Skip James’ Blues Imagery

Texts of all songs discussed are appended to the essay.


     During the summer of 1964 I traveled with a friend east from Chicago without stopping until we reached Greenwich Village where we attended a show at the Gaslight hard by Izzy Young’s Folklore Center and the Kettle of Fish. Sleeping in his parents’ car, we toured the Northeast visiting folk clubs as we went. In a coffee house one evening in Cambridge Massachusetts with perhaps a half dozen people in the audience we heard Skip James perform, his wife by his side. As reluctant a performer at the end of his life as he had been when young, [1] James has nonetheless produced a powerful oeuvre which has exercised a strong influence through the fifty years since I heard him including versions by Jimi Hendrix, the Cream, and others.
     His distinctive fingerpicking with open D minor tuning (which he called “cross-note”) to accompany his falsetto voice produced a unique sound often described as spooky, otherworldly, or ethereal. His repertoire helped shape the expressive and beautiful system of images in the Delta blues. Quintessentially poetic in that their significations provide rich detailed information that could not be encoded without metaphor, they shed light on the techniques of all poetry. The body of classic blues songs, like the comparable systems in Troubadour lyric or the Elizabethan sonnet, is particularly revealing about convention. Frequently misunderstood as clichéd or automatized expressions characteristic of second-rate writers, convention is, in fact, a dynamic process in which every occurrence is unique and the meaning of which deepens and transforms through intertextuality. The understanding of American readers of Chinese poetry is often limited by their lack of familiarity with the image conventions of Chinese poetry. The blues aficionado, however, is in a position to see the often complex and revealing interrelations of text to text.
     As a rural Southern genre, the blues made use of the imagery people knew best including the barnyard rooster, the catfish, and the cow. As a source of milk cows are female (as authors of children’s books know) and singers developed a complex of ideas in which the beloved is represented as a cow. [2] A milk cow was a relatively expensive investment and require substantial care, yet she might provide rich cream and butter, a striking analogy for the delights of love. The most common use of such bovine imagery is to signify the longing the owner feels when a cow has been lost. [3] Among the more familiar lines in the blues are the following.


If you see my milk cow, please, drive her on home
'Cause I ain't had no milk and butter
Since my cow's been gone.


     In James’ “Little Cow And Calf Is Gonna Die Blues” (see song 1 appended) James is primarily the cow itself, searching for love as the animal whose offspring is missing would devote all her efforts to “just tryin' to find, my calf, again,” paralleling his own search for his “used-to-be.” With the same poignant attachment of so much ancient Greek poetry to love and sex, only heightened by recognition of the evanescence of pleasure, James notes that all potential affective relationships are conditioned by mortality. “Every cow and calf, I believe was born to die,” and “I ain't gonna be here long.” Thus the listener to his song, if competent in the signifying codes of the blues, will respond first at the mere mention of a cow with a train of associations with the elements of voluptuous pleasure and well-being which simultaneously involves the opposite, the fear of painful loss. Since the speaker would ordinarily be the cow’s owner, the altered perspective here, the trope or twisting of the convention adds wit and ingenuity while recalling to the mind the costly loss of livestock, lovers, money, happiness, and health, and life itself. By loving one always puts oneself at risk of suffering. The entire figure resembles the Wheel of Fortune in which success prefigures failure.
     Another term that recurs repeatedly in the blues is the “killing floor.” Though the popularity of the expression has been identified with the slaughterhouses of Chicago’s stockyards, [4] James used it in his 1931 “Hard Time Killing Floor,” (see song 2) one of the rare blues songs that directly comments on politics. The song, which often burst through intelligibility into moans and sighs, depicts life itself as enacted on a killing floor. The Depression is the immediate cause of suffering (“Hard time's is here.”) so great as to be all but lethal (“these hard times gon' kill you”), but the song’s continuous appeal suggests that life itself is a killing floor. The infernal stink and blood and suffering that characterizes the abattoir might serve a medieval monk as an apt picture of life here below and it seems equally apposite to the Southern sharecropper or farm laborer. The suggestions of joy and fulfilment, even luxury, inherent in the dairy cow image is absent; the vision could hardly be bleaker.
     James’ “Devil Got my Woman”(song 3) is a complaint against the woman’s fickleness. Surely the devil has led her, after she had left another to be with the singer, to then change her mind and returned to the original lover. In the approximate center of this straightforward, if mellifluous and eloquent, lament is a striking image, placed like a jewel on a necklace. “But my mind got to rambling/ Like a wild geese from the west.” It is not the woman who “rambles,” though this particular word is often used for free-wheeling sexual habits; it is the speaker’s own unruly mind. The image of wild geese is common in Chinese poetry where it connotes sadness, exile, loss, and separation, [5] though James’ listeners would hardly have known this. It occurs only rarely in blues songs and with different associations. [6] The restless wandering character of the birds and their piercing cries are parallel to a train in the distance with its “lonely” whistle. Perhaps they are “from the west” primarily for the sake of the rhyme, but the phrase can only contribute to their air of wildness as they appear over a bleak landscape. The goose image is an example of the growth of the inventory of images available to the singer, as some are added and others fall away over the years.
     James may seem to deliver a dubious compliment when he says of his woman in “Lorenzo Blues,” (song 4) “You know, she's stutters in her speech/ An she wiggle and she wobble,” but the image has many precedents both out and in the blues idiom. The scintillating movement of a body in motion ravishes the singer just as it had dazzled Robert Herrick (who in “Upon Julia’s Clothes” had noted the “liquefaction” and “brave vibration, each way free”) and Theodore Roethke (who wrote “I'm martyr to a motion not my own “ in “I knew a woman lovely in her bones”). The classic statement in the blues is


I got a big fat woman, meat shakin' on her bone
I say, hey, hey, meat shakin' on her bone [7]


     The whole poem in fact is a systematically constructed string of compliments rather like the convention of the blason, common in the Middle Ages but never thereafter vanishing altogether. The woman oddly named Lorenzo has a Coke bottle shape and “a likeness” that’s “outta this world,” and apparently her speech impediment only intensifies the dizzying impact of her charm.
     In a song titled “Forty Four” included in Thomas W. Talley's 1922 collection Negro Folk Rhymes: Wise & Otherwise the number refers first to a handgun and then to a Bible verse. Roosevelt Sykes' popular “.44 Blues" in 1929 elaborates this process of wit by cleverly using the same number to refer first to a gun, then to a train, and finally to a home address (presumably in prison). James, however, in his 1931 “22-20 Blues” (song 5) accompanied by his excellent piano playing ignores such ingenuity and focuses (as Robert Johnson was later to do in his “32-20 Blues”) on pure aggression. The weapon, and such shocking lines as “I cut that woman half in two,” express in the strongest terms the speaker’s distress at his “unruly” lover.
     Simple though the situation may seem, it is presented with considerable ambiguity. Who is the mysterious “Mr. Crest” who appears at the outset? Has violence been done, or is it merely threatened? At the end the singer pictures himself out on the highway, on the pilgrimage of this life, as one might say, holding the gun that he has said is “burnin’ hell,” but declaring that he has harmed no one yet, though he says he means to “raise some sand” (start a fight) before heading on down the line. Experts seem to disagree on just what gun is meant, but the speaker makes it clear that he is weighing all options and selecting the one that reflects his despair. This indeterminacy contrasts sharply with the fatalistic directness in murder ballads such as “Little Sadie,” for James’ song is not narrative, but is primarily lyrical, defining through concrete terms the persona’s state of mind. The audience would here the song, even in its earliest versions, in a context of others’ use of similar imagery, against which the singer/poet seeks to define a new turn to the familiar convention.
     In each of these cases the listener responds to a whole complex of images. I have elsewhere explained [8] that every recognizable convention immediately spawns a host of variations which require competence in the tradition to perceive. In Skip James’ beautiful and expressive lyrics the strands of intertextuality may take a number of forms. In “Little Cow And Calf Is Gonna Die Blues” the singer provides an original twist to a familiar image, keeping the word fresh and the meaning original. In “Hard Time Killing Floor” a formula is used in a very standardized way, but signifying an intense and upsetting reality. The goose image in “Devil Got my Woman” is nonetheless suggestive for being innovative, but neither is it for that reason superior. Though the song concerns a missing lover, the image on which I focused in “Lorenzo Blues” celebrates women’s beauty. Equally intense, the weapon image of “22-20 Blues” takes its place among a lineage of songs referring to specific models.
     One may note significant patterns in the artist’s oeuvre as his reality is organized in a set of ever-changing symbolic forms. For Skip James the texts surveyed here emphasize the delights of love (in the cow and the wiggling), the feeling of love-longing (in the geese), and the terrible truths of aggression and suffering (in the killing floor and the gun). In every case the only amelioration or (temporary) elimination of pain is through fulfilled love. The images themselves portray a world-view more accurately (including emotional tone) than prose would be likely to do. These rural American songs deploy the stratagems of image usage in ways as artful (and artificial) as any sonneteer or mandarin.


1. James (born Nehemiah Curtis) had refused to record for Okeh in 1927, perhaps because his illegal activities, notably dealing in moonshine, seemed at once more lucrative and a good reason not to draw attention to himself. After he began performing again after his rediscovery by John Fahey, Bill Barth, and Henry Vestine he felt constrained both by failing health and his commitment to church music. James told a biographer that, while he was willing to play blues with his “thinkin' faculties,” he refused to “put my heart in it.” See Stephen Calt, I’d Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues.

2. Compare the standard Homeric epithet “ox-eyed Hera.” My wife tells me that, while growing up in North Carolina, her sister was told by a high school boyfriend that she “had pretty eyes, like a cow.”

3. Among the very numerous occurrences of this topos in work by Son House, Big Bill Broonzy, Kokomo Arnold, Robert Johnson, Elvis Presley and others, two are of particular, if passing interest here. In Sara Martin’s 1928 recording “Mean Tight Mama” she sings “the cow that black and ugly has often got the sweetest milk.” In Sleepy John Estes 1930 “Milk Cow Blues” the convention is well enough established that a cow is never mentioned except in the title. The tone of yearning loneliness is evoked in a narrative of fleeing love snatched while the “slow consumption” does her in “by degrees.”

4. Hubert Sumlin says that for Howlin’ Wolf the term had particular reference to an incident in which he was shot by a jealous woman and, when downed, saw himself as on the killing floor according to Debra Devi. See her The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu.

5. As far back as the Confucian Classic of Poetry (the Shijing) geese symbolize the suffering people in the poem Hong Yan. Geese appear prominently as emblems of what might be called the blues often connoting longing for an absent friend or lover in many later poets including Du Fu and Su Shi.

6. See “Wild Goose Blues” and “Blue Goose Blues.” “Cry of the Wild Goose” by the folk-style singer/composer Terry Gilkyson who recorded with the Weavers was a hit for first Frankie Laine and then Tennessee Ernie Ford.

7. From Blind Boy Fuller “Meat Shakin’ Woman,” but see many others including Ida Cox’s “Four Day Creep” and Tommy Johnson’s “Big Fat Mama Blues.”

8. See my “Transformation of Convention” article posted in August of 2013 for the most general statement of this idea.


This site includes a good many other essays treating blues songs as poetry. To see the others open the Index under the current month in the archive and consult section 5D “songs.”


Song 1

Little Cow And Calf Is Gonna Die Blues

Hey hey-hey-hey-hey, hey hey hey hey hey
Hey hey-hey-hey-hey, hey hey hey hey...
And every cow and calf, I believe was born to die

I'm a-milk my heifer, milk her in a churn
I'll milk my heifer, I'll milk her in a churn
If you see my rider, tell her it ain't a darn thing doin'

I wringed my hands, baby, and I wanted to scream
I wringed my hands, honey, and I wanted to scream
And when I woke up I thought it was all a dream

Hey hey-hey-hey-hey, hey hey hey hey
Hey hey-hey-hey-hey, hey hey hey hey...
And every cow and calf, I believe was born to die
Hey hey-hey, I ain't gonna be here long
Hey hey-hey, pretty mama, I ain't gonna be here long
That's the reason why you hear me singin' my old lonesome song

Hey, hey-hey-hey-hey-hey, hey hey hey hey
Hey hey-hey-hey-hey, hey hey hey hey hey
And every cow's calf, honey, got to be dyin'

I walked the levee from end to end
I walked the levee, honey, from end to end
I was just tryin' to find, my calf, again

I'm feelin' back to my used-to...
I feel a notion, back to my used-to-be
I have a pretty mama, she don't care for me


Song 2

Hard Time Killing Floor

Hard time's is here
An ev'rywhere you go
Times are harder
Than th'ever been befo'

Um, hm-hm
Um-hm
Um, hm-hm
Um, hm-hm-hm

You know that people
They are driftin' from do' to do'
But they can't find no heaven
I don't care where they go

Um, hm-hm
Um-uh-hm
Mm-hm-hm
Um, hm-hm-hm

People, if I ever can get up
Off a-this old hard killin' flo'
Lord, I'll never get down
This low no mo'

Um, hm-hm-hm
Hm, um-hm
Hm, hm-hm
Hm, hm-hm-hm

Well, you hear me singin'
This old lonesome song
People, you know these hard times
Can't last us so long

Hm, hm-hm
Hmm, hmm
Hm, hm-hm
Hm, hm-hm, oh Lord

You know, you'll say you had money
You better be sho'
But these hard times gon' kill you
Just drive a lonely soul

Um, hm-hm
Umm, hmm
Umm, hm-hm
Hm, hm-hm-hm

Umm-hm
Hmm-hm-hm
Umm-hm
Hm-hm-hm
Hmm, hm-hm-hm


Song 3

Devil Got my Woman

You know, I'd rather be the ol' devil
Well, I'd rather be the devil
Then to be that woman' man
You know, rather be the devil
Than to be that woman' man
You know, I'm so sorry
You know, so sorry
That I ever fell in love wit' you-ooo-hoo-oo
Because you know you don't treat me
Baby, like you used ta do-hoo
You know, I laid down last night
You know, I laid down last night
And I thought to take me some rest
But my mind got to rambling
Like a wild geese from the west
You know the woman that I love
The woman that I love
I stol't her from my best friend
But you know he done got lucky
An he done got her back, again
You know, I used to cut your kindleing
You know, I used to cut your kindleing
Baby, then I made you some fire
Then I would tote all your water
Way, way, way, from the bogy brier
You know, my baby she don't drink whiskey
My baby, she don't drink no whiskey
An I know she ain't crazy about wine
Now, it was nothin' but the ol' devil
He done changed my baby's mind
You know, I could be right
You know, I could be right
Then again, I could be wrong
But it was nothin' but the ol' devil
He done got my baby
Now he done gone


Song 4

Lorenzo Blues

I wonder has anybody here
Seen my lovin' Lorenzo, today?
I wonder has anybody here
Seen my lovin' Lorenzo, today?
You know, we had a nice time Christmas
But she left me on New Year's Day

Oh, you got to know her
When you see her
'Cause she's so different
From any other girl
Oh, you've got to know her
When you see her
From any other girl
Because she's made up
Like a Coke-Cola bottle
An she got a likeness
It's outta this world, alright

You know, she's stutters in her speech
An she wiggle and she wobble
When she walk
She's stuttered in her speech
An she wiggle an a-wobble
When she walk
Yes, an she got three gold teeth
An she got deep dimples in her jaw, yeah

I say, 'Hello, Lorenzo, Lorenzo
How in the world come you treat me this-a-way?'
I say, 'Lorenzo, Lorenzo
How in the world come you treat me this-a-way?'
Darling, you know that you was gonna leave me
But you didn't tell me you was goin' to stay

Now, if I can make a half a million
I declare, I'm 'on give it all, to the hoodoo man
I declare, if I can make a half a million
I'm 'on give it all, to the hoodoo man
Just after he promise me that he will
Bring my lovin' Lorenzo, back home to me, again
An I want her back ho-oh-ome, to me again.


Song 5

22-20 Blues

Oh, Mr. Crest, Mr. Crest
How in the world you
Expect for me to rest?
Oh, Mr. Crest, Mr. Crest
How in the world you
Expect for me to rest?
You've got my 22-20
Layin' up across my breast

Oh, if I send for my baby
An she act a fool
An she don't never come
If I send for my baby
She act a fool
An she don't never come
All the doctors in New York City
I declare, they can't help her none

You know, sometimes she gets unruly
An she act like she just don't wanna do
Sometimes she gets unruly
An she act like she just don't wanna
But I get my 22-20
I cut that woman half in two

Oh, your.38 Special
Buddy, it's most too light
Your .38 Special
Buddy, it's most too light
But my 22-20
Will make ev'rything, alright

Ah-or, your .44-40
Buddy, it'll do very well
Your .44-40
Buddy, it'll do very well
But my .22-20
I declare you, it's a-burnin' hell

I was stranded on the highway-hi
With my 22-20 in my
I was standin' on the highway
With my 22-20 in my
They got me 'cused for murder
I declare, I never have harmed a man

Lord, oh I measured my gun
An it's just a-long as my right arm
I measured my gun
An it's just a-long as my right
I'm gon' raise me some sand
And back down the road, I declare.

Local Politics

     With the aim of being a good citizen, I have consistently expressed love of community by striving to do my individual’s bit to support the general good. I have had very little to do, however, with electoral politics due to America’s two major parties’ fatal entanglement with monied interests. Thus, since my adolescence I have considered myself part of the extra-parliamentary opposition, that is to say, I will join all righteous demonstrations. Apart from union activism, my involvement has been primarily with national and international issues; however, perhaps because of my staying in one place for twenty-five years, I have become active in two local causes. One might think that county government could be freer of corruption than state or federal where, under the cash-dominated American system, no successful candidate can avoid soliciting corporate contributions that amount to nothing more than bribes. My experience in Orange County, New York has convinced me that even on this small-scale stage the contending forces parallel those on higher levels, and our local experience is exemplary of what happens in state capitols and Washington D.C. While those who do not live in my own Hudson Valley community may legitimately take little interest in the details of our political battles, their general traits may be indicative of what is happening in a great many other jurisdictions. So far as I am concerned in each case the public good is pitted against the most selfish and rapacious greed.
     The current county-run nursing home was founded in 1831 and has always served the aged and indigent. In recent years a top-rated rehabilitation center has been added and the facility as a whole has maintained the highest standards operating with a stable and professional unionized staff in contrast to many similar institutions (both for profit and private “not-for-profit”) that focus on the bottom line instead of patient care and employ casual and unqualified minimum-wage workers. In the past the place sometimes showed a small profit, sometimes a modest deficit, but no one questioned the social responsibility of caring for the vulnerable residents. Something over ten years ago Republican politicians to whom profits are sacred decided our nursing home was an egregious example of socialism and began to undermine it. After receiving campaign contributions from interested parties, they hired a management firm with the proviso that, should the county home be sold to private interests, this company would have the first option. These villains then operated the facility in such a slipshod way as to cause unprecedented deficits year after year, until the politicians took up their next lines in the script and argued that it was too costly to run and that it must be sold. They did not explain why buyers, including their own sweetheart firm, were eager to buy a concern that regularly lost money. They also did not explain why this excellent nursing home was an unacceptable expense while the county’s two golf courses and airport for private planes, in effect subsidized services for the well-to-do, each of which costs a substantial amount annually, were untouchable.
     As it happened, the law requires a two-thirds vote to close a county department, but the party of greed had only a majority. (I should mention that one lone Republican with integrity stood against his caucus on both this issue and the other I mean to discuss. Bravo for him for following the principles of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt rather than the vicious and bigoted party leaders of today! It is also true that a Democrat or two was lured somehow to the dark side.) Undaunted, the right-wing majority created an Industrial Development Agency, unelected and unresponsive to the public, to whom to give the nursing home. This agency, they thought, could then proceed with the illegal sale. By pure good fortune our community has a very talented and progressive attorney who took up the case and blocked the IDA.
     Meanwhile the workers had accepted givebacks and the administration that was driving the home into the ground was ousted. Immediately the balance sheet recovered. This year it looks like it might turn a small profit. I have no doubt that the backward politicians will resume their efforts as soon as they think they have the votes, so the battle is not over, and their appeal of the initial decision continues to work its way through the courts. For the moment, though, due in the end to the chance of the people’s having a disinterested friend to file suit on behalf of all of us, it looks as though we have won.
There could scarcely be a clearer example of social good than this nursing home. The only possible reason to sell is to enrich a soulless corporation. The only reason for elected officials to push for a sale is to enrich themselves through campaign contributions and perhaps sinecures later on. It’s people against profits.
     The second issue is our county Government Center, a striking structure built in the 60s to a design by Paul Rudolph, one of the era’s most celebrated architects. This building, recognized by the state and national Registers of Historic Places, is now on the endangered list of the World Monuments Fund since the county executive wants to destroy it and build a new and utterly boring structure instead.
     The hostility of the local philistines to this building dates back a good many years. Hoping to justify its demolition, our political leaders failed to properly maintain it, neglecting the roof, for instance, in the hope that it would eventually be wrecked. Four years ago following Hurricane Irene the county executive saw his chance. He declared that the building was damaged beyond repair and posed for photos wearing a protective mask he claimed to be against mold, though none of his aides, the press or others, had any need for protection. Subsequent investigation by engineers found little damage apart from that caused intentionally (and no mold). Exactly as in the case of the management team called in for the nursing home, a deal was reached with one architecture company which, in return for lucrative contracts, would say whatever they were told.
     The details are readily available online, but in essence, the county legislature voted to renovate the existing structure, though the Republican leaders continued to insist on destroying this structure, recognized worldwide as a masterpiece. Then a remarkable development occurred. A prominent New York architect, primarily motivated by a desire to preserve the building, offered to purchase it, repurpose it as a center for the arts and design a new government office complex on the land behind. Though this would have saved at least thirty million dollars, while stimulating the local economy, the reactionaries and their hired designers remained obdurate. Incrementally, through executive decisions alone without another vote, the “renovation” turned into an eight-five percent destruction. Two firms that had been subcontractors on the project resigned due to ethical considerations, yet the fat cats maintained their control. On the eve of destruction, the same attorney entered the lists. His claim that the demolition of the building would be illegal remains to be tested in court.
     The exemplary value of these incidents of local politics lies in the fact that in case balanced the public good against the profits of a greedy few. In the one case, supporters of the nursing home urged continuing the tradition almost two hundred years old of caring for the county’s elderly in a first-rate facility from which no one would be barred for financial reasons and, in the second, they advocated saving money and stimulating the local economy while preserving a landmark building recognized around the world. The only opponents of these righteous causes were conservative politicians and those in the corporate world with whom they connive, yet the struggle seemed from the start unequal. Had it not been for our white knight in the legal profession, the people would have been readily defeated. As long as the one per cent governs through campaign contributions and corrupt backroom deals the interests of the nine-nine will regularly be defeated in spite of a façade of political democracy. I have always thought that a political ideology can be useful only if it explains the events in the daily newspaper. Following the money offers the only satisfactory explanation of the treacherous behavior of those who were elected to serve the people. Until the entire social system is reoriented to serve us all, the best we can do is to hold off the thugs in business suits where we can. The cause of the people should not depend, as it has in my own county, on a single enlightened advocate and the integrity of a few judges to restrain those in power from looting the public treasury for themselves and their corporate friends.

Every Reader’s Pope

This is the fourth of a series of essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) readers to the work of important poets. In this series I limit my focus to the discussion of only three or four of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography, eschewing most byways and all footnotes.



     Alexander Pope is a very great poet, but one like Horace in whom many nonacademic readers find little pleasure today. Even to those with some acquaintance with literary history, the eighteenth century is a dull spot between the Metaphysicals and the Romantics. Yet his mastery of the music of words, what Pound called melopoeia, is outstanding, and the wit he exercised in both sententiae and satire remains a marvel. Hazlitt’s description of him as a master of “the artificial style of poetry” is just and need not in itself imply a lower rank in the poetic big leagues. A further hurdle is that many readers today think of poetry as necessarily lyric since narrative, philosophical, topographical, and a dozen other sorts have virtually vanished since the Romantic Era, and these days most everyone is one sort of Romantic or another. Pope wrote long poems, long enough that I present only excerpts here.
     Pope’s Essay on Man is composed in the most well-wrought verse, its flow of heroic couplets an example (like tragic choruses) of literary form redeeming what might seem the cruel chaos of reality. It is unsurprising that the poet, who aimed, after all, for popular success, includes no distinctly Catholic dogma in his effort to “vindicate the ways of God to man,” but, in fact, he sounds little like a Christian. Many critics have concluded he was a deist as were many intellectuals of his era, but the point remains disputed. To me he sounds almost like a monist, even a Vedantist Hindu, in his explanation of the radical unity that underlies the Great Chain of Being.


IX. What if the foot, ordained the dust to tread,
Or hand, to toil, aspired to be the head?
What if the head, the eye, or ear repined
To serve mere engines to the ruling mind?
Just as absurd for any part to claim
To be another, in this general frame:
Just as absurd, to mourn the tasks or pains,
The great directing Mind of All ordains.
All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul;
That, changed through all, and yet in all the same;
Great in the earth, as in the ethereal frame;
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees,
Lives through all life, extends through all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent;
Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part,
As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart:
As full, as perfect, in vile man that mourns,
As the rapt seraph that adores and burns:
To him no high, no low, no great, no small;
He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all.
X. Cease, then, nor order imperfection name:
Our proper bliss depends on what we blame.
Know thy own point: this kind, this due degree
Of blindness, weakness, Heaven bestows on thee.
Submit. In this, or any other sphere,
Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear:
Safe in the hand of one disposing Power,
Or in the natal, or the mortal hour.
All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.


     The explosion of duality in such lines as “changed through all, and yet in all the same,” the pantheism of the divine soul that “Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees,” the universal wisdom of the single imperative “submit,” all lead toward the conclusion that soothed so many in Pope’s day and since: “whatever is, is right.” In spite of Dr. Johnson’s sniffing, "Never were penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment so happily disguised," the poem was widely read on the Continent as well as in Britain.
     Whether the poet really held orthodox views of any sect is unclear, but he never publically disclaimed his family’s Roman Catholicism which under the Test Acts of his day forbade Nonconformists of all sorts from university enrollment, voting, holding office, and even living in London. Since his adolescence he suffered from Pott’s disease which left him stunted, hunchbacked, and subject to numerous pains and problems. Still he made his way with his wit and his translations of Homer were successful enough for him to purchase his Twickenham property which he elaborated with gardens, grottoes, curious geological specimens, and a camera obscura, all as artfully planned as his poetry.
     Apart from the masterful and self-conscious craftsmanship of his own poetry, Pope wrote one of the greatest works of criticism in his Essay on Criticism. His ingenuity is particularly evident in the passage discussing sound effects and clichés. A veritable primer of poetic effects, the passage exemplifies each effect while commenting on it -- the pedestrian sound of “ten low words” or the interminable twelve syllables of the Alexandrine. Too few modern writers can even attempt to make the sound “seem an Eccho to the Sense,” while Pope does it so deftly his words bring a feeling of discovery and delight at every reading.


These Equal Syllables alone require,
Tho' oft the Ear the open Vowels tire,
While Expletives their feeble Aid do join,
And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line,
While they ring round the same unvary'd Chimes,
With sure Returns of still expected Rhymes.
Where-e'er you find the cooling Western Breeze,
In the next Line, it whispers thro' the Trees;
If Chrystal Streams with pleasing Murmurs creep,
The Reader's threaten'd (not in vain) with Sleep.
Then, at the last, and only Couplet fraught
With some unmeaning Thing they call a Thought,
A needless Alexandrine ends the Song,
That like a wounded Snake, drags its slow length along.
Leave such to tune their own dull Rhimes, and know
What's roundly smooth, or languishingly slow;
And praise the Easie Vigor of a Line,
Where Denham's Strength, and Waller's Sweetness join.
True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance,
'Tis not enough no Harshness gives Offence,
The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense.
Soft is the Strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth Stream in smoother Numbers flows;
But when loud Surges lash the sounding Shore,
The hoarse, rough Verse shou'd like the Torrent roar.
When Ajax strives, some Rocks' vast Weight to throw,
The Line too labours, and the Words move slow;
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the Plain,
Flies o'er th'unbending Corn, and skims along the Main.
Hear how Timotheus' vary'd Lays surprize,
And bid Alternate Passions fall and rise!
While, at each Change, the Son of Lybian Jove
Now burns with Glory, and then melts with Love;
Now his fierce Eyes with sparkling Fury glow;
Now Sighs steal out, and Tears begin to flow:
Persians and Greeks like Turns of Nature found,
And the World's Victor stood subdu'd by Sound!
The Pow'rs of Musick all our Hearts allow;
And what Timotheus was, is Dryden now.


     The heirs of Romantic “spontaneous overflow” including Ginsberg with his dictum of “first thought, best thought” have lost Pope’s faith in imitation of classic models and indeed in the premise that had seemed self-evident in all the arts and crafts, expressed here in a persuasive simile: “True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,/ As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.”
     Pope was well-known for fierce and biting satire in works like The Dunciad. So many of his targets have faded into obscurity that the import of Pope’s lines is now evident only with rafts of footnotes. Indeed, those without a classical education will fail to appreciate much of the play in his mock-heroic narrative The Rape of the Lock, but other passages require less mediation and provide greater immediate reward. Pope compliments the courtly ladies of his day, imagining them to be attended by groups of sylphs, a thoroughly unclassical concept. The term arose in Paracelsus’ alchemy and was popularized by Pope who asserts the whimsical proposition that deceased women can by no means have given up due to mere death their fondness for such “Vanities” as fancy carriages and card games. He details the various fates of those who had erred though bad temper, excessive complaisance, or prudery, noting the “light Coquettes,” apparently those who played their social role by the rules, “aloft repair,/ And sport and flutter in the Fields of Air.” From this vantage point they can defend the female against “the treach'rous Friend, and daring Spark,/ The Glance by Day, the Whisper in the Dark.” People, Pope says, may call their behavior “Honour,” but it is in fact due to the sylphs.


Know then, unnumbered Spirits round thee fly,
The light Militia of the lower Sky;
These, tho' unseen, are ever on the Wing,
Hang o'er the Box, and hover round the Ring.
Think what an Equipage thou hast in Air,
And view with scorn Two Pages and a Chair.
As now your own, our Beings were of old,
And once inclos'd in Woman's beauteous Mold;
Thence, by a soft Transition, we repair
From earthly Vehicles to these of Air. [1.50]
Think not, when Woman's transient Breath is fled,
That all her Vanities at once are dead:
Succeeding Vanities she still regards,
And tho' she plays no more, o'erlooks the Cards.
Her Joy in gilded Chariots, when alive,
And Love of Ombre, after Death survive.
For when the Fair in all their Pride expire,
To their first Elements the Souls retire:
The Sprights of fiery Termagants in Flame
Mount up, and take a Salamander's Name. [1.60]
Soft yielding Minds to Water glide away,
And sip with Nymphs, their Elemental Tea.
The graver Prude sinks downward to a Gnome,
In search of Mischief still on Earth to roam.
The light Coquettes in Sylphs aloft repair,
And sport and flutter in the Fields of Air.
Know farther yet; Whoever fair and chaste
Rejects Mankind, is by some Sylph embrac'd:
For Spirits, freed from mortal Laws, with ease
Assume what Sexes and what Shapes they please. [1.70]
What guards the Purity of melting Maids,
In Courtly Balls, and Midnight Masquerades,
Safe from the treach'rous Friend, and daring Spark,
The Glance by Day, the Whisper in the Dark;
When kind Occasion prompts their warm Desires,
When Musick softens, and when Dancing fires?
'Tis but their Sylph, the wise Celestials know,
Tho' Honour is the Word with Men below.


     Not only, it seems, is the credit given women for chaste behavior really due to their sylphs, the same aery creatures are equally the cause of infidelity. At their prompting, the ladies drift from one beau to another, as though all society were constantly changing partners in some grand dance figure, and Pope manages in his description at the same time to parody the well-known lines from his own version of Homer that Dr. Johnson had quoted in his Dictionary. The same acceptance the “Essay on Man” had recommended quite seriously (“Whatever is, is right.”) here reappears in comic restatement: “with Heav'n who can contest?”
     So naturally that the reader scarcely notices, Pope turns then to a wide-ranging satire on the theme of the moon’s inventory of lost objects. The sophisticated society of the beau monde which could appreciate The Rape of the Lock is also capable of manifold foolishness, and Pope sprays out a scattergun attack. In a single line the poet devastates heroic literature and the modern effete beaux of lesser wit than he. He proceeds to targets such as “Death-bed Alms” (presumably less meritorious than earlier donations) and “Sick Man's Pray'rs” which mean no more than the “Smiles of Harlots.” He then takes a rather metaphysical leap to conclude the list with “Cages for Gnats, and Chains to Yoak a Flea” and “Dry'd Butterflies” before coming in for a heavy landing with “Tomes of Casuistry.” The thorough cynicism is levitated by his humor and delight, and the rueful and the ridiculous become one.


There Heroe's Wits are kept in pondrous Vases,
And Beau's in Snuff-boxes and Tweezer-Cases.
There broken Vows, and Death-bed Alms are found,
And Lovers Hearts with Ends of Riband bound;
The Courtiers Promises, and Sick Man's Pray'rs,
There Heroe's Wits are kept in pondrous Vases,
And Beau's in Snuff-boxes and Tweezer-Cases.
There broken Vows, and Death-bed Alms are found,
And Lovers Hearts with Ends of Riband bound;
The Courtiers Promises, and Sick Man's Pray'rs,
The Smiles of Harlots, and the Tears of Heirs, [5.120]
Cages for Gnats, and Chains to Yoak a Flea;
Dry'd Butterflies, and Tomes of Casuistry., and the Tears of Heirs, [5.120]
Cages for Gnats, and Chains to Yoak a Flea;
Dry'd Butterflies, and Tomes of Casuistry.
Oft when the World imagine Women stray,
The Sylphs thro' mystick Mazes guide their Way,
Thro' all the giddy Circle they pursue,
And old Impertinence expel by new.
What tender Maid but must a Victim fall
To one Man's Treat, but for another's Ball?
When Florio speaks, what Virgin could withstand,
If gentle Damon did not squeeze her Hand?
With varying Vanities, from ev'ry Part,
They shift the moving Toyshop of their Heart; [1.100]
Where Wigs with Wigs, with Sword-knots Sword-knots strive,
Beaus banish Beaus, and Coaches Coaches drive.
This erring Mortals Levity may call,
Oh blind to Truth! the Sylphs contrive it all.
With such a Prize no Mortal must be blest,
So Heav'n decrees! with Heav'n who can contest?
Some thought it mounted to the Lunar Sphere,
Since all things lost on Earth, are treasur'd there.
There Heroe's Wits are kept in pondrous Vases,
And Beau's in Snuff-boxes and Tweezer-Cases.
There broken Vows, and Death-bed Alms are found,
And Lovers Hearts with Ends of Riband bound;
The Courtiers Promises, and Sick Man's Pray'rs,
The Smiles of Harlots, and the Tears of Heirs, [5.120]
Cages for Gnats, and Chains to Yoak a Flea;
Dry'd Butterflies, and Tomes of Casuistry.
But trust the Muse — she saw it upward rise,
Tho' mark'd by none but quick Poetic Eyes:
(So Rome's great Founder to the Heav'ns withdrew,
To Proculus alone confess'd in view.)
A sudden Star, it shot thro' liquid Air,
And drew behind a radiant Trail of Hair.
Not Berenice's Locks first rose so bright,
The heav'ns bespangling with dishevel'd light. [5.130]
The Sylphs behold it kindling as it flies,
And pleas'd pursue its Progress thro' the Skies.


     The piece concludes then as a summer concert on some holiday shore might with pyrotechnics as Belinda’s lock soars aloft, a miraculous comet of hair, an elegant and fanciful compliment that must have made the lady smile. The author was obliged to use an iron frame to sit upright in his last years, gamely joking about the picture he presented, and he jokes for us all, though we may be at present less discomfited. Pope indeed redeemed himself with taste and wit and language, proving not just his intelligence but his spirit as well, borne on high by imagination and force of will. His words may be so smooth as to seem glib or second-hand, but inscribed within Pope’s wonderful verses is the steady conviction that the stakes are high because the stakes are always high even while whiling away the day with pastimes such as the fooling with words called poetry.

Saki's Novels

Page references in parentheses are to The Complete Works of Saki (London: The Bodley Head, 1980). Endnotes are in brackets.


     Though the list of literary works that a common reader might be expected to know diminishes annually, short stories by Saki (H. H. Munro) retain a place in what remains of the generally educated person’s leisure reading. Their spirited wit, effervescent with one-liners, remarkable endings, and, quite often, a bracing edge of gruesome horror, has retained their place in anthologies and created Saki fans since their original publication. His plays (one full-length and two one acts) have received far less attention either on stage or in print [1], and his three short novels have been similarly neglected.
     In the case of his The Westminster Alice (really more a short story than a novel at a bare twenty-five pages), a decay of interest is to be expected. A satire on the parliament of the day based on Lewis Carroll, it is done with a light and expert hand, yet it requires far too many footnotes for a contemporary reader, particularly for one who is unsympathetic with Munro’s retrograde political views.
     When William Came, however, though not killed by its political program, is severely wounded. The book, published the year the Great Britain entered World War I, imagines the country defeated by Germany and under Hohenzollern rule. [2] Though “invasion literature” had been popular for forty years, producing at least four hundred works, Munro did write on the very eve of hostilities. The story is a wake-up call, in particular urging conscription and expenditures for war readiness. [3]
     The writing is sparking and delicious when describing the doings of what is left of London society. One can depend on lines such as “A noisy and very wearisome sort of woman . . .she reminds me of garlic that’s been planted out of place.” (752) Or “love is one of the few things in which the make-believe is superior to the original, it lasts longer, and you get more fun out of it, and it’s easier to replace when you’re done with it.” (695) The speaker of those lines, Ronnie Storre, is later dismissed by Joan Mardle, saying, “Ronnie, oh, I don’t count him, he’s just a boy who looks nice and eats asparagus.” (719) Gorla Mustelford’s exhibition of modern dance would have been worth enduring if only for the sake of the reviews. Mr. Maulevrer Morle: “Rostand . . .has been called le Prince de l’Adjectif Inopiné. Miss Mustelford deserves to be described as the Queen of Unexpected Movement.” (746) and the Standard reports, “It would have been a further kindness, at any rate to the audience, if some of the training which the wolves doubtless do not appreciate at its proper value, had been expended on Miss Mustelford’s efforts at stage dancing.” (753)
     Apparently art is no consolation for the citizens of the defeated nation. Not only is Gora’s dancing ludicrous, but Ronnie’s piano playing meets with approval only from the Germans and the collaborators, while Yeovil responds with hostility, venting his love of country suddenly declaiming an out-of-the-way passage of Cowper. (781)
     After the reliably amusing rewards of the dance spectacle and the ensuing critical reaction, such an ejaculation seems out of place, though this one is odd enough to seem merely curious. But the book has outrightly flat passages. Saki’s wit finds itself uncomfortably cheek-by-jowl with purely didactic statements the sincerity of which proves no compensation for the loss of flippancy and thoughtlessness. The ascription of the defeat to failure to “apprentice” for war (i.e. to have a draft) (706) is a fair specimen of the book’s call-to-arms. Much of Chapter 12 in which the Hungarian offers his opinions, criticizing the British for having grown soft and accepting a mild-mannered Christ no longer supernatural as well as the view that most foreigners were “amiable, good fellows” could have been written by anyone (766-7) and Yeovil’s own reflections at the end make even worse prose.
     The author’s conservative patriotism leads him to the peculiar notion that imperial Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm is a socialist state. A phrase like the “Junkerdom and Socialism of Continental Germany” (751) is virtually inexplicable, though one hears that there are a suspicious number of socialists in Germany. (749) We find the forces of British labor acting disloyal by “hob-nobbing” with their German fellow-workers prior to the war, though in historical fact socialist parties throughout Europe were swift for the most part to abandon solidarity and embrace nationalism and the horrors of on an unjustifiable war. (708)
     The version of the international socialist threat Saki envisions is mysteriously allied with an even more sinister element -- international Jewry. With the German victory Jews have become the “dominant race” or, what is nearly as bad, “ubiquitous.” (711) Yeovil describes his wife’s supper party as “racially-blended” in a scornful attack in which, to prevent anyone’s missing the point, he specifies (hissing, perhaps, as he does) “the name Mentieth-Mendlesohnn.” (752) As commonplace as anti-Semitism may have been, such an attitude seems out of place for an English patriot.
     The savior from this poisonous internationalism compounded of Germans, Jews, and working people is Yeovil’s mother the Dowager Lady Greymarten, grown old in the service of the good, representing the landed gentry as England’s backbone and moral compass. Though too elderly now to do much, she remains stalwart and unbowed, a defender of all that’s good. Specifically what that good may be remains rather vague, but it is surely unsympathetic to Labour or Liberal views. It is this fine stock from which he has sprung that guarantees, perhaps, Yeovil’s principled resistance to the occupation which everyone is euphemistically calling the fait accompli. This absurd faith in the vestiges of the feudal system doubtless arises from the same reaction against modern capitalism felt by Trollope some decades earlier, but it is no whit more credible. Yet Saki’s rhetoric rises and swells as he recalls “successive squires and lords of Torywood had walked to and fro with their friends, watching the thunder-clouds on the political horizon or the shifting shadows on the sundial of political favour, tapping the political barometer for indications of change, working out a party campaign or arranging for the support of some national movement.” (771) Presumably all these past machinations in the service of Britain occurred within parameters considered safe by the ruling class. It is Lady Greymarten who charges her son to fight against the new regime. (775)
     Murrey Yeovil had never doubted where he stood, and others begin to sort themselves out. We get a sentimental set-picture of emigrés raising the Union Jack in France (795), and Tony Luton, who had come up in society, shows the soundness of his character by departing for Canada while the altogether selfish like Cicely and Ronnie stay put and make accommodations. (785) But the hopeful ending is provided by, of all things, the Boy Scouts who fail to appear at a parade before the reviewing stand of the country’s new masters. I could think only of Red Dawn, the jingoistic American film with juvenile heroics a few minutes of which I once viewed in a late night motel room. Saki would have done better to write a few more Clovis stories. There he never went wrong. He might have known that his real-life patriotism and sincerity would mix poorly with his proven brand of literary cynicism.
     The Unbearable Bassington proves that a small tincture of genuine emotion, albeit apolitical, could produce an effective novel when mixed with Saki’s wickedly witty satire of the idle rich. That comic sensibility, of which one recognizes elements in Wilde, Shaw, Firbank, Waugh, Wodehouse, Noel Coward, Cole Porter and others is inherently amoral, but it’s all in fun, and part of the game is to pretend that nothing really serious is ever at stake. Etiquette is all the more necessary because it always masks people’s universal self-interest. Caring for nothing, believing in nothing, they are left with only their manners and their taste. At the novel’s opening one learns that Francesca “if pressed in an unguarded moment to describe her soul, would probably have described her drawing-room." (570) “The impression she made on people was solely one of externals.” (675) And her son Comus is a marvelous figure of feral homoeroticism. “In appearance he exactly fitted his fanciful Pagan name.” He resembles a “goblin” or a “faun”; “one almost expected to see embryo horns fretting the smoothness of his sleek dark hair.” (576) The reader meets him as he sadistically enjoys caning a younger boy in his role as prefect.
     The highly artificial structures of society seem all that separates human society from the brutes, so one practices them as a sort of ritual magic to protect one’s own interests without wastefully knocking horns with others. The humor generated by this elaborate pretense of civility wells up on every page. I need hardly document Saki’s most pronounced characteristic, but a single example, chosen nearly at random, can represent the rest. Comus bums a cigarette from Youghal.

     “Friendship could go no further,” he observed, as he gave one-half [of his last smoke] to the doubtfully appeased Comus and lit the other himself.
     “There are heaps more in the hall.” said Elaine.
     “It was only done for the Saint Martin of Tours effect,” said Youghal; “I hate smoking when I’m rushing through the air.” (608)

     The lack of an invading Teuton seems to have done little to enhance the consolations of art. At the theater the crowd “seemed for the most part to recognize the probability that they were quite as interesting as any play they were likely to see.” (654) This is perhaps true in the case of “Sherard Blaw” “the dramatist who had discovered himself, and who had given so ungrudgingly of his discovery to the world.” (655) Religion fares little better. The Archdeacon, a man “exquisitely worldly,”(655) declares his sympathy for the playwright's (presumably Shavian socialist) message, contrasting himself with “unbelievers,” only to be reproved by Lady Caroline who “blinked her eyes. ‘My dear Archdeacon,’ she said, ‘no one can be a unbeliever nowadays. The Christian Apologists have left one nothing to disbelieve.’” (655)
     Nor has peacetime settled the author’s political discontents. One finds the same nasty anti-Semitism. In Vienna Elaine and Courtenay Youghal are obliged to mix with “stray units of the Semitic tribe that nineteen centuries of European neglect had been unable to mislay.” (670) Even as wit that characterization of Europe’s treatment of the Jews is pointless as well as monstrous and irresponsible. What comes off considerably better is Saki’s satire of the “progressive-minded” rich. [5] The interest of society people in “emancipating the serfs of poverty” is indeed ridiculous. In the catalogue of the bore Thorle’s causes “the furtherance of vague talkative religious movements” is of a piece with “the fostering of racial ententes,” since he is in the end “a skilled window-dresser in the emporium of his own personality.” (664) And even the radical reader can agree with Lady Caroline when commenting on Ada Spelvexit’s fondness for delivering improving lectures to working class women, “how painfully true it is that the poor have us always with them.” (617)
     The book’s last two chapters mark a real departure, more sustained in its descent (or is it an ascent?) into genuine human emotion than anything else in the author’s oeuvre but which flashes forth occasionally in the short stories. Comus’ exile to one of the roughest of colonial assignments – West Africa – which had seemed most comically unfitted for one of his luxury-loving and idle temperament, and hence a dig at Imperialism in which titled peers took little active part and second sons tended to aim for the church or academia. Even among those who sought a living in the colonies, the Caribbean and a miscellany of other posts were generally preferred to British West Africa which had to make do with staffing its outposts with what might be left over. Perhaps I am influenced by my own time in sunny Nigeria, but to me the penultimate chapter was lyrical and affecting. The reader feels the first actual sympathy for the ne’er-do-well, an emotion sealed by his historically plausible early death in a place once called “the white man’s grave.”
     Chapter XVI begins with a magnificent sentence in which the river of time like the author’s rhetoric, rushes impetuously, unstoppably onward through the heat and humidity. The paragraph has covered an entire page before the reader is even quite aware and it ends in a ghastly crescendo of the “horrible, tireless spiteful-sounding squawking of the iron-throated crows.” (677) And just as the reader feels, for the first time, poignant emotion toward Comus, Comus himself, the last man one would have thought liable to sentiment, has an epiphany. “He had loved himself very well and never troubled greatly whether any one else truly loved him, and now he realized what he had made of his life. And at the same time he knew that if his chance were to come again he would throw it away just as surely, just as perversely. Fate played with him with loaded dice, he would lose always.” He is thinking, of course, of his mother. (681)
     Though Comus expires in the bush, at the same time his mother Francesca comes to realize, to her sadness, that “she knew he was the one thing the Fates had willed that she should love.” (683) Her suffering even touches the reprobates about her. “’Heaven help that poor woman,’ said Lady Caroline which was, for her, startlingly like a prayer.” (685) Just as the reader is enveloped in pathos Henry Greech appears, mistaking her distress to be a lament for her prized painting which had once meant a very great deal to her, but which now seems valueless. It has, it seems, been found a forgery. And apart from the pathos and comedy of this final scene, it washes the entire story in the same issue of authenticity. Even in her mourning, Francesca realizes “his naughtiness, his exasperating selfishness, his insurmountable folly and perverseness, his cruelty that spared not even himself.” (683) One wonders whether all the high-spirited fun of this book and of Saki’s wonderful short stories is a sort of whistling in the dark. All the dedicated self-amusements, the witty ridicule, the posturing and refined aesthetic pleasures may take place not in spite of, but because of the old truth restated by Lady Veula whose voice had held such kindness when bidding Comus farewell and who had then sighed, “What a tragedy life is!” (668)



1. Oddly, while his plays went unread, his short stories have been dramatized with some success in Emlyn Williams’ The Playboy of the Week-End World (1977), Saki Shorts(2003) a musical by John Gould and Dominic McChesney, Toby Davies’ Wolves at the Window (2008), and another musical Miracles At Short Notice (2011) by James Lark.

2. The fact, ironic but irrelevant here to pursue, is that the House of Hanover and that of Hohenzollern are closely interrelated.

3. For a popular account of invasion literature, see Tom Reiss, “Imagining the Worst,” The New Yorker, November 28, 2005, p. 106. Munro himself enlisted at the age of forty-three, when he might have been excused, insisted on the rank of a common soldier, returned when wounded against medical advice, and recklessly volunteered for hazardous missions. The story has been often repeated, how he was killed by a German sniper moments after warning a comrade-in-arms, "Put that bloody cigarette out!”

4. It matters little that the British Jews are given a phrase of praise for their loyalty. (710) In the novel it’s those Continental Jews that are so much more disagreeable. One may imagine what the author’s reaction would have been to genuine Ostjuden.

5. I can similarly appreciate the satire of Tom Wolfe in “Radical Chic” without conceding to a single reactionary view. In the last forty years the term “politically correct,” at first a self-mocking term used only among leftists, has come to be used almost exclusively by the right.

The Fetish of the Primitive in Twentieth Century Art

This is a work in progress, the current draft of a lecture I will deliver in the spring or summer at the Seligmann Center’s Robert Fagan Library which includes a substantial share of books describing non-European art. Kurt Seligmann himself not only traveled around the world in 1936 but made a further trip to the American Pacific Northwest in 1938 where he purchased a magnificent totem pole now on display at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris.


     The visitor to my home will see West African carvings from Benin and Urhobo artists, masks from the Tarahumara of the Mexican Sierra Madre Occidental, weavings from the Maghreb, a Cambodian wooden Buddha, set among dozens of other artifacts collected during a lifetime of travel. Doubtless these are simple souvenirs like the decals of Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon people used to place in their car windows, yet to my mind they also provide a potent reminder of the nature of art, displayed as they are among contemporary drawings and paintings, many by my wife or by friends and acquaintances. Thus I am no scholar claiming a fictitious objectivity; rather I am myself a participant in the fetishization I mean to discuss. Far from casting doubt on my conclusion, this involvement seems to me to provide life and blood to my inquiry.
     The articulation of connections between the twentieth century artistic avant-garde and the idea of the primitive is hardly a simple pattern of influence or inspiration. The revaluation of so-called “primitive art” [1] as well as folk art, outsider art, and children’s art by sophisticated European artists, critics, and intellectuals has been a significant influence in poetry and music as well as visual art. In many cases the use of “the primitive” requires little or no specific reference to indigenous art but signifies primarily either a rebellious inversion of received ideas or a more general claim to artistic freedom. In fact, the primitive has been used as a fetish, very much in the historical and anthropological use of the word which originally, like poem, meant simply an artificially constructed object, which is to say, a work of art, but which was used by Portuguese mariners to describe West African objects charged with power by human imagination. Just as the Africans infused their masks and charms with juju, and Polynesians with mana, so, in turn, the European artists gave those same objects a new sort of force, replacing the contempt with which their white ancestors had viewed the “superstition” of what seemed lower races, with respect and even awe. The art was cut free from the world-view of its creators and made to serve instead the purposes of its modern discoverers.
     Though many in the nineteenth century subscribed to an evolutionary view of human development in which the most recent developments were considered the “highest,” a significant faction of artists dissented, finding value in what was generally rejected or ignored. Especially since the Romantic era, the mythic projection of the “primitive” as Other meant that such art was seen by a counter-culture as having greater access to emotion, truth, and the divine than that produced by etiolated Europeans throttled by self-consciousness and decadence. In this polemical reaction against prevailing values, artists conflated all “primitives” into a single category and sometimes also included children, mental patients, peasants, and women as fundamentally similar.
     Such symbolic use of primitive as Other charging it with significance it would not otherwise bear is in fact an ancient and universal topos, far too vast a topic to treat here. It was sophisticated urban Greeks that invented the poetic pastoral, presenting poetry with shepherds as personae, sometimes for comic effect, but often as ideal lovers. Theocritus was an Alexandrian but wrote in the voice of a Sicilian shepherd, and one of the themes of Classical pastoralism is the superiority of rural life to that of the corrupt cities. For Ovid the primal age was Golden without armies, judges, or even labor. [2] It was to this mythic era that Rousseau refers in The Social Contract which opens “Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains.” His Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men maintains, as Engels was to do a century later, that originally men lived in a utopian communist state and that private property is the source of classes and inequality.
     During the Romantic Era the polarity received renewed attention. The Romantics privileged emotion and intuition over rationality, spontaneity over craft, originality over tradition, and the primitive over the civilized. Thus in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth says he has decided to “chuse incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men [that is to say, not in literary or learned language].” He goes on, “Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated.” [3]
     The celebration of the “primitive” was evident as well in the new-found attention and respect oral literature received from Percy in England, Burns in Scotland, Herder, von Arnim, Brentano, and the Grimm brothers in Germany. The nationalist impetus during the nineteenth century led to the recognition and use of folk motifs in music by composers such as Lvov, Chopin, Sibelius, and Dvořák the last of whom declared that "In the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music." [4] Meanwhile on the level of popular culture minstrel shows were the leading form of musical entertainment in nineteenth century America. [5]
     With the growth of colonialism, knowledge about the actual circumstances of other societies became more widespread and the curious could view non-European artifacts, not in art museums but in new institutions whose galleries were entirely devoted to ethnographic displays. Napoleon’s Egyptian campaigns led to the popularity of “oriental” scenes which increased in popularity throughout the century in both France and Britain, particularly as an avenue of presenting “harem” scenes or other female nudes. [6] By the end of the nineteenth century not only had European museum collections of colonial art swollen; in addition, the general public was exposed to such work at expositions such as the 1889 Paris World’s Fair and the 1908 Franco-British show in London which included “indigenous villages.” [7]
     Scholars had, for the first time, sufficient fairly accurate information about oral cultures to generalize in such works as Primitive Culture (1871) by E. B. Tylor, the “father of cultural anthropology,” James Frazer’s Golden Bough (1890), and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (1910). As the title of Lévy-Bruhl’s work reveals, these authors generally took an evolutionary approach, regarding the thought processes of the societies they studied as quite different from those of the moderns studying them. [8]
    A significant number of artists and intellectuals accepted this sort of conventional judgment, but reversed the values, preferring the primitive. For this reason artists in France left the metropolis for Pont-Aven in Brittany, thinking it more backward and thus Edenic. Long before setting out for the South Seas, Gauguin wrote “I love Brittany. I find something savage, primitive here.” [9] He was joined by Émile Bernard, Paul Sérusier, and others, while German artists were forming similar colonies for the same reasons in Worpswede and Neu Dachau. These artists were in general not seeking to imitate folk art styles; they sought instead the inspiration of what seemed a more elemental lifestyle. Thus Gauguin, speaking of his “Vision after the Sermon,” said, ““I believe I have achieved a great rustic superstitious simplicity in these figures.” [10] Gauguin proudly declared his satisfaction with a village where, as he said, “I live like a peasant and am known as a savage.” [11]
     But the fact was that Brittany had already become a favored spot for British and American second homes as well as for the occasional artist, and it soon seemed too civilized for Gauguin. He traveled to Tahiti and then to the Marquesas. Among the artists who sought in their travels a first-hand look at “the primitive” were Matisse, who spent time in Algeria and Morocco, Kokoschka in Tunisia, Pechstein who followed Gauguin to Tahiti, and Nolde who visited the Far East and New Guinea. Meanwhile they and others looked with a new eye during their visits to museum collections such as those at the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro which attracted the attention of Picasso and others. [12] Further, by 1905 Matisse, Vlaminck, and Derain had all purchased African art for their own collections. [13]
     Artists of the Blaue Reiter group protested “the contemptuous gesture with which connoisseurs and artists have to this day banished all artistic forms of primitive cultures to the fields of ethnology or applied art is amazing at the very least” [14] Marc, Burliuk, and others labeled themselves “savages,” (just as slightly earlier artists had been called les fauves) [15] while in Russia Shevchenko called Neoprimitivism “a profoundly national phenomenon.” [16]
     For the Surrealists Freud’s concept of the unconscious placed a sort of primitive realm within every person’s psyche, reachable by dreams, by art, and by chance operations, but which are as well immediately available in the primitive. There they thought they might find “manifestations of uninhibited desire” and techniques to further “the integration of the sacred in their everyday world.” [17] Breton even operated a shop Gradiva which sold non-European art as did Éluard on a smaller scale. Michel Leiris participated in the Mission Dakar-Djibouti that brought thousands of objects from Africa to France. Max Ernst created a myth of his own shamanic rebirth as “a magician” “seeking to find the myth of his time.” [18] Their attitude was reflected in a map of “the world in the time of the Surrealists” in which Europe is insignificant and Oceania both central and immense. [19] Many classic Surrealist techniques such as invention of automatic writing, trance, and the invention of myth and ritual were considered to mirror practices of primitive cultures.
     In spite of this profound and consistent interest in primitive art among generations of moderns, actual stylistic borrowing is rare indeed. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century artists rebelled against the illusionist realism of academic painting by stressing the flat and decorative surfaces they perceived in Japanese woodcuts and Oceanic ornamentation in what Dujardin called Cloisonnism. The schematic planes of some African masks clearly encouraged Cubist portraiture. Yet even these cases cause and effect is very difficult to demonstrate convincingly. According to Robert Goldwater’s pioneering study Primitivism in Modern Art (1938), artists used the primitive precedent to ratify or reinforce what they were already doing. [20] The groundbreaking Negro Art Exhibition at Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery curated by Marius de Zayas was designed to open viewers to modern art rather than to educate them about Africa. In the pamphlet he wrote for the exhibit de Zayas says, “Negro art has reawakened in us a sensibility weakened by education.” Though itself a “product of the ‘Land of Fright,’ created by a mentality full of fear and completely devoid of the faculties of observation and analysis,” African art resembles the most modern in that it is “intensely expressive” rather than “natural.” [21]
     Primitivism in poetry proves an instructive parallel to that in visual art. Occurring later, due doubtless to the lag in the availability of oral texts in comparison with sculpture from the same regions, the valorization of the primitive by writers once begun went hand in hand with that by painters. After a vogue for the archaic in the Romantic era that produced such faux semi-primitives as Macpherson’s Ossian and Chatterton’s Rowley, [22] the interest in foundational national epics led to Lönnrot stitching together the Kalevala and Longfellow’s composition of Hiawatha. In Une Saison en Enfer Rimbaud had declared as a battle-cry, “The pagan blood returns!” [23] shortly before he departed for the African bush. D. H. Lawrence’s infatuation with Mexico and ancient Etruria and his fierce critique of modern society was informed by his familiarity with Tylor and Frazer.
     The Dadaists celebrated the primitive as part of their drive to overturn all received ideas. Weimar Dadaist Hannah Höch showed her own work, including African-style masks, under the title “From an Ethnographic Museum.” Huelsenbeck invented his own “Negro words” (“’Umba, umba,’ which I roared and spouted over and over again to the audience” [24] is a fair example) and Tzara collected African and Oceanic art and wrote what he called Negro Poems. [25] They performed “les chants nègres” with music, sounds, and dancing of their own invention. Tzara said “My other brother is naïve and good, and laughs. He eats in Africa or along the South Sea Islands . . . Art, in the infancy of time, was prayer. Wood or stone were truth.” [26]
     In the early twentieth century translations of Far Eastern poetry by Pound, Waley, and others had an impact on Imagism comparable to that of African sculpture on Cubism. The best-known Asian poetic traditions are, of course, highly sophisticated. After such individual adventures as Artaud’s visit to the Tarahumara peyotists in Mexico and Paul Bowles’ transcription of the stories of illiterate Moroccans, the quest for primitive poetry led to Jerome Rothenburg’s best-selling Technicians of the Sacred in 1968 to be followed by other anthologies, and then his founding of the journal Alcheringa with Dennis Tedlock two years later.
     Though Tedlock is an academic anthropologist, he is also an initiated shaman among Highland Mayan people (as is his wife Barbara) in Guatemala. Alcheringa published translations of oral texts as well as new poetry by poets such as Gary Snyder and Robert Kelly. Its first issue identified itself as “the first magazine of the world’s tribal poetries,” yet disclaimed scholarly goals, noting that “while its sources will be different from other poetry magazines, it will be aiming at the startling & revelatory presentation that has been common to our avant gardes.” In other words, the “primitives” are to read as though they were contemporary experimentalists despite the fact that the social role of all oral poets guarantees that they be highly conventional traditionalists.
     Rothenburg claimed for the primitive a mystical “sense-of-unity” he believes to have been “shattered” by modern minds. “Revolutionary & limit-smashing” poets are to him “forerunners” in the recovery of such a wholesome unified vision. [27] He lists six areas of common ground between the primitives and his own circle, including orality, “intermedia,” and the poet’s role as shaman. This bias leads to the presentation of texts and events first recorded by anthropologists in such a way to make them resemble happenings or performance art. With this refracting lens, a simple conversation in William R. Geddes’ Nine Dayak Nights in which the tribal people explain quite sensibly that they discard food waste from their stilt houses without carrying it to a dump area because their pigs eat it becomes a “Garbage Event” in which “the participants defend the ‘abandoned beauty’ and ‘town-quality’ of their environment” [28] though in fact the quoted terms are those of the European observer and not those of the natives at all. The primitives again provide an excuse for deviation from the norm and criticism of existing values. Other American poets participating in similar shamanistic ambitions include Michael McClure (whose growlings differ little from the pseudo-African cries of the Dadaists) or the feminist myth-making of Diane di Prima in Loba and Anne Waldman in The Iovis Trilogy.
     In the eighteenth century Schiller had regarded “naïve” poetry expressing a “primal unity of vision,” which the civilized, entangled in “artificial relations and situations” could only recall as an ideal. [29] The early twentieth century considered primitive art a model in that it was somehow absolute art, “non-referential,” or “self-contained,” in the words of Carl Einstein “oriented not toward the viewer, but in terms of themselves” [30] though in fact, anthropologists would say that in traditional societies art is far more closely integrated with other realms of people’s lives. According to Wilhelm Worringer all art had been at first abstract, though European art had deviated in its gradually tendency toward mimesis and illusionism. [31] Françoise Gilot recalled Picasso’s saying that what impressed him about African sculpture was that it was made for “a sacred purpose, a magic purpose.” [32] Surely it is no coincidence that the attempt to recover the artist’s vatic role, the search for the divine, for a truth truer than science arose in the wake of the nineteenth century death of god and the rejection of modern capitalist society went hand in hand with the rejection of rationality itself. Nietzsche’s deeply non-logical but creative will passed into the Freudian subconscious. Those who sought truth and beauty in the primitive often were little concerning with actual “primitives”; instead they were expressing a sort of faith in the metaphysical itself, imperiled by science, and asserting the central role of artists in accessing a deeper truth than that of everyday consciousness.
     Looking at the Huichol yarn painting on the wall of my study, or the Haitian wax figures from a Brooklyn botanica behind the glass in a barrister’s bookcase, or, indeed, the works my wife Patricia has brought home from schizophrenic patients and the paintings of my small grandchildren provides me not so much with information about the specific vision of the artists who created these objects as a constant reminder that an accurate concept of art cannot be constructed without the inclusion of such evidence. Art for most people in most times seems in many ways far closer to these “anthropological” artifacts than it is to the work of Raphael or to Marina Abramović, but art is universal because it is at its root an essential need of humanity. We require fetishes to make life livable just as the masked tribal dancer possessed by deity does. Often investigators have sought to recover the “artistic” value of what once was labeled primitive art; it is time to admit the “magical” value of work by contemporary and cosmopolitan minds. The biologists have long known that, since the appearance of our singular species and in every part of the world to which we have spread, our minds are all the same.



1. Of course, the term (as well as others like “savage,” and “barbaric”) is now considered impossibly ethnocentric and outmoded. In the first half of the twentieth century “primitive” was used unselfconsciously, including by Robert Goldwater for his seminal study Primitivism and Modern Art. I employ it here since my focus (like his) is the idea of the primitive; it is for anthropologists to analyze the actual cultures that were once given that label.

2. Metamorphoses, 1, 89 ff.

3. Among other significant pre-Romantics who revalued the primitive is Montaigne whose marvelous essay “On the Cannibals” declares “there is nothing barbarous and savage in this nation, by anything that I can gather, excepting, that every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country.” Schiller’s On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, Diderot’s Supplement au voyage de Bougainville and most particularly Vico’s New Science were particularly influential in the 18th century.

4. Often quoted, the remark first appeared in an interview in the New York Herald Tribune for May 21, 1893.

5. The trend continued as first ragtime and then jazz enjoyed enormous vogues in the early twentieth century. In the past fifty years that connoisseurs have discovered blues and other folk music including that from India and other parts of the world. Most would agree that West African music is, by way of American jazz, blues, and rock and roll, the most important component of popular music throughout the world today. Compare the prominent place of the music of the socially despised and poverty-stricken Roma in Europe.

6. Many commercially produced postcards of the era and indeed well into the twentieth century featured putatively North African or Arab models in partial or complete undress.

7. Such shows had been part of the Jardin d'acclimatation amusement park in the Bois de Boulogne since 1877. They became de rigeur thereafter in virtually all such exhibitions including Colonial Exhibitions in Marseilles (1906 and 1922) and in Paris (1907 and 1931). “Natives” were often caged and appeared nude or semi-nude. Since the 1874 introduction of Sami herdsmen to accompany a reindeer exhibit in Hamburg, indigenous people were increasingly featured in zoos. Such attractions were offered in fifteen European zoos by 1900 as well as in America. The trend lasted until 1936 when the last such exhibit was closed in Turin. Artists such as Kirchner and Heckel visited such shows. See Gill Perry, “Primitivism and the Modern,” in Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction (New Haven: Yale UP, 1993), 63.

8. Lévy-Bruhl’s book was translated into English as How Natives Think (1926). To Tylor all religion was a vestigial survival of primitive modes of thinking.

9. Quoted in Perry 8.

10. Quoted in Perry 18.

11. Quoted in Colin Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art, (London: Thames on Hudson, 1994), 26.

12. Picasso’s visit in 1907 occurred 83 after he had painted Demoiselles d’Avignon. In 1928 Georges-Henri Rivière who had ties to the Surrealists became the director of the museum.

13. Perry 55.

14. August Macke, “Masks,” in The Blaue Reiter Almanac The Documents of 20th-Century Art, edited by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc documentary edition by Klaus Lankheit (NY: Viking Press, 1974), 88.

15. The Blaue Reiter Almanac, 61, 72, and elsewhere.

16. See Aleksandr Shevchenko’s Neo-primitivizm (1913). Shevchenko envisioned an art in which influences of Cézanne, Cubism and Futurism would mix with traditional Russian 'folk art' conventions.

17. Louise Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic (Routledge: London and New York, 2003), 59. It is telling that, while providing a wealth of historical and biographical data, Tythacott’s detailed study offers little in the way of specific borrowing.

18. Rhodes 174.

19. Published in a special issue of Varietés in 1929 along with writing by René Crevel, Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, André Breton, and others. Africa is small. Alaska is huge as is Russia, though perhaps this fact owes more to Communism as to primitivism.

20. Joyce Henri Robinson in a review of Frances S. Connelly’s The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern European Art and Aesthetics 1725-1907 in Studies in the Decorative Arts, Vol. 4, No. 1, fall/winter 1999, p. 130 supports Goldwater’s contention that it is more a matter of an “attitude conducive to art” than specific borrowings.

21. Reprinted in Primitivism and Twentieth-century Art: A Documentary History, edited by Jack D. Flam and Miriam Deutch (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 2003).

22. Compare with Armand Schwerner’s imitation of Sumero-Akkadian texts in his Tablets (1974).

23. He had originally considered titling the book Livre païen or Livre nègre.

24. Richard Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer (Berkeley: University of California, 1991),9. Huelsenbeck says then that Mynheer Ephraim, the landlord of the Cabaret Voltaire, an old sailor, objected that these were not Negro at all and taught Huelsenbeck what he said were authentic African and Oceanic chants.

25. Reprinted in a translation by Piette Joris, Alcheringa II,1 (Boston: 1976), pp. 76-114.

26. Reprinted in Vassiliki Kolotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou’s Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 281.

27. Jerome Rothenberg, Technicians of the Sacred (Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1969), xxii.

28. Rothenberg 108. Cf. W. R. Geddes, Nine Dayak Nights (London: Oxford UP, 1967), 19-20.

29. See Schiller’s On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry.
30. See Carl Einstein, African Sculpture (1915).
31. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy (1908).
32. Francoise Gilot and Carleton Lake, Life with Picasso (New York: Doubleday, 1964), 266.

Marius the Epicurean as a Modern

Page references in parentheses are to Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean (New York: The Modern Library). My copy bears no date but was printed after the time the series carried the Boni & Liveright imprint but before Random House, probably in the late 1920s. Endnotes are in brackets.


     The twenty-first century reader may perhaps be excused for thinking of Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean as an outdated old Victorian volume. The author indeed revels in archaic language to represent his second century characters, a strategy that makes about as much sense as film actors accenting their English to indicate that they are to be understood as speaking a foreign tongue. His elaborate prose style, whatever pains he may have taken over it with whatever success, has little general appeal these days. Some of his sentences, once they have taken off, hover over clause after clause, each with pendants of attached phrases, until the reader who fails to be entranced may begin to wonder when the soaring syntax will ever come in for a landing, though it generally sets down with considerable grace in the end.
     Since fictional representations of late antiquity and the early Christian era were exceedingly popular toward the end of the nineteenth century, they naturally seem outmoded today. The original buyers of Pater’s Marius the Epicurean may have expected something similar to the immensely popular novel by Marie Corelli Barabbas: A Dream of the World’s Tragedy (1893). [1]
     Pater’s book, however, did not conform to a formula likely to produce a best-seller. His connoisseurship is evident in his inclusion of a miniature library of literary genres of the era in which he set his work: the entire Cupid and Psyche episode from The Golden Ass of Apuleius as well as Fronto’s oration, Eusebius’ letter, and a good bit of Lucian's Hermotimus. Though this assemblage might seem weighty with scholarship and bookish tastes, Marius the Epicurean was in fact attacked, not for being dryasdust, but as an enemy of public morals. The dangers some once saw in The Renaissance as an invitation to antinomian hedonism seem now distant indeed, but Yeats’ words can perhaps suggest the reaction of many less sympathetic readers in Pater’s own time and after. Though he says of the novel, “it still seemed to me, as I think it seemed to all of us, the only great prose in modern English,” “yet I began to wonder if it, or the attitude of mind of which it was the noblest expression, had not caused the disaster of my friends. It taught us to walk upon a rope, tightly stretched through serene air, and we were left to keep our feet upon a swaying rope in a storm.” [2] Yeats’ attitude surely expresses his personal regret at the dissolute ways and premature deaths of several associates including friends in the Rhymers’ Club, but newer forms of self-destructive behavior have rendered the aesthetic pose decidedly démodé.
     Even those with no lost bohemian friends once felt that Pater was potentially toxic. Legouis and Cazamian’s masterful and thorough literary history included a warning on Pater that must have made his readers feel as though they were in danger of contracting a dreadful and lethal progressive disease: “This consistent hedonism does not stop short of its ultimate stage; it shakes off all the chains with which society and the hygiene of souls have loaded the skillful search for pleasure, unmindful of the collectivity, it makes for the death of the individual along a path blossoming with roses and strewn with ashes.” [3]
     In spite of his place in what today seems quaint controversy, prose that strikes many as fustian, and absorption in the past, Pater’s recent editors claim him as a modernist of sorts. The prolific critic Harold Bloom deemed Marius the Epicurean “one of the more remarkable fictional experiments of the late nineteenth century," and considered Pater the inspiration of “all the High Modernists.” [4] while to Michael Levey the book "look[s] forward beyond its century to modern works of fiction". [5] To critic Gowan Dawson the book displays “a self-conscious manipulation of various levels of discourse and genre that anticipates the fictional techniques of modernism.” [6] One might in fact with some justice call the book postmodern on the basis of its substitution of bricolage for plotting, its self-referentiality and intertextuality, as well as its themes of decentered truth and ineluctable flux. In fact, Marius the Epicurean in both content and form is distinctly modern.
     Chapter VI titled “Euphuism” can be read as Pater’s apologia for his stylistic and narrative innovations, justifying highly artificial, ingenious, and learned rhetoric, yet mixed with vigorous and colorful demotic expressions, thereby constituting a “late” manner and forming a dramatic contrast to the realism and naturalism popular at the time of the book’s publication. Rather than ideals of spontaneity, sincerity, and directness, he claims for “the literary art,” “the secrets of utterance,” the sole power to convey “the intellectual or spiritual power within one.” (77) He praises Flavian’s taste: “What care for style! What patience of execution! What research for the significant tones of ancient idiom – sonantia verba et antiqua! What stately and regular word-building! – gravis et decora construction!” (80) Though he likens his values to those of the writers of late antiquity and of the Elizabethan period, his style is, for his own age, a significant innovation.
     The modernity of the book in both style and content is evident if unintended from the statements of its most prestigious and hostile twentieth century reader, T. S. Eliot. While Yeats recalled Pater with admiration mixed with the pain of personal loss, Eliot’s far more influential criticism in “Arnold and Pater” aspires to a magisterial tone. To Eliot Pater followed Arnold in chipping away at the grounds for revealed religion (as though Darwin, Freud, Frazer, the Sacred Books of the East series, and the Higher Criticism had had little to do with God’s decline in the late nineteenth century). He objects to Arnold’s concept of Culture as a “study of perfection” as that “arrogates” too much from religion. Insisting on the value of the irrational, Eliot says with that without supernaturalism religion degrades into art and morality as though it were somehow thereby condemned. He tosses barbs even at those who seek to salvage spirituality: Spencer for preferring to call the divine “the Unknowable,” and Arnold for the “eternal-not-ourselves.” He imagines he can turn aside Pater’s comment that traditional religion is “impossible for a man of culture” by simply calling the remark “tedious.” While recognizing the very real phenomenon of what he calls the nineteenth century “dissolution” of thought,” Marius is significant to him chiefly for its inadequacy as religion. Eliot dismisses Pater’s life-work and characterizes his influence as noxious, saying, “The degradation of philosophy and religion, skillfully initiated by Arnold, is competently continued by Pater.”
     This is really the sum of his case, though he adds a few specific observations meant in the way of evidence. In formal terms Marius is “incoherent,” “a series of fresh starts,” a “hodgepodge.” While these departures from conventional narrative may support the book’s modernity to some, to Eliot they are simply signs of its failure. What really alarms Eliot, however, is not Marius the Epicurean but his preexisting discomfiture at finding religion in his day “partially retired and confined.” Paradoxically, for Eliot to lack religious faith is to be, as he calls Pater, “incapable of sustained reasoning.” [7]
     Pater, whether the fact pleases or dismays, was clearly looking forward while Eliot, who had made such technical innovations and so finely expressed twentieth century Angst in his early work, came to assume a defensive and reactionary posture, doing his best to look backwards to an age of universally shared faith. [8] The real modernity of Pater’s vision, though, emerges only upon a closer examination than Eliot cared to make. Though Marius is often said to have considered Epicureanism and Stoicism before becoming Christian in every way short of baptism, [10] this analysis neglects both the novel’s treatment of the Cyrenaic predecessors of Epicureanism and the likelihood that Pater had good reason to magnify his sympathy with Jesus and downplay Aristippus and Epicurus.
     Marius’ original orientation in the book is a sort of unreflecting traditional observance, but he then learns a spiritual goal from Plato, particularly from the Phaedrus, promising a vision like “a bride out of heaven” to the seeker who “fastidiously” selects “form and color” and mediates “much on beautiful visible objects, on objects, more especially, connected with the period of youth.” (26-7) Yet the higher rungs of Plato’s ladder of love strike him as fabulation. For him human nature is “bound so intimately to the sensuous world.” (121)
     The thoughtful young Roman admires the Stoicism of that remarkable emperor Marcus Aurelius, yet finds it unsatisfying. He leaves the imperial household feeling that, for all its temperance and humanity, his strongest impression was of “a sentiment of mediocrity, though of a mediocrity for once really golden.” (189) He condemns the Stoic and the medieval monk alike for despising the body and calling for worshippers to “Abase yourselves!” while contrasting their rejection of life with his wholesome “Cyrenaic eagerness . . . to taste and see and touch.” (165) It is because of his contempt for the world, Marius thinks, that the emperor can tolerate blood sports involving beasts in the amphitheater. (198)
     The philosophical position of Marius and presumably of Pater is best defined in the chapter title “The New Cyrenaicism.” He is a total skeptic for whom the phenomenal world, not to mention any notion of an afterlife, is a “day-dream.” (121) He feels a particular affinity for Lucian, who appears in the book and whose work Is enfolded within Pater’s text and who made the greater part of his humor out of debunking the claims of religious and philosophical systems. While the cruder sort of hedonist may occupy himself with satisfying grosser appetites, the wise man who realizes that he “can make no sincere claim to have apprehended anything beyond the vail of immediate experience” will prefer the pleasures of “the highest moral ideal” which will lead to doing the “Father’s business.” His slogan emphasizes what a Buddhist might call mindfulness: “Be perfect in regard to what is here and now.” (120) The wise man who pursues an “esthetic education” in all the arts will find himself in the end with “a kind of religion – an inward, visionary, mystical piety” consistent with the sort Marius had instinctively displayed from his youth. This “new form of the contemplative life” would rest on “the intrinsic ‘blessedness’ of ‘vision’ – the vision of perfect men and things.” (122) This religion requires no irrational faith, no “unverified hypothesis” and, Pater drily adds, “makes no call upon a future after all somewhat problematic.” (123) In this way one might makes one’s own life a piece of music allowing one participation in the “’perpetual motion’ in things.” Moral and spiritual and aesthetic taste are revealed to be essentially the same (212) as the fine-tuned imagination will inevitably turn to morality’s service. (230)
     Criticism long before Yeats and Eliot yet on a similar moral or religious basis rather than a literary one disturbed Pater and he reacted. Indeed the very composition of the novel may well have been a project to clarify and redeem his value system. Pater says in a footnote to the 1888 edition of The Renaissance, “This brief ‘Conclusion’ was omitted in the second edition of this book, as I conceived it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall. On the whole, I have thought it best to reprint it here, with some slight changes which bring it closer to my original meaning. I have dealt more fully in Marius the Epicurean with the thoughts suggested by it.” Anxious to avoid the accusation of fostering immorality, he distorted his own views to portray Christianity in a more favorable light and to emphasize morality and even chastity to an extent that would never have occurred without the public controversy.
     Vague charges of “immorality” often represented euphemistic accusations of homosexuality. Though Pater tried to be fiercely private, his sexual orientation, no unusual thing in an academic culture that forbade marriage for Fellows until 1882, cannot be doubted. Stung by accusations that The Renaissance encouraged behavior the more shocking for being unspecified, he produced in Marius a singularly eremitical epicurean. It is of prime importance that “The blood, the heart, of Marius were still pure.” (124) Indeed, one critic at least finds that Pater “seems to spiritualize the search for pleasure as far as sacrifice pure and simple.” [10] To him Christianity is “the most beautiful thing in the world.” (303) (How this conviction differs from faith is unclear.) He not only finds the Christian home itself a (presumably sufficient) bride (277) and admires what he calls “the virginal beauty of the mother [!] and her children” (288) but he goes on to declare outright, “Chastity – as he seemed to understand – the chastity of men and women, amid all the conditions, and with all the results, proper to such chastity, is the most beautiful thing in the world and the truest conservation of that creative energy by which men and women were first brought into it.” (288) Even had it not been for such contrary assertions as his decision that he must be a “materialist” and “cling” to “the body and the affections it defined – the flesh” as opposed to incorporeal Platonic ideas, (103) he must surely be making such a conspicuous virtue of chastity to answer past critics and forestall future ones.
     Similarly, Marius’ approach to Christianity which never quite leads to conversion can only be an accommodation to the prejudices of his era. Pater’s father was himself an unbeliever and Pater felt strongly enough during his university days to found the Old Morality Club, often described as an agnostic group. Marius’ Christ-like self-sacrifice for Cornelius belies the insistence on the joy of Christianity in contrast to “the heavy burden of unrelieved melancholy” he sees in Marcus Aurelius’ Stoicism. (103) Aware of the strong tendency for Christianity to view the body as corrupt, the world as hopelessly fallen, and the divine judge as stern indeed, he claims that the era of the Antonines represented a milder Christianity, one in which “gladness” is most welcome to God. (292-3) In this form of the church he finds its primary element to be Love. (338) Thus Cornelius’ “pleasantness” is the result of his faith, and to Marius the very first thing “he must ask of the powers” is to be happy in the world. (313) This agreeable sort of Christianity suits Marius’ nature as a “rich and genial character.” (112) Who could argue with a system that promises to deliver a “more durable cheerfulness” of which Greek pagan “blitheness” is a mere “transitory gleam”? (241-2)
     Nothing could be more modern than Pater’s acceptance of a world without certainty, without prescribed or revealed values except for those inherent in the human subject. Much of what he says is akin to the Existentialist writers of a half century ago or to more recent post-structuralist ones. Pater finds images for this flux and uncertainty, reusing old tags like a skillful bricoleur. The phrase from Lucretius “flammantia moenia mundi,” which in De rerum natura refers to a specific location between earth and heavens [12] is for Pater a beautiful and nearly mystical image of unknowability, the unstable flux of things and the mysterious boundaries between the human realm and the kosmos, “what might really lie behind,” (110). He cites Hadrian’s lines beginning “Animula, vagula” (101) to represent Marius’ speculation upon the death of Flavian, a poem which simply wonders about the soul’s wandering and the mystery of death, suggesting no answer but only a tone of pathos. The most powerful image of Pater’s enduring skepticism is perhaps the epigraph which might be translated "a winter's dream, when nights are longest." [13] Though Lucian speaks of a specific dream he means to discuss for the edification of the young, the notion of a long winter’s sleep is as well a skeptic’s view of human life experience, unsure of what is real and what is not, experiencing the hallucinatory fantasms of consciousness as we huddle in night-clothes against the cold of life’s inevitable suffering. More than a century later this powerful borrowed image seems not so much modern as timeless.



1. The genre included not only Corelli, a best-selling author for decades, but also books like Bulwer Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) and Rienzi, Last of the Roman Tribunes (1835), Kingsley’s Hypatia (1853), Wilkie Collins’ Antonina or The Fall of Rome (1871) Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880), and Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis (1896). On such texts was built Hollywood’s industry of Biblical epics.

2. William Butler Yeats, “More Memories LXXIII,” The Dial, August 1922, p. 148, reprinted in The Trembling of the Veil.

3. See p. 1273 of Emile Legouis and Louis Cazamian’s A History of English Literature (first published by J. M. Dent in one volume in 1930). For a general treatment see Matthew Potolsky, “Fear of Falling: Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean as a Dangerous Influence,” ELH, Volume 65, Number 3, Fall 1998, pp. 701-729.

4. The first comment from Bloom is on page x of the introduction to the 1970 NAL edition; the second on p. 441 of Genius (Warner: New York, 2002).

5. See Michael Levey’s introduction page 8 of the 1985 Penguin edition.

6. Gowan Dawson, “Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean and the Discourse of Sciencein Macmillan’s Magazine," English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Vol. 48, No. 1, 2005.

7. T. S. Eliot, “Arnold and Pater” originally appeared in The Bookman, Sept. 1930, LXXII, 1, and was later published in his Selected Essays. He was not alone in his opinion. According to Denis Donoghue Eliot’s essay “damaged Pater’s reputation beyond hope of repair in the English-speaking world.” Paul Elmer More had earlier made a similar attack in his Shelburne Essays, 8th Series “Walter Pater.” See also “The Reception of Walter Pater in Europe,” Comparative Critical Studies, Volume 5, Issue 2-3, 2008, p. 330 and David Weir’s “Decadence and Aestheticism: Pater’s Marius the Epicurean,” chapter 4 of his Decadence and the Making of Modernism.

8. Eliot was sufficiently frightened by all the alternatives that he notoriously and rather absurdly called himself, in his preface to the volume For Lancelot Andrewes “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.”

9. See Harold Bloom, Genius (New York: Warner Books, 2002), p. 441 “The greatness of Pater is his secularization of the religious epiphany, a displacement in which so many were to be his heirs: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and perhaps all the High Modernists.” For his influence on Joyce see again David Weir’s Decadence and the Making of Modernism.

10. See, for example, Lee Behlman, “Burning, Burial, and the Critique of Stoicism in Pater's Marius the Epicurean,” Nineteenth-Century Prose, Vol. 31, No. 1 , Spring 2004 or Transfigured World: Walter Pater's Aesthetic Historicism by Carolyn Williams.