A Question about John Pomfret

 

Pomfret’s “The Choyce” is appended.  Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes, those in parentheses to lines of the poem.  I have here been somewhat casual with the proprieties expected in quasi-scholarly writing.  See note following the essay.  

 

     The novice world traveler is likely at first to make it a point to stop by those sites already over-familiar from a thousand pictures: the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, but later trips may turn to neighborhoods and parklands that attract fewer visitors.  The reader has a parallel experience.  One can only once read for the first time the Iliad or Quixote or Rabelais or Hamlet, and the experience is wondrous and staggering, yet, having encountered such grand prospects, one wishes at times to wander in less-frequented purlieus of literature where the pleasures may be less potent but offer instead a certain piquant novelty.

     A bookish flâneur, I sought just such a mental excursion by reviewing a few passages in what is surely one of the finest works of general applied criticism, Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets.  While his theory may be creaky, Johnson’s taste is generally on the mark, and, more than many old critics, he provides evidence for his reactions.  I determined to simply select at random a poet of whom I was wholly ignorant and have a look to see what Johnson saw in him (all fifty-two if Johnson’s choices are men).

    One of the poets whose names meant nothing to me, but whom Johnson considered important, drew my attention.  Johnson’s account of John Pomfret runs less than a page but includes a startling claim: “Perhaps no composition in our language has been oftener perused than Pomfret's Choice.”  Pronouncing a well-formulated dictum (as was his habit) that expresses skepticism of the poet’s worth, Johnson then declares “He pleases many; and he who pleases many must have some species of merit.”  Even the word “peruse,” the reader realizes, had been chosen to suggest a more casual engagement the reader requires from “great” literature. 

     Johnson’s observation about Pomfret’s popularity is substantiated by the fact that his works went through sixteen editions during the eighteenth century.  In a magisterial tone, Johnson accounts for the poet’s popularity by the patronizing comment that he “has been always the favourite of that class of readers, who, without vanity or criticism, seek only their own amusement.” 

     Johnson was not alone in feeling that the poet enjoyed more prestige than sophisticated readers would think he deserved.  In 1753 Theophilus Cibber noted those who held Pomfret’s work “in very great esteem” were specifically the “common” readers, “people of inferior life” who appreciate the fact that “there is little force of thinking in his writings” as that makes the poems “level to the capacities of those who admire them.” [1]  The ambiguity of Pomfret’s standing is evident in Southey’s question in 1807: "Why is Pomfret the most popular of the English poets? The fact is certain, and the solution would be useful.” [2]  Leigh Hunt’s “The Choice” (1823) imitates Pomfret, but Hunt opens by calling his model “trivial” and his poem “A pretty kind of -- sort of -- kind of thing.”

    The poem that “sort of” inspired Hunt was Pomfret’s most popular composition, “The Choyce,” a piece in  heroic couplets outlining an idealized life plan in retirement from London in  a country estate.   The poem had an impeccable pedigree, with influence from Horace, as well as sharing its theme with other respected poems such as Cowley’s “The Wish.”

    The sentiments Pomfret expressed in the poem were far from original; they emphasized moderation and temperance in all things, “not little, nor too great” (6), the old ideal of nothing in excess, μηδὲν ἄγαν as the oracle once put it.  [3]  the writer wishes only for what is “Useful, Necessary, Plain,” (10) which to him must include “a Clear and Competent Estate,/ That I might live Genteelly, but not Great.”  Eschewing “The needless Pomp of gawdy Furniture” he will feed on “healthful, not luxurious Dishes” .  Pomfret spends fourteen lines assuring his reader that he would  not drink too much (53-64).  Rather, he would enjoy books of “the Noblest Authors,” both ancient and modern, dispense charity so that “the Sons of Poverty” might not “Repine” “Too much at Fortune.”  He describes his chosen friends at length, using balanced  periods to reaffirm that they, too, follow “the middle way,” as they are, for instance, “Merry, but not Light” (82), “Close in Dispute, but not tenacious”(88), “Not Quarrelsom, but Stout enough to Fight” (93).  The reader feels something of the sensation of riding a see-saw.

     In an even longer passage (98-139), Pomfret describes his ideal female company, some “Modest-Fair” from whom he may obtain “Fresh Vital Heat” [3].  She, too, is the soul of temperance.

 

No Fear, but only to be proud, or base:

Quick to advise by an Emergence prest,

To give good Counsel, or to take the best.

I'd have th' Expressions of her Thoughts be such,

She might not seem Reserv'd, nor talk too much;

That shows a want of Judgment, and of Sense:

More than enough, is but Impertinence.        (114-120)          

 

In spite of her exemplary character, he would see her only “seldom” and “with Moderation,” “For highest Cordials all their Virtue lose,/ By a too frequent, and too bold an use” (137).

     With his strong allegiance to social norms, he is, of course, patriotic and willing to serve.

 

T' oblige my Country, or to serve my King,

Whene'er they call'd, I'd readily afford,

My Tongue, my Pen, my Counsel, or my Sword. (143-145)

 

     He anticipates preparation for death and the aid of “Some kind Relation” (157) to take over his affairs “While I did for a better State prepare” (159).  His life plan is so emphatically mainstream that he feels confident that, given the choice, “All Men wou'd wish to live and dye like me” (167).  Far from the Romantic idea of representing himself as a distinct and idiosyncratic genius, he is guided by the neo-Classical ideal familiar from  Pope’s Essay on Criticism: “What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd.” 

    While writers who retread familiar ground may expect, at least at first, a greater readership than those that strike out in new directions, it remains difficult to imagine a writer who so definitively fulfills every reader expectation, who affirms every received idea so perfectly as to become a veritable prince of mediocrity, yet this is Johnson’s explanation of Pomfret’s popularity.  By  definition the bulk of the writing of any age is fundamentally “ordinary,” yet some authors, it seems, please their readers by paradoxically excelling at ordinariness.  For over a hundred years Pomfret was praised and admired for his perfect rendition of the average, the expectable, reassuring readers of their perspicuity and good taste by endorsing their idées reçues.  While his secret for besting dozens of other predictable writers may remain elusive, once he had become popular, his position would naturally reinforce itself.  Just as some of today’s bourgeoises might show they are au courant having attended the most popular Broadway shows, in Pomfret’s day and for a good while after, they could do so by demonstrating familiarity with his work. 

     Some authors’ popularity is more easily explicable: Amy Lowell, Vachel Lindsay, Allen Ginsberg, and Dylan Thomas were public characters who sometimes behaved extravagantly.  In a time when fewer people read poetry, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, and Leonard Cohen won fame by casting their poetry in the genre of popular music.  Perhaps the closest parallel to Pomfret’s celebrity may be found in writers like Edgar Guest, Joyce Kilmer, Ted Kooser, and Billy Collins [4] who have proven comforting and highly digestible to large numbers of readers.  Each of them, like Pomfret, satisfies readers by affirming the correctness of their preconceptions in easy and competent verse.

 

 

1.  Theophilus Cibber, “The Life of the Revd. Mr. John Pomfret,” in The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland vol. III.

2.  Robert Southey, Specimens of Later English Poets, I, 91.

3.  This passage of the poem proved controversial.  Johnson says that, just as Pomfret was about to assume an ecclesiastical “living,” a “malicious” informant delayed his departure, alleging that “The Choyce” suggested a mistress was preferable to a wife.  Remaining in the city to answer the charge, Pomfret (who was himself married) contracted smallpox and died. 

4.  A dramatic example is the synthetic Rumi composed using other English versions by Coleman Barks which proved immensely popular in the 1990s, offering contemporary Americans a Sufism in which they felt instantly at home..  

 

 

An apologia

     The modest liberties of tone I have here allowed myself may seem out of place in a commentary with any scholarly pretensions.  Academic essays are usually written in a rigid form, sometimes betraying an anxious effort to appear learned, sometimes to sound scientific.  Inspired once by a lecture from William Arrowsmith about a French T. S. Eliot poem which he cast as a dialogue among recognizable faculty types, published then as “Eros in Terre Haute: T. S. Eliot’s ‘Lune de Miel’”,  I once proposed a session of conference papers which had in common deviation from the standard thesis-proof format.  None were submitted. 

     I consider this piece pure recreation, though the reader might object that everything I write could be so described.  Opening with a reflection on tourism, I stroll off into a text of Dr. Johnson, finding my way then into Pomfret with divigations toward Horace, Cowley, and others.  To me the exercise constitutes a sort bracing mental dérive, to use the Situationist term.

 

 

 

The Choyce

 

If Heav'n the grateful Liberty wou'd give,
That I might chuse my Method how to live:
And all those Hours propitious Fate shou'd lend,
In blissful Ease and Satisfaction spend.
Near some fair Town I'd have a private Seat,
Built Uniform, not little, nor too great:
Better, if on a rising Ground it stood,
Fields on this side, on that a Neighb'ring Wood.
It shou'd within no other Things contain,
But what are Useful, Necessary, Plain:                            10
Methinks, 'tis Nauseous, and I'd ne'er endure
The needless Pomp of gawdy Furniture:
A little Garden, grateful to the Eye,
And a cool Rivulet run Murmuring by:
On whose delicious Banks a stately Row
Of shady Lymes, or Sycamores, shou'd grow.
At th' end of which a silent Study plac'd,
Shou'd with the Noblest Authors there be grac'd.
Horace and Virgil, in whose mighty Lines,
Immortal Wit, and solid Learning Shines.                           20
Sharp Iuvenal, and am'rous Ovid too,
Who all the turns of Loves soft Passion knew:
He, that with Judgment reads his Charming Lines,
In which strong Art, with stronger Nature joyns,
Must grant, his Fancy do's the best Excel:
His Thoughts so tender, and exprest so well;
With all those Moderns, Men of steady Sense,
Esteem'd for Learning, and for Eloquence:
In some of These, as Fancy shou'd advise,
I'd always take my Morning Exercise.                                   30
For sure, no Minutes bring us more Content,
Than those in pleasing useful Studies spent.
I'd have a Clear and Competent Estate,
That I might live Genteelly, but not Great.
As much as I cou'd moderately spend,
A little more sometimes t'oblige a Friend.
Nor shou'd the Sons of Poverty Repine
Too much at Fortune, they shou'd taste of Mine;
And all that Objects of true Pity were,
Shou'd be reliev'd with what my Wants cou'd spare;        40
For what our Maker has too largely giv'n,
Shou'd be return'd in gratitude to Heav'n.
A frugal Plenty shou'd my Table spread,
With healthful, not luxurious Dishes, fed:
Enough to satisfy, and something more
To feed the Stranger, and the Neighb'ring Poor.
Strong Meat indulges Vice, and pampering Food
Creates Diseases, and inflames the Blood.
But what's sufficient to make Nature Strong,
And the bright Lamp of Life continue long,                          50
I'd freely take, and as I did possess
The bounteous Author of my Plenty bless.
I'd have a little Cellar, Cool, and Neat,
With Humming Ale, and Virgin Wine Repleat.
Wine whets the Wit, improves its Native Force,
And gives a pleasant Flavour to Discourse;
By making all our Spirits Debonair,
Throws off the Lees, the Sedement of Care.
But as the greatest Blessing Heaven lends
May be debauch'd, and serve ignoble Ends;                       60
So, but too oft, the Grapes refreshing Juice,
Does many mischievous Effects produce.
My House, shou'd no such rude Disorders know,
As from high Drinking consequently flow.
Nor wou'd I use what was so kindly giv'n,
To the dishonour of Indulgent Heav'n.
If any Neighbour came he shou'd be free,
Us'd with respect, and not Uneasy be,
In my Retreat, or to himself, or me.
What Freedom, Prudence, and Right Reason give,       70
All Men, may with Impunity receive:
But the least swerving from their Rules too much;
For what's forbidden Us, 'tis Death to touch.
That Life might be more comfortable yet,
And all my Joys refin'd, sincere and great,
I'd chuse two Friends, whose Company wou'd be
A great Advance to my Felicity.
Well born, of Humours suited to my own;
Discreet, and Men as well as Books have known.
Brave, Gen'rous, Witty, and exactly free                         80
From loose Behaviour, or Formality.
Airy, and Prudent, Merry, but not Light,
Quick in discerning, and in Judging Right;
Secret they shou'd be, faithful to their Trust,
In Reasoning Cool, Strong, Temperate and Just.
Obliging, Open, without huffing, Brave;
Brisk in gay Talking, and in sober Grave.
Close in Dispute, but not tenacious, try'd
By solid Reason, and let that decide;
Not prone to Lust, Revenge, or envious Hate;              90
Nor busy Medlers with Intrigues of State.
Strangers to Slander, and sworn Foes to spight,
Not Quarrelsom, but Stout enough to Fight:
Loyal and Pious, Friends to Caesar true
As dying Martyrs to their Maker too.
In their Society I cou'd not miss,
A permanent, sincere, substantial Bliss.
Wou'd bounteous Heav'n once more indulge, I'd chuse
(For, who wou'd so much Satisfaction lose,
As Witty Nymphs in Conversation give)                      100
Near some obliging Modest-Fair to live;
For there's that sweetness in a Female Mind,
Which in a Man's we cannot find;
That by a secret, but a pow'rful Art,
Winds up the Spring of Life, and do's impart
Fresh Vital Heat to the transported Heart.
I'd have her Reason, and her Passions sway,
Easy in Company, in private Gay.
Coy to a Fop, to the Deserving free,
Still constant to her self, and just to me.                   110
A Soul she shou'd have for great Actions fit,
Prudence, and Wisdom to direct her Wit.
Courage to look bold danger in the Face,
No Fear, but only to be proud, or base:
Quick to advise by an Emergence prest,
To give good Counsel, or to take the best.
I'd have th' Expressions of her Thoughts be such,
She might not seem Reserv'd, nor talk too much;
That shows a want of Judgment, and of Sense:
More than enough, is but Impertinence.                   120
Her Conduct Regular, her Mirth refin'd,
Civil to Strangers, to her Neighbours kind.
Averse to Vanity, Revenge, and Pride,
In all the Methods of Deceit untry'd:
So faithful to her Friend, and good to all,
No Censure might upon her Actions fall.
Then wou'd ev'n Envy be compell'd to say,
She goes the least of Womankind astray.
To this fair Creature I'd sometimes retire,
Her Conversation wou'd new Joys inspire,               130
Give Life an Edge so keen, no surly Care
Wou'd venture to assault my Soul, or dare
Near my Retreat to hide one secret Snare.
But so Divine, so Noble a Repast,
I'd seldom, and with Moderation taste.
For highest Cordials all their Virtue lose,
By a too frequent, and too bold an use;
And what would cheer the Spirits in distress,
Ruins our Health when taken to Excess.
I'd be concern'd in no litigious Jarr,                          140
Belov'd by all, not vainly popular:
Whate'er Assistance I had power to bring
T' oblige my Country, or to serve my King,
Whene'er they call'd, I'd readily afford,
My Tongue, my Pen, my Counsel, or my Sword.
Law Suits I'd shun with as much Studious Care,
As I wou'd Dens, where hungry Lyons are;
And rather put up Injuries, than be
A Plague to him, who'd be a Plague to me.
I value Quiet, at a Price too great,                           150
To give for my Revenge so dear a Rate:
For what do we by all our Bustle gain,
But counterfeit Delight for real Pain.
If Heav'n a date of many years wou'd give,
Thus I'd in Pleasure, Ease, and Plenty live.
And as I near approach'd the Verge of Life,
Some kind Relation (for I'd have no Wife)
Shou'd take upon him all my Worldly Care,
While I did for a better State prepare.
Then I'd not be with any trouble vext,                  160
Nor have the Evening of my Days perplext.
But by a silent, and a peaceful Death,
Without a Sigh, Resign my Aged Breath:
And when committed to the Dust, I'd have
Few Tears, but Friendly, dropt into my Grave.
Then wou'd my Exit so propitious be,
All Men wou'd wish to live and dye like me.

Playing Cards

 

     The deck of playing cards has an elaborate structure, capable of communicating a symbolic code, just as a language does.  The suit and rank of each card define a specific position in the grid, resembling in this way the coordinates of a mapping system.  Games and techniques of divination are both based on the random selection of certain cards or groups of cards with which value or other specific significance is associated. 

     Some structural characteristics are undeniable, chief among them the four suits and thirteen ranks [1].  An initial division produces the colors, red and black.  Each of these then splits again, producing the four suits which show only a small deviation through the centuries and the countries of Europe, where, doubtless due to increased trade with Egypt and the East, they had first appeared shortly before the Renaissance.

     Considered diachronically, a session with playing cards, whether recreational or fortune-telling,  presents a sort of table model of fate, in which each player receives a certain destiny in the deal.  In a worthwhile game, the player’s outcome will depend in  part on skill just as in cartomancy the subtlety of the practitioner is often decisive.  Receiving a strong or weak hand parallels being born into affluence or poverty, health or disability, though a vulnerable position can sometimes come out ahead through bluffing or other strategy.  Fortune-telling differs only in that the implications are made explicit with the occult practitioners  defining the specifics they find implied by a particular array of cards.  Like a life, the game or the session with a “reader/advisor” has a beginning and an end with victories and defeats between.  The cards allow players to experience a variety of such brief imaginary lives recreationally or, if the players are gambling, with some real consequences reflecting the symbolic ones. 

     Synchronically, the array of possibilities in a deck of cards is designed as a universal symbolic system, like the catalogue of possibilities available in the divination tools offered by astrology, I Ching, the Ifa oracle, and the like.  The more elaborate mahjong set of tiles evolved from playing cards, with possibilities far beyond a simple set of dominos.  [2]  Many have noted the numerological correspondence of playing cards with the passage of a year: fifty-two cards and fifty-two weeks, four suits and four seasons, thirteen of each suit and the thirteen lunar months, two colors corresponding to night and day, yet these associations are in general an indication of their encyclopedic comprehensiveness rather than a specific and determined signification.   To some the suits possess differing inherent worth.  For instance, in bridge the lowest is clubs, followed by diamonds, hearts, and spades.

     The face values playing cards are fixed, representing an increasing series from two to ten, then ascending further through the face cards.  The ranks prima facie indicate a differentiation in worth, and the face cards clearly refer to the stratification of feudal society, with the numbered cards representing the lower tiers of society.  The deck then forms an image of “the great chain of being” or scala naturae, as it was more commonly called in Latin. [3]  The deck arrived in Europe from the Mamluk Sultanate where the face cards were all  male, with an “under-deputy” (thānī nā'ib) in the place now occupied by the queen, a pattern reflected in the German decks with an “Obermann” and a lower status Untermann)..  In some Italian decks the place is held by a knight (cavallo).

     In some games, of course, and in particular when using the cards to tell fortunes, every rank must have associated meanings.  Any number of modern occultists have specified such adventitious significance.  For instance, one popular book, written seventy-five years ago yet currently available at Wal-Mart and Target, says that the three indicates happiness, the seven spirituality, and the nine humanitarianism. [4]  All codes, however, of this sort are arbitrarily assigned.  This very susceptibility to a variety of interpretations indicates the cards’ underdetermination, allowing the same deck to be used in  an endless variety of ways.  Specific cards share with Symbolist images a fruitful imprecision conducive to a broad range of interpretations.

     The four suits have varied surprisingly little since they came to Europe from the Mamluk Sultanate in the fourteenth century.  Originally the suits of the Mamluk cards were cups, coins, swords, and polo-sticks.  Virtually all suits since have been minor variations of these four.  The swords, in Spanish espadas, became spades, the cups turned to hearts, the coins to diamonds, and, since polo was not a significant game in Europe, the last suit was changed to lances or clubs.  The familiar English set corresponds closely with the suits used in early fifteenth century France, while the Tarot suits are closer to the Muslim model.  Arriving in Britain through Belgium In the passage from Belgium to England the French suits piques (pikes), as coeurs (hearts), carreaux (tiles, “lozenges”), and trefles (clovers)  became the modern hearts, spades, diamonds, and clubs.  In Spain and parts of Italy and France the naibi  deck [5] came into use using cups (copas), coins (oros), swords (espadas), and clubs (bastos), the only difference being that in Italy the clubs are ceremonial batons, whereas in Spain they are crude cudgels like Hercules carried.  In Germany and other parts of central Europe the suits are leaves (Grün, Blatt, Laub, Pik or Gras), hearts (Herz or Rot), bells (Schelle, Schell or Bolle) and acorns (Eichel or Kreuz),

     The most profound explanation of the origin of the playing card suits was suggested over a hundred years ago by Jessie Weston. [5]  She argues that the suits correspond as a group to both the treasures of the Tuatha de Danaan and the objects displayed in the Grail castle.  Links between the magic objects of ancient Celtic lore [6] (the Sword of Nuada, the Lia Fáil or Stone of Destiny, the Spear of Lugh, and the Cauldron of the Dagda) and the numinous objects seen in the Grail castle (the Grail itself -- either Cup or Dish, the Sword, the Stone, and the Lance) certainly have remarkable similarity to the naibi suits (cups, swords, coins, and clubs), but Weston felt that both were themselves developments of a more archaic significance.  To her behind the set are elemental sexual symbols through which people sought to encourage abundance and fertility through a ἱερός γάμος, a sacred marriage, that ensures the continuity of life. 

     For her the suits evolved from a pair of sexual symbols, doubled then to make four; lance and sword are clearly the male components, dish and cup the female.  While Weston and others of the Cambridge group doubtless over-emphasized the centrality of re-energizing the “spirit if the year,” the religio-magical motive of  promoting the fruitfulness of the earth and the prosperity of the human community is evident world-wide.

     The origin of the images and their later resonance and reception need not be consistent.  In fact, the durability of a symbol may well benefit from its underdetermination.  A great many interpretive schemes have been applied to them, but all of these are secondary, afterthoughts in a way to the original promotion of life for which they were first intended.  Sometimes the red cards were associated with beneficence and the black with threats.  To some the suits suggested the four elements, to others the cardinal directions.  They have been associated as well with the social classes: hearts (once cups or chalices) suggesting the clergy, spades (once swords) indicating the nobility, diamonds (once coins) for those engaged in commerce, and clubs (once crude wooden ones like Hercules’) for the peasantry. 

     Specific figures from history and legend were sometimes identified with individual cards: the king of spades being pictured as the Biblical David, that of hearts as Charlemagne, diamonds as Julius Caesar, and clubs as Alexander, thus encompassing the known world with the lands of Jews, Franks, Romans, and Greeks.  The queens were identified with Athena (spades), Judith (hearts), Jacob's wife Rachel (diamonds), and Argine, an anagram for regina (clubs), while the jacks were Charlemagne’s knight Ogier (spades); La Hire, a general in the Hundred Years’ War (hearts), the Trojan Hector (diamonds); and Lancelot or Judas Maccabeus (clubs). 

     The significance of the cards is determined strictly by the rules of the game.  Thus queen of spades in the game of hearts is undesirable, trumps in bridge make a good hand, and any two pair will beat a couple of aces in poker.  The flow of the arrival of such cards, meaningful only within the compass of a game, constructs an experience resembling the recognition of motifs in a musical composition, a fugue or  symphony, but there is an important difference.  Every note of The Well-Tempered Klavier is intentional, chosen by Bach, whereas the cards should appear without any conscious design. [8]  The loss in “beauty” due to chance composition is compensated by the fact that the card table more nearly replicates the unpredictability of life itself.   Apart from dependence on chance, the play of the game brings good or ill or middling fortune just as in life.  The value of speculating on the cards of one’s fellow-players likewise resembles the prudent conduct of worldly affairs in which the estimation of the power of rivals may be relevant.  

    The card game is wholly ludic, just for the fun of it, like the delights and disappointments vicariously undergone by the film viewer.  Yet a hand in cards is marvelously abstract, given meaning only by the specific terms of a given game.  Adeptness at the manipulation of symbols is the most distinctive human characteristic, doubtless the source of our species’ success, if success it be, and playing cards allow people to develop, but more importantly, to relish this skill in concert with others.  Dog owners cannot doubt that a dog in play, exercising canine athletic and perceptual abilities, is having a grand time.  A table of suburban bridge players may be doing very much the same in human terms.

 

 

 

1.  I say nothing about the Tarot since, in spite of enthusiasts fond of claiming ancient and exotic origins for the deck, these have been shown to be a variation of the older deck.  In spite of its portentous images, the Tarot deck was developed in fifteenth century Italy for the game trionfi and exclusively used for games until several hundred years later when its use in divination began.

2.  The first references to Chinese card-like game pieces called pái (牌) (a term that could apply to either tiles or cards) date from the ninth century C. E. describing the use of inscribed paper “leaves” and dice in a board game.  Playing cards are known there from circa 1200 C. E.

3.  See Arthur O. Lovejoy’s classic study The Great Chain of Being.  For an early exposition of the scala naturae, ranking animals by their apparent complexity, see Aristotle’s Historia Animalia.

4.  Edith Randall and Florence Evylinn Campbell, Sacred Symbols of the Ancients: The Mystical Significance of the Fifty-two Cards (1947).  Randall and Campbell mention as their source Olney Richmond who claimed to revive a 20,000-year-old tradition in Chicago in 1888. 

5.  The word naibi, of Arabic origin, was used in the original statute mentioning cards in fifteenth century Florence and it is used yet today of the Spanish deck, the baraja Española.

6.  In Ch. 6 of Ritual to Romance (1920).  While it is true that Weston ‘s readership is the result of T. S. Eliot featuring her in the footnotes to The Waste Land and that the Cambridge School as a whole has lost authority, her work, like that of Jane Harrison and Frazer himself, is replete with fruitful observations.  The fact that Weston was susceptible to the occultists of her day whom she liked to think the latest in a lineage descending from ancient esoteric masters does not invalidate her every conclusion.  Even the connections she traces between the treasures of the Tuatha de Danaan, the Grail objects, and the suits is also unnecessary to accept her fundamental idea that spade, hearts, diamonds, and clubs have sexual connotations.  

7.  The treasures appear in an interpolated recension of the legendary Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of the Taking of Ireland), the same passage introduction, interpolated in the introduction of Cath Maige Tuired (The Second Battle of Mag Tuired), and in "The Four Jewels", a later, short text in the Yellow Book of Lecan.

8.  Some works of Cage, Stockhausen, and other aleatory composers constitute at least in part an exception. 

The Framing of Brontë’s The Professor

 

Endnotes are in brackets.  References in parentheses are page numbers is the readily accessible Penguin edition edited by Heather Glen.

 

     Charlotte Brontë’s earliest work for publication The Professor remained unpublished until after the author’s death.  Perhaps the most prominent difference between The Professor and Villette, which she wrote next using portions of the earlier story, is the shift from a male to a female narrator, but the two works begin with markedly different perspectives as well.  Whereas the later novel opens with Lucy Snow’s first-person adolescent reminiscences, the first chapter of the earlier work, titled “Introductory,” covers similar ground, but in the form of a letter.  Both novels, however, end using the device of a slip in the narrative voice from past to present tense.  The Professor has been taken by some critics to be a premature false start as Brontë developed her professional writing skills, and the unusual device employed in the first pages of the book has been called “clumsy and artificial” and “an early gaucherie” by critics. [1]

     The opening letter might seem a vestige of the epistolary practice of Richardson and Smollett.  In earlier novels the pretense of the letter form supports the historicity of the text, reinforced by the reduction of some place names to initials as though to protect the characters’ privacy.  While a few novels like Robinson Crusoe that adopted the pose of recording literal truth were actually accepted by some readers as fact, once the device became familiar, it had the dialectic effect of representing a known literary artifice depicting lived reality, thus suggesting truth and falsity at once. 

      Yet Brontë’s use of this device has peculiar characteristics.  She would have the reader believe that Crimsworth came across the copy of a letter when he simply “found” it in his desk, and that this discovery of an aborted memoir led him to complete the story. 

     The fact that the letter was written, not received, by the persona telling the story shifts the reader’s perception more directly on its author.  Few enough people maintain copies of their own correspondence that this presentation alone draws attention.  Charles, the intended recipient of the letter, never appears at all, and the letter was never delivered as thee writer’s old schoolmate had moved.  Why had the narrator felt drawn to send an account of his life to this long-ago “acquaintance,” as Crimsworth calls him?

     One effect of this device is to emphasize the focus on the protagonist whose ego is a primary theme Brontë is to develop.  The letter is a curious document.  Though the point of the letter is to renew a relationship with an old schoolmate, it opens by declaring that neither of the two had been popular, Charles “sarcastic and cold-blooded,” and William “not strikingly attractive.”  Though exclusion by others might make the basis for the two outsiders to ally, Crimsworth says he cannot understand what “animal magnetism” joined them.  What is more, he declares that he felt (and presumably feels) himself superior.  He has no interest in the affairs of his correspondent.  “What you have been doing I know not, but you shall hear “how the world has wagged with me” he says imperiously.  The solipsistic letter goes on to detail his rebellion against the injustice he suffered at the hands of his brother.

     He notes at the end of the “Introductory’ chapter that, having leisure in  retirement, he had, apparently motivated by generosity, intended to describe his life for the “private benefit” of his acquaintance Charles.  Frustrated in that goal, he determined that his tale would have value “for the public at large,” in particular for the use of other educators for whom his experience, he believes, will prove instructive.  The presumption is palpable.

     The persona considers the account of his career a sort of self-help book, inspiring others to rise through discipline and work to affluence.  In this partial truth the tale bears some resemblance to the stories of Horatio Alger heroes and the deserving waifs of Charles Dickens, though in these cases the heroes’ ascents often depend on providentially charitable patrons, while William Crimsworth has only his own ambition.  Thus he represents a model of a kind of Calvinist capitalist, prospering through self-denial and looking out for the main chance.  Though his story is in part a guide to overcoming obstacles and climbing the economic ladder, Crimsworth is, as a recent editor noted a “disquieting” hero. [2]  While his calculating moves do bring him success, he often appears as unattractive, selfish, or aggressive.

    He must, it seems, strive against the world to attain his own felicity, suppressing his own feelings in pursuit of his larger worldly ends.  This includes the rejection of his relatives who suggest for him a marriage and settled living, then after a time of his brother with whom his relations had always been prickly  but from whom he had accepted a position.  Seeking his fortune by himself in the world, he succeeds as a schoolteacher (in French a professeur) first with M. Pelet and then with Mlle. Reuter through his forceful manner with the students.  His “system” for instructing pupils he found to have “dense intelligence” and “feeble reflective powers” was to lower his expectations radically, but then, “having brought down my lesson to the lowest level of my slowest student’s capacity,” to become suddenly a “despot,” insisting on “submission and acknowledgement of error, or ignominious expulsion.” (98)

     Even his love affair with Frances Henri is described in the same manner.  He is the master; she the faithful server.  Even so, she is obliged sometimes to object, “Monsieur, vous me faites mal; de grâce lâchez un peu ma main droite.” She addresses him as Master.  To him “reproofs suited her best of all” (204).  He has no interest in her feelings; their relationship is plainly portrayed in physical terms of domination and submission.  “My arm, it is true, still detained her, but with a restraint that was gentle enough, as long as no opposition tightened it.”  His heart, he says, is wholly taken up with “its own content” which he finds “fathomless.”  (248-9)  The happy ending’s evidence of his success are the acquisition of a devoted wife and child, hard-earned, without a doubt. 

     The price, then of worldly success for this wronged orphan is to “resist” any “impulse” to be  “warmer” or “more expressive” (204), and to be governed instead by “perseverance and sense of duty.” (159)  The darker elements of his state of mind are suggested by Crimsworth’s xenophobia and contempt for Catholicism as well as, more deeply, his susceptibility to depression, or “Hypochondria” (254)    

     A similar tension is evident in the book’s other generic conventions.  The plot follows the form of classic comedy in that a couple overcome obstacles, marry, and find a settled and serene life.  Yet it is evident that the love portrayed in The Professor is flawed, though perhaps only because it is all too human.  From another angle, the story is about how to succeed in business, a story of a clever lad who through determined efforts of his own, accomplished much.  Yet the reader will wonder whether the stern pedagogy and cagey dealings with employers are really to be recommended.  An anodyne slogan like “Hope smiles on Effort!” elides the issue of what sort of effort. (206) 

     In spite of all the conventional paradigms of a hero’s path to love and worldly prosperity, Brontë claims that her book is straightforward, unadorned realism.   She opens a chapter with a declaration that could open a manifesto.  “Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of everyday life.” (186)  In the novel’s preface Charlotte, writing under her pseudonym Currer Bell claims, “I said to myself that my hero should work his way through life as I had seen real living men work theirs.” (37)  In the preface of 1851, she says, as an explanation of the sobriety of the story: “In many a crude effort destroyed almost as soon as composed, I had got over any such taste as I might once have had for ornamented and redundant composition, and come to prefer what was plain and homely.”  The spare style of realism established in the opening letter asserts the book’s veracity. 

     The slide into the present tense in the last  pages (from 288) has the effect of casting the concluding scene as constant, a “happy ever after,” as though nothing of significance would later occur. Such a coda resembles the way some pop songs, instead of ending with an appropriate musical phrase, simply fade to silence or a final movie shot that rises into the air over the last scene.  While marking the end of the work in a conventional and recognizable way, at the same time the concluding present tense adopts the pose of portraying a scene immediately before the observer’s eyes, leaving the reader poised in the end as in the beginning between realism and convention, symbolic commentary and bare facts.

     Both opening and closing of The Professor indicate the tension between natural and artificial.  The reader must wonder whether Crimsworth is seeking to “live his dream,” as a modern idiom would have it, to fully become himself and escape from the limitations of his birth, or whether his ambition has led him to make a tortured topiary of his soul, in the effort losing real love, and perhaps a genuinely successful classroom as well. 

     The framing of the story in fact highlights its difference from Villette.  The opening pages reveal a far less attractive protagonist than Lucy Snow.  Crimsworth’s asperities reappear in Villette, though transferred to M. Emanuel.  Though Lucy may seem more deserving, her love affair ends, at best, in separation and ambiguity.  The Professor concludes with images of connubial bliss (though the reader may suspect that the real picture is more complex), while Villette ends in a note of sinister foreboding with howling banshees signaling lethal storms.  In spite of the common ground of the plots and even of the language, the first two novels Charlotte Brontë completed are for the reader independent of each other in direction and theme, though, had The Professor been published, Villette would never  have been written.

  

 

1.  Carl Plasa,  “Charlotte Brontë's Foreign Bodies: Slavery and Sexuality in ‘The Professor,’” Journal of Narrative Theory, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Winter, 2000), pp. 1-28  “For many critics, the epistolary manoeuvre with which Brontë begins The Professor is both clumsy and artificial.”

2. Heather Glen in her introduction to the Penguin Classic edition.  Glen provides as well useful background on early nineteenth century self-help books.