THE BACKWARD LOOK

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 715, 27 March 1953, Page 12

THE BACKWARD LOOK

an Aucklander who went off 20 years ago on a research fellowship to Oxford and stayed to become a Fellow of Magdalen College and Lecturer in the University, is fond of quoting a remark by William Morris that a consciousness of the past is necessary for a true living of the present. While Dr. Bennett was in New Zealand the other day en a visit with his English wife, he talked about the Middle Ages and the various ways in which modern scholarship has been able to increase our knowledge of them, in an interview with The Listener. "The more one studies the Middle Ages," he said, "the more sceptical one grows of the whole concept of the Renais"sance as one is taught it at school. We ‘no longer talk about the ‘crude but sincere artists’ of Anglo-Saxon England, for instance. In the South of England at least there was a highly developed culture. "An interesting similarity between medieval man and ourselves," he said, "lies in their attitude towards progress. They didn’t think that progress was the principle of the universe. The backward look was just as characteristic of the Middle Ages as it is of today. Chaucer thought of Virgil as the greatest poet. There was no suggestion that the older literature of the classics was barbaric and crude." : A misconception about the Middle Ages that modern scholarship had done much to clear up, he said, was that the classics were unknown to medieval thinkers and artists. For this mistaken notion we had in part to blame the Victorian attitude cultivated-by men like Pater. While it was true that some of the JACK BENNETT,

classics were not available, it had now been established that Chaucer, to take one example, had been a close student of the writings of Cicero and Ovid, and could not have written exactly as he did if he had not been. There had been a reassessment of medieval culture in recent years, and it was recognised that there was an established culture in the 10th Century at Winchester, where there was a school of manuscript writing and illumination, and also of sculpture, which _had lasted until the. 12th Century. Anglo-Saxon Art’ "Views on Anglo-Saxon art have also changed in the past five years," Dr. Bennett said. "It is now known, for instance, that there was a great deal of interchange of pattern, design and motif among the various parts of Europe, and in medieval England there were far greater influences from Byzantium than had previously been supposed. There were even Byzantine craftsmen working in England." ~ In some of its aspects, modern art and sculpture bore a noticeable resemblance to the best Anglo-Saxon art. Epstein’s controversial Lazarus, in particular, could be compared with ‘the panels of the raising of Lazarus in Chichester Cathedral. Erie Gill’s art also had affinities with Anglo-Saxon and Romanesque art. Anglo-Saxon art was not Provincial or barbaric. It had reached a high leyel of sophistication and had absorbed European influences. Yet so great had been our misconceptions about the culture of the Middle Ages that an outstanding example of Anglo-Saxon art such as the famous Madonna in York Cathedral, a perfect piece of sculpture showing Byzantine influences, had for centuries gone , unrecognised for what it was because no one believed it possible for a medieval artist to have fashioned it. oe

The. impetus towards this reassessment of medieval art and culture had come from abroad, he said, particularly from French research into Romanesque art, which had led to similar investigations in England. Formerly it had been the custom to think of Gothic as the high pinnacle of art in the Middle Ages, and everything before or since as either decadent or immature, largely because of the propaganda influence of Ruskin. In the past fifty years there had been a rediscovery of the importance to Western culture of Romanesque and Byzantine art, partly because only now had it been Possible to work from exact and true photographs instead of the sometimes crude or misleading copies made by artists, Freedom to Speculate "Our whole notion of the scope and _ significance of the Renaissance (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) has to be reconsidered in the light of recent research," he continued. "It is not true of the Middle Ages, for instance, that there was a blind acceptance of authority, apart from the major dogmas. The amount of freedom to speculate’ allowed men like Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meung, to name only a few, was much greater than is supposed. There was an era of rediscovery and intellectual activity following the re-establish-ment of the monastic system about the time of Bede and the School of Jerome, in 700 A.D. It was in the Middle Ages, and not, as we used to be taught, in the Renaissance, that the scientific | spirit first burgeoned. On the other hand we must remember that some medieval conceptions. still dominated men’s minds right up to the 17th Century, as in Spenser’s concept of Nature." "Has human nature changed?" Dr, Bennett was asked. "The Middle Ages had a reputation for cruelty. Isn't the 20th Century, with its concentration camps, just as cruel and inconsiderate of human life?" Doctor Bennett looked out of the window for a few moments. "No," he said. "Human nature hasn’t changed. One has a feeling that it has all happened before. I was impressed when

reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby that here was a situation which had its exact parallel in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. It is the story of a man with a violent background becoming involved in an ideal love for a woman who | isn’t worth it, a tragedy of love and | betrayal which ends with the violent death of the lover. Gatsby first meets Daisy in the rain, as happened with Troilus and Cressida. The progress of Gatsby’s love affair also parallels the medieval pattern of courtly romantic love. There is the period of worship from afar, the open declaration of his love, the period as a self-praising suitor after having established his reputation for great deeds, and so on. The pattern has been carried over into our own times." Doctor Bennett is an expert on medieval literature and. is currently at work on* a new edition of Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale, a commentary on Pier’s Plowman, and a book on Chaucer’s The Parliament of Fowls. He is also workin with H. V. Trevor-Roper on an edition o the poems of Richard Corbet, the friend of Ben Jonson and once Bishop of Oxford. While he was in Auckland Dr. Bennett recorded a talk on the- Grey Collection of Medieval Works in the Auckland Public Library, which will shortly be broadcast,