Uses for a Dead Child in Chaucer, Livy, and Ancient Israel

 

     Like most of his fellow-pilgrims’ narratives, the Physician’s contribution to the Canterbury Tales is a retelling based on a written source.  Far from simply repeating an earlier version, though, Chaucer’s revisions express meaning absent from his source.  The anecdote from Livy [1] the Physician relates has quite a different meaning on the road between London and Canterbury than it did in ancient Rome.  Much significance arises from context and explicit cues apart from the implications of the plot.  The incident is sensational enough to guarantee readers’ attention in any era: in mythic, elemental terms it tells of a loving father who kills his daughter to save her from sexual exploitation.  Yet the significance is altogether different in the two versions and these meanings are also at variance with an earlier story of a sacrificed daughter and with the contemporary reader’s likely reaction.

     The plot elements of the story follow closely the spirited account in Livy, seizing the reader’s attention with lurid sex and violence.  A father finds his lovely and virtuous fourteen-year-old daughter fraudulently claimed as a slave by a lecherous judge.  Rather than let his Virginia (with her sprechende Name) fall to Appius’ lust, the father kills her.  She is a virgin sacrifice, offered up for the ideal of female sexual purity and dependence.

     Yet the first reaction of the modern reader must be shock at Virginius’ filicide, an issue that does not exist in Livy but which by the Middle Ages had become sufficiently important that in Chaucer’s telling, unlike in the Latin, Virginia consents willingly to her own murder.  Thus her end approaches the hagiographic pattern set by the many female saints who are said to have died willingly rather than accept a pagan or otherwise unacceptable lover.  While embracing her own death, she asks only for a brief delay, referring to the respite given Jephthah’s daughter in the Hebrew scriptures. 

     What follows Virginia’s death in Chaucer’s account has no hint of criticism of her father’s brutal deed.  After she dies at his hands, an aroused mob exacts revenge, imprisoning Appius who then commits suicide, hanging his partisans, yet Virginius requests that Claudius, whose false testimony was the excuse for Virginia’s abduction, be only exiled.  The reader hears another Christian grace-note there, surely, in a glimpse of a divine glow of the about such compassionate mercy.

     The reaction to this story in Chaucer is dramatic and has nothing to do with either praising or blaming the father.  The host is overcome with pathos, with such strong feelings of indignation at the malefactor and sympathy for the poor daughter that he acts as though he were crazy (287).  So distressed by the “pitous” (302) narrative is he that he insists he must have a remedy, either medicine or “corny ale” or a “myrie tale.” (316)  The Pardoner, who is to go next, insists on the second of these alternatives, and they stop into a tavern for a drink.  The excuse is presumably welcomed by others among the travelers. 

     The father’s act is not questioned, but rather presented as an extreme example of paternal love, forced on Virginius, like Oedipus the victim of a terrible fate.  Appius is an obvious villain, by pagan or by Christian standards, and his wickedness makes Virginia and her father shine forth the more brightly with their virtue. In a brief coda (277-286) the physician glosses his own story, providing an unlikely version of the story’s instructive value.  Rather than, like the Host, considering Appius a model of extreme sin and Virgina exemplifying the polar opposite, an all-but-impossible saintliness, the Physician identifies with Appius as a fellow sinner and takes the tale as a warning to forsake sin while one still may, bearing in mind that none can tell when God might bring hidden deeds to light.  There is no mention of the evil-doer’s victims, only the pain of the “worm of conscience” and his constant fear, knowing that in the end there must inevitably be an accounting for sin. 

     Presented in the context of the pilgrimage the Physician’s Tale seems, in spite of its shocking content, a diverting tale, a potent emotional experience suited for passing an idle hour, the medieval version of a late show horror movie.  The motif of a lovely and innocent heroine in danger is universally popular, and here its sensationalism is heightened by the horrific act of the father.  In spite of this potent, highly-colored material, though, the stated theme is generic, the most commonplace of medieval Christian formulae, encouragement toward salvation, to avoid sin and embrace Jesus. 

     The primary source for the Physician’s Tale is Livy (III, 44ff.) who tells the story in a leisurely and lively manner, clearly exploiting the sex and violence that make the story of Appius and Verginia (Livy’s spelling) attractive to readers.  The context and the stated significance of the account in Livy, however, is quite distinct from those of Chaucer’s story.   The Roman historian’s goal was to trace the founding of his city and the tale of Verginius marks a transition from the second decemvirate to the second plebeian succession.  Even apart from the intrusion of legends like that of Verginius, Livy’s presentation of such change is often based as much on tradition and literary models as on historical fact.  For him Appius’ attempt to rape Verginia is representative of his generally vicious rule.  Thus Livy includes a lengthy explanation of the strengthening of plebian power in the aftermath of Appius’ crime.  For him the political issue was leading the people’s reaction.  “The people were excited partly by the atrocity of the deed, partly by the opportunity now offered of recovering their liberties.”  The ordinary Romans “talked of nothing but the abolition of the tribunitian power and the right of appeal and loudly expressed their indignation at the condition of public affairs.” 

     Livy emphasizes the role of sexual offenses against women as a sign of decadent leadership and the marker of institutional change by referring to the earlier rape and death of Lucretia which had preceded the overthrow of the monarchy and the original founding of the senate.   Clearly, violence to respectable women is the hallmark of misrule, allowing a political struggle to be accompanied (or, perhaps, masked) as moral outrage.  In Chaucer the sin is personal or spiritual whereas here it is socio-political.   

     In Chaucer’s version Virginia’s daughter refers to another story that in part resembles her own when she asks for some brief respite before her death like that afforded Jephthah’s daughter in the book of Judges.  Though she also is killed by a loving father, this ancient Hebrew episode includes no lascivious and unjust judge.  Jephthah, despite being the son of a “harlot” and practicing banditry, defeats the Ammonites as a Jewish general and becomes then a respected “judge,” ruling Israel for six years.  He finds himself sacrificing his own daughter as the result of a rash vow.  There is no question of his failing to carry out his contract with the divine.  His daughter was, like Agamemnon’s, the price of military victory.

     Once again female blood accompanies a regime change.  The putative theme is, as so often in the Hebrew scripture, the ups and downs of the Jews interpreted as the result of either cleaving to pious rules or flirting with non-Jewish practices.  Israel had been losing its battles because they “did evil again in the sight of the Lord, and served Baalim, and Ashtaroth, and the gods of Syria, and the gods of Zidon, and the gods of Moab, and the gods of the children of Ammon, and the gods of the Philistines, and forsook the Lord, and served not him.” (Judges 10)  Oddly, though, Israel’s champion Jephthah endears himself to God with a vow that echoes the human sacrifice of the Jews’ neighbors.  His prayer must have pleased Jehovah since victory in battle follows.  Far from deserving censure for killing his daughter, Jephthah was originally, like Abraham, whose case turned out somewhat differently, a type of the believer who demonstrates virtue by submitting his will to the divine.

     The archaic ritual character of this sacrifice is evident in the fact that Jephthah’s daughter’s death was remembered in an annual observance.  “And it was a custom in Israel, that the daughters of Israel went yearly to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite four days in a year. (Judges 11, 39-40)  This custom suggests that the story is a descent into legend of what was once a divine myth about a female vegetation spirit similar to Ishtar or Persephone.  Here the context is wholly mythic.  Such actions occur on a cosmic stage.  Jephthah’s actions have no moral content any more than those of Oedipus, though later priestly commentators including the Jewish B'reshith Rabba and (much later) Rashi and the Christians Ambrose and John Chrysostom made him an example of error for the same actions that had been consdiered praiseworthy.

     The righteous killing of one’s child so outrages ordinary expectations that stories of such deeds will excite interest in any human society.  Yet the themes implied by the stories of Jephthah and Verginius (and Virginius) vary widely.  The Hebrew version has origins in the cycle of the natural year and the observation that life lives only on life and the hard insistence that the life of the community supersedes personal grief.  Later, Livy’s Latin anecdote about another father’s sacrifice continues the notion that the father’s individual loss is justified by a social gain, in Jephthah’s case the military victory over the Ammonites and in Verginius’ the assertion of the power of the commons, but the mythic and ritualistic associations are muted in favor of proto-democratic political values and individual ethical choice.  Finally, in Chaucer, the story is told for the fun of it, and the putative theme urging the reader to gain salvation by avoiding annoying God seems tossed into the text as an afterthought.      

     Using the violation of the strongest taboos, with the shedding of female blood marking historical change, stories of this type exercise a strong narrative appeal.  The Verginius anecdote appeared in The Romance of the Rose, was depicted by Botticelli, and was retold by later authors, including John Webster and Thomas Heywood in Appius and Virginia and Thomas Babington Macaulay in Lays of Ancient Rome.  In every instance the story’s meaning is a unique compound of plot and context, complicated by what the text says about itself and what the reader makes of it.

 

 

The Meaning of Art for Art’s Sake

 

Numbers in brackets indicate endnotes; those in parentheses refer to page numbers or other divisions of quoted texts.

 

     The phrase “art for art’s sake” is so familiar that one may fail to notice that its accepted meaning is not explicit but rather is conveyed by indirect implication.  Art, after all, can scarcely be altogether autotelic since without human beings art can have no value or meaning whatever. [1]  It is absurd to imagine that a score of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony would serve any end at all were there no people to hear and appreciate it.  When a critical statement maintains the worth of “art for art’s sake,” it really means that art is justified, not for some abstract theoretical inherent worth, but because it provides pleasure to people. [2]  The very evasion of this direct statement looks like a kind of residual puritanical euphemism masking hedonism [3], though pleasure, of course, has many varieties, from simple entertainment through sensuality to experiences of the sublime.  The phrase implies as well a criterion for evaluating works of art that foregrounds form and style rather than content or theme. 

     The original occurrences of the expression, though, bore a rather different meaning.  Apparently, the phrase first appears in Benjamin Constant’s account of a visit with Schiller and English expatriate Henry Crabb Robinson (a student of Schelling) [4] whom he recorded as declaring directly that art could have no function or end outside itself without being deformed.  Constant specifically mentions the roots of the concept extending through Schelling to Kant.  Though pleasure does play a role in determinations of beauty, the German Idealist lineage would be unsatisfied with either pleasure alone as the raison d'être of art or the pursuit of purely abstract formal value.   Kant and Schelling would claim for art a truth, indeed a truth more profoundly true than most.  The phrase, once forged, was developed and mutated in subsequent authors.

    The phrase next appeared in print in an 1818 essay by Victor Cousin that insisted “We must have religion for religion’s sake, morality for morality’s sake, as with art for art’s sake...the beautiful cannot be the way to what is useful, or to what is good, or to what is holy; it leads only to itself.” [5]   Cousin’s  commonsense “Eclecticism” began from a material base.  “Man is sensible to pleasure and pain: he shuns the one and seeks the other.” (lecture 12)  He declared that “art is the free reproduction of the beautiful” with no other end in mind.  “The sole object of art is the beautiful.  Art abandons itself as soon as it shuns this.” (lec. 9)   While he recognized the autonomy of aesthetics in statements like these, his philosophy continued to link the beautiful to the good, the true, and the divine, so, unsurprisingly, ulterior considerations of morality and spirituality linger in spite of his formula “l’art pour l’art.”  

     Causin emphatically denies that beauty entails desire.  For his belated neo-Platonism aesthetic the experience of beauty is not limited to pleasure (which he trivializes by calling it “the agreeable”) or indeed to sensation or to sensual imagination at all.  It is rather based in reason and indeed for him ethics are likewise aesthetic, because the good, the true, and the beautiful are, on the most sublime level, all one. (lec. 6)

     It is in the cheeky preface of Gautier to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin that the line blossoms into its principal role as a controversialist slogan of the aesthetic party.  It is as a cri de coeur that it has survived to the present.  Its advocates have energetically opposed the traditional role of art in teaching morality (and the more subtle claims of humanists that art is uplifting or ennobling) and the complementary claims of reformers that art must subserve the goal of social justice. 

     Gautier there maintains categorically that “there is nothing really beautiful save what is of no possible use.” (9) With the bohemian impudence that endeared him to Pound, Gautier ridicules attention to “virtue,” calling her “a very pleasant grandmother, but a grandmother.” [10]  He would prefer to gaze with pleasure on Dorinne’s bosom (47) and in general recommends a hedonistic life devoted to the bottle, the pipe, and Pantagruel (48).  The contrast with Cousin’s discomfort around desire and pleasure could hardly be more marked.  He seeks to êpater la bourgeoisie as he cheerfully identifies himself as “the most enormously immoral individual in Europe or elsewhere.” (53)  He muses on the progress possible were a “large reward” provided for anyone who could invent a new pleasure.”  In sum, he declares, “to me enjoyment seems to be the end of life and the only useful thing on this earth.” (83)

    Whistler’s lecture “Ten O’Clock,” for which he sent formal invitations as though for a dinner party at an unusual hour, declared his artistic notions with similar high spirits.  For him art is “selfishly occupied with her own perfection only” (4), having nothing whatever to do with a benefit of any kind (5).  He will have nothing to do with any literary or narrative reading of paintings (16) or an educational end (21).  While he does pause to ridicule Oscar Wilde as a clotheshorse (23), for him the value of art is formal.  “The painter’s poetry,” for Whistler, consists of his arranging “form and colour into such perfect harmony, that exquisiteness is the result.”  With such creativity, or “invention,” and not from profound ideas or novel insights, the artist’s work gains a “dignity” and “nobility of thought.” (17)  He maintained in “The Red Rag” (reprinted in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies) “Art should be independent of all clap-trap—should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it; and that is why I insist on calling my works ‘arrangements’ and ‘harmonies.’”

     Whistler’s lecture, like Gautier’s preface is lit with high spirits and fleering if dry remarks.  He expresses discomfort at having to “appear in the role of the Preacher” (3) and imagines a scene in which “the Gods stand by and marvel, and perceive how far away more beautiful is the Venus of Melos was their own Eve.” (15)  Unabashedly elitist, he deplores that art has become of late “a sort of common topic for the tea-table” useful for signaling one’s “culture and refinement.” (3)  Yet he mocks art historians as well who “frequent museums and burrow in crypts,” seeking to “establish with due weight” unimportant reputations” and in the process reduce Art to statistics (18-19).  Far from hoping like William Morris to bring art to everyone, he wishes to “lift from their [the public’s] shoulders this incubus of Art.” (22) 

     In both Gautier and Whistler, the formal pleasures of art are its sole reward.  Their sassy tone is merely the seasoning indicating their dissent from the age-old formula naming delight and instruction as art’s goals.  That many thought this belief arose from an artistic milieu that not only considered immorality irrelevant to aesthetics, but was suspected of actually cultivating sin only attracted more attention to these writers.  Indeed, the poses of many among the decadents and aesthetes of the time often encouraged this view.

     So, far from being claiming that art is entirely autotelic, the phrase “art for art’s sake” was used to assert the value of the pleasure beauty inspires and the primacy of form over content.  What the expression most often signifies is that pleasure, whatever form it may take -- whether simple entertainment, inspiration, or spiritual afflatus, is the only “final cause” of art and that this value consists arises from purely abstract formal patterning.  An examination of nineteenth century uses of the phrase indicates that the line was employed as a provocation to the bourgeoisie by counter-cultural artists eager to disassociate themselves from conventional respectability.  Strong reactions condemned the notion.  For instance, an unsigned editorial in The Art World was titled “Art for Art's Sake: Its Fallacy and Viciousness.” [8]  This, of course, is precisely the reaction the artists were seeking. 

 

 

 

 

1.  Originally “l’art pour l’art,” in Stefan George “Kunst für die Kunst.”  The use of “ars gratia artis” in the MGM logo must strike the viewer as ironic in light of Hollywood cinema’s undisputed profit motives.  I ignore here a certain generic truth in the proposition in the sense that not only every creative or intellectual field, but indeed every technical skill, can be judged only by its own standards, applied by practitioners.  Thus only a carpenter may fully appreciate the skill of another carpenter and only a highly trained practicing musician can best evaluate another’s performance.

2.  In The Sense of Beauty Santayana defines beauty as “objectified pleasure.”

3.  In a seminar, with five or six other graduate students, all of whom had presumably pursued literary study because they love to read, I once ventured to suggest that pleasure was a motive for consuming art.  The professor drily responded, “Mr. Seaton, we don’t talk about our personal lives here.”

4.  Benjamin Constant, Journal intime, Jan. 1804.  “Art for art's sake, with no purpose, for any purpose perverts art. But art achieves a purpose which is not its own.”  (‘L'art pour l'art, sans but, car tout but dénature l'art. Mais l'art atteint au but qu'il n'a pas.”)  The same sentiment is recorded in Robinson’s own journals. 

5. Du Vrai, du beau, et du bien [Sorbonne lectures, 1818] (1853) pt. 2.   These talks had originally appeared as Cours de philosophie professé à la faculté des lettres pendant l'année 1818.

6.  Mademoiselle de Maupin, translated  by C. T.Brainard (1900), p. 82.

7.  James A. McNeil Whistler, Ten O’Clock, a Lecture, 1916, p. 4.

8.  Vol. 2, No. 2 (May, 1917).

Notes on Recent Reading 48 (Huxley, Cossery, de Maupassant)

 

Point Counter Point (Huxley)

     Huxley gets far less respect these days than he did in my youth.  His lack of engagement with the major trends of modernism combined with the intensification of his mystic inclinations toward the end of his career have diminished his importance for many readers in recent years.  He is left with those who are like him interested in cleansing their doors of perception as well as a remnant that relish the social novels of his early days: Crome Yellow, Antic Hay, and Point Counter Point. 

     Reading Point Counter Point one has the innocent amusement of a roman à clef including, by most accounts, characters based on D. H. Lawrence and Nancy Cunard, as well as a denatured and belated impression of Baudelaire.  There is an all-but-constant stream of weary Bloomsbury wit.  “My wife assures me that her underclothes are positively Phryean.”  “Quotations have something facetiously pedantic about them.” “He talks slang as though he were a foreigner with a perfect command of English.”  “[Marjorie] took such horribly small bites from a slice of bread and then chewed only with the front teeth, like a guinea pig – as though the process of eating were an indelicate and rather disgusting affair.”  These I found by opening the book at random; they constitute its most reliable reward.            

     I thought of Peacock through much of the book, as one character played off another, none more than two-dimensional, and then of Oscar Wilde and Saki.  Toward the end, when things other than repartee start to happen, the action seems incongruous and faintly disturbing, as though a Punch and Judy puppet were suddenly to express real pain.   Yet the novels are well worth reading, at least up through the ‘thirties.  I myself have a considerable tolerance as well for the Vedanta articles and the allied exploration of the value of psychedelics.  And I have a nostalgia as well, remembering how, as a teen-ager, I loved Texts and Pretexts, his poetry anthology with comments.  He wrote a very great deal, his own poetry, essays, travel pieces, stage plays and screenplays, supporting himself with his pen in a way all but unthinkable today.   

 

Men God Forgot (Cossery)

     Cossery was an Egyptian-born writer of Syrian Christian descent who, despite living in Paris for most of his life, continued to set his fiction in some version of his remembered Cairo childhood.  Though his own father was well off, Cossery found his themes in the slums, among the poor scrabbling to survive and smoking hashish to get through the day.  Men God Forgot, his first book, consists of five stories whose titles convey their tone: three are “The Girl and the Hashish Smoker,” “The Barber Has Killed his Wife,” and “The Hungry Dream Only of Bread.”  The ambiance is supported by the names of roads in his fictional city such as the Cul-de-sac of the Cripples, the Street of the Pregnant Woman, and the Lane of the Pissing Child. 

     Though his original inspiration was Balzac and he wrote only in French, his tales are sure to remind readers of Paul Bowles’ storytellers like Mohammed Mrabet as well as the sophisticated narratives of Naguib Mahfouz.  Cossery’s successful pursuit of lyricism in scenes of squalid ugliness is reminiscent as well of Céline.  

     In Egypt Cossery found allies in the Groupe Art et Liberté, a largely Surrealist and anti-fascist formation and associated as well with such writers as Lawrence Durrell, Jean Genet, and Henry Miller (who contributed a note for a later City Lights edition).  The book was translated by Harold Edwards, a professor at an Egyptian university and published by George Leite’s Circle Editions in Berkeley in 1946.  The many typos seem to testify to the book’s authenticity.  My own copy, from the University Avenue Goodwill store near the UC campus, has a penciled price inside the cover: 25¢.  Cossery would have particularly welcomed, I think, being read on the cheap.

 

Bel-Ami (de Maupassant)

     Georges Duroy is introduced as a man who attracts attention in public places due to his masterful military air and, more importantly, his striking good looks.   Before long the reader finds that he acquired his “swagger” during service in colonial North Africa where he not only indulged in incidents of gratuitous brutality, but then found lasting amusement in recalling them later.  Ego-driven and amoral, he improbably makes his way to wealth and an influential position in Paris journalism, his advancement spurred by his sexual conquests of a series of women.  Utterly cynical about the government and his profession as well as about romance, he rises irresistibly in Belle Époque France.  In the concluding scene, a glorious celebrity wedding, Duroy (or Du Roy de Cantel, as he now styles himself) the toast of the town, his ambition somehow satisfied, gazes out across the city, a master of the universe like Tom Wolfe’s Sherman McCoy, and his thoughts turn to his mistress’s hair, charmingly disordered in bed. 

     The combination of Duroy’s almost inhuman selfishness with his capacity for a nearly (but not quite) tender sensuality heightens the dramatic tension for the reader, while for the character there can be no doubt.  His crass material goals are the only real ends in life.  The story of his affairs plays out before the historical background of French colonial expansion in the Maghreb, a plotline of unbounded national greed to match the individual avarice of the novel’s hero.

     The book, like de Maupassant’s stories, is filled with telling specific details in every scene.  While the human landscape is bleak indeed – the characters generally act from the most venial motives – the context is described with vivid delight and rich plenitude, with scenes set in poverty and in wealth, in the city and in the countryside.  In part at least the reader is enabled, like Lear in the end, to look on fallen society with bemusement, to become one of “God’s spies” in a world that might sometimes seem altogether wicked were it not that we are inextricably tangled in it and we know, if we know nothing else, our own vulnerability.