Every Reader’s Tennyson

  

     This is the sixteenth of a series of Every Reader’s Poets, essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) non-scholarly readers to the work of important English poets. 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 general introduction to the series titled “Why Read Poetry?” is also available on this site.

     Tennyson’s poetry is readily available on line, but for the reader’s convenience I have here appended the poems I discuss.

 

 

     Every poem, indeed, every utterance, is a combination of familiar and novel elements.  We relish some poets for their idiosyncratic sensibilities, thrillingly contrasting with the reader’s more normative reactions.  Among the writers prized for seeing the world in a way dramatically different from others are Blake in the English tradition and Rimbaud in the French.  At the same time other writers, some equally gifted, excel at representing received opinions so precisely that they become culture bearers for a generation.  Though the description does not hold in every particular, Vergil in antiquity, Trollope in fiction, and Longfellow in the United States may be found toward the conventional side of the spectrum.

     Alfred, Lord Tennyson is an author of this latter sort.  Though unsuccessful in his first ventures as an author, at the age of thirty-three his new volume of Poems was well-received and a mere eight years later he was named Poet Laureate, a position he held longer than any of his predecessors, from 1850 until 1892, long enough to be considered an institution.  Gerard Manley Hopkins was bothered by a “vulgarity” in his work which allowed him to achieve a “vogue” but not “ascendancy.”  Tennyson was more popular with Queen Victoria and other rear-guard aristocrats as well as among the middle-class book-buying public.  Enough of a genuine celebrity during his life to find himself pestered by poetry-loving tourists, his funeral in Westminster Abbey (where one may yet visit his grave) attracted over ten thousand applicants for the thousand seats assigned to the general public, while a great many more citizens clustered outside.  The invited mourners included scholars like Benjamin Jowett and numerous dukes, marquis, and bishops.  It is difficult to imagine such a fuss over any poet’s death today.  In The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, that museum of words, Tennyson is given more pages than any other writer with the single exception of William Shakespeare.

     With time his sentiments came to seem overdrawn, his attitudes conformist, and the fantasy of medievalism with which he had captivated the public in his Idylls of the King and other works became passé.  With the arrival of free verse in the twentieth century, fewer readers appreciated Tennyson’s mastery of meters, though he was perhaps the most skillful prosodist since Pope.  Even his successor to the dignity of the laureateship, Alfred Austin, himself an indifferent poet, while obliged to concede that “the present age, taken in the lump, likes Mr. Tennyson’s poetry,” found him third-rate.  His reputation never has recovered. 

     Perhaps the best illustration of his successful use of conventional opinion is the non-partisan if unthinking patriotism of his best-known poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (the text is appended), which celebrates the valor of the British soldiers in the Crimean War who, as the result of an erroneous order, attempted an impossible objective and were cut to pieces.  This simple sentiment so appealed to British nationalism (and to American as well) that the poem soon found a place in school curricula and memorial assemblies.  Its brevity, repetitions, and jangling rhymes make it as digestible as a nursery rhyme.

     The reader needs know no history.  The soldiers are exemplary citizens specifically because they obey without reflection. 

 

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

 

Because such dedication is an ideal of all ruling classes in every time and place, the poem sheds little light on the author’s attitudes or the specific historical circumstances of the war, yet this generic quality is what makes it so instantly understandable to all and so comforting to the fellow-countrymen of the fallen.    

     Tennyson was often far more subtle.  He reflected the changes in taste as British culture shifted from feudalism to capitalism and the Victorian world-view was shaken not only by Marx, but also by Darwin and the scientific study of the Bible and of non-Christian scriptures.  Thus Tennyson, while in a sense as laureate the official propagandist for the regime (and found himself writing works such as “A Welcome to Alexandra” for the Queen Dowager upon her return from overseas) was in fact in politics a mild liberal a bit in advance of his more backward compatriots and in religion somewhat slippery, tending in the end toward the broadest opinions, even beyond the borders of Christianity.  The tensions generated by his uncertainty are often evident and modern readers are likely to identify with his Angst and his ambiguity more than with the pose of confident and conservative opinion that won him renown during his life. 

     One of Tennyson’s most lovely lyrics, “Tears, Idle Tears” (text appended) articulates such a dialectic while at the same time appealing to nineteenth century sentimentality.  Ambivalence is foregrounded even in the title.  The “tears” expressing a pathetic emotion are checked by the qualifier “idle,” posing the poem’s question – “I know not what they mean” – at the outset.  They are the age-old tears inspired by mortality and the passing of time, familiar poetic themes since Gilgamesh.  Such tears “rise in the heart” when contemplating “the happy Autumn-fields” and “thinking of the days that are no more.”  The naming of the season means belatedness and the approach of death, yet the scene is nonetheless “happy.”

     Rather than eliding this tension, Tennyson develops the contradiction in extraordinary images.  The thoughts of the past, though dwelling on the departed are still “fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,” while at the same time “sad as the last” beam of daylight.  The days gone by are “sad” since they are not recoverable, and the distress they inspire is heightened because they remain “fresh,” as powerful in the memory as they had been at first. 
     Tennyson then constructs the most precise and telling image of this contradiction.  The “freshness” of memory is now figured as morning birdsong light, but heard by “dying ears.”  With cinematic power the poet depicts the sickroom during sunrise as the light slowly increases.  In the face of the collision of life and death, he can only muse in wonder “so sad, so strange.”  

     Tennyson seeks to resolve his anxiety by embracing the unity of the opposite ends of the bipolar opposition.  In the penultimate stanza all the images have this compound character.  The summer is “dark,” the moment teeters between night and day, the ears and eyes are “dying” yet alert, the casement displays both light and shade.  The poet can only sigh and repeat in wonder “so sad, so strange.”

     After two stanzas detailing the deathbed scene, the poem concludes with the romantic application of regret, the shock of reaching out in embrace only to find one’s lover a phantom due to death or faithlessness or simply the inexorable passage of time.  Even love, it seems, is inescapably “Death in Life” due to the transient character of all experience.  Just as life is bound always death, joy cannot be without pain, and all love necessarily entails loss.  Tennyson here offers a more nuanced if less popular attitude than simply portraying love as the saving grace of life.  Christianity plays no role.

     Tennyson walks the same fine line between the popular appeal which tends toward saying all is well and the darker intuitions of his soul in "In Memoriam A.H.H.," an elegy for his dear friend Arthur Hallam  (Canto LIII is appended).  Though the book-length poem enjoyed immense popularity (an appeal that eludes any book of poetry today) including the approval of Queen Victoria who said she was “soothed & pleased” by the poem during her mourning for Albert, it contains much distressed agnosticism.  The beginning and ending, though, adopt a pose of orthodoxy.  The first lines address the “Strong Son of God, immortal Love,” and conclusion confidently imagines that his deceased friend lives now in God.

 

That God, which ever lives and loves,

One God, one law, one element,

And one far-off divine event,

To which the whole creation moves.

 

     Yet between these expressions of conventional religiosity, Tennyson concedes the impact of the science of his day which seemed to contradict a literal reading of the Bible: evolution, geological history, Higher Criticism as well as his own internal crises of belief.  Similarly on the smaller scale, canto LIII walks the ridgepole between belief and disbelief. 

     All the rhetoric is deeply ambiguous.  Beginning with a cry of the lyric pathos “Oh,” the poet says “yet,” that is, in spite of evidence to the contrary, we “trust,” since we cannot know, that “somehow” “good will the final goal of ill.”  The statement could hardly be more conflicted.  The poet is so confounded that he must in the end throw up his hands and give up, declaring “we know not anything” and comparing himself to an infant who can only cry. 

       Philosophically, of course, Tennyson was striving to attain an unlikely position, to imagine that in some way hidden from human view, every pain serves a beneficent end.  He represented a good many other middlebrow British citizens who were comforted by his platitudes, cleaving always to the accepted standards of the day.  Tennyson in fact embodied his Zeitgeist so well specifically because remained superficially loyal to accepted opinion despite being troubled by religious doubts that would not have occurred in an age of hegemonic faith and by sympathy for political reform tendencies that were aimed at ending feudalism and softening capitalism. 

     Tennyson found an effective escape from the disquiet induced by modernity’s ambiguities other than seconding received opinion.  He ornamented his bourgeois practicality with gay ribands of aristocratic glamor by recalling a mythic past.  A good number of his most popular works developed the idealized picture of the Middle Ages now known as Medievalism that inspired pre-Raphaelite painting, Gothic Revival architecture, research into balladry, and, for Tennyson, poems like The Idylls of the King and such shorter pieces as “The Lady of Shalott.”  Bedivere’s lament over the dying Arthur in “Morte d’Arthur” expresses nostalgia for a lost world where everything made sense and fostered excellence.  The Round Table is here explicitly an image for the fallen world, tangled with sin since the expulsion from Eden, further degraded by the collapse of chivalric values, and, in the poet’s own time, sullied by the physical and spiritual pollution of industrial capitalism.  While propriety forbids direct protest, one may, perhaps sentimentally, but also with effective elegance, allude to more blessed earlier times.    

 

       Then loudly cried the bold Sir Bedivere:

"Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go?

Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes?

For now I see the true old times are dead,

When every morning brought a noble chance,

And every chance brought out a noble knight.

Such times have been not since the light that led

The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh.

But now the whole Round Table is dissolved

Which was an image of the mighty world,

And I, the last, go forth companionless,

And the days darken round me, and the years,

Among new men, strange faces, other minds."

 

The taste for this sort of thing has not quite vanished, it has merely reached an epigone in phenomena like Game of Thrones, so-called Renaissance Faires, The Society for Creative Anachronism, and over-priced restaurants where one may dine while people play at sword-fighting. 

     Tennyson was a major poet in a sense now extinct.  Mass audiences read lengthy works and cried and sighed and smiled.  Tennyson was the favorite of a demographic which in today’s time prefers television and films and reads no poetry at all. His mastery of meters was widely appreciated in viva voce readings and he both expressed the experience of millions and, in turn, influenced them, embodying the culture of his day.  If contemporary Americans find less beauty in his verse, perhaps that means that we have the more to learn from him.    

 

 

 

 

The Charge of the Light Brigade

 

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

"Forward, the Light Brigade!

Charge for the guns!" he said:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

 

"Forward, the Light Brigade!"

Was there a man dismay’d?

Not tho’ the soldier knew

Some one had blunder’d:

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

 

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

Volley’d and thunder’d;

Storm’d at with shot and shell,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of Hell

Rode the six hundred.

 

Flash’d all their sabres bare,

Flash’d as they turn’d in air

Sabring the gunners there,

Charging an army, while

All the world wonder’d:

Plunged in the battery-smoke

Right thro’ the line they broke;

Cossack and Russian

Reel’d from the sabre-stroke

Shatter’d and sunder’d.

Then they rode back, but not

Not the six hundred.

 

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon behind them

Volley’d and thunder’d;

Storm’d at with shot and shell,

While horse and hero fell,

They that had fought so well

Came thro’ the jaws of Death,

Back from the mouth of Hell,

All that was left of them,

Left of six hundred.

 

When can their glory fade?

O the wild charge they made!

All the world wonder’d.

Honor the charge they made!

Honor the Light Brigade,

Noble six hundred!

 

 

 

 

Tears, Idle Tears

 

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

Tears from the depth of some divine despair

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,

And thinking of the days that are no more.

 

         Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,

That brings our friends up from the underworld,

Sad as the last which reddens over one

That sinks with all we love below the verge;

So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

 

         Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns

The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds

To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;

So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

 

         Dear as remember'd kisses after death,

And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd

On lips that are for others; deep as love,

Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;

O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

 

 

In Memoriam, A. H. H., Canto LIII

 

Oh yet we trust that somehow good

⁠Will be the final goal of ill,

⁠To pangs of nature, sins of will,

Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

 

That nothing walks with aimless feet;

⁠That not one life shall be destroy'd,

⁠Or cast as rubbish to the void,

When God hath made the pile complete;

 

That not a worm is cloven in vain;

⁠That not a moth with vain desire

⁠Is shrivel'd in a fruitless fire,

Or but subserves another's gain.

 

Behold!;

⁠I can but trust that good shall fall

⁠At last—far off—at last, to all,

And every winter change to spring.

 

So runs my dream: but what am I?

⁠An infant crying in the night:

⁠An infant crying for the light:

And with no language but a cry.

Heine’s “Rückschau” and “Weltlauf”

 

  

The German texts of the poems and quoted prose are appended.

  

1.  Heine’s “Rückschau” 

 

A Look Back

 

I have smelled every smellable scent

that the kitchen of earth can present.

I’ve taken all pleasures I could,

just like a hero would,

drunk coffee and gobbled down cake,

known many fine girls for love’s sake,

worn a silk vest and a very fine cloak

with money jingling in my poke.

I rode on a horse like Gellert the Great;

I had more than a house, I had an estate!

On fortune’s green field I’ve often reclined

while golden sunrays on me shined.

A laurel wreath round my brow one would find

inspiring new dreams to be born in my mind,

dreams of fine roses and unending May.

So blissful it was then to me each day,

addicted to twilight and idle as sin!

Roast pigeons just saw my mouth and flew in!

An angel appeared and from out of his gown –

a vintage Champagne for me to drink down!

These, though, were visions, just bubbles of soap,

which burst.  Now I lie on a wet grassy slope.

Rheumatism has seized all my limbs

and my soul is so sad, it with shame overbrims.

Every joy and every delight

I have paid for with harsh acrid spite.

I’m soaked in the bitterest gall,

while bedbugs do bite and crawl.

Beset by every black grief,

I find I’m a liar, I find I’m a thief.

Each affluent booby and dry old maid

must be begged if I’m to be paid.

I’ve now grown so tired of dashing around,

I’m ready to lie in my grave in the ground.

For now, my Christian friends, good-bye!

It’s quite understood, we’ll meet in the sky. 

 

 

    This poem, though high-spirited, is anything but frivolous.  It appeared in Romanzero, Heine’s last book, written from his sick-bed with the knowledge that he would not recover.. 

     I translated this primarily for the fun of the couplets, many of which are constructed with the care of a stand-up comedian.  Punchlines arrive as regularly as the surf.  While maintaining these clanging insistent rhymes, I have jazzed up the rhythmic patterns (for the most part keeping a four-beat line of variable length) to avoid a sing-song tone.  The rhymes still create an impression of a certain jauntiness, which should not distract readers from Heine’s graver implications.  One may gather a hint of this darker tone from the title of one of the chapters in Adorno’s Notes to Literature: “Heine the Wound.”

     The irony that begins with naïve hyperbole, which comes to seem mere bravado as it is undercut and eventually all but inverted by bedbugs and illness and dependence on unworthy others.  The poet’s élan vital drained, he is fatigued with life, ready to leap into the grave.  Yet at the same time, he is a spirited observer of his own position and able to toss off an ironic greeting for the close, the hollow Christian promise of pie in the sky.  His supposed conversion serves as an example of the “begging” to which the author is reduced, yet he remains afloat in the sea of circumstance through artful and defiant words.  If he cannot eliminate life’s pains and injustices, he can at any rate make fun of them.

 

 

ii.  Heine’s “Weltlauf”

 

     This poem, also from Romanzero, provides economic analysis boiled down to the bare minimum.  In a society in which worth is measured by wealth, further success inevitably goes to those who have no need of it, while those in penury stand no chance.  As another poet put it “Them that's got shall get/ Them that's not shall lose/ So the bible said and it still is news.”

     In the French introduction to Lutetia Heine asserted his simple and radical belief that “all people have the right to eat.”  He proceeded to a righteous condemnation of capitalism.  “The old social order has long been judged and condemned.  Let justice prevail!  May the old society be shattered in which innocence always loses, where cynicism flourishes, where people exploit their fellow man!  May the old way be destroyed from the very base with its whitewashed graves, filled with lies and injustice.”

 

The Way of the World

 

If someone’s got a lot you know what’s next:

the money rolling in will never cease.

The man with very little at the start

will never find his wealth increase.

 

And if you haven’t anything at all,

you may as well be buried ‘neath the clay.

The right to live belongs only to those

who have the cash to pay their way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rückschau

 

Ich habe gerochen alle Gerüche

In dieser holden Erdenküche;

Was man genießen kann in der Welt,

Das hab ich genossen wie je ein Held!

Hab Kaffee getrunken, hab Kuchen gegessen.

Hab manche schöne Puppe besessen;

Trug seidne Westen, den feinsten Frack,

Mir klingelten auch Dukaten im Sack.

Wie Gellert ritt ich auf hohem Roß;

Ich hatte ein Haus, ich hatte ein Schloß.

Ich lag auf der grünen Wiese des Glücks,

Die Sonne grüßte goldigsten Blicks;

Ein Lorbeerkranz umschloß die Stirn,

Er duftete Träume mir ins Gehirn,

Träume von Rosen und ewigem Mai —

Es ward mir so selig zu Sinne dabei,

So dämmersüchtig, so sterbefaul —

Mir flogen gebratne Tauben ins Maul,

Und Englein kamen, und aus den Taschen

Sie zogen hervor Champagnerflaschen —

Das waren Visionen, Seifenblasen —

Sie platzten — Jetzt lieg ich auf feuchtem Rasen,

Die Glieder sind mir rheumatisch gelähmt,

Und meine Seele ist tief beschämt.

Ach, jede Lust, ach, jeden Genuß

Hab ich erkauft durch herben Verdruß;

Ich ward getränkt mit Bitternissen

Und grausam von den Wanzen gebissen;

Ich ward bedrängt von schwarzen Sorgen,

Ich mußte lügen, ich mußte borgen

Bei reichen Buben und alten Vetteln —

Ich glaube sogar, ich mußte betteln.

Jetzt bin ich müd vom Rennen und Laufen,

Jetzt will ich mich im Grabe verschnaufen.

Lebt wohl! Dort oben, ihr christlichen Brüder,

Ja, das versteht sich, dort sehn wir uns wieder.

 

 

Weltlauf

 

Hat man viel, so wird man bald

Noch viel mehr dazu bekommen.

Wer nur wenig hat, dem wird

Auch das Wenige genommen.

 

Wenn du aber gar nichts hast,

Ach, so lasse dich begraben —

Denn ein Recht zum Leben, Lump,

Haben nur die etwas haben.

 

 

 

 

The passage from the introduction to Lutetia in German is, in the original, “dass die Menschen alle das Recht zu essen haben.  Sie ist schon seit langer Zeit gerichtet, verurteilt, diese alte Gesellschaft.  Möge ihr Gerechtigkeit widerfahren!  Möge sie zertrūmmert warden, diese alte Welt, wo die Unschuld zu Grunde ging, wo der Cynismus gedieh, wo der Mensch durch den Menschen exploitiert wurde!  Mögen sie von Grund aus zerstört warden, diese ūbertūnchen Grabstätten, wo die Lüge und die Unbilligkeit residierten!”

Steven Hirsch's Demon Commuter

 

Steven Hirsch’s Demon Commuter from Giant Steps Press is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and elsewhere for $19.95.  Further information on Hirsch and his work is available at the Giant Steps site https://giantstepspress.wordpress.com/steven-hirsch/.

 

      Steve Hirsch’s readers expect a lot: great poems of corralled consciousness barely contained in words stretched to the breaking point.  Hirsch captures the unique moment, but his imagistic precision mingles intimately with the recognition of the socio-political-historical dimension of the scenes of his life, and with a view longer yet, his lines are lit with glints of what does not change, the illumination which is for him less a conviction than a habit of vision, nothing more than the way things look.  

     In its most literal reading the title refers to Hirsch’s (and many other workers’) daily routine, the commute to earn a living, the mental “drivenness” imposed by the reality principle.  Taking a step back, Hirsch makes it clear that his own sometimes ill-fitting vocation is embedded in an inescapable system that privileges greed and aggression, giving the demonic the face of war and exploitation.  Yet in his final vision, everything is transformed, redeemed even, and “demon” can regain a numinous glow.  But even once the demon of the title has appeared in beneficent form as the sort of interior muse of which Socrates spoke, now and then he seems more closely to resemble S. Clay Wilson’s Checkered Demon in his frantic, barely controllable impulsive energy.  

     With a Mahayana impulse toward sympathy with all sentient beings, Hirsch imagines what burdens may weigh on the psyches of his fellow citizens.

 

the dark bags you carry

the persnickety boss, the wear of

gravity, knees chafed by

seat backs, groveling and

fruitless weekend prayers to a god

that simply is not there

as maddening as a crossword

missing a critical clue

 (from “Demon Commuter”)

 

Often the hurrying lines of Hirsch’s poems overflow in catalogues, words falling as in a cataract.  In “Supplication to the Muse of a Dark Age” specific signs of the season lead to the definition of a psychic hunger and then to a masterful concluding image, so natural it seems a proverb.

 

 

Full force fall in a rain of leaves, crops trimmed

& drying in large bins, shrink wrapped sanity

convenient and hermetically sealed.

Last little green tomato at risk to ripen or rot before

winter frosts the cold stovepipe and eaves.

Try to talk sense so I hear you through the rain on the gutters

the sirens, derailments, hurricanes, flak —

A mask surrendered is a

mask traded for another mask that masks the mask Jack

 

     For Hirsch current events are as much an element in the phenomena boiling all about him as the autumn.  He reacts to his local nuclear plant and the Mueller investigation and reviles “Vlad the scum-paler,” but in the end these are the fleas of the world, the social projection of the comedown inscribed in miniature on every waking day.

 

At 5:58 again

no matter what the song

clockradio curdles spirit

sours mind, kills dreaming

slays the composer writing aubades

in lazy morning afterglow.

On the dawn-chilled depot platform

(“Transgressions”)    

 

Yet the dreaming may be overcome, seen past, transcended with high thoughts and the illuminated dreams of art.  A longtime Buddhist practitioner, Hirsch has studied what he calls the “blank book of Zen” and realizes that irritation and desire do not vanish, but rather assume a place in a whole and perfect picture.

 

Deer ticks leap from tree bark

to truck their miniature dose of Lyme

into the truck stop of loose socks hanging

over a row of hiking boots.

Hold cosmic mudra below my navel

for another quiet hour until the gong

and then Kin Hin walking like mountain

(“Zazen Weekend at the Grail”)

 

We all travel together as demon commuters, all passengers on “The Train to the End of the World.”  No need for sighs. 

 

No muscle can lift

the unsurpassable.

                                                            (“Zazen”)

 Yet there is beauty and solace and vision in Hirsch’s small machines made of words, one all the more necessary for frantic commuters, anxious householders, and those terrified by the evening news.

 

[This poetry is a rescue

from the death of all dreams.]

(“Urban Verses”)

Thematic Instability in Balzac’s La Rabouilleuse

     The center of Balzac’s La Rabouilleuse is elusive. Though the book is a part of Balzac’s Scenes of Provincial Life a good part of the narrative occurs in Paris.  The family dynamics between Joseph, Phillipe, and their mother seem to be heart of the book until Flore appears and then Maxence with their designs on the Rouget money.

     The unusual instability of the novel’s title reflects this thematic ambiguity.  First published as Les Deux Frères in 1840, it became Un Ménage de Garçon in 1842 and then La Rabouilleuse in 1843.  The final choice is perhaps the most puzzling as Flore, la rabouilleuse herself, has a limited role and is clearly more a motive than an active agent in the plot.  In translation it has appeared as The Black Sheep in Donald Adamson’s version, as A Bachelor’s Establishment in Clara Bell’s, and as The Two Brothers in Katherine Prescott Wormeley’s. 

     Clearly these shifts in the title imply an uncertainty about the central theme of the story.  While the original title focuses on the comparison of Joseph and Phillipe, the second seems to turn primarily to Joseph as protagonist, though it remains uncertain whether the “bachelor” is Phillipe before his marriage, or Joseph whose ménage includes his mother. 

     Balzac’s comments in a brief avant-propos only complicate the question of the book’s primary subject further.  Balzac claims in a dedication to Charles Nodier that his principal theme is to point out the harm done by the weakening of patriarchy.  Few readers might have guessed.  He explains that his story carries “a great lesson for the family and for Motherhood” by calling attention to “the effects of diminished paternal authority.”  In fact, he finds a general decay of morality in modern society which he finds “based solely on the power of money.”  For Balzac as an orthodox believer, the remedy is obvious: the country must “return to the Catholic Church for purification of the masses by religious feeling” and all will be well. [1]

     All these highly conventional opinions seem to have little, though, to do with the narrative in spite of the author’s assertions.  Only in a harsh verdict on Agathe’s husbandless household and her acting the hapless woman by preferring her ne’er-do-well son to the dutiful one might “diminished paternal authority” be relevant to the plot.  Dr. Rouget, a strong husband of the previous generation, clearly errs in his mistreatment of his daughter.  Jean-Joseph, Phillipe, and Maxence are all “strong” male characters with far from exemplary behavior, while the laudable Joseph is quiet and unassertive.  Likewise, apart from the priest’s deathbed counseling of Agathe bringing her to the realization that she had been wronging her more virtuous son, the novel contains little to support the notion that regeneration must come from the Church.  Balzac, perhaps motivated by moralistic critics of his work, claims with little basis that the most respectable values underly his novel.     

     The theme of greed displacing ethics is, however, in a general way, appropriate, as the characters motivated by money or by money’s glow reflected in social prestige are depicted as amoral while those with more humane motivations behave better.  In the plot’s mainline clear patterns of retributive justice govern the paths of Joseph, the character most positively portrayed who finds success and even ennoblement in spite of his indifference to such rewards and the avaricious Maxence, Phillipe, and Flore  all of whom come to ruin.  The final miseries of Flore read almost like a medieval exemplum.  Yet, though she has no worldly ambition, Agathe is profoundly misguided in her treatment of her sons., while the community in general is neither pious nor wicked, [2] though often self-interested and gossipy. 

     This novel is only a small portion of Balzac’s grand project, La Comédie humaine, comprising ninety-one completed works and the planning for another forty-six over a period of two decades.   Balzac’s introductory note to the novel points out the thematic complexity allowed by his comprehensive plan.  His soldiers, he says, in this story indicate the “depravity” that “results from the exigencies of war in certain minds which dare to act in private life as they would on the field of battle,” but the reader can see that this is no general verdict due to the “fine characters,” motivated by “great and noble devotion” depicted in his Scenes of Military Life. 

     The conflicted focus implied by the multiple titles may, then, be an answer as well as a question.  As La Rabouilleuse is a single mosaic stone in a large composition in which every portion need not mimic the whole, the themes of one isolated portion need not agree with those of another.  Even the irreligious among Balzac’s nineteenth or twenty-first century readers may echo Dryden’s cogent praise of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales “Here is God's plenty.”  A certain exhilarating liberty emerges, allowing Balzac to compose without preconception. 

     Balzac’s approach to theme, nuanced far beyond his conscious, expressed values, is evident in the ambivalence of his political implications.  Though Balzac was himself a conservative royaloist, Marx and Engels had the highest regard for his work.  Marx had enough respect for the Comédie humaine to envision writing a major, full-length study of it, though he never completed this project.  Engels praised Balzac for writing that belied the conscious reactionary theme, often betraying (to a receptive reader at least) what looks quite like revolutionary implications. 

 

Well, Balzac was politically a Legitimist; his great work is a constant elegy on the inevitable decay of good society, his sympathies are all with the class doomed to extinction. But for all that his satire is never keener, his irony never bitterer, than when he sets in motion the very men and women with whom he sympathizes most deeply - the nobles. And the only men of whom he always speaks with undisguised admiration, are his bitterest political antagonists, the republican heroes of the Cloître Saint-Méry, the men, who at that time (1830-6) were indeed the representatives of the popular masses. That Balzac thus was compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the necessity of the downfall of his favourite nobles, and described them as people deserving no better fate; and that he saw the real men of the future where, for the time being, they alone were to be found - that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of Realism, and one of the grandest features in old Balzac.

   Engels to Margaret Harkness April 1888

 

     The same authorial freedom that allowed Marx and Engels to see their notions of French society reflected in Balzac’s epic canvas also enables the reader without a partisan view to see large and complex patterns in this narrative world which, like those we observe in life, offer in general no easy answers and include many shades between the extremes, even now and then to revealing the unexpected. 

     The liberty that enables ambiguity need not result in randomness.  Balzac employs observations of unprogrammed lived experience mixed with literary conventions, and he has no difficulty in developing incidents that suggest generalizations that might be called themes.  Rather like some painters who chose to work en plein air claiming to reproduce their sense impressions on canvas, but in fact propelling art in new directions, Balzac’s pose as a scientifical observer of society allowed him to construct fictions in a new vein.

     La Rabouilleuse, a novel that has met more blame than praised from critics, [2] has at any rate a gripping story, punctuated with dramatic incident and scenes of pathos.  The reader who hunts after a theme reducible to a single line may be missing both that simple narrative excitement and the grander sense, based on Balzac’s life’s work, that his novels provide access to a complete and coherent scene of human life, one as subjective as individual as any writer’s.  The specific correspondence to historical moments in France during the author’s life seems almost immaterial, in spite of the references to documented events.  In the end La Rabouilleuse and the entire Comédie humaine are, not because of topical or documentary detail, but by virtue of the specifically Balzacian imagination they record, as resistant to reductive formulae and sometimes as enigmatic as life itself. 

 

 

1. The passages quoted in Clara Bell’s rendering are in the original French: “grands enseignements et pour la famille et pour la maternité; “des effets produits par la diminution de la puissance paternelle;” “puisse une société basée uniquement sur le pouvoir de l'argent;” and “puisse-t-elle recourir promptement au catholicisme pour purifier les masses par le sentiment religieux.”  “Assez de beaux caractères, assez de grands et nobles dévouements brilleront dans les Scènes de la Vie militaire, pour qu’il m’ait été permis d’indiquer ici combien de dépravation causent les nécessités de la guerre chez certains esprits, qui dans la vie privée osent agir comme sur les champs de bataille.”

2.  In  his introduction to the entire Comédie humaine, Balzac notes that in his view “Man is neither good nor bad” (“L’homme n’est ni bon ni méchant”).

3.  A number of negative judgements are mentioned at the outset of Allan H. Pasco, “Process Structure in Balzac's ‘La Rabouilleuse,’" Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1/2 (Fall and Winter 2005-2006).

 

 

 

 

Note of an Accidental Bibliophile

     Feeling I have enough to do to attend to the authors’ words, I don’t seek out rare editions of books, but now and then I happen across an interesting old title in a Salvation Army or library book sale, and I am quite willing then to enjoy a volume’s particular qualities.  My English copy of La Rabouilleuse, titled A Bachelor’s Establishment, was published by J. M. Dent in 1896, translated by the indefatigable Clara Bell and introduced by George Saintsbury, part of his twenty-volume edition of the Comédie Humaine.  (The Times reviewer, grandly named E. Irenaeus Stevenson, welcomed the set on June 25, 1898 in a piece “Balzac in English” which began by noting that Balzac “is not even yet read and measured nicely by all those men and women quick in perception [and] broad in cultivation.”  “It may be doubted,” he goes on, “whether in English translation and with Anglo-Saxons, Balzac will ever attain a much more general circulation that his masterpieces today receive.”

     The design of my copy has charm in its art nouveau cover lettering and decoration, deckle edges and irregular signatures, thick, palpable pages, and engraved illustrations by the Scots painter and printmaker D. Murray Smith.  While not memorable art, they and their inlaid protective tissues grace the book. 

Lands of All Play and No Work: Cockayne and the Abbey of Thélème

 

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; those in parentheses either to lines of “the Land of Cockayne” or to chapters of Gargantua.   Translations from Rabelais are makeshift, but my own. 

 

      Eve and Adam were chagrined to discover that even in the Garden of Eden, there were rules, and in the twentieth century the Rolling Stones still complained “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”  St. John of the Cross adopted a contrarian approach, concluding that “In order to arrive at having pleasure in everything,/ Desire to have pleasure in nothing,” [1] but, several hundred years later, Freud treated the pleasure principle and its frustration as the most universal of motives.  People feel sufficient wistful longing for a world that never was, where limits no longer contain individual desire, that they have sometimes sketched dream-like pictures of impossible sensual utopias. 

     “The Land of Cockayne” (ca.1330) is contained in a book called the Kildare Lyrics which contains, for the most part, devotional and moralizing poems, an unsurprising subject matter as the collection was probably made by a Franciscan friar. Most are vigorous with vernacular and convey orthodox Christian sentiments, often in highly conventional treatments. [2]  The frolicking light-hearted tone of the first poem, “The Land of Cockayne,” is unique.  The poem is set “Fur in see bi west Spayngne,” perhaps in the neighborhood of the garden of the Hesperides, Hy-Brasil, or Tír na nÓg, the land of the ever-young.  In this land the residents enjoy uninterrupted pleasure (24), prominently including unlimited eating and drinking.  The catalogue of available culinary pleasures includes buildings made entirely of food and rivers of “oile, melk, honi and wine” (46).  A place of superabundant luxury, among the delights of Cockayne are precious gems on every side and the aromas of all the spices of the Orient. 

 

In the praer is a tre,

Swithe likful forto se.

The rote is gingeuir and galingale,

The siouns beth al sedwale,

Trie maces beth the flure,

The rind canel of swet odur,

The frute gilofre of gode smakke.

Of cucubes ther nis no lakke.  

                                                (71-78)

 What is more, fanciful whimsy is afforded free play.  There is no dirt, no flies, fleas, or lice (37).  In Cockayne the church windows are photochromic and adjust themselves to provide appropriate light.  The monks are so “heigh of mode” (125) that they flit about in the sky in play when they are not busy acting like stallions in teaching the nuns “a prayer,” “up and down” with “legs in the air” (165-167).

     In spite of the distractions, food is the primary appeal of the land.  In Cockayne cooked fowl fly to the diner to offer themselves.  Through the glorious plenitude of food in this land of wish-fulfillment one may glimpse the sometime rigors of a medieval diet.  The fascination with food is the obsession of the periodically deprived.  The dream of a full larder, often unrealized, had earlier found expression in the Classical cornucopia associated variously with Gaia, Plutus, Demeter, or Abundantia and the Dagda’s cauldron of plenty (the coire ansic) in Irish lore. 

     The speaker’s attitude toward this embarrassment of riches is unequivocal delight.  The monks flutter down from the sky for evensong, attracted by the exposed white buttocks of a “maidin,” (136) and the tone is altogether jolly.  Far from censorious, the poet’s attitude is “ribald,” with the sort of harmless innocence of adolescent fantasy difficult to imagine in the present era. 

     Though readers have sometimes taken the poem as a fiercely critical satire of clerical corruption, such a motive finds no support whatever in the text.  The poem opens with the speaker finding Cockayne so appealing, it is preferable even to Heaven.   

 

Þoȝ paradis be miri and briȝt.

Cokaygn is of fairir siȝt.

                                            (5-6)

(Though Paradise be merry and bright, Cockayne is a fairer sight.)

 And the poem ends with what looks very like instructions on how to “win” the prize of spending time in such a marvelous place.  One might atone for time in Cockayne by spending seven years wading in pig excrement but it sounds as though the author considers that a fair enough bargain.

 

Whose wl com þat lond to.

Ful grete penance he mot do.

Seue ȝere in swine-is dritte.

He mot wade, wol ȝe i-witte. ⁠

Al anon up to þe chynne.

So he schal þe lond[e] winne.

                                              (177-182)

(Whoever wishes to visit that land must perform a heavy penance.  Seven years in pigshit he must wade, up to his chin, you may well know, in order to win that land.)

 The poem ends with a prayer to God, not to protect Christians from worldly temptations, but rather kindly asking that the reader may one day enjoy the opportunity to experience Cockayne.

     Far from moralistic, the poem is an ebullient, light-hearted acknowledgement of the sensual inclinations of humans (indeed, of all organisms).  It no more implies acceptance of free love or gluttony than enjoyment of a Chaplin short requires endorsement of kicking people from behind.  Rather like the world of a silent film comic, the poet’s Cockayne is Carnivalesque; norms may be harmlessly transgressed in an interval of festive gaiety even if they revert to their default settings the next morning.  The low mimetic focus on appetite is far more conducive to comedy than to realism or idealizing, but the laughter is entirely hearty and sweet-tempered, far from the Swiftian “fierce indignation” of satire.. 

     The poem need not contradict the principles of a religious vocation.  Readers sometimes look for more consistency in literature than they do in life.  The same poet may write a tenderly respectful lyric and one of selfish lust, possibly even with the same evening in mind.  Both may be equally “true.”  The pious monk to whose book we owe the preservation of this poem may have seen no impropriety at all in having a wry laugh at the spectacle of human weakness.  “The Land of Cockayne” has preserved such a spell of sublime mirth in reaction to the human condition.  It is funny and warm and oh-so-human, the opposite pole from anything as serious as a polemic.     

     Two hundred years later, another presumably sincere monk, another Franciscan, in fact, at the beginning of his career, imagined an equally permissive territory, Gargantua’s Abbey of Thélème, where the sole rule of the order is notoriously “Do as you like” [3]  Far from being rooted in egoistic desire, this rule against rules expresses humility.  When Gargantua offers to reward his ally the valiant Friar John with the creation of a new and innovative religious establishment of his own design, the monk’s reply is charmingly modest: “But how” says the monk, might I be able to govern others when I am not able to govern myself?” [4]  Accordingly, Thélème invites both men and women to live together without any vows whatsoever. 

     Not only are the residents free from oppressive rules, they live in opulent luxury.  They go about in the finest clothes, covered with jewels.  Even their dressing is no chore, thanks to the attentions of their “masters of the wardrobe” [5].  They amuse themselves in a huge multi-story library.  Each is able to “read, write, sing, play musical instruments, and speak five or six languages” [6].  In addition, they enjoy the aristocratic amusements of hunting and hawking as well as agreeably passing time in each other’s society.  This is the greater pleasure, as they are all themselves beautiful people; neither men nor women may be admitted who are not “good-looking, well-built, and with a pleasant nature” [7].  The inscription over the abbey’s door invites “noble gentlemen” and “ladies of aristocratic birth” [8] while barring greedy professionals such as lawyers and usurers whose goal is the mean accumulation of wealth. Such mean money-grubbers are distasteful and likely to be ugly. 

     Moral excellence is bound up with intellectual achievements and aesthetic cultivation, indeed, with idleness, in this world in a fantasy of a sensitive and elegant ruling class, resembling nothing so much as the almost exactly contemporaneous world of Castiglione’s The Courtier.  It is as though Plato’s philosopher-kings did not have to bother with ruling, but could devote their entire lives to entertainments.  Contrary to history’s evidence, which has no lack or malicious and rapacious nobles, freedom makes them altogether virtuous.  “Because free people, well-born and educated, familiar with honest society, are by nature and impulse propelled always to virtuous acts and away from vice, by an impulse they call honor.“ [9]  The abbey is a post-industrial paradise in which people may develop their sensibility and, in fact, enjoy life without regard for the Reality Principle. 

     People in the “Land of Cockayne” found utter satisfaction in sensual delights of food and drink and love with only a few signifiers (like the beautiful tree, sweet odor, precious stones, and lovely birdsong   to betoken luxurious beauty. (67-100)  Placed in such a setting, with every appetite instantly satisfied, the reader might well imagine agreeing with the author’s encomium.

 

Þer n'is lond on erthe is pere.

Vnder heuen n'is lond iwisse.

Of so mochil ioi and blisse.

(21-⁠24)

            (No land on earth is its peer.  Under heaven there is no land, I                 know, of so much joy and bliss.)

      Since in Cockayne the only acknowledged human desires are physical, the tone is comic, in an ebullient Carnivalesque mode in which the human dependence on food and sex is ridiculous and insistent, but nonetheless endearing.  In the Abbey of Thélème the animal pleasures are taken for granted and the stress is on imaginative delights, culture, art, and civilized company, the sophisticated manipulative play with symbols that most distinguishes our species from the beasts.  Thus, while Rabelais’ tone is extravagant and fanciful, it contains as well a program for how to live life well that goes beyond a full belly, and among the fanciful and humorous elements notes of high seriousness are discernable. 

     While a dramatic contrast is evident between the riotous “low” aim of Cockayne’s utopia and the more “noble” and cerebral occupations of the Thélèmites, the two libidinal Edens have in common that each is enabled by the abolition of labor.  In Cockayne the unlimited availability of everything good means that competition need not exist.  There can be no motive for theft, no distinction between the industrious and the idle or, in the end, between the vicious and the virtuous when each individual is the recipient of superfluous unearned wealth.  The Abbey seems to be underwritten by Gargantua’s endless purse, so its residents need tend only to themselves.  The lifestyle of the inmates of Thélème is supported by an entire townful of workers: goldsmiths, jewelers, embroiderers, tailors, goldworkers, velvet-makers, tapestry makers, and upholsterers.” [10]  Of course, every high culture from ancient Athens through Heian Japan and Victorian England has been created by a leisure class of intellectuals and artists supported by the labor of others.

     Something not far from a land of “all play and no work” in which labor is pleasant and voluntary was conceived by William Morris in News from Nowhere and during the nineteen-sixties seemed actually possible to the theorists of “post-industrial society” [11], though working hours never shrank much and, in recent years, have been rising.  The work of Marshall Sahlins suggesting that hunter-gatherers who needed only to work fifteen to twenty hours a week to satisfy their needs were the original “affluent society” made the possibility of a largely work-free life more plausible.  

     In Genesis work seems to have arrived only to the fallen world where it seems very much like a punishment linked closely with mortality: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”  Perhaps the thrill of sexuality and the comfort of a good meal can only exist with the contrast of field-work or housework.  Even if pleasure cannot be experienced by one who does not feel pain as well, the thought of constant bliss (or at least well-being) is itself beguiling enough to inspire such dreams as the fabulous land of Cockayne and the wonderful Abbey of Thélème. 

 

  

1.  Ascent of Mt. Carmel 1.13.11.

 

2.  One poem “The Song of Michael of Kildare” identifies its author as "Frere Michel Kyldare,” and as a "frere menour."  Among the collection is a touching lullaby “Lollai, Lollai, litil child” and a verse reminiscent of Sei Shonagon “Five Hateful Things” beginning “Bissop lorles.”

 

3.  Ch 57 “Fay ce que vouldras.”

 

4.  Ch.  52  “Car comment (disait-il) pourrait-je gouverner autrui, qui moi-même gouverner ne saurrais?”

 

5.  Ch. 56 “Maîtres de garde-robes.”

 

6.  Ch. 57 “lire,  ecrire, chanter, jouer d’instruments harmonieux, parler de cinq et six langages.”

 

7.  Ch. 52 “belles, bien formées, et bien narturées.”

 

8.  Ch. 54 “Compagnons gentils” and “dames de haut parage.”

 

9.  Ch. 57 “Parce que gens libres, bien nés, bien instruits, conversant en compagnies honnêtes ont par nature un instinct, et aiguillon, qui toujours les pousse á faits vertueux, et retire de vice, lequel ils nommaient honneur.”

 

10.  Ch. 56 “orfèvres, lapidaires, brodeurs, tailleurs, tireurs d’or, veloutiers, tapissiers, et haut lissiers.”

 

11.  The term was popularized by Ivan Illich, Daniel Bell, and others after arising a few years earlier among the more utopian strains of leftists and cultural revolutionaries.  More recently, advocates of a guaranteed annual income have argued that not everyone need work.