A Preface to Paradise Lost - Astrology (Part 3)

(Continuing...) I'd be interested in looking through Lewis' literature to compare all his royal, kingly characters, including Queen Orual (from Till We Have Faces)...with a fresh perspective on Jupiter.

I've now stumbled upon his fascination with the planet Jupiter and kingly joviality in three books & one letter:

(1) at the end of Out of the Silent Planet

(2) in the chapter The Heavens from The Discarded Image

(3) And perhaps Prince Caspian if one were to allow the fictitious planet, "Tarva, the Lord of Victory" to be the Narnian equivalent of Jupiter...which I'm almost sure its the same planet, different name.

(4) In Lewis' letter to Sister Penelope (Jan 31, 1946), he's been asked to compare his portrayals of Mars & Jupiter to those Holst musically depicts in The Planets:

Wasn't his Mars brutal and ferocious? - in mine I tried to get the good element in the martial spirit, the discipline and freedom from anxiety. On Jupiter I am closer to him: but I think his is more "jovial" in the modern sense of the word. The folk tune on which he bases it is not regal enough for my conception. But of course there is a general similarity because we're both following the medieval astrologers. His is, anyway, a rich and marvellous work.

"Jovial in the modern sense"?..."we're both following the medieval astrologers"?

What does Lewis mean?

Perhaps a clue comes from the chapter "Primary Epic" in his book, A Preface to Paradise Lost. In it Lewis is building an explanation for how Milton's epic fits within the greater tradition of court poetry or epic poetry written for and about kings and nobles...oftentimes recited by kings & nobles; "warrior poets".

In "Primary Epic", Lewis sets up a description of joviality when he describes one of the characters in Beowulf, Hrothgar, as a nobleman who

sometimes produced a gidd or lay which was sop and sarlic (true and tragic), sometimes a tale of wonders (sellic spell), and sometimes, with the fetters of age heavy upon him, he began to recall his youth, the strength that once was his in battle; his heart swelled within him as he remembered the vanished winters.

Interestingly, Lewis references J.R.R. Tolkien's claim "that this is an account of the complete range of court poetry": (1) the lament for mutability, (2) the tale of strange adventures and (3) the "true & tragic" lay "which alone is true epic".

Lewis continues to explain how "true tragedy" of the earliest epic poetry, were part of "that old unity", "a quality which moderns find difficult to understand" and was appropriate in the royal court:

Such, then, is epic as we first hear of it...We shall go endlessly astray if we do not get well fixed in our minds at the outset the picture of a venerable figure, a king, a great warrior or a poet inspired by the Muse, seated and chanting to the harp a poem on high matters before an assembly of nobles in a court, at a time when the court was a common centre of many interests which have since been separated...it was the place of festivity, the place of brightest hearths and strongest drink, of courtesy, merriment, news and friendship.

Lewis goes on to assert that we moderns could understand this quality better if we could "understand the meaning of the Middle English word solempne...This means something different, but not quite different, from our Modern English solemn":

Like solemn it implies the opposite of what is familiar, free and easy, or ordinary. But unlike solemn it does not suggest gloom, oppression or austerity...Feasts are, in this sense, more solemn than fasts. Easter is solempne, Good Friday is not. The Solempne is the festal which is also the stately and the ceremonial, the proper occasion for pomp-and the very fact that pompous is now used in only a bad sense measures the degree to which we have lost the old idea of solemnity.

Then Lewis provides the antedote:

To recover it you must think of a court ball, or a coronation, or a victory march, as these things appear to people who enjoy them; in an age when every one puts on his oldest clothes to be happy in, you must re-awake the simpler state of mind in which people put on gold and scarlet to be happy in. Above all, you must be rid of the hideous idea, fruit of a widespread inferiority complex, that pomp, on the proper occasions, has any connexion with vanity or self-conceit. A celebrant approaching the altar, a princess led out by a king to dance a minuet, a general officer on a ceremonial parade, a major-domo preceding a boar's head at a Christmas feast-all these wear unusual clothes and move with calculated dignity. This does not mean that they are vain but that they are obedient; they are obeying the hoc age which presides over every solemnity. The modern habits of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offenders inability to forget himself in the rite and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual.

This isn't modern joviality.