Review of Héloïse: A Biography

by Enid McLeod

A Machine Readable Version

Thomas MacGreevy

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[p.100]

Miss McLeod does not always resist the temptation to poeticise, as when she says, "Héloïse caught fire from him as the cool rose of a morning cloud flames at the approach of the mounting sun." But considered as a whole her book is a fine piece of scholarship and a creditable attempt at heroic portraiture. For the Héloïse who wrote those passages in the letters which are as great tragic literature as the most fateful utterances of Racine's troubled heroines come to life here. Miss McLeod gives reasons for accepting the letters as authentic. They are good reasons but the question is one for scholars. What is of interest from the point of view of the general reader — who should not be discouraged from reading the book by the numerous notes and appendices — is that Miss McLeod's Héloïse has verisimilitude, an air of reality. By a skilful selection of quotations from Abailard and tactfully unemphatic comment, Miss McLeod creates a young Héloïse in whom the genuine passion for study is but part of a not less genuine passion for experience. Which is to say — experience in such circumstances meaning knowledge gained at first hand — that she makes her studious Héloïse a potential poet rather than a potential professor.

A poet in the more comprehensive sense, is what Héloïse became. But like another great poet of her sex, Saint Teresa of Avila, whose youth was also troubled (though not scandalously) Héloïse proved herself an extremely able mother-abbess. Her nunnery was so renowned that Abailard's enemy, the redoubtable Saint Bernard himself, deigned to visit it and the bulls in which successive popes confirmed the rights granted to it by Innocent II are couched in "Phrases full of affection and praise for Héloïse and her sisters." Yet the able mother-abbess was a spirit in revolt. She had become a nun by Abailard's orders, but she was his wife and as long as he lived she felt that her real place was beside him. He was a priest and, after her uncle's attack on him, he was no longer a man. But Héloïse's love for him did not change.

In discussing Abailard's attitude to Héloïse after the tragedy I think Miss McLeod falls somewhat short of the greatness of her subject. She does not succeed in resolving the apparent discord [p.102] between the intensity of his earlier passion for Héloïse and the ten long years of absolute silence followed by twenty years of impersonal utterance. The loss of his manhood might not account for the change, but the "conversion" which would quite naturally follow, if it did not actually precede, his retirement to the abbey of Saint-Denis would surely explain it. Who is more impersonally severe, not to say censorious, than the converted sinner?

Miss McLeod's Abailard remains, nevertheless, a memorable figure, by turns glamorously brilliant and cynically wanton, chivalrous, cruel, critical of himself, not less critical of others, but at all times quite evidently a man of very great genius. And against the two stormy protagonists of the great drama, Miss McLeod places the sympathetic figure of Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny, who brought them both to greater peace than they could possibly have known without him. It is he who, by his goodness, brings the terrible story to an end in an atmosphere of something like classical serenity.

Apparently there has not hitherto been any straightforward "life" of Héloïse. It was therefore a very considerable task that Miss McLeod set herself, and it is high praise to say she has performed it not unworthily. But now that it is finished one may ask her whether she still believes that the twelfth century was "an age of rougher manners and customs" than our own. Surely the manners and customs of every epoch are mirrored in its art, and is there any art being produced in any part of the civilised world to-day that is as gracious as the twelfth century sculptures at Vézelay, Autun, Moissac and Loches?