Every Reader’s Raleigh

 

   

     The story of Sir Walter Raleigh’s laying down his coat for Queen Elizabeth to cross a puddle was not recorded until eighty years after his death but it signifies his courtly style at a time when members of the ruling class were expected to display both politesse and aesthetic refinement as well as political discernment and military valor.  Like others of his age, he was only by the way a poet.  An active courtier, he endured military service and hazardous voyages of exploration in service to the crown, though his public role under powerful and jealous rulers led him to be imprisoned for several months by Elizabeth and later for thirteen years by James I who ultimately beheaded him.   As a diplomat and a military man, he held influential positions that enabled him to reinforce British rule over Ireland, defend England against Spain, and develop colonies in North America.

     His adventures on behalf of his country are recorded in part in his The Discovery of Guiana, which mixed reportage of his experiences in  the New World with fanciful tales of natives with faces in their chests (highlighted by depiction in the book’s frontispiece) as well as of the gold-rich city of El Dorado.  With the involuntary leisure of his imprisonment he also began a compendious History of the World, admired yet as a monument of English prose if not of historiography. 

      Much of his poetry is written in the comparatively conversational mode called the plain style, eschewing elaborate conceits and dense classical allusions to create the impression of sincerity and passion.  This relatively realistic vision is illustrated by Raleigh’s response to Marlowe’s poem “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love,” a seduction poem in which the man offers his beloved endless “pleasures” and “delights” might she only “live with me, and be my love.”  Raleigh’s canny lady is well aware that love is not always such an unmixed blessing.   

 

The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd

 

If all the world and love were young,

And truth in every Shepherd’s tongue,

These pretty pleasures might me move,

To live with thee, and be thy love.

 

Time drives the flocks from field to fold,

When Rivers rage and Rocks grow cold,

And Philomel becometh dumb,

The rest complains of cares to come.

 

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields,

To wayward winter reckoning yields,

A honey tongue, a heart of gall,

Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall.

 

Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of Roses,

Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies

Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten:

In folly ripe, in reason rotten.

 

Thy belt of straw and Ivy buds,

The Coral clasps and amber studs,

All these in me no means can move

To come to thee and be thy love.

 

But could youth last, and love still breed,

Had joys no date, nor age no need,

Then these delights my mind might move

To live with thee, and be thy love.

 

Each of the blandishments so invitingly catalogued by Marlowe is questioned.  A “honey tongue” may conceal a “heart of gall.”  Material objects are all subject to dessication or rot, people grow old and love fades, time changes all things.  The sole classical reference here is more like a hand grenade than a decorative posy.  Philomel was raped and then suffered her tongue being cut out to prevent her disclosing the crime, a horrific example of sexual violence here concealed in an allusion.

     Raleigh’s sober realism coexists with the most fanciful figures of speech.  Raleigh’s “Nature, That Washed Her Hands in Milk” constructs a fine filigree of imagination idealizing the beloved only to dismiss that pleasing illusion. 

 

Nature, That Washed Her Hands in Milk

 

Nature, that washed her hands in milk,

And had forgot to dry them,

Instead of earth took snow and silk,

At love’s request to try them,

If she a mistress could compose

To please love’s fancy out of those.

 

Her eyes he would should be of light,

A violet breath, and lips of jelly;

Her hair not black, nor overbright,

And of the softest down her belly;

As for her inside he’d have it

Only of wantonness and wit.

 

At love’s entreaty such a one

Nature made, but with her beauty

She hath framed a heart of stone;

So as love, by ill destiny,

Must die for her whom nature gave him,

Because her darling would not save him.

 

But time (which nature doth despise,

And rudely gives her love the lie,

Makes hope a fool, and sorrow wise)

His hands do neither wash nor dry;

But being made of steel and rust,

Turns snow and silk and milk to dust.

 

The light, the belly, lips, and breath,

He dims, discolors, and destroys;

With those he feeds but fills not death,

Which sometimes were the food of joys.

Yea, time doth dull each lively wit,

And dries all wantonness with it.

 

Oh, cruel time! which takes in trust

Our youth, our joys, and all we have,

And pays us but with age and dust;

Who in the dark and silent grave

When we have wandered all our ways

Shuts up the story of our days.

 

 

     Whereas Adam and Eve were made from earth, the beloved cannot be so common; she, the poet says, is composed of finer things: milk, snow, and silk.  She has eyes of light, a floral breath, and lips of jelly!  Yet this perfect creature refuses her devoted lover, having “a heart of stone.”  Her loss thereby is evident as time turns all her charms in the end  to dust.  Her physical charms and her “wanton” spirit cannot last, since decline comes to all and death and everyone’s story ends with the same lamentable conclusion.  The ubi sunt (‘where has gone  . . .”} theme is here allied with the advice to “seize the day” (carpe diem), advising lovers to make the most of their youth since it will soon vanish. 

     The same ironic realism is apparent in “The Lie,” denouncing what Kenneth Rexroth called the Social Lie, the set of assumptions that ratifies social order, each element of which Raleigh disputes. 

 

The Lie

 

 Go, Soul, the body's guest,

Upon a thankless errand;

Fear not to touch the best;

The truth shall be thy warrant:

Go, since I needs must die,

And give the world the lie.

 

Say to the court, it glows

And shines like rotten wood;

Say to the church, it shows

What's good, and doth no good:

If church and court reply,

Then give them both the lie.

 

Tell potentates, they live

Acting by others' action;

Not loved unless they give,

Not strong but by a faction.

If potentates reply,

Give potentates the lie.

 

Tell men of high condition,

That manage the estate,

Their purpose is ambition,

Their practice only hate:

And if they once reply,

Then give them all the lie.

 

Tell them that brave it most,

They beg for more by spending,

Who, in their greatest cost,

Seek nothing but commending.

And if they make reply,

Then give them all the lie.

 

Tell zeal it wants devotion;

Tell love it is but lust;

Tell time it is but motion;

Tell flesh it is but dust:

And wish them not reply,

For thou must give the lie.

 

Tell age it daily wasteth;

Tell honour how it alters;

Tell beauty how she blasteth;

Tell favour how it falters:

And as they shall reply,

Give every one the lie.

 

Tell wit how much it wrangles

In tickle points of niceness;

Tell wisdom she entangles

Herself in overwiseness:

And when they do reply,

Straight give them both the lie.

 

Tell physic of her boldness;

Tell skill it is pretension;

Tell charity of coldness;

Tell law it is contention:

And as they do reply,

So give them still the lie.

 

Tell fortune of her blindness;

Tell nature of decay;

Tell friendship of unkindness;

Tell justice of delay:

And if they will reply,

Then give them all the lie.

 

Tell arts they have no soundness,

But vary by esteeming;

Tell schools they want profoundness,

And stand too much on seeming:

If arts and schools reply,

Give arts and schools the lie.

 

Tell faith it's fled the city;

Tell how the country erreth;

Tell manhood shakes off pity

And virtue least preferreth:

And if they do reply,

Spare not to give the lie.

 

So when thou hast, as I

Commanded thee, done blabbing—

Although to give the lie

Deserves no less than stabbing—

Stab at thee he that will,

No stab the soul can kill.       

 

     Relentlessly in stanza after stanza Raleigh exposes the pretensions of the world.  At his trial Socrates denounced his accusers declaring that proximity to death brings prophetic power, and Raleigh dares likewise to turn accuser before his execution with the honesty that nearness to the grave lends.  The court’s glamor, he says, is specious, and the power of rulers depends upon “factions,” while the nobles are themselves hateful and self-interested.  Raleigh then moves toward a more general cynicism, declaring zeal to be hollow and all love merely lust.  The flesh is ashes and everyone is moving steadily toward the grave.  Intelligence, he says, is only ingenuity and science arrogance, charity is phony, and law nothing but wrangling.  Academics even want “soundness” and depend only on “seeming.”  Both faith and morality have “fled.”  Even  his own mantic denunciations are only in the end “blabbing,” though to let the cat out of the bag, to admit mankind’s hypocrisy, is a capital offense.

    Though the poem is utterly cynical, it concludes on a defiantly positive note, declaring “no stab the soul can kill.”  The reader may well suspect that Raleigh had more in mind his preservation of dignified equanimity rather than Christian salvation.  He had asked that his beheading be public and he impressed onlookers calling the ax “sharp medicine” and, when executioner hesitated, saying “What dost thou fear? Strike, man, strike!”  His reputation was such that one of his judges later said, “The justice of England has never been so degraded and injured as by the condemnation of the honourable Sir Walter Raleigh.”

     Skilled as he was at satire and ironic realism. Raleigh was also capable of spinning courtly sentiments, elegant if not exactly aureate, even making specific reference to Petrarch.   

 

A Vision upon the Fairy Queen

 

Me thought I saw the grave where Laura lay,

Within the Temple, where the vestall flame

Was wont to burne; and passing by that way,

To see that buried dust of living fame,

Whose tombe faire love and fairer vertue kept;

 

All suddeinly I saw the Faery Queene:

At whose approch the soule of Petrarke wept;

And from thenceforth, those graces were not seene,

For they this Queene attended: in whose steed

Oblivion laid him downe on Lauras herse:

Hereat the hardest stones were seene to bleed,

And grones of buried ghostes the hevens did perse,

Where Homers spright did tremble all for griefe,

And curst th’ accesse of that celestiall theife.

 

 

 

     Here Raleigh applauds his friend Edmund Spenser for his monumental allegorical epic The Faery Queene.  Raleigh’s witty compliment is based on  the conceit that Spenser’s queen, representing Elizabeth I, has beauty and virtues that put Petrarch’s lover Laura in the shade.  The Italian poet breaks into tears when the arrival of the living queen so outshines the earlier lady that Laura is cast into “oblivion.”  This substitution of one female ideal with another disturbs even buried ghosts, including that of Homer as obsolete poetic practices and the women praised by earlier poets are displaced by the new queen. This ingenuity and literary shop-talk befits the poem’s place in the introductory material to an edition  of The Faery Queen where it is accompanied by a lengthy letter from Raleigh to Spenser commending and commenting on the method of his friend’s vast poem.

     Raleigh’s life story is the history of his age in courtly rivalries, Realpolitik among nations, and colonial expansion.  His poetry likewise is part of the fabric of his times, representing a late development of courtly love influenced by Italian poets, but with a distinctively British tone of realism and irony that makes many of his pieces appeal to the contemporary reader.   

Derangements of Love in Two Early French Folk Songs

 

    These poems are most readily available in the Geoffrey Brereton’s Penguin Book of French Verse, vol. 2.  The texts appended to the essay are from that source.  The English here is my own, meant (like the glosses provided by Brereton) only to facilitate reference to the French originals.

 

     The drama of human sexual love is subject to endless variation in expressions of the immense power of the human erotic dynamo.  Every individual probably experiences a great variety of identities and relations with a single beloved over a course of time. In general, perversions and fetishes develop from a single-minded concentration on what might engage an ordinary lover for a moment every now and then.  For instance, while exclusive BDSM tastes are rare, doubtless everyone has momentarily experienced the wish to overmaster another, to gratify a drive for power rather than sensual pleasure, to indulge a selfish rather than a thoughtful impulse.  By the dictate of nature herself, the boundary of such play is death. 

     Such an extreme dialectic between love and death, today the stuff of tabloids and films, was often expressed in ballad-type songs.  Two early French folk songs, first recorded from the fifteenth century, may be juxtaposed to form a diptych illustrating variations of the theme that might be called love gone awry, distinguished from such harmonious conflations of love and death as Wagner’s Liebestod in which to die is called höchste Lust (highest desire or delight).  This mystical transport was associated by Wagner, who had been led by Schopenhauer to India, with a longing for nirvana. [1]  In “La Blanche Biche” (“The White Doe”) and in “Renaud le tuer des femmes” (“Renaud the Killer of Women”) love and death are joined in more sinister fashion.  In the first, the woman proves a victim, while in the second she triumphs over her would-be attacker.

     The lady in “La Blanche Biche” at times becomes a white doe and in that form is hunted and killed by her brother Renaud.  The story is akin to countless tales of human to animal transformation, many of which feature a magic deer.  These include the white deer upon which Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty rode and the thousand-years-old animal of Emperor Xuanzong.   Lenape, Chickasaw, and other native American groups told stories of supernatural white deer.  Yet today in the Ozarks people speak of Snawfus, the ominous white deer.  Among contemporary evocations of the power of such animals, I am just now thirty miles from a shopping center called White Deer Plaza [2] and I understand that the character of Gus on the Netflix series Sweet Tooth, is a deer-human hybrid, though not white.

     Celtic analogies are far closer to the song’s French roots.  The Celtic god Cernunnos was depicted as a man with the antlers of a deer; indeed, his very named derives from “the horned one.”  Oisin’s mother Sadhbh was transformed into a doe by Fer Doirich for refusing his advances.  Oisin’s own name means little deer.  According to Chretien De Troyes' Erec et Enide, King Arthur’s court conducted an annual hunt after a white stag.  David I of Scotland, while violating taboo by hunting on the feast of the Holy Cross, has a vision of that same cross between a white stag’s antlers seen by Sts. Eustace and Hubert.  In Marie de France’s Guigemar the knight of the title kills a white doe and is placed under a spell which may be undone only when he as entered an unselfish love relationship. 

     The beauty of white deer and the rarity of their appearance suggested that such animals signaled an intersection of human and divine realms, and these contacts are depicted as dangerous as often as they are exalting.  “La Blanche Biche” ends with a horrible display of the lady literally turned inside out, dismembered and displayed in the kitchen and described in a macabre manner by the victim herself. 

 

Ma tête est dans le plat

et mon coeur aux chevilles

Mon sang est repandu

par toute la cuisine

Et sur less noirs charbons

mes pauvres os y grillent.

 

(My head is in the dish

and my heart on pegs.

My blood is spilled

throughout the kitchen

And on the black coals

my poor bones are roasting.)

 

      Underlying this hideous spectacle is very likely a coded horror story of incest.  In danger from the hunt the woman would be naturally frightened, but she describes herself rather as “angry” and apparently deeply ashamed: "J'ai bien grande ire en moi, et n'ose vous le dire." (“I am filled with anger and dare not tell you why.”)  She complains that her brother Renaud is “le pire” (“the worst”).  His assault on her is not inadvertent.  The implied incestuous rape is symbolically enacted as his hunting and butchering of her body. 

     This implication is reinforced by numerous parallels in other songs, particularly those from Scotland.  Thus in “The Bonnie Hind” a young man, long away at sea, unknowingly has sex with his sister who, when she discovers their relationship, commits suicide, causing him to laments the loss of his “bonnie hind.”  The man’s name is even Randal, corresponding to the French Renaud. [3]  Just as in the ancient story of Oedipus, this song of the people depicts the most monstrous transgression imaginable, and the oblique ballad dialogue of “La Blanche Biche” makes the crime seem so very dreadful that it may only be  only suggested. 

     The representation of the woman’s sexuality as a white doe implies a quasi-divine character but at the same time a vulnerability.  The song is in a way like a sensational pulp fiction story with the popular appeal of its sex and violence, ultimately resembling Grand Guignol or a contemporary horror movie in the extremely graphic final stanza.  Listeners [4] or readers might be in turn thrilled by the image of the doe’s beauty, moved by her defenselessness, and shocked by her death.

     In “Renaud le tuer des femmes” another Renaud, as wicked as the first, meets quite a different end.  The handsome but sinister lover carries off the fair lady and, when she says she is hungry, shocks her by saying that she may eat her own hand and drink her own blood.  He threatens her with death, saying he has already done away with thirteen women.  Preparing it seems to die, she, asks him for the sake of propriety to turn away as she disrobes, and he, with a delicacy surprising in a killer, does, allowing her to turn the tables, catch him unawares, and toss him into the pond to his death.

     The song is one of a large family of very similar narratives, distributed across Europe [5].   In “May Colvin” and some versions of “the Outlandish Knight” the woman escapes by the same ruse as in “Renaud le tuer des femmes,” while in “Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight” and “The Gowans Sae Gae” she convinces him to “sit down a while, lay your head on my knee” and then employs a sleep charm.  “The Water o Wearie's Well” has her asking for a kiss and then grabbing him, while in “The Outlandish Knight” she asks him to cut down the shoreside nettles for fear they would sully her body.  In some Danish variants she strategically distracts her antagonist by asking him to remove his mantle to avoid spattering it with blood or offers to delouse him. [6] 

     In each of these it is the lady’s own wit and courage that save her life, while in Perrault’s version of “Blue Beard” the wife’s siblings rescue her.  This retelling is thought to be influenced by accounts of Breton king Conomor the Accursed [7] whose wife and victim Tryphine requires the aid of St. Gildas to return to life.  This denial of agency to the woman is hardly incidental.  While the contemporary reader will doubtless see the narrative as a heroic story of a strong and wily woman, Perrault extracted quite a different “moralité,” helpfully appended for the reader’s edification.

 

 

La curiosité, malgré tous ses attraits,

Coüte souvent bien des regrets ;

On en voit tous les jours mille exemples paraítre.

C’est, n’en déplaise au sexe, un plaisir bien léger;

Dès qu’on le prend, il cesse d’ètre,

Et toujours il coüte trop cher.

 

(Curiosity, in spite of its appeal, very often brings regret.  One sees a thousand examples every day.  It is, with all due respect to the sex, a very slight pleasure which, when one takes it, ceases to be, and costs too much every time.) 

 

 

Perrault continues under the title “autre moralité”:

 

 

Pour peu qu'on ait l'esprit sensé,

Et que du Monde on sache le grimoire,

On voit bientôt que cette histoire

Est un conte du temps passé;

II n’est plus d’époux si terrible,

Ni qui demande l’impossible,

Füt-il malcontent et jaloux,

Près de sa femme on le voit filer doux ;

Et de quelque couleur que sa barbe puisse ètre,

On a peine à juger qui des deux est le maítre.

 

(If one looks at this grim story with a sensible attitude, you will instantly see that it is a story of days gone by.   There is no spouse who would ask the impossible of his wife, nor would he be so jealous and malcontent.  Whatever color his beard may be, it is hard to tell who is the master between the two.) 

 

 

     For Perrault the lesson of the story is not that a young woman must look beyond wealth in selecting a lover and must respond to danger with energy and enterprise, but rather that “curiosity” and, presumably, disobedience, to which women are particularly inclined, leads to problems.  Unsatisfied with the statement of this surprising inference, Perrault then enlarges upon it by implying disapproval of the lessening of patriarchal authority in marriage.  The terrible beard, the symbol of maleness, has lost its power. [8]  

     Yet more than three hundred years later the monster of sexism has retained disproportionate, even murderous, force.  While lacking both the playful farce of fabliaux and the earnest aspirations of courtly love, these songs depict a far darker erotic derangement in which sensuality has become lethal aggression.  Both narratives might remind a modern reader of newspaper headlines, since domestic violence remains commonplace world-wide.  The immense libidinal energy, when blocked, does not vanish, but rather surges with new and sometimes violent expression.  Stories in song of brutal attacks on women occasioned by incest, rape, adultery, or simply an extra-marital affair are not only entertaining for their sensationalism; they are also based on lived experience.  These early French folk songs represent two possible outcomes: in one the woman is consumed, while in the other she survives.  In each the explosive destructive force of machismo provides a dramatic and sinister antagonist. 

 

 

 

1.  Peter Bassett, “The Use of Buddhist and Hindu Concepts in Wagner's Stage Works,” The Wagnerian,  January 1, 2014.

 

2.  Mme. d’Aulnoy included a version of the white hind story with a happier ending in her book of fairy tales.  The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, dating from the eleventh century, is an extraordinary survival in which villagers yet today dance brandishing reindeer antlers along with a number of other characters including Maid Marian, a fool, and a hobby horse.  St Nicholas, of course, drives a team of reindeer.  

 

3.  Other Scots songs on the theme of incest include “Lizie Wan,” “Babylon,” “The King's Dochter Lady Jean,” and “Sheath and Knife.”

 

4.  The song has often been recorded by French (by Tri Yann, for instance) and Canadian performers (including Michel Faubert). 

 

 5.  The story is classified as 312 in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index.

6.  See Holger Olof Nygard, “Narrative Change in the European Tradition of the ‘Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight’," The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 65, No. 255 (Jan. - Mar., 1952) for a survey of Scandinavian variants.  Among the many other variations of the story are “Tam Lin” where the man threatens extortion or rape but not murder, he turns out to be an enchanted man whom the lady frees from  his thralldom to the fairy queen.   “Johnny Sands” is a late comic epigone in which the trick leading to death is played by a long-suffering husband ridding himself of a termagant wife.

7.  The story appears in Alain Bouchard, Grands Chroniques de Bretaigne (1532).

8.  Unlikely as it seems, this interpretation remained dominant.  In 1808 an anonymous retelling was published as Bluebeard, or the Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience.

The Hazardous Lives of the Sonneteers

  

This essay is an attempt to be more popular and journalistic than usual.  I shall be curious to see what readership the following piece attracts. I am contemplating a similar article on the scandals of the Romantic poets.

  

     Were an Elizabethan or Jacobean sonneteer to appear in a cartoon strip, he would probably be depicted as a mincing aesthete, a sort of Percy Dovetonsils in doublet and breeches, yet anyone with the sketchiest knowledge of history would know that poetry was associated with powerful men in those days.   The sonnet form in particular was associated with courtiers who were, of course, warriors as well, suffering the chances of combat, including becoming prisoners of war.  In addition a significant percentage of prominent poets in Elizabeth’s time were imprisoned at home by their own queen, always on the lookout for signs of opposition to her will, while others fell afoul of the ordinary criminal laws.  The life expectancy of members of the ruling class was limited by the fact that under an absolute monarchy in which the will of the ruler is law, a court will inevitably be filled with back-biting and tale-telling among ambitious aristocrats quite willing to sacrifice their rivals while seeking to advance their own prospects.

     The link between high nobility and the arts was emphasized in Castiglione’s The Courtier, published in English translation by Thomas Hoby in 1561, which emphasized that the best courtier, the noblest aristocrat, must cultivate excellence of all sorts, not only athletic and martial abilities, but aesthetic skills as well, including the practice of music, painting, and poetry.  Verbal skills, honed by literary study, Castiglione argues, allow the courtier to be at once more beautiful and more persuasive.    

     Since his own time, Sir Philip Sidney has been considered the embodiment of Castiglione’s ideal.  Strikingly handsome, valorous in war and accomplished in sports, quick and clever in conversation yet discerning in judgement, he was always the faithful servant of the queen.  The center of his career was his work as parliamentarian, soldier, ambassador, and counsellor to Elizabeth.  His masterful sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella was not published until five years after his death and then only because faulty pirated editions were already circulating. 

     Dead before his thirty-second birthday from a wound received at the Battle of Zutphen, his character inspired legends immediately.  He was said to have removed the thigh armor that could have prevented his mortal injury when he noticed that one of the men under his command had incomplete armor.  As he lay bleeding, water was brought which he was said to have declined, offering it to a comrade with the words "Thy necessity is yet greater than mine."

     Despite his conformity to his culture’s standards, even Sidney might have suffered an even earlier end due to his bold advocacy in a time of customs that seem today savage.  Though at the age of eighteen he was a member of the embassy sent to seek to arrange Elizabeth’s marriage to the Catholic Duke of Alençon, as a Protestant partisan he fervently opposed the union and quarreled with Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, to the point of challenging de Vere to a duel.  Fortunately for literary history the queen ordered that they not fight.  The young Sidney persisted in writing a letter detailing his strong opposition to the match, attracting her disapproval of his presumption and prompting his temporary absence at court. 

    The sonnet form had been introduced in England by Sir Thomas Wyatt with translations of Petrarch and original compositions.  Though his father had been incarcerated and tortured under Richard III, the elder Wyatt then became Privy Counsellor when Henry VII and after him Henry VIII succeeded.   By his late teens the son was already a prominent figure in court, taking a ceremonial role, for instance, as the champion of the Castle of Loyalty during the Christmas celebrations of 1526.  As a teenager he was named Esquire of the Body serving as a personal attendant and confidant of the king and a few years later acquired the remarkable title of Sewer Extraordinary. 

     Though popular, Wyatt was known as an impulsive, headstrong individual, and, from the testimony of his contemporaries as well as from his poetry, a passionate lover.  With a reputation as a ladies’ man, he surprised no one when he separated from his wife after three years and accused her of adultery while conceding as well his own infidelity. 

     He was meanwhile active as a negotiator, ambassador, and advisor to the throne.  On a mission to Italy in 1527 he insisted on parting with his company, saying he was “desirous to see the country” and was taken prisoner by forces controlled by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V who demanded a substantial ransom for his release.  A captive of unpredictable soldiers on the edge of mutiny, he was certainly in mortal danger, but he did go free.  It is unclear if the money was paid – some think he was repaying the debt for years --  or if perhaps he escaped, but he did manage to return to his own country unscathed.

    Before long however, he aroused Henry’s ire.  He had been a childhood friend of Anne Boleyn, and some whispered that he was paying particular her attention even when she was the queen consort.  The unfortunate Boleyn had given birth to Elizabeth but subsequently suffered three miscarriages, trying the king’s patience.  Henry turned his attentions to Jane Seymour and sought to remove Boleyn.  She was seized and placed in the Tower of London, accused of a series of ill-documented crimes including treason, and beheaded.

     Doubtless suspicious about the dashing courtier’s relationship with his wife, and likely thinking that he could at any rate get some useful information about her from Wyatt, Henry had the poet put into the Tower of London, accused of an affair with her.  From his cell, Wyatt probably witnessed Boleyn’s death and must have felt that his own survival was again in doubt. 

     Surely shaken by this experience, Wyatt stayed out of trouble for a time, but in a few years he was again arrested and himself charged with treason.  The poet’s charm may have saved his life, as the current queen consort Catherine Howard intervened on his behalf and obtained his release with the condition that he must reconcile with his wife.  It was not long before Howard in her turn was led to the executioner’s block.   After her death, it was whispered that the king had his eye on Wyatt’s wife, but, as it happened, Wyatt died of natural causes shortly thereafter.  (His sole legitimate son, Thomas Wyatt the Younger, was executed under Queen Mary.)

     Though Wyatt managed to avoid the headsman, the other poet credited with introducing sonnets to the English language (and the originator of the English or Shakespearean sonnet rhyme pattern) the contentious Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, did not.  The poet, well aware of the dangers of royal service as a first cousin of both Boleyn and Howard, was made Lieutenant General of the King on Sea and Land and fought in France.

    His pride and temper were as well-known as his gallantry under fire.  Though he (and his father as well) had taken the crown’s part in opposing the Lincolnshire rebels who had taken up arms against the dissolution of the monasteries, a fellow courtier suggested that he had been in fact sympathetic to their cause.  Offended, Surrey struck the man in the park at Hampton Court and was imprisoned for breaking the peace in the king’s domain. 

     After his release he was for a time absent from court but he returned to royal favor after a few years.  In 1543 he was accused by the Privy Council of a nighttime adventure in which he (in company with Wyatt and others) broke windows of London homes using a sort of crossbow that could hurl stones in what must have been a drunken revel, and a second charge – eating meat during Lent – was added.  Once again, his friends were able to secure his release.  In “A Satire on London” he makes the unlikely claim that his disorderly actions were meant to awaken the citizens to their sins. 

    The poet’s ego, however, led eventually to his downfall.  Though immensely proud of his descent from the Plantagenets, he and his family had long been loyal to Henry and the Tudors.  As the king aged, afflicted by health problems, he became increasingly suspicious that Surrey meant to usurp the throne from his son, the future Edward VI.  When Surrey’s sister, Mary FitzRoy, widow of Henry’s illegitimate son, was to be married to Jane’s brother Thomas Seymour with the blessings of her father and of the king, she and Surrey objected and the match was called off.  According to her statements, Surrey then tried to persuade her to seduce the king, suggesting that she might as a palace mistress "wield as much influence on him as Madame d'Etampes doth about the French King."  In response, she flatly declared that she “would sooner cut her own throat.”

     With the tensions over succession rising, in 1546 at Kenninghall Surrey chose to include on his quartered shield (quartering allowed more visible connections to highly placed lines of descent) the arms of Edward the Confessor.  In spite of the fact that the rules of heraldry allowed this usage and that Surrey had collared the leopards in the royal arms and placed them in the secondary quarter of his shield, he was arrested on the excuse that he had symbolically indicated his own ambitions on the throne.  Once he was prisoner, he was questioned not about his arms but only about his attempted use of his sister as an informer, his supposed plans to depose Henry, claims of his heterodoxy, and his preparations to leave the country.  He mounted a full defense of his innocence, yet was executed.  His father would have been beheaded as well had Henry VII not died whereupon the Privy Council removed the death penalty but seized his lands and kept him locked up for years.  

     Another of the group known as the “silver poets” for their eloquence was Sir Walter Ralegh, whose name is known in this hemisphere for his role in early colonization.  He campaigned in France for the Huguenots, and for his service in suppressing the Irish received considerable estates there, but he had little success in inducing English tenants to emigrate.  He turned his attention to the New World, sponsoring the failed settlement that became known as the Lost Colony of Roanoke.   Dubious about his ability to fund settlements that, beyond being self-supporting, could make him rich, he set out to find El Dorado in South America but there too had little success. 

    A few years before his South American venture, he had impregnated and secretly married one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting.  When their relationship was discovered, he and his wife were sent to the Tower.  He was temporarily released to oversee the spoils of a ship captured from Spain, but then returned to the Tower, only to be again set free and assume a seat in Parliament.  His influence rose once more, though he was accused (and acquitted) of atheistic views.  He fought to capture Cadiz, to repel the Armada, and became governor of the Isle of Jersey.

     Yet, with the demise of Queen Elizabeth, his loyalty to James was suspected, and he was arrested for involvement in the “Main Plot” to replace James with Lady Arbella Stuart.  The evidence was slight, and Ralegh claimed he could exonerate himself if he were allowed to question his friend the Baron Cobham, the main witness against him, but this was not allowed and he was incarcerated for thirteen years during which he worked on his Historie of the World.  Even in this scholarly enterprise he attracted the doubts of the king who found the book "too sawcie in censuring Princes."

     He was freed in 1617 after thirteen years confinement to lead another expedition to South America during which men commanded by his friend Lawrence Kemys attacked the Spanish outpost of Santo Tomé de Guayana in violation of the Anglo-Spanish treaty and Ralegh’s instructions.  In this conflict his son Walter was killed and Ralegh was arrested when he returned, having spurned chances to flee into exile.  The Spanish demanded his execution, and he was beheaded.  (His subordinate Kemys committed suicide.)

     A sonneteer might encounter all manner of other calamities.  Virtually every biography includes episodes of violence of harsh legal judgements.  The account of all these tumultuous events would be voluminous.  Some are entertaining enough to seem as though written for the stage.  Attorney and Parliamentarian as well as sonneteer, John Davies was disbarred for attacking a colleague with a cudgel upon which he promptly repaired to Oxford for the next year where he devoted himself to literature.  He was later made attorney-general of Ireland.  In 1613 he was the king’s candidate for speaker of the Irish Parliament but was opposed by the Catholic members who instead proposed Sir John Everard.  The dispute led to an absurd scene in which Everard seized the speaker’s chair, refusing to vacate it until Davies’ supporters carried the stout poet and placed him on Everard’s lap.  Edmund Spenser, who wrote the Petrarchan Amoretti, was also an Irish landlord whose castle in North Cork was taken and burned by rebels after which the writer died in London “for want of bread,” according to Ben Jonson (though this statement is surely inaccurate).  Politics also made Henry Constable a convict, largely over his urging of toleration of Catholics.  The prolific Samuel Daniel was praised for his sequence of love sonnets Delia but called before the Privy Council for supposedly seditious implications of his play The Tragedy of Philotas.

     Several were at least suspected of common crimes including murder.  Barnabe Barnes, who wrote a sequence called Parthenophil and Parthenophe (Virgin-lover and Virgin-voiced), engaged in ferocious pamphleteering polemics and was tried for attempting to poison a man, though he escaped custody and was never recaptured, doubtless due to the influence of powerful friends.  The prolific George Gascoigne who came between Wyatt and Surrey, was a noble soldier when taken prisoner during the Siege of Leiden, but a common criminal as well, arrested more than once for debts and apparently also for attempted murder.  He had served in Parliament, but in a re-election bid was disqualified as a man not only “noted for manslaughter" but also "a common Rymer.”  A poet might also be a crime victim.  Fulke Greville, a protégé of Sidney, was stabbed by a servant.  His learned physicians filled the wound with pig fat and he died a lingering death.  A number of writers, including William Percy, the writer of Sonnets to Coelia, and the middle-class Henry Lok who wrote religious sonnets were imprisoned simply for debt.

     A few years later after the tumultuous careers of these poets Hobbes was to describe human life in general as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” characterized by “continual fear, and danger of violent death.”  While everyone half a millennium ago suffered equally from the lack of effective medical knowledge and the draconian, often arbitrary, legal system, and the poor contended with a constant fear of malnutrition, belonging to the power elite was no guarantee of longevity.  Those at the top faced the perils of war, but combat was hardly a greater threat to them than their own monarch’s disfavor.  Perhaps the beauties of their poetry, and the sonnet during this period became one of the most subtle and expressive forms in all of literature, far from conflicting with a hazardous life, proved the best response to uncertainty and danger.  Many of us who are far from courtiers in the great chain  of being have found that, for us as well as them, love and art can make an otherwise intolerable life worth living.

Dialectical Rhetoric in Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie

  

Parenthetical citations, sometimes serving to locate more than one quotation, refer to Book and Chapter of Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie.  Numbers in brackets are endnotes.

 

     With the decay in the social value of public speaking and the general fading of the Classical tradition, the role of oratory in education, once so prominent, has all but vanished.  Only a few generations ago, the brightest secondary students competed in declamation competitions and participated in Mock Trial exercises that would have been recognizable to an ancient Athenian.  For two thousand years many wrote about rhetoric as the definitive art of the effective use of language and drew examples from both poetry and speeches.  Though there are significant exceptions, many literary theorists have used the vocabulary of rhetoric from Rhetorica ad Alexandrum, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, Quintilian and Cicero, through medieval writers like Matthew of Vendôme, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and John of Garland.  The most important Elizabethan work in this lineage is George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589) which, though entirely concerned with poetry, employs the concepts of earlier rhetorical manuals.  While Puttenham thus roots his work deeply in past authorities, he is nonetheless able to use it to develop and express sophisticated, sometimes novel, concepts.  He is far more pragmatic than theoretical, tolerant of contradictions in the interest of presenting a full description view of poetry.  On a good many matters he is unwilling “to commit himself and holds the balance between the contesting parties,” as a modern critic comments on his posture regarding the use of rhyme and of learned vocabulary. [1]

     Puttenham’s rhetorical orientation was standard in his own day [2], but his use of it was unusually pragmatic, rigorous, and productive.  He fully understands the arbitrary nature of the relation between signifier and signified, noting, “speech it selfe is artificiall and made by man,” [3] yet, in a dialectical gesture that recurs throughout his work, he also says “VTterance also and language is giuen by nature to man for perswasion of others.” (I, 4) 

     A parallel ambiguity is reflected in his opening claim that the poet is a “maker” and thus in a way divine while at the same time being a “counterfaitor” who simply imitates the world around since “Poesie an art not only of making, but also of imitation.”  (I, 1)   Similarly he is elusive, or, rather, pleased to affirm both options, on the old issue of whether a poet is born or artistic skill must be learned, observing that poetic skill might “come by nature or by arte or by exercise.” (III, 2)

     Puttenham declares that the poet must be inspired “by some diuine instinct, the Platonicks call it furor.” (I, 1)  This special access to truth led to poets’ role as “Prophetes or seears” (I, 3), giving birth then to religion since the first role of poetry is “the laud honour & glory of the immortall gods.” (I, 9)  Poets then created culture, civilization, and all the arts and sciences.    

      Yet these grand roles seem forgotten when he treats poetry as a courtly accomplishment.  Puttenham, writing in the wake of Castiglione [4], describes his work as is “fitter to please the Court then the schoole” and claims that his “chiefe purpose herein is for the learning of Ladies and young Gentlewomen, or idle Courtiers, desirous to become skilful in their owne mother tongue, and for their priuate recreation to make now & then ditties of pleasure.” (III,10)  This paradoxically studied off-handedness is surely itself a form of sprezzatura or Renaissance “cool.”  A wider gap could scarcely exist than between this aestheticism and the pious author who defined the first function of poetry as “the laud honour & glory of the immortall gods,” followed by cdelebrating princes, then “the praise of vertue & reproofe of vice, the instruction of morall doctrines, the reuealing of sciences naturall & other profitable Arts, the redresse of boistrous & sturdie courages by perswasion.”  Only then does he accept also “the consolation and repose of temperate myndes, finally the common solace of mankind in all his trauails and cares of this transitorie life.” (I, 9)

     The dialectical nature of aesthetic language is also reflected, Puttenham recognizes, by another sort of doubling, the operation of novel figurative language over the inherited formulae of everyday speech.  In the gap between expected usage and artfully twisted figure is born beauty and delight, new thoughts, and courtliness, an aristocratic cultivated style.  Puttenham calls “our ordinary talke then which nothing can be more vnsauourie and farre from all ciuilitie.” (III,2)  According to him the beauty of both women and poems depends upon their being “artificially handled.”  “The discreet vsing” of figures” in writing is like the use of ornament in clothing and “other mechanicall artes” requiring taste. (III,1)  He quotes Horace on changing fashions in language as in other matters. (III, 3)

     “Figuratiue speech is a noueltie of language euidently (and yet not absurdly) estranged from the ordinarie habite and manner of our dayly talke and wri∣ting”  (III, 10)  Novelty seems a requirement since poetry’s appeal derives from “a certaine noueltie and strange maner of conueyance, dis∣guising it no litle from the ordinary and accustomed.” (III, 1)  Yet at the same time, every new work is built upon the old and new fashions are often accepted, “though many tymes worse then the old.” (I.7)

     Poetry may not only be in bad taste; it also may mislead, since the domain of poetry includes lying as well as truth-telling, as Hesiod had had it in one of the earliest formulations of art’s ambiguous character.   Puttenham cautions that “poesie should not be imployed vpon vayne conceits or vicious or infamous.” (I, 8)  He dramatizes the negative potential of poetry with the cautionary story of Hegesias (III, 8) whose words, according to Cicero [5], persuaded people to suicide with his words.

     Yet he feels that it is not the failings of poetry, but rather a failure of appreciation by those who should be its consumers that poetry has lost prestige since ancient times, in spite of its once central place in all culture, to the extent that the poet is labeled “light headed.”  Poets as well as “Poesie are despised, & the name become, of honorable infamous, subiect to scorne and derision.”  He says that a poet, instead of being respected, is likely to be called “in disdayne a phantasticall” man. (I, 8) 

     In the course of his compendious volume, Puttenham provides a rich exposition of rhetorical figures and an invaluable guide to the taste of his day, but the reader looking for a coherent theory will find a wealth of ideas but little system.  Thus language is said to be wholly artificial and man-made as well as given by nature.  Poetry is wholly original, created as though by divine fiat and, at the same time, imitation or “counterfeit.”  Powerful poetry is at once the result of a “divine instinct” and the imitation of models.  The ends of poetry could not be more ambitious – praise of god and inculcation of morality – and yet it is also a “priuate recreation” pastime for “idle Courtiers.”  Poetic language must be fresh and novel, yet it must also follow accepted models.  A poet, finally, he finds, might be valued as the most acute and inventive thinker, the sort he calls “euphantasiote” but also might be “dismissed and derided.” (III, 8)  All these propositions may indeed be true at once – art is more adept than other forms of discourse in handling contradiction and ambiguity – but Puttenham is unconcerned with delineating the tensions among these antinomies. 

     For him poetry’s fallen status calls for a heart-felt lament resting on the notion of a bygone Golden Age rather than a specific program for its returning to relevance.  Even apart from the marvelous catalogue of figures his book is a useful record of the ideas current in his day and what he knew or took to be the opinions of the past.  The venerable study of rhetoric broadly conceived which had formed the foundation of education for millennia underlies Puttenham’s careful work, recording rather than reconciling the contradictions and mysteries that have always characterized art.  If he affirms opposites, it is because only in that way might he provide an accurate picture of his (and of our) lived experience of literature.  

 

 

1.      1.  Émile Legouis and Louis Cazamian, A History of English Literature (1930), 357.

 

2.      2.  Among his predecessors extending the tradition in England were Richard Sherry, A Treatise on Schemes and Tropes (1550), Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), Angel Day, The English Secretorie (1586), and Abraham Fraunce The Arcadian Rhetorick (1588), and Henry Peacham The Compleat Gentleman (1622).  Some critics, notably Sir Philip Sidney, focused, somewhat defensively, on a moral defense rather than a broader view of art’s ends and a technical analysis of poetic devices.      

 

3.      3.  Similarly, “SPeach is not naturall to man” (III, 3).

 

4.      4.  Castiglione’s The Courtier, the influence of which on Puttenham and others can hardly be overstated, had been translated in 1561 by Sir Thomas Hoby.

 

5.      5.  Tusculan Disputations 1.83.

Pater’s Renaissance

I used a 1959 Mentor volume of The Renaissance which sold for 50¢. Though the pages are brown and falling out, it sustained yet another reading. As no one else is likely to be using this particular edition I identify quotations here only by the chapter from which they come.


     During Walter Pater’s life, he suffered a degree of notoriety. Though a retiring and scholarly man, he was like Socrates accused of corrupting the youth by providing a justification for hedonism and denying religion. Wrong-headed though they were, his accusers, who included even such subtle thinkers as George Eliot, had reason. What his critics regarded as his baleful influence extends well beyond the author’s life; indeed, it even reached to mid-twentieth century Midwestern suburbs in America and indeed further still, to the very present.
     As a teenage aesthete I was deeply moved by The Renaissance. Probably to some extent under his influence I wrote a college admission essay that said nothing whatever about professional goals, but instead defined my main ambition as to experience as much as possible. The only concession I made to the role of higher education was to declare that by experience I included learning as much as possible and consuming the finest, most beautiful works of art and intelligence. I might have been taking my text directly from Pater’s famous conclusion. For better or worse my values remain unchanged over a half century.
     Immorality was, of course, never Pater’s aim, except for those to whom homoeroticism is a vice. [1] His radical theme was subjectivism. For all his denigration of “abstract theory,” his approach was founded on a thorough philosophic skepticism. Pater has been, I think, insufficiently recognized for the degree to which his ideas anticipate more recent thought in both aesthetic theory and philosophy more generally. Among the many trends for which Pater’s thought opened the way are Rorty’s “ironism,” the reader response theory associated with Stanley Fish, and Derridean Deconstruction.
     The author thought best to omit his “Conclusion” in the second edition for fear it “might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall.” Pater’s celebrated call “to burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life” has suffered the curse of success and become a cliché, but the “Conclusion” opens with a less-cited line from Herakleitos which Pater translated as “All things give way; nothing remains.” [2] Pater develops then an evocative passage describing the flux of experience, sounding like a Tang Dynasty Buddhist in his wistful insistence on the insubstantiality of what ordinarily passes for reality. He spares neither body nor consciousness, deploying images of whirlpool and flame to demonstrate that physical life is a “perpetual motion” which is “beyond us.” Sense experience is a mere ”swarm of impressions,” “that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.” The human ego is nothing but “an image,” a sort of recollection of memories of past moments. “Our life . . . is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.” Coherence, solidity, knowledge are all illusions.
     For Pater this meant no end of inquiry but rather the most powerful motivation to pursue his researches while privileging sensation. “While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend.” As “we are all condamnés,” to spend life “in art and song” is the best strategy for “getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time,” while recognizing that “art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.”
     Pater entertains no illusions and takes refuge in no mythic refuge. [3] His subjectivism as a critic emerges naturally from his skepticism as a philosopher. He quite correctly identifies his position as distinctly modern in his early essay on Coleridge. “Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the ‘relative’ spirit in place of the ‘absolute.’ … To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly known, except relatively and under certain conditions.” [4] He later restates the theme, again with the emphasis on its modernity, noting that “according to the scepticism latent at least in so much of our modern philosophy, the so-called real things themselves are but spectra, after all.“ [5]
     It is curious but true that those who argue for impressionistic art criticism, while inviting the accusation that their judgements must be arbitrary and unfounded, are in fact the only critics who can present solid evidence. After all we know nothing of any topic whatever but the data of our senses imperfectly processed by our brains. Precisely in that interaction of subject and object is the spot where Pater correctly locates the aesthetic experience. In the “Preface” to The Renaissance he correctly locates aesthetic value neither in the author nor in the text, but in the reader’s reaction. “What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence?”
     While this focus on consumption is a productive approach, Pater does succumb to polemic’s temptation to overshoot the mark. He repeatedly claims that art has no relation whatever to lived experience, insisting, for instance, that “the Venus of Melos” “is in no sense a symbol, a suggestion of anything beyond its own victorious fairness.” “This ideal art, in the thought does not outstrip or lie beyond its sensible embodiment” [6] Any viewer of a human nude must react in part to a work’s content, in this case to the humanity, the femaleness, and the nudity of the statue. As for symbolism the viewer must realize that the object is in fact a religious cult image, meant for religious services.
     In another passage, Pater maintains that “in its primary aspect, a great picture has no more message for us than an accidental play of sunlight and shadow for a few moments on the wall or floor.” [7] Though stating it, he ignores the critical fact that the “play of sunlight” is, in fact, wholly “accidental,” lacking intention. Thus it cannot be a signifier unless one posits, as Pater would not, some artistic deity presiding over the enormous site-specific installation that is the cosmos. The distinction rests in the fact that every human artifact bears meaning whether consciously designed or not. Every objet d’art poses the question, impossible for natural phenomena, “what does it mean for a person to have made this?”
     Yet many have overestimated the role of truth in art. Art is by no means exhausted by a mimetic ideal. The maker may strive for the greatest verisimilitude, but books remain always black marks on a page and paintings smears of color on a surface, by all means “real” only in a qualified sense, and none “more real” than another. Truth occupies a place similar to realism in art. For some works such considerations are a part of the design, for others they are insignificant, while for yet others deviation and distortion of verisimilitude are intentional and effective. It is elementary that, while art may seek to seem “true” in one sense or another, such an end is merely one among a great many elements that may play a role in a work’s structure.
     Again, Pater has the passionate enthusiasm to go once more a bit too far. Discussing the meaning of false attributions to Giorgione, he comments that “in what is connected with a great name, much that is not real is often very stimulating.” [8] Even errors and misapprehensions are fruitful; indeed, like Freudian slips, they may provide the richest veins of meaning. Having no functional end, art resembles play. [9]
     Pater’s oft-quoted dictum declaring that the arts all aspire to the condition of music [7] does not, of course, suggest that in some way music is a higher or more perfect art than poetry or painting. He means only to clarify his claim that “the sensuous element in art” contains “almost everything in art that is essentially artistic.” Art differs from other human artifacts in that its form, its style, its manner is sufficient for its meaning, or, at any rate, those elements comprise the strictly artistic component of its appeal. A poem may have attractive ideals or a painting may include data of historic or scientific interest, but such considerations have no effect on its artistic worth.
     Pater is one of those like Frazer, Margaret Murray, Joseph Campbell, and others who made dramatic new readings of the materials of history and culture and who are liable to be picked to pieces by specialists far less capable of original thought. Of course, anyone who dares to suggest innovative readings of the past and attempts to synthesize great masses of data will be vulnerable to criticism, all the more as studies advance over the years, yet such work remains more significant, more beautiful, and more readable than any of those who point out their numerous errors. I might add even such names as Freud and Marx. All these are great artists, and from a literary point of view they are all true in the sense that the Iliad and the gospel of St. Matthew and King Lear are true. This would have been Pater’s point of view. In discussing Pico della Mirandola Pater says of Pico’s attempts to reconcile Greek religion and Christianity by imagining wildly fanciful allegorical interpretations “his thoughts, however little their positive value may be, are connected with springs beneath them of deep and passionate emotion” and this alone justifies them. Surely the very same may be said of Pater’s own deeply significant though highly idiosyncratic judgements.



1. No reader could deny what no one today will condemn, Pater’s homoerotic sensibility. We are inclined to be indulgent if his embattled tastes in life lead him slightly astray in theory. In accordance with his own notions, he approves Winckelmann’s “escape from abstract theory to intuition, to the exercise of sight and touch.” He proceeds In the same essay to venture a side comment, suggesting that homosexuality is associated with “an inborn instinct for beauty and art.” While this is a very dubious notion, it does not entirely lack evidence.

2. Pater’s translation and a lengthy discussion in Plato and Platonism, “Plato and the Doctrine of Motion”: “[Herakleitos says somewhere that] All things give way; nothing remains.” Plato, Cratylus 402 A.

3. Even his Marius the Epicurean is led only to the very edge of Christianity ten years after The Renaissance. Chastened by criticism and doubtless frightened by the outré behavior of some of his admirers, Pater hedged his bets, yet he still resisted making his hero a believer.

4. “Coleridge’s Writings,” Westminster Review 1866.

5. “Coleridge” in Appreciations.

6. See the “Essay on Winckelmann.”

7. In “The School of Giorgione.”

8. See “The School of Giorgione.”

9. In the same chapter, Pater links art and play in that neither has a functional end.