaway passion.  But when his rose has been transformed by the magic of this passion and he is on the verge of fulfilling his desires, he suddenly awakens.  The fantasy created by his fevered imagination dissolves like the proverbial Castle in Spain, into thin air.

Reason…The Immanent Image of the Logos…

Physician of Souls...

Her Rejection:  The Third and Final Stage of the Fall…

Priceton Quiz:  What does the rosebud signify?…

     The third and final step in the fall of Guillaume’s lover occurs when he refuses to listen to the voice of Lady Reason–which is foolish enough in the context of a philosophical and theological tradition in which reason is the highest virtue and divine element within man, but even more so insofar as the lover explicitly recognizes the lady’s exalted identity:

She wore a noble crown upon her head.
A queen she might have been, but more did seem,
To judge by her appearance and her face,
An angel come, perhaps, from paradise.
Nature could hardly frame a work so fair.
‘Twas God himself, unless the Scriptures lie,
Who in his image and his likeness formed
This godlike one, and her with power endowed
To rescue men from rash and foolish acts,
Provided that her counsel they’ll believe.

But the lover doesn’t accept her counsel, any more than he accepted the counsel of the admonitory tale of Narcissus, which he blithely re-actualizes.  He rejects it (though its function, as he notes, is “to rescue men from rash and foolish acts”), and though the Reason that appears to him is the Logos itself, second Person of the Trinity, “the likeness and image” of God the Father, of which the reason immanent in the human soul is also the “likeness and image”.

When the dreamer disdains to take Reason’s advice, he is thus denying what is highest in himself, and, of course, repeating the archetypal pattern.  Instead of referring the beauty of the rose to the sovereign rational and masculine component of the soul–like the beauty of the vase in John’s the Scot’s allegory of the Fall–, the dreamer allows its image to remain fixed in his “outer garden”, “the woman”.

Like Lady Philosophy in Boethius’ Consolation, Dame Reason tells the lover in the Roman that he is himself the cause of his own imprisonment.  Only a fool, she says, would make a friend of Idleness:

                             ‘Twas evil hour
At which you came into that shady park
Of which the key is kept by Idleness,
Who ope’d the gate for you.  One is a fool
Who makes acquaintance with that tempting maid,
Whose sweet companionship is perilous.
You’ve been deceived and brought to grief by her;
For had not Idleness conducted you
Into the garden that is named Delight
The God of Love had never seen you there…
But ‘tis no wonder; men are fools in youth.
Now I should like to give you this advice:
Into oblivion consign that god
Who has so weakened, tortured, conquered you.
I see no other way to healthful cure…
Nothing but foolishness is this disease
Called love; ‘twere better it were folly named.

Reason has come as the physician of the soul (another classical and thereafter Christian topos) to cure his “lover’s malady”, and then describes his condition using the same equestrian imagery as Andreas Capellanus employs to describe that of his friend Walter:

From day to day it will entrench itself
If you allow this folly to remain.
Now firmly seize the bits between your teeth;
Resist the guidance of your stubborn heart,
Against whose will you’ll have to use some force.
You will be ditched if passion keeps the reins.

 

I needn’t say much more about Guillaume’s Roman.  In future installments, we’ll look at a few brief excerpts from the much longer and more philosophically rich second part by Jean de Meun.  In that part, Reason plays a rather bigger role, comparing Blind Cupid to the capricious Goddess Fortuna, and identifying the pleasures of carnal love as one of the Goddess’s deceptive and transitory earthly gifts.  The poem ends with a description, moreover, of another garden, the Shepherd’s Park, which is the true Paradise, and the direct antithesis to the garden of Deduit.

But before we leave Guillaume’s Roman, let me draw your attention to one more passage, in which the lover describes his beloved rosebud as if looking at it through a macro lense, just before achieving his kiss.

When I approached the Rose, I found it grown
A little larger than it was before;
A little greater height the bush had gained.
But I was pleased that the unfolding flower
Had not yet spread so as to show the seed,
Which still was by the petals well concealed,
That stood up straight and with their tender fold
Hid well the grains with which the bud was filled.
And, thanked be God, the bud’s maturer curves
Were better hued and comelier than before.
I was abashed, and marveled at the sight.
The fairer the bud, the more Love fettered me;
The happier I, the more I felt his chains.

You tell me what this exalted “rosebud” really signifies.

The Conventional Symbolism of Flowers…

The Book of Wisdom and the Playboy Philosophy…

Cupid’s Arrows, “Fairness to the Eyes”, and the First Stage of the Fall…

The Second Stage:  “Pleasurable Thought”…

Cupid’s Laws of Love and the Lover’s Malady...

     The dreamer then explains why he is tempted above all by the bush’s tender buds, not yet unfolded into bloom:

Who could hate
Such folded buds! For roses spreading wide
Within one day will surely all be gone;
But fresh the buds will still remain at least
Two days or three; so they allured me most.

Two days or three!  Hardly objects of eternal and immutable beauty, but then that is the poet’s joke.

Flowers in general, and roses in particular, are conventional symbols of the transience of earthly goods and pleasures, especially the fading beauty of the flesh.  This tradition derives in part from the well-known opening verses of the book of Wisdom, often quoted out of context as though it were an early statement of the Playboy Philosophy:

But ungodly men by their acts and words have summoned Hades…
For they did not reason soundly, but said to themselves:
“Our life will pass away like the traces of a cloud,
And be scattered like mist…
So come, let us enjoy the good things that exist…
Let us have our fill of costly wine and perfumes,
And let us not miss the spring flowers,
Let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they wither…”

In his commentary on Wisdom, Thomas Ringstede, a fourteenth-century English friar and bishop, associates these seizers-of-the-day, who crown themselves with rosebuds, with the servants of Venus.  And since in ancient mythography, the fading rose was an attribute of the vulgar Venus, it became, in turn, an attribute of the Christian vice of luxuria.

To recall a passage from the Third Vatican Mythographer to which I referred earlier:

Roses are ascribed to Venus, for roses redden and prick just as lust causes redness through the opprobrium of shame, and the dart of sin pricks.  Moreover, just as roses delight for a short while but are destroyed by the quick passage of time, so it is with lust.

This, then, is the rosebud, enduring for as long as two or three days, that the dreamer in the Romanyearns to pluck.

 

At this point Cupid, who like everyone else in the Roman is not so much a character as a personification of  “cupidity” or desire, springs into action.  He unleashes his five arrows, the most important of which is the first, called “Biaute”, which enters, says the poet, through the dreamer’s eye.  It is this same beauty that enters the garden of the soul by way of the outer, sensible garden or the “Woman” in John the Scot’s psychological allegory of the Fall, and it is its “fairness to the eye” that in the forbidden fruit first deceived Eve.

The next stage of the Fall is “pleasurable thought”, a point on which the God of Love gives the dreamer explicit instruction:

Next I enjoin as penance, night and day,
Without repentance, that you think on love,
Forever keeping ceaselessly in mind
The happy hour which has such joy in store…

Cupid’s proclamation of the laws of love center on this obsession, but they include all of the other absurd behavioral tics and symptoms of the lover’s malady as we have already noted in Ovid and Andreas Capellanus, and observed in Arcite, Nicholas, and Absolon in Chaucer’s Tales:  the primping and combing of one’s hair; the attention to the tailoring of one’s coat; the stylish lacing of one’s boots; the proper fabric of one’s gloves and purse; the sort of flowers to carry in one’s coronet; the way to cut an impressive figure on horseback; the songs to sing and dances to learn; how to secure a reputation as a big-spending host—how, that is, to appear in order to advance one’s cause with one’s lady.

At the same time, the lover must prove the worthiness and authenticity of his passion by suffering a never-ending cycle of torment followed by joy:  weeping one hour, singing the next,

For everyone should do in every place
That which he knows will advantageous be,
Because by this he gets thanks, grace, and praise.

When reminded of your love, you must depart from company and in secret succumb to

Sighs and complaints, tremors and other ills.
Tormented will you be in many ways:
One hour you will be hot, another cold;
One hour you will be flushed, another pale;
No quartan fever that you ever had—
No quotidian either—could be worse.

Sometimes you will

               half forget yourself, bemused,
And long time stand like graven image mute
Which never budges, stirs, or even moves
Its foot, its hand its finger, or its lips,

until you finally recover from your lover’s reverie.

You will always complain bitterly that you cannot feast your eyes upon your sweetheart, and periodically set out to find her; but your search will usually be in vain.

Then will you be anew in sad estate,
To you will come cold shivering and sighs,
And pains that prick more sharp than hedgehog’s quills.

So you will always be alert to the opportunity to catch a glimpse of your beloved, but what if you succeed?  For then

Her beauty with great joy will fill your soul;
But sight of her your heart will broil and fry.
The glowing coals of love will burst ablaze.
The more you gaze upon her whom you love,
The hotter will the fire engage your heart.
Sight is the grease that swells the amorous flame.
Each lover customarily pursues
The burning conflagration.  Although scorched,
He hugs it closer; for its nature’s such
As makes him contemplate his lady love
Although at sight of her he suffers pain.

After you have been roasted by her flame, you will then accost yourself for not having had the courage to speak, but only

               to have boobied by her side,
Awkward and dumb, and let the chance escape.

And so, bewailing your fate, you will seek a new opportunity to wander into the street where you last saw her but remained mute, and inevitably you will stroll back and forth on the road across from her home, trying meanwhile to explain yourself to the neighbours.  If she does come out,

Then you will feel your color change; a chill
Will run through all your veins; and when you try
To hold converse, your thoughts and words will fail.
Or, if you do succeed to start a speech,
Of every three words you’ll say scarcely two,
So shameful your embarrassment will be.

Once again, you will upbraid yourself for your stammering inarticulateness.

Then will your martyrdom begin again.
This is the struggle, this the sorry strife.
This is the battle that forever lasts.
Lovers will never gain what they seek;
Always it fails them; never have they peace.

 

In the panoply of his sufferings, the lover’s nocturnal torments are the most grievous, when the image of the beloved so burns in his imagination that it banishes sleep, or fecundates an erotic dream (of which, as Guillaume well knows, the entire Roman is an example).

A thousand more annoyances at night
You’ll have, and in your bed but small repose;
For, when you wish to sleep, there will commence
Tremblings, agitations, shivers, chills.
From one side to the other you will toss—
Lie on your stomach first, then on your back—
Like one with toothache seeking ease in vain.
Then will return the memory of her
Whose shape and semblance never had a peer.
I’ll state a miracle that may occur:
Sometimes you’ll dream that your beloved one,
Fair-eyed and naked quite, lies in your arms,
And yields herself companion to your love.
Then castles in the land of Spain you’ll build,
And naught will please you but to fool yourself
With pleasant thoughts whose basis is a lie.

As we will see, the “pensee delitable” of the dreamer remains a figment even in the last part of the poem, with the implication that the pleasure of carnal love that the dreamer so ardently pursues is, like the dream itself, a fleeting fancy.

The Bird-Snare of Pleasure…

Satan the Fowler…

The Mirror of Narcissus…

The Mirror of the Mind…

     Looking into the fountain, the dreamer sees two marvelous crystal stones in which are reflected a hundred different hues:

Just as a mirror will reflect each thing
That near is placed, and one therein can see
Both form and color without variance,
So do these crystals undistorted show
The garden’s each detail to anyone
Who looks into the waters of the spring.
For, from whichever side one chance to look,
He sees one half the garden…

But then he remembers Narcissus:

The Mirror Perilous it is, where proud
Narcissus saw his face and his gray eyes,
Because of which he soon lay on his bier.
There is no charm nor remedy for this;
Whatever thing appears before one’s eyes,
While at these stones he looks, he straightway loves.
Many a valiant man has perished thence;
The wisest, worthiest, most experienced
Have there been trapped and taken unawares…
There a new furor falls to some men’s lot;
There neither sense nor moderation holds
The mastery; there will to love is all;
There no man can take counsel for himself.
‘Tis Cupid, Venus’ son, there sows the seed
Which taints the fountains, and ‘tis there he sets
His nets and snares to capture man and maid;
For Cupid hunts no other sort of bird…

But the dreamer still insists on gazing into the fountain:

Long time it pleased me to remain to view
The fountain and the crystals that displayed
A hundred thousand things which there appeared.
But I remember it as sorry hour.
Alas, how often therefore have I sighed!
The mirrors me deceived.  Had I but known
Their power and their force, I had not then
So close approached.  I fell within the snare
That sorely has betrayed and caught full many a man.

Well, the mirrors didn’t exactly deceive the dreamer; he should have “known their power and their force” from the warning label that explained that Narcissus died as a result of looking into them.  The dreamer’s attempt to exculpate himself is patently unconvincing; but then this is a perfect example of a medieval poem that cares little for realism or psychological verisimilitude.  On the level of the allegory, there is no ambiguity whatsoever.  The dreamer is re-actualizing the myth of Narcissus, and the moral folly of which it is a universal admonitory exemplum.  He is submitting himself to the fate of those countless wise and worthy men whose moderation and reason “could no longer hold the mastery” against the “furor” (that is, the madness) of their all-consuming love, and who thereby ended up in Cupid’s bird-snare.

 

The bird-snare of pleasure is another common medieval topos.  The early tenth-century theologian and poet Odo of Cluny expresses it as follows in his famous philosophical epic on the Redemption, Occupatio:

And just as bait draws flying birds to the snare,
Wicked appetite draws those moved by its sweetness.
Fixed in the lime, they cannot stretch their wings;
They lack devotion to virtue and the wings to fly.
Hunger for a little morsel makes them hungry forever.

     We see the bird snare of pleasure in the illuminations of a number of fourteenth-century Psalters, accompanying the text from Ps. 123: 7, “Our soul hath been delivered as a sparrow out of the snare of the fowlers”.  The bait in the snare (according to the fourteenth-century Glossa Ordinaria on this verse) is “dulcedo huius vitae”—the sweetness of this life, as opposed to the sweetness of the spirit.

This moralized imagery belongs to a larger complex in which Satan is conceived as hunter or a fowler stalking human prey.  In the Roman, this is not coincidentally the occupation of Cupid; but it is the mirror imagery of the well of Narcissus—the Mirror Perilous—that is emphasized above all by Guillaume.

Let me remind you of the allegories of the Fall discussed earlier from John the Scot and Chaucer’s Parson, according to which the crucial stage is that in which the image of the object of beauty becomes fixed in the sensual imagination and the focus of “pleasurable thought” or “excessive meditation”.  This, as you recall, was also the crucial stage, according to Andreas Capellanus, in the lover’s passio.  Here, again,  is the relevant text from Andreas’ De amore:

Love is a certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of and excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex…That this suffering is inborn I shall show you clearly, because if you will look at the truth, and distinguish carefully you will see that it does not arise out of any action; only from the reflection of the mind upon what it sees does this suffering come.

The Mirror Perilous is, in other words, the mirror of the mind in which the image of the beloved (in the case of Narcissus, himself; in the case of the dreamer, a rosebud) is meditated upon obsessively.  This is the same mirror, of course, that medieval artists depict in the hand of the personification of Luxuria, which is also, as we have seen, carried by Oiseuse (Idleness), the porteress to the garden of Deduit.

The same mirror is visible in figures 15 and 16, in the latter, being held by a Siren, while in both, the women gazing vainly into it do so to the accompaniment of the Old Song, played (in fig. 15) on the bagpipe.

The two crystals that the dreamer sees in the well of Narcissus are, obviously enough, reflections of his own eyes, and at the same time the mirrors that reflect images of the garden through them onto the mirror of the mind.  As the dreamer gazes into them, he sees a profusion of beautiful flowers (the conventional symbols of the transient beauty of the world and the flesh), and these bring him unimaginable delight.

Amongst them he sees a rosebush, whose beauty enthralls him:

                                     And such desire
Then seized me that I had not failed to seek
The place where that rose-heap was on display
Though Pavia or Paris had tempted me.
When I was thus o’ertaken by this rage,
Which many another better man has crazed.
Straightway I hurried toward the red rosebush.

“Rage”, “craze”, and so on, are words from clinical psychology, and indeed, as we have already seen, love of this kind was typically diagnosed in the Middle Ages as a kind of full-blown mania or mental illness.  It is the same “craze”, as the dreamer recognizes, as that which gripped many a better man before him.

Paradise on Earth…

Narcissus and the Lover’s Malady…

In Medieval Moral Allegory…

Narcissus and “Pleasurable Thought”

     At this point “the dance was ended”, and we see immediately and unambiguously that of which it is the preamble:

                                for the most
Departed with their sweethearts to make love,
Shaded beneath the secret-keeping boughs.
Foolish were he who envied not such a life
As there they led!  It lusty was, God knows!
He who might have a chance to live that way
Might well deprive himself of other boons;
For there’s no better paradise on earth
Than any place where lover finds a maid
Responding freely to his heart’s desire.

The dreamer has stumbled into the Playboy Mansion and once again imagines that he has found Paradise.  But since the Christian Paradise is hardly a place to which you gain entrance by living a life of carnal pleasure, nor has it much to do with the contempory jihadist fantasy about 144,000 virgins “responding freely to one’s heart’s desire”, it is unlikely in the extreme that Guillaume de Lorris could have shared his dreamer’s risible enthusiasm.  The fact, moreover, that the love-making takes place in the shade, “beneath the secret-keeping boughs”, reminds us that after eating of the fruit, Adam and Eve hid themselves amongst the trees from the sight of God.  If this is Paradise, then, it is the Paradise of the Fall and its aftermath.

Following the dance, the dreamer goes on a tour through the garden, noting the profusion of exotic trees, flowers, and little furry creatures, and noticing also that the God of Love is stalking him like a hunter pursuing his prey.  At last, he reaches what he calls “the fairest spot of all where flowed a spring beneath a spreading pine”, and around the fountain, a marble border, and incised into the marble as if on a tombstone, the epitaph/warning, “Here it was that fair Narcissus wept himself to death.”

At this point, naturally, the poet/dreamer recounts the myth of Narcissus, cleaving closely to the usual medieval source, Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  He begins,

Narcissus was a youth whom Love once caught
Within his snare and caused such dole and woe
That in his grief he rendered up his ghost.

The dreamer goes on to narrate how Echo, the fine Lady whose love Narcissus spurned, so pined for him that she wasted away to nothing but her own voice and died.  Before expiring, she begged the gods to grant her last request:  that Narcissus should be made to feel the same torment of unrequited love as she had suffered.  And so one day, returning from the hunt, tired, hot, and thirsty, Narcissus came upon a clear fountain which lay in the shadow of a magnificent pine tree.  Kneeling down to drink, he saw in the waters a beautiful image:

Enraptured, he gazed upon the crystal spring
Until he fell in love with his own face;
And at the last he died for very woe.
That was the end of that; for when he knew
Such passion must go e’er unsatisfied,
Although he was entangled in Love’s snare…
He lost his reason in but little space,
For very ire, and died.

Narcissus, having lost his reason, died of the same lover’s malady as did Echo, save that his passio was all the more irrational for being incited by his own beauty.

 

In medieval, as in classical mythography, Narcissus is an exemplum of the folly of self-love.  In Arnulph of Orleans’ twelfth-century commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, we read that

Narcissus is said to have loved his shadow because he placed his own excellence above all other things.  Whence he was turned into a flower, that is, into a useless thing, for he soon perished like a flower.

But in a way that was well understood in medieval moral psychology, any love of merely physical beauty or delight is a form of self-love, inasmuch as what it aims at is self-satisfaction.  Thus, in Cliges,Chretien de Troyes compares his hero with Narcissus for falling in love with Fenice at first sight, with the implication that what Cliges loves is an image he has created within his own mind.  Similarly, in his fourteenth-century treatise, Li ars d’amour, Jehan le Bel condemns some loves “because the profit and delight on account of which they are cultivated are not in the persons loved but in the lovers”.  This is especially true of love that arises from carnal delight “for then the objects of love are not loved, except by accident, but the delight alone is loved”.

In Narcissus’ brooding over his own reflection in the well and dying for love of an insubstantial image, the medieval reader would thus have seen an excellent example of the danger of what John the Scot, Andreas Capellanus, and Chaucer’s Parson called “pleasurable thought” or “excessive meditation”, the crucial second stage of sin.  But even if he hasn’t read these authorities, the dreamer clearly recognizes what an unhappy fate Narcissus suffered in being caught in the snare of Cupid.  His coming upon the place where Narcissus died and being reminded of his story at the very moment when he is himself being hunted by Cupid seems, clearly enough, to be a timely warning he ought to heed.

After reading the inscription, the dreamer at first sensibly draws back, “lest I like Narcissus might in these water gaze”, he says.  But he quickly accuses himself of cowardice, and then precisely repeats the actions that led to Narcissus’ tragedy:

I then approached
And kneeled before the fountain to observe
How coursed the water o’er the pebbled floor
That bright as silver fine appeared to me.
‘Twas the last word in fountains!  None more fair
In all the world is found.

Here is a man of who can find the silver lining in any cloud.

The “Old Dance” in Medieval Verse…

 In the Roman de la Rose…

     I’ve discussed the Old and New Songs in a previous posting, featuring some manuscript illustrations of that opposition, including one from the Roman de la Rose which shows Gladness playing the bagpipes and leading the companions of Sir Pleasure in their terpsichorean diversions (see Fig. 42, Grammar, Part Twenty-Six).

The Old Song and the Old Dance go together, of course.  In a poem by Gautier de Coincy, the Old Dance is conducted by the Devil himself,

Anemis a mout grant puissance
Et tant seit de la vielle dance
Qu’a sa dance fait bien baler
Celz qui plus doit cuident aler.

[The Enemy of most great power who knows so well the old dance that at it he causes to dance those who ardently wish to go there.]

In one of Gautier’s metrical sermons (on chastity), the Old Dance takes on all the amorous connotations of the Old Song.  Here Gautier calls virginity and chastity “holy flowers of paradise”, which should be perceived with the eye of the spirit:

Sachiez de voir:  se vous en eles
Des iex dou cuer bien vous mirez,
L’ anemi tout esbaubirez.

[Learn how to see:  if you look at them (the flowers of chastity and virginity) with the eyes of the heart, you will abash the Enemy.]

Mais tant set de la vielle dance,
S’il voit en vous point d’inconstance,
De tez pensez voz amenra
Par quoi mout tost voz sozpenra.

[But he is so skillful at the old dance that if he detects in your thoughts any sign of inconstancy, he will take you suddenly and lead you away.]

The Enemy, then, may lead you in a dance for the express purpose of destroying your virtue and carrying you off with him to the underworld.

Pepe le Pew’s metaphor of seduction as “making beautiful music together” thus has an ancient pedigree, and the same invitation is profferred by the young suitor in one of Deschamps’ balades:

Marion, entendez a mi:
Je vous aim plus que creature,
Et pour ce d’umble cuer vous pri
Qu’ au dessoubz de vostre sainture
Me laissez de la turelure
Et de ma chevrette jouer.
La vous aprandray a dancer
Au coursault, et faire mains tours.
–Robin, je n’y scaroie aler:
Doint on ainsi parler d’amours?

[Marion, listen to me.  I love you more than any creature, and for this reason I beseech you with a humble heart, in spite of your sacred virtue, to let me play on my turelure and my chevrette.  I will teach you to dance, to make somersaults and spins.

–Robin, I don’t wish to go there.  Is that the way one talks of love?]

The turelure, of course, is a bagpipe, the chevrette, a related instrument made of goatskin.  The maid Marion is well aware of the sexual implications of Robin’s offer to teach her to dance to his bagpipe, and her sainture disinclines her to accept.

 

The dance to which Robin invites Marion is the same as the kissing-and-grinding affair the dreamer sees taking place in the terrestrial paradise of Deduit, and he is soon invited to take a turn around the floor with the beautiful maiden Courtesy.  Not yet feeling quite sure of himself, the dreamer for the moment demurs, biding his time while observing and describing the dress and attributes of each of the dancers.

He begins with Sir Pleasure, then his consort Gladness (“she a belle and he a beau”), then the God of Love himself, then Sweet Looks, the randy young bachelor who attends upon Love as his all-round factotum and squire who carries his quiver.  In passing, we read a description of Cupid’s bow and five arrows, each of which is duly personified, as, for instance, Fair Seeming which, we are informed, made the deepest wound.

The dreamer then identifies the noble dame Beauty, to whom, he says, Cupid is most attached, and standing by Beauty’s side, he sees Wealth, “a lady of great haughtiness and pride”, who demands to be flattered and catered to by anyone who wishes to gain her indispensable favour, and against whom no one would dare offend.  “Many an envier and a flatterer”, as the dreamer observes, “thronged her court”.  But hardly chastened by this fact, the dreamer goes on to admire Wealth’s fabulously opulent robe, including the gorgeous clasp ornamented with a magic stone, which protects its wearer against poisoning.

Wealth’s consort just happens to be a pretty youth.  The dreamer describes him as well-dressed, well-shod, with a stable full of the finest horses.

With Lady Wealth and her benevolence
To be acquainted he was therefore glad;
For ever in his mind was one thought fixed:
How he might sojourn most luxuriously;
And she would furnish him with the wherewithal
For his expenditures…

Amongst the dancers, the dreamer next describes Lady Franchise, whose name in Old French suggests the freedom with which she bestows her sexual benefices.

Like turtledove’s
Was her simplicity; her tender heart
Was debonair; she dared not say or do
To anyone a thing that was not meet.

A tender heart is a fine attribute, insofar as it can be bestowed in mercy and compassion upon the poor, the unfortunate, and so on; but in the next lines we learn why the odd comparison to the turtledove is apposite.

If any man were dying for her love,
On him she would take pity, probably;
For such a rueful, pious, loving heart
She had that, lest he do a desperate deed,
She’d aid a man who suffered for her sake.

Like the turtledove indeed (another commonplace symbol of lechery), she was, as one would say today, an “easy” woman.

These, then, are the “angelic” companions in the celestial paradise of Deduit:  the deadly sin Idleness; Cupid and his manservant; Lady Wealth, who, as she is described by Boethius in TheConsolation of Philosophy, is so dubious a worldly good that she is always surrounded by flatterers and enviers, and has to protect herself against those who covet her possessions by wearing an amulet against poison; Lady Wealth’s beau, whose youthful attention she must purchase with her riches, and whose addiction to luxury he must pay for with his body; and finally, Franchise, Easy Woman, whose “rueful, pious, loving heart” never refuses a desperate man’s entreaty for love.

The dreamer lavishes his praise upon the excellence and virtue of all of these characters, as upon everything he sees; and it is in the great disparity between his rosy appraisal of things and their rather darker reality that the humour, once again, lies.

Music in the Roman de la Rose…

 The Old and New Dance…

     The pretension of the dreamer in the Roman de la Rose, that the music he hears in Deduit’s garden of earthly delights is really the angelic harmony of the spheres, is thus rather badly undercut by his comparison of it to the song of the Sirens.  The commonplace characterization of the Sirens as harlots who symbolize lust and carnal pleasure, and Honorius’ pointed allusion to the temptations of Adam in Eden, suggest that the dreamer is in much greater peril than he knows.

This is what makes his sunny optimism so funny, of course:

You may well know that, when I heard these tunes
And saw the verdant place, I was most gay.
Never so merry I—so glad of heart—
Until the day I knew the garden’s charms!
Then I perceived most plainly and well knew
That Idleness had excellently served
In placing me in midst of such delight.
Well I resolved to be her faithful friend…

Again, the moral humour here comes through loud and clear in the dreamer’s plain statement that Idleness/idleness served him so excellently that he was determined to be her fast friend.  It’s the sort of statement that everyone would recognize as a joke if it were made by P.G. Wodehouse’s Berti Wooster; yet, for some reason, many critics take it in earnest in a medieval poem.

The dreamer then describes in somewhat greater detail the Siren-song of the birds and the activities that accompanied it in the garden of Sir Pleasure:

The birds kept on performing all their rites;
Sweetly and pleasantly they sang of love
And chanted courtly sonnets and well.
In part songs joining, one sang high, one low.

They sang, that is, the music of “courtly love”, which once again, the dreamer affects to compare to the harmony of the spheres which is produced by the consonance of the opposites of high and low.

And then he goes on to describe the human companions of Sir Pleasure in the same ontologically exalted terms:

For, truly, winged angels they did seem.
No earth-born man had ever seen such folk.

These angelic creatures, like the birds, are engaged in the making of “melodye”, which, as we are not surprised to learn, the dreamer describes with the same breathless enthusiasm:

This noble company of which I speak
Had ordered for themselves a caroling.
A dame named Gladness led them in the tune;
Most pleasantly and sweetly rang her voice…

Gladness also

Knew well the dance steps, and could keep good time
The while she voiced her song.  Ever the first
Was she, by custom, to begin the tune;
For music was the trade that she knew best
Ever to practice most agreeably.

Whether the music that this Gladness played was the harmony of the spheres or the music of the vulgar Venus, whether the dance of which she knew all the steps was the cosmic dance of the planets held in orbit around God by their love for Him, or the latest crazes in which Chaucer’s Nicholas was an expert, is made clear enough in the subsequent passage:

Now see the carol go!  Each man and maid
Most daintily steps out with many a turn
And farandole upon the tender grass.
See there the flutists and the minstrel men,
Performers on the viol!  Now they sing
A rondelet, a tune from old Lorraine;
For it has better songs than other lands.
A troop of skillful jugglers thereabout
Well played their parts, and girls with tambourines
Danced jollily, and, finishing each tune,
Threw high their instruments, and as these fell
Caught each on finger tip, and never failed.
Two graceful demoiselles in sheerest clothes,
Their hair in coifferings alike arrayed,
Most coyly tempted Mirth to join the dance.
Unutterably quaint [cf. M.E. queynte] their motions were:
Insinuatingly each one approached
The other, till, almost together clasped,
Each one of her partner’s darting lips just grazed
So that it seemed their kisses were exchanged.
I can’t describe for you each lithesome glide
Their bodies made—but they knew how to dance!

Yes, indeed, the dreamer can hardly describe each lithesome glide, but they sure knew how to dance!, he says with a wink.

The dance he describes, I imagine, is the sort of “grinding” that takes place on prom nights and at the clubs in Toronto’s so-called Entertainment District—the kind of dancing that is the prelude to the main event.  It’s what passes for “courtship” now as it apparently also did then.  And it’s what in medieval allegorical commentary is known as “the old dance”, which is done to the accompaniment of the “old song”.

Ulysses and the Sirens in Christian Allegorical Commentary…

     As usual, early and medieval Christian commentators preserved all the main outlines of the pagan allegorical interpretation of the Sirens and merely fitted them into the new Christian frame.  Odysseus tied to the mast of his ship becomes a figure for Christ upon the Cross; the sea remains the sea of passion and worldly temptation; but the ship is now the Church and the wax with which Odysseus-Christ stops up the ears of his sailors becomes the teaching of Scripture.

     These ideas were already conventional when Clement of Alexandria invoked them in his Protrepticus at the end of the second century A.D.:

Let us flee, comrades, let us flee from this wave.  It belches forth fire [i.e., from hell-mouth]; it is an island of wickedness heaped with bones and corpses, and she who sings therein is pleasure, a harlot in the bloom of youth, delighting in her vulgar music:

Hither, renowned Odysseus, great glory of all the Achaeans:  Bring thy ship to the land, that a song divine may entrance thee. [Od. XII, 184-185]

She praises thee, sailor, she calls thee renowned in song; the harlot would make the glory of the Greeks her own.  Leave her to roam among the corpses; a heavenly wind comes to thine aid.  Pass by pleasure; she beguiles…Sail past the song; it works death.  Only resolve, and thou has vanquished destruction; bound to the wood of the cross thou shalt live freed from all corruption. The Word of God shall be thy pilot, and the Holy Spirit shall bring thee to anchor in the harbours of heaven. (Protrept. xii)

Gathered together in this passage are all of those images and themes that had been repeatedly sounded by the pagan commentators of classical antiquity:  the sea-voyage as the proving-ground of the soul which tries to avoid shipwreck on the shoals of carnality while buffeted by the storms of the passions; the Sirens of flattery and pleasure; the Logos as helmsman of the soul; the soul’s return to safe-harbour in heaven; the beguiling but vulgar melody of the world as opposed to the divine music of the realm above.  As usual, Clement has borrowed, and peremptorily “Christianized”, these venerable allegorical commonplaces.

     Throughout the Middle Ages, the Christian interpretation of the myth of Odysseus and the Sirens remained fundamentally unchanged;  in his early-sixth-century Mythologiae, for example, bishop Fulgentius’ moralization might well have come straight from the handbooks of the ancient Platonist and Stoic commentators:

The Sirens’ name means “attractors”, for most men are attracted in various ways by the enticement of love, either by a song, or a pretty face, or a way of acting—for some are loved for the beauty of their faces and some for their lewd habits.  Those whom Ulysses’ companions pass by with their ears blocked, he himself passes bound.  Ulysses’ name is the Greek olonxenos, that is, “stranger to all”, and since wisdom is a stranger to all the things of this world, it is ingeniously called “Ulysses”.  Thus he both hears and sees—that is, perceives and judges—the Sirens (that is, the enticements of pleasure), and yet passes by.  And because they are heard, they are dead, for in the senses of the wise man every passion dies away.  They are flying things because they quickly penetrate the minds of lovers, and they have chickens’ feet because the passion of lust scatters all that it grasps, and finally that is why they are called “Sirens”, so sirene is in Greek, “draw, attract”. (Mythologiae, ii, 8)

   In the twelfth century, shortly before the writing of the Roman de la Rose, the Sirens continued to be an obligatory theme of both mythographers and theologians. The anonymous Third Vatican Mythographer interprets Ulysses as a holy pilgrim, “for wisdom makes men pilgrims among all terrestrial things”.  The Sirens represent carnal pleasures, and the ears of the mariners are stopped with the “precepts of salvation” so that they do not hear the modulationes carnis.  Tied to the mast, Ulysses hears these melodies, but he is restrained by virtue from their enjoyment, so that he moves toward his home in eternal blessedness.

      For Honorius of Autun, Ulysses is the wise man tied to the Cross of Christ, and the island of the Sirens is the delight of the mind in worldly things.  Honorius goes on to distinguish each of the three sirenic temptresses according to the music they perform:  she who sings is avarice; she who plays the pipe, boasting; she who plucks the lyre, lechery.  These, says Honorious, reflect the three temptations of Adam (the world, the flesh, and the devil).

 The Garden of Deduit as a Type of the Biblical Paradise…

 The Sirens…

     Idleness boasts to the dreamer that her dearest friend is Seigneur Deduit, the genteel beau who owns the garden.  Deduit in Old French means “divertissement amoureux” or “plaisir”;  whence we might call him in English Sir Pleasure or Sir Amorous Fun and Games.  He is, in other words, the keeper of a kind of brothel for horticulturalists–a Hugh Heffner with a green thumb.

When Idleness says that Sir Pleasure is her closest companion, the allegory is clear enough:  the sin of idleness and the sorts of amorous delights enjoyed in this garden go together.  But the dreamer is not very good at understanding allegorical irony, even irony as straightforward as this.  If the porter of the garden had introduced herself as Lady Disease, a close friend of Sir Death, perhaps the dreamer would have known what to do; but apparently he does not recognize Dame Idleness as a dangerous seductress, even though when we read the sentence, “The gate by Idleness was opened wide”, it’s impossible not to hear in it the sort of moralizing metaphorical idiom that one hears in a sermon.  Still, the dreamer still wants in.

He then describes the garden of Sir Pleasure in terms that make it impossible for the reader not to call to mind the garden of Eden, and the garden of the soul of which it is a symbol:

You may right well believe I thought the place
Was truly a terrestrial paradise,
For so delightful was the scenery
That it looked heavenly; it seemed to me
A better place than Eden for delight.

And then he lists all the species of birds he finds in this “paradise”.

In general, as I said, any literary or artistic garden in the pre-modern period cannot help but evoke (explicitly, as here; but sometimes implicitly) the archetypal garden:  the biblical paradise of Eden.  A pre-modern garden might therefore be a genuine paradise, morally and spiritually speaking, or a hypocritically false one:  a place, that is, in which, under the pretext of having created a heavenly paradise of sanctity and innocence, the inhabitants devote themselves to the enjoyment of distinctly carnal and earthly pleasures.  This, after all, is the dual signification of the biblical Eden itself:  a garden of innocence, but also the scene of capital sin, through which man’s original beatitude and salvation were tragically lost.  The irony of no small number of medieval and Renaissance works of literature turns exactly on this, the misperception or deliberate mischaracterization of an earthly garden as a celestial one. (In Chaucer’s poems alone, one can think of several examples.)

The dreamer, needless to say, either thinks, or pretends to think, that the garden of Deduit really is a celestial paradise on earth, and inevitably, he also imagines that the birdsong he hears is the harmony of angelic choirs:

                   A service meet,
As I have told you, all these birds performed,
For such a song they sang as angels sing,
And sang it, truly, to my great delight.
No mortal man e’er heard a fairer tune,
So soft and sweetly pealed their melody
That, if a man comparison should seek,
It seemed no hymn of birds, but mermaids’ song,
Who for their voices clear, serene, and pure
Are Sirens called.

Ah, the Sirens.  In pre-modern literature, the relationship between the literary themes of music and love practically guarantees that the myth of the Sirens–attaching to which there is an ancient and well-known allegorical tradition–will be invoked sooner or later, in one context or another.

The Sirens, as you recall, are those femmes fatales whose entrancing vocalizations lure sailors to their deaths.  When, in the Odyssey, Odysseus’ ship passes by their island, there is already a mountain of human skeletons piled up on the shore.  Odysseus alone recognizes the danger, and to prevent his sailors from leaping into the sea and swimming into the Sirens’ fatal embrace, he stops up their ears with wax.

The history of the Sirens as moral allegorical symbols begins with the philosophical commentaries on Homer that were first written in the fifth century B.C., and abounded until the close of classical antiquity.  For the Pythagoreans, Odysseus is the wise man who, by avoiding the fleshly temptations represented by the Sirens, was able to escape from the wheel of reincarnation and fly back to the soul’s celestial homeland.  For the Stoics and Middle Platonists, he is the helmsman of the soul, the immanent Logos. The sea through which his ship is tossed is the sea of the passions and temptations of this world; and Ithaca is the safe harbor of the heavenly patria.  The wax with which Odysseus stopped up the ears of his crewmen is, of course, philosophy.

While repeating these allegorical commonplaces, the Neoplatonists twinned the Sirens in the same way as Plato had conferred upon Venus and Eros both a celestial and an earthly aspect.  Their conceit of the two sets of Sirens was inspired by a passage from Plato’s myth of Er in Book X of the Republic, in which Er describes the eight concentric whorls of the cosmos—the eight spheres, that is–rotating on the spindle of Necessity:

Above, on each of its circles is perched a Siren, accompanying its revolution, uttering a single sound, one note; from all eight is produced the accord of a single harmony. (Republic 687 b)

Plato here identifies the Sirens with the Intelligences that intone the harmony of the spheres.  Neoplatonic commentators such as the fifth century Proclus thus differentiated between the celestial Sirens of Plato, whose heavenly music they interpreted as the wisdom of philosophy, and the vulgar Sirens of Homer, whose song symbolized the false pleasures of the world and the flesh.

The Passio of Love in Andreas…

Its Stages, and those of the Universal Pattern of Sin…

 The Roman de la Rose…

Idleness and Lust…

     Andreas’ admonition against the pursuit of carnal love is thus something that runs through the whole work, and is not confined to the last book, “The Rejection of Love”, which is usually mistakenly dismissed as a sort of pious palinode.  In the first chapter of the first book, for example, Andreas gives his friend Walter anything but a positive prospectus.  He warns him that lovers are in a constant state of agitation and fear:  knowing their love is illicit, they fear it may at any time be revealed; they fear they may not be able to succeed in their suit (perhaps they’re ugly); or they worry that having gained their lady’s favour, they will lose it.  The lover is in a state, in other words, exactly like that of the foolish worldling described by Boethius’ Lady Philosophy, whose earthly ambition and avarice have made him a slave to the fickle goddess Fortuna.

Andreas then formulates a definition of love that places it in a wider and instantly recognizable theological context.  Love, he says, is “a certain inborn suffering (passio) that derives from the sight of and excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex.”  The passio of love, he continues, originates from the “suggestion of sight”, grows with “excessive meditation” or “pleasurable thought”, and becomes entrenched through the “consent of the reason”.

In the Middle Ages, as we have just seen, this is how the development of any sin was typically described, as every act of sin was thought to follow the pattern established by the Original Sin of Adam in the garden of Eden.  For Andreas, as for Chaucer’s Parson, the crucial stage in the formation of this passion is that of excessive contemplation or pleasurable thought, as he emphasizes when he continues:  “This suffering does not arise from any action; only from the reflection of the mind upon what it sees does this suffering (passio) come.”

Then Andreas alludes to a famous biblical text, Matt. 5:28, from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount:  “For when a man sees some woman shaped according to his taste, he begins to lust after her in his heart; then the more he thinks about her, the more he burns, until he proceeds to a fuller meditation.”  He begins, continues Andreas, to “differentiate her limbs,…to pry into the secrets of her body, and he desires to put each part of it to its fullest use”.  Now the lover, having committed adultery in his heart (as the biblical text and former President Carter have put it), is ready to commit the sin “in deed”:  “Then after he has come to this complete meditation, the lover cannot hold the reins, but he proceeds at once to action.”

 

Bearing this background in mind, we are now in a position to understand the passio that afflicts the poet-narrator when he falls in love with his rose bud in the Roman de la Rose. 

Begun ca. 1237 by Guillaume de Lorris, and continued ca. 1277 by Jean de Meun, the Roman is by genre an allegorical dream vision; thus, in the very first lines the speaker anatomizes the various types of dreams as they had been conventionally enumerated since late antiquity, while being careful to invoke the authority of Macrobius’ celebrated discussion of the subject at the beginning of his commentary on the Dream of Scipio: 

Many a man holds dreams to be but lies,
All fabulous; but there have been some dreams
No whit deceptive, as was later found.
Well might one cite Macrobius, who wrote
The story of the Dream of Scipio,
And was assured that dreams are ofttimes true…
Now, as for me, I have full confidence
That visions are significant to man
Of good and evil… 

The speaker thus makes it clear that the dream he is about to narrate has a moral signification, and that—as is hardly unusual for medieval literature—his poem is going to be didactic.

He calls his dream “The Romance of the Rose”, and says that “it enfolds/Within its compass all the Art of Love”.  It will be another “manual of instruction”, that is, on the proper conduct of the lover, after the manner of Ovid’s Art of Love and Andreas Capellanus’ De Amore.

Like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the action of the Roman begins in spring, when the dream is said to have occurred, specifically

In that month [May] amorous, that time of joy,
When all things living seem to take delight,
When one sees leafless neither bush nor hedge,
But each new raiment dons, when forest trees
Achieve fresh verdure, though they dry have been
While winter yet endured, when prideful Earth,
Forgetting all her winter poverty
Now that again she bathes herself in dew,
Exults to have a new-spun, gorgeous dress…
The birds, long silent while the cold remained…
Are glad in May because of skies serene,
And they perforce express their joyful hearts
By utterance of fitting minstrelsy.
Then nightingales contend to fill the air
With sound of melody, and then the lark
And popinjay with songs amuse themselves.

Here, again, the bird-song and universal rebirth of nature in the spring induce thoughts, not of the music of the spheres, nor the resurrection of the spirit in imitation of the vernal death and rebirth of Christ on the Cross, nor of holy pilgrimages, as in Chaucer, but of more earthly pastimes:

The young folk then their whole attention give
To suit the season fair and sweet with love…

In this season of love, the speaker dreams that he has been awakened by the morning chorus of the birds and wanders across town to hear more of their music (and thus “welcome the new year”).  On his journey, he comes to a river, and on its bank a walled garden.  Painted on the walls, he sees the images of a number of personified abstractions, each clearly identified in an inscription, including:  Hate, Hypocrisy, and the deadly sins Covetousness, Avarice, and Envy, the conventional iconography of each of which he describes in detail.  Notwithstanding the rather ominous implications of these allegorical emblems, hearing the marvelous sounds of the birds singing their “courteous, pleasing songs of love” within, and “most powerfully stirred by all their tunes”, the dreamer proceeds eagerly to the garden gate and knocks.

The gate is opened by the porteress of the garden, a beautiful, yellow-haired, tender-fleshed maiden named Oiseuse, who carries a wreath of roses, a comb, and a mirror.  As the dreamer comments with envious approval, “When she was combed, adorned, and well arrayed,/Her daily task was done.”

 

The name Oiseuse means accidia in Latin (idleness or sloth en anglais), and indeed the “character” who is the gate-keeper of the garden is no character at all, but another allegorical abstraction.  She is the personification of one of the Seven Deadly Sins, and the comb and mirror she carries are her traditional iconographical attributes in ecclesiastical sculpture, stained glass, manuscript illuminations, theological manuals on the Seven Sins, and literary descriptions of which there are literally thousands of examples.

Not surprisingly, the mirror of self-love and pride in her own physical beauty, and the roses that fade of a season, are attributes that Idleness shares with another of the Seven Sins, Luxuria, or Lust; and indeed (as mentioned in a previous essay), the former is understood to be one of the necessary conditions of the latter:  “Remove idleness”, as Ovid famously wrote in his Remedies for Love, “and you destroy the arrows of Cupid”.

This became a favourite quotation in medieval and Renaissance texts, and the idea that idleness leads to lust was another Christian commonplace.  In the popular thirteenth-century satire Architrenius,for example, idleness is called “the nurse of Venus”.  The fourteenth-century English preacher Robert Holcot says idleness is the “first cause” of lechery.  And with Ovid’s text in mind, Guido Faba writes in his treatise on the virtues and vices:

He who wishes to remove lust should strive to remove idleness.  Which is why you are exhorted by all means to heed duty and labour diligently, lest the seductress Venus shower you with her deadly arrows, since while the enjoyment of lust is brief, the penalty is eternal.

 

Oiseuse confirms the dreamer’s impression of her, when she introduces herself formally:

All my companions call me Idleness,
A woman rich and powerful am I.
Especially I’m blessed in one respect:
I have no care except to tress and comb
My hair, amuse myself, and take mine ease.

There can be no mistaking, then, the identify of the lady who stands at the gate to the garden; and any rational dreamer at this point, having seen the images of the Sins and other misfortunes depicted on the wall of the garden, and now having met one of them in the “flesh”, would have done everything in his power to rouse himself from sleep.