Song texts follow the essay.
Filmmaker, doper, and record collector Harry Smith chose to conclude his seminal Anthology of American Folk Music with Henry Thomas’ “Fishing Blues” [1] a song of surpassing sweetness and coy flirtatious sexual play. The lyrics have delicacy and grace reminiscent in formal elegance and frothy wit of the Cavalier poets; Thomas’ tone is altogether different from the assertive joyful rudeness of hokum songs or the cathartic and profound longing of many classic blues. [2] The singer wryly acknowledges the universality of desire and engages in playful competition with an interlocutor representing the listener. Love is here a pleasant game, allowing the singer to celebrate human sexuality as a quiet and absorbing pastime comparable to fishing.
Thomas was born in 1874 and is thought by some to represent a largely lost “pre-blues” body of African-American music, but the folk process (unlike some of its enthusiasts) cares little for purity, and critics have seen influences of minstrelsy and parlor poetry in the verses of “Fishing Blues.” To Mack McCormick the song is “pure minstrel show material” derived from “Gumbo Chaff,” [3] though I find virtually no common ground with the earlier song apart from the mention of catching catfish. More certain is Thomas’ debt to James Whitcomb Riley, the author of “Shortnin’ Bread” (itself sometimes taken for a folk verse). (See below.) Yet these influences seem accidental, irrelevant to the primary design of the song. On the other hand, the text has significant and pervasive parallels to other blues.
The analogy of fishing with sexual relationships combines the widespread blues imagery systems associating love with appetite and food and with animals. Fishing of course occupied a prominent place in the rural Southern lifestyle and offers many relevant associations with romance, not merely the uncertainty of outcome and the sensual pleasure of success, but a tempting verbal element: the rhyme pair hole and pole. [4] Apart from the broad analogy expressed in expressions like “there are plenty of fish in the sea” and “I think this one’s a keeper,” fish have often carried obscene associations of various sorts. The mere mention of “big fish little fish : playing in the water” follows a reference to the singer’s kissing another man’s wife in Kokomo Arnold’s 1937 version of “Salty Dog.”
The fishing topos appears in a great many lyrics before and after Thomas, and the convention takes numerous forms: the lover may be male or female, fisher or fish, successful or unsuccessful. The angler is a woman in 1926 Ma Rainey’s 1926 “Don’t Fish in My Sea,” complaining about a wandering lover and asking somewhat illogically “If you don't like my ocean, don't fish in my sea.“ The man is an enthusiastic prey in William Harris’ 1929 version of “Kansas City Blues” which is the earliest use of which I am aware of the couplet, later used by dozens of artists: “I wished I was a catfish in the deep blue sea/ I'd have all these women just fishin' after me.” [5] On the other hand, the man is fishing in Tampa Red’s 1934 “Kingfishing Blues” which boats “I’m a kingfishin’ poppa, I know what kind of bait to choose./That’s why so many women cryin’ those ‘Kingfish Blues’” Man and woman seem both to be fishing in Freddie Spruell’s “ Let’s Go Riding” (1925): “Now if you got the line : I got the pole/ Now tell me dear : don't you know/ We can go out for a good time.”
Just as in Greek Anthology lyrics, troubadour songs, and Elizabethan sonnets, a single motif undergoes endless transformation in this dynamic tradition. A subcategory of the form of the figure in which the fisherman is male and the fish the female object of his hunt is built around the idea of poaching. Bo Chatman, though not the source of the convention, presents a simple metaphor in “Old Devil” (1928) with his complaint, “Some lowdown scoundrel/ been fishing in my pond.” While other singers were taking this notion in other directions, Johnnie Temple elaborated and intensified this particular concept, adding an excruciating final phrase in the “Louise Louise Blues” (1936): “somebody baby is fishing in my pond/ They catching all my perches : grinding up the bone.” Then further, more baroque, play appears in Robert Johnson’s “Dead Shrimp Blues” (1936):
Someone's fishing in my pond
Catching my goggle-eyed perches :
and they barbecuing the bones
Now you taken my shrimp baby.
The first verse of Thomas’ “Fishin Blues” simply establishes the topic as the poem’s persona gathers his gear without suggesting any broader implications. The listener will be aware, however of such usages as Blind Lemon Jefferson’s lament “I won't go to fishing : mama I done broke my pole” in his“Southern Woman Blues” (1929) and Tommy McClennan’s faux naif reminder “Now when you go to fishing : now don't forget the pole.” (“Crosscut Saw Blues” 1941)
The refrain line is repeated throughout with such regularity as to sound like a general principle, aided by the sexual associations, of the universality of desire.
Says you've been a-fishin' all the time.
I'm a-goin' fishin' too.
The sudden introduction of the second person may seem enigmatic in this initial occurrence, but its naturalistic explanation would be simply that the singer, having seen another person fishing is inspired with the desire to do the same. The second person usage allows the singer to engage the listener directly, involving the outside world in the scene and allowing the singer to address his pointed banter through the individual audience member to people in general.
The second verse lets the cat out of the bag with its opening lines:
I bet your life, your lovin' wife.
Can catch more fish than you. [6]
There are now three people fishing, and the speaker is teasing “you” that your “lovin’” wife is likely to be more successful. This might seem still to be simple good-natured competitive joshing among friends, but the succeeding verses emphasize that “any fish bite, you've got good bait.” This presumably indicates why the wife will “catch more fish.” Here is an example of the arch and pointed figurative language called “signifying.’”[7] Should the listener be slow to recognize that the phrase demands particular attention, it is introduced with the phrase “here's a little somethin' I would like to relate” indicating that some significant insight will follow. The “bait” in romantic encounters is most obviously good looks. The speaker is ragging on the unidentified man while slyly complimenting the other’s lady.
The song goes on to imply the joyful consummation of dinner or love-making.
Put on your skillet, don't never mind your lead.
Mama gonna cook 'em with the short'nin' bread.
Here the poet clearly alters James Whitcomb Riley’s line.
Fotch dat dough fum the kitchin-shed—
Rake de coals out hot an' red—
Putt on de oven an' putt on de led,—
Mammy's gwineter cook som short'nin' bread. [8]
To Greil Marcus, always eager to be extravagantly enthusiastic, the singer’s accompaniment of himself on the “quills” (panpipes) “goes back to the end of the Palaeolithic.” To him the song’s line about “any fish bite if you got good bait” is delivered “as if it held all the secrets of the universe.” In the critic’s next line the conditional has diminished, and he declares that “there is an almost absolute liberation in ‘Fishing Blues,’ a liberation that is impossible not to feel and easy to understand.” [9]
One need not impute such vague sublimity to the text to relish the song’s charm. Indeed, its casual amiable tone embodies the old formula ars est celare artem. Many of Thomas’ twenty-three recorded songs exhibit similar formal beauty, wit, and dancing vitality. In “Fishing Blues” it is as though a slender stream of pure unapologetic eros is spun like cotton candy into a warm, reassuring, good-natured affirmation of physicality. It may not strike all listeners as a source of absolute liberation, but it will do as well today as it did in 1928 as a celebration of human nature, temporarily free from real conflict, suffering, and fear, very similar to an afternoon that passes like a pleasant dream on the banks of a small Southern stream, a idyll in the life of one whose daily experience may be fraught with anxiety, which is to say any of us. To create a few moments of such serenity is no small artistic achievement. In fact, I suppose it just may be about all that we ever know, or at least all we need to know, of the cosmic mysteries.
1. The song, called “Fishin Blues” on the record, was originally recorded for Vocalion in Chicago in 1928. Smith’s inclusion of Thomas is the source of the modern popular versions such as those by the Loving Spoonful (1965), Taj Mahal (1969), and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (2002). Groups including Canned Heat and the Grateful Dead have performed other songs from Thomas’ repertoire. A few later recordings have some material in common with Thomas’ song, including “Gone to Fishin” (Leroy Williams, Fiddlin’ Joe Martin and Willie Martin, 1941), “I’m Going Fishing Too” (Alice Moore, 1936) and “Everybody’s Fishing’” (Bumble Bee Slim, 1935) which includes the lines:
I woke up this mornin’ an’ I grabbed my pole
Can’t catch the fish to save my soul.”
Everybody’s fishin’ – yes, Everybody’s fishin’;
Everybody’s fishin’, I’m gon’ fish some too.
Every little fish like this bait I got,
My babe home got her skillet hot.
2. Mississippi John Hurt was capable of bringing a similar warmth even to such potentially raunchy songs as “Candy Man Blues” or “Coffee Blues.”
3. See his admirable liner notes to Henry Thomas Texas Worried Blues: Complete Recorded Works 1927-1929 titled “Henry Thomas: Our Deepest Look at the Roots.”
4. In fact Thomas demonstrates his classic restraint and does not use this rhyme. In my opinion it is hovering in the background even though unspoken.
5. Robert Petway’s more popular “Catfish Blues” (1941) is more ambivalent with its reference to “poor” me.
Well, if I were a catfish, mama
I says, swimmin' deep down in the blue sea
Have these girls now, sweet mama
Settin' out, settin' out hooks for po' me
Tommy McClennan’s “Deep Blue Sea Fishing Blues” (1941) is similar: “Lord I would have all these good-looking women now now now : fishing after me”
6. Note how the singer slyly bets the other’s life and not his own!
7. Cf. Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Don’t Start Me Talking“ which says
I'm gonna break up this signifyin'
'cause somebody gotta go.
8. The verse entered the folk process rapidly and was recorded by E. C. Perrow on page 142 of his Songs and Rhymes from the South (1912) as sung by “Tennessee mountain whites.” Another equally unlikely adaptation from Riley’s “Shortnin’ Bread – Pieced Out” is “thought I hearn a chickin sneeze” used by Woody Guthrie in “Talking Blues” and Hank Snow in “Trouble Trouble Trouble.”
9. In what seems more likely carelessness and haste than conscious paradox, Marcus a few lines later says “this liberation or absolute is not easy to comprehend, but, just for that reason, it is here.” See his essay “The Old, Weird America” in Democracy and the Arts, edited by Arthur M. Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 123.
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.”
Fishing Blues by Henry Thomas
Went up on the hill about twelve o'clock.
Reached right back and got me a pole.
Went to the hardware and got me a hook.
Attached that line right on that hook.
Says you've been a-fishin' all the time.
I'm a-goin' fishin' too.
I bet your life, your lovin'wife.
Can catch more fish than you.
Any fish bite if you've got good bait.
Here's a little somethin' I would like to relate.
Any fish bite, you've got good bait.
I'm a-goin' a-fishin', yes, I'm a-goin' a-fishin',
I'm a-goin' a-fishin' too.
Looked down the river about one o'clock.
Spied this catfish swimmin' around.
I've got so hungry, didn't know what to do.
I'm gonna get me a catfish too.
Yes, you've been fishin' all the time.
I'm a-goin' a-fishin' too.
I bet your life your lovin' wife.
Catch more fish than you.
Any fish bite, got good bait.
Here's a little somethin' I would like to relate.
Any fish bite, you've got good bait.
I'm a-goin' a-fishin', yes, I'm goin' a-fishin',
I'm a-goin' a-fishin' too.
Put on your skillet, don't never mind your lead.
Mama gonna cook 'em with the short'nin' bread.
Says you been fishin' all the time.
I'm a-goin a-fishin' too.
I bet your life, your lovin' wife.
Can catch more fish than you.
Any fish bite, if you've got good bait.
Here's a little somethin' I would like to relate.
Any fish bite, you've got good bait.
I'm a-goin' a-fishin', yes, I'm goin' a-fishin',
I'm a-goin' a-fishin' too.
Fishing Blues by Taj Mahal
I betcha' goin' fishin' all o' the time
Baby goin' fishin' too
Bet you life, your sweet wife
Is gonna catch more fish than you
Many fish bites if you got good bait
Here's a little tip that I would like to relate
With my pole and my line
I'm a goin' fishin', yes I'm goin' fishin'
And my baby goin' fishin' too
I went on down my favorite fishin' hole
Baby got myself a pole an' line
Caught a nine poun' catfish
On the bottom, yes I got him
And I brought him home to my mom about supper time
Singin' many fish bites if you got good bait
Here's a little tip that I would like to relate
Many fish bites if you got good bait
I'm a goin' fishin', yes I'm goin' fishin'
And my baby goin' fishin' too
Baby brother 'bout to run me up outta my mind
Sayin', "Can I go fishin' with you?"
So I took him on down to the favorite fishin' hole
Now what do you think that brother of mine did do?
Caught a seven poun' catfish
On the bottom yes he got him
Took him home to mama he was real gone
With his pole and his line
He was goin' fishin', yes he goin' fishin'
And baby goin' fishin' too
Put him in the pot, baby put him in the pan
Mama cook him till he nice an' brown
Get yourself a batch o' buttermilk, whole cakes mama
An' you put that sucker on the table and eat it on down
Singin' many fish bites if you got good bait
Well here's a little tip that I would like to relate
With my pole and my line
I'm a goin' fishin', yes I'm goin' fishin'
My baby gone fishin' too
I betcha' goin' fishin' all o' the time
Mama goin' fishin' too
Bet you life, your sweet life
I gonna catch more fish than you
Many fish bites if you got good bait
Here's a little tip that I would like to relate
With my pole and my line
I'm a goin' fishin', yes I'm goin' fishin'
And my baby goin' fishin' too
I'm a goin' fishin', yes I'm goin' fishin'
And my baby goin' fishin' too
I'm a goin' fishin', yes I'm goin' fishin'
And my baby goin' fishin' too
Thursday, October 1, 2015
In Memory of my Generation’s People’s Heroes
In every town are war memorials: statues, parks, shrines, and solemn ceremonies recalling those who donned uniforms and obeyed their officers, and indeed the travails of such people (on all sides and in all wars) can be considerable. Their suffering touches many, and their commemoration is accordingly social and official. Politicians and relatives alike glibly say that their sacrifice maintained American freedom, though what there is of American freedom has not been threatened from without since the War of 1812, most certainly not by Kaiser Bill, Ho Chi Minh, or Saddam Hussein.
Those who died for the people’s cause are fewer, and sparks of their memory (such as this) are obscure and idiosyncratic. Yet it is this group that has, by the purest voluntarism in most cases, sought to advance humanity as a whole in work that has laid the foundation of the comparative comfort enjoyed by many today. The grasping hands of the powerful will make no concession voluntarily; even the mildest of reforms come only when forced. Frederick Douglass was correct in his celebrated analysis and deserves quoting yet one more time.
If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. [1]
In other countries and in the USA in days gone by, the killing of political rebels was wholesale and unashamed. The first verse of the old song “The Red Flag” spoke no more than sober reality for all its clothing of sentimental rhetoric.
The People's Flag is deepest red,
It shrouded oft our martyred dead,
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
Their hearts' blood dyed its every fold. [2]
Though every country produced such people’s martyrs, I mean here to commemorate only Americans. I conceive the group broadly otherwise, accepting as those who labored for a brighter future: community and labor organizers, socialists, anarchists, communists of various stripes, supporters of civil rights, feminists, ecologists and gay activists. I include people outrightly assassinated by law enforcement or military as well as some who ended their own lives as a political statement. [3] No scholar of American history, I simply write about the people whom I recall and a few others whose names I only recently learned. This list is unsystematic and certainly incomplete, but I feel that simply naming these few names is justified by simple respect for those who genuinely sacrificed for us all. Perhaps, as well, the young and others unfamiliar with the people mentioned here might learn. I welcome additions.
My own roll call includes only my generation and emphasizes the movements of the sixties, though I am aware of massacres such as those during the Homestead strike in Pennsylvania in 1892 (nine killed), at Lattimer -- another Pennsylvania mine near Hazleton, Pennsylvania -- in 1897 (nineteen dead), at Ludlow, Colorado in 1914 (twenty-six killed), Everett, Washington in 1916 (twelve victims) and the 1921 Rising of Logan County, West Virginia in which between fifty and a hundred workers fell, the Little Steel Strike of 1937 when ten demonstrators were killed by Chicago police and sixteen more fell in Youngstown, Ohio. I am aware that controversy has muddied the narrative for such victims of the judicial system as Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, and Mumia Abu-Jamal. Whatever the details, like those regularly killed on urban streets by police officers, these people did not receive fair trials or just sentences and thus are victims of political persecution whatever their guilt or innocence.
Doubtless the greatest number of political killings occurred in the Southern Civil Rights Movement. Fortunately in this case, scholars have documented the deaths of activists, and they are remembered in the only such monument of which I am aware, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. Archivists have verified the deaths of forty-one people in the Movement from 1954-1968. [4] They include also a list of seventy-four others who had not yet been killed or for whom the historical research had been in process when the memorial was dedicated. Among those honored there are such well-known names as James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, who died in the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi as well as others such as Lamar Smith who had organized voters in his community and was shot on the courthouse lawn in midday in Brookhaven, Mississippi in 1955 and William Lewis Moore, a white postman from Baltimore murdered in Attalla, Alabama during his solitary march against segregation in 1963.
A late spasm of criminal racist violence occurred in 1979 when Klan and Nazi Party members killed five Communist Workers activists during a protest in Greensboro, North Carolina: Sandi Smith, James Waller, Bill Sampson, Cesar Cauce, and Michael Nathan. The dead included three physicians (one of whom served as president of a textile workers local). The police provided no protection; indeed, there were not present on the scene of the demonstration though it had been announced well in advance, and the assailants were acquitted by all white juries in spite of film documenting the murders.
The police regularly reacted with fierce disregard for law during demonstrations in those days and were sufficiently reckless that occasionally someone died. Dean Johnson was killed in Chicago in 1968 at the beginning of the historic demonstrations around the Democratic Convention, and in 1969 James Rector died in Berkeley while demonstrating in behalf of People’s Park. Most everyone is at least aware of the 1970 attack at Kent State in Ohio in which National Guardsmen fired sixty-seven rounds at demonstrators, killing Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, William Schroeder, and Allison Krause. One hears considerably less about the deaths of Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green less than two weeks later at Jackson State in Jackson, Mississippi, or about Samuel Ephesians Hammond Jr., Delano Herman Middleton, and Henry Ezekial Smith who were shot and killed by police in 1968 at South Carolina State in Orangeburg while protesting a segregated bowling alley. The victims in Mississippi and South Carolina, needless to say, were black.
Many people remember television news reports of the dramatic suicide of the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức in Saigon in 1963. The evening news on the American networks showed the monk maintaining his meditation posture as his body burned. A few might recall the self-immolation of Quaker Norman Morrison in 1965 below Secretary of Defense McNamara’s Pentagon office. The fact is that a bit before Morrison’s act, Alice Herz, an eighty-two year Holocaust survivor, had similarly emulated Thích Quảng Đức in Detroit in 1965. A little later that year Roger Allen LaPorte burned himself in protest in New York City as did Florence Beaumont in Los Angeles in 1967, Bruce Mayrock in New York City in 1969 (protesting Biafran War policies), George Winne, Jr. burned himself in San Diego in 1970, as did Gregory Levey in Amherst in 1991 (protesting the Gulf War), Kathy Change in Philadelphia in 1996 (protesting “the present government and economic system”), and Malachi Ritscher in Chicago in 2006 in reaction to the Iraq War. [5]
It is difficult to calculate the precise number of wholly unjustified killings of Black Panthers by law enforcement. Their attorney Charles Garry claimed that police had wantonly murdered thirty Panthers between January of 1968 and December of 1969 alone. A hostile journalist challenged the circumstances of many of these killings, conceding only the deaths of Bobby Hutton, Fred Hampton, and Mark Clark as altogether unjustified. [6] Considering the state’s interest in lying or obscuring the facts in many of these cases and the unquestioned program by the government to foment violence among black activists, it may never be clear what happened in many of these cases.
The case of Hampton and Clark is particularly egregious. In one of the clearest examples of political assassination by the state in American history, the Chicago police with the aid of the FBI and an informer in the Black Panther organization drugged Hampton with secobarbitol and then burst into the Panthers’ apartment with guns firing in 1969, killing the two while they lay in bed and wounding four others. No one was ever prosecuted for the violence though the families of the dead and injured won a civil suit years later due to the overwhelming evidence of criminal behavior on the part of the government.
Throughout history the wealthy have held the power. They have never ceded a penny to others unless they had no choice, while the poor are regularly sent off to the front lines of imperialist wars and other military adventures. Through organization, struggle, strikes, and demonstrations the masses have gained a modicum of comfort in the developed world. If today slavery and child labor have ended, women have the vote, labor unions have won some measure of shorter hours, job safety, and a piece of the economic pie, albeit far smaller than workers deserve, it is only because of those who have championed the people’s causes. If you and I appreciate what we have of leisure, a portion of the fruits of our labor, and a bit of space in which to raise the next protest, it is only right that now and then we devote a moment’s thought to those who have been willing to put their bodies on the line in defense of us all.
1. West India Emancipation speech in Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857.
2. The Irishman Jim Connell’s song has been an anthem of the British Labour Party and the IWW, among other organizations. It was recently sung by those celebrating the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party Leader.
3. I do not include many righteous activists who were themselves wielding deadly force such as the Weather Underground’s Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins, and Ted Gold who died in the Greenwich Village townhouse in 1970 or Americans such as priest James Carney and former Green Beret David Arturo Baez who had joined insurgents and were killed by the Honduran military in 1983. In the case of Black Panthers the record is often obscure though the government’s desire to eliminate the organization is certain. (See note 6 below.)
4. Their list is available at https://www.splcenter.org/what-we-do/civil-rights-memorial/civil-rights-martyrs.
5. The New York Times story on Levey’s death in 1991 mentions two other self-immolations protesting the Gulf War and eight in protest to the Vietnam War but provides no further details.
6. See Edward Jay Epstein “The Black Panthers and the Police: A Pattern of Genocide?” in The New Yorker for February 13, 1971.
Agnostic Credo and Vita
I
I just returned from three hours of rocking, propulsive gospel music by members of the congregation of the House of Refuge in Newburgh. These musicians live in the largely depressed East End of the city with the highest rate of violent crime in New York State. They face racism and poverty; we noticed members of the congregation with track marks and missing teeth, yet the mood was overwhelmingly joyous. Every performance insisted on thanking a benevolent deity for blessings and insisting on the certainty that the worshipper is heaven-bound. Hellfire, even morality itself, scarcely played a part. Every participant was wholly involved, possessed one might even say by the occasion, dancing and calling out and singing in ecstasy.
I was moved. One might think it scarcely plausible that a thorough skeptic like myself could appreciate the choir. Yet I think the House of Refuge embodies something of the essence of the religious impulse. Their elated acceptance is the opposite of a glum submission to the circumstances of life or indeed to the dictates of organized religion. Untroubled with doubt and little concerned with doctrine, they feel connected to a divine they embrace with the highest of rapturous spirits. Though I rejected my family’s less expressive Protestant church at an early age, I was touched and responded with admiration and envy to the singers from the House of Refuge.
Lacking any faith, I am an unlikely formulator of a credo. Does the position of a skeptic, believing nothing, lead nowhere as well? One might, like some ancients, argue that it is arrogant and unseemly to deny the common opinion of humankind and proceed then with a spirituality of the majority. One might act on Pascal’s wager and practice religion to be on the winning side just in case. Like many less sophisticated church-goers, those who take these paths seem to be able to believe what they wish to believe. My own beliefs have developed quite differently, out of a lifelong exploration of religion and in particular of mysticism that seems to me wholly consistent with a materialist world-view. Several observable facts lie at the foundation of the initial conviction that such a search is likely to be rewarding.
First of all, spiritual inquiry might begin with the established fact that all human cultures have religion. This is true around the world and all through history and as far back before as evidence exists. It appears as though belief in the unseen arose contemporaneously with language and art. [1] Such a universal cultural practice cannot be arbitrary but must be radically meaningful in some sense. Much of what passes for religion in both archaic and contemporary times is admittedly self-interested and shallow. People have always performed do ut des sacrifices and conjured what is simply magic, attempting to persuade themselves they have some control over a frightening environment. Yet surely it is absurd to imagine that the Ultimate Reality is in any way concerned with granting a defense against malice, a recovery from illness, a successful hunt, or a fulfilling and exceedingly long-lasting retirement in paradise.
Yet the universality of the spiritual quest implies an object. It is as unthinkable that everyone desires to reach an altogether nonexistent Ultimate as that human should suffer physical hunger in a world without food. We have as well a rich record, likewise common to all humankind, of the experiences of those convinced they have felt the presence of the holy or have even achieved union with god. In individual cases one might write off the saints of various belief systems as neurotic, psychotic, power-hungry, or sexually frustrated, but the persistence and the similarity of mystical experience around the world implies a deeper explanation.
As a lifelong littérateur I am familiar with the capacity for the symbolic forms in images and narratives to express the subtlest and most profound ideas and affects. Indeed, I have always regarded art as the most effective instrument for interrogating the cosmos and expressing the human consciousness. Religion, with its myths and rituals, is in one sense a subcategory of art. Our species’ greatest skill is symbolic manipulation, and religion records thousands of years of attempts to concretize the ineffable in forms understandable to our fellow humans.
The validity of religion as a nexus out of which aesthetic objects are created cannot be doubted, yet its dogmas can. There are some particular doctrinal elements that I find particularly implausible, yet which have appealed to many. The initial governing principle in many statements of religious belief is the necessity of faith, meaning the acceptance of a proposition as true without evidence. To have faith is considered a great virtue, though the difficulty is in deciding which of the countless varieties of “faith” one should adopt. Bobby Henderson’s Pastafarians with their deity of spaghetti and meatballs (including His Noodly Appendage) are consciously outlandish, but logically correct when they say their “deeply held beliefs” have equal truth value to those of any other supernatural religion. [1] Surely it sounds very like flimflam when someone praises the adoption of a whole philosophical and spiritual position on the questions of the very importance without any reason whatever. Suspicions rise higher yet when the proponent insists on the exclusive value of a single brand of belief while condemning all others, yet this is the habit of virtually all institutionalized religions. They advertise while seeking, like corporations, to out-claim their competitors.
The anthropomorphic personal god described as feeling love, anger, mercy, jealousy, even regret is, if assigned such characteristics, no longer an absolute. When I read that Noah burns a sacrifice and “the Lord smelled a sweet savor” (Genesis 8:21), I cannot avoid imagining the Old Gentleman leaning over the edge of a cloud to take a whiff. This is the stuff of myth – it is what we expect in a two thousand five hundred year old tale, but it is thinnest and least rewarding when taken literally.
Religions tended to be intensely local and tribal in antiquity. Priests in ancient India, Greece, and Israel attributed their army’s victories to divine blessing and defeats to holy chastisement. To this day groups like the Amish, the Hindus, and the Jews do not proselytize. In effect theirs is a family god, passed down the generations but generally unavailable to those outside their community, surely a concept implausible in deity.
It is not only inconceivable to me that god should recognize ethnic distinctions; it is likewise impossible that revelation and theophany could manifest at only particular times and places. For instance, Christianity, insisting on the belief in Christ for salvation, writes off all those born in non-Christian parts of the world, many of whom in the past may never have heard Jesus’ name. Christianity invented a way to imagine that the old patriarchs who lived prior to Christ might have been saved, but the whole notion is ill-patched together. Clearly, whatever humans know of Ultimate Reality must be equally accessible at all times and places.
Morality is a preoccupation of most religions, yet ethics relates only to human society. Good and evil are defined by an act’s effect on oneself and others. In the natural world, and even more emphatically on its cosmic scale, morality cannot exist. Religious tradition prescribes two sorts of rules governing its followers’ actions. Some arise from the thoughtful and considerate practice of social life: prohibitions on killing, stealing, and unrestrained sexuality. These require no divine sanction; purely human considerations are quite sufficient. Other rules are purely ritual. Male Sikhs never cut their hair or beard as a show of piety; Buddhist monks shave hair, beard, and eyebrows for the same reason. The point of taboos is to create community. Hindus do not eat beef; Jews and Muslims avoid pork, the old Pythagoreans proscribed beans. Many groups insist on modest dress covering the body; sky-clad Jains go naked. Some uncover the head to show respect; some cover it. Whether arbitrary or morality-based, human behavior simply cannot be meaningful to the absolute.
Yet, in seeking to control people’s actions, religions have often sought to make their devotees believe that good character will be rewarded and evil punished, either through heaven and hell or karmic rebirth. There is a symbolic propriety to this reduction of ethics to self-interest, because after all, the primary reason we agree not to assault our neighbors, apart from the fact that many of us may not be so inclined, is to avoid being assaulted oneself. Yet is seems demeaning and childish to promise pie in the sky to hoodwink someone into cooperating.
I find myself defending the dignity of deity against those who would portray a grandly awesome, quasi-human as god. Very nearly all my objections arise of my unwillingness to put limitations on the godhead. I realize the value of these lesser visions of deity. People have different natures and different routes to spirituality. Some have a sensibility primarily responsive to devotion which might be symbolized by Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa in Rome’s Santa Maria della Vittoria. Devotional worshippers such as those in the Hindu bhakti tradition may require an anthropomorphic god as the object of their meditation. Others may practice good works, recalling the words of the apostle James the Just "Ye see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only" (James 2:24). Such a path is called karma yoga in Hinduism. Theologians may be regarded as pursuing enlightenment through knowledge, the route of jnana yoga, through ideas and reasoning after the manner of Aquinas or Nagarjuna. For me, the divine cannot have attributes, though to some this would amount to emptying the meaning of the grandest of ideas. Yet even in these lesser conceptions patterns are clear and well-established through the world and through history. Partial and flawed though the congruence may be, it is clear that there is considerable common ground on the highest reaches of spiritual theory and practice.
Not all traditions insist as singlemindedly as Jews, Christians, and Muslim on a personal god. The fact is that a number of belief systems ordinarily considered religious are essentially atheist. At least some varieties of Daoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism (as well as certain of the Skeptics, Epicureans, and Stoics of antiquity) construct religions or quasi-religious philosophical systems that do not depend on a supernatural god. [2] Each of these goes beyond mechanical materialism to promise some divine afflatus, some profound joy at the feeling of cosmic connection, a delight in the phantasmagoria of the phenomenal world while recognizing its dependent and ephemeral nature. I might compile a long series of texts, a sort of unbeliever’s, Bible promulgating a featureless deity, a skeptic’s god.
The first sentence of the Dao De Jing insists that no verbal statement can define the Dao.
In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad the universe is identified with Brahman and with the soul, and Brahman is described as "neti-neti" or "neither this, nor that." Adi-Shankara and others in the Advaita school of Hinduism write of the Nirguna Brahman, which specifically means the god without attributes. The Katha Upanishad describes even the gods as skeptics entertaining doubt. [3]
Buddhists both Theraveda and Mahayana, acknowledge the fruitlessness of inquiry into the “fourteen unanswerable questions” including issues of epistemology and the afterlife. One could scarcely conceive a skepticism more radical that that expressed in Nagarjuna’s Catuṣkoṭi or Tetralemma : “Any object or proposition cannot be said to exist. It cannot be said not to exist. It cannot be said to both exist and not exist. It cannot be said to neither exist or not exist." His view was the basis for the Madhyamaka school.
Even in the insistently literal-minded Abrahamic religions, the same worldview breaks through. In Christianity the author of the Divine Names, the so-called pseudo-Dionysius, using ideas already elaborated by Proclus and Plotinus, set forth an entirely apophatic vision of deity. For his translator John Scotus Erigena as well God is “nothing,” but rather “the negation of all things.” [4] Contrary to much of his tradition, Moses Maimonides declares god to be wholly without attributes. [5] I know little of Mu`tazila Islam but I understand it approaches a similar sort of negative theology.
Furthermore, each of the theistic traditions has produced mystics whose transports are described in such a variety of mythic languages that they may well be considered to share their essence while differing in rhetoric. To those inclined to accept the notion of a perennial philosophy [6] the insights of the mystics are relatively free of cultural specifics and lack the exclusivity that informs most orthodox ritual and theology. The fourteenth century English Cloud of Unknowing suggests that the worshipper who feels even the “kindness” and “worth” of god must abandon those thoughts and plunge into the “thick cloud of unknowing.” [7] Yet rather than striking the author as a descent into a frightening abyss this realization generates an in him an extraordinary state. The mystic may feel the divine as heat, light, sweetness, music, or as an exalted form of love, transforming the ordinary self into an effortlessly virtuous serenity, marked as well by the sort of joy that is visible today bubbling up from the belly of the Dalai Lama in public events.
The enlightenment of the great tulku for all his esoteric lore seems to me essentially similar to that of the gospel singers from the House of Refuge. Millennia of evidence support the conviction that these people and countless others from all corners of the globe possess something precious, something worth pursuing, something that opens one’s eyes, not only making life livable, but rendering it a delight. For the Pentecostals and the Yellow Hat line of Tibetan Buddhists it may be a simple matter of acquiescence in an inherited tradition, while for others a dense undergrowth of imagery and story must be decoded or bypassed. A total skeptic, I find myself still rooting around in the mudpool of the world to seek the kernel of enlightenment. Neither swine nor divine we pursue the mystery of divinity (and such subsidiary enigmas as death, love, and epistemology) animated somehow from with an impulse virtually universal in our species. [8] One need take nothing on faith; we have records in every generation of those who realized their own relation to the cosmos and thus their own true nature.
We can hardly know the truth about the universe, astonishing as we find the glimpses given us by astronomers, since we can know nothing that is not mediated by our own sensory apparatus and consciousness. Yet there are many examples of those who turned this limitation into an opening by focusing on altering the subjective mind itself, seeking enlightenment and liberation within rather than information or a helping hand from gods without. While no one can alter the galaxies or create gods by wish-fulfillment, people can to some extent direct their own thoughts, sometimes with dramatically satisfying results. If religion and philosophy are conceived as the search for the best way to live a human life, the mystics, for all their apparent focus on the beyond, seem to have devised a highly effective technology of the mind for living in the mundane.
II
My path to the positions outlined here was hardly unique. Many others in my age cohort, the first year of post-war babies, read the same books and responded to the same social influences. I suspect a brief sketch of some details of my own development might reveal significant likenesses (as well as equally important differences) with the experience of others.
A normal middle-class child growing up in the Midwest of the 1950s, I attended church, Sunday school, and vacation Bible school like all my friends. I was encouraged to pray before going to sleep, and I believe that for a few years I did. All the same, I withdrew from this Methodist upbringing in preadolescence. I had come to dread the interminable hymns, slowly winding through six solemn verses of Charles Wesley’s poetry. During the sermons, which tended toward such topics as “Women of the Bible, Part 7,” I invented a system to pass the time by counting the organ pipes and calculating how many seconds longer I would be contained in the purgatory of a pew. I recall during my church’s confirmation classes asking the unimaginative minister incredulously if he thought a pious and humane Hindu man who practiced kindness to his neighbors and followed the rituals of his culture would be condemned to hellfire. The reverend gentleman’s confident response (“Only through Jesus!”) convinced me that, though he had an honorary Doctor of Divinity (and was fond of the title), he could know very little about the divine. Part of the run-up to church membership was to submit a spiritual diary covering the weeks of the course, but I never wrote a word. Until the day I was received into the church I feared that he might fail to include my name from the roll as a result of this omission.
A few years before I had read Joseph Gaer’s 1929 book How the Great Religions of the World Began, [9] a survey that, for all its chatty anecdotal reductiveness, gave me a good deal of information and more than enough reason to doubt my pastor. I think I was in sixth grade when my parents purchased Life’s book of The World’s Great Religions, and I read and reread and studied the photographs. When my sixth-grade teacher assigned the construction of a shoe box diorama depicting a scene in history, I illustrated the legendary meeting of Confucius and Laozi.
The next year I discovered Evelyn Underhill’s Christian-oriented books on mysticism, a rich source of quotations from the European mystics, as well as the Dover reprints of the Sacred Books of the East series. I had a look at R. B. Blakney’s Mentor Dao De Jing (titled The Way of Life) and felt at once at home and entranced with the very first verse. I began to consider myself a Daoist Buddhist. Though I found no point of contact between the spirituality I was earning about and my Methodist church by middle school I had decided the highest possible ambition was to be an ecstatic mystic. [10]
In high school I pursued these interests and began reading D. T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, and Joseph Campbell and paying special attention to Buddhist references in the Beat writers. I discovered that the Theosophical Society’s American headquarters were next door to my home town in Col. Olcott’s grand old mansion with its fascinating Victorian library filled with Asian philosophers. [11] Exposed to Vedanta, I read Upanishads and then Huxley and Isherwood upon which I could only conclude that I was a Daoist Buddhist Hindu.
At university I followed Huxley and Watts in the use of psychedelics and found the alteration of consciousness with LSD roughly comparable to other methods such as fasting, chanting, meditating, and the practice of austerities. In the middle sixties we took the drug very seriously indeed, carefully designing the trip and discussing its implications for weeks afterwards. I was learning Greek and trying to digest the immense interconnected fabric of ancient myth. I wrote my senior thesis on Christopher Smart’s visionary madhouse poem Jubilate Agno under the direction of an eighteenth century scholar who could only scratch his head over my excitement about this wild work he viewed only as a curiosity. Later in graduate school I made a particular study of medieval mystic poets and translated Mechthild von Magdeburg while spinning theories connecting mystical texts with literary theory.
Toward the end of my undergraduate years I began attending a Friends meeting, in part to bolster my dossier as a conscientious objector in case push came to shove with my draft board, but also because of a real sympathy for a brand of Christianity without a leader, practicing group meditation without insisting on Christian belief. [12] That they had such a magnificent radical social tradition, not only on war, but on race and virtually all others issues only heightened their appeal. I joined in 1968 and attended meeting for about ten years. During unprogrammed meeting for worship people simply sit silently. Should any one feel moved, that person may speak. After years of sitting quietly in meeting, I was not once moved to speak.
I not only made a poor Quaker, I feel itchy and impatient while sitting zazen (though I once could pull myself into an uncomfortable full lotus) and I have miserably failed as a yogi quite a number of times even after persisting in what I considered good faith efforts for months. Yet, I think I have caught sight of the footprints of the Ox of Ultimate Reality; I may even have seen his tail disappearing into the thickets once or twice, [13] and I can hardly give up the pursuit now whether or not I ever progress, indeed, whether or not there is an ox at all.
1. Lord Bertrand Russell made precisely the same point in a more decorous manner in his 1952 essay “Is There a God?” when he declared that, were he to claim there is a teapot orbiting the sun between earth and Mars, he could hardly expect others to believe him simply because they cannot prove that there is not. For another materialist’s evidence on the origin of the supernatural see J. David Lewis-Williams’ excellent The Mind in the Cave.
2. Or agnostic or “transtheist, “a term used by Paul Tillich and Heinrich Zimmer to describe those who may accept the existence of deities, but for whom these superhuman entities are not the Ultimate Reality. Of course the Jain tirthankaras are venerated as people worship gods and a Daoist or Buddhist temple will include no end of deities, flamboyant and restrained.
3. Katha-Upanishad I.3.15.
4. Periphyseon, “nihilum” I, 447c, “negatio omnium” III.686d.
5. Guide for the Perplexed, I: 57.
6. The concept of a philosophia perennis was first proposed by Agostino Steuco drawing on neo-Platonic ideas of Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. The idea was accepted by the neo-Vedantists. See Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy.
7. The Cloud of Unknowing, tr. Clifton Wolters (Penguin), Ch. 6.
8. Freud in The Future of an Illusion claims never to have felt the “oceanic” sensation about which Romain Rolland had written him, but perhaps his superego was suppressing more archaic sensations arising from beneath.
9. Gaer had taught at Berkeley and was involved in New Deal programs such as the Federal Writers Project, the Farm Security Administration and the Treasury Department and then served as publicity director of the Political Action Committee for the CIO.
10. It is only in part self-satire when I recall that at this time I considered careers as a mystic, revolutionary, and poet, before selecting the last as the most practical choice.
11. Olcott was an American military officer and attorney who became interested in spiritualism when writing an article for the New York Sun about séances. He was a founder with Mme. Blavatsky and others of the Theosophical Society and, like her, an early American Buddhist. He is well-known in Sri Lanka for his work there with Buddhist and educational groups.
12. Since the early nineteenth century many Friends have regarded Christ as divine only in the same sense that all humans are if they act on their inner light.
13. See the Ten Ox-Herding pictures which occur in many Chinese and Japanese versions and are popular in translation. The best-known version is that by Kuòān Shīyuǎn from the 12th century.
Tuesday, September 1, 2015
Dolce's Aretino
References in parentheses are to Mark W. Roskill’s Dolce’s Aretino and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento (New York: NYU Press, 1968). The entire text including magisterial apparatus is conveniently available at http://www2.gwu.edu/~art/Temporary_SL/105/Reading105/Roskill.pdf.
Lodovico Dolce was a superlatively productive man of letters in sixteenth century Venice, writing epics, tragedies, comedies, romances, histories, and essays as well as editing, commenting, and translating, but he is today best-known as the author of the Aretino, a dialogue on painting. There the historical figures Pietro Aretino (the poet, pornographer, and playwright) [1] and the humanist and scholar Giovan Francesco Fabrini argue the comparative merits of Florentine and Venetian painting and discuss the very nature of art. The all-but-contemporary evaluations of the artists are lively, but the book’s central value is in the picture it provides of the ordinary aesthetic assumptions of the time.
Translator Roskill explicitly denigrates Dolce’s theoretical powers, saying his theory consists of “a weak compound of Platonism and Aristotelianism,” (10) [2] and that “he certainly had small capacity for originality of thought.” (6) Besides, visual art for him was not even “a vital or recurrent enthusiasm.” (7) Accepting these as accurate judgments, however, makes it only more likely that he will trot out the common assumptions, the received ideas of his time, employing the currently fashionable jargon.
Much of the dialogue is absorbed with discussion of Michelangelo, praised in particular by Fabrini, Raphael, championed by Aretino, and finally of Titian whose work Aretino says allows one to see “gathered together to perfection all the excellent features which have individually been present in many cases.” (185) Both praise and blame are distributed with what often seems subjective enthusiasm of a piece with Dolce’s insistence that “the painter really needs to be born that way, just as much as the poet does.” Paintings must “move the spectator,” (159), but can there be evidence of one’s being moved?
A standard begins to emerge with the declaration that “painting is nothing other than the imitation of reality” (97), but Dolce offers little basis for evaluating realism other than “propriety” and the avoidance of “absurdities” (which he found in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment). (165) In Dolce’s telling Aretino declares that “man’s ability to judge comes, in general, from practical experience of the way things are . . .each man is qualified to pass judgment on what he daily sees.” Every “living human being,” not just those educated in the arts, is qualified to make aesthetic decisions. (101) Common sense, when it is so very common, is of little use. Stuck with such a limited criterion for excellence, Dolce provides stories of trompe l’oeil paintings as though such stunts reflected the finest of art (151) and enlists Dante (of all poets) in support of realism. (159)
Apart from an apparent ideal of photographic realism, one gets little information about what constitutes beauty. It is associated with design (disegno) (115 and elsewhere) or “harmony of proportion.” (101) And proportion assumes an almost divine significance since sensitivity to “ideal” proportions leads one to a “higher” model for which the ancients provide the best models as they “embody complete artistic perfection, and may serve as exemplars for the whole of beauty.” (119) The artist’s ambition soars beyond mere realism then since the aesthetic aim is “the execution of a perfect body, above and beyond the ordinary imitation of nature.” (139)
Lest the modern fear that Dolce’s artist would be wholly absorbed in academic imitation, he also recalls Castiglione’s Courtier when he recommends “sprezzatura” (translated by Roskill as “casualness”). It is apparently possible to have “too much beauty” (157) if it results in an impression of fussiness. All this is likely to sound a great deal like individual taste gussied up with the era’s catch-words.
Dolce’s impressionism is occasionally buttressed by unconvincing socially-based arguments, maintaining, for instance, that since Alexander respected painters, the art must surely be itself noble. (105) This argument is consistent with the conditions of the author’s society including his fulsome dedications and semi-relevant praise of the powerful.
His basic scheme then is founded on an idea of a sort of illuminated realism in which the artist through his good taste selects elements that are especially harmonious but who is bound by representation of reality. His most dramatic omission is a concern with didacticism which had since Augustine captured the critics of the Middle Ages but which seems to mean nothing to Dolce. He declares that painters “surpass the rest of humanity in intellect and spirit, daring as they do to imitate with their art the things which God has created” (113) yet this supremacy is qualified by his assertion that painting is second to literature. (107)
In fact, he thinks his work is relevant to literature, (99) saying “writers are painters,” and that “poetry is painting.” Not stopping there, he proceeds to what sounds like a general semiotic view, saying that “history is painting, and that any kind of a composition by a man of culture is painting.” (101) There is however, a more particular and technical relationship between his dialogue and literature, and that is his use of rhetorical theory. The general tradition of literary theory from antiquity through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance was solidly founded on rhetorical theory though this connection receives little attention today. A general European tradition including writers such as Matthew of Vendome, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and John of Garland lie behind Dolce’s treatment. Dolce analyzes the painter’s creative process into invention, design, and coloring, paralleling rhetoric’s elements of invention, division, and elocution. (117) [3] Since ancient times rhetoricians had counseled the same imitation of models and the sophists in particular had similarly broken free of the need to teach, being similarly satisfied with moving or captivating an audience.
Dolce was fortunate in his translator/editor and Professor Roskill has provided not only a clear and readable translation, but has, in this volume made from his dissertation, added voluminous commentary with such full information on meaning, sources, and influences that the reader feels that the scholarly work is complete. He has made accessible to all a book which conveys in a lively and vivid manner the assumptions and rhetoric of the connoisseurs of art in sixteenth century Italy, including their debt to classical writers and in particular to the rhetorical tradition. Only specialists, perhaps, would care to delve so deeply into the subject, but the fact is that Dolce gives more than anything a sense of what it meant to be civilized for him, and we are all still investigating that question.
1. I might warn the curious that I found Aretino’s obscene dialogues (in the translation by Raymond Rosenthal) to be boring to the point of unreadability. My copy is a popular Ballantine edition which touts such other titles as Girls Who Said Yes.
2. Roskill regards as “Platonist” the assertion that people are naturally drawn to the good and that love of art is evidence for this tendency and as Aristotelean what he calls “the value of practical experience as a basis for sound human judgments.” (11)
3. See Roskill’s commentary pp. 267 ff. for a detailed analysis of these categories as well as authoritative information on Dolce’s immediate sources.
Lodovico Dolce was a superlatively productive man of letters in sixteenth century Venice, writing epics, tragedies, comedies, romances, histories, and essays as well as editing, commenting, and translating, but he is today best-known as the author of the Aretino, a dialogue on painting. There the historical figures Pietro Aretino (the poet, pornographer, and playwright) [1] and the humanist and scholar Giovan Francesco Fabrini argue the comparative merits of Florentine and Venetian painting and discuss the very nature of art. The all-but-contemporary evaluations of the artists are lively, but the book’s central value is in the picture it provides of the ordinary aesthetic assumptions of the time.
Translator Roskill explicitly denigrates Dolce’s theoretical powers, saying his theory consists of “a weak compound of Platonism and Aristotelianism,” (10) [2] and that “he certainly had small capacity for originality of thought.” (6) Besides, visual art for him was not even “a vital or recurrent enthusiasm.” (7) Accepting these as accurate judgments, however, makes it only more likely that he will trot out the common assumptions, the received ideas of his time, employing the currently fashionable jargon.
Much of the dialogue is absorbed with discussion of Michelangelo, praised in particular by Fabrini, Raphael, championed by Aretino, and finally of Titian whose work Aretino says allows one to see “gathered together to perfection all the excellent features which have individually been present in many cases.” (185) Both praise and blame are distributed with what often seems subjective enthusiasm of a piece with Dolce’s insistence that “the painter really needs to be born that way, just as much as the poet does.” Paintings must “move the spectator,” (159), but can there be evidence of one’s being moved?
A standard begins to emerge with the declaration that “painting is nothing other than the imitation of reality” (97), but Dolce offers little basis for evaluating realism other than “propriety” and the avoidance of “absurdities” (which he found in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment). (165) In Dolce’s telling Aretino declares that “man’s ability to judge comes, in general, from practical experience of the way things are . . .each man is qualified to pass judgment on what he daily sees.” Every “living human being,” not just those educated in the arts, is qualified to make aesthetic decisions. (101) Common sense, when it is so very common, is of little use. Stuck with such a limited criterion for excellence, Dolce provides stories of trompe l’oeil paintings as though such stunts reflected the finest of art (151) and enlists Dante (of all poets) in support of realism. (159)
Apart from an apparent ideal of photographic realism, one gets little information about what constitutes beauty. It is associated with design (disegno) (115 and elsewhere) or “harmony of proportion.” (101) And proportion assumes an almost divine significance since sensitivity to “ideal” proportions leads one to a “higher” model for which the ancients provide the best models as they “embody complete artistic perfection, and may serve as exemplars for the whole of beauty.” (119) The artist’s ambition soars beyond mere realism then since the aesthetic aim is “the execution of a perfect body, above and beyond the ordinary imitation of nature.” (139)
Lest the modern fear that Dolce’s artist would be wholly absorbed in academic imitation, he also recalls Castiglione’s Courtier when he recommends “sprezzatura” (translated by Roskill as “casualness”). It is apparently possible to have “too much beauty” (157) if it results in an impression of fussiness. All this is likely to sound a great deal like individual taste gussied up with the era’s catch-words.
Dolce’s impressionism is occasionally buttressed by unconvincing socially-based arguments, maintaining, for instance, that since Alexander respected painters, the art must surely be itself noble. (105) This argument is consistent with the conditions of the author’s society including his fulsome dedications and semi-relevant praise of the powerful.
His basic scheme then is founded on an idea of a sort of illuminated realism in which the artist through his good taste selects elements that are especially harmonious but who is bound by representation of reality. His most dramatic omission is a concern with didacticism which had since Augustine captured the critics of the Middle Ages but which seems to mean nothing to Dolce. He declares that painters “surpass the rest of humanity in intellect and spirit, daring as they do to imitate with their art the things which God has created” (113) yet this supremacy is qualified by his assertion that painting is second to literature. (107)
In fact, he thinks his work is relevant to literature, (99) saying “writers are painters,” and that “poetry is painting.” Not stopping there, he proceeds to what sounds like a general semiotic view, saying that “history is painting, and that any kind of a composition by a man of culture is painting.” (101) There is however, a more particular and technical relationship between his dialogue and literature, and that is his use of rhetorical theory. The general tradition of literary theory from antiquity through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance was solidly founded on rhetorical theory though this connection receives little attention today. A general European tradition including writers such as Matthew of Vendome, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and John of Garland lie behind Dolce’s treatment. Dolce analyzes the painter’s creative process into invention, design, and coloring, paralleling rhetoric’s elements of invention, division, and elocution. (117) [3] Since ancient times rhetoricians had counseled the same imitation of models and the sophists in particular had similarly broken free of the need to teach, being similarly satisfied with moving or captivating an audience.
Dolce was fortunate in his translator/editor and Professor Roskill has provided not only a clear and readable translation, but has, in this volume made from his dissertation, added voluminous commentary with such full information on meaning, sources, and influences that the reader feels that the scholarly work is complete. He has made accessible to all a book which conveys in a lively and vivid manner the assumptions and rhetoric of the connoisseurs of art in sixteenth century Italy, including their debt to classical writers and in particular to the rhetorical tradition. Only specialists, perhaps, would care to delve so deeply into the subject, but the fact is that Dolce gives more than anything a sense of what it meant to be civilized for him, and we are all still investigating that question.
1. I might warn the curious that I found Aretino’s obscene dialogues (in the translation by Raymond Rosenthal) to be boring to the point of unreadability. My copy is a popular Ballantine edition which touts such other titles as Girls Who Said Yes.
2. Roskill regards as “Platonist” the assertion that people are naturally drawn to the good and that love of art is evidence for this tendency and as Aristotelean what he calls “the value of practical experience as a basis for sound human judgments.” (11)
3. See Roskill’s commentary pp. 267 ff. for a detailed analysis of these categories as well as authoritative information on Dolce’s immediate sources.
On Pronunciation and Pedantry
As not everyone is familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet I have here used phonetic spellings which I hope will be immediately clear to American speakers.
The entire world has decided it must learn English which is certainly convenient for us Americans with our peculiar national antipathy to the study of foreign languages. Yet it still happens, especially to those who have managed to catch some fragments of a liberal education in this era when all school (including higher education which ought properly to concern itself with pure research) is made into vocational school, that one desires to use a word or phrase or name in another language. In the pronunciation of foreign names there is no consistent rule of usage, and when no standard of propriety exists, the choice become a matter of style, though, of course, style taken far enough impinges on propriety.
I once read a piece in public that mentioned the church of St. James in Prague, naming it Svatý Jakub in my best imitation of Czech tones. A listener questioned my usage – I don’t really speak Czech -- and my only defense was that my pedantic side preferred to approximate local pronunciation. That occurred at a reading that drew a literary crowd, but even an American in the midst of academic Francophiles would be unlikely while speaking English, to pronounce France’s capital any way other than “Pear-iss.” Yet France’s third largest city, which a Londoner would cheerfully call “lie-uns” (adding an “s” as well as anglicizing) is likely in America to undergo a variety of local impressions of a French pronunciation of Lyon. A little-known location would receive everyone’s best try at its local name. Though even Americans competent in French generally pronounce Montreal without nasalized o, acute accent for the “e’ or a French “r,” but, should the same person speak of the town of Saint-Jacques, it would surely come out “Zhahk” and not “Djay-kweez” as Shakespeare had it in As You Like It. (In the play the character’s last name is deBoys, pronounced as W.E.B. duBois did “Doo-boyz,” not like Blanche “Doo-bwah” in Streetcar Named Desire.) Anyone who calls Hungary’s capital “Booda-pesht” or the Peruvian ruins “Mah-choo Peek-choo” has probably been instructed about the sound during a visit. And, of course, more or less subtle bragging about international travel is an established practice among the educated classes as is the put-upon reaction of those who have not been there and find listening to such correctness as bad as Grandpa’s ordeals during the fifties in watching his neighbors’ slides of the Grand Canyon.
Perhaps the lingering memory of empire allows people in the U.K. to be more confident about pronouncing words in an English fashion. They do, after all, regularly discuss Cervantes’ novel “Dahn Kwicks-ut” and the reader of Byron will find that the meter doesn’t work if he tries to say the name of the hero of “Don Jew-un” as “Whahn.” The editors of the Oxford dictionaries unashamedly declare, “the anglicized pronunciation represents the normal pronunciation used by native speakers of standard English (who may not be speakers of other languages) when using the word in an English context.” France can be equally shameless in its Frenchifying. In the Louvre when I first visited, I saw works by Titien, Michelange, and the like, though a current check of their website suggests that they now use more names that more accurately reflect the artists’ original languages.
No one, I think, today would speak of “Green-witch” Village, but rather would pronounce the name in approximately the same way they would in referring to the London borough, and Worcester everywhere is, I think, “Wuh-ster,” though not everyone is hip to the Cheshire village Cholmondeley (“Chum-lee”) or the personal name Saint-John (“Sin-djin”). Further, many adopted names are treated differently from their originals. An educated person will name Jefferson’s plantation “Monti-chello” whereas the town in New York is “Monti-sello.” Odd patterns emerge. In Illinois there are towns named Peru, Milan, New Madrid, and Pekin. In every case, the residents stress the first syllable of the name while the second receives the accent when speaking of South America, Italy, Spain, or China. For such cases the standard of propriety is set by local usage.
A similar rule applies to personal names the sound of which is always subject to the wishes of their bearers. My mother’s maiden name was Kopecky and I never heard anyone in the family pronounce it other than with the Czech “ts” for “c,” yet surely most Americans would make the “ck” a simple “k” sound. Meeting a Polish-American, one cannot know whether the person’s preference is for “w” as “v” or as an American “w.” And reference to language of origin is far from an infallible guide. I used “High-meh” for a Hispanic student who corrected me, saying his name was “Djay-mee” and I have known a Thérèse (complete with accents when written) who said “Teh-rees.”
Words that have become thoroughly naturalized in English often acquire a new accepted sound. Still, for my part, I would rather hear “root” than “rowt” 66 because the word is French in origin, and likewise “neesh” and not “nitch.” Most people pronounce the Italian segue as “seg-way” -- but the striver who thinks it French and says “seeg” sounds not more sophisticated but less.
Indeed, over-correction is a greater hazard for certain overreachers. One hears talk of people having a “tett-ah-tay,” though of course the final “t” deserves to sound the same as the initial one. I once worked for a Spanish man named Javier who always responded though perhaps with a faint air of contempt hovering about his nose, to a colleague who regularly addressed him as “Havy-ay,” which must have sounded properly Continental, though the fact is that in Spanish all letters (with the exception of initial “h”) are pronounced.
The issue is doubly present for a classicist since written as well as spoken forms vary. The pronunciation of Greek and Latin changed, of course, over time, both as languages spoken and studied, even apart from popular pronunciations. If one called Julius Caesar “Kahee-sar” it would at least lead to an understanding of the origin of Kaiser and Czar, but no one calls him that. “Kick-ero” the orator? It is not likely to gain favor. And, as for the spelling, in recent years it has become far commoner to use Greek transliteration, for instance Bakkhos instead of Bacchus, Aischylos for Aeschylus, etc., but does anyone really want to say Platon and Omeros in English? The extremely punctilious might choose to begin Sappho’s name in the Aeolic manner, not with a sigma but with a psi, yet to call her Psappho introduces a distracting defamiliarization.
For those interested in Chinese culture the multiple questions of spelling as well as pronunciation are similar. Many first became accustomed the widely used Wade-Giles transliterations which date from the Victorian period and remain widely known. We read Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tzu, and the poetry of Li Po and Tu Fu. The introduction of the Yale system during World War II influenced language learners but not the general reading public. Now, however, hanyu pinyin is the standard, and those names have become Lǎozǐ, Zhuāngzǐ, Dàodéjīng, Li Bo (or Li Bai in a more recondite literary usage) and Dù Fǔ. Confucius derives from neither of these Romanization systems but rather from a Latinization like Erasmus, Columbus and Linnaeus.
Foreign phrases can also pose questions. The beautiful former home of Frederick Franck is called Pacem in Terris which I say with a hard “c” in spite of the fact that the phrase is derived from church Latin and everyone else says “Pah-tchem.” Greek scholars would prefer to hear “the many” rather than the solecism “the hoi polloi.” It is a statement of a sort even to use the foreign words. We always say laissez-faire (never “let-work”) and double entendre (probably maintaining the French pronunciation apart from the final “r”), while “free verse” is far more common than its original vers libre and received ideas has beat out idées reçues.
With no accepted standard of usage, each speaker or writer defines an individual profile in the use of foreign words and phrases. For everyone there is a tipping point where the appeal of exotic sounds and erudition starts to seem bumptious and annoying; from the other direction, the borderline would be when the natural and unpretentious begins to seem ignorant. My own preference, while no more systematic than anyone’s, leans low in the direction of original spelling and pronunciation, but then I also like original sources and full documentation. A carelessness about a name might cast doubt on all else in the passage, while I fancy something like a genuine German “r” will cast an air of authenticity over fiction and fact alike. Still, my scruples in these matters may ill accord with my casual, colloquial, or subjective comments, but it is through such inconsistencies that personality takes shape.
And today virtually everybody will be put off, as no one would have been a century ago, by an author presenting an untranslated Latin tag in a rhetorical move with only the most highly speculative returns. In spite of that I might remind the reader what the great Venutian wrote:
Dulce est desipere in loco.
Godwin's Theatre of Calamity
References in parentheses are cited by part and chapter.
Godwin may have conceived of Things as They Are or Caleb Williams as a Tendenzroman, and the theme is certainly asserted with little room for doubt. The book’s unfortunate protagonist, a clever and idealistic youth of serious moral character, suffers all but constantly from the irrational persecution of a member of the ruling class, whose imperious power is unjust always and susceptible to aggravated criminal misuse. The legal system is condemned in the strongest terms for its injustice and inhumanity. The novel’s revolutionary implications did not escape the bookseller or the authorities and Godwin was first dissuaded from his original ending and then convinced to remove a preface that indicated the book meant to illustrate “a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism, by which man becomes the destroyer of man.” Godwin arranged for its publication on the very day Prime Minister William Pitt suspended habeas corpus and began rounding up the radicals of the London Corresponding Society. [1] Stage adaptations were banned, though Sheridan presented one under a different title.
Countless passages throughout the book remind the reader that morality and justice have little to do with the operations of government, that the wealthy and privileged are empowered to do as they will while the poor make do as they must. Godwin’s position as a philosophical anarchist is evident from his non-fiction works, [2] and he presents with passion and conviction a shocking story of “the gore-dripping robes of authority.” ( III, 1) The book’s title (anticipating Trollope’s The Way We Live Now with which Godwin’s book might be profitably contrasted) insists on its intention to break through what Rexroth used to call the Social Lie and reveal the simple fact of the absolute amorality of government by the selfish.
Yet it is difficult to view the novel in only that way. The theme of social protest is surely distorted by the depiction of the oppressor Falkland who is anything but a typical aristocrat just as Caleb is not a representative worker. Falkland in fact seems an extraordinarily unselfish and moral person whose sense of noblesse oblige is part of his polished and sophisticated manners. His degradation arises not from simple greed (as does the corruption of the ruling class under any system) but rather from his obsessive idealistic concern about honor and reputation. The reader never hears of how he makes his money. Though he might be viewed as an etiolated aristocrat whose decadence presages the end of his class’s governance, the central protest is not economic but legal. The wealthy can manipulate the law.
But in the conclusion as it stood in the first edition, Williams is implicated in similarly using legal process for private ends. Though he had long made it a point of pride not to reveal his one-time employer’s blood-guilt, he ultimately does, not to secure a disinterested retribution, but in revenge. He relates the tale of his personal “theatre of calamity” (I, 1) retrospectively so the pathetic (if not quite tragic) conclusion was never in doubt and Caleb ends by thinking himself more a sinner than his persecutor. Though at the outset he had said he wrote in hopes that “posterity” might “render me a justice, which my contemporaries refuse,” (I, 1) but he ends having given up on himself – he says “I have no character that I wish to vindicate” -- and hoping only that his antagonist “may be fully understood.” (Postscript) Even Falkland lauds Williams’ “greatness and elevation of . . .mind.” (Postscript) The reductive social reading’s bipolar distribution of good and evil is thoroughly confounded, and the alternate ending, in which the narrator’s persecutions continue, pushing him into madness, would have emphasized Williams’ own pathology.
As the first-person narrative voice tells the tale in retrospect, the reader can never expect a Dickensian story of the eventual rise of a meritorious but poor lad. The curiosity that marks his advancement in education and skills also will lead him to investigate the forbidden chest, extract his employer’s confession, and lock them in mutually destructive struggle. The very real economic conflicts of the early Industrial Age are quite absent; instead, the story suggests the role of chance (called “fatal coincidence” in the Postscript) and a powerful psychological determinism.
In the final pages of the book Caleb excoriates himself and excuses Falkland, thinking his employer has acted in the only way that he could given his life experience which led him early to dedicate himself to “the poison of chivalry.” The reader is invited to consider Caleb, too, as a victim of circumstance, operating blindly in a deterministic world where a person can only suffer and cannot control destiny.
The book, as Godwin said in his 1832 preface to the Bentley’s edition, “has always been regarded by the public with an unusual degree of favour.” He conceived it, he says as a volume of “fictitious adventures, and wrote the last part first, elaborating Caleb’s repeated attempts to dodge his tormentor, never for long successful, a continuous “flight and pursuit.” And indeed the book makes a decent episodic suspense story as Williams finds the agents of his nemesis oppressing him at every turn. Taken realistically the narrative involves a wide variety of circumstances from the robber’s den with its unlikely leader to his short-lived idyll in Wales. The conclusion in which Falkland and Williams reconcile at the end of the novel betrays the laboriously constructed horror of the Gothic machinery. The original ending, too strong for the publisher’s opinion of the public, had had Williams descend into madness while imprisoned under the supervision of the tireless Gines (or “Jones”).
Godwin may have conceived of Things as They Are or Caleb Williams as a Tendenzroman, and the theme is certainly asserted with little room for doubt. The book’s unfortunate protagonist, a clever and idealistic youth of serious moral character, suffers all but constantly from the irrational persecution of a member of the ruling class, whose imperious power is unjust always and susceptible to aggravated criminal misuse. The legal system is condemned in the strongest terms for its injustice and inhumanity. The novel’s revolutionary implications did not escape the bookseller or the authorities and Godwin was first dissuaded from his original ending and then convinced to remove a preface that indicated the book meant to illustrate “a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism, by which man becomes the destroyer of man.” Godwin arranged for its publication on the very day Prime Minister William Pitt suspended habeas corpus and began rounding up the radicals of the London Corresponding Society. [1] Stage adaptations were banned, though Sheridan presented one under a different title.
Countless passages throughout the book remind the reader that morality and justice have little to do with the operations of government, that the wealthy and privileged are empowered to do as they will while the poor make do as they must. Godwin’s position as a philosophical anarchist is evident from his non-fiction works, [2] and he presents with passion and conviction a shocking story of “the gore-dripping robes of authority.” ( III, 1) The book’s title (anticipating Trollope’s The Way We Live Now with which Godwin’s book might be profitably contrasted) insists on its intention to break through what Rexroth used to call the Social Lie and reveal the simple fact of the absolute amorality of government by the selfish.
Yet it is difficult to view the novel in only that way. The theme of social protest is surely distorted by the depiction of the oppressor Falkland who is anything but a typical aristocrat just as Caleb is not a representative worker. Falkland in fact seems an extraordinarily unselfish and moral person whose sense of noblesse oblige is part of his polished and sophisticated manners. His degradation arises not from simple greed (as does the corruption of the ruling class under any system) but rather from his obsessive idealistic concern about honor and reputation. The reader never hears of how he makes his money. Though he might be viewed as an etiolated aristocrat whose decadence presages the end of his class’s governance, the central protest is not economic but legal. The wealthy can manipulate the law.
But in the conclusion as it stood in the first edition, Williams is implicated in similarly using legal process for private ends. Though he had long made it a point of pride not to reveal his one-time employer’s blood-guilt, he ultimately does, not to secure a disinterested retribution, but in revenge. He relates the tale of his personal “theatre of calamity” (I, 1) retrospectively so the pathetic (if not quite tragic) conclusion was never in doubt and Caleb ends by thinking himself more a sinner than his persecutor. Though at the outset he had said he wrote in hopes that “posterity” might “render me a justice, which my contemporaries refuse,” (I, 1) but he ends having given up on himself – he says “I have no character that I wish to vindicate” -- and hoping only that his antagonist “may be fully understood.” (Postscript) Even Falkland lauds Williams’ “greatness and elevation of . . .mind.” (Postscript) The reductive social reading’s bipolar distribution of good and evil is thoroughly confounded, and the alternate ending, in which the narrator’s persecutions continue, pushing him into madness, would have emphasized Williams’ own pathology.
As the first-person narrative voice tells the tale in retrospect, the reader can never expect a Dickensian story of the eventual rise of a meritorious but poor lad. The curiosity that marks his advancement in education and skills also will lead him to investigate the forbidden chest, extract his employer’s confession, and lock them in mutually destructive struggle. The very real economic conflicts of the early Industrial Age are quite absent; instead, the story suggests the role of chance (called “fatal coincidence” in the Postscript) and a powerful psychological determinism.
In the final pages of the book Caleb excoriates himself and excuses Falkland, thinking his employer has acted in the only way that he could given his life experience which led him early to dedicate himself to “the poison of chivalry.” The reader is invited to consider Caleb, too, as a victim of circumstance, operating blindly in a deterministic world where a person can only suffer and cannot control destiny.
The book, as Godwin said in his 1832 preface to the Bentley’s edition, “has always been regarded by the public with an unusual degree of favour.” He conceived it, he says as a volume of “fictitious adventures, and wrote the last part first, elaborating Caleb’s repeated attempts to dodge his tormentor, never for long successful, a continuous “flight and pursuit.” And indeed the book makes a decent episodic suspense story as Williams finds the agents of his nemesis oppressing him at every turn. Taken realistically the narrative involves a wide variety of circumstances from the robber’s den with its unlikely leader to his short-lived idyll in Wales. The conclusion in which Falkland and Williams reconcile at the end of the novel betrays the laboriously constructed horror of the Gothic machinery. The original ending, too strong for the publisher’s opinion of the public, had had Williams descend into madness while imprisoned under the supervision of the tireless Gines (or “Jones”).
The book may have sold as a straightforward adventure story, but the hero’s persecution is so extreme that the plot sounds very like a projection of the imagination of a paranoid schizophrenic, and his suffering is primarily psychological. If Williams is paranoid, surely Falkland is grandiose. Both Falkland and Williams are obsessively enwrapped in each other, their relationship deeply neurotic, ambivalent, and in the end internecine. Their connection has been taken by some as homoerotic and much of what happens might be viewed as a dramatic representation of the trials of love. [3]
The narrator’s mental suffering reaches such heights that it becomes a truly Existential theme. Like Beckford’s Vathek and Byronic heroes soon to come, Williams takes on the world and goes crashing down in glory if not in comfort. A large share of Williams’ pain arises from his isolation, as Falkland denies him the chance to have friends or even more casual human relationship. His isolation and his Job-like suffering lead him to cry out “Here I am, an outcast, destined to perish with hunger and cold. All men desert me. All men hate me. I am driven with mortal threats from the sources of comfort and existence. Accursed world . . .Why do I consent to live any longer?” (III, 7)
Today Godwin’s philosophic anarchism plays little role in contemporary political discourse, and his name most commonly appears in accounts of Shelley and Byron detailing their involvement with his daughter Mary and his step-daughter Clair Clairmont. The reader of Things as They Are or Caleb Williams will find something unrelated to these issues, a readable, compelling story that reflects how everyone has felt, at one time or another, about a boss, a loved one, or life in this world.
1. The date was May 12, 1794. It is a pleasure to report that English juries freed all the defendants.
2. See most prominently his Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness which was published the same year as Things as They Are.
3. See, for instance, Gold, Alex, Jr. “It's Only Love: The Politics of Passion in Godwin's Caleb Williams.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 19 (1977): 135–160.
The narrator’s mental suffering reaches such heights that it becomes a truly Existential theme. Like Beckford’s Vathek and Byronic heroes soon to come, Williams takes on the world and goes crashing down in glory if not in comfort. A large share of Williams’ pain arises from his isolation, as Falkland denies him the chance to have friends or even more casual human relationship. His isolation and his Job-like suffering lead him to cry out “Here I am, an outcast, destined to perish with hunger and cold. All men desert me. All men hate me. I am driven with mortal threats from the sources of comfort and existence. Accursed world . . .Why do I consent to live any longer?” (III, 7)
Today Godwin’s philosophic anarchism plays little role in contemporary political discourse, and his name most commonly appears in accounts of Shelley and Byron detailing their involvement with his daughter Mary and his step-daughter Clair Clairmont. The reader of Things as They Are or Caleb Williams will find something unrelated to these issues, a readable, compelling story that reflects how everyone has felt, at one time or another, about a boss, a loved one, or life in this world.
1. The date was May 12, 1794. It is a pleasure to report that English juries freed all the defendants.
2. See most prominently his Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness which was published the same year as Things as They Are.
3. See, for instance, Gold, Alex, Jr. “It's Only Love: The Politics of Passion in Godwin's Caleb Williams.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 19 (1977): 135–160.
Saturday, August 1, 2015
The Use of Nostalgia in George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life
Chapter numbers appear in parentheses following quotations.
The three stories in George Eliot’s first published work of fiction Scenes of Clerical Life are all set in the past, though the focus is primarily psychological (and after that moral) having little engagement with historical events. Her stories did indeed owe a sufficient number of details to her own memories of childhood in Chilvers Coton that the locals could discern who had written the book and her publisher asked her to apologize to John Gwyther, the model for the pock-marked curate prone to solecisms. By removing her narratives to a previous generation, Eliot has taken a single step in the direction of the “once upon a time” of legend. Yet we think of nostalgia as differing from immediate lived experience by the editing of the unpleasant and an unrealistic generalized tone of satisfaction, and, indeed, many find in the past a lost perfection. In these tales, however, displacement in time implies a reduction in humanity, in living conditions, and, most of all, in insight, yet, by this very diminution, she generates a warm affectionate glow about her scenes, a sort of sentimentality that affects contemporary readers no less than her own generation.
Eliot has been paired with Flaubert as the source, through Henry James and Marcel Proust, of the modern novel. [1] Conscious of her role as an innovator, Eliot had earlier written a devastating attack on “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” [2] which criticizes the lack of reality in popular novels, the idealization of the heroine, the overblown unnatural language, and the facile moral tags. Though surely less guilty of the second of these weaknesses than Georgiana Chatterton whose “Ossianic” rhetorical flight (attributed to an four and a half year old) she quotes, [3] Eliot is more susceptible to the first and last.
At the outset of “The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton” the significance of the displacement to the past (which is true of all three narratives) is emphasized. With a swelling rhetoric of romantic conservatism, the narrator enumerates the changes a generation has brought to the fictional Milby. Change, of course, is inevitable and universal, but Eliot’s narrator assumes an attitude of “Toryism by the sly,” (I) meaning an imaginative preference for the past, for “dear old quaintnesses.” (I) Part of this indulgent regard for the attractively inferior aspects of the past is a fondness for the slightly absurd curate, the Rev. Barton. With six children he is hard put to put food on the table and surely in need of an income, though he seems to have little true vocation, while his bad complexion and errors in usage compound his difficulty in making a proper impression on his parishioners. What he makes is a pittance since he is a mere curate, serving as a sub-contractor to the actual vicar, a man of far more substantial assets. Apart from being associated with low church practices, he is "sadly unsuited to the practice of his profession," and, worse, he tends to be thoughtless of his hard-working and loyal wife Milly. His friendship with a dubious countess which seems to the reader to arise from a mild sort of snobbery and pride excites suspicion of graver sins among the town gossips.
These shortcomings in the good cleric and the hierarchy for which he labors, though, are cast upon a benighted past, toward which the author adopts a condescending attitude very similar to that of contemporary American who think that in the 1950s everyone was corny and tasteless but that “things were much simpler then.” Finally redeemed in the eyes of the community through his suffering at the loss of his wife, the Rev. Barton never presents a spectacle other than pathetic, the reader’s sentiments being engaged more sluggishly than the residents of Milby or perhaps more shallowly. His failings were gently comic like those of all but the real villains in Trollope. At the story’s end one might well agree with Mrs. Hackit’s opinion expressed in the first chapter, “I think he’s a good sort o’ man, for all he’s not over-burthened i’ the upper story.”
This essential goodness is rewarded in the end in an utterly conventional way. All the children have done well; they prosper like those in other people’s Christmas letters. His wife’s passing, apparently the sole rough spot of the good cleric’s life having concluded, he slowly slides toward his end in comfort, even the departed Milly is replaced by the satisfying surrogate of a faithful daughter.
Eliot distances her working class characters by the use of Midland dialect which creates an image of country folk, outside the sophisticated ambits of the author and reader. The exchange in the first chapter of “Mr. Gilfil’s Love-Story” is typical. Already somewhat comic through her professions of leech-breeding and lollipop vending, Dame Fripp describes for simple comic effect, unrelated to the main trajectory of the story, her motives for keeping a pet pig: “A bit o’ company’s meat and drink too, an’ he follers me about, and grunts when I spake to’m, just like a Christian.” (I)
This lady’s amiable qualities emerge in the course of telling how her loyalty was won by Mr. Gilfil with a gift of bacon, after which the narrator describes the vicar’s more general spiritual influence. He performs his duties responsibly if somewhat mechanically, selecting a sermon from his stack without reference to its content and delivering it while the farmers dozed, secure in the sense that their presence alone would magically benefit their relation to God. And the freethinker Eliot diffidently compares them to an audience of her own day. Following the service, they were, she says, “perhaps almost as much the better for this simple weekly tribute to what they knew of good and right, as many a more wakeful and critical congregation of the present day. “
The theme of the story, Mr. Gilfil’s youthful romance, unsuspected by those who knew him in later life, may remind some readers of Mr. Chips, another muddling commonplace sort of fellow whose onetime passionate attachment is described in Hilton’s unabashedly sentimental novel. Just as Barton’s story centered about the recognition of the curate’s flawed humanity, revealed only in suffering, this second story indicates the depth of feeling to which an apparently inconsequential cleric is susceptible. He, like Barton, settles into the decrescendo of old age in which “the dear old vicar” “had something of the knotted whimsical character of the poor lopped oak.” (Epilogue) The image neatly expresses the affectionate yet superior attitude consistent through these stories.
The final story “Janet’s Repentance,” though it also concerns a local priest, differs from the first two stories in that it introduces a markedly more vicious antagonist in Mr. Dempster and it focuses on a female character. Yet it maintains the same tone toward the narrative’s era. “Pray, reader, dismiss from your mind all the refined and fashionable ideas associated with this advanced state of things, and transport your imagination to a time when Milby had no gas-lights . . .” (II) Here it is the male, the Rev. Tryan, who expires, leaving Janet to survive to a dignified old age, sustained by contact with the young, evidence herself of her husband’s cure of one soul at least.
This book through its displacement of the stories to a diminished past steps away from the advance into literary realism marked by Flaubert and Balzac. The fact that each tale describes a single crisis, the death of Milly Barton and that of Caterina Gilfil in the first two and the expulsion of Janet Dempster and her subsequent loyalty to Mr. Tryan in the third, and that after these decisive events, life is largely uneventful is enough to suggest the fairy tale character of the stories. In her essay Eliot had scolded the “lady novelists” of the “the mind-and-millinery species” for lacking plausible plots. She ridiculed a work that mixed a realistic modern setting with “mere shreds from the most heterogeneous romances.” Yet her own readers may catch a scent of romance (or may it be anti-romance?) in the fact that each of her heroines is a submissive wife for whom the solidity of Victorian marriage is the only desirable course of life.
Every story also follows a simple pattern of retributive justice. The townspeople who had failed to appreciate Mr. Barton perceive his value through his suffering, and he lives to a ripe old age. The depth of feeling inherent with the heart of the aging Mr. Gilfil emerges through the story of his onetime love as the unassuming fellow plods through his paces without asking for more. And the vicious yahoo Mr. Dempster dies wretchedly while his repentant wife sobers up and receives a second chance at life. Eliot brings each piece to a conclusion without surprising or disturbing her readers or causing them to think.
Though Eliot had decried the “oracular” and “white neck-cloth” species of novels for their obtrusive moralizing (of high and low church persuasion respectively), her own clergymen are all characters whose grasp of theology of or of even the very best pastoral practices has little significance. Each demonstrates spirituality through love and common humanity which, however admirable a value, and however consistent with what we have of the words of Christ, certainly challenges no one.
Eliot indeed wrote about people in modest circumstances while the authors she criticized “write in elegant boudoirs.” These stories of village people and village events, like the later work of American regionalists, depicted the high drama that plays out in every village, indeed for the sympathetic sensibility, in every life. Yet her initial explorations in Scenes of Clerical Life are tentative and qualified. By casting her stories into a nostalgically remembered recent past she creates about their characters a genial warmth that allows their travails to bear a measure of grace and charm. By including the reader with herself as a pair who have most assuredly “gone on” she encourages a view of the puppets of the past as largely entertaining, while her themes are restrained, gentle and accessible. The monument of Middlemarch can scarcely be recognized in embryo.
1. See, for instance, Barbara Smalley, George Eliot and Flaubert: Pioneers of the Modern Novel , 1974.
2. Published under her own name, as all of her early nonfiction had been, in The Westminster Review, vol. 66, October 1856, 442-461.
3. From Compensation. In the twenty-first century, virtually any rhetoric beyond the most simple and colloquial may strike many as “unrealistic” fustian
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