Of Noon Scholars and Old Schools*

Extract

In the Parliament of Fowls, the elder Scipio, who is a Roman officer and conqueror of Carthage, takes the younger Scipio, civil servant and little more than a common soldier, on a trip to the heavens to view the great cycles and our little world beneath the cycles, and to place our cities within the cycles and world. The point of the examination is that the younger Scipio should learn from the contemplation of natural law what we men are and how he can serve “our common profit” and so take his place among those founders and makers of the laws of commonwealths who are the most blessed of men. In Chaucer's succeeding spring dream, the same elder Scipio takes Chaucer, who is a civil servant and little more than a common squire, to a vision of the speaking together of people-birds who are working out the order of their common weal in parliament and exercising the faculty which is the natural footing of Aristotelian and medieval civil society: “Men are civil beings by nature made for speaking together (parlement) since nature makes nothing in vain and men by nature have the capacity for speech.” The point of Chaucer-the-dreamer's contemplation of the natural bird-human congregation, as it searches and finds its common weal in speaking together in the presence of Nature's order, is, I think, both that the civil servant must know what is what to serve the commonwealth and that the scholar-contemplative must, in some sense, serve the civil if he wishes to know with more than private vision. For vision based on the search for private advantage does not anywhere in Chaucer's world come to the court of Nature. I would like to suggest that Chaucer may be right, that the gates of his vision are not ivory. Their accuracy may be turned toward our present school situation and there suggest what is a reasonable relationship between the civil and the scholarly.