Every Reader's Burns

 

by Alexander Nasmyth (1828)

 

     Like others in the Every Reader’s Poet series (of which this is the twenty-second), this essay assumes no knowledge of literature among its readers and aims simply at acquainting people with a few poems by canonical authors while eschewing scholarly jargon and footnotes.  Since Americans will require some annotation due to Burns’ dialect, I am including none of the poems’ texts here.  All are, of course, readily available online, often with glosses for the Scots words.

     Even in this poetry-starved age, virtually all English speakers know four or five poems by Robert Burns: "Auld Lang Syne,” certainly, and very likely “For A’ That and A’ That,” “A Red. Red Rose,” “Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled” and perhaps “Address to a Haggis” or “To a Mouse” as well.  Some of his lyrics are popular songs: “Green Grow the Rashes, O” and “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye.”  Several of his lines are known by many who may even be unaware of their origin. 

O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us

To see oursels as ithers see us!

                        from “To a Louse”

 

The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men

Gang aft a-gley.

            from “To a Mouse”

     This penetration into the general culture would doubtless have pleased the poet who was himself a working man who espoused a radically democratic political view.  Here, however, the reader will find those favorites neglected in favor of comment on several of Burns’ somewhat less-known poems.  He may have been less pleased to learn that he has drawn scant attention among academic critics, though his general popularity and his reputation as Scotland’s national poet are undiminished.

     Conscious of this role and loyal to the land of his birth, Burns commonly employed Scots dialect, though did write some poems in standard English.  Upon first opening a book of his poetry, the language presents an immediate obstacle.  Any persistent reader will find that the difficulty soon vanishes.  At first, one should by all means find an edition with convenient glosses (ideally on the same page), but soon these will be consulted only occasionally.  For Scots people the reward is to hear artful poetry couched in the sounds of home, and for the rest of us a glimpse of yet another way to be human.

     When Burns was active, many Britons held anti-Scots prejudices.  In spite of the considerable intellectual history of the country, including the Scottish Chaucerian poets in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment which produced writers like David Hume and Adam Smith, many considered the Scots backward.  Samuel Johnson asked "What enemy would invade Scotland, where there is nothing to be got?" and dismissed it as a tourist destination, saying "Seeing Scotland, Madam, is only seeing a worse England.”  An extreme popular expression of the English attitude is the widespread but ill-documented story of Sawney Bean, the supposed cannibal.  Highlanders were considered particularly barbaric and likely traitorous -- the wearing of kilts was outlawed for political reasons in 1746, effectively ending their use in everyday dress.

     However, with the coming of attitudes associated with the Romantic movement, many values were inverted and “primitivism” became fashionable. Macpherson’s Ossian, which purported to be translated from Scots Gaelic, enjoyed a considerable vogue (though to Johnson it was simply "another proof of Scotch conspiracy in national falsehood").  Folk songs as well as unlettered poets like Stephen Duck became objects of curious interest to the reading public and Thomas Percy’s collection of traditional songs, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, inspired Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Sir Walter Scott.  At the same time Burns’ outspoken radical political views, including support for the American and French Revolutions, were more or less consistent with those of many of the Romantic writers, though they continued to attract criticism as well.

     Burns had been struggling as a farmer and was contemplating moving to Jamaica when he published Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect in 1786 with the idea of raising funds for his passage, but the book was so successful that the poet never emigrated.  He found that he had sufficient success as an author to decline job offers as an editor and as a professor of agriculture, and was eventually given a post as excise supervisor which, while no sinecure, provided a stable income. 

    “The Twa Dogs” is a beast fable, a form familiar from such medieval examples as Reynard the Fox, The Owl and the Nightingale, and Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules.  Caesar, who, as his name suggests, is a dog owned by a rich man, speaks with Luath (a Scots Gaelic name meaning swift or nimble) whose master is a working man.  Caesar, a dog “o’ high degree” of an exotic non-native breed, is “keepit for his Honour’s pleasure.”  He is, nonetheless, no snob and is willing to frisk even with a “tinkler-gipsy’s” mutt.  Luath, on the other hand, is a working dog, "a plough-man’s collie” and thus a Scots native.  Yet the two are great friends, as Burns says, “thick thegither.”

     Caesar describes how the landlord who lives on rents has every luxury, to the point of ”downright wastrie” and asks how the poor can live, saying “I own it’s past my comprehension.”  Luath replies that, though it is true that they are often hard put to hold off “cauld and hunger,” unaccountably they are “moistly wonderfu’ contented.”  The clear-sighted master’s dog notes the attitude of the ruling class.

 

Lord, man!  Our gentry care sae little

For delvers, ditchers and sic cattle;

They gang as saucy by poor folk

As I wad by a stinking brook.

      

    Luath explains what pleasure the poor take in their families, “their gushies weans an’ faithfu’ wives,” though noting that, when they have a bit of leisure and can take a drink or two such that they feel “unco [uncommonly] happy,” their complaints emerge. 

 

They'll talk o' patronage an' priests,

Wi' kindling fury i' their breasts,

Or tell what new taxation's comin,

An' ferlie at the folk in Lon'on.

 According to Luath they are “decent, honest, fawsont [respectable] folk” who are “riven out baith root and branch” “some rascal’s pridefu’ greed to quench.”  Surely, he thinks, the wealthy who have no material want, must be free form care.

      Caesar replies that anyone who truly knows them “wad ne’er envy ‘em.”  Having “no real ills” of which to complain, “they make now themselves to vex them.”  He observes the working people, when labor is done, feel “unco weel” whereas the idle rich are “curst” by “want o’ wark,” and neurotically “loiter, lounging, lank, and lazy,” ”their days unquiet, lang, and restless,” leading many to succumb to “drink and whoring.”  In the end both friends “rejoice they werena men but dogs.” 

     Just as in “For A’ That and A’ That” Burns manages to portray the very real suffering of the laborers and the injustice of the economic system while ridiculing the masters and claiming defiantly that the worker has the better life, feeling the satisfaction of a job well done while, unlike the corrupt ruling class, exemplifying widely accepted moral and family values.  The dogs are a clever rhetorical device, serving as objective observers whose comments are trustworthy and a natural standard against which to measure human society.  Burns proposes replacing the hierarchy of the "great chain of being" with a more natural and democratic order.

     Burns was something of a romantic in the common meaning of the word as well as in its literary usage.  He had a daughter with his mother’s servant, at the same time as he was sleeping with Jean Arthur who bore him twins, shocking her family, though they did marry.  Before long he was in love with Mary Campbell to whom he wrote a number of lyrics such as "The Highland Lassie O."  His poem “Ae fond kiss and then we sever" was written for another woman, Agnes Maclehose, with whom  he had, as far as is known, a warm relationship without physical intimacy.  Written on the occasion of their parting as she sailed to join her husband in Jamaica.

     Burns is often described as simple, direct, and emotional.  He does not shrink from leaning toward sentiment, but then probably most people have moments when sentimentality sems appropriate.   The strength of his love poetry is not in ingenuity (like Donne) or spirituality (like Dante), but rather in the purity and power of simple emotion as experienced by all people.  Reading Burns’ poem, however, and thinking of his biography, one might well think that he is enjoying the display of his loss at parting nearly as much as he might welcome another day spent together.   

     “To a Louse, on Seeing one on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church,” like the poems to a toothache, a mouse, and a haggis comically focuses on a “low” theme, here exaggerated by the insect’s crawling about on a lovely lady at church, while the pest better belongs “in some beggar’s haffet squattle” (“squatting in  some beggar’s ‘temple’”).  While amusement is the primary intention of the piece, it satirizes the woman’s pretensions at the same time as praising her, with the noxious louse indicating first, that, whatever her charms, she occupies the same world as those with less status.  She is slightly ridiculous for her failure at self-awareness ("To see oursels as ithers see us!") which leads her to “mony a blunder” and “foolish notions,” due to her putting on “airs in dress and gait.”   

     The language is lively and conversational from the opening “Ha!”  The metric form is close to ballad measure, a pattern also prominent in nursery rhymes, alternating three-beat lines with four beat ones and knitting them with rhymes.  Thus Burns poems, which employs four and two (rather than three) beat lines for variety, sounds more casual and popular than the sustained five beat line of Shakespeare or Milton.  He rhymes AAABAB, intensifying the melody to resemble a dance tune at a village festival.

     His conversational tone is appropriate for poems in the form of letters of which he composed many.  His amiability is evident in his “Epistle to John Rankine," in which the poet’s friend is celebrated for a sometimes raucous conviviality in which the poet is glad to join.  While celebrating their high spirits and occasional frolics, Burns also criticizes the hypocritical moralists who would condemn them.  In the end, the greater part of his verse letter is concerned with the poet’s being apprehending poaching and subsequently fined.  The tone is evident in the first stanza.

 

O Rough, rude, ready-witted Rankine,

The wale o' cocks for fun an' drinkin!

There's monie godly folks are thinkin,

Your dreams an' tricks

Will send you, Korah-like, a sinkin,

Straught to auld Nick's.

 

Notice that the meter and rhyme scheme are the same as in the poem to a louse.

     One need not have Scots ancestry to find Burns one of the most approachable of poets (apart from his dialect).  His poems are generally transparent enough to be understood at first hearing and sufficiently musical to please the ear.  Those uncomfortable with more learned or elite art may enjoy the lyrics of this poet who, like Whitman, thought of himself as a man of the people, and those of us who have bristled at the world’s injustice appreciate his ridicule of the ruling class and praise for the workers.  Finding himself out of the mainstream of English literary tradition, Burns was able to contribute novel sounds and sentiments that continue to capture the imagination of readers far from the fields of his Ayrshire upbringing.  

The Christian Romanticism of Chateaubriand’s Atala and René

 

 

Portrait of Chateaubriand 

by Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, 1809.

 

 

References in parentheses to Atala refer to the 1905 edition with an introduction, notes, and a vocabulary by Oscar Kuhns; those to René to Claude Martin’s edition of 1984.  Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.  Translated passages are my own hasty renderings; the original French is relegated to endnotes. 

 

 

     Chateaubriand is universally considered the founding figure of French Romanticism, and there can be no question about the label’s general accuracy.  His self-consciously emotional analyses of nature and of love made him an icon in his day, much as Byron was in England just a few decades later [1],  Many readers have found René to have something in common with Childe Harold as exemplars of the mal du siècle, and something of their kinship as celebrities might be inferred from the tousled portraits of the viscount by Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson and of the baron by Thomas Phillips. 

      Chateaubriand not only created a character who wandered the world trying to free himself from alienation, he himself spent time in an America that was still largely possessed by its natives.  The question has been debated by historically-minded critics how much of America Chateaubriand actually saw.  He surely never visited the Mississippi River or Florida, and it is very unlikely that did he ever wrote while squatting on the floors of Indian hits, as he liked to claim.  Indeed, it is not direct observation but rather his tumultuous imagination that underlies his descriptions of America,

     Among the most rhetorically elaborate and mythic passages in Atala is the opening description of the Mississippi River, so extravagant as to be altogether unrealistic, so majestic it is worth quoting at length. 

 

When all these rivers are swollen with the torrents of winter, when the storms have uprooted great swaths of forest, the felled trees fill their sources.  Before long the mud has cemented them and creepers joins them together and the plants, sending out roots in every direction, consolidate the debris.  Carried off by the foaming waves, they descend in the Meschacebe which takes hold of them, carrying them to the Gulf of Mexico only to run grounds on banks of sand, multiplying thereby the river’s outlets.  Now and then the river raises its voice while passing these heaps and   its overflowing waters spread among the forests’ colonnades and the pyramidal Indian tombs.  It is the Nile of the desert.  But grace is always accompanied by grandeur in scenes of nature.  While the central current pulls the corpses of pines and oaks toward the sea, one sees currents on either side rising, along the shores, floating islands of water cabbage and water-lilies, the yellow blossoms of which mount up like little pavilions.  Green snakes, blue herons, pink flamingos, and young crocodiles embark as passengers on these flowery vessels, and the colony, unfurling its golden sails before the wind, lands asleep in some secluded cove of the river.                 (1-2) [2]

 

     This grand vision of great island-like agglomerations of timber cascading downstream, reshaping the topography moment by moment, in effect constantly reshaping the continent, is enacted between the columns of the trees and near to native peoples’ funerary pyramids, suggesting Greek and Roman antiquity and the even older Egyptian civilization.  Not only are the great floating islands of debris covered in flowers; they are also rich to an unlikely degree in fauna, birds and reptiles, which sail like the early explorers until they come to rest by chance and establish a terra nova. 

     The primary characteristics of Chateaubriand’s America are its magnificent richness in animals and plants and the wildness of its formation amid turbulent earth-shaping floods.  The new world is specifically associated with Eden, for instance in Genesis’ mention of four rivers but the reference is rendered ambiguous by the counterbalance of Milton’s four infernal streams [3].

     The fecundity of nature recurs elsewhere, for instance, during the escape of Atala and Chactas when the cedars and live oaks, covered with Spanish moss, teem with wildlife: “butterflies, bright flies, hummingbirds, green parakeets, and blue jays” (28) [4] in a veritable swarm of life.  Likewise, the scene at Niagara Falls is awe-inspiring not simply because of the cataract, but also because of the eagles who “ride on currents of air” and the altogether unreal picture if “wolverines” who “hang by their flexible tails at the end of a low branch, to seize from the abyss the broken corpses of elks and bears” (77)[5]. 

     Yet such fantasies were not the only indulgences Chateaubriand allowed his imagination.  Since his reconversion to Roman Catholicism in 1798, he had abandoned the philosophes to become a committed Christian, and both Atala and René were portions of his Génie du christianisme, a work which as a whole sought to justify religion on largely aesthetic rather than intellectual or spiritual grounds.  Thus, while nature may be a staggering marvel, human beings, infected by original sin, are unredeemed until accepting Jesus.  In order to advance, Atala must “have recourse to the Christian God” and pray to Mary (18).   The”savages” inflict dreadful tortures on their captives (19), and in fact cruelly kill the benevolent Father Aubry (79).  They are, at best, “child-like” (68), with “sorrows” that “arise from ignorance” which can be remedied only by “necessary instruction” (58) [7].  Chactas cannot be a lover of Atala unless he “learn the lessons of the Christian faith” (64).  Doubt is impossible as Chateaubriand describes a veritable theophany. 

 

The grotto seemed suddenly lit up; one could hear in the air the words of angels and the tremelos of heavenly harps; and when the recluse took the holy vessel from his tabernacle, it seemed I saw God himself emerging from the side of the mountain. (65) [8]

 

     A powerful figure for René’s “faiblesse” is his prospect from the top of Etna. 

 

     A youth full of passion, sitting at the mouth of a volcano, weeping for the mortals whose homes he sees below is doubtless, o old men, an object deserving of your pity, but, whatever you might think of René the scene provides an image of his nature, of his being.  Thus during my entire life I have had before my eyes the creation, at once huge and imperceptible, and an abyss open at my side. (67) [9]

 

His is an existential anxiety, not a Christian “dark night of the soul,” specifically because what he faces is not the prospect of judgement and eventual apocalypse, but rather a drear emptiness.  Though he placed the novella as part of his apologia for Christianity, the hero lacks Christian hope.  A distinctly modern variant on the medieval sin of acedia (sometimes spelled accidie) which Aquinas describes (in Summa Theologica II) not as a symptom of sensitivity or a contemplative stage but rather as a flight from the divine, amounting very nearly to unbelief.  The closing words of the epilogue’s narrator in Atala indicate a remoteness from Christian salvation: “man, you are nothing but a passing illusion, a melancholy dream.  You exist only for sadness; you are nothing but the dolor of your soul and the unending misery of your soul.” (81) [10]

     This is not the only contradiction which Chateaubriand ignored as a consequence of his clinging to Christianity’s consolations.  The glorification of nature itself evident in the opening passage (and throughout) is sweeping and unqualified, familiar from many other authors’ Romantic rhetoric, yet inconsistent with the Christian notion of the natural world as fallen.  The most fundamental statement of this proposition  is Genesis 3:17: “cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life,” but the idea recurs, for instance in Romans 8:22: “For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.”

     America was an apposite scene for René’s ambivalence toward nature, natives, and, indeed, the entire creation.  Since Europeans arrived on these shores, the country was often described as an unspoiled paradise but equally often as hell.  Thus to many early settlers Indians must be remnants of the ten lost tribes of Israel whose conversion would lkead to the apocalypse.  Thomas Morton who founded the colony at Merrymount called New England Canaan in his 1637 book, and for John Winthrop the Massachusetts Bay Colony was “a city on a hill,”  [11] while William Bradford says the new world was a “hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men" [12].  For William Crashaw the devil "visibly and palpably reigns” in America and for John Smith “the chefe God they [the natives] worship is the Devel.” [13]

     Just as Chateaubriand’s lifelong royalist politics may seem to harmonize poorly with his liberal sentiments on m any issues, his allegiance to orthodox Christianity compromises his Romanticism.  His enthusiasm for nature is prototypically Romantic, but, to be consistent, this would be accompanied by a view of the indigenous people as Rousseauian “noble savages,” though for Chateaubriand their heathenism is a fatal deficiency.   Similarly, René’s despair is a godless one, though he is nominally Christian.  These contradictions would scarcely have bothered the author, whose conclusions were always more impressionistic than systematic.  Atala and René dramatic examples of the mythic use of the American colonies by an author who broke considerable new ground while insisting on traditional religious faith.

    

 

 

1.  In his Mémoires d’outre-tombe (vi) Chateaubriand clearly regards Byron as a rival, complaining of the British writer’s failing to name him as an influence and disappointedly calling himself “one of those fathers who are disowned when the son has come to power” in an trope invoking Oedipal anxiety of influence.

2.  Quand tous ces fleuves se sont gonflés, des déluges de l’hiver, quand les tempêtes ont abattu des pans entiers de forêts, les arbres déracinés s’assemblent sur les sources. Bientôt la vase les cimente, les lianes les enchainent, et des plantes, y prenant racine de toutes parts, achévent de consolider ces débris. Charriés par les vagues écumantes, ils descendent au Meschacebé: le fleuve s'en empare, les pousse au golfe Mexicain, les échoue sur des bancs de sable, et accroit ainsi le nombre de ses embouchures. Par intervalles, il éléve sa voix en passant sur les monts, et répand ses eaux débordées autour des colonnades des foréts et des pyramides des tombeaux indiens; c'est le Nil des déserts. Mais la gráce est toujours unie à la magnificence dans les scénes de la nature: tandis que le courant du milieu entraîne vers la mer les cadavres des pins et des chénes, on voit sur les deux courants latéraux remonter, le long des rivages, des iles flottantes de pistia et de nénufar, dont les roses jaunes s'élévent comme de petits pavillons. Des serpents verts, des hérons bleus, des flamants roses, de jeunes crocodiles, s'embarquent passagers sur ces vaisseaux de fleurs, et la colonie, déployant au vent ses voiles d’or, va aborder endormie dans quelque anse retirée du fleuve.

3.  See Genesis 2:10 and Paradise Lost II, 575.

4.  Papillons, de mouches brillantes, de colibris, de perruche vertes, de geais d’azur.

5.  Des aigles, entraînés par le courant d'air, descendent en tournoyant au fond du gouffre, et des carcajous se suspendent par leurs queues flexibles au bout d'une branche abaissée, pour saisir dans l'abîme les cadavres brisés des élans et des ours.

6.  La fille de Simaghan ut recours au Dieu des chrétiens.

7.  Tous vos malheurs viennent de votre «ignorance; c'est votre éducation sauvage et le manque «d'instruction nécessaire qui vous ont perdue;

8.  La grotte parut soudain illuminée; on entendit dans les airs les paroles des anges et les frémissements des harpes célestes; et lorsque le solitaire tira le vase sacré de son tabernacle, je crus voir Dieu lui-même sortir du flanc de la montagne.

9.  Un jeune homme plein de passions, assis sur la bouche d'un volcan, et pleurant sur les mortels dont il voyait à ses pieds les demeures, n'est, sans doute, ô vieillards, qu'un objet digne de votre pitié; mais, quoi que vous puissiez penser de René, ce tableau vous offre l'image de son caractère et de son existence: c'est ainsi que toute ma vie j'ai eu devant les yeux une création à la fois immense et imperceptible, et un abîme ouvert à mes côtés.

10.  Homme tu n'es qu'un songe rapide, un rêve douloureux ; tu n'existes que par le malheur ; tu n'es quelque chose que par la tristesse de ton âme et I'éternelle mélancolie de ta pensée.

11.  In his 1630 sermon "A Model of Christian Charity."

12.  Bradford,  Of Plymouth Plantation (1952) p. 62.

y.  Wm. Crashaw, "The Epistle Dedicatory" to Alexander Whitaker's Good News from Virginia (London, 1613), in Early Accounts of Life in Colonial Virginia, 1609-1613.  Ed. W. F. Craven (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimile & Reprints 1976, n. p.

13.  John Smith A Map of Virginia with a description of the country (1612), 29.

Breton's Surrealism

  

 For convenience, my quotations from Breton use the translation by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, readily available at https://monoskop.org/images/2/2f/Breton_Andre_Manifestoes_of_Surrealism.pdf.   References in parentheses are to this text; those in brackets are endnotes.

 

       Surrealism is one of the chief artistic movements of the twentieth century.  Its practices are now not only familiar in countless works of art, but in advertisements and popular culture as well.  Song lyrics (and band names) that would have seemed radically revolutionary in the 1920s had, by the 1960s, become commonplace on popular radio stations.  In spite of earlier precedents for writing that seems Surrealist as well as prior uses of the term by Apollinaire and Yvan Goll, the Surrealists, as an organized cultural formation, are generally traced to André Breton’s 1924 “Surrealist Manifesto.”  For decades Breton defined the movement, notoriously exerting a tyrannical authority over the group, admitting new acolytes and expelling the insubordinate, while maintaining tight control of the brand during his entire life.

     Intended as a revolutionary call to action, Breton’s manifesto might well be read as a look backwards, a belated document of Romanticism.  It is quite natural that he makes an extended example of a passage from the 1796 novel The Monk.  The Surrealist valorization of irrationality and the marvelous would have been familiar to Lewis’s readers over a hundred years earlier.  For Breton “in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest.” (9)

     While Breton’s Surrealist program is wandering and self-indulgent, its general drift is unmistakable.  He seeks to question the value of received ideas and everyday experience, rejecting the limitation of imagination by “the laws of an arbitrary utility”  which confine most peoples’ imagination to “a state of slavery.” (4)  “The case against the realistic attitude demands to be examined,” he insists, since “the realistic attitude, inspired by positivism . . . clearly seems to me to be hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement. I loathe it, for it is made up of mediocrity, hate, and dull conceit.” (6)  In reaction against Realism, he quotes a passage from Crime and Punishment, the “purely informative style” of which he declares to be an “unworthy” “school-boy description.” (8)

     In place of a straightforward imitation of ordinary (or dramatic) lived experience, Breton offers new perspectives available in such sources as dreams, madness, chance operations, and the minds of children.  The first of these suggestions flies in the face of the cliché that nothing is more boring than other people’s dreams, a notion seconded by most readers of Anais Nin and Jack Kerouac.  In literature all readers are aware that anything presented as a dream, a vision, a fantasy, or hallucination is likely to be of critical importance in  understanding the narrative in which it is embedded, but these are carefully composed elements of a work of art, not simple transcriptions of real dreams.   Deluded perhaps by such precedents, Breton and others (Gide even) published what purported to be their dreams, but these have attracted little attention, particularly when compared to the concept on which their presentation to the public is founded.  The Surrealist fetishization of dreams is  a modern twist on the ancient idea that at night the gods speak to the sleeper, only in its twentieth century iteration the source of wisdom is not the divine but rather the unconscious.

     In fact the most dreams can do is to suggest possibilities that would not otherwise occur to the writer and to widen the scope of what is permissible in narrative.  The artist must, however, process the raw material presented by this richer inventory of possibilities, selecting those which taste admits whether the decisions be conscious or intuitive.  Fruits of this new freedom are apparent in the devices of magic realism and in metafiction.  Breton had rejected the therapeutic value of dreams claimed by Freudian analysis, but maintained their aesthetic value, a claim which has proven largely fruitless in practice.  His story about Saint-Pol-Roux posting a sign outside his bedchamber declaring “the poet is working” (14) is delightful, but implies nothing about the poet’s actual writing routine.  Far from recognizing the craftsmanship and care that produces worthwhile art, Breton provocatively (and simplistically) claims that the waking state is “a phenomenon of interference” and calls for “sleeping logicians” and “sleeping philosophers.” (12)

     According to Breton what limits the artist, in his terms what keeps “the flag of imagination furled,” is an unjustified “fear of madness.” (6)  Since Breton’s manifesto, the art world has cultivated an appreciation for “outsider art,” what Dubuffet called art brut, many of the most celebrated works of which were made by people diagnosed with major mental illness.  The reader may wonder whether Breton learned anything from contact with people suffering from major mental illness.  To him mad people “derive a great deal of comfort and consolation from their imagination,” indeed “they enjoy their madness,” (5) generalizations which would scarcely be consistent with what psychiatric workers and the families of the afflicted observe.  While the art of people like Adolf Wölfli and Henry Darger is indeed impressive and beautiful, that is simply because they are outstanding artists, not because of their illness.   On the other hand, Breton notes with satisfaction that Robert Desnos’ drawings were taken to be the work of an insane person, though the artist was not, in fact, mad. (23) 

     Breton names “psychic automatism” as the very heart of Surrealism (26), and “automatism” in English or French can only mean production without conscious control.   The most important element of his free-writing with Soupault is that they make no revisions. (24)  He emphasizes “the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” (26)  Surrealism thus, by only a slight elaboration, became associated with altogether chance operations, the sort called “aleatory” by Werner Meyer-Eppler in 1955.  The notion that a discerning judgment is an obstacle can be entertained only by those who have never devoted prolonged attention to works produced without conscious craftsmanship.. 

     Finally, Breton fancies that wisdom resides in the insights of small children, another Romantic notion straight from Wordsworth.  According to him to find inspiration, one need only “tum back toward his childhood.” (3)  Yet this enlightened early stage is undone by education.  “At an early age children are weaned on the marvelous, and later on they fail to retain a sufficient virginity of mind to thoroughly enjoy fairy tales.” (15)  Some writers, such as Chatterton and Rimbaud, are the more celebrated for writing done in their teens, and parents are fond of quoting their clever sayings of their offspring, but no art whatever by young children is preserved and enjoyed. 

     The barrenness of all these resources – dreams, insanity, suspension of judgement, and the mind of early childhood --  is transformed to luxuriant fruitfulness, however, when Breton’s ideas are read as metaphorical gestures, as figures of speech.  In this rhetorical way, he is recommending writing as weighted with significance as dreams, as daring and innovative as the moves of a schizophrenic’s mind, as unpredictable as randomness, and as fresh and attractive as a child’s imagination.  Reading the manifesto in this way produces ideas far less provocative and dramatic but far more defensible.

     While Breton’s condemnation  of rational cognitive processes pervades the manifesto throughout, providing a polemical froth that he never cares to justify, the real innovation of Surrealism, the acceptance of underdetermined metaphors had more lasting influence.   Many critics and readers are, like Breton, susceptible to “the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations.” (26)  In support he offers the testimony of Apollinaire (who recommended figures of speech with an “extreme degree of immediate absurdity” which “upon closer scrutiny” which may “give way to everything admissible, everything legitimate in the world.” (24) 

     Even more explicit is the prescription he quotes from Reverdy.

 

     It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities.

     The more the relationship between the two Juxtaposed realities is distant and true) the stronger the image will be-the greater its emotional power and poetic reality. (20)

 

While clearly going too far in advocating such “modern” images by claiming that there is a direct correspondence between “distance” and value, this formulation states the principle unmistakably.

     Breton proceeds then to provide an example of his own, saying that the apparently meaningless phrase "There is a man cut in two by the window," occurred to him quite clearly but without any cause in prior thought or experience, straight from the unconscious he would have his readers believe. (21)   This verbal “apparition” then stimulates “a whole series of phrases” coming into his consciousness without reflection or intention.  The reader has nothing but Breton’s enthusiasm to indicate that the image has any meaning or that this concatenation of words has the slightest value.

     Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto” is less a statement of aesthetic theory or a handbook for practice than a pose, a work of art on its own, regardless of its “truth” or “usefulness.”  As a statement of what might by now perhaps be labeled the “classic avant-garde,” it is bracing in its cheekiness and provocative in its iconoclasm.  In visual art and in literature, Surrealism’s primary contribution was in fact the admittance of novel and “readerly” metaphors, to an extent far beyond what the Symbolists had dared.  Today art-lovers have become accustomed to the use of such figures of speech, finding them far less puzzling than they had seemed a few generations ago.  When “exquisite corpses” are a recommended elementary school exercise and dream imagery fills music videos the time has perhaps come to define what was new and what is lasting about Breton’s Surrealism.

Language and Lies in Sand’s Indiana

 

Passages cited from the novel are in my own off-the-cuff translations.  Endnotes provide the text in the original French and the chapter in which each occurs.

 

     Amantine Aurore Dupin, who published under the name George Sand, produced a prodigious body of work, amounting to perhaps seventy novels and fifty other volumes, becoming one of the most popular writers of her day.  She was, however, and remains today, at least as well-known for her life as for her writing.  The attention she drew is hardly surprising as she courted notoriety, smoking tobacco and wearing men’s clothing while conducting numerous love affairs with both women such as actress Marie Dorval and with male fellow artists Prosper Mérimée, Alfred de Musset, and Frédéric Chopin among others.  In spite of her sometimes transgressive ways, her work was immensely popular with the public while critics, since Victor Hugo at her funeral labeled her an immortal, have consistently regarded her as one of the greatest novelists of nineteenth century France.

     Just as her lifestyle in some ways defied the norms of her time, her version of Romanticism included anti-Romantic parody and ample irony.  The natural description in the conclusion of her first novel Indiana is more straightforward Romanticism, celebrating Réunion’s simple island scenery as at once idyllic in its serenity and picturesque in its confusion: “in the Brulé de Saint Paul all the forms, all the beauty, all the playful and vigorous elements, these are all recombined, superimposed and arranged, put together in a single stormy night.” [1]  The trajectory of the theme as a whole is romantic as well as Romantic with its happy ending, a satisfying marriage with Ralph, isolated from the world but sustained by mutual love.

     Sand, however, often casts a caustic satiric eye on society and portrays the provincials as cruel, hypocritical, and thoughtless.  Romantic assumptions are deflated in the observation that “this was not the first time that Raymon had seen a woman take love seriously, though, luckily for society, such examples are rare” [2]  The locals are seen as vain and malicious.  “The spirit of a small town is, as you surely know, the most wicked in the world.  Good people are never recognized there, and any superior minds are natural enemies of the public . . . If you make war on prejudice, pettiness, vice, you insult them personally, you attack that which to them is dearest” [3]  Sand deserves the recognition from  feminists for identifying the sexism that unjustly limits women’s roles.  Indiana defiantly says to her husband, “I know I am the slave and you the lord.  The law of the land makes you the master. . . . but my will, monsieur, is my own.”  [4]  The novel’s primary plot thread, woven of Indiana’s contrasting relations with Raymon and Ralph, takes place against a backdrop of town gossips whose idle talk easily turns malicious.

     The general social critique and its pointed sexist corollary are exemplified in Raymon’s relation with Indiana.  He is no worse than typical when it seems to him that anyone would be “ungrateful” were he to “reproach Providence for the unhappiness of others when he himself has had only her smiles and favors.” [5]  He takes advantage of a vulnerable woman with blithe entitlement and without hesitation. Raymon is surely exceptional, however, in the extent to which he maintains such an elaborate façade of Romantic notions.  His use of language is as spirited as it is mendacious.  He had “a rare faculty . . . of refuting positive truth by sheer talent,” which served him as well in then government as in his personal life.  For him language is “a queen of prostitutes” and he possesses the “rare skill to refute a plain truth through his skills.” [6]  He repeatedly generates great smokescreens of words to obscure his true motives and intentions, most extravagantly in chapters vi, xvii, xviii, and xxii, with rhetoric.  The reader knows his ach-romantic fusillades are insincere show-pieces, meant only to gain him an amusing if temporary lover while at the same time displaying his genteel accomplishments. 

Right now, Indiana, give me orders!  I am your slave, you know that perfectly well.  I would give my life for an hour in your arms, I would suffer all my life for one of your smiles.  I am willing to be your friend, your brother, nothing more.  If I suffer, you shall not know it.  [7]

He says this, claiming as he does a suffering which he scarcely feels.  His language conceals the truth, asserting a tender and vulnerable heart while the reader recognizes that it in fact reveals his cruel duplicity.

     The showy fraud of his language is only emphasized by the contrast with its complement in the usage of Ralph who feels emotions strongly but says nothing.  It is little wonder that the reader does not perceive the depth of his feelings having read early on that his “only passion was fox-hunting.” [8]  The reader assumes the omniscient narrator is accurate in the devastating observation that, though Sir Ralph’s portrait has little to recommend it with all its “puerile fidelities” and “bourgeois minutiae,” “there was in the world only one thing on earth more insignificant than the portrait, and that was its original.” [9]  Yet this impression turns out tom be wholly mistaken.  Though “giving all the appearance of coldness and selfishness,” in fact “hunting and study had been only a pretext to conceal his long and bitter reveries.” [10]  Ironically, while he is labeled an “egoist” due to his “stone mask,” he was, in fact “born to love.” [11]  This contradiction is for Ralph “the secret of my life.” [12]

     Still, the truth about Ralph’s emotional life does emerge.  He and Indiana contemplate a Romantic double suicide like that of Heinrich von Kleist and Henriette Vogel, but they stop short of that irrevocable step and claim a happy if isolated life on a remote plantation.  There, with their removal from the web of social lies, they may tend their gardens in peace.   

     Such a conclusion is profoundly Romantic and Sand is routinely and casually called a Romantic, but this usage is imprecise.  In Indiana she engages Romantic conventions, but only to confute them.  The rural setting is satirized rather than idealized; it is full of venal and vicious types, though Eden recurs in the “Indian cottage” [13] of the conclusion.  Mme. Delvare’s passions led her only into self-deception.  The choice of Ralph, who had earlier seemed impossibly dull, turns out to be the right one and marriage more satisfying than an affair.  The glorious display of language, the sort of thing that Wordsworth considered the “spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion” is in this novel a pernicious and deceitful spectacle.  Perhaps in response to the requirements of a popular novel (and Sand was long a best-selling writer), in spite of the author’s own counter-cultural lifestyle and her dim view of the provincials, her leading lady (in spite of her errors of a mésalliance and an infatuation) and leading man (though more silent than most strong and silent heroes) are quite conventional.  From the tensions generated by these dialectics – popular and rebellious, Romantic and Realistic, art as truth and art as lies – rises the music of the novel. 

 

  

1.  Conclusion ”Dans le Brûlé de Saint-Paul, toutes les formes, toutes les beautés, toutes les facéties, toutes les hardiesses ont été réunies, superposées, agencées, construites en une nuit d’orage.”

2.  ch. xii “Ce n’était pas la première fois que Raymon voyait une femme prendre l’amour au sérieux, quoique ces exemples soient rares, heureusement pour la société.”

3.  ch. xix “L’esprit des petites villes est, vous le savez sans doute, le plus méchant qui soit au monde. Là, toujours les gens de bien sont méconnus, les esprits supérieurs sont ennemis-nés du public . . . Faites-vous la guerre aux préjugés, aux petitesses, aux vices, vous les insultez personnellement, vous les attaquez dans ce qu’ils ont de plus cher.”

4.  ch. xxi “Je sais que je suis l’esclave et vous le seigneur. La loi de ce pays vous a fait mon maître . . . mais sur ma volonté, monsieur, vous ne pouvez.”

5.  . ch. x “Quel homme est assez ingrat envers la Providence pour lui reprocher le malheur des autres, si pour lui elle n’a eu que des sourires et des bienfaits ?”

6.  x  “une reine prostituée, ”“Cette rare faculté qu’il possédait, de réfuter par le talent la vérité positive”

7.  xviii “À présent, ordonne, Indiana ! je suis ton esclave, tu le sais bien. Je donnerais ma vie pour une heure passée dans tes bras ; mais je puis souffrir toute une vie pour obtenir un de tes sourires. Je serai ton ami, ton frère, rien de plus. Si je souffre, tu ne le sauras pas.”

8.  vi “un Anglais passionné seulement pour la chasse du renard!”

9.  xxx “toutes ses puérilités de ressemblance, toutes ses minuties bourgeoises,” “Il n’y avait qu’une chose au monde qui fût plus insignifiant que ce portrait, c’était l’original.”

10.  xxiv “donner toutes les apparences de la froideur et de l’égoïsme,” “Et pourtant la chasse et l’étude n’étaient que le prétexte dont il couvrait ses amères et longues rêveries.”

11.  xxx “un masque de pierre,” “j’etais né pour aimer.”                                                                                 

12.  xxx “c’est le secret de ma vie.”

13.  Conclusion “notre chaumière indienne.”

Every Reader's Coleridge

      This is the eighteenth in a series of essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) non-scholarly readers to the work of important poets. Consult the Index for the current month under Blog Archive on the right.  An introduction called “Why Read Poetry?” is available at http://williamseaton.blogspot.com/2018/05/why-read-poetry.html. 

     In this series I limit my focus to the discussion, often including a close paraphrase, of only three or four of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography, eschewing most byways and all footnotes. The poems discussed are all readily available on the internet. 

 

      Samuel Taylor Coleridge is known to most readers through a few poems so widely anthologized and reprinted in textbooks that students often encounter them in classrooms.   Then, too, he has a reputation both as a poetic innovator, the founder with Wordsworth of the theory and practice of English Romanticism, and as a drug addict.  Lyrical Ballads, the ground-breaking book that proclaimed the new style in 1798 included poems by both writers.  In the introduction Wordsworth, the nature poet who was said by his friend De Quincey to be addicted not to drugs or alcohol but to hiking, declared his aim “to make the incidents of common life interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature.”  They agreed that Coleridge would adopt the complementary technique: to write about the supernatural “yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief [the first use of this term] for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”  Wordsworth meant to defamiliarize commonplace experience by seeing deeply into it, while Coleridge would indicate the symbolic relevance of the exotic and extraordinary.

     Times may have changed, but in my day at least, it was all but impossible to avoid getting “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” in school.  Its emphatic, if somewhat muddy, moral theme and its archaizing trappings (including the spelling of the title and the marginal notes) made it popular among pedagogues and its narrative ballad-like stanzas seemed more approachable than odes.  Folksong, which had been dismissed as sub-literary, was embraced by the Romantics such as Bishop Percy and Robert Burns in Britain and  Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano in Germany.  The form particularly suited Coleridge’s project because the supernatural often plays a role in English ballads, though his own story is recognizably in the "gathic" style of the late eighteenth century and has little in common with the Middle Ages. 

     This passage includes perhaps the poem’s most well-known lines (“Water, water, every where,/ Nor any drop to drink”) before indulging in horror movie scares in which “slimy things” dance about in lurid special effects.

 

Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.

 

Water, water, every where,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink.

 

The very deep did rot: O Christ!

That ever this should be!

Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs

Upon the slimy sea.

 

About, about, in reel and rout

The death-fires danced at night;

The water, like a witch's oils,

Burnt green, and blue and white. (115-130)

 

The poem invokes a kind of Calvinist divine judgement in which the mariner is punished for his violence against the albatross, though, of course, the crew also perishes in collateral damage, while the protagonist goes on to work out his cursed destiny rather like the Wandering Jew.  The moral, when it arrives, seems facile:

 

He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all.

                                    (614-617)

 

     A careful reader is likely to find this an inadequate theme.  Surely the story suggests not only a deep love for the entire creation, hence pacifism and vegetarianism and true Christian nonresistance, but also the unknown impact of casual choices, a sort of tragic fate or ἀνάγκη..  When the mariner shoots the albatross, no motive is given.  The act is as gratuitous as Meursault’s  killing in The Stranger, yet, once done, it determines his entire destiny.  There is as much of the absurd as there is of retributive justice in the story.

     In fact the supernatural element, not the theme, is the heart of the poem’s appeal.  The “special effects” quoted above are expanded to cover a prolonged agony in which the crews’ souls go whizzing by as they die one by one, apparently having become mere aspects of the mariner’s punishment.  (The image reminds me of the skeleton sent over the heads of his audiences for showings of House on Haunted Hill [1959]).  Yet in spite of the mariner’s repentance, he must ever wander on, cautioning others to have compassion.  Very like William Castle’s modern horror movie, the creepy and mysterious thrills are the principal point. 

     The supernatural is replaced by the fabulous and exotic in “Kubla Khan,” all the more fascinating when the author notes that its origin was “a sort of Reverie brought on, by two grains of Opium.”  Here Kubla Khan’s “pleasure-dome” is not just a luxury resort with its gardens and “many an incense-bearing tree”; it is at the same time “a savage place,” “haunted” and “filled with wails,” where tumultuous movements of the earth occur.  He hears then the melody of the “Abyssinian maid” whose song, if he could but remember, would allow him to “build that dome in air,/ That sunny dome! those caves of ice!”  Yet the music is not purely pleasurable; the sublime insights of art are menacing as well, even those from the most profound source.  The fruits of divine inspiration here seem dangerous, wrought about with magical protective ritual (“Weave a circle round him thrice”).  Yet, just as in  the “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,” the primary significance is not in theme at all, but rather in the creation of a tone, a mood of dramatic portent, and the writer’s providing a strange and marvelous setting, a second-hand account of an obscure passage brought to life in a drug dream.  The “person from Porlock” who interrupts his reverie is in fact oneself, the reader, for whom the poem was set down, the spectator who may experience the weird at second-hand.  Again, the poem’s primary appeal is like that of science fiction or fantasy, the appeal of the strange.

     Though “Dejection: An Ode” deals with the natural phenomenon of depression, it associates the author’s low spirits with storms and opens with an archaizing, folk prognostication of impending severe weather from a stanza of an old ballad.  In his earlier poem “The Eolian Harp” (1796) the device (a passive musical instrument like wind chimes) had produced “a soft floating witchery of sound” which suggested. to him a magnificent song of the whole creation “Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,/ At once the Soul of each, and God of all.”  Here, however, the strains of the harp “better far were mute,” since, like the ominous moon, they presage disaster and thus “better far were mute.” 

     The poem proceeds to specify the sensations of a mind sunk in depression with vivid imagery.

 

          A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,

         A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,

         Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,

                In word, or sigh, or tear—    (21-24)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

                My genial spirits fail;

                And what can these avail

To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?

                                          (39-41)

 Coleridge is very much the modern neurotic, a member of the “poor loveless ever-anxious crowd.” (52) Though he gazes at nature, it is with “how blank an eye” (30) and his mood is unrelieved.  He can only “see, not feel” (38) the charms of the creation.  He come then to realize that he “may not hope from outward forms to win/ The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.” (45-46)  The appreciation of the world is a reciprocal affair, “we receive but what we give,” (47)  In the end

 

from the soul itself must issue forth

A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud

           Enveloping the Earth—

                                        (53-55)

  

To regain access to the divine “Joy” love provides a route.  “This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist,/

     This beautiful and beauty-making power” (62-63) arrives with a spiritual “wedding” (68).

 

 

  We in ourselves rejoice!

And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,

      All melodies the echoes of that voice,

All colours a suffusion from that light.

                                        (72-75)

 

 The poet finds refuge in love from the “viper thoughts, that coil around my mind/ Reality's dark dream!” (94-5), though these may arise from real conditions, the “groans” of “trampled men, with smarting wounds” that suffer “pain, and shudder with the cold.” (112-113)  He is thus able to conclude with a victorious wish for the high spirits of his beloved; in the warmth of human love he finds melancholy’s remedy.

 

           With light heart may she rise,

           Gay fancy, cheerful eyes,

      Joy lift her spirit, joy attune her voice;

To her may all things live, from pole to pole,

Their life the eddying of her living soul!

      O simple spirit, guided from above,

Dear Lady! friend devoutest of my choice,

Thus mayest thou ever, evermore rejoice.

                                              (132-139)

 

     This conclusion in felicity is often lacking in Coleridge, a man of decidedly depressive tendencies who served an addiction for much if his life.  His somber and intellectual vision is not to everyone’s taste.  Yet Coleridge contributed to the modern style by his objections to neo-Classicism including his insistence that poetry should not stray too far from the ordinary spoken language.  His fondness for the both the quaint and the tumultuous have aged less well.  Much of his work is too philosophical for many sensibilities.  A hostile critic once accused him of over-emotionalism, labeling him a member of "the School of whining and hypochondriacal poets that haunt the Lakes," but his poetic descendants have been only more self-interested and neurotic.   

     What the reader may make of his poetry, Coleridge is undeniably a substantial critic.  Though philosophers may differ on his significance in the history of ideas, in literature his Lectures on Shakespeare, Biographica Literaria, and  other criticism offer many influential ideas, not least the concept of the "willing suspension of disbelief" and the distinction between "imagination" and "fancy."  His adaptation of Schelling’s notion of Ineinsbildung for which he devised the ungainly term "esemplastic power" exemplifies at once the somewhat opaque vulnerability of his ratiocination and its accurate reflection of the poetic mind.

     If Coleridge is quite certain to be read in the future for his role in literary history, he is surely no less certain to impress new readers every year, even some who encounter him in classrooms, with his fondness for the strange fey quality he found provided  bit of the sublime, and for his pronounced rhythms that render his work always cadenced even when irregular. 

     The curious may visit Coleridge’s grave in  St. Michael’s Church in London to read the poet’s epitaph.  The verses are at first glance entirely conventional with the request for passers-by to pray for the departed and the author’s own hopes for salvation.

 

Stop, Christian passer-by!—Stop, child of God,

And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod

A poet lies, or that which once seemed he.

O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.;

That he who many a year with toil of breath

Found death in life, may here find life in death!

Mercy for praise—to be forgiven for fame

He asked, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same!

 

     First of all, the reader is likely to be struck by the fact that Coleridge has here adopted the role of the Ancient Mariner, accosting others to awake them to truths more easily avoided.  Here the equivalent of the Mariner’s curse is life-long depression (“death in life”).  He expresses also a radical skepticism over his career and even his identity (“or that which once seemed he”).  The close inquirer will observe that the initials in the fourth line are not used solely for the convenient rhyme they allow.  The three English letters sound very much like the Greek word ἐστηση, “he has stood” and the same sounds echo repeatedly throughout the verses beginning with the first line (“Stop, Christian” and “Stop, child”) and continuing to the end ( “through Christ . . .same”).  The given name and the proximity to death suggest the book of Samuel in which David says (as part of the affecting story of his relationship with Jonathan) “there is but a step between me and death” (1 Samuel 20:3).  Later David laments his beloved friend, saying “How are the mighty fallen!” (II Samuel 1, 23-27).  David’s grief is ameliorated, however, by his Biblical confidence in the order of things, a certainty Coleridge may have desired, but never attained.  And so the poet elaborated his simple expression of desire, not so much for everlasting life as for a purchase on a certain truth, with elaborate flights of thought, sound patterns, word-play, and allusion, as though with art he could lift himself into the sublime.  In his weaknesses perhaps even more than in his strengths Coleridge was a harbinger of our belated age.