A Look at Ten Versions of Martial's Guide to the Good Life

 

 

 

Martial x 47

 

Vitam quae faciant beatiorem,

Iucundissime Martialis, haec sunt:

Res non parta labore, sed relicta;

Non ingratus ager, focus perennis;

Lis numquam, toga rara, mens quieta;

Vires ingenuae, salubre corpus;

Prudens simplicitas, pares amici;

Convictus facilis, sine arte mensa;

Nox non ebria, sed soluta curis;

Non tristis torus, et tamen pudicus;

Somnus, qui faciat breves tenebras:

Quod sis, esse velis nihilque malis;

Summum nec metuas diem nec optes.

 

 

     All translators agree that no translation can be altogether successful in reproducing a poem’s qualities in a new language.  Yet translations remain useful for two reasons.  They convey some portion of the original, allowing readers a view, though an imperfect one, of otherwise inaccessible writing.  Secondly, each translation may excel in different ways, so that the reader of a number of versions of a lyric will not only develop a fuller view of the source poem but also encounter new poems, some of which are worth reading in the target language.  Works like Chapman or Pope’s renderings of Homer, Fitzgerald’s Rubiayat, Pound’s Cathay, and Lowell’s Imitations are valuable in themselves as well as embodying, to varying degrees of accuracy, earlier literary works.

     This principle is illustrated by an examination of several of the many translations of Martial X, 47, a poem that owes much of its celebrity to its attractive moralizing theme.  The poem has been a favorite for centuries: one scholar has published an article with thirty-nine versions before 1750 (Stuart Gillespie, “Martial's Epigram 10.47: Thirty-Nine English Translations to 1750,” Translation and Literature, Volume 24, Number 1).  The attraction is doubtless largely due to the author’s recommendation of a rational and moderate enjoyment of life.  Martial’s theme here has been labeled an “Intellectually debased Epicureanism” as well as, more sympathetically, “a cultivated Epicurean conformist.”  (The former is the opinion of Alison Keith,  the latter phrase is J. P. Sullivan’s.  See Allison Keith, “Epicurean Principle and Poetic Program in Martial Epigrams 10.47–48,” Phoenix Vol. 72, No. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2018.)  For a modern pagan the recommendations remain as appealing as they did to the ancients.  This variety of philosophia perennis has been so attractive that this poem has been very frequently translated.  While another rendering is far from necessary to convey Martial’s ideas, each version possesses unique charms and weaknesses. 

     Martial seems to imagine himself being advised by a philosophic mentor on that central topic of Classical philosophy (though it plays little role for today’s academic philosophers), “the good life.”  Epicurus adapted  the old Delphic maxim “nothing in excess” (μηδὲν ἄγαν) recommending sophrosyne (σωφροσύνη) and taught that one must strive to eliminate or minimize pain, both physical pain (ἀπονία) and mental anxiety (ἀταραξία).  Avoiding suffering is surely a program most could accept as desirable.  Martial here not only resembles other Classical authors (for instance Horace in Epode 2), but he is also reminiscent of the long tradition of Chinese poets retiring to mountain retreats under the influence of Buddhist or Daoist quietism or the Confucian doctrine of the mean, zhōngyōng (中庸). 

 

 

A new translation of Martial x, 47

 

The things that make a happy life,

are these, my genial friend:

no work, but money one’s been left,

rich fields, a burning hearth,

no fights, rare togas, quiet mind,

with strength and fleshly health,

simplicity and well-matched friends,

good guests at rustic meals,

no drunken nights, but free of cares,

a joyful decent bed,

good sleep that makes the night slip by,

satisfied, with spite for none,

you’ll neither dread nor crave your final day.

 

 

     The long list of desiderata makes this a comparatively simple poem to translate.  I proceeded pretty much line by line.  This version uses iambs with tetrameters alternating with trimeters with a bit of syncopation in line twelve and a concluding pentameter to lend the last line a gnomic air.  I like the less-than-blank verse line for its casual, folksy cadence.  Even without the rhyme, the background beat is like a nursery rhyme or folk song.  (And a few of Surrey’s stumbles are enough to suggest why rhyme is a burden in this short lyric even in the most skilled hands.)  This does, of course truncate the lines somewhat, leading to such decisions as the omission of Martial’s own name in the second line.  (This detail struck me as distracting in any event, causing the reader to wonder fruitlessly who the speaker might be.)  We will assume, as others do, that “rare togas” sufficiently implies a minimum of formal business.

 

 

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1557)

 

Martial, the things that do attain

The happy life, be these, I find:

The riches left, not got with pain;

the fruitful ground, the quiet mind:

the equal friend, no grudge, no strife;

No charge of rule, nor governance;

Without disease, the healthful life;

The household of continuance:

The mean diet, no delicate fare;

True wisdom join'd with simpleness;

The night discharged of all care,

Where wine the wit may not oppress:

The faithful wife, without debate;

Such sleeps as may beguile the night.

Contented with thine own estate;

Ne wish for Death, ne Fear his might.

 

 

   Surrey uses smooth and polished four beat lines, though he does use three more than the Latin.  The interference of rhyme intrudes in such places as the slightly odd use of “attain” in the first line and the obscure “continuance” in line eight.  Surrey expands the reference to “rare toga-wearing” in line six as suggesting avoiding government office and then repeats the meaning to pad out the line.  In line thirteen the phrase “no debate,” absent in the original, calls up the convention of the termagant spouse, whereas the original simply implies passionate yet faithful.  Line fourteen is memorably strong.

    Surrey’s is a polished craftsman whose translations were among his most memorable and influential work.  He pioneered the use of blank verse in his admirable translation of a portion  of the Aeneid, and these shorter, more intimate lines are equally effective.  The epigram form encourages the formulation of witty little packages of thought contained in a line or a half-line, almost every one of which delivers his thought direct without distractions.  The tendency toward sententiae is foreign to the modern sensibility, but it appears here to advantage. 

  

 

Ben Jonson (1640)

 

The Things that make the happier life, are these,

Most pleasant Martial; Substance got with ease,

Not labour'd for, but left thee by thy Sire;

A Soyle, not barren, a continewall fire;

Never at law; seldome in office gown'd;

A quiet mind; free powers; and body sound;

A wise simplicity; freindes alike-stated;

Thy table without art, and easy-rated:

Thy night not dronken, but from cares layd wast;

No sowre, or sollen bed-mate, yet a Chast;

Sleepe, that will make the darkest howres swift-pac't;

Will to bee, what thou art; and nothing more:

Nor feare thy latest day, nor wish therfore.

 

    

     Jonson, a close student of Martial and the expert author of many epigrams himself, employs pentameters.  “Gown’d” is a clever word for the phrase about togas. “Friends alike-stated” is clumsy and unclear, and its rhyme “easy-rated” is little better.  “Cares laid waste” is another casualty of the rhyme scheme, and the phrase itself suggests the opposite of temperance.  Simply saying one’s wife ought be neither sour nor sullen yet chaste seems rather too modest an aim.  The penultimate line is neatly crafted, but the final word seems weak enough to spoil the otherwise good effect of the whole. 

    Jonson is, as in all his work, professionally competent.  I find this piece, however, to contain  few delights.  Though in fact he uses a syllable less per line than Martial, his English sounds slightly loosened.  The rhymes for me come round with too great a regularity, promising a conclusion with every other line that does not always arrive (and which sometimes arrives at more inopportune points). 

 

 

Abraham Cowley (1656)

 

Since, dearest Friend! 'tis your desire to see

A true receipt of happiness from me;

These are the chief ingredients, if not all:

Take an estate neither too great, nor small

Which quantum sufficit the doctors call.

Let this estate from parents' care descend;

The getting it too much of life does spend.

Take such a ground, whose gratitude may be

A fair encouragement for industry.

Let constant fires the winter's fury take,

And let thy kitchen's be a vestal flame.

Thee to the town let never suit at law,

And rarely, very rarely, business draw.

They active mind in equal temper keep,

in undisturbed peace, yet not in sleep.

Let exercise a vigorous health maintain,

Without which all the composition's vain.

In the same weight prudence and innocence take;

And of each does the just mixture make.

But a few friendships wear, and let them be

By nature and by fortune fit for thee.

Instead of art and luxury in food,

Let mirth and freedom make thy table good.

If any cares into the daytime creep,

At night, without wine's opium, let them sleep,

Let rest, which nature does to darkness wed,

And not lust, recommend to thee thy bed.

Be satisfied, and pleas'd with what thou art;

Act cheerfully and well th' allotted part;

Enjoy the present hour, be thankful for the past,

And neither fear, nor wish th' approaches of the last.

 

 

     One first notices the length.  At thirty-one lines Cowley’s rendering is two and a half times as long as Martial’s.  In part this expansion is due to vestiges of the amplificatio characterizing much medieval rhetoric and Renaissance euphuism.  Thus the two words denoting “fertile soil” here become two lines on the ideal size for an estate, an attribute unmentioned in the original, including the clause “which quantum sufficit the doctors call,” words that seem rather like an altogether unnecessary footnote.  Though neglected at first the simple word “ingratus” had not been forgotten, as it bobs up a few lines later in “Take such a ground, whose gratitude may be/ A fair encouragement for industry.”  The four word recommendation for “prudens simplicitas” and “pares amici” becomes here four lines instead. 

     This relaxed unfolding of Martial’s laconic phrases has its own charm, however, as Cowley generates a tone of leisurely discursiveness, implying a persona at ease, whose unhurried portrait of the civilized life is exemplary of the peaceful ease he has achieved.  In spite of his expansions and deviations from the Latin Cowley’s poem has much to recommend it.  He sounds like a baronet with a glass of port by the fireside, not Martial perhaps, but appealing.  (Cowley’s poetry and essays are, is in my opinion, unjustly neglected.)

 

 

Sir Richard Fanshawe (c. 1660)

 

The things that make a life to please,

Sweetest Martial, they are these:

Estate inherited not got:

A thankful field, hearth always hot:

City seldom , lawsuits never:

Equal friends agreeing ever:

Health of body, peace of mind:

Sleeps that till the morning bind:

Wise simplicity, plain fare:

Not drunken nights, yet loos'd from care:

A sober, not a sullen spouse,

Clean strength , not such as his that plows:

Wish only what thou art, to be;

Death neither wish , nor fear to see.

 

    

     Fanshawe is notably concise, with each four-beat line a unit.  Tight expressions such as “estate inherited not got” are followed by satisfying rhymes, here “a thankful field, hearth always hot.”  Similarly

“city seldom , lawsuits never” admirably conveys the sense, completed by “equal friends agreeing ever” where the melody compensates for the phrase’s awkwardness.  As with many other translators, Fanshawe decorously minimizes the marital joy with “a sober, not a sullen spouse,” which implies nothing positive at  all.  The antepenultimate line “clean strength, not such as his that plows” seems to come from nowhere, owing little to the corresponding Latin “somnus, qui faciat breves tenebras.”  Was he desperate to rhyme “spouse”?  And why does its apparent closer translation “sleeps that till the morning bind” occur earlier?  The concluding couplet, on the other hand, is accurate, shapely, and sweet-sounding.

     Sir Richard Fanshawe translated ably from Portuguese, Latin, and Italian.  This version of Martial has much to admire was well as several lapses.   

 

 

James Elphinston (1782)

 

Of things that heighten human bliss,

The sum, sweet Martial, may be this.

A freehold, not amast by care;

But dropt on a deserving heir:

A soil, that ev'ry culture pays,

A hearth, with never-dying blaze:

No contest, and but little court;

A quiet mind, her own support:

A gale, to fan ingenuous flame;

Exertion, to enforce the frame:

Simplicity, that wisdom blends;

Equality, the bond of friends:

An easy converse, artless board,

With all the little needfull stor'd:

A night not soaking, care effac'd;

A couch not dismal, always chaste:

Sleep stealing o'er the gloom so sweet,

That evening bids and morning meet.

content, which nought beyond aspires;

And death nor dreads, nor yet desires.

 

 

     Though Dr. Johnson’s friend James Elphinston was a considerable linguistics scholar, he seems to have been an indifferent poet.  Expanding the verse to twenty lines, he managed to include considerable extraneous material.  The meaning of “a soil, that ev'ry culture pays” is not immediately obvious; “enforce the frame” is awkward; and “not dismal, always chaste” hardly sounds positive.  A couplet like “Sleep stealing o'er the gloom so sweet,/ That evening bids and morning meet” has regular cadence and a neat rhyme but the syntax requires untangling.  “With all the little needful stor’d” comes out of nowhere and the meaning of “not soaking” is not clear at once.  Such difficulties are obstacles that the smooth metrics glide over.  His final line is tidy and effective, but perhaps more memorable than Elphinston’s translation is Burns’ epigrammatic reproach to its author.

 

 

To Mr E - on his translation of and commentaries on Martial

 

O Thou, whom Poesy abhors,

Whom Prose has turned out of doors;

Heards't thou yon groan? - proceed no further!

'Twas laurell'd Martial calling, Murther!

 

 

     While I would hardly imagine the shade of the Roman poet calling out for revenge, I do find Elphinston’s translation marred by awkward phrasing and shackled by rhyme. 

 

 

Rolfe Humphries (1963)

 

Here are the things, dear friend, which make

Life not impossible to take:

Riches bequeathed, not won by toil;

Fire on the hearth; responsive soil;

No law suits; seldom formal dress;

A frank but wise disarmingness;

A healthy body, and a mind

Alert, but peaceably inclined;

Congenial guests; a table set

Without excessive etiquette;

Nights free from exigence and worry,

But not too bleary or too blurry;

In bed, a wife not frigid nor

Too reminiscent of a whore;

Slumber, to make the shadows swift;

Contentment with your native gift;

And, without longing or dismay,

The prospect of your final day.

 

 

     Humhries is a professional, but his wit sometimes leads him beyond his original.  Lines like “life not impossible to take” are clever but misleading.   The rare term “disarmingness” is distracting.  “Bleary” and Blurry,” again, are ingenious but off-focus for tone.  “Exigence” is too formal a word for this usage, and “too reminiscent of a whore” is too inventive.

     In spite of these strictures, Humphries’ is an excellent version.  He is capable of juggling even the rhymes while staying on course. 

 

 

Peter Porter (1972)

 

Friend and namesake, genial Martial, life’s

happier when you know what happiness is:

money inherited, with no need to work,

property run by experts (yours or your wife’s),

Town House properly kitchened and no bus-

iness worries, family watchdogs, legal quirks.

Hardly ever required to wear a suit,

mind relaxed and body exercised

(nothing done that’s just seen to be done),

candour matched by tact; friends by repute

won and all guests good-natured -- wise

leavers and warm stayers like the sun;

food that isn’t smart or finicky,

not too often drunk or shaking off

dolorous dreams; your appetite for sex

moderate but inventive, nights like sea-

scapes under moonlight, never rough;

don’t scare yourself with formulae, like x

equals nought, the schizophrenic quest!

What else is there? Well, two points at least --

wishing change wastes both time and breath,

life's unfair and nothing's for the best,

but having started finish off the feats --

neither dread your last day nor long for death.

 

 

     Peter Porter called his 1972 collection After Martial since his intention was not to follow closely upon his original.  He stretches out Martial’s thirteen lines to twenty-four five-beat lines, allowing himself to introduce considerable new material.  His rationalization of the name in the first line (“friend and namesake”) serves a purpose, but the second half of line four is not only absent in the Latin but, more seriously, it adds nothing in the English.  Suspending the word ”business” at the end of line five only to complete it on line six is surely distracting and fussy to most peoples’ taste.  Breaking “seascapes” into two parts is less jarring due to its being a compound word and the whole phrase “seascapes under moonlight” is pretty enough to be satisfying though there is nothing in Martial to give it birth.  Lines seventeen and eighteen, though, run seriously awry with the peculiar formula “x equals nought” and the modern term “schizophrenic.”  Whatever it may mean to “finish off the feats,” the phrase enfeebles the conclusion here, though the final line is neatly crafted.  The “sneer” and “the poisoned sigh” are elaborations, vivid in English but absent in the original.

 

 

Peter Whigham (1984)

 

My carefree Namesake, this the art   

Shall lead thee to life's happier part:

A competence inherited, not won,

Productive acres and a constant home;

No courts, few formal days, your mind stable,

A native vigor in a healthy frame;

A tact in candor, friendships on a par,

Convivial courtesies, a plain table;

A night, not drunken, yet shall banish care,

A bed, not frigid, yet not one of shame;

A sleep that makes the dark hours shorter:

Prefer your state and hanker for none other,

Nor fear, nor seek to meet, your final hour.

 

 

     A follower of Pound, Whigham was capable of sounding like an eighteenth century neo-Classical poet at times, yet he has loosened his model to allow many half-rhymes in a pattern that will seem unpredictable at first reading.  His use of a pentameter line allows regular caesurae, and the whole proceeds most smoothly. 

     This is the best in my view of the modern translations. 

 

 

Brendan Kennelly (2008)

 

What constitutes a happy life?

Enough money to meet your needs

steady work

a comfortable fire

a clear distance from law

a minimum of city business

a peaceful mind and a healthy body

simple wisdom and firm friends

enjoyable dinners and plain living

nights free from care

a virtuous wife who's not a prude

enough sleep to make the darkness short

contentment with the life you have,

avoiding the sneer, the poisoned sigh;

no fear of death

and no desire to die.

 

 

     Kennelly is a talented modern poet whose version flouts the regularities of the original, preferring free verse with the line varying from three syllables to ten and little attention to rhyme or assonance.  Alliteration is allowed a subdued effect: the proximity of “money” and “meet” in line two, “”firm” and “friends” in  line eight, “sneer” and “sigh” in  eleven, and “desire” and “die” in thirteen.  This casual form and the lack of punctuation until the end supplies an appropriate off-hand tone that reinforces the theme.  M any of the lines are out so efficiently into English that, though Kennelly‘s version has three more lines than the Latin, many of the terms are expressed in fewer syllables.  “Steady work” deviates from his source which is closer to meaning no work at all, but perhaps this is a concession to modernity which frowns upon the idle aristocrat.  Like others, Kennelly neglects the positive term in describing the connubial bed.  “Make the darkness short” is both accurate and neatly phrased. 

     His rendering is smooth and natural in modern American usage and conveys the poem’s essential elements without asserting any translator’s peculiarities.  Its weakness arises from the same qualities: an offhand prosiness that, as it draws no attention to itself, run s the risk of sounding artless, though it is more successful than versions with distracting characteristics not found in the original.

Toes

 

    I suspect my toes may be nursing a grievance.  A remote and neglected part of the body, they are perhaps aware that I rarely take any note of them at all.  Lurking down low to the ground, encased often in both socks and shoes, they seem to pursue an independent existence.  Yet I suspect they are uneasy.  They may feel they have reason to fear evolutionary obsolescence after such a long period of being ignored.  One can imagine future homo sapiens with a smooth shoe-fitting flipper metamorphosed from the unused digits like a horse’s hoof.  Tiny fragments of vestigial toenails would have retreated to the interior of such futuristic feet.  Already some people, I am told, lack the middle joint of the smallest toe.

   The experts say that toes (the halluces or great toes in particular) are important for our species’ bipedal propulsion, but that is not subjectively obvious, nor is it essential.  People lacking toes can yet walk, and in fact those who have lost a thumb may have it surgically replaced by a big toe, which, like the thumb, has two phalanges, and such people will continue to walk and run, though their gait may be modified.  The role of toes in human locomotion is based on our walking on the soles of our feet, a trait described as plantigrade we share with, for instance, bears.  (Cats walk on their toes, a motion labeled digitigrade, while unguligrade mammals, like deer and horses, walk on hooves, the hardened tips of their feet in which toes are no longer distinguishable.)

     In spite of the fact that feet give their owners an impression of only marginal function, nature implies otherwise.  Feet are densely covered with more sweat glands and nerve endings than any other part of the body, in part explaining the phenomena of stinky feet and ticklishness.  Physicians say we may lose a cup of water through our feet in a single day.  A lessening of this flow may be an early sign of neuropathy which could, if undetected, lead to amputation.  The fact that feet are as sensitive to touch as hands was surely useful when our remote ancestors made homes in the branches of trees.  Toes are subject to a frightening array of pathologies, in the main impairing ordinary walking, including turf toe, claw toe, club foot, bunions, hammertoe, and mallet toe.  Feet are sufficiently a field apart that the sufferer likely to be treated by a specialist physician, not an M. D. but a podiatrist or D. P. M., a profession that, like medical, osteopathic, dental, veterinary, and pharmacy schools requires four years of graduate study.   

     We no longer have (as apes do) opposable big tors, though a hominin ancestor found in Ethiopia and dated to three and a half million years ago retained this characteristic.  Its loss rendered the feet less capable of many tasks.  Yet today’s humans may with training recover some of our remote ancestors’ agility.  People without hands have long compensated by learning to accomplish many tasks with their feet.  Dressing, cooking, eating, and most activities of daily life may be managed with feet alone.  A considerable number of people have developed sufficient dexterity in their toes that they can play the piano with their feet.  Though lacking arms, a Chinese man named Liu Wei has become not only a foot piano virtuoso but also a champion toe typist and swimmer.  (Which skill, one wonders, might he have thought most difficult to acquire?)

     Akshat Saxena from Uttar Pradesh is a sort of toe champion, having been born in 2010 with ten toes on each foot.  He is an extreme case of polydactyly, a condition which affects about three of every two thousand babies.  For reasons not yet understood, polydactyly occurs about a thousand per cent more commonly in people of African descent as opposed to those with a European ancestry.  Sometimes a single toe will grow unusually large, a condition with unknown cause called macrodactyly. The longest toe yet measured was that of Xi Shun, verified by Guinness World Records in 2005 at over eight centimeters or three and a third inches) and belongs to Xi Shun (China).  Louise Hollis became known in 1991 as the grower of the longest toenails known having achieved a total combined length of eighty-seven inches.  (Though she grew her fingernails as well, she was never able to attain a record for them.)

     Habitually avoiding the spotlight, toes have played little role in magic and mythology.   The belief is, however, widespread, that a second toe longer than the first is an auspicious sign of royal descent or long life or good luck in general.  Though the link between toe size and destiny is a fanciful one, it is clear that to the ancient Greeks such an extended toe was considered aesthetically pleasing and most of their statues display the characteristic, though it appears in a minority (only twenty percent) of people.  For this reason it is sometimes called a Greek toe.  Michelangelo’s David and the Statue of Liberty display such toes in neo-Classical form.  Called “Morton’s toe” by the medical profession, it can sometimes interfere with balance and walking. 

     During the heyday of physical-anthropological speculation in the nineteenth century, researchers produced a taxonomy of foot profiles.  (In some listings, the Roman is inconsistently called the Peasant.)

 

 

     While none of these identifications reliably identifies a pattern common in a certain area, national variations do exist.  Three quarters of Japanese, for instance, have the Egyptian foot with a steady slope from toe to toe. 

     According the National Shoe Retailers Association the average American foot is two sizes bigger than a generation ago, a change for which increased size in general is primarily accountable.  In my own childhood a visit to by shoes frequently involved the opportunity to see one’s own bones in a fluoroscope using a special machine patented in America in 1927 as the Foot-O-Scope.  By the nineteen-fifties over ten thousand such devices were installed in American shoe stores.  Originally unregulated, such unnecessary examinations delivered a dangerous dose of radiation.  By the nineteen fifties, though, medical experts were warning about the hazards of this apparently modern, scientific technology and in 1957 Pennsylvania became the first state to ban the machines and, by a few years later, they had vanished from most U. S. retailers, though they lingered in Canada and the U. K.

     Toes are associated with infantile innocence as we all know the game “This little piggy” which first appeared in print in the eighteenth century, yet they are as well the focus of prurient interest for foot fetishists (or podophiles), among whom toe-sucking may be a game of dominance and submission.  The lowly status of feet which underlies this sort of power game inspires Georges Bataille to make of toes a grand symbol of the horror of being human.  He maintains in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 that “The big toe is the most human part of the human body.”  Accompanying his text with monstrous closeups of big toes, Bataille regards toes as a symbol not only of humanity but of mortality as well.

 

Corns on the feet differ from headaches and toothaches by their baseness, and they are only laughable because of an ignominy explicable by the mud in which feet are found. Since by its physical attitude the human race distances itself as much as it can from terrestrial mud -- whereas a spasmodic laugh carries joy to its summit each time its purest flight lands man's own arrogance spread-eagle in the mud -- one can imagine that a toe, always more or less damaged and humiliating, is psychologically analogous to the brutal fall of a man -- in other words, to death. The hideously cadaverous and at the same time loud and proud appearance of the big toe corresponds to this derision and gives a very shrill expression to the disorder of the human body, that production of the violent discord of the organs.

 

     What in an infant seems tiny and cute and quite perfect later evolves into a terrifying reminder, almost medieval in  its disgust with life, of how dirty and disappointing one’s days can be and of their inevitable end.  Bataille goes on. 

 

Human life entails, in fact, the rage of seeing oneself as a back and forth movement from refuse to the ideal, and from the ideal to refuse--a rage that is easily directed against an organ as base as the foot.

Artists and Eccentricity

 

    In our day people associate artistic ability with eccentricity.  Research has indicated that people value art more highly if they are told the creator is unconventional in behavior {1].  Yet the association may not be unfounded.  According to another recent study truly creative people are indeed more likely to flout social expectations [2].  Yet this idea is far from universal.  In many cultures such as Heian Japan and Renaissance England poetry has been among the accomplishments expected of courtiers at the center of power.  For Pope, the poet, far from being a transgressive personality, is a skilled technician capable of eloquently expressing normative sentiments: “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed” [3]. 

     The fact is that, though contradictory, both notions are valid, indeed complementary.  Just as every work of art reflects lived experience with a twist, never exactly duplicating it, and every phrase rests to some extent upon remembered language, every work in part affirms consumers’ expectations and in part twists or disappoints them.  In this way art transmits accumulated cultural data to every new generation yet avoids stagnating, always potentially admitting new data.  Folk, mass, and popular art are all more likely to tend toward the side of the continuum that confirms received ideas, while avant-garde art, including much contemporary work, is by definition more unpredictable. 

     Each tendency in fact has an archaic lineage, the first from shamans inspired by ecstatic experiences and the second from ritual priests capable of performing rites according to tradition.  The shaman’s vocation is by definition idiosyncratic, though his role is wholly traditional.  The distinguishing characteristic of his practice is a journey alone into spiritual realms inaccessible to others, often with the aid of those psychoactive substances called entheogens by their advocates [4].  Eliade’s classic study says that shamans are generally considered likely to display “aberrant psychic behavior patterns” if not outright “mental disease,” though he demurs in  part from this judgement, preferring to say simply that “they are separated from the rest of the community by the intensity of their own religious experience, "and that that break from the group begins the practitioner’s “true life” [5].

     On the other hand, priests are, even in pro-literate cultures, fundamentally learned men who are educated in the proper performance of ritual duties such as sacrifice.  In ancient Jewish, Hindu, and Classical Greek and Roman culture, the role of the priest is essential if one wishes one’s ceremonies to be efficacious.  His job, like that of a Roman Catholic priest administering sacraments, is in no way dependent on his individual spiritual character but rather on his knowing the prescribed procedures and the correct magic formulae.  Whereas the shaman may go into trance and otherwise act in extravagant or mysterious ways, the priest probably will present as a sober and respectable individual.  This function is as prevalent in oral cultures as in those with writing.  Thus an African anthropologist notes that only priests can offer “major sacrifices” and reliably transmit tribal lore.  According to an observer long resident among the Tiv of Nigeria, their priests were “grave” and “dignified” men [6].

     The same division is apparent in urbanized societies.  According to Plato, “just as they [Korybantian revelers] do not dance while in their right mind, thus the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they compose heir beautiful melodies” [7].  Yet the very fact that such celebrants were collectively enacting a social ritual indicates their normative role.  Moralizing poets like Theognis and the composers of Doric choral poems reinforced values shared by their community, while monodists might  express more idiosyncratic attitudes.  Thus Tyrtaios regularly praised valor in war, whereas Arkhílokhos expressed a more individualistic sentiment, and in  the nineteenth century Rimbaud’s transgression may be measured against the regularities of Claudel. 

     Genres may cluster toward one end or another of this spectrum.  Popular, folk, and mass literature all tend to reinforce pre-existing ideas, while experimental and avant-garde texts will overturn them.  A good deal of extremely sentimental, patriotic, and pious material is churned out to strengthen the status quo, while works more radical in form are likely to be cast in novel forms as well as are works of art brut.  One might contrast even within a single author’s oeuvre Christopher Smart’s craftsmanlike and orthodox Song to David with his unpredictable and verbally pyrotechnic Jubilate Agno.  In the twentieth century,  T. S. Eliot also illustrates both sides of the polarity, with his early poetry free and fragmented in form, disillusioned in vision, and quite novel in style and his later work in regular cadences as well as exemplifying his self-consciously reactionary formula (in “For Lancelot Andrewes”) "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic [sic] in religion.” 

     Earlier literature had been largely sponsored by either the court or the church, guaranteeing a more or less conventional ideology and well as stimulating fulsome dedications in the hope of patronage, the equivalent of what would today be a grant or a commission.  With the coming of capitalism and the spread of literacy accompanying an increase in the middle class, not only the authors of best-sellers, but also such accomplished writers as Dickens and Mark Twain sought middle-brow audiences while others like Baudelaire and Stephen Crane scorned the bourgeoisie, creating counter-cultural or otherwise elitist bohemias.  Today a career as any sort of artist (the case is particularly obvious for poets) is so marginal that one may be considered a bit eccentric even to consider such an impractical ambition. 

     This dialectic has been obscured by the principle critical tradition (including Plato, Sidney, Puttenham, and Matthew Arnold) which has, often defending art against those to whom it seemed frivolous and moral, always maintained that the poet’s task is to define and reinforce his society’s ethical rules.  This millennia-long public relations campaign has obscured the extent to which certain writers, and portions of the work of others, have criticized or flouted accepted norms.  Ben Shahn notes that many people who would be glad to have a Van Gogh on their wall would be discomfited to find Van Gogh himself in their living room [8]. 

     The indices of aesthetic and social conformity often coincide, though they need not.  One can imagine, of course, an individual of thoroughly irregular life who nonetheless writes in quite regular meters or, on the other hand, a pillar of bourgeois respectability whose work is wholly experimental.  Most works and most artists will prove somewhat elusive, occupy shifting yet meaningful positions in the spectrum of possibilities.  Identification neither as traditionalist nor radical indicates value.  Bohemianism associated with high spirits and extravagance in one person may manifest as cruelty and self-destruction in another.  Likewise, of a hundred new expressive novelties only a few will suggest fruitful avenues for continued work. (the percentage may be similar for scientific researcher proposing hypotheses in a laboratory.)

     Still, locating an author or a poem along the continuum of conventionality yields information about the theme and about the place of a given text in  the society of its day.  Surely Villon’s life among thieves influenced his innovations far beyond his use of underworld slang and Allen Ginsberg’s enthusiasm for flamboyant transgression was of a piece with the originality of Howl.  On the other hand the decorum of John Milton and Alfred, Lord Tennyson is consistent with their influential roles as Cromwell’s Latin Secretary and as Poet Laureate. 

     So the historic association between artists and eccentricity is neither baseless nor universal.  The two are articulated in a way meaningful for the expression of theme and style and indicative as well of the place of the arts in a given context.  The beards and berets that signify an artist in Bushmiller’s Nancy comic strip may be in part a silly Philistine invention, but such symbols are also indicators of a genuine social tendency.  Art is aways simultaneously conforming and nonconforming to the expectations of those who receive it.  It confirms and also challenges preconceived ideas, and, depending on which end of the spectrum of predictability a given work occupies, the artist may seem a pillar of the establishment or a revolutionary.

 

 

1.  Wijnand Adriaan Peter Van Tilburg and Eric Raymond Igou, “From Van Gogh to Lady Gaga: Artist eccentricity increases perceived artistic skill and art appreciation” in the European Journal of Social Psychology vol. 44 no. 2.

2.  Shelley Carson, “The Unleashed Mind: Why Creative People Are Eccentric,” Scientific American, May 1, 2011.

3.  Essay on Criticism, 97.

4.  The term was introduced in 1976 by a group of ethnobotanists including Jonathan Ott and R. Gordon Wasson.

5.  Mircea Eliade, Shamanism : archaic techniques of ecstasy.  See pages xi , 8, and 13. 

6.  According to Return to Laughter by Elenore Smith Bowen (pen name of Laura Bohannon).

7.  Ion.  534a. οὐκ ἔμφρονες ὄντες ὀρχοῦνται, οὕτω καὶ οἱ μελοποιοὶ οὐκ ἔμφρονες ὄντες τὰ καλὰ μέλη ταῦτα ποιοῦσιν.

8.  In “On Nonconformity.”