What Use is a Princess? [Madame de La Fayette]

 

My account of the controversy in France draws on an article by Andrew Gallix, “Why a 17th-century novel is a hot political issue in France,” The Guardian, Tuesday, March 31, 2009 which notes “France may no longer be the centre of world culture, but culture remains at the centre of what it means to be French,” and a retrospective review of the issue a few years later by Elisabeth Zerofsky, “Of Presidents and Princesses,” The New Yorker, November 8, 2012.

The unpretentious translations are my own.  The original French texts of quoted passages longer than a phrase are provided as end-notes.

 

 

     Though one hardly expects venal politicians, especially reactionaries, to have any taste, Nicholas Sarkozy seemed to have  entertained a particular animus against Madame de La Fayette’s novel La Princesse de Clèves (1678).  Always a mediocre student, Mr. Sarkozy must have felt confounded by his literature assignments to such an extent that his distress was still evident when, decades after his schooldays, he complained of the poor princess “I’ve suffered greatly by her.”  To him it could only have been “either a sadist or an idiot” that included the novel in civil service examinations.  Sarkozy asked a sympathetic audience in mockery whether “it happens to you often that you ask a counter clerk what she thought of The Princess of Clèves.”

     The fact that aspiring postal workers in  the United States need not show any familiarity with Moby Dick or the poems of Emily Dickinson does indeed indicate a cultural difference.  The reaction of the French to the denigration of what is generally considered a cultural treasure is likewise difficult to imagine occurring in this country.  In reaction to Sarkozy’s remarks, university students staged readings of the novel, publishers issued three new editions, and booklovers sent copies of Mme. de La Fayette’s book to the president in protest.  (Lovers of literature may be reassured to recall that Mr. Sarkozy was later twice convicted of peculation.)

     In this country, where respect for the nation’s cultural patrimony is far feebler, we might well envy the vigorous defense the French mounted in behalf of their Princesse.  Yet it remains a useful exercise to ignore the immediate reaction of considering anyone who would object to the study of the novel a know-nothing philistine and consider more seriously Sarkozy’s attitude.  What, in fact, is the value to the average citizen of studying such old literature?  And why should such knowledge be encouraged by the state?

     The most fundamental reason that the novel was required reading is the simple fact that from the very outset European education has been founded on textual study.  From the ancient Greeks through the medievals education began with the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, all concerned with the effective use of language.  The demands on the student increase when the texts that are studied use archaic or obsolete language and concepts.  Europe went so far as to rely heavily on the challenges of Greek and Latin to provide a sufficient mental workout to train young people.  Oxford today has a flourishing program in English literature, but the subject was never taught there until 1894 and it was ten years more before the first chair of the subject was established.  Until that time, it was thought that the best training, no matter what career the student meant to pursue, was the study of dead languages.  Now, over a hundred years later in America, even the ideal of a liberal education using only English has been largely discarded in favor of vocational training.

     The idea that people are best educated by reading the classics is not peculiar to Europe.  Traditional Chinese and Indian scholars had to know historical philology to read documents already ancient.  In China examinations centered on the Confucian classics determined government appointments from the Sui Dynasty until the twentieth century.  Westerners who have experienced Ph. D. comprehensives and dissertation defenses will identify with the anxiety of the Chinese candidates.  Similarly, traditional schools in India such as the great university at Nalanda maintained vast libraries.  The focus of study was the Sanskrit Vedas, including reading and memorization, with attention to philosophy, textual criticism, prosody, and logic.  The only non-literary topics were astronomy and medicine.  .  

     Of course, those who succeeded in their studies eventually had to acquire new and more obviously practical skills once they began their careers as administrators, bankers, or generals, but (with the exceptions of medicine, law, and theology) this training was on the job.  The location of literary studies at the center of education, once almost universal, has become marginal at best, with English 101, a freshman essay-writing class, a sorry lingering vestige of millennia of practice.

     Whether or not one accepts the reading of literature as the best basis for education, poetry clearly is an essential tool for the species since it is found in every human society.  Perhaps the most undeniable function is entertainment.  Whatever else people are doing as they sit around a fire hearing Anansi stories or at home reading a bestseller or recline in a lounge chair in one chamber of a mall’s multiplex theater, they are amusing themselves.  As soon as it was published La Princesse de Clèves was immensely popular.  Demand outstripped supply and a reader in the provinces had a difficult time obtaining a copy. 

     The book’s appeal may have in part derived from its unprecedented realism, as the author, a comtesse, knew well the court of her own day, but her picture is hardly contained by rules of verisimilitude.  With its center in the glittering court of Henri II graced by the Pléiade poets and written during the even more spectacular reign of Louis XIV when Versailles was built, the narrative doubtless excited reader’s interest just as stories of celebrities, largely unreal, do yet today. 

     An idealized glaze covers in particular the novel’s opening.

       

Grandeur and sophistication have never appeared in France with as much radiance as in the latter years of the reign of Henri II.

Never had there been a court with so many beautiful women and such admirably well-made men.  [1]

 

 

     Even in the context of this magnificent court, the novel’s leading characters stand out.  The Duc de Nemours is “a masterpiece of nature” 9“un chef-d'œuvre de la nature”) and the Princesse herself is a similar marvel.

 

There then appeared at court a beauty, which attracted the eyes of all the world, and one must believe that she was a perfect beauty, to be so greatly admired  in a setting where people were so accustomed to see beautiful people. [2]

 

     This excess of refinement savors of the précieuse sensibility practiced in the salon of Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet, and familiar from Molière's satire Les Précieuses ridicules.  The hyper-aesthetic values of the court recall those of Heian Japan.  Readers who did not dwell in such lofty circles were nonetheless dazzled by the glory of their betters represented on the page, as indeed many readers are yet today.. 

     Apart from internal monologues as the duc and the princesse cope with their attraction to each other, much of the plot concerns plausible complications such as the stolen portrait or the note the vidame asks Nemours to claim was sent to him.  Several events, however, resemble the unlikely coincidences prominent in earlier romances.  The scene of Nemours eavesdropping on Monsieur and Madame de Clèves in the garden and the king’s fateful insistence on making a final run in the tournament, thus fulfilling a prophecy, would seem contrived in a narration that truly aims at realism.  La Princesse de Clèves thus offers a plot with a theme of love, founded in realism, but heightened by hyperbole and turns of plot too good to be true. 

     Traditionally, though, apologists for poetry have most often maintained that literature is essentially justified not as entertainment but as instruction, revealing “truths” about experience.  Very likely Madame de La Fayette agreed with Pierre Daniel Huet who introduced her novel Zayde (1670) with an essay “Sur l’origine des romans” that noted “Love must be the principal subject of novels” (“L’amour doit être principal subjet des romans”) and specified the goal of fiction writers as “the instruction of the reader” (“l’instruction des lecteurs”) toward the end of “the correction of morals” (“la correction des moeurs”).  For this reason, he specifies that “virtue must always be crowned and vice chastised” (“il faut toujours faire la vertu couronne & la vice châtié”), a requirement that prefigures  the old Motion Picture Code.

     The Princesse is taught the most conservative moral behavior by her mother.

 

She frequently described love to her daughter, showing her what was pleasant about it in order that she might more easily understand what was dangerous: she told her of men’s deceit, their trickery and infidelity, the domestic unhappiness caused by liaisons.  And she explained to her also, on the other hand, what peace accompanies the life of an honest woman, and how much virtue adds to the brilliance and stature of a person who possesses beauty and high birth.  But she showed her as well how difficult it is to maintain such virtue by an extreme self-control and by taking extreme care to retain always that which alone can bring a woman happiness which is to love her spouse and to be loved by him.  [3]

 

     Yet the Princess is such a paragon that she surpasses any ordinary faithful wife.  Though she lacks love for her husband and feels a passionate attraction to the Duke, her behavior remains impeccable. She is so exceedingly punctilious that even after M. de Clèves’ decease, she insists on remaining loyal to his memory.  The novel is less a love story than a tale of a quasi-saint.  The heroine’s scrupulous morality is no less a marvel than her beauty and charm, leading her to a heroic act of self-denial.  She herself says, “I know that there is nothing more difficult than what I mean to do.” (“Je sais bien qu'il n'y a rien de plus difficile que ce que j'entreprends.”)  An Olympic athlete of virtue, she elevates honor, what she calls “duty” (devoir) over love, leaving her beautiful Duke de Nemours a courtly lover whose affair is, like the “distant love” of Jaufre Rudel, the more perfect for being unconsummated.  Her “austere virtue” (“austère vertu”) finds a physical alliance with him impossible, while his devotion, equally “austere” under the circumstances, is likewise exemplary.

     In the last paragraphs M. de Nemours’s emotional energy slowly fades.  “In the end, after years had gone by, and absence had lessened his suffering and  extinguished his passion.” [4]   This leaves the Princess shining alone in the sky, her life blossoming, like the lives of the canonized saints of the church, with many “examples of matchless virtue” (“exemples de vertu inimitables”). 

     Though the book may exalt self-control as a theme, all art aims at beauty, and Mme. de La Fayette’s prose style has, since the publication of La Princesse, been considered an outstanding example of anti-Baroque neo-Classicism.  Her sentences are clear and concise, lacking the elaboration and obscurity associated with trends like English Euphuism, Spanish Gongorism, or Italian Marinism.  Her words are largely abstract with none of the accumulation of concrete specifics with which Flaubert and Balzac build effects.  Her point of view is less like a camera, recording a series of events more or less objectively, than it is a stream of consciousness in the minds of her characters, an exchange of subjectivities in which her readers may imaginatively share. 

     The limpid clarity of her phrasing supports the idealized aspects of the court and enacts the refined sensibilities of the duc and the princesse.  Due to the prestige accorded ancient writers, a sort of Classical simplicity, combining restraint and elegance, was considered the pinnacle of beauty.  By praising Mme. de La Fayette’s book, critics might pay homage to France as the home of a true revival of art, the center of culture in Europe.  This nationalistic concern with purity of language had had earlier been the motive for the foundation of L'Académie française, which continues to this day its attempts to safeguard the French language from ordinary linguistic evolution.

     Here, of course, is the source of the demanding curriculum of the lycées générals.  To know a book like La Princesse de Clèves conveys specifics of history which contribute to a sense of nationhood, but it also cultivates a particular accompanying sensibility, in the French case privileging abstraction and formal beauty.  A reader who has assimilated the style as well as the content of such canonical works might be considered authentically French, though his skin be Senegalese.  Texts like Madame de La Fayette’s novel unite the community of French-speakers in the same way that learning the lore of a tribe does for oral peoples.  And, like any young person being initiated in the myths of a tribe, the French student hoping only for a high mark comes not only to know the group’s history and values, but to consider them exceptional and superior.   

     Defenders of the French literary canon might then argue first of all, that, judging by historical practice, the study of the classics has been found the best training for general intellectual acuity.  Further, reading “great books” also has been considered a significant way to inculcate desirable social and ethical behavior.  The concept of a shared national heritage encourages social cohesion, pride, and even nationalism.  Such non-aesthetic ends have quite naturally played a role in the policies of government-run schools, libraries, and civil service systems, but surely the primary reason for reading Madame de La Fayette (or Racine or Apollinaire), the paramount motive in fact for consumption of all art, is the pleasure found in beauty.  In La Princesse de Clèves one may experience the delights of narrative turns and participate through imagination in the characters’ profound emotional experiences.  The reader will become ever more sensitive to the appreciation of the beauty of the author’s prose.  Such rewards make other considerations trivial.  Politicians, especially the poor students among them and those insensitive to beauty who think only of economic value may question whether people in general should know literature.  Yet a land of post office workers and motor vehicle clerks who are at least capable of reading the classics must surely be a more livable and more humane place than the current United States in which even otherwise well-educated people consume little art not viewable on their streaming services. 

     Most Frenchmen, politicians and citizens, have long been proud of the prestige enjoyed by their language and culture.  In this country we have seen the doublespeak of demagogues who call what is in the common interest elitist while promoting the interests of the one percent.  The right-wing Sarkozy’s opposition to La Princesse de Clèves ignores the rewards acquaintance with her might offer to readers: not only the mental calisthenics considered through history to be the most beneficial, but also the same shared culture that unites tribal societies, resulting in a benign sort of nationalism and encouraging every sort of excellence.  The formulation of a national curriculum based on the classics means that these rewards are available, not only to those who attend exclusive private schools, but to every citizen equally.  Those willing to read with an open mind will develop a capacity for the appreciation of beauty, an appetite easy and inexpensive to satisfy, allowing all citizens to spend time with the finest productions of human ingenuity and in that way to construct bonds with fellow citizens through their shared experience.  Making such texts the basis of education brings multiple benefits, not the least of which is making available to everyone the pleasures of aesthetic and intellectual life.  

 

1.  La magnificence et la galanterie n'ont jamais paru en France avec tant d'éclat que dans les dernières années du règne de Henri second. . . .Jamais cour n'a eu tant de belles personnes et d'hommes admirablement bien faits.

2.  Il parut alors une beauté à la cour, qui attira les yeux de tout le monde, et l'on doit croire que c'était une beauté parfaite, puisqu'elle donna de l'admiration dans un lieu où l'on était si accoutumé à voir de belles personnes.

3.  Elle faisait souvent à sa fille des peintures de l'amour ; elle lui montrait ce qu'il a d'agréable pour la persuader plus aisément sur ce qu'elle lui en apprenait de dangereux ; elle lui contait le peu de sincérité des hommes, leurs tromperies et leur infidélité, les malheurs domestiques où plongent les engagements; et elle lui faisait voir, d'un autre côté, quelle tranquillité suivait la vie d'une honnête femme, et combien la vertu donnait d'éclat et d'élévation à une personne qui avait de la beauté et de la naissance. Mais elle lui faisait voir aussi combien il était difficile de conserver cette vertu, que par une extrême défiance de soi-même, et par un grand soin de s'attacher à ce qui seul peut faire le bonheur d'une femme, qui est d'aimer son mari et d'en être aimée.

4.  Enfin, des années entières s'étant passées, le temps et l'absence ralentirent sa douleur et éteignirent sa passion. 

The Gypsy Gentleman [George Borrow]

 

     I was gazing over the last few decades’ self-help books and romances on the bookshelves of a nearby Salvation Army store when my eye was caught by the familiar form of a faded early Everyman’s library volume with handsome ornamentation on the spine, reminiscent of William Morris design.  It dated from 1906, the year that J. M. Dent launched this admirable series of classics costing only a shilling.  The title -- The Romany Rye -- was unknown to me and its meaning obscure, though the author’s name George Borrow seemed like one I had heard before.  His own story turned out to be at least as compelling as the narratives he put to  paper.

     George Borrow’s name has fallen into obscurity, yet during the Victorian Age he was a literary man of consequence.  His The Bible in Spain, recounting his activities distributing Protestant scriptures in Spain and including descriptions of the country in general as well as details about the Romani population [1], was a minor best-seller, going through six printings in a year.  He went on to write two novels which, while they were less popular than his book on Spain, were highly regarded for decades, entering the canon briefly before sinking into neglect.  His book Wild Wales contains much lore and careful (if Romantic) nature description, though Borrow repeatedly manages to maneuver the rhetorical spotlight onto himself.  He translated a sufficient quantity to fill sixteen volumes, including significant work from an astonishing range of languages, though much was unpublished in his lifetime.  He made so bold as to produce English versions of works in Danish, German, Old Norse, Russian, and Turkish, and a variety of other tongues, as well as translating the Bible into Manchu and a Gypsy dialect.  One book that did see print has the remarkable title Targum Or Metrical Translations from Thirty Languages (1835).  Meanwhile he also found leisure to research and publish six volumes of Celebrated Trials and Remarkable Cases of Criminal Jurisprudence from the Earliest Records to the year 1825.  

     He produced this remarkable literary output, in part the work of a non-university man seeking to support himself with his pen, at the same time as he devoted considerable enthusiasm to the cause of Protestant Christianity.   He acquired half his languages to assist in proselytizing and pursued converts in such unlikely places as Catholic Spain and Orthodox Russia.  His virulent anti-Catholic prejudices are evident in much of his work (as is his English patriotism), and his uncompromising evangelism led twice to his imprisonment.   

     Around the time of my copy’s publication, H. W. Boynton in The Atlantic called Borrow “a writer of unique genius,” adding that “that genius found, of course, its best expression in Lavengro and its sequel.”  To Boynton not only is “the charm of his mere style” “irresistible,” in addition “the peculiarity of the subject-matter” “will keep Borrow’s writings alive.”  He felt confident that “whatsoever books of the Victorian epoch are smothered and lost beneath the ever-accumulating mass of English literature, Borrow’s writings will be remembered.” [2]  In an introductory note that prefaced the 1893 edition  of Lavengro, Theodore Watts ventures to say that “there are passages in “Lavengro” which are unsurpassed in the prose literature of England—unsurpassed, I mean, for mere perfection of style—for blending of strength and graphic power with limpidity and music of flow.” He goes on to describe Borrow as “splendid,” “brilliant,” “classic,” and a “genius,” adding that “all competent critics” allowed Lavengro and The Romany Rye “to be among the most delightful books in the language.” A few years later Edward Thomas said, begging the question: “We to-day have many temptations to over praise him, because he is a Great Man.” [3]  And the Brittanica’s article yet today declares him “one of the most imaginative prose writers of the 19th century.”                   

     Though the only clues to ambivalence in Boynton’s praise are his use of the words “unique” and “peculiar,” the authors of many of the standard literary histories were more straightforward in qualifying Borrow’s place in Parnassus.  They are likely to use terms like “idiosyncratic” or, in a slightly more circumspect, phrasing: “No figure is more original than that of Borrow.”   Some prefer to provide an explicitly balanced judgement:  “There are dull stagnant places in his books, and there are passages aflame with genius.” Another notes circumspectly that “more than one of the publications of George Borrow are still held in honour by critics of eminence” due to their containing “enough of the genuine spice of free genius to overpower our sense of their eccentricity and offences against good taste.” [4]

     By 1912 opinion had shifted sufficiently that his first biographer speaks of him as passé.  “It was Borrow’s fate, a tragic fate for a man so proud, to outlive the period of his fame.  Not only were his books forgotten, but the world anticipated his death by some seven or eight years.” [5]  A review of another survey of the author in 1929 flatly calls him “one of the most pathetic failures” in letters whose writing “leaves much to be desired.” [6]

     From the start critics had puzzled over the genre of The Romany Rye.  They accurately noted its picaresque character, but devoted considerable discussion to the question of whether it and its predecessor Lavengro should be considered fiction or memoir.  Very little of either book, though, is devoted to the primary line of narration.  In The Romany Rye the love interest with Isopel is so discreet as to be almost vanishing, and she does indeed disappear early, only to bob up again at second-hand much later.  The reader’s interest is to be held by the story of the narrator’s acquisition and sale of a horse.  The animal is more or less forced upon the hero, for reasons that remain obscure, and the sale, though occurring in the midst of a variety of tensions, takes place without incident.  In the very last line, in a wholly unexpected turn, the narrator contemplates traveling to India, scattering the wispy fragments of a plot. 

     The Romany Rye clearly lacks the formal unity of a conventional novel.  The book does not fit the genre of autobiography as it provides no coherent pattern of a particular life.  Neither is it a proper travel book as the descriptions both of the Romani camp and of the countryside are for the most part vague or conventional or both.  At heart The Romany Rye resembles most those collections of odd stories midway between folk-tale and modern short fiction, the kind of tales in Canterbury Tales, the Decameron, Painter's Palace of Pleasure, or the Thousand and One Nights that replicated for a more literate age the archaic story-teller around a fire.  One speaker succeeds another, the Old Man, the Hungarian, the Postilion, the Jockey, and Murtagh all tell stories, and the sum of these together constitutes a significant portion of the book. 

     These inserted narratives have a miscellaneous character.  The tale of the old man robbed of his ass in  Chapter XXI resembles a folk-tale with its retributive justice and the concluding idyll of rural simplicity as the old man cultivates his garden to the humming of his bees.  The man in Chapters XXXII to XXXIV who becomes an aficionado of “crockery literature” is pure quaint picturesqueness as is the jockey’s knowledge of “coin sharping,” Hopping Ned and Biting Giles.  Borrow does not mind retooling old stories like the history of Hunyadi (Ch. XXXIX) and of Finn-ma-Coul (Ch. XLIV).  Yet these little divertimentos add up to very little. 

     Apart from included narratives, other sections are similarly irrelevant to any central plotline.  The Man in Black, whose discourse covers three chapters (II-IV) is a straw man for Borrow’s narrow-minded anti-Catholic prejudice.   Just when one might think Borrow might better be establishing the verisimilitude of his story, he features a caricature who talks as the most cynical priest has never done.  Other chapters are related in the voice of Ursula, the landlord, and the ostler, leaving very little spacet for the narrator’s own affairs.  It is as if the “novel” is composed in large part of filler material. 

    For today’s reader the book remains a curiosity.  If the style has little charm and the structure is almost arbitrary (it has been called “formless” [7]), the one-time popularity of The Romany Rye might be explained by its providing access to an exotic culture of which few Britons had experience as intimate at Borrow’s.  Yet, in spite of his adoption of the Romani, living and working side-by-side with them and learning their language, exceedingly little information about them finds a place in his book.  Apart from the use of some Romani words which provides a patina of authenticity and references to “dukkerin” (fortune-telling) and theft, he tells his readers virtually nothing about their beliefs and practices.   Significantly, the titles of both his novels , though couched, he tells his readers, in Romani dialect, refer to Borrow himself: Lavengro meaning “wordmaster” and The Romany Rye meaning the “Gypsy Gentleman.”  What appeals to Borrow’s readers is not the Romani vision of the world, which would require a fuller picture, but rather his own.  Bourgeois homebodies are engaged by the sensibility of this man who has chosen to live among the outcast, and this is perhaps the key to his charm. 

     The same critic who found Borrow’s work to lack structure also noted that he is “unique in English literature for the sense they convey of intimate contact with adventurous, lawless life.” [8]  The vagueness of the last three works is significant.  The reader is entertained not by becoming acquainted with Romani life in particular, but rather by imaginative intimacy with the “adventurous, lawless life” of a white Englishman.  While The Romany Rye certainly looks back toward picaresque novels, which regularly featured footloose heroes, it looks also forward to the twentieth century vagabond road books that hover between memoir and novel: London’s The Road, Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier, and Kerouac’s On the Road.  Though at first glance the concluding resolution to go to India seems to come out of the blue, it is the clearest sign for a Westerner of daring adventure as much in Borrow’s time it seems as in the nineteen-sixties.

     Borrow might be considered a late Romantic gasp, a last Byronic hero, doing what his readers would not dare to do but about which they relish reading.  His  exoticism and counter-cultural enthusiasm rise directly from Romantic models.  He has the assertive ego of the nonconformist, the bluster of a mountebank, the theatrics of a man who likes the spotlight.  Childe Harold enjoyed a considerable audience, but he seemed to be putting up the highest existential stakes as his creator did in Greece.  In comparison with the profundity of Byronic alienation and anxiety, though, Borrow seems a mere entertainer, though with a similar self-absorption.  The Romany Rye wanders about, free of real risk or drama.  Arthur Compton-Rickett noted in 1912 that his persona regularly betrayed “a curious selfishness.”  His characters seem to “exist chiefly for his own curiosity and inquisitiveness.”  In Borrow the “human touch is markedly absent;” “not even Isopel could break down the barrier of intense egoism.” [9]

    In part the interest the book retains today derives from its prefigurations of modernity.  The book’s very randomness suggests later practices of conscious fragmentation and bricolage.  Borrow might be seen as a proto-hip character, anticipating an important twentieth century aesthetic category.  His indifference to social norms and his individualist adventuring make him seem a free spirit to readers in spite of his peculiarity, aimlessness, and vulnerability to depression which he called “the horrors.”

     He remains, diminished perhaps to a vanishingly minor figure, a fascinating curiosity, a pleasant read, a diverting story-teller, and, perhaps most important, a colorful character.  His breadth surely outshone his depth.  Though he vaunted his linguistic accomplishments at every opportunity, subsequent scholars have found his mastery even of German to be imperfect at best. [10]  His insouciance about form, his idiosyncratic attitudes, his very eccentricity constitutes his appeal. [11] 

     The fact that this book and its predecessor Lavengro were included in the Everyman’s Series indicates the regard of the literary establishment for Borrow as a modern classic a quarter century after his death. [12]  He had attained a position in the literary canon, albeit toward the margin, eliciting an oddly enduring but lukewarm appeal from both critics and common readers.  I consider my discovery of a copy of The Romany Rye a happy chance, unlikely to be repeated by future junk shop browsers, though it takes but a bit of imagination to envision the Gypsy Gentleman himself sifting through the old clothes and kitchen wares.

 

 

 

1.  Borrow translated the Gospel of Luke into Caló, a Gypsy dialect used in Spain and Portugal.    His first book The Zincali: or an account of the Gypsies of Spain (1841) described Romani life.   Romano Lavo-lil A dictionary of the language of the English Romanichal people (1874) has been found seriously defective by scholars.  Mérimée was influenced by Borrow in his depiction of Carmen.  The World Romani Conference has declared the use of the name “Gypsy” to be pejorative.  I use it in my title for historical reasons.    

2.  H. W. Boynton, “George Borrow,” The Atlantic, Feb. 1904.

3.  Edward Thomas, George Borrow: The Man and his Books, 1912.

4.  In order, the quotations are from Theodore Watts-Duncan in Ephraim Chamber’s Cyclopedia of English Literature 1901-3 edition in an article that runs over six double-columned pages; Émile Legouis’ History of English Literature (1926)  Andrew Lang, History of English Literature from Beowulf to Swinburne (1921), and Thomas B. Shaw. B., A History Of English Literature (1895). 

5.  John Murray, The Life of George Borrow (1912), Iv.

6.  Review of Samuel Milton Elam’s George Borrow, New York Times, July 7, 1929.

7.  George Sampson, “George Borrow,” The Concise Cambridge history of English literature (1965). 

  

8.  Sampson.

9.  Arthur Compton-Rickett, A History of English Literature (1912).

10.  Though, in the view of George Hyde, Borrow “produced some of his best poetry in his capacity as translator.”  See “’Language Is First of All a Foreign One': George Borrow as a Translator from Polish,” The Slavonic and East European Review Vol. 77, No. 1 (Jan., 1999). 

11.  The most comprehensive book on Borrow in the last generation is titled George Borrow: Eccentric (Michael Collie, 1982).  Shortly after Borrlw’s death a little feature in the New York Times (February 24, 1894) titled “The Eccentric Borrow” retells several stories of his odd behavior.  The writer explains Borrow’s  peculiarities as “those unaccountable fits to which men of genius . . . are often subject.”

12.  Lavengro had already been published in in the Oxford University Press World's Classics Series in 1904.

Rereading the Classics [Burton]

This is the first of what I expect to be a series of essays along the lines of Kenneth Rexroth’s Classics Revisited, originally a feature in the Saturday Review during the later sixties when intelligent literary comment could still find a page in a magazine of more or less general circulation. Rexroth said that he was not engaged in picking a top forty, his own version of Dr. Eliot’s five foot shelf, but merely talking about books he loved. He had a good-sized list of topics he never reached, and the reader can regret the lack of his pithy words about Water Margin, say, or the essay he projected grouping Kropotkin with Ruskin and William Morris. Having, like Rexroth and my topic in the piece below, spent a good share of time in reading, I, like them, speak perhaps most precisely about myself when speaking about books.


     Robert Burton, the British scholar and divine, author of the Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621, enjoys something of a cult, which is only to say that, while he is not to the taste of many, his partisans feel immoderate affection for his book. What is more, his partisans include such contrasting sensibilities as Dr. Johnson and John Keats, as well as the ill-starred General Custer.
     During the same period when Burton chose to investigate the human psyche in his monumental work, sometimes called the earliest comprehensive text on psychiatry, Francis Bacon was pursuing truth in other realms of natural history. As a courtier (Baron Verulam, Viscount St. Albans and Lord Chancellor of England) Bacon wrote several accomplished if unimpressive poems in pious and classicizing veins. In his philosophic writing, however, he regularly emphasizes the fictive quality of poetry, calling it “feigned history.” Though “a part of learning,” poetry “being not tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which nature hath severed, and sever that which nature hath joined, and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things.” He cites “One of the fathers” who called “poesy vinum daemonum, because it fireth the imagination; and yet, it is but with the shadow of a lie.” Its only power was “to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things denies it.” [1]
     Burton might have argued in turn that all he knew was his own mind and thus to report this knowledge is the veriest direct observation. Surely, too, his pages contain the fruits of exhaustive research and a plenitude of cases for inductive analysis. And many a reader will testify to having found more than a “shadow of satisfaction” in their books. In the twenty-first century, we can scarcely avoid observing that Bacon’s descendants have immensely expanded the privileges of science and technology, though psychiatry has been reduced to diagnosing and prescribing, and humanistic studies have, especially in recent years, withered.
     A writer’s writer, Burton weighs each element of syntax and constructs dynamic and elegant mobiles of words. A scholar for whom Classical citations constitute a good share of discourse, he refers to authorities obscure even at Oxford with perfectly natural familiarity. Further, he is a true philosopher, in the old sense of Buddha and Socrates, for whom the primary question, the really important one, is how to find happiness in life. Finally, many readers through the years have found his Anatomy, the only book he wrote other than a satire in Latin, to be a most entertaining volume, suitable for taking up and putting down at any point. In this extraordinary book, while discussing the capacity of vicious spirits to bring melancholy, he manages to swerve into an inquest on the corporeality of spirits with prodigious batteries of experts testifying on either side, and he turns then to the natural question of whether, if they be bodily, they must then have excrement. [2] Other authorities, we hear, believe all spirits to be strictly spherical in shape. Burton exhibits the views of the learned; the reader may decide on the evidence.
     Though Burton provides a rigorous outline plan, his tendency always is to wander in what can approach stream of consciousness. Focusing on infirmities of the mind, he finds occasion to discuss human psychology in an all but unrestricted way. After all, according to Burton, all men are depressive. And for him the term melancholy is broad enough to take in mania as well as depression, as well as the derangements of every deadly sin, and countless other irregular forms of behavior. While he reviews the entire world (or at least a library reflecting the entire world), he tells his readers his motivation is intimately personal: “I write of melancholy by being busy to avoid melancholy.” [3] His true topic, though, goes beyond even psychology and tends toward the encyclopedic. Burton declares, “I had a great desire. . .to have some smattering in all, to be aliquis in omnibus, nullus in singulis.” Wishing to consume all knowledge, this “roving humour” has led to systemless study: “I have read many books, but to little purpose, for want of good method. I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our libraries, with small profit for want of art, order, memory, judgment.” Yet Burton’s mental life was teeming, and he found his academic seclusion, “a monastic life ipse mihi theatrum.” [4]
     The universal scope of his interests is consistent with his wandering style which moves from one thing to another naturally but unpredictably. Though never shy about expressing opinions on these multifarious issues, he tends, as real life does, to simply present the evidence and leave the contradictions for the reader to sort.
     Because of his desultory style and constant patchwork of quotation, Burton may be claimed by post-modernists as a bricoleur, pasting together as he does a tissue of others’ utterances Only perhaps in the pages of Athenaeus does the reader find a like delight in moving from one thing fluidly to another, engaging with all that is human, making an unmapped voyage of discovery by dead reckoning, and thus reproducing the quality of lived experience.
Burton’s ultimate contribution is his attitude, his convincing pose as the man who has researched the cosmos, and, familiar with the endless odd vagaries of the human mind, has become broadly tolerant, accepting, and moderate in all things. Sex, food, party politics, he is easy-going in most things. His intimate acquaintance with the past has brought him a sophisticated recognition of what never changes. The passions of our hearts – romantic, religious, and simply depressive -- are too familiar to dismiss lightly yet too absurd to take seriously. Like the Epicureans of late antiquity, has achieved a sort of weary acceptance, facing up to the terrible terms of existence with dignity and a redemptive style, spinning the most wonderful tapestries of words while waiting to die. He is, of course, nominally a Christian (indeed a vicar and a rector), and he asserts conventional Christian doctrine and Christian prejudices, but the reader may doubt that that role sufficiently characterizes his spirituality or what he offers to a modern.
     Frye, whose Anatomy of Criticism was a central text of my own early literary education, regards the anatomy as a subgenre of Menippean satire, and the spirit of Menippus the Cynic (and his teacher Leucippus) does inform Burton’s work. Yet, if Burton never cared to deflate the holy afflatus as his models Leucippus and Democritus had done, he did gaze at life with the same wide open eyes and then managed to so relish words that he built a fabulous monument of them, sometimes resembling Seneca, of whom he thought so much, and sometimes looking more like one of those weird and endless outsider art constructions like Cheval’s Palais Ideal or Henry Darger’s endless illustrations.
Democritus, whose character he assumes, was said to leave his retreat now and then to walk to the port and “laugh heartily at such variety of ridiculous objects, which there he saw.” As Juvenal tells us, Democritus “found food for laughter at every meeting with his kind: his wisdom shows us that men of high distinction and destined to set great examples may be born in a dullard air, and in the land of mutton-heads.” [5] In the same way, when Burton’s depression weighed upon him, unrelieved by either his beloved books or his eloquent pen, he would walk to the Bridge-foot in Oxford and his spirits would rise as he listened to the barge-men scolding and storming and swearing at each other. There must have been a grand edge to that laughter, and we know from his book that Burton would have found the very king’s court equally ridiculous.


1. The Advancement of Learning. Bacon refers to Augustine in Contra Academicas (386). In light of these views, it is amusing to recall the faction over the centuries that has maintained that Bacon, a “concealed poet,” was the true source of Shakespeare’s plays.

2. These topics are covered in one small section of Pt. I, Sec. 2, Mem. I, subs. 2.

3. 20 in the 1932 Everyman edition.

4. 17-18

5. This translation by G. G. Ramsay.