Sartre's "Black Orpheus"

Numbers in brackets refer to footnotes; those in parentheses are to Sartre’s “Black Orpheus” as it appeared in John MacCombie’s translation in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Autumn, 1964 - Winter, 1965), pp. 13-52. This text is conveniently available online.



     Though in general socio-political readings are a subdivision of theme, and all thematic considerations must in any event be balanced with considerations of form and style, négritude writers themselves have foregrounded race in the movement’s very name, and this fact alone justifies (if not demands) a racial response. Yet racial consciousness can only arise in situations of the encounter, mixing, and conflict among differing ethnic groups, so processes of reaction and creolization inevitably swirl around an identity which in a homogeneous environment would be taken for granted.
     This fact is implicit Senghor’s seminal 1948 Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache. The mere fact of the poets’ use of the French language, reflecting their thoroughly French education is itself evidence of the mixed character of the project. Unlike the writers of the Black Arts Movement, the négritude writers did not shrink from this entanglement with the culture of their colonialist oppressors. Césaire, for instance, declared “What is négritude if not the aggressive proposition of fraternity?” [1] and Senghor called for a “give and take,” resulting in “a cultural métissage,” “a dynamic symbiosis of complementary parts.” According to him “we are all cultural half-castes” and, in fact, “all the great civilizations . . .resulted from interbreeding.” [2]
     The introductory essay in Senghor’s Anthologie by Jean-Paul Sartre titled "Orphée Noir" ("Black Orpheus”) explores this vexed issue, while incidentally guaranteeing the book a wide audience. Sartre may have seemed an unlikely sponsor for these writers from the distant colonies. The Existential philosophy for which he is best-known had, in its prewar form, centered on the individual and had been little concerned with ethical concerns and virtually not at all with political issues.
     The Nazi occupation of France and his nine month term as a prisoner of war altered his views. Upon his return to Paris he became a founder (along with Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others) of the resistance group Socialisme et Liberté. Later he wrote for Camus’ underground paper Combat. The posture of l’homme engagé, the Existential man of action, became for him a proper, even a heroic, response to the absurdity of the human condition. [3] Until the end of his life, he espoused Marxism and remained active in left agitation.
     The Surrealists on the other hand had expressed revolutionary sentiments, socialist, communist, and anarchist from the start as had the Dadaists before them, and in January of 1927 their leaders joined the Communist Party and encouraged others to do so. [4]
     Apart from political considerations, the alliance of négritude writers with Surrealism might have been an insuperable stumbling block for Sartre as he had fiercely criticized the French Surrealists. He rejected Freud and the very notion of a subconscious, characterizing the movement as “an attempt by adults to cling to the destructive daydreams of their adolescent existence.” To Sartre the Surrealists, though they constituted the most important modern poetic movement, nonetheless signaled the bankruptcy of poetry in the West with their abandonment of rationality and absorption in “verbal games.” In Sartre’s view the quietism and impotence of Surrealist theory is evident in their emigration during the Occupation. [5] “They were the proclaimers of catastrophe in the time of fat cows; in the time of lean cows they have nothing more to say.” [6]
     Thus, though he had little affinity with their artistic method or their French patrons, his sympathies lay with the anti-colonial posture of the négritude writers. “Black Orpheus” explicitly foregrounds both the historical moment and Sartre’s own white bourgeois European subjectivity. It is most significant for him that négritude “is inserted into Universal History, it is no longer a state, nor even an existential attitude, it is a Becoming, the black contribution to the evolution of Humanity.” [7] The “mission” of Africans,” like the proletariat’s, "comes to him from his historic position.” (47) According to Sartre cultural nationalism is a stage that necessarily precedes blacks’ organizing for socialism. (19) [8] In fact Sartre begins with politics: “When you removed the gag that was keeping these black mouths shut, what did you expect?” (13) but the political views remain anchored in his own subjectivity. Opening with the declaration “I am talking now to white men” (16), he nonetheless says that whites cannot write about négritude. (35) Yet his own warning does not stop him. To Sartre the black race is “chosen” because of its suffering. He sometimes even approaches the Christian notion of the redemptive power of Christ’s Passion, praising the “righteous suffering” of Africans, (42) and claiming that they discover their own pride only to abandon it “through supreme generosity.” (50) It is through the experience of “the absurdity of suffering” that blacks come to a truth elusive to the bourgeois. (45-6)
     He conflates the aesthetic and the political, claiming that “black poetry in the French language is, in our time, the only great revolutionary poetry.” (16) In the poems of négritude he finds “the most authentic synthesis of revolutionary aspirations and poetic anxiety . . . essentially pure Poetry.” (35) [9]
     Yet much of Sartre’s appreciation is grounded in the acceptance of old stereotypes but with value judgements reversed, a characteristic evident as well in many European connoisseurs of the primitive. Whites are ruled by a crippling “rationalism, materialism, positivism” (17), while blacks possess feeling rather than rationality and a mystic “rapport” in place of science (36) The beauty of black poetry arises from an “intuitive seizure of the human condition and the still-fresh memory of a historic past [slavery].” (43) [emphasis added] “The black man is closer than we to the great period when, as Mallarmé says, ‘the word creates Gods.’” [10] He is therefore enabled to create objective poetry that approaches the charms of magical practice. (29)
     Sartre is well aware that the whole structure is mythic. He says quite clearly that the poets’ Africa is “an imaginary continent” though at the same time “more real.” In the end “if he turns to look squarely at his négritude, it vanishes in smoke.” (21) Though it might be purely mythological this assignment of racial roles is familiar. From Montesquieu and Chateaubriand to D.H. Lawrence and recent Africaphiles like Ulli Beier and Janheinz Jahn, and such musicians as Peter Gabriel and Mickey Hart, white authors have used non-white peoples to represent their own subconscious. They have used this view of non-European peoples to criticize their own cultural values and to privilege irrationality and passion. Thus Jahn argues that African poetry is timeless and pure, devoid of historical moment [11], specifically because such a myth is meaningful to him as a white European just as many in our own country continue to view our aboriginal people as noble savages though the term has become taboo.
     In fact the trois pères themselves collaborated in the construction of this bipolarity. As students they had encountered the ethnological theories of Leo Frobenius and Maurice Delafoss [12] which seemed to validate the idea of an Africa which was truly civilized, though quite unlike Europe.
     Sartre’s politics, as well as, one guesses, his scientific bias and his common sense, resists racial essentialism, though his reasoning seems at times forced. Whites, he says, have “real human flesh the color of black wine” beneath their “strange livid varnish” of whiteness. (14) In spite of the fact that the poems in Senghor’s anthology “were not written for us,” whites can still “tear off our white tights” in order to become simply men” and thus “become part of the totality from which those black eyes exile us.” (15) [13] “This poetry – which seems racial at first – is actually a hymn by everyone for everyone.” (16) “Anti-racist racism” provides the only way out for both black and white. (18) Négritude so efficaciously explodes dualities that it is androgynous. (43)
     Sartre’s sponsorship of négritude thus rests ideologically on his own revaluation of Surrealism as well as a pair of complementary or contradictory tendencies: the provisional acceptance of racial conventions and a fiercely engaged partisanship in behalf of the exploited. In spite of the undoubted significance of Sartre’s endorsement, his judgements seem driven by his political engagement rather than by aesthetic considerations of the poetry itself. Though such discernment may be ethically admirable, evaluation of art can never rest on historical or biographical considerations. The most righteous political art may be incompetent, while those with despicable views may produce great works. Sartre’s “Black Orpheus” is more significant as a document of mid-twentieth century race relations and the decline of old-style colonialism than as a study of new poetry. Fortunately for the reader, it is also a great piece of writing. Just as the essays of James Baldwin are monuments of magnificent American prose quite apart from their historical significance, “Black Orpheus” is a beautiful essay, lit with passion and structured with dramatic rhetoric.



1. Lylian Kesteloot, Négritude et situation coloniale, p. 84. Her Les ecrivains noirs de langue française (1963) was published in translation as Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Négritude in 1974.

2. Senghor: Prose and Poetry, ed. and trans. by Guy Reed and Clive Wake, p. 97 and 74-5.

3. See Sartre on Cuba and later references to Che Guevara as "not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age." Feeling perhaps that this understated his position, Sartre later called Che the "era's most perfect man."

4. Breton, Aragon, Eluard, Unik and Peret joined the Party, though their movement had earlier been associated with anarchism, including contributing a regular column to the anarchist paper Le Libertaire. The ambivalence of the relation between Communists and Surrealists is evident in Breton’s Second Surrealist Manifesto (1929) in which he declares loyalty to “historical materialism” and promises Surrealists will prove “fully capable of doing our duty as revolutionaries” while expressing the fear that other Communists may regard his group as “strange animals.” In 1932 Breton was expelled from the party not for bourgeois individualism but because of his association with Trotsky. At a Communist-dominated International Congress for the Defence of Culture in 1935 the Surrealists who had attended were denounced and allowed only marginal participation. In 1938 an essay “Towards a Free Revolutionary Art” signed by Breton and Diego Rivera was published in the autumn edition of the Partisan Review. It is, however, reprinted in the collection of Trotsky’s writings, Art and Revolution. In La Clé des Champs (Free Rein), published in 1953, Breton explains that Trotsky was the primary author. In 1952 Breton wrote "It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself."

5. Some intellectuals who were even more actively anti-fascists (such as fellow philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch) criticized Sartre’s level of militancy during the Occupation.

6. What is Literature, translated by Bernand Frechtman, p. 220.

7. Ibid. 158-9.

8. Americans may be reminded of the “Black Power” espoused by Malik el Shabazz (né Malcolm Little) and Kwame Ture (né Stokeley Carmichael) before their arrival at socialist ideology.

9. Similar sentiments appear in What is Literature and other essays: “For once at least, the most revolutionary plan and the purest poetry come from the same source.” (p. 330)

10. See p. 37 as well. The opposition is restated on the next page as intuition and intelligence. On p. 39 the erotic potency of the black peasant is celebrated. For Sartre, French is an “analytical” language and thus used by blacks only with internal struggle. See p. 23.

11. Jahnheinz Jahn, Neo-African Literature, 207.

12. See, for instance Michael Dash, Before and Beyond Negritude, 537 and A. James Arnold, Modernism and Negritude, 37.

13. Though Sartre surely was unaware of the fact, his image coincides with the usage of the word oyibo for white people in Nigeria. Literally, this means “peeled.”

Seven Poems from Léon-Gontran Damas

Those interested in Damas may also wish to read "A brief History of Negritude" and "Sartre's Black Orpheus," both posted for this same month.



Sale
for Aimé Césaire


I feel laughable
in their shoes
in their dinner jacket
in their stiff shirt
in their detachable collar
in their monocle
in their bowler hat

I feel laughable
with my toes that were not born
to sweat from morning until night’s disrobing
with swaddling that weakens my limbs
and robs from my body its loincloth beauty

I feel laughable
with my neck a factory chimney
with headaches that stop
each time I greet someone

I feel laughable
in their salons
in their manners
in their low bows
in their enormous need for monkeyshines

I feel laughable
with all that conversation
until you are served in mid-afternoon
a bit of hot water
and some rheumy pastries.

I feel laughable
with the theories they shape
to the taste of their needs
of their passions
of their instincts wide open at night
like a doormat

I feel laughable
an accomplice among them
a pander among them
among those bloody hands red and frightening
with the blood of their ci-vi-la-za-tion




They Came Tonight
for Léopold-Sedar Senghor


They came the night the
tom
tom
spun from
rhythm
to
rhythm
frenzy
of eyes
the frenzy of hands
the frenzy
of the feet of statues
SINCE
how many of ME ME ME
are dead
since they came that night when the
tom
tom
spun from
rhythm
to
rhythm
frenzy
of eyes
frenzy
of hands
frenzy
of the feet of statues




Hold Off Now


Hold off now with the blues
the boogie-woogie
the muted trumpet
the mad foot-stomping
the joys of rhythm

Hold off now the swinging sessions
with crowds
overstimulated
by cries of hepcats.

Hold off now dropping out
and bootlicking
and brownnosing
and
the attitude
of those who would be white.

Hold off now for just a bit
The infantile life
and desires
and needs
and narcissism
and individualistic
ego.




Nerve Pain


Nerve pain of a running tap
fills the pitcher of my building’s super
till it’s sucked up by a rainbow.

End the nerve pain of a running tap
that fills the pitcher of my building’s super
till it’s sucked up by a rainbow.

Remove from the running tap
the pitcher of my building’s super
till it’s sucked up by a rainbow.

or sever the hand to the elbow
the rainbow that sucks up
the pitcher of my building’s super
which is filled by the nerve pain
of a running tap.




The Blues
for Robert Romain


Give back my black dolls
that they can dispel
the image of wan whores
selling love and promenading
on the boulevard of my ennui

Give back my black dolls
that they can dispel
the constant image
the unreal image
of heaps of spanked puppets
whose miserable mercy
the wind brings to the nose

Give me the illusion that I’ll no longer need to comfort
the need splayed out
before the snoring mercy
under the world’s unthinking disregard.

Give back my black dolls
so I can play with them
the naïve games that come naturally
lodged in the shadow of my laws
my heart recovered
my daring
I become myself again
newly myself
from what I was Yesterday
yesterday
quite simply
yesterday
when the time of uprooting came

Will they never know this resentment in my heart
the eye of distrust opened too late
they made off with the space that was mine
the clothes
the days
the life
the song
the rhythm
the work
the way
the water
the shacks
the grey smoked earth
the wisdom
the words
the palaver
the elders
the beat
the hands
the tempo
the hands
the foot-stomping
the sun

Give back my black dolls
my black dolls
black dolls
black
black




The Black’s Lament
for Robert Goffin


They gave me back
life
heavier more tired

My present’s overlaid on my past
staring eyes roll with anger
and shame

The days of inexorable
sadness
have never stopped
with the memory
of what had been
my life cut off

It goes on
my dullness
from days gone by
blows from knotted ropes
body burnt
burnt from toe to back
dead flesh
branding irons
of red hot iron
arms broken
under the whip unleashed
under the whip that makes the plantation work
and the sugar mill drink the blood my blood
while the foreman’s pipe shows off to the sky




Position
for J. D.


The days themselves
have assumed the shape
of African masks
indifferent
to any profanation
of quicklime
flattered by
a piano flatters
repeating the same old tune
of moonlight that sighs
any sort at all
in the shrubbery
gondolas
et cetera

A Brief History of Negritude

     Négritude is a movement of Francophone writers of Africa and the African diaspora who sought to develop a literature reflecting distinctly African values and sensibility. Of course, traditional African poetry, largely oral, but sometimes written, had long existed, as well as a scattering of individual authors in European languages, but the fact that a flowering of literary thought and work arose first in French rather than English or Portuguese was influenced by differences in techniques of colonial rule.
     Though all colonial governance was exploitative and often brutal, significant variation existed. The English preferred “indirect rule,” in which they found cooperative traditional rulers who would work with them, in this way maintaining control while leaving much indigenous culture intact. On the other hand, the French sought to educate selected Africans in the French curriculum, and regarded a colonial subject who had mastered not only their language, but who could write explications of Corneille and Racine as a sort of fellow countryman. Thus residents of the motherland’s départements et territoires d'outre-mer have long had French citizenship and representation in the National Assembly and Senate.
     Among the promising young students brought to Paris for higher education were Aimé Césaire from Martinique, Léon-Gontran Damas from French Guiana, and Léopold Sédar Senghor from Senegal. These three produced the journal L'Étudiant noir in 1934–1935 where the word négritude first appeared in a piece by Aimé Césaire.
     Yet négritude’s trois pères did not work in isolation. [1] They admired Alain Locke’s 1925 anthology The New Negro and met American writers of the Harlem Renaissance, many of whom, including Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and Richard Wright, spent time in France. [2] Sisters Jane (or Jeanne), Paulette, and Andrée Nardal from Martinique hosted a literary salon and published the Revue du monde noir. Jane Nardal’s article “Internationalisme noir,” one of the earliest expressions of pan-Africanism, was published in 1928. Etienne Léro, René Ménil, and Jules Monnerot from Martinique published a single number of a radical journal titled Légitime défense in 1932 in which Léro condemned as dodoism (that is to say, obsolete) poets such as Daniel Thaly who imitated French literature and advocated instead a poetry influenced by black Americans, Surrealism, and Marxism. Ménil later served as editor of Aimé Césaire’s 1941 Tropiques which had a thoroughly Surrealist program.
     Légitime défense, a legal term roughly equivalent to self-defense, had been used by Breton in a 1926 pamphlet declaring Surrealism’s revolutionary autonomy. The Surrealists as a group had also spoken on the specific issues of race and colonialism. In 1932 a manifesto titled “Murderous Humanitarianism” [3] was signed by the principal white figures in the movement such as Breton, Char, Crevel, Éluard, and Tanguy, as well as by Martiniquans Pierre Yoyotte and Jules Monnerot. “Murderous Humanitarianism” was predominantly anti-capitalist, calling exploiters “slavers” and supporting the Communist Party. [4] The few comments on culture per se remain governed by political considerations, and jazz itself seemed to the authors merely a “distorted” vogue like chinoiserie.


“Those Blacks who have merely been compelled to distort in terms of fashionable jazz the natural expression of their joy at finding themselves partners of a universe from which Western peoples have willfully withdrawn may consider themselves lucky to have suffered nothing worse than degradation. The eighteenth century derived nothing from China except a repertoire of frivolities to grace the alcove. In the same way the whole object of our romantic exoticism and modern travel lust is of use only in entertaining that class of blasé clients sly enough to see an interest in deflecting to his own advantage the torrent of those energies which soon, sooner than he thinks, will close over his head.”


     The solidarity extended to the colonial subjects by the Surrealists on political grounds was returned by all the important négritude writers, though in varying degrees. In the introduction to Légitime défense, Léro wrote, “we accept without reservation surrealism, to which—in 1932—we bind up our future.” Césaire explicitly identified as a Surrealist; indeed, he regarded himself as a Surrealist before Surrealism.
     

I was ready to accept surrealism because I already had advanced on my own, using as my starting points the same authors that had influenced the surrealist poets. Their thinking and mine had common reference points. Surrealism provided me with what I had been confusedly searching for. I have accepted it joyfully because in it I have found more of a confirmation than a revelation. . . Surrealism interested me to the extent that it was a liberating factor . . . if I apply the surrealist approach to my particular situation, I can summon up these unconscious forces. [5]


     Damas’ first collection of poetry was introduced by Robert Desnos and illustrated by Frans Masere, both closely associated with Surrealism. In a revealing hedge, Senghor insisted on the distinction between European reason and African intuition, saying “Negro-African surrealism is mystical.” [6]
     The alliance was furthered by other factors, both in Communist politics, and Surrealist theory. It is surely significant that at this time, Stalin’s line encouraged ethnic identification and every recognized minority in the USSR was granted its own national territory such as the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the Far East. [7] Apart from (and even in a sense in opposition to) revolutionary aspirations, Surrealism shared with négritude writers the celebration of magic and the subconscious. The fetishization of the primitive by European avant-gardists is well-known, [8] while African and African-American authors found the Surrealist rejection of European rationalism and other values attractive, allowing them to view what had seemed superstition as a sort of higher wisdom.
     In 1945 Damas’ Poètes d'expression française 1900–1945 appeared with an anti-colonialist introduction quoting Léro's “Misère d'une poésie” (“Poverty of a Poetry”). The book included writers from Africa, the African Diaspora, and Indochina. In 1948 the definitive anthology of the movement was published, Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache. The book’s introductory essay by Sartre titled "Orphée Noir" ("Black Orpheus") guaranteed that the volume would receive widespread attention.
     Though Sartre had grown to be sympathetic to the politically revolutionary aims of many négritude poets, he had been actively hostile to Surrealism, most notably in his “Situation of the Writer in 1947” which calls them “victims of the disaster of 1940,” noting that, for all their revolutionary rhetoric, their emigration and solipsistic endeavors in the face of fascist occupation signaled their fecklessness. Indeed, like this condemnation of the white Surrealists, his motives for endorsing writers of color seem primarily political.
     Négritude has been criticized from several angles. Wole Soyinka’s jibe "The tiger does not proclaim its tigerness, it jumps on its prey" [9] is doubtless the most well-known. The fact is, of course, that, unlike humans, the tiger proclaims nothing whatever in words, but only in actions. Soyinka later moderated his opposition, saying “When you pass where the tiger has walked before, you see the skeleton of the duiker, you know that some tigritude has been emanated there.”
     Tension arose between black writers to whom Marxism or a similar political orientation was primary and those who pursued a specifically Afrocentric art. Stanislas Adotevi from Benin condemned the assignment of racial characteristics even by fellow Africans, and, in particular, objected to the projection of a special intuition or mysticism on Africans. [10] He described the movement contemptuously, saying that, négritude was the “soporific of the Negro. It’s opium.” By its tenets, "in the great orchestra of the Universal, mankind will have Europe as its conductor, white. The Negro will hold the rhythm section. " [11] For some such as the Cameroonian Marcien Towa [12], Senghor in particular was guilty on the one hand of accommodating and finally accepting colonialism and on the other of cultivating a “biologisation du culturel,” which amounted to a sort of racism. Paulin Hountondji, student of both Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser, objected to what he called “ethnophilosophy, implying that different concepts were applicable for different peoples.” [13] Perhaps most influential was Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist, revolutionary theoretician, and former student of Césaire's, who claimed not only that that négritude was simplistic, but also that the notion of the "black soul was but a white artifact." [14]
     The influence of these poets is profound. Without attempting further detail, here it will suffice to note that among the groupings and individuals which would not have been the same without their example are political figures such as Harry Haywood, Maulana (Ron) Karenga, and Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), artists such as Ted Joans, Bob Kaufman, and Amiri Baraka, the Afro-Surrealism and Black Arts Movements, Larry Neal, Ishmael Reed and Neo-Hoodoo, Etheridge Knight, Henry Dumas, Jacques Stephen Alexis’ Marvelous Realism, D. Scot Miller, the Last Poets, and, in academia Henry Louis Gates and Molefi Kete Asante.
     Whatever evaluation a critic may make of their work in itself, the place of the négritude movement writers is secure in literary history. Their work marked an end of the slavish imitation of European literary models and the beginning of the construction of a modern African literature in European languages. It was Senghor, Damas, Césaire and their fellow-countrymen, not the colonialist overlords, as Sartre’s phrase suggests, who “removed the gag that was keeping these black mouths shut,” [15] changing and enriching both social and aesthetic thought.



1. All literary history is continuous, but the historian must begin somewhere. Apart from earlier African writing in European languages, Arabic (and Swahili and Hausa) and Bantu, I omit here the earlier movements in the Caribbean of Indigenism in Haiti and Negrism in Cuba.

2. Damas said that McKay was the movement’s spiritual founder and dedicated his first book of poetry Pigment to McKay. Lilyan Kesteloot found that even in the sixties all three of the pères could “still cite entire chapters” of McKay’s Banjo. See Les écrivains noirs de langue française: naissance d'une littérature.

3. Later published in the remarkable Nancy Cunard's Negro Anthology (1934).

4. Revolutionary politics had, of course, been an essential part of the Surrealist program as of Dadaism before it. This element is routinely neglected by more recent theoreticians, practitioners, and scholars.

5. From an interview of Aime Césaire by Rene Depestres at the Cultural Congress of Havana, 1967.

6. By far the best general treatment of the topic is Jean-Claude Michel’s The Black Surrealists.

7. With their tailing of Stalin’s line expressed in the Sixth Congress of the Comintern, the American Communist Party during this era suggested the creation of a similar black national state in the South. This was never a popular notion in American black communities, though in general the Party enjoyed disproportionate support from blacks, for instance electing Benjamin J. Davis, the editor of the Communist Party’s journal The Negro Liberator, to the city council from 1943 and served until he was jailed for his Party membership in 1949.

8. See for instance, my own “The Fetish of the Primitive in Twentieth Century Art.”

9. Apparently first said in Kampala in 1962. Soyinka’s second comment was from a 1964 talk in Berlin.

10. See, for instance, his “Léopold Sédar Senghor : Négritude ou Servitude?” Poésie de la Négritude: Approche structuraliste, and Essai sur la problématique philosophique dans l'Afrique actuelle.

11. “Dans le grand orchestre de l’Universel, l’humanité aura pour chef d’orchestre l’Europe, le blanc. Le nègre tiendra la section rythmique. La négritude doit être le soporifique du nègre. C’est l’opium.” See also his Négritude et négrologues.

12. His critique is repeatedly restated, including in Poésie de la Négritude and Identité et Transcendance.

13. See Sur la philosophie africaine.

14. See Peau noire, masques blancs.

15. See the opening line of “Black Orpheus.”

The Familiar Note in Poetry

     Reading Scott’s Marmion, I found the poetry thin and shallow, though fluent. While a Romantic in his involvement with love and the past, in his nationalism and use of folk materials, Scott was uninventive (if competent) in his handling of verse. Yet I found the dedicatory excurses that begin every canto refreshing, fresh, and entertaining. Their casual evocation of deep friendship and their informal commentary on history and the contemporary scene contrast with the highly conventionalized and nearly mythic plot line of the main narrative, rendering these passages, which some have found intrusive and inappropriate, more lively and convincing than the main body of the poem.
     I thought of other great poems which purport to be addressed to a specific individual and thus deal with what might seem to be private matters. Since all literature as such is circulated to a general readership, this pretense is a rhetorical pose, yet, like all rhetorical figures, it ideally contributes to the poem’s beauty, meaning, and effectiveness.
     When Sappho writes of love, it is rarely in the abstract. If not addressing Aphrodite, whom she conceives anthropomorphically, she writes a letter to Atthis or an intimate note to Anaktoria. Yet she performed these compositions at least semi-publically, and they were circulated and recorded by others who may well have known none of the principals in person. Similarly, we all have taken an interest in Horace’s best wishes for a safe voyage of his friend Vergil and Catullus’ invitation to Fabullus for a dinner, promising rewards beyond food. An illusion of intimacy arises from the poet’s familiar tone.
     The lineage of use of this device extends worldwide through history. Among its practitioners are such Tang Dynasty poets as Du Fu (for instance, for his “To Han the Censor” and “On Waiting for my Friend Ting”), troubadours employing such forms as the partimen and the tenso (such as the exchange between Marcabru and Uc Catola), Gay’s Epistles, Goldsmith’s “Verses in Reply to Dr. Baker’s Invitation” or his “Letter in Prose and Verse to Mrs. Bunbury.” The increasingly demotic idiom of modern poetry is congenial to this phenomenon. Though examples abound, I will mention only Elizabeth Bishop’s “Letter to N.Y.," Frank O’Hara’s “To the Harbormaster,” and Anne Waldman “A Phone Call from Frank O’Hara.”
     To present a poem as a note between friends suggests its “reality,” implying that it arose, not as an intentionally designed aesthetic object, a “thing made,” or poem, but rather as a natural byproduct of everyday life. This pretense of authenticity resembles that of early novelists who encoded their imaginative productions as journals or letters arising directly from lived experience. The familiar text thus playfully asserts its character as a private utterance at the same time as its writer and every reader know that it is not, creating a sort of shimmering illusory simulacrum of experience.
     Unreal as its consumers know it to be, this pose nonetheless dramatically supports a claim of sincerity. A note to a friend is assumed to be spontaneous and natural. The poet is using a version of the same device familiar from Sir Philip Sidney’s first sonnet in Astrophil and Stella which ends “’Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart, and write.’" This could be considered, of course, entirely a matter of convention, a literary pose with no implication of straightforwardness in the author’s lived experience. [1]
     Apart from sincerity, addressing a friend in poetry focuses on the value of love and comradeship, especially an affection heightened by a mutual verbal sophistication, a capacity for delight in words. Friendship is a major theme in poetry and rises to prominence in Chinese and late Latin lyrics, though less prominent today. The poems then remain in a realm lit by human affection. If it is not the fevered heat of romantic love, it signals what is perhaps a steadier, more sustainable flame, promising a potential of companionship and mutual support.
     By collapsing in the gap between the artistic and the natural, by acting as though poetic language is used in everyday exchanges, that a persona is identical with a historical individual, the writer is playfully suggesting the primacy of the cultivated poetic sensibility. The implication in the end is that life itself is aestheticized and unfolds in a realm of pattern, beauty, and significance. [2] In this sense the composition and consumption of aesthetic texts can be seen as a sort of sympathetic magic which strives by its verbal spells to impose order, grace, and meaning on the chaos of observed reality. In a sort of stealth technique, poets sometimes employ the most casual and unpretentious forms of discourse, words that present themselves as having little more weight than the trivia of daily conversation, hoping thereby to assure a life made livable by love and beauty.
     The playful uses to which words are put in poetry are the most sophisticated use of the distinctively human capacity to manipulate symbols. Like other forms of art, poetry is, among other things, a pastime: people, in part for the fun of it, practicing their greatest skill, enjoying the companionship of others who enjoy the same game, and thus passing the time as the sun declines in the heavens.

 

1. Important as it may be to the Romantic for whom art is self-expression, the issue can hardly exist for those to whom another’s subjectivity must remain forever unknown to the observer.

2. Ironically, taking the artificial to its limit as in a Renaissance dream vision such as Lydgate’s Temple of Glas has much the same effect. One might compare the division of labor in Lyrical Ballads, with Wordsworth striving to illuminate the hidden depths of the quotidian and Coleridge seeking what is significant to all in the exotic and remote. Both aimed by such a contrast to point readers’ minds in new directions.

Every Reader’s Poets: Milton

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

     Even considering the long term continental drift of literary focus away from poetry and from pre-twentieth century authors, Milton is a classic little honored by actual readers. Of course, there was a time when Paradise Lost shared a shelf in many British homes with the Bible and perhaps another title or two, but that was when many people not only accepted the poet’s theology but also were capable of swinging with the cadence of his iambic pentameter.
     The fact is that Milton would be remembered had he never written a line of verse. His prose essays, notably those in defense of press freedom and divorce and in opposition to the monarchy, are eloquent as well as striking the modern reader as right-minded. He was sufficiently active in the tumultuous politics of his age that he was named Secretary for Foreign Tongues (primarily requiring him to draft diplomatic documents in Latin) under the Protectorate, and he found himself in trouble after the Restoration.
     Though his greatest work is in long poems such as Comus, Lycidas, Samson Agonistes, and his masterpieces Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, he may more easily be approached through the rapid tetrameters of his youthful lyric “L’Allegro,” portraying “the happy man” as opposed to “the thoughtful one” characterized in “Il Penseroso.” The contrast of the two poems implies a dominantly formal interest; as the author seeks to display his technical skills in a show-piece.
     The bipolar opposition is invoked in the poem’s first thirty-four lines which dramatically evoke melancholy with all the special effects of a fantasy or horror film. The Stygian cave is by itself insufficiently thrilling and is succeeded by an “uncouth cell” in the obscurity of Cimmeria. This dark vision suddenly vanishes, however, to be replaced by the cheering appearance of Euphrosyne.


Hence loathed Melancholy
Of Cerberus, and blackest midnight born,
In Stygian Cave forlorn
'Mongst horrid shapes, and shreiks, and sights unholy,
Find out som uncouth cell,
Wher brooding darknes spreads his jealous wings,
And the night-Raven sings;
There under Ebon shades, and low-brow'd Rocks,
As ragged as thy Locks,
In dark Cimmerian desert ever dwell.
But com thou Goddes fair and free,
In Heav'n ycleap'd Euphrosyne,
And by men, heart-easing Mirth,
Whom lovely Venus at a birth
With two sister Graces more
To Ivy-crowned Bacchus bore;
Or whether (as som Sager sing)
The frolick Wind that breathes the Spring,
Zephir with Aurora playing,
As he met her once a Maying,
There on Beds of Violets blew,
And fresh-blown Roses washt in dew,
Fill'd her with thee a daughter fair,
So bucksom, blith, and debonair.
Haste thee nymph, and bring with thee
Jest and youthful Jollity,
Quips and Cranks, and wanton Wiles,
Nods, and Becks, and Wreathed Smiles,
Such as hang on Hebe's cheek,
And love to live in dimple sleek;
Sport that wrincled Care derides,
And Laughter holding both his sides.
Com, and trip it as ye go
On the light fantastick toe,


     Euphrosyne or “high spirits,” one of the three Graces, is born either the offspring of Bacchus and Venus or, in an equally original but more imaginative version, she is conceived as miraculously as Christ when Zephyr blows across fields of flowers, impregnating Aurora. Her birth produces a variegated rush of phenomena associated with high spirits, concluding with the delightful phrase which became enough of a cliché to appear in American popular song “trip the light fantastic.” For a moment it seems nearly as though life itself could be a blithe and glorious dance, though the poem’s companion piece “Il Penseroso” opens by banishing “vain deluding joys” in favor of “divinest Melancholy.” Taken together, the poems balance the dualities they engage and highlight the profound ambivalence of human experience with such accomplished music that his own skill becomes the principle theme and the beauty of the work guarantees the ambivalent rightness of things.
     The masterful display of Classical references and the virtuoso versifying, though literary and artificial, articulate deep emotion. Milton also employed Classical pastoral conventions in “Lycidas” his elegy for his deceased college classmate Edward King. One passage describing the appropriate funereal bouquets constitutes a veritable garden on the page in tribute to his drowned friend.


Return, Sicilian Muse,
And call the vales and bid them hither cast
Their bells and flow'rets of a thousand hues.
Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use
Of shades and wanton winds, and gushing brooks,
On whose fresh lap the swart star sparely looks,
Throw hither all your quaint enamel'd eyes,
That on the green turf suck the honied showers
And purple all the ground with vernal flowers.
Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,
The white pink, and the pansy freak'd with jet,
The glowing violet,
The musk-rose, and the well attir'd woodbine,
With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears;
Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,
And daffadillies fill their cups with tears,
To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.


     Nature here is animated and can respond to the pastoral muse in individual ways: the “wanton” wind, the stars that “sparely” gaze, the “forsaken” primrose. The Christian god appears diffused into all creation, the recipient of virtually pagan devotion. The poet’s grief is projected onto nature where it is not merely ameliorated but fundamentally challenged by the glory of the blossoms represented in the beautiful lines of verse. The loss of life inherent in all of nature, then, is redeemed through aesthetics. The glory of god is evident in the charms of the creation and of the poet’s art alike.
     Paradise Lost was composed after the restoration of the monarchy which prompted Milton to go underground when a warrant was issued for his arrest. He escaped the worst of consequences through the efforts of influential friends and a general pardon, but the poem was dictated by a blind and penurious poet. This grand epic is the basis of Milton’s reputation, though critics like Samuel Johnson (who had little sympathy with Milton’s politics) found it tiresome. Its Christian apologetics are complicated by its compelling drama. Blake notoriously said that Milton was “of the devil’s party without knowing it,” and Satan never appears a grander figure than in his self-reflective insight at the opening of Book IV. He addresses the sun.


O thou that with surpassing Glory crownd,
Look'st from thy sole Dominion like the God
Of this new World; at whose sight all the Starrs
Hide thir diminisht heads; to thee I call,
But with no friendly voice, and add thy name
O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams
That bring to my remembrance from what state
I fell, how glorious once above thy Spheare;
Till Pride and worse Ambition threw me down
Warring in Heav'n against Heav'ns matchless King:
Ah wherefore! he deservd no such return
From me, whom he created what I was
In that bright eminence, and with his good
Upbraided none; nor was his service hard.
What could be less then to afford him praise,
The easiest recompence, and pay him thanks,
How due! yet all his good prov'd ill in me,
And wrought but malice; lifted up so high
I sdeind subjection, and thought one step higher
Would set me highest, and in a moment quit
The debt immense of endless gratitude,
So burthensome, still paying, still to ow;
Forgetful what from him I still receivd,
And understood not that a grateful mind
By owing owes not, but still pays, at once
Indebted and dischargd; what burden then?
O had his powerful Destiny ordaind
Me some inferiour Angel, I had stood
Then happie; no unbounded hope had rais'd
Ambition. Yet why not? som other Power
As great might have aspir'd, and me though mean
Drawn to his part; but other Powers as great
Fell not, but stand unshak'n, from within
Or from without, to all temptations arm'd.
Hadst thou the same free Will and Power to stand?
Thou hadst: whom hast thou then or what to accuse,
But Heav'ns free Love dealt equally to all?
Be then his Love accurst, since love or hate,
To me alike, it deals eternal woe.
Nay curs'd be thou; since against his thy will
Chose freely what it now so justly rues.
Me miserable! which way shall I flie
Infinite wrauth, and infinite despaire?
Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell;
Book IV, ll. 32-75


      Milton here formulates the dialectic between ego-loss and illumination. Lucifer cannot understand what the “grateful mind” appreciates, that “by owing [one] owes not, but still pays, at once.” The paradoxes of the gospel are all implicit there: in death is life, humility is exaltation, giving is getting, the most real is the utterly imaginary. Satan willfully remains in darkness; his pride is his captor, and thus hell, and, presumably, for others heaven, is a condition in his own psyche. [ 55 ] He has chosen to refuse the grace-filled rain of “Heav’n’s free love” (68) and, like many a suffering mortal, condemns himself to despair. To Milton, of course, Satan’s options are those of every soul.
     Devout and thoughtful Christian though the author was, Milton’s spirituality is meaningful to all. Though the knowledge cannot readily ward off suffering, people regularly alienate themselves from Ultimate Reality, Atman, or enlightenment by their own choices. Egoism is only the most yawning pitfall. Truly open eyes will find the cosmos a marvel with or without an anthropomorphic overseer.
     The reader of “L’Allegro” can admire Milton’s technical abilities. “Lycidas” displays the same skill as well while adding the profoundly felt emotional content of an elegy for a beloved friend. Milton’s crowning achievement, the poem in which he encoded a comprehensive philosophy (including, according to many critics, veiled references to his unapologetic resistance to the king) rewards those susceptible to beauty and imaginative enough to transpose seventeenth century theology into more modern and universal terms.

Alkaios’ Happy Hour

These are new versions of a few poems and fragments of Alkaios, the Archaic poet. For the most part, I have not sought to mimic his meters, but only to maintain some rhythmic energy. Several editors have differently numbered Alkaios’ texts. The numbers in parentheses following translations refer to the ordering in J. M. Edmonds’ old Lyra Graeca, available on archive.org.


The works of Alkaios, who surely knew Sappho more than two and a half millennia ago in Mytilene, have been, like hers, largely lost. In antiquity the two were considered among the greatest of poets, and the Alexandrians counted both among the canon of nine. Sensation alone would perhaps have kept Sappho’s name familiar, if not always her words, but few readers know anything of her elder contemporary.

Alkaios was deeply involved in his island’s politics and was exiled for years as a result of his aristocratic opposition to the ascendancy of the “popular” party under a succession of tyrants. Many of his surviving poems are politically partisan poems, [1] but he also left hymns, war poems, and a few tattered remnants of what was once a book of love poems. [2] He wrote also a book of drinking songs, a genre popular in ancient China and the Latin Middle Ages as well as in Greece though quite neglected today even, I suspect, at fraternity parties.

The place of drinking songs in human culture is not difficult to explain. Though Camus thought the proper response of a human who realizes his identity with Sisyphus can only be revolt, many people have found intoxication a serviceable alternative. The implications of the surviving texts from Alkaios, whom one might reasonably assume to be socially if not politically normative, is that alcohol is an effective anodyne for mortal ills, appropriate for virtually any occasion.

According to Alkaios wine might, along with a blazing hearth and a good cushion, ameliorate the rigors of winter.


Zeus nods, the heavens open up
and all the streams are frozen hard.
[two lines missing]
Put down the storm, build up the fire,
and pour a good big bowl of wine,
so honey-sweet! Then pile soft pillows
on either side of your brow.
(157)


Here sky-god Zeus is associated with the rigors of winter, implying as well all the rigors of life. The loving list of cozy sensual comforts promises instant if temporary pleasure, and the emphasis is on a generous serving of alcohol.

Yet summer heat provides an equally compelling reason to drink. Alkaios reworks a description in Hesiod’s Works and Days:


Wet your throat with wine -- the dog-star's here again
and hard days, too. In this heat all people drink.
Cicadas sing from under leaves, and from their wings
the shrill song pours when heat-fire flashes
and spreads across the earth. Everything is dry.
* * * * *
But the artichoke blooms. And the women do as they like,
while the men grow thin and wasted in brain and limb by
that scorcher,
the dog-star.
(161)


The sound image of the cicadas suggests the punishing temperature, further emphasized by the mention of artichokes with their desert-like toughness and sharp bract-ends. The peculiar gender contrast that follows perhaps signified more the lassitude of the persona than any actual claim of sexually confident women, equivalent to declaring, “Let them do whatever they please. I’m not moving.”

Alkaios is ready to rush the cocktail hour.


Let’s drink! Don’t wait for dark! A finger’s all
that’s left of day. So from the shelf get down,
my dear, the biggest cups, for wine that frees
from care was given us by Zeus’s son
and Semele’s. Pour cups brimful and mixed
quite strong; let one cup quick pursue the last.
(163)


Here the persona’s depth of feeling is signaled by the multiple intensitive terms: “biggest cups,” cups filled “brimful,” “quite strong,” and rapidly refilled with no end in sight.

The justification for drinking is explicitly the inevitable woes of life which leave a tender human sufficiently battered to appreciate a pharmacological insulation from suffering.


One mustn’t give over one’s heart to one’s pain.
Rejecting Bakkhos no one can move on.
So surely all that one can do
is order wine and then drink deep.
(158)


Pour perfume on my head that’s been through much
and on my greying chest. Oh, he who suffers --
let him drink! Olympians send woe
to everyone.
(164)


But then for Alkaios, any excuse will do.


Let’s drink! The star is coming round again!
(162)


If Alkaios repackages clichés, they are clichés none the less powerful for their familiarity, clichés that have become established through their resonance to generations of people who have found life to be so full of suffering as to be all but unbearable. With sufficient attention one may hear this millennia-old voice calling out a refrain that might be seconded by millions of moderns who have never heard his name.


“here, let’s have a drink”
(441)


Greetings! Have a drink
(170)


Come here! Let’s drink!
(171)



1. One bit yet extant (42) declares in effect of his political foe: “Now that Myrsilos is dead, let’s go get really drunk!”

2. Quintilian reversed the modern reflex by judging on moral grounds and finding the political poems to be excellent and the love poems dubious at best.

3. l. 581 ff. though, significantly, unlike the aristocratic Alkaios, Hesiod depicts the busy farmer pausing in his harvest to enjoy some wine with his frugal meal of curds.

Rereading the Classics [Goldsmith]

     Rambling about the works of Oliver Goldsmith, the reader may never be astonished at a spectacular vista but does enjoy a consistently picturesque one, punctuated with insights, apt images, and clever turns. Goldsmith may not take the reader swooping up toward the sublime, but he offers the more steady reward of well-crafted rhetorical architecture and a humane and penetrating voice, scintillating with wit. To read Goldsmith is to realize that the world may, for those of a certain turn of mind, be redeemed by language alone.
     His friend Dr. Johnson wrote an eloquent epitaph for his grave, using Latin since he did not care to “disgrace the walls of Westminster Abbey with an English inscription.” [1] This brief encomium attests to Johnson’s as well as to Goldsmith’s literary skill and sums up the latter as author with such succinctness that it is worth quoting (though here, in a concession to our age, rendered in the vulgar vernacular).


Oliver Goldsmith: A Poet, Naturalist, and Historian, who left scarcely any style of writing untouched, and touched nothing that he did not adorn. Of all the passions, whether smiles were to move or tears, a powerful yet gentle master. In genius, vivid, versatile, sublime. In style, clear, elevated, elegant.


     Goldsmith’s limits are implied in the adjective “gentle,” for no one would call Homer or Dante or Shakespeare gentle. The praise of his style as “clear, elevated, elegant" suggests craft and competence rather than the “sublime” Johnson allowed to his friend’s “genius.” Boswell had been disturbed to hear Goldsmith remark, “As I take my shoes from the shoemaker, and my coat from the taylor, so I take my religion from the priest,” but the reader is justified in thinking that he got his literary standards in the same way, by accepting the pre-existing norms and working deftly within their limits.
     Goldsmith had economic motive for his writerly professionalism, as it was for him essential to make a living with his pen. The son of an Anglican priest, he was born in Ireland and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he barely graduated. [2] He then made a tour of Europe, though his was not so “grand” as those of his wealthier classmates. Goldsmith walked great distances and sometimes raised cash by playing his flute on the street. Upon his return he sought to make a living as a hack writer and managed to impress Johnson and others enough to be admitted to membership in “The Club” which met to dine at the Turk’s Head in Soho. Still he was chronically in debt, in part due to his gambling habit, and in Boswell Johnson tells of discovering him “in great distress” unable to pay his rent. Johnson instantly sent him a guinea and discovered when he arrived that Goldsmith had already spent it for wine. Finding he had the manuscript of The Vicar of Wakefield completed, Johnson (the tastemaker of the day) took it to a printer and received immediate payment. [3]
     He was considered odd by his contemporaries, often awkward in company even among his intimates. According to Boswell he once told a clergyman that his brother was Dean of Durham in order to puff his own importance. When Johnson composed his dignified Latin tribute, other members of The Club composed burlesque epitaphs, and the actor Garrick contributed a memorial of the writer’s social unease.


Here lies Nolly Goldsmith for shortness called Noll,
Who write like an angel, but talked like poor Poll.


     The essays he wrote to pay his rent provide perhaps the purest access to Goldsmith’s essential tone built of civility, wit, and contemplation. He is regularly amused rather than, like Swift, indignant at human failings, in the same way that he is decent rather than demanding in morality and conventional rather than innovative in style. When he does propose an original idea, it is likely to be more show than substance, as he strove (with, apparently, less success than Wilde) to formulate paradoxes meant to be clever but which struck observers as ridiculous. For instance, his “On the Use of Language” suggests that “the true use of speech is not so much to express our wants as to conceal them.” Yet so loose is his hold on the potentially provocative point [4] that he slides from it into complaints over his observation that those in no need of hospitality and of loans are least likely to be offered them, a discussion which will recall the author’s own penurious circumstances.
     His embryonic Romanticism is reflected in “A City Night-Piece” [5] in which he muses in dark solitude and, seeing the homeless, complains of “this heart of mine formed with so much sensibility.” He returns to familiar thematic ground for the conclusion which condemns those who seek vice when night falls, saying of the respectable men who may “talk of virtue all the day,” that they then steal out to brothels. “He has passed the whole day in company he hates, and now goes on to prolong the night among company that as heartily hate him.”
     Johnson called him a “naturalist” in the day when natural philosophy was studied and practiced by philosophers in general. Though he was never responsible for actual research (such as Goethe and Benjamin Franklin did), he did produce references such as An History of the Earth and Animated Nature. In “The Sagacity of Some Insects,” he marvels at the spider and concludes with real pathos for an aged arachnid.
     His criticism is spirited, though lightweight; he took little interest in literary theory and wrote either with an eye to fictionalizing style or a wholly impressionistic critical standard. Indeed, in “Upon Criticism” he declares “I have assumed the critic only to dissuade from criticism.” To him every common reader makes a critic superior to the connoisseur. As with the consumer, so the producer: “let us,” he says, “instead of writing finely, try to write naturally.” In general his positions are today commonplace. Few contemporary critics would dissent from his preference for “laughing” over “sentimental” comedy, his defense of subjects in his day considered “low” by the fastidious, or his acceptance of the excellence of modern works against those who would honor only the classics. One work advocating for the literature of his own day is “A Resverie” which imagines writers as traveling in various “stage-coaches,” associated with pleasure, industry, fame, and riches and bearing well-known appropriate writers.
     That essay verges on being a short story just as many of the chapters of The Citizen of the World are very like essays. This satiric series, with little or no over-arching structure, represents the view of Britain to a Chinese philosopher, allowing satire of all areas of life, but, in Goldsmith’s loose treatment, allowing as well for disquisitions on virtually any topic including literary criticism, the sketchy creation of a backstory for the supposed author, and the interpolation of narratives such as the story of the “beautiful captive.” As always, Goldsmith is casual, current, and conversational.
     Perhaps the greatest single essay, “A Reverie at the Boar’s Head Tavern in Eastcheap” is entertaining, even memorable and, in parts, moving. Goldsmith’s appeal survives though the essay reads like a series of smaller pieces. The tone is established at the outset. Saying that while young he much enjoyed reading Cicero on old age, but that having “declined into the vale of years,” he finds that “Cicero is no longer pleasing.” Falstaff, he finds, “with all his faults, gives me more consolation than the most studied efforts of wisdom,” and thus he drinks until closing time and after passing out dreams even of interviewing Dame Quickly, the tavern’s resident genie. In her narration the Boar’s Head becomes the seat of sensuality, not just intoxication but gambling, sexual desire, and vanity as well. Human weakness according to her never changes. “You will find mankind neither better nor worse now than formerly.” In the social realm the church is depicted as utterly hypocritical while in general “those that labour starve, and those who do nothing wear fine cloaths and live in luxury.” The place was occupied throughout its history “by adventurers, bullies, pimps, and gamesters,” in other words by human beings, who, in their occasional recoils from sensuality, fall into equally ridiculous religious or political enthusiasm. Listening, the author at last rebels against this unrelieved display of human foolishness, declaring that he had expected from her “a romance,” and that in future he is “determined to hearken only to stories,” that is to say, to fantasy. What can one do but drink?
     Goldsmith’s poetry is clever and natural like conversation. He excels at little occasional pieces to friends such as “Verses in Reply to Dr. Baker’s invitation” or “The Haunch of Venison.” His facility with heroic couplets serves him well in his longer poems.
     “The Traveller,” which is dedicated with real warmth to Goldsmith’s brother, reflects on the writer’s European experience which he refers to as “my prime of life in wand’ring spent and care” during which he found “no spot of all the world my own.” To compensate for this restless instability he assures himself that “to repine” is “affectation all, and school-taught pride.”


And wiser he, whose sympathetic mind
Exults in all the good of all mankind.


     With enlightened tolerance, he guesses that in the various countries of the earth, for all their differences, “the bliss of all is much the same,” though he does recur to some standard ethnic generalizations when he details his impressions. To him the Italians, though “surely blest,” are too sensual, and the French are given to “vanity” and “ostentation,” the Dutch to “love of gain.” He finds an ideal in the mountain-dwelling peasants of Switzerland because they are “content,” are “calm” and “cheerful,” but concludes with a patriotic encomium on English “freedom.” But even at home he finds corruption in his belated times and fears that in the end “as social bonds decay,” Britain itself may be “stript of all her charms” and sunk to one low level of “avarice.” Already he sees that “laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.” Citing the dreadful threat of the thugs of state power,


The lifted ax, the agonizing wheel,
Luke’s iron crown, and Damien’s bed of steel,


he finds that “bliss . . . centers in the mind,” and that “our own felicity we make or find.”
     “The Deserted Village” is an admirable example of the eighteenth century topographical style, like Pope’s “Windsor Forest” combing landscape description with political comment. Unlike Pope in “Windsor Forest” or Denham in “Cooper’s Hill,” though, Goldsmith takes the part of the poor, contrasting beautiful and idealized images of a pre-industrial provincial world with the immoral rapacity of the owners of his own day. He unforgettably portrays evicted families, many of them victims of the Inclosure Acts, trudging toward London where they will only encounter “profusion that he must not share,” (312) while losing their daughters perhaps to prostitution as well. (333) Some even emigrate to the New World where they are likely to find “the various terrors of that horrid shore.” (348) The political point remains a righteous one, as Goldsmith’s contemporaries such as Thomas Spence, the radical activist, realized. Even to a self-avowed conservative like Goldsmith, the aristocrats were immoral who abandoned a paternal role as landlords and expelled workers who had lived for generations as faithful tenants in order to indulge their fancies with extensive parks and decorative gardens or to turn over the land to grazing with an eye to trade.
     The author’s moralizing is well-served by the abstract Augustan vocabulary and the balanced rhetorical periods that had earlier been used so adeptly by Pope: “Ye friends to truth, ye statesmen, who survey/ The rich man’s joy’s increase, the poor’s decay.” (267-268) “Hoards, even beyond the miser’s wish abound,/ And rich men flock from all the world around.” (271-271) “The man of wealth and pride,/ Takes up a space that many poor supplied.” (277-278) His final appeal, to “Poetry, thou loveliest maid” to “teach erring man to spurn the rage of gain” (426) is pathetic in its ineffectuality.
     Goldsmith’s most enduring work, his only novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1761) tends to relax into essays about literary or dramatic taste or politics, or criminal justice reform when it is not providing accounts of the highest emotional intensity fancied by those fond of the “sentimental novel.” Throughout the author counsels modest personal tastes and voices suspicions of high life, yet the wealthy and virtuous win out in an exceedingly unrealistic romance version of Job complete with his final restoration to prosperity. The good Dr. Primrose even has an apparently deceased daughter returned which bests what Jehovah did for Job. It is for good reason that the priest feels faith in a benevolent Providence through all his misfortunes that rivals those of Voltaire’s ever-optimistic Pangloss in Candide (1759).
     She Stoops to Conquer is an amusing farce, and an amusing face is a worthy thing. Moderns who enjoy its absurd situations will readily assent to Goldsmith’s defense of “laughing” over “sentimental” comedy. Here Goldsmith invokes the principle social polarities in a spirit of pure play. Male and female, rich and poor, town and country, virtue and vice are all reconciled in harmonious and proper marriages as though their apparent contradictions were all in fun. Suddenly Tony’s irresponsible roistering, Charles’ intrigues with lower status women, George’s plans to elope surreptitiously with the family jewels are as harmless as Mr. Hardcastle’s nostalgia and his wife’s wish to be fashionable.
     The character of Goldsmith’s oeuvre is epitomized by his Life of Richard Nash. Especially in an age in which (as in Plutarch’s time) biography was often exemplary, one might wonder why he chose to memorialize this gambler and womanizer for whom his most frequent epithet is “dissipated.” There are, of course, sufficient prudential reasons. “Beau” Nash, the unofficial “master of ceremonies” at the baths, was, in his day, not unlike the figures that grace the tabloids, “famous for being famous.” A good many anecdotes, of greater or lesser veracity, circulated about him, and he was himself an all-but-incessant reteller of his own legend, so there was doubtless a brief but bright efflorescence of interest in the superannuated celebrity when he died. It is then natural that a hack writer would foresee a likely market.
     Surely, though, Goldsmith (himself socially awkward) felt a deep interest, compounded perhaps of envy, sympathy, horror, and fascination, with this man whom Goldsmith describes as capable of appearing much wittier than he was in fact due to his charismatic aplomb. Though the depiction of an aged and poverty-stricken fop makes the account a morality tale in the end, Goldsmith is not as critical of his subject as his reader may be. Nash was a self-conscious hedonist who challenged Wesley when he came to Bath [5], yet Goldsmith makes every allowance for him, placing him in a middle character, neither “truly great or strongly vicious.” A modern might not be as indulgent of a man whose bons mots included ridicule of another’s appearance, but we may accept Goldsmith’s word that he did many good works: saving gamblers from “sharpers,” and young women from those who might take advantage of them, that his benefactions were so open-handed as to be even ruinous of his own interests. Though openly irreligious and flouting social proprieties, he nonetheless seems have taken his role in Bath quite seriously, carefully organizing the dances and dinners and strictly enforcing his own set of rules by force of personality alone. Goldsmith must have liked as well the way that Nash insisted on mixing the aristocracy with the haute bourgeoisie in a way unacceptable to some of the aristocrats.
     The book is fundamentally an easy read, as genial and likable as its author was by the accounts of his friends, an oddball of whom it may be said that, like Nash, “his virtues were all amiable” and whose weaknesses were excusable. Reading Goldsmith, one feels as though one is walking alongside one of the more charming of men, one whose conversation consumes the hour pleasantly. One can hardly afford to spurn such rewards. Goldsmith’s response to life is warm rather than hot. Just as he habitually insists that a man of modest means who is satisfied is both rich and wise, he offers no startling revelations, but rather makes do on a simple humane decency and acceptance, lit by wit and delivered with the fluent confidence of a professional writer. Indeed, any more extravagant returns from literature of any sort, while perhaps more thrilling, must surely prove less dependable. Goldsmith may never attain the heights of sublimity, but he is altogether comfortable dancing with grace on the lower plateaus of Parnassos.




1. Nonetheless, his Latinity was impugned in a lengthy article “On Epitaphs” in the Classical Journal during 1816.

2. Apart from poor grades, he was involved in a “riot” outside the Marshalsea debtor’s prison.

3. Mrs. Piozzi offers an livelier account of the incident with bailiffs besieging Goldsmith’s lodging and the author roaring drunk and “enraged.”

4. Has Goldsmith been enlisted by the Deconstructionists?

5. Cf. Gay’s “Trivia” which likewise records nocturnal wandering in urban neighborhoods.

6. Wesley, followed by a crowd of Methodists, held his own, but, after Nash had departed and Wesley had begun to lead prayers for him, hostile members of the crowd “hollowed and hissed us.” (Wesley, Letters 1739)