All posts in category Literary criticism

Classical Epic: Homer and Virgil by Richard Jenkyns (1992)

W.A. Camps’s Introduction to Virgil was horrible to read, long-winded, verbose and highly repetitive; he describes the same series of events 3, 4, 5 times, first from the point of view of Aeneas, then of Turnus, then of the gods, then for its poerry, then for its symbolism etc etc, all without telling you anything particularly interesting or insightful. I found it so frustrating I gave up.

Richard Jenkyns’s dinky little primer (80 pages including Further Reading) is, by contrast, jaunty, accessible, logically structured, covers all the territory. It aims to be popular i.e. aims at a general audience, and his enthusiasm is infectious. Camps writes at great length without ever saying anything interesting. Jenkyns says something interesting in almost every sentence. Key learnings include:

Who was Homer?

There are two camps, unitarians and analysts. Unitarians think the Iliad and the Odyssey were written by one man in the same sense that Shakespeare was the author of Hamlet.

Analysts think the poems were the work of successive generations of anonymous authors. Analysts can themselves be subdivided into 2 groups: one group think the poems grew gradually as successive generations of minstrel poets added plotlines and details; the other type think this is so but posit the existence of a ‘redactor’, standing at the end of the oral line, who sorted the works out, synthesised various stories and consciously created the works we have today.

Milman Parry

In the 1930s a young American academic named Milman Parry revolutionised Homer studies. He had been on several extended sociological expeditions to poor illiterate villages in Bosnia, in the Balkans, and there was introduced to a fraternity of oral poets who could recite epic poems of enormous length purely from memory. He made many recordings of them in action and in conversation. It became clear that they had at their command a large number of ready-made formulae which they could slip into the poems at will to fit any metrical gap. Milman’s notions of ‘formulae’ were characterised by scope and economy: scope meant there were phrases to describe everything; economy indicated that they were short phrases, although they often came in grammatical variations which meant the poet could slip in the appropriate phrase to fill gaps in his lines. I like that Parry was dubbed the ‘Darwin of Homer studies’ in the sense that he gave it an utterly new, scientific basis.

Homer’s Greek was never spoken. It mashes together grammar and vocab from different dialects, embedded like different colours in a tapestry.

Parry didn’t actually change the who-was-Homer theories, just gave them a whole new dimension. But scholars stlil squabble to this day about whether they were written by one person at the end of a tradition of oral poets, or were assembled by a master writer but then continued to be adapted and retold in later generations. Nobody knows.

Against great men

Jenkyns highlights what you could call the bourgeois fallacy of literature which is that there is a kind of reader and critic who wants their literature to be produced by Great Geniuses. They are upset by the idea that the Iliad and Odyssey might be the result of communities of makers, spread over generations. Their critical approach depends on the notion that works of literature ought to display Fine Sensibilities and Moral Choices and Profound Psychological Insights and all the rest of it. So if it turns out that some of the greatest works of literature ever were produced by committees and communities, the entire humanist-bourgeois-moralistic school of criticism loses its assumptions and all its tools, what is there to write about?

Which is why I distance myself from that approach. For me a work of literature is a verbal machine, a semantic device, for eliciting psychological, cognitive and emotional responses. Who made it or why or what they intended are very secondary questions to analysing how the machine works and what it does to our brains when we read or hear it. This approach just seems to me more flexible and answerable to the weird, diverse and often inexplicable jungle of literary texts we engage with. Or proverbs or maxims or folk stories or limericks or the many other types of literary form or genre.

The whole insistence that literature must be original and must express the super-fine feelings of creative geniuses is a very narrow, blinkered view which only came into being with the Romantic Revolution around 1800. People who have only read literature from the last few decades, or the last two centuries at most, will get on fine with theis blinkered view because a lot of literature post 1800 was conceived and written in this way and a lot of criticism can justifiably focus on the author, their biography, their intentions and so on.

But if you read literature from before 1800 – from the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, the Icelandic sagas, the huge range of anonymous poems, the literature of the ancient world – it’s conceived and originated in completely different ways. Anglo-Saxon poetry, Beowulf, say, can’t be fitted into the post-Romantic, sensitive genius model but, like Homer, it obviously exists. So your critical approach must be modified to take account of the widest possible variety of literary artefacts.

An illiterate peasant can say something as profound as Shelley. Some of the greatest stories are folk stories. Some of the greatest wisdom is in proverbs. Get your head round it.

Back to Homer, most critics think the author of the Iliad and of the Odyssey cannot be the same man. Jenkyns tends to think they are but not because he’s wedded to the Great Man theory, more for the accumulation of technical evidence.

Homer’s gods

The ungodlike behaviour of Homer’s gods offended Plato. He thought they ought to be more dignified. Indeed, Homer’s men and gods are very similar in their selfishness and their emotional responses, but with 2 key differences: the gods are immortal and the gods are happy; men are mortal and, on the whole, miserable. But this means:

The gods’ desires and passions are shallower and more transitory than men’s. Men are complex and deep in a way that the gods are not; they face challenges and dilemmas from which the gods are exempt. (p.29)

The most distinctive thing about the Iliad is its phenomenal virile energy. It has a fierce love of life. It is Nietzschean. It asserts life and nothing but life. The most intense experience a man can have is fighting in battle. Death is always near so every moment is superhumanly intense. Nothing matches the complete, pure, 100% masculine experience of victorious fighting, of killing an opponent.

The pitilessness seems to be a necessary part of the vision…a fundamentally tragic conception, high, austere and unflinching in a fashion not easily grasped by the modern liberal imagination. (p.28)

Menis, anger, is the first word of the Iliad. It is a 11,693-line long poem about male anger.

The Christian idea is that God is great because he loves us. Homer’s idea is the reverse: the gods are great because they get involved, a bit, superfically; but deep down they are immortal and wonderfully indifferent, light-hearted, care-less. Essentially frivolous.

This offended the stern moralist Plato. Which is why I don’t like Plato, whose philosophical approach leads him to the ludicrous idea that this world is simply a cheap reproduction of the Ideal World which exists on some other plane and is much to be preferred. Nonsense. This is the only world and that is why it is so important to live as intensely and fiercely as Homer’s heroes.

The Iliad is named after Troy because Ilium was the old Greek word for Troy. So the title Iliad could be translated as ‘Troy Story’. Except that isn’t what the poem is really about. It is the story of Achilles’ anger and the tragic vision of the universe which that anger invokes, calls forth, embodies.

The Iliad covers a period of one month. The central 21 books of the poem cover just three days.

The Odyssey

Many readers remember the Odyssey as a picaresque series of exotic adventures. But it isn’t. The actual action ofthe poem covers a similiarly brief period with all the exotic adventures being told in a flashback to the court of King Alcinous of hte Phaeacians.

The Odyssey is actually a nostos, the story of ‘a return home’. It’s also easy to forget that Odysseus’s journey home is mirrored by his grown-up son Telemechus’s journey away from home, to mainland Greece, to meet and ask Odysseus’s comrades in the war what has become of him.

In the Iliad man is alone, and Homer dramatises this in the superficial bonding of Priam and Achilles when the former comes to beg the latter for Hector’s body. I’ve always through this scene one of the most beautyiful and heartrending in all literature, but Jenkyns brings out how they are grieving for different things and remain isolated in their own worlds.

Anyway, by contrast, Odysseus’s nostos continually brings him into greater and greater society.

There is lots of evidence that there were and are two Odysseuses in the ancient tradition: one was a wily trickster, whose character appears much earlier than the Homeric poems, and owes a lot to folk legend. The other is the upright noble king of the Iliad type. The two traditions are combined in the Odyssey.

The Odyssey is, despite its many grim moments, a comedy. The hero arrives home safe and sound to be reunited with his wife and son. The good are rewarded and the bad are punished.

It is also a poem about showing hospitality to the stranger at the door.

Virgil

Virgil obviously copied the worldview, historical setting, characters and key events from Homer. Yet there would have been no point doing it if you just ended up as a second-rate Homer. Virgil co-opts Homer big time but he is trying to do something different and the poem is full of this effort, of struggle, of difficulty, to rethink and remodel his exemplars.

Virgil co-opts huge parts of both the Iliad and the Odyssey into a poem which somehow manages to be shorter than either of them.

Primary and secondary epic

The distinction between primary epic (anonymous product of illiterate societies) and secondary epic (written product of literate societies, generally with a named author) is boringly familiar. Jenkyns adds a wrinkle I hadn’t thought of: secondary epic is generally more moralising, more earnest and serious than primary epic. That’s one of the appeals of primary epic – its amoral energy.

In Homer the gods are frivolous and happy-go-lucky, and the human heroes have a kind of heroic freedom of action: they defy the gods as they go to their deaths. In the Aeneid (or Paradise Lost) the characters carry a heavy burden of meaning/destiny and nobody is ever happy-go-lucky. The fierce Nietszchean joy has evaporated. Everything is an effort and a burden and a sacrifice. I’ve just read T.S. Eliot’s essay on Virgil where he describes Aeneas as having ‘a very heavy cross to bear.’ Exactly, and the poem also bears that weight.

Poiund’s definition of epic

It’s easy to overlook but when Ezra Pound says an epic is a long poem with history in it, both the Iliad and the Odyssey do NOT have history in them, not proper history, autheticated factual history. They both come from the Greek Dark Ages of legends and myths.

By contrast, Virgil’s Aeneid emphatically is a poem with history in: book 6 features the parade of future Roman heroes which refers to umpteen real historical personages and their military achievements, and here and at the end of book 8 (the shield) Virgil goes out of his way to include real history in his poem.

The burden of meaning

Again: many poets in Roman times wrote long epic poems, but the heroes generally had their adventures and that was it. Only in Virgil is their this tremendous weight of significance and symbolism, and all the way through the sense of tremendous effort, and its self conscious sense of burden and heavy historical meaning which Milton copied.

Aeneas introduces himself as ‘pius Aeneas’ (1.378) and his awareness of the burden of responsibility to family, state and the gods repeatedly threatens to crush him. It makes Aeneas a new type of epic hero. This is cognate with Eliot’s notion that Aeneas has what none of the Homeric heroes have, and what will become a great Christian virtue, humility. He accepts that his destiny is bigger than he is.

Virgil’s prisms

Virgil uses a prismatic method. He walks round his men and women, examining them from all angles. The most obvious way this is done is by comparing them to other figures from myth or history. Thus Aeneas is compared at various points to Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, Hercules, Theseus, Jason and Augustus. The point is not that Aeneas is like any of these: it is precisely the differences that the reader is invited to ponder and define.

Dido and Aeneas

Jenkyns makes a neat observation about Aeneas and Dido: it is best to think of them as Homeric characters who have got out of their depth. They continue to behave with the insouciance of the Homeric heroes, but somehow their world they inhabit has become darker and dominated by this effortful quest and destiny which Aeneas is cursed to fulfil. Aeneas starts out as a Homeric hero but he rapidly finds himself in a world where the Homeric rules no longer apply. Compare and contrast with the heroes of the Iliad in particular, who are confidently in and of their world. They are masters of it. Aeneas gropes his way through an alien world.

Jenkyns makes the neat point that, after her moving appearance to him as a phantasm after the fall of Troy, Aeneas never sees, or even thinks about, his lost wife Creusa again: and this is because ‘a good marriage is complete; its memory does not trouble the spirit.’ Unlike the doomed affair with Dido which, of course, very much does trouble his spirit for some time afterwards.

Aeneas the listener

One mark of the Homeric heroes’ at-homeness in their world is the long fluent speeches they make. It’s their world, they’re completely at home in it, they make lengthy speeches about it.

Aeneas, by contrast, speaks but doesn’t make many speeches. More often than not he is listening to ther people’s speeches, taking instruction, learning about his destiny.

And he is frequently puzzled and perplexed, led on by half-prophecies and obscure omens, knowing that something awaits him in Italy but only given the details half way through the poem. No-one in a Homeric poem is perplexed in this way. They are crystal clear about their grievances and their anger etc.

The Aeneid is a poem about a troubled man. It should start: ‘Arms and a troubled man I sing’.

Roman reviews

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by Simon on September 23, 2022  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on September 23, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/09/23/classical-epic-homer-and-virgil-richard-jenkyns/

Virgil and the Christian World by T.S. Eliot (1951)

T.S. Eliot: a potted biography

The great Anglo-American poet, playwright and critic T.S. Eliot (1888 to 1965) came from America to England just before the First World War, published a small number of sensuous, ‘modernist’ poems displaying a sensibility in debt to French Symbolism. Soon after the Great War ended he published the seminal modernist poem, The Waste Land (1922), but also established a reputation as a deeply insightful and intelligent critic of much earlier English literature, particularly the Jacobean playwrights and metaphysical poets of the early 1600s.

His reputation was enhanced and his influence steadily spread, especially among the younger generation of writers and critics, due to his editorship of a literary and philosophical magazine, The Criterion, which he edited from 1922 to 1939. Readers of The Criterion came to realise that, far from being a youthful revolutionary who was set on overturning literary values, and despite the radical format of The Waste Land (collage, fragments, quotes from multiple foreign languages), Eliot was, in fact, a profoundly conservative thinker.

This was made explicit when in 1928, in the foreword to a book of essays titled ‘For Lancelot Andrewes’ (the Jacobean bishop and writer) Eliot ‘came out’, declaring himself ‘a classicist in literature, royalist in politics and Anglo-Catholic in religion,’ committing himself to hierarchy and order in all three fields.

He had already taken British citizenship. In the later 1930s he attempted to revive the verse drama of the Elizabethans which he had spent so much time analysing, on the modern stage, writing a series of plays in verse, starting with Murder in the Cathedral (1935).

During the Second World War Eliot worked as a reader for the publishers Faber & Faber during the day and a fire warden at night. The masterpiece of his maturity was the set of four longer poems collectively titled the Four Quartets (Burnt Norton, 1936, then East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding, published in 1940, 1941 and 1942, respectively).

After the war, Eliot settled into the position of Grand Old Man of Poetry, with a leading role at the leading publisher of poetry, Faber. He continued to write essays and make broadcasts on the radio. With his public conversion to Anglicanism he had achieved an ideological and psychological stability.

Having lived through two ruinous world wars, a lot of Eliot’s effort was now devoted towards helping to define and preserve the best of European civilisation. His early essays had been offshoots of a poet working through his own problems and interests; the later essays are a conscious effort to establish a canon of classic literature, trying to formulate universal categories to define and preserve it.

It is in this spirit that in 1951 he delivered a lecture on BBC radio titled ‘Virgil and the Christian World’, which was then printed in The Listener magazine and collected in the volume On Poetry and Poets.

Virgil and the Christian World

As befits radio this is not an address to a specialist audience of literary scholars but a more broad brush approach for a general audience. Eliot explains that he is not setting out to assert Virgil’s special value as a poet or moralist, but to pay attention to ‘those characteristics of Virgil which render him peculiarly sympathetic to the Christian mind’.

Straight away he addresses the notorious issue of the Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue. This, the fourth and final of Virgil’s set of lengthy poems about the countryside or ‘eclogues’, contains extravagant praise of the forthcoming birth of a special child, who, the poet claims, will bring a new golden age, the return of Saturn and the Virgin, the gift of divine life etc.

As early Christianity established itself, early Christian apologists ransacked all available texts, from old Jewish scriptures to the entire literature of the ancient world, looking for proofs and prophecies, any text anywhere which could be made to prefigure and predict the arrival of their messiah.

Thus the Fourth Eclogue was quickly adopted by these apologists and Virgil was made an honorary Christian before the fact because Christians claimed he had been gifted with spiritual prophecy to foresee the coming of the Christ. Throughout the entire Middle Ages and well into the Renaissance scholars and theologians genuinely believed that Virgil had predicted the coming of the Christ child.

Eliot makes clear right at the start that he in now way thinks that Virgil foresaw the birth of Christ (some 19 years after he himself died). Rather, Eliot thinks the Fourth Eclogue was written to a friend of his, Pollio, whose wife was expecting a baby.

[In fact, the notes to the OUP edition of the Eclogues which I recently read, suggest that this passage of the Fourth Eclogue was describing the hoped-for son of the recent marriage of Antony and Octavius’s sister, Octavia (in 40 BC), because contemporaries devoutly hoped that their union would usher in a final end to Rome’s endless civil wars.]

Eliot then ponders the meaning of the words prophet, prophecy and predict. He himself has no doubt that Virgil had no inkling of the coming of Christ. On the other hand, he suggests that if the word ‘inspiration’ means writing something the poet himself does not completely understand, and which he or she may themselves misinterpret once the ‘inspiration’ has passed, the maybe Virgil was ‘inspired’.

This is by way of preparing the way for some autobiography, for Eliot then paints an obvious portrait of himself and how his most famous poem, The Waste Land, which arose out of his purely private concerns, amazed him by going on to become the rallying cry for an entire generation of writers.

A poet may believe that he is expressing only his private experience; his lines may be for him only a means of talking about himself without giving himself away; yet for his readers what he has written may come to be the expression both of their own secret feelings and of the exultation or despair of a generation.

A poet need not know what his poetry will come to mean for others just as a prophet need not understand the meaning of their prophetic utterance. Thus there may be any number of secular, historical explanations for the Fourth Eclogue; but he repeats his definition of ‘inspiration’ as tapping into a force which defies all historical research.

Anyway the point is that the existence of the Fourth Eclogue which so many Christians mistakenly thought was divinely inspired, gave Virgil and his writing a kind of free pass into the new Christian order, opening ‘the way for his influence in the Christian world’, something mostly denied to other explicitly ‘pagan’ authors. On the face of it this is a lucky accident but Eliot doesn’t believe it was an ‘accident’.

Eliot anticipates Jackson Knight’s view, expressed in his Penguin translation of the Aeneid from a few years later (1956), that Virgil was the poet of the gateway, looking both back to the pagan world and forwards to the Christian dispensation.

So after these preliminaries, Eliot gets to the meat of his essay: In what way did Virgil anticipate the Christian West? Eliot tells us that, to answer his question, he is going to rely on a book by a German scholar, Theodor Haecker, titled Virgil: The Father of the West.

Before he gets started though, Eliot rather surprisingly devotes a page to autobiography, telling us that as a boy learning the Classics he much preferred Greek to Latin (and still does). However he found himself immediately more drawn to Virgil than Homer. The main reason was that the gods in Homer are so capricious, selfish and immoral and all the so-called ‘heroes’ are in fact coarse ruffians. The only decent character in the entire book is Hector.

Nowadays, if forced to explain his preference, he’d say he prefers the world of Virgil to the world of Homer: it was ‘a more civilised world of dignity, reason and order’. Eliot goes on to compare the Greek and Roman worlds, saying the culture of Athens was much superior in the arts, philosophy and pure science. Virgil made of Roman culture something better than it was. Then he quietly makes a very big leap in the argument, claiming that Virgil’s ‘sensibility was more nearly Christian than any other Roman or Greek poet’. How so?

He says he is going to follow Haeckel’s procedure of examining key words in the poem and highlights labor, pietas and fatum. However, he immediately drops this plan and veers off into a consideration of the Georgics. What Virgil really intended the Georgics for remains a bit of a mystery: they’re not particularly useful as a handbook to farming, and they contain many digressions completely extraneous to their ostensible subject matter. After pondering Virgil’s motivation, Eliot concludes that Virgil intended to affirm the dignity of agricultural labour and the importance of the cultivation of the soil for the wellbeing of the state, both materially and spiritually.

The Greeks may have perfected the notion that the highest type of life is the contemplative life (Plato et al) but they tended to look down on manual labour. For Eliot the Georgics affirm the importance of manual labour on the land. Then he makes a leap to talk about the monastic movement which grew up within medieval Christendom and how the monastic orders combined both aspects, combining a life of contemplation with quite arduous labour, as both being essential for the life of the complete man.

It may be that the monks who read and copied Virgil’s manuscripts recognised their spirit in the Georgics.

Now onto the Aeneid. Eliot says this epic poem is:

concerned with the imperium romanum, with the extension and justification of imperial rule.

(quite unlike W.A. Camps with his silly claim that the Aeneid is not a work of propaganda.) But Eliot claims that Virgil’s ‘ideal of empire’ was founded on a devotion to the land, to the region, village, and family within the village. This brief explanation is his discussion of labor because Eliot now turns to the more important concept of pietas.

In English someone is called ‘pious’ if they make a great show of their religious faith. Eliot says that pietas for Virgil had much wider associations: it implies a respectful attitude to the individual, the family, the region, and towards ‘the imperial destiny of Rome’. Aeneas is also ‘pious’ in his respect towards the gods and punctilious observance of rites and offerings.

Eliot delves further into the meanings of the word. Piety to a father can, for example, mean not only affection for an individual but acceptance of a bond which one has not chosen. Piety towards the father is also an acceptance of the correct order of things, and so, obliquely, respect of the gods. After some shilly-shallying Eliot gets to the point he wants to make: all these forms of piety involve some form of humility and humility is a professedly Christian virtue. Aeneas is, in this respect, the polar opposite of Achilles or Odysseus, who have not a shred of humility about them.

[Interestingly, given the date of the essay, written soon after the end of the Second World War, Eliot describes Aeneas as the original Displaced Person, a fugitive from a ruined city and an obliterated society.]

Odysseus endures ten years of exile but eventually returns to his home hearth, to a loyal wife, a dutiful son, his slaves and faithful dog. Whereas Aeneas can’t go home: he is a man on a mission and accomplishing that mission, the poem makes repeatedly clear, is only the very beginning of the long history of Roman origins and rise. Odysseus’s story ends when he gets home (and kills the suitors); Aeneas’s entire journey is itself only an episode in the much larger history of Rome.

Therefore, Eliot asserts (with a bit of a stretch, in my view) Aeneas is ‘the prototype of a Chistian hero’. He accepts the duty laid on him by the gods regardless of the price to himself. He subjugates his own will and desires to his god-given task.

This brings Eliot to fatum (so, OK, we are proceeding via the key word process). There is an excess of words to cover this concept. Eliot says maybe the best translation is ‘destiny’ but then makes the polemical point that you cannot have ‘destiny’ in a purely mechanical universe.

Eliot then tries to give a Christian interpretation to Aeneas’s ‘destiny’. It is a burden and a responsibility rather than a reason for self glorification. It happens to some men and not others because some have the gifts and the responsibility but they did not make these; something external made these and the humble man accepts the gifts and the responsibility. Who made them? Not the anthropomorphised pagan gods who behave so selfishly and vulgarly in the poem. Some power much deeper.

He zeroes in on the entire Dido episode (book 4) in particular Aeneas’s shame at abandoning Dido, shame which is revived when he meets her shade in the underworld in book 6 and she refuses to look at him or speak. This, for Eliot, more than personal shame, symbolises how much Aeneas suffered to carry out his god-given destiny. Making his point completely explicit, he says: ‘it is a very heavy cross to bear.’

Eliot can think of no other pagan poet who could have created this situation with its emotional, psychological and philosophical subtlety.

What does this ‘destiny’ mean? For Virgil’s conscious mind, and his contemporary readers, not least the all-powerful Augustus, there’s no doubt it means the imperium romanum. But Eliot then makes some dubious and sweeping generalisations. He claims that Virgil proposed for his contemporaries a noble ideal of empire – personally, I don’t see that in the poem. There are Anchises’ lines reminding Romans they must rule well and there’s praise of Augustus for bringing peace and order, but that’s about it. Eliot stretches it by claiming that Virgil’s work proposed ‘the highest ideal’ for any secular empire. Personally, I just don’t see that. In my view what the Aeneid praises is military conquest, might and power. There might be a strong thread of regret and sadness running through it, but that is the poem’s overt message.

Eliot proceeds to claim that ‘we are all, so far as we inherit the civilisation of Europe, still citizens of the Roman Empire’. Is that true? I can see strong points on either side of the argument.

But he then goes on to claim that the Roman Empire Virgil imagined was ‘greater’ than the actual one of generals and proconsuls and businessmen. Eliot claims that Virgil invented this ideal and ‘passed [it] on to Christianity to develop and to cherish.’ I disagree on a number of levels.

First, I find the actual process of creating empire, as described in the Aeneid, to be hyper-violent and destructive, flagrantly contrary all Christian morality.

Second, part of the ideal which Eliot is describing must include the idealisation of the first Roman emperor Augustus. I can see why Virgil a) pinned his hopes for peace on b) sucked up to, the most powerful man in Rome, but in the end the entire poem amounts to the propagandistic adulation of a mass murderer, a man who achieved supreme power by liquidating all his enemies and then ensuring nobody could threaten his unique rule for the next 40 years. The Aeneid defends a military dictator.

So I just don’t agree when Eliot claims that it passed onto its Christian heirs any kind of noble model for how to run a spiritual empire. The exact opposite.

Eliot reiterates his claim that we are all still citizens the Roman Empire. Well, there are arguments both ways but ultimately I think he is incorrect. The state we inhabit in England in 2022 owes more to the non-Roman traditions of the pagan Danes and Anglo-Saxons and feudal Normans who each conquered this country, than to the Roman civilisation which they eclipsed. Our democracy owes nothing to Rome; it developed out of medieval feudalism, itself an import from Normandy, itself a colony of Vikings.

I think Eliot’s vision of a total European civilisation is erroneous and that his claim that this civilisation was in part inspired by Virgil is wrong.

Moreover, there is a blindingly obvious problem here, which is that Eliot is defending empire as an ideal form of government. Obviously this was considerably easier to do in 1951 than it would be nowadays. Millions of inhabitants of the former British Empire have immigrated to Britain and their children, in politics, in culture and in academia, have enthusiastically set about damning the British Empire, rubbishing any claim that it ever had anything positive about it. So just the sound of Eliot defending empire as a ‘noble ideal’ sounds badly in our time.

As to whether Virgil’s ideal of a suprahuman noble empire actually did inspire church authorities in the Middle Ages, I think you’d need a book examining the impact of the Virgilian ‘ideal’ on theologians, political thinkers, churchmen and statesmen throughout the Middle Ages and that would be a vast undertaking. I bet one exists, though. I’d love to read it.

This was, after all, only a half-hour radio lecture. Eliot’s sensitivity and insight and intellect bring out all kinds of aspects of Virgil’s achievement. And his thesis – that Virgil’s achievement of creating the notion of an ideal empire was to haunt the European imagination – is one of those ideas which is itself so big and vague that you can’t really prove or disprove it. But it’s an interesting perspective to add to the hundreds of other perspectives with which we can view Virgil’s epic poem.

Eliot concludes his essay with a page about a word which is missing from Virgil which is ‘love’. Amor does crop up, especially in the story of Dido and Aeneas. But it has nowhere near the force and central importance that it has for a Christian poet like Dante. It never has:

the same significance as a principle of order in the human soul, in society and in the universe that pietas is given.

Thus Eliot agrees (no surprise) with Dante’s positioning of Virgil in the Divine Comedy as an inspired teacher and guide right up to the barrier of belief, which he is not allowed to cross. In Eliot’s view Virgil mapped out a universe which in many ways anticipated the Christian universe, and handed many of its values onto later generations of Christian thinkers (and poets). But there is a line and Virgil doesn’t cross over into being a Christian. He can’t.

Instead, Virgil was limited by his position in history: the highest value he can conceive of, the value which underpins so much of the character and action of the Aeneid, was pietas, respect for father, family and fatherland.

But the highest value for the Christian poet Dante was love, the love which has created the entire universe and moves the sun and the stars and which we can all aspire to. Next to the gorgeous rose of Dante’s universe of love, Virgil’s pietas is a hard, iron sword, the colour of Roman imperialism.

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by Simon on September 21, 2022  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on September 21, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/09/21/virgil-and-the-christian-world-t-s-eliot/

An introduction to Virgil’s Aeneid by W.A. Camps (1969)

sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.
(‘There are tears of things and mortal things touch the mind’)
(Aeneid Book 1, line 462)

The Aeneid’s structure

The first six books describe wandering, the second six books describe war.

The first six books are set on or near the sea, the second six books are set on land.

The first six books copy a lot from Homer’s Odyssey, the second six books copy a lot from Homer’s Iliad.

The first half focuses on Carthage, leading to the death of Dido, the second half focuses on Latium, leading to the death of Turnus. (In fact, it’s not quite as neat as that because Dido dies at the end of book 4, leaving book 5 to describe the funeral games for Anchises and book 6 the journey to the underworld, so the deaths of Dido and Turnus don’t perfectly bookend each half.)

Historical background

Virgil lived through stormy and decisive political times. He was born in 70 BC only 15 or so years after the end of the Social War, a 4-year-long bitter and needless fight between Rome and various tribes and peoples of Italy who demanded full Roman citizenship. In the end Rome acquiesced and gave it them. The precise relationship between Rome and the other local tribes is implicit in the whole idea of Aeneas coming as an immigrant and stirring up a huge ruinous war between its existing inhabitants, and then is specifically addressed right at the end of the Aeneid when Juno demands equal rights for the Latins vis-à-vis the newcomers from her husband Jupiter, as a condition of giving up her vicious vendetta against the Trojans.

Then Virgil was 21 when civil war broke out in 49 BC between Caesar and Pompey. He saw what it was like for the Roman ruling class to be split right down the middle and many men die pointlessly, as, arguably, all the terrible deaths in the second half of the Aeneid are, ultimately, pointless and unnecessary.

Then Virgil was 26 when Caesar was assassinated and Rome plunged into a further 15 years of instability and recurring civil wars, before Octavian finally brought peace by defeating Antony in 31 BC, as Virgil turned 40.

The price of peace

Virgil composed the Aeneid over the 10 or so years from 29 BC to his premature death in 19 BC. After a life lived against a backdrop of unending civil strife you can see why Virgil would desperately have wanted peace and order to be restored and pinned his hopes for that outcome on the new rule of Augustus. But you can also see why one of the Aeneid‘s main themes is the price that has to be paid for the final arrival of peace and order, and it is a very, very high price in tragedy and bloodshed. Hecatombs of the dead. So many brave young lives cut short. Aeneas wins his place in the promised land of Hesperia, but my God what a trail of death and destruction he leaves behind him.

Aspects of patriotism

All elements in the poem are multi-levelled and dense with allusiveness. Thus the poem’s patriotism is plain for everyone to see, and yet is effective because it works at so many levels. Central is the plot itself, Aeneas’s journey to Italy to found a new city and new people. The gods repeatedly reassure him of the future greatness of the Roman people. He sees a procession of eminent Romans in the underworld at the end of book 6. The figure of Augustus appears here, and as the central figure on the shield his mother gives him at the end of book 8, as well as being invoked several other times, crystallising the hopes of the world.

But it also works in a host of other ways. Most poignantly and hauntingly when we discover that King Evander’s little township is built on the site of the future Rome and that he and Aeneas are walking through the landmarks of the greatness that is to come. But also in the mention throughout the poem of beliefs and customs which first came with the Trojans or, conversely, are already practiced by the Arcadians or the Latins:

  • they Latins are referred to as ‘the people of the Roman gown’
  • the Roman custom of covering the head at sacrifice is enjoined on Aeneas by the seer Helenus before his arrival in Italy (3.403)
  • the exhibition of horse drill known to the Romans as lusus Troiae is demonstrated by Ascanius and the young horsemen during the funeral games for Anchises (5.596)
  • Aeneas promises to inaugurate the tradition of the Sibylline Books (6.71)
  • the practice of opening or closing the doors of the temple of Janus in times of war already exists in Latium (7.601)
  • the worship of Hercules at the great altar in the cattle market which existed in Virgil’s time is said to already exist when Aeneas arrives in Latium (8.268)

So the poem’s patriotism is shouted from the rooftops in the shape of the plot and in the multiple predictions but also threaded subtly into a fabric of hints and allusions.

A political poem?

Camps surprises me by claiming the Aeneid is not a political poem. He deploys the kind of sentimental humanism found throughout post-war Anglophone literary criticism, deflecting analysis off into fancy fondling about morality or spirituality:

The Aeneid is in no sense political propaganda, for it is not in its nature a political poem. The Rome that is its inspiration is not conceived in terms of a political system; and the background against which the humans in the story act and suffer is provided not by contrasting political ideas but by the working of the historical process and the conflict of spiritual powers. (p.2)

This is plain wrong, isn’t it? It’s as if someone who wrote a long poem in praise of Nazi rule over occupied Europe claimed that it wasn’t a political poem because the Nazi rule it praises ‘is not conceived in terms of a political system’. Well, it doesn’t need to be. If politics in the broadest sense is defined as how a society chooses to run itself, then this poem explicitly says that Rome will reach its height when it is ruled by the enlightened dictator Augustus, and that the Roman people are destined to rule the entire known world – and are justified in doing so because of their unique skill at ruling justly.

Roman, remember by your strength to rule
Earth’s peoples — for your arts are to be these:
To pacify, to impose the rule of law,
To spare the conquered, battle down the proud.
(6.1,151 to 1,154)

This prophecy of Anchises is only the most famous of several passages which justify Roman conquest and rule over the entire world. The Aeneid is a hymn to Roman hegemony. Nothing could be more political. Claiming it is ‘not in its nature a political poem’ because it doesn’t go into the nitty-gritty of the constitution or describe any particular ‘political system’ or discuss political parties is being disingenuous or naive. Try telling any of the peoples Rome had conquered, whose towns they had destroyed and populations they’d sold into slavery (read Caesar’s Gallic Wars) that writing an elaborate poem justifying Rome’s eternal rule over the entire known world was not a political statement and watch them laugh in your face.

Clearly your answer to the question, ‘Is the Aeneid a political poem?’ depends on how you define ‘politics’, but there’s also another level or type of definition of politics in play here: this is the issue of taking sides during a civil war. This, also, is a glaring ‘political issue’: whether one is on the side of, say, the nationalists or the republicans during the Spanish Civil War could hardly be a more political and politicised decision.

Well, in the civil war with Antony, Virgil hugely comes down on the side of Augustus and writes it into his poem. In the epic scene where Vulcan forges a mighty shield for Aeneas he depicts on it the Battle of Actium where Augustus defeated Antony and Cleopatra, and the narrator throws in criticisms of the doomed lovers. And the shield then goes on to celebrate Augustus’s unprecedented three triumphs over his political and military opponents.

It beggars belief that Camps thinks that this hugely committed work of propaganda is ‘in no sense political propaganda’ solely because it ‘is not conceived in terms of a political system.’ As I’ve been writing this I’ve realised I myself am missing another way to argue against him, which is to point out that he is wrong even on his own terms: that the entire poem is ‘conceived in terms of a political system’, namely – the imperial rule of Augustus. Rule by an emperor emphatically is a political system and this poem consistently and repeatedly predicts and celebrates this political system.

Copying the Greeks

Virgil wrote three great works. In each of them he copied Greek originals. The Eclogues copy the Idylls of Theocritus, the Georgics copy the Work and Days of Hesiod, the Aeneid very closely copies the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer. Camps claims Virgil is not stealing – he is reconciling the two cultures.

Camps lists some of the major plot devices he is indebted to Homer for:

  • an extended sea journey packed with adventures – the Odyssey
  • enmity of a god who hates the hero drawing out the journey to extended length – the Odyssey
  • councils of the gods in heaven – both Odyssey and Iliad
  • descent to the underworld – the Odyssey
  • funeral games – the Iliad
  • massive, sustained war featuring a siege and many detailed battle scenes – the Iliad
  • the aristeia in which a warrior reaches the peak of their excellence before being cut down – the Iliad
  • the blacksmith god creating a suit of armour and a shield decorated with emblematic events for the hero – the Iliad
  • strong female warrior (Camilla) – the Iliad
  • a foray into the enemy camp by night – the Iliad
  • retirement of the protagonist in whose absence the other army comes right up to the allies’ base and threatens to storm it and win the war – the Iliad
  • hero’s beautiful young friend killed by the main antagonist, a loss which drives the hero to psychopathic vengeance – the Iliad
  • climactic single combat between two epic heroes – the Iliad

(Camps gives a much longer list of direct copying on page 81.) Camps says that Virgil used Homer to supply ‘a deficiency in the possibilities of his own imagination’ (p.9) but it’s bigger than that: the Aeneid doesn’t borrow elements from Homer’s epics, it couldn’t have existed without them. They provide the entire historical background, the entire worldview of gods interfering in the lives of mortals, the entire concept of a long poem focusing on an epic hero, and almost all the significant events. ‘Borrowing’ or ‘copying’ aren’t adequate enough words for the wholesale reincarnation of Homer’s epics in Virgil’s work, and in a later chapter Camps seems to acknowledge this:

To a very large extent the story told in the Aeneid is made by remoulding Homeric materials, as well as owing to Homer the broad motifs which govern its design. (p.82)

The process of composition

Camps devotes an appendix to describing some of the short biographies of Virgil which were written after his death. Suetonius wrote one, now, unfortunately, lost. The best early one which survives is by Aelius Donatus and Camps presents a translation of the full text (6 pages long).

Donatus and fragments from other biographies tell us that Virgil’s method in composing poetry was to make a complete prose summary of the entire story before he began writing any verse. Donatus says that every morning Virgil dictated some verses to a secretary for as long as inspiration lasted, then, after lunch, spent the afternoon working over what he had dictated, sometimes whittling a mass of verses down to just a handful of lines, sometimes just one. Apparently, Virgil compared the process to the ancient folklore notion that a mother bear gave birth to formless lumps of life and then literally licked them into shape (p.117).

(In fact, Donatus describes this as Virgil’s method in writing the Georgics but everyone has silently agreed that this is probably how he composed the Aeneid as well.)

Crucially, Donatus says that Virgil did not compose the poem by starting at the beginning and working through. Instead, he was inspired to versify particular ad hoc scenes as the inspiration took him, sometimes composing later scenes years before earlier ones. This explains all sorts of discrepancies which a close reading of the poem brings to light, notably the lack of linking and smoothing passages, for example the abrupt ending of the famous book 6, and the even more abrupt ending of the entire poem.

Moreover, Donatus tells us that the poem contains many lines of poor quality, as well as lines which are metrically incomplete which Virgil deliberately left in because he needed the padding and structure to get onto the more finished sections, but would have returned to improve had he lived.

The violence

I think my view of the poem has been very strongly skewed by the hyper violence of the second part of the poem. The orgies of testosterone-fuelled slaughter which it describes with such relish strongly affect my impression of the first half, so that I remember mainly the violence – for example, the extended description of the fighting at the sack of Troy. Camps wants us to feel soft and sentimental about the book-long love affair with Dido but what I mainly remember from book 4 is:

  • the murder of Dido’s husband and the unhappiness of his ghost
  • the self slaughter of Dido, who does it in the Roman way, falling on her sword
  • Dido’s extended curse on the Romans and getting her people to swear eternal enmity, an enmity which will lead to three ruinous wars and then the eventual sack of Carthage, the killing of tens of thousands of soldiers and the selling of her entire people into slavery

Similarly, I take the point that the journey to the underworld is genuinely weird and spooky, and Aeneas encounters many strange sights, that his pity for suffering humanity especially aroused by the sight of the pitiful shades waiting to be ferried across the river Styx and then his doleful reunion with the shade of his father.

But for me this all tends to be eclipsed by the shiny vision of the procession of his Roman descendants and, when you look at this list of Great Romans, what are they famous for? What all Romans are famous for, their military victories. David West in his 1991 Penguin edition has a handy little appendix which lists the figures Aeneas sees in the procession of Great Romans:

  • Silvius the warrior king
  • Brutus, famous for expelling the last kings and executing his two sons when they tried to restore them
  • the Decii, father and son, famous for giving their lives to win victory in two wars
  • Torquatus, led an army against the Gauls and executed his own son for disobeying orders
  • Lucius Mummius who not only sacked Corinth in 146 but utterly destroyed it as an example of Roman power
  • Aemilius Paullus credited with the conquest of Greece for defeating Pyrrhus king of Epirus
  • Cornelius Cossus defeated a foreign king in single combat
  • Tiberius Gracchus and Gaius Gracchus, the reforming tribunes, both of whom were murdered in the streets of Rome along, in the latter case, with thousands of their supporters
  • Scipio Africanus Maior defeated Hannibal at the Battle of Zama
  • Scipio Africanus Minor leading the army which sacked, utterly destroyed Carthage and sold its 50,000 inhabitants into slavery
  • Fabricius who led an army against Pyrrhus
  • Fabius Maximus Cunctator, the general who delayed and delayed confronting Hannibal in Italy
  • M. Claudius Marcellus killed a Gaulish chieftain in single combat

This is (not quite all) the people who feature in Aeneas’s vision of his glorious descendants, and what do they all have in common? Violence and killing. Slaughter. Rome was hyper-violent state, engaged in almost non-stop war (the Gallic Wars) and when they weren’t destroying other peoples’ cities (Corinth, Carthage, Gaul) they fought with terrible ferocity among themselves (Pharsalis, Philippi, Actium).

If any contemporary Roman set out a pageant of their glorious history, what would it consist of? Except a litany of wars and battles. It was a phenomenally militaristic state. Even the humanist’s favourite, Cicero, not only went to serve as governor on Cilicia but led his army in a siege and battles. Even the sternly principled Cato sided with Pompey in the civil war and was made governor of north Africa where he managed the military campaigns. Holding a senior magistracy at any time in Roman history almost inevitably entailed leading a Roman army.

Camps’s attempts at a moral interpretation undermined by the violence

Maybe I’m getting this way wrong, but I read Camps’s introduction from end to end and I think it gives a deeply misleading impression of the Aeneid. He devotes a chapter to Aeneas, then one to Dido and Turnus, and these overflow with sensitive empathy for their sufferings and the deeply ‘moral’ choices which they face.

But the poem I read venerates power, might, military strength, masculinity, supreme ability in battle and its centre stand two awesome killing machines, terminator-figures, Aeneas and Turnus who rampage across the battlefield beheading, belimbing, skewering and butchering anyone who stands in their way.

This is one of the reasons I dislike the moralising tone of humanist literary criticism, because it distorts the facts, it deceives and lies. You can read Camps’s book from end to end and get no sense of the piles of bodies, bloody gore and funeral pyres which clot the poem, and end up thinking it’s a Henry James novel making sensitive discriminations about moral scruples. It really isn’t.

At the end of Camps’s chapter about Aeneas, he does, eventually, concede, that there is a bit of fighting, and, OK, Aeneas is a bit brutal. He lists some examples. On the battlefield at the height of his rage Aeneas taunts a victim with the thought that his body will lie unburied; he consigns some of the prisoners they’ve taken to be executed in cold blood to adorn Pallas’s funeral.

There’s more like this but Camps deliberately omits it. Instead he goes out of his way to exonerate his vision of a caring, sharing, sensitive hero, these brutalities:

are altogether at variance with the hero’s usual humanity, and indeed with the standards of the poet’s civilised contemporaries.

Rubbish. A quick checklist of Augustus’ behaviour refutes this, not to mention a scan of Caesar’s record in Gaul, Roman behaviour in Carthage or Corinth or in the Wild East of Asia Minor. Camps limply goes on to concede that ‘the Roman world was not a gentle one’ [sic], and then devotes a paragraph to trying to justify Aeneas’s brutal, bloody execution of an unarmed prisoner on his knees at the end of the poem. He claims that this execution ‘would seem to Virgil’s readers poetically just’. Right at the end of his introduction, he returns to the fact that the entire poem builds up to this ominous and disturbing conclusion, the enraged murder of Turnus, and finds it:

strangely discordant with the normally disciplined humanity of Aeneas (p.142)

But reading Camps’s efforts to explain away this glaring, brutal event I thought: ‘But what if…what if the brutal killing, maiming and taunting, the sending for execution and murderous mayhem Aeneas enacts at the end of the Aeneid is NOT the temporary aberration Camps tries to explain away? What if it is the real Aeneas coming through and showing his “civilised contemporaries” what the real Rome is really like and it is – a killing machine?’

To be really crude, Camps is an apologist for a poem glorifying a mass killer and a violent empire.

The animal sacrifices

You don’t have to be a vegetarian to be disgusted by the vast number of animals who are ritually slaughtered on almost every page of the Aeneid, led to the place of sacrifice and having their throats cut so their hot blood splashes over the altar by the gallon. Thousands and thousands of animals are butchered in the name of religion, in fact, in practical terms, animal butchery is their religion, both Trojans and Latins.

You know the line they’ve been putting on movie credits for decades, ‘No animals were harmed in the making of this movie’? Well, thousands of animals were slaughtered, had their throats slashed while they were alive and fully conscious, in the making of this poem.

Two points. 1. Again, this is the kind of really obvious in-your-face aspect of the text which a ‘moralising’ critic like Camps completely ignores. It’s just not there for him, because his ideology that literature must be about humanistic morality and sensibility simply prevents him from registering what is in front of him. As soon as I see a critic (of literature or art or film or whatever) mention the words ‘moral’, ‘morality’, ‘moral choices’ etc I know they are going to give a distorted and inaccurate account of the work under consideration, because their obsession with ‘moral values’ restricts them to just one narrow aspect of the characters and the text and blinds them, like the blinkers on a carthorse, to everything else which is going on around them, to the totality of the work.

Anyway, Camps doesn’t have the ‘moral’ awareness to even register that the cruel slaughter of thousands of sentient animals might be wrong.

But 2. The relentless animal slaughter plays a really important role in the fabric of the poem by making the human slaughter seem natural. It desensitises you. If you’ve already waded through lakes of animal blood, spurting from slashed throats, it makes the butchery of human beings just that bit more assimilable. The entire poem becomes a welter of blood and gore.

As I said, I’m aware that this is also a biased and partial view and that there are plenty of passages of delightful description, Aeneas’s sensitivity and sea nymphs frolicking in the waves etc. I am just pointing out what Camps’s supposedly thorough introduction to the poem completely omits from its account.

Virgil’s multi-levelled and holey theology

Christian theology has spent 2,000 years trying to reconcile the paradox that, while on the one hand God is all-knowing and so knows the future as well as the past, on the other hand, the theology of reward and punishment only makes sense if humans have free will. If everything is foreordained, then I have no free will, and therefore cannot be guilty or innocent of my actions. Therefore cannot be sent to hell or heaven. Whereas Christian theologians and hierarchies and organisations, very much do want to emphasise our free will precisely in order to threaten us with punishment in the afterlife and keep us in line.

Now the same problem is raised by the Aeneid only in a much more intense form because at every step of the way, at almost every decisive moment, it is the gods’ intervention which makes things happen. Venus makes Dido fall in love with Aeneas, going to some lengths to do so, luring Aeneas’s son into a copse where she puts him asleep and replacing him at Dido’s reception feast for Aeneas with her other son, Eros god of love, assuming the form of Eros entirely to soften her spinsterhood and make her fall for the Trojan. And then it is Venus who, at the end of their affair, comes to Aeneas in a dream and tells him he must get up and rouse his companions and load his ships and leave Carthage right now.

Similarly, the entire action of the second half of the book, the entire war between the Trojans and the Latins, with the enormous destruction and loss of life on both sides, only takes place solely because Juno makes it happen, commissioning the Fury Allecto to fire up the Latins against the peace treaty with the Trojans.

And yet, throughout the poem, the narrator also assigns praise and blame to individual actors, and they themselves debate their guilt and responsibility. For example, Aeneas tells Dido it is not his fault that he is running off and abandoning her: sed me iusa deum – the nasty god made me do it.

It would be interesting to read a clever analysis which explained what we know of Roman theology and sets Virgil’s depiction of the issue within that framework of belief. Camps sketches out the issues in his chapter 5 but doesn’t tell us anything which wasn’t already obvious from the poem.

For me the key to thinking about this problem is suggested by something Camps explains at the start of his book, which is to do with Virgil’s method of composition. Namely, it was episodic. (Camps uses the Latin word particulatim which means ‘piecemeal’, p.125). According to Donatus’s Life of Virgil, the poet first wrote out a prose version of his story but then chose not to work through it in order, but to work up particular ad hoc scenes from different parts of the narrative into verse.

And in doing so, he focused on producing as intense and vivid a scene as possible for the scene’s sake and we know that this sometimes led to discrepancies between episodes; characters behave inconsistently or say one thing in one scene, another in another; characters are introduced who we have already met and so on.

(Camps mentions the two apparently different deaths of Palinurus, who, at the end of book 5, plunges down into the sea, drowning, but in book 6 is said to have swim to shore, p.125. Or there are the two completely different versions of how Helen reacts to the sacking of Troy a) hiding in terror 2.567, or b) out confidently leading the Greeks around the city in book 6. He gives more examples of this kind of contradiction in appendix 4.)

Well, Virgil’s theology can be thought about in the same way as his method of composition, namely that he is not expounding a consistent and thought-through theology in the manner of Tertullian or Augustine; rather he is writing a dramatic poem and all that matters is the intensity of particular episodes. The momentary impact is the thing. Therefore it creates a great dramatic effect to show Juno or Venus interfering almost all the way through the narrative. But at other moments, on the human plane, mortals may discuss their decisions and implications in human terms of agency and responsibility. And because Virgil is concerned with creating whatever is most effective at any particular point, he isn’t concerned with trying to reconcile the theological contradictions thrown up by these different approaches.

In fact there are at least three levels at work in the poem, because above the continual interfering of the gods, which is continually described, sits another force – this is the power of fate or the Fates. This isn’t described but referred to at various points, mainly by the gods themselves. Nothing at all, not even Jupiter, can change what is destined and fated. He and the other gods can only interfere with what, in the end, are details, but the overall Fate and Destiny of everyone is fixed and unalterable.

Thus Juno herself is made to admit that she cannot change Aeneas’s ultimate destiny to settle in Italy and found the Roman race; she can only delay it. Which she does, at the cost of thousands of needless deaths including, ironically, that of her own favourite, Turnus.

On this view, you can pray to the gods, and the gods are depicted answering some (though not all) prayers (mortals can never be sure which ones will be answered and which ones won’t). But no prayers can alter the fixed outlines of Fate.

Fate has built the matrix with bands of steel. Nothing can change or alter them. But within the matrix, individual gods are free to mess about with details, to delay, to alter, to bend – but never to change the fundamental ends.

It’s in this context that Camps makes the shrewd point that the gods themselves pursue their own ends. The gods are as selfish as mortals, maybe more so. Only Jupiter rises above their endless squabbles and tries to adjudicate fairly but, as many readers have observed, he is only an intermittent presence in the poem: Juno and Venus are much more prominent, Juno most of all. The Aeneid could accurately be called the Book of Juno, or The Book of Juno’s Anger.

To anyone who takes this mirage, ‘morality’, seriously, the gods in Virgil are quite demonstrably monsters of immorality, cruel, thoughtless, heartless, irresponsible – like children. Any real consideration of the pagan gods of antiquity eventually suggests why they had to be superseded by the Christian god. They were just not worthy of serious intellectual consideration. And they are fundamentally indifferent to human life, breath-takingly callous. Serious consideration of the pagan gods led philosophers to sets of beliefs like Epicureanism or Stoicism, very different ideologies but alike in their aim of trying to eliminate the role of the gods in human life. Paganism tends towards a brutal indifference to human existence.

Compare and contrast that with the intense feeling of personal salvation which Christianity offered its believers. As Camps puts it, ‘the promise of the new kind of religion is evidence of the terrors of the old’ (p.49).

Anyway, the existence of these three levels of action allows Virgil to switch between them as it suits his narrative ends. Jupiter apologises to Juno, saying his hands are tied by Fate. Aeneas apologises to Dido, saying his hands are tied by the gods, and so on.

How are humans meant to know what the devil is going on? Via the welter of omens, signs and prophecies which the text is full of. These are the channel of communication between the three levels.

Sometimes a god personally explains something to Aeneas, but far more often it is the shade of a dead mortal (Hector or Anchises) who can explain things up to a point but not the full picture. This up-to-a-pointness is really striking: ghosts and spirits are continually telling Aeneas just so much of his future and, when he wants to know more, fading into smoke.

At other times it is the mute symbolism of some sign or portent like a comet in the skies or a swarm of bees or the eagle carrying off a swan who is beaten off by all the other birds – in other words, portents which mortals are forced to interpret and guess at.

My position is that none of this amounts to a worked-out theology on the analogy of Christian theologies. The opposite. Although these elements fill the text to bursting, they don’t indicate a coherent worldview, but one that is cheerfully incoherent: one which is ragged and flexible enough for the characters and narrator to switch between at least 3 levels of belief: belief in a Fixed and Unchangeable Fate, belief in the continual intervention of the gods, and belief in man’s free will which is sufficient to allow him to carry out free actions which can, accordingly, be judged within a ‘moral’ framework.

The overlap and interplay of the different systems is one of the things which keeps the poem dynamic and varied, keeps the reader in a continual sense of flux and uncertainty.

Furens

Alongside the multiple levels of destiny, goes a kind of dualistic theory of human nature. Dido and Turnus have two modes of being: their ‘normal’ selves and themselves possessed. In their states of possession they are associated with a range of frenetic adjectives, to wit: amens, turbidus, fervidus, ardens, furens, trepidans, in a state of inania, furor and violentia.

Furor in particular is applied to Dido a dozen times and Turnus half a dozen times. And Aeneas, after the death of Pallas, becomes a man ‘possessed’ on the battlefield. If you felt so inclined you could read the entire poem through the vector of frenzied possession just as much as by Camps’s limp metric of ‘morality’.

The poetry

It’s difficult to follow Camps’s chapter about the verse itself (chapter 7) unless you can not only read Latin but have a good feel for it as a medium of expression. I did Latin GCSE but have nowhere near the ability to judge it as poetry. Some key points which come over from Camps’s account are:

Vocabulary Virgil used a consciously ‘poetic’ diction, on the model of Milton in Paradise Lost or Tennyson in Idylls of the King, with a sprinkling of words from earlier poetry and archaic forms to give it sonority and authority.

Syntax Flexible, sometimes an adjective whose meaning attaches to one noun is grammatically attached to another; two nouns related by a verb have their normal relationship inverted; a phrase is compressed by omitting a term of meaning, letting the reader supply it; sometimes grammar as well as meaning is understated or omitted and the reader needs to supply it, too. These and other tactics create:

  • flexibility in writing lines and passages
  • compactness

But Camps says that, more distinctive than either of these is Virgil’s coining of highly expressive original phrases out of very basic words. Alongside their power goes a certain ambiguity. This has meant that many phrases of Virgil’s can be extracted from their original context and acquire new, more powerful meanings. Take lacrimae rerum.

Aeneas has been washed up on the coast of Africa and welcomed into the new city of Carthage and now he is looking at a mural in a Carthaginian temple dedicated to Juno that depicts battles of the Trojan War and the deaths of his friends and countrymen. He is moved to tears and says ‘sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt’.

Apparently, even in the original Latin, this phrase is grammatically ambiguous and can equally mean, ‘There are tears for things and mortal things touch the mind’ or, ‘There are tears of things and mortal things touch the mind.’

Either way, the phrase went on to have a tremendous afterlife, being widely quoted in later writers as pithily summing up the sadness of human existence. Then, in the early twentieth century, it began to be used on Great War memorials, thus entering wider consciousness. It’s one example of the way Virgil’s just-so selection of very ordinary words was done in such a way as to pack an eerily powerful – and enduring – punch.

Pederast

The single most striking thing in Camps’s book is not by him but is in Aelius Donatus’s short Life of Virgil which Camps includes in its entirety in an appendix. In the early section about his appearance and nature, Donatus writes:

He was somewhat inclined to pederasty, [his particular favourites being Cebes and Alexander, whom he calls Alexis in the second Eclogue. Alexander was given to him by Asinius Pollio. Both of them were well-educated and Cebes wrote poetry himself.] (p.115)

Donatus then goes on to report the rumour that Virgil had a relationship with an apparently notable woman named Plotia Hieria, but that she denied it in later life. Apart from that ‘his conduct and demeanour were so respectable’ that at Naples he acquired the nickname Parthenias, an adjective applied to Athena and meaning chaste and virginal.

Three points. 1. This entirely chimes with several of the Eclogues which describe passionate love between  some of the poems’ idealised young shepherds and are plainly homoerotic. 2. The fact that ‘Alexander’ was a gift shows that the young men in question were slaves. Virgil had gay relationships with his male slaves. Slavery.

3. It’s interesting how Donatus’s description moves easily from describing his fondness for male slaves to his rumoured affair with a Roman matron. I.e. the homosexuality had the same kind of value or scandal value as a rumoured ‘straight’ affair i.e. merited a sentence or two, but not worth making any fuss over.

It’s a demonstration of the point made in M.I. Finley’s essay about women and marriage in ancient Rome, that what mattered more than anything else was the legal integrity of the official family, and in particular the legal status of sons and daughters to ensure the efficient heritance of property, titles and lineage. As long as these legal forms were observed, then there was considerable leeway in how citizens (mostly men) (mis)behaved.

Credit

An Introduction to Virgil’s Aeneid by W.A. Camps was published by Oxford University Press in 1969. All references are to the 1984 paperback edition.

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by Simon on September 14, 2022  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on September 14, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/09/14/an-introduction-to-virgils-aeneid-w-a-camps/

Introductions to the Aeneid – 3. David West

I own three English translations of the Aeneid:

  • the 1956 Penguin classics prose translation by W.F. Jackson Knight
  • the 1970 verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum
  • the 1991 Penguin classics prose translation by David West

This is the last of three blog posts giving detailed analyses of the introductions to each of these translations. This one looks at David West’s introduction to his 1991 translation. It also gives examples of each of the translators’ work, first their renderings of the Aeneid’s opening 12 lines, then of the final few lines.

1991 Penguin classics prose translation by David West

Unlike the vapouring spiritualist Jackson Knight, and the namedropping Vietnam War protestor Mandelbaum, West is wonderfully unpretentious and to the point. In his introduction’s brisk 6 pages he bluntly says the Aeneid is about a man who lived 3,000 years ago in Asia Minor so – why should we care?

1. The origins of Rome

He gives a fantastically compressed précis of the plot before going on to say that, 300 years after Aeneas’ legendary death, the city of Rome was founded by his descendants. So that’s one reason to read the Aeneid: because it is the foundation story of the most important city in European history, the state that underpins modern Europe.

2. Aeneas an emblem of the refugee from war

Another reason is because it is a great poem. Part of this is down to it being about a very human figure,  Prince Aeneas, a man who knew defeat and exile, love and the loss of love, who maintained his sense of duty to family and country through thick and thin, who knew war and hated it but was capable of fighting with hatred.

At the end of the twentieth century the world is full of such people.

If West was writing in 1990, then he was about to witness the First Gulf War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the prolonged civil wars in Yugoslavia, the Rwandan genocide and the Great War of Africa, followed by 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq. Yes. War and the bitterness of war, and exile and grief and lost love, these are eternal fixtures of the human condition. I am writing this on day 201 of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The gods have changed but for the men there is not much difference.

3. Virgil’s humanity

But the Aeneid is not only about The Human Condition but is full of individual human touches, insights  and moments which make the poem a deeply rewarding read:

  • Dido putting the Trojans at their easy 1.567-578
  • the grief of Andromache meeting a Trojan youth who is the same age as her murdered son would have been 3.305
  • Acestes and Aeneas shaming an old champion into fighting in their games 5.389
  • the throwaway remark of Ascanius which has such momentous consequences 7.116
  • old King Evander enjoying looking upon his old friend’s son 8.152
  • the native’s abuse of foreigners 9.598
  • the glorious death of Mezentius and his horse at 10.858
  • the fussing of the doctor as he fails to treat Aeneas’s arrow wound 12.387

The Aeneid presents a ‘heroic’ view of life i.e. all the characters are super-lifesize – but it is also full of these realistic human moments. So its depiction of timeless themes of human suffering, combined with these insights into human nature mean that, even after 2,000 years, it is still not out of date.

Virgil and Augustus

West then devotes a zippy two-thirds of a page to summarising Virgil’s life and career. For me the strong part is the confiscation of his family’s land by Octavius (unlike, Mandelbaum West doesn’t mention Virgil’s trip to Rome to beg for it to be returned) but West adds a new fact: to qualify to be a member of the Senate a Roman citizen needed to be very wealthy; when Virgil died, he had property worth ten times this wealth requirement. Being Augustus’s top poet made Virgil rich. It would be fashionably easy to despise Virgil for sucking up to Augustus, in the Aeneid as in the Eclogues and Georgics, but this would be wrong because:

  1. After a century of violence and civil war, Augustus’s hard-won victories promised peace and moral regeneration. There was every reason to believe a genuine Golden Age was at hand. Virgil’s friend, Horace, believed just as fervently. It is reasonable enough to praise the peace-bringer.
  2. Virgil was no superficial tyrant-pleaser. He had a deep appreciation of the countryside and traditions of a much wider definition of Italy (his upbringing on a farm outside Mantua). He knew it had taken hard fighting to secure peace and would take hard work to create this Golden Age. I like the way West says Virgil didn’t have the answers to these questions and he didn’t even pose the questions. He told an exciting story and lets the story raise, at numerous points, thoughts and questions about love of country, love of family, and what it means to fight for peace. The critique is buried deeply within the narrative.
  3. West draws a distinction between praise and flattery. The Aeneid praises Augustus in two ways: first, it tells the story of his heroic ancestor, in such a way as to reflect well on the emperor. The second way is the direct references to Augustus at key moments of prophecy and prediction.

West’s approach to translation

Finally, a page about the translation itself. Interestingly, West says that up to his time the W.F. Jackson Knight translation (whose introduction I have considered at length) had been the gold standard English translation of the Aeneid. However, it suffers from two weaknesses and that is why it is now being replaced: 1. The prose is old fashioned 2. It follows the original Latin very slavishly, often to the detriment of good sense.

So West is setting out to right the balance, to try and capture some of the allusive, changing poetry of the original – but never at the expense of – and while always writing –good, muscular, rhythmic, expressive English prose. In my opinion, he succeeds very well (see examples, below).

As you can tell, West’s introduction is far and away the best of the three for its complete absence of swank and bullshit, for its brevity, for telling you just enough to warm you up – and then pitching the reader straight into the narrative.

I enjoyed his translation more than the others for the same reason. It is straight-talking, clear and to the point. But it also, despite being in prose, includes subtle effects of alliteration, assonance and rhythm.

Disagreement

Blazing with rage, he plunged the blade full into his enemy’s breast….(Book 12)

But even with West I disagree. He says the poem is a vision of ‘a search for peace and order for Rome and humanity’. Is it, though? The Aeneid portrays a universe of anger and death and ends with a brutal act of murder. All three of these translators, in their introductions, are inexplicably drawn to praise the humanism and sweet sadness of Virgil’s poem. I know what they mean, the sadness is there and is sometimes a very dominant mood. But the narrative is also splattered with blood, the blood of hundreds of men hacked to pieces in battle, the ravening fury of Juno and her agents, screeching harpies, the foul dira, and the stink of the hundreds which are barbarously slaughtered at altars, their hot blood spurting out onto the hungry earth.

Yes, there’s a gentle tone of sweet sadness but, for my money, all three of these translators inexplicably underplay the centrality of war and anger and death and bloodshed which run alongside and, in my opinion, overwhelm the poem’s sweet humanism.

The fact that such diametrically opposite views can be held about it makes me wonder whether, deep down, even Virgil himself knew what his great poem is actually about? What it is really saying? Despite his conscious intentions, did his poem, once he had stitched it all together, end up saying much more, and give a different impression, than he originally intended?

Samples of the translations

Which of the three translations do you prefer?

The Aeneid book 1, lines 1 to 12

Jackson Knight translation:

This is a tale of arms and of a man. Fated to be an exile, he was the first to sail from the land of Troy and reach Italy, at the Lavinian shore. He met many tribulations on his way both by land and on the ocean; high heaven willed it, for Juno was ruthless and could not forget her anger. And he had also to endure great suffering in warfare. But at last he succeeded in founding his city, and installing the gods of his race in the Latin land: and that was the origin of the Latin nation, the Lords of Alba, and the proud battlements of Rome.

Mandelbaum translation:

I sing of arms and of a man: his fate
had made him fugitive; he was the first
to journey from the coasts of Troy as far
as Italy and the Lavinian shores.
Across the lands and waters he was battered
beneath the violence of the High Ones, for
the savage Juno’s unforgetting anger;
and many sufferings were his in war–
until he brought a city into being
and carried in his gods to Latium;
from this have come the Latin race, the lords
of Alba, and the ramparts of high Rome.

West translation:

I sing of arms and of the man, fated to be an exile, who long since left the land of Troy and came to Italy to the shores of Lavinium; and a great pounding he took by land and sea at the hands of the heavenly gods because of the fierce and unforgetting anger of Juno. Great too were his sufferings in war before he could found his city and carry his gods into Latium. This was the beginning of the Latin race, the Alban fathers and the high walls of Rome.

The Aeneid, book 12, lines

Jackson Knight translation:

Aeneas stood motionless, a fierce figure in his armour; but his eyes were restless, and he checked the fall of his right arm. And now at any moment the pleas of Turnus, already working in his mind, might have prevailed on his hesitation, when suddenly, there before him, he saw slung over his shoulder the accursed baldric of Pallas and his belt, inset with the glittering rivets, which he had known of old when they belonged to his young friend whom Turnus had brought low with a wound, and overcome. This Baldric Turnus was wearing now over his own shoulder, and the trophy was fatal to him. Aeneas’ eyes drank in the sight of the spoils which revived the memory of his own vengeful bitterness. His fury kindled and, terrible in his rage, he said: ‘Are you to be stolen hence out of my grasp, you who wear spoils taken from one whom I loved? It is Pallas, only Pallas, who by this wound which I now deal makes sacrifice of you; he exacts this retribution, you criminal, from your blood.’ Saying this and boiling with rage he buried his blade full in Turnus’ breast. His limbs relaxed and chilled; and the life fled, moaning, resentful, to the Shades.

Mandelbaum translation:

Aeneas stood, ferocious in his armour;
his eyes were restless and he stayed his hand;
and as he hesitated, Turnus’s words
began to move him more and more – until
high on the Latin’s shoulder he made out
the luckless belt of Pallas, of the boy
whom Turnus had defeated, wounded, stretched
upon the battlefield, from whom he took
this fatal sign to wear upon his back,
this girls glittering with familiar studs.
And when his eyes drank in this plunder, this
memorial of brutal grief, Aeneas,
aflame with rage – his wrath was terrible –
cried: ‘How can you who wear the spoils of my
dear comrade now escape me? It is Pallas
who strikes, who sacrifices you, who takes
this payment from your shameless blood.’ Relentless,
he sinks his sword into the chest of Turnus.
His limbs fell slack with chill, and with a moan
his life, resentful, fled to Shades below.

West translation:

There stood Aeneas, deadly in his armour, rolling his eyes, but he checked his hand, hesitating more and more as the words of Turnus began to move him, when suddenly his eyes caught the fatal baldric of the boy Pallas high on Turnus’s shoulder with the glittering studs he knew so well. Turnus had defeated and wounded him and then killed him, and now he was wearing his belt on his shoulder as a battle honour taken from an enemy. Aeneas feasted his eyes on the sight of this spoil, this reminder of his own wild grief, then burning with mad passion and terrible in his wrath, he cried: ‘Are you to escape me now, wearing the spoils stripped from the body of those I loved? By this wound which I now give, it is Pallas who makes sacrifice of you. It is Pallas who exacts the penalty of your guilty blood.’ Blazing with rage, he plunged the blade full into his enemy’s breast. The limbs of Turnus were dissolved in cold and his life left him with a groan, fleeing in anger down to the shades.

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by Simon on September 12, 2022  •  Permalink
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Introductions to the Aeneid – 2. Allen Mandelbaum

I own three English translations of the Aeneid:

  • the 1956 Penguin classics prose translation by W.F. Jackson Knight
  • the 1970 verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum
  • the 1991 Penguin classics prose translation by David West

This is the middle of three blog posts giving detailed analyses of the introductions to each of these translations. This one looks at Allen Mandelbaum’s introduction to his 1970 translation. (The third blog post, about David West’s introduction, includes examples of each of the translators’ actual translations, including Mandelbaum’s.)

1970 introduction by Allen Mandelbaum

Allen Mandelbaum (1926 to 2011) was a Jewish-American professor of literature and the humanities, poet, and translator from Classical Greek, Latin and Italian. After going to live for decades in Italy he returned to the States and taught English and comparative literature at the City University of New York from 1966 to 1986. His translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy (1980 to 1984) won him Italy’s highest award, the Presidential Cross of the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity. Impressive. This translation of the Aeneid won the 1973 National Book Award in the translation category. The preface to it, which am now going to summarise, was published in 1970.

***********

Before we even get to Mandelbaum’s introduction, the blurb on the inside cover about Virgil is interesting. It says that as part of Octavius’s sweeping land reallocation to retired soldiers after the Battle of Philippi (42 BC), he confiscated Virgil’s parents’ extensive farmlands around Mantua. It says Virgil travelled to Rome to argue for its return, and this certainly chimes with the accounts in several of the Virgil’s eclogues of land confiscation and of the shepherd who has travelled to Rome and seen the young prince i.e. Octavius to try and get his land back.

The blurb goes on to say it was as a result of Virgil’s pleading that he became friends with Octavius and was handed over to be managed by his arts minister, Maecenas. This close relationship between patron and poet leads the blurb writer to say that it was at Augustus’s express command that Virgil’s request to burn the draft of the Aeneid was overruled, and that it was Augustus who handed it to the scholars Varius and Tucca with specific instructions to edit only the obvious errors and repetitions, but to add nothing new to it, and to publish the result, which they did in 16 BC.

**********

Mandelbaum’s introduction is only 8 pages long but it’s packed. He gets stuck in right away by saying he came to Virgil late because he was put off him by three judgements. First was a quip by the American critic Mark Van Doren (1894 to 1972) that ‘Homer is a world; Virgil, a style’. Mandelbaum associated this comment with Coleridge’s similarly negative judgement that ‘If you take from Virgil his diction and metre, what do you leave him?’ So these two adverse opinion come under the heading of ‘Homer is the Great Original, Virgil is a Poor Copy’.

Mandelbaum goes on to mentions the judgement of the great Marxist critic, György Lukács (whose thoughts on Kafka I’ve reviewed). György boy who wrote in his Theory of the Novel that: ‘The heroes of Virgil live the cool and limited existence of shadows, nourished by the blood of noble zeal, blood that has been sacrificed in order to recall what has forever disappeared.’

Lukács was a swine but I still enjoy this kind of class-based Marxist criticism, ancient though it now feels; after all, we still live in a heavily class-based society where privately educated ministers hand out multi-million pound contracts to their friends and wives while northern proles queue at foodbanks, where gas and energy prices makes billions in profits while old age pensioners freeze to death in their flats.

Anyway, Lukács’s implication is that Virgil’s characters are contemptible because they harbour a utopian hankering for what has irredeemably disappeared, namely a nostalgic memory of a land of small family-owned farms, which had mostly been swept away by vast estates worked by slaves by the time Virgil wrote.

Anyway, Lukács’s criticism, as well as being vague and impressionistic, seems wrong to me. To me the Aeneid reads as a poem very much of the harsh present, reeking with the blood of animals slaughtered at the altar and men being stabbed, eviscerated and burned to ashes in a very perilous present.

(In case you needed to know, the third dismissal came in Concetto Marchesi’s History of Latin Literature which deprecated Virgil in favour of Lucretius.)

It is when Mandelbaum goes on to describe the personal importance to him of the English poet John Milton that the reader begins to realise that this is not going to be a scholarly introduction, but the personal musings of Mandelbaum the poet (for in addition to his prizewinning translations, Mandelbaum also published several volumes of his own poetry, as the preface now proceeds to tell us). This introduction is going to be a description of his own personal odyssey from these boyhood influences who put him off Virgil, to his late-flowering realisation of Virgil’s brilliance.

Central to Mandelbaum’s conversion were the poems of Giusseppe Ungaretti (1888 to 1970). Mandelbaum was deeply involved in translating Ungaretti’s Italian poems into English as he wrote them, and helped get them published in America throughout the 1950s. And many of Ungaretti’s poems invoked characters or themes from Virgil. So Mandelbaum first really discovered Virgilian themes through the lens of Ungaretti. He quotes a florid passage of Ungaretti’s:

Aeneas is beauty, youth, ingenuousness ever in search of a promised land, where, in the contemplated, fleeting beauty, his own beauty smiles and enchants.

Personally I’d have thought nothing could be further from a true picture of Aeneas, the careworn early-middle-aged son of decrepit Anchises and anxious father of young Ascanius, bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders, stumbling from one disaster to another, his hands red with blood.

As so often with ‘criticism’ by writers or poets, this isn’t objective analysis but a deliberate, and I’d say knowing, teasing, rewriting of Virgil’s character entirely to suit Ungaretti’s own poetic preoccupations. Heavily misleading, in other words. Mandelbaum goes on to quote an even more overripe slice of tripe:

Dido came to represent the experience of one who, in late autumn, is about to pass beyond it; the hour in which living is about to become barren; the hour of one from whom the horrible, tremendous, final tremor of youth is about to depart. Dido is the experience of nature as against the moral experience.

This may be a fine expression of Ungaretti’s (mimsy, impressionist) concerns but strikes me as having nothing whatsoever to do with the Dido who features in the Aeneid. All this is a worrying indication that Mandelbaum’s response to Virgil is going to be hugely contaminated by his embroilment in Ungaretti’s highly ‘poetic’ prose, all ‘tremors of youth’ and ‘the moral experience’ and fuck-all to do with the Dido who calls down the vengeance of the gods on Aeneas and makes her people swear eternal enmity with Rome.

Reminiscing about those happy times in Italy in the 1950s you can almost hear Mandelbaum relaxing the sinews of his mind and slipping into an odoriferous bath of fine feelings, claiming that Ungaretti helped him to see:

the underground denial – by consciousness and longing – of the total claims of the state and history.

I think he means the persistence in the poem of numerous threads which oppose or undermine the overt worship of Rome, of Roman patriotism, of obeisance to the predictions of Rome’s rise to world-dominating empire, which occur throughout it on a surface level.

But like so many other aesthetes what comes over strongly is the way Mandelbaum wants to reject the overt meaning of the text in front of him, preferring to project his own bourgeois fantasies of rebellion and subversion onto Virgil – very much as W.F. Jackson Knight projected his fantasies about spiritualism and universal truth onto the poor Roman in his introduction to his translation.

So much literary criticism from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century consists of this kind of whipping-up meringues made of knowing references and stylish allusions, like a conjuror pulling a string of multi-coloured flags out of his mouth, designed to impress us with the author’s wide reading and fine feelings, but leaving behind no tangible insights or ideas.

Next, Mandelbaum shows off by telling us how he loves a passage by Mark Van Doren, which uses a ‘brilliant suggestion’ by Jacob Klein to use a passage from Plato’s text The Statesman to shed light on the episode in Aeneid book 6 where Anchises is explaining to Aeneas how the souls of the dead are made to forget their past lives before being reincarnated in new bodies back on earth.

It feels like a competition to see how many names he can drop in a single passage.

Van Doren claims this passage is evidence that Virgil believed in the reassuring and ‘lulling myth of cycles’, and the hope that peace would come about by magic. Mandelbaum cites all this in order to disagree with it. He points out that far from finding the creation of new generations ‘lulling’, Virgil had demonstrated in the Georgics the sheer amount of hard physical labour which goes into producing the basics of civilisation.

With this much, I can agree, although Mandelbaum then goes on to equate the hard physical manual labour of maintaining the land depicted in the Georgics with the 11 years of dedicated mental labour involved in writing the Aeneid.

Contrary to all this talk of lulling cycles, Mandelbaum asserts that Virgil believed in power, dominion and the rule of law. As the Sibyl predicts to Aeneas:

yours will be the rulership of nations;
remember, Roman, these will be your arts:
to teach the ways of peace to those you conquer
to spare defeated peoples, spare the proud
(6. 1,134 to 1,137)

But Virgil was aware of the price to be paid in the triumph of positive law over natural law. King Evander explains to Aeneas how his people originally lived at peace and plenty under the rule of exiled Saturn when humans needed no laws or rules. But then an Age of Iron came, violence increased, and laws became vital. All this is an accurate summary of this part of the Aeneid.

But then Mandelbaum is back to Ungaretti, telling us that he was, apparently, ‘a true Petrarchan’. I can’t see any relevance whatsoever of this random observation in a supposed introduction to Virgil. It just feels like another example of Mandelbaum’s compulsive name-dropping and/or personal reminiscence. Develop the idea, man! What are you trying to say?

But the thought isn’t developed or even explained properly. Instead, Mandelbaum switches to tell us that his other route into Virgil was via a long-lasting engagement with Dante, whose Divine Comedy he has also translated. Having lived with the Inferno, in particular, for years, he knew that Dante learned not from the style of Virgil but the styles of Virgil.

Mandelbaum quotes a passage from the English critic Donald Davie who distinguishes poets into two classes (how many critics, over how many centuries, have taken this simple-minded approach of dividing the thing under consideration into just Two Types?)

Davie says the first type of poet revels in words, that Shakespeare would have ended up using every word in the language if he’d enough time. The second type of poet is one who carefully employs a narrower selection of words, consciously excluding ones which don’t fit, in order to create a style, a verbal world.

On this reading Dante is a Shakespearian, with a very wide lexis while Virgil is the second type, with a much more limited vocabulary.

Now Mandelbaum explains what Dante learned from Virgil: he quotes the ancient grammarian Macrobius who says Virgil’s style was ‘now brief, now full, now dry, now rich, now easy, now impetuous’ to suggest that what Dante learned from Virgil was variety of tone.

Also he learned a free approach to the line, the free use of enjambment and runover.

And lastly, the free mixing up of time, the ‘rapid shifts of tenses’ which are, indeed, very noticeable in the Aeneid as Virgil mixes up the past and present, sometimes in the same sentence.

Only as he approaches the end of this brief but packed introduction does Mandelbaum explain his aims as a translator. He has tried to ‘impress’ on his translation ‘the grave tread’ but also ‘the speed and angularity’ of Virgil, ‘the asymmetrical thrust of a mind on the move’. This is fair enough, an interestingly impressionistic description of something which maybe can’t be fully put into words.

But then Mandelbaum goes into full late 60s mystical mode:

The other part of the self brings me to the last way, the unmediated one. The way is the path that opens when the guides, for whom one has been grateful, fall away or say: ‘I crown and mitre you over yourself.’

Mandelbaum doesn’t tell us, because his technique is one of flashy meringue-making, that this last phrase is in fact a quote from Dante’s Paradiso canto 27. I suspected as much though I had to Google it to confirm my hunch.

Veering off in another direction, Mandelbaum then overshares with us the personal fact that he left Italy after many years and embarked on his translation of Virgil ‘at a time of much personal discontent’. He had long thought poetry shouldn’t be used for consolation (why?) but now his experience of ‘personal discontent’ changed his mind.

And now, abruptly and dramatically, he casts a vivid slash across his entire preface when he suddenly starts talking about the Vietnam War!

The Vietnam War has, he claims, as of 1970, made it impossible to talk about American ‘society’ any more – he insists we have to use the harsher word, ‘state’. In Vietnam, the American ‘state’ ‘has wrought the unthinkable, the abominable’.

Wow. With one flash you get the full colour of Mandelbaum’s mindset. In this book, in this translation, in this introduction, it is 1970, America is just starting to withdraw its forces from Vietnam after a shameful military debacle, and Allen Mandelbaum is applying the atmosphere of these times to his thinking about power and dominion as described by a poet from 2,000 years ago.

Unfortunately, instead of drawing any kind of analogy between America’s intervention in Vietnam and Aeneas’s intervention in Italy – which would be unexpected but potentially very illuminating – Mandelbaum’s mind once again veers off into impressionistic mush and hero worship. It is frustrating that he thus raises but fails to address the key political aspect of the Aeneid, which is Virgil’s attitude towards Augustus, his violent conquests and domestic tyranny.

I take the point that the expression of these political themes in the poem is complex and multi-levelled but Mandelbaum’s entire analysis of this huge subject amounts to the following:

Virgil is not free of the taint of the proconsular; but he speaks from time to time of peace achieved, and no man ever felt more deeply the part of the defeated and the lost.

Two points. 1. See how he mentioned Virgil’s complicity in Augustus’s regime in just ten words, ten words expressed in the pompous and evasive phraseology of a nineteenth century politician (‘not free of the taint…’). Mandelbaum avoids the issue; he tries to gloss over it by saying that although Virgil might have been complicit with the crimes of the regime, it’s alright because he was so sensitive to the suffering of ‘the defeated and the lost’ and so that redeems him. But does it?

Second point is the rather offensive hyperbole of claiming that ‘no man ever felt more deeply the part of the defeated and the lost’. Really? No man? Ever? Primo Levi describing the damned in Auschwitz? Solzhenitsyn describing the defeated millions in the gulags? Even if those authors are not directly comparable with Virgil, Mandelbaum’s claim is still wildly hyperbolic, symptomatic of the way hero worship replaces analysis.

At regular moments throughout the poem the text may express what might be Virgil’s feelings about the pity of war, the pity of loss and death and grief. BUT. At the centre of the poem is the brute fact of Aeneas as a huge man-killing machine, raging like Mars across the battlefield, slaughtering hecatombs of men to achieve his God-given destiny. And his last action, the memorable last image of the poem which is left squelching in the mind’s eye – is of Aeneas thrusting his sword right up to the hilt into the chest of a man begging for mercy.

Both Jackson Knight and Mandelbaum have spent years with the Aeneid but, in their respective introductions, repress or ignore the off-the-scale levels of toxic, masculine hyper-violence which runs through it in rivers of blood, preferring to write willowy tripe about universal values and deep feelings.

Instead of analysis, Mandelbaum has namedropping combined with hero worship:

And if the relative weights of the Epicurean, the Stoic, the Pythagorean in him are often hard to assess, his humanity is constant.

Is it, though, Allen? I didn’t find it so. I find the Aeneid very uneven, manufactured from hundreds of strands and themes and tones which often sit very uncomfortably together, and all of it drenched in psychopathic anger and rivers of gore. You can pick out the moment of sad sympathy with suffering humanity, stitch them together and claim this is the ‘real’ Virgil. But what about the far greater number of passages of brutal animal sacrifice? Or passages describing insensate fury? Or the many many passages describing slaughter and massacre? Or the frequent passages expressing slavish sycophancy to the great Augustus. All of these and numerous other topics and tones need to be incorporated into an proper assessment of the ‘real’ Virgil.

Instead of addressing all this, Mandelbaum thanks Virgil for not being ‘shrill’, and then brings in yet another unnecessarily personal angle:

and when, with the goad of public despair, my own poetic voice has had to struggle often with shrillness, the work on this translation has been most welcome.

So, if I read this correctly, we are to be grateful to Virgil for helping Allen Mandelbaum to overcome the tone of shrill invective which his protests against the Vietnam War and the evil American state often led him into. No doubt this is useful if you are a big Allen Mandelbaum fan, but if you’re mainly interested in understanding Virgil, maybe not so much.

Finally, Mandelbaum returns to the notion raised in the comparison with Dante, of Virgil’s limits. In Mandelbaum’s view Virgil does not swarm with the really full variety of a Homer or Dante or Shakespeare. He is not as exhaustive as they are. His is a world, not the world. He is more selective and less objective than the other three greats. At which point, as he reaches the conclusion of his preface, Mandelbaum becomes quite hard to understand:

Virgil is ‘sustained’ and is not ‘of the young’ (though for them, and for the aged, too, of Plato’s Laws); and none of his selection and imagination seems to involve what I think of as premature stripping, where the other world of poetry takes over before this world is known: Virgil selects after his knowing this world. For this he is a name-giver whose letters and syllables seem to imitate not what Lukács called ‘the cool and limited existence of shadows’ but ‘the real nature of each thing’.

After repeated reading I think the second half of this proposition indicates that Virgil is a poet who described the real world, selecting descriptions of the world as experienced and not reaching out to describe the world of shadows beyond this one, which Mandelbaum appears to think the superior approach. But if this is what Mandelbaum means, why doesn’t he say so? Surely a teacher is paid to teach.

Mandelbaum’s short introduction flashes insights like a striptease artist, momentary promises of insights which he never delivers on. One or two of his ideas hove into view, make sense, but then are smothered by his autobiographical reminiscences or detour into namedropping allusions. It’s maybe worth reading for these moments but, on the whole, Mandelbaum’s introduction is not very helpful as any kind of guide to reading the huge, magnificent and appalling epic poem the reader is about to embark on.

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by Simon on September 9, 2022  •  Permalink
Posted in Ancient history, Literary criticism, Poetry, Translation
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Posted by Simon on September 9, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/09/09/introductions-to-the-aeneid-2-allen-mandelbaum/

Introductions to the Aeneid – 1. W.F. Jackson Knight

‘The best poem of the best poet’
(John Dryden on Virgil’s Aeneid)

I own three English translations of the Aeneid:

  • the 1956 Penguin classics prose translation by W.F. Jackson Knight
  • the 1970 verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum
  • the 1991 Penguin classics prose translation by David West

The next three blog posts consist of detailed analyses of the introductions to each of these translations. The third one, about David West’s introduction, also give examples of each of the translators’ work.

1956 introduction by W.F. Jackson Knight

William Francis Jackson Knight (1895 to 1964) was an English classical scholar. After private school and Oxford he served in the First World War where he was badly wounded. You would expect this to give him to give him special insight into the brutal fighting in the Aeneid but it doesn’t. After returning to civilian life he taught Classics at another private school for ten years before securing a place at a university (Exeter) in 1936. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1945 and spent 4 years doing a translation of his beloved Aeneid, which was published by Penguin in 1954.

There’s a very full Wikipedia article about him. In it a contemporary, M.L. Clarke, is quoted as saying of him:

‘Knight had little gift for sustained and coherent argument and exposition, and he could, under the influence of whatever book or article he had just been reading, write what can only be described as nonsense.’

With friends like that… Even more striking, we learn that in later life Knight became consumed by a belief in spiritualism:

‘When he began his Penguin Aeneid translation, T.J. Haarhoff, ‘who had for years claimed spirit-contacts with Vergil himself…now put his powers at Jack’s service’… Vergil visited Haarhoff ‘every Tuesday evening’ and wrote out answers to questions raised by Knight, whom Vergil regularly called ‘Agrippa.’ ‘He still does,’ writes Haarhoff in January 1968… Vergil then began to contact Knight ‘directly at Exeter’ warning him ‘to go slow and be extra careful about the “second half.”‘ Knight gratefully dedicated his [Penguin] translation to Haarhoff. After Knight’s death … Haarhoff [was] assured by a medium that ‘Vergil met him when he went over.’ (Reminiscences of W.M. Calder, 1977)

So some aspects of Jackson Knight’s Penguin translation are influenced by what he thought Virgil told him. In person. This is a more interesting fact than anything in Jackson Knight’s introduction.

***********

Jackson Knight’s 20-page introduction to his translation of Aeneid is typical of a type of old bufferish, old fashioned, romantic, wishy-washy, gushing, hero worshipping and idea-free literary criticism which surrounded me as a boy in the 1960s. I read it before I read the Wikipedia article and so took JK’s frequent mentions of ‘the beyond’ and ‘eternal truths’ and the ‘deep truth’ and ‘truth to life’ to refer to Christian beliefs. Reading the Wikipedia section about his increasing obsession with spiritualism makes sense of the entire orientation of his introduction which is to make Virgil a great teacher of eternal values etc, and to take a soft-lens, romanticising view, emphasising Virgil’s gentleness and sweetness of spirit and thus completely ignoring the testosterone-fuelled hyper-masculine anger and violence which dominates the actual poem, rather than his rose-tinted version of it.

Here’s a summary of key points:

Jackson Knight calls the Aeneid the ‘gateway between the pagan and the Christian centuries’. ‘Virgil is the poet of the Gate.’

Rome rose from being an obscure town in the middle of Italy to running an empire which stretched all round the Mediterranean, slowly and arduously, over a period of some 500 years of continuous warfare.

As the Republic reached its height it was undermined by unparalleled wealth and bitter rivalries for power. Romans who lived through the increasing political violence of the last 50 years of the Republic (which is generally thought to have ended in 27 BC) looked back at what they took to be the noble virtues of their predecessors, their courage, their nobility, their civic high-mindedness. Educated Romans became increasingly interested in antiquarianism and the study of their city’s roots. By going right back to the very original roots of the city, by moulding a new, vastly powerful version of legends about Prince Aeneas of Troy, Virgil distilled this nostalgia and these feelings for a better, nobler world, into imperishable art – and helped to pass it on to the new Christian culture which began to rise soon after his death (in 19 BC). [This is all wish fulfilment. Obviously Christianity didn’t exist until after Jesus was executed in 33 AD, or until Paul began formulating his theories about it in the 40s, and was just one obscure oriental sect among many until well into the second century AD.]

It was on a journey accompanying Augustus to Greece that Virgil fell ill and died, aged just 51. He wished his literary executors, Varius and Tucca, to destroy the Aeneid but they talked him out of it. [The poem is, in my opinion, visibly unfinished, both in structure and many details, but thank God they succeeded.]

Jackson Knight (JK) rather naively claims that Virgil foresaw that Augustus would bring the Roman world peace and order, and supported him. That said, it may be one can read subtle criticisms of Augustus’ early brutal methods in some of Virgil’s poetry. JK optimistically says the influence of gentle Virgil and his friend, Horace, may have helped reform Augustus in later life. [Naiveté and rosy-tinted optimism are Jackson Knight’s key notes.]

JK thinks the Eclogues are full of charming thoughts and imagery. [It was reading statements like this that for years gave me a completely misleading impression of the Eclogues, which in actual fact contain passage of bitterness and emotional turmoil.]

JK’s description of the Georgics as ‘poetry of the farm’ containing advice to farmers about crops, trees and animals also omits the harsh punitive tone of some of them, the descriptions of total war, of a devastating plague, a denunciation of sexual passion, and the long mini epic which takes up half the fourth Georgic. Nothing at all of ‘the poetry of the farm’ about any of these bits.

JK limply defines an epic poem as a long narrative poem full of action which tells us about human life and makes us think about the relation between man and superhuman powers; featuring ‘heroes’ who are above ordinary mortals in skill and strength, while not being divine.

Epic poems consist of two types: oral poems developed by illiterate cultures; and written poems composed in literate cultures, but usually copying the form and conventions of their oral predecessors.

The legend that Aeneas escaped the sack of Troy, sailed the seas to Latium and founded a settlement near modern Rome was ancient. Virgil rewrote it at epic length for his own purposes.

JK points out, pretty obviously, that the entire story is threaded with divine appearances and admonitions with commands, advice and help from various gods. They work through dreams, visions, omens, the worlds of prophets and clairvoyants. Virgil gives the impression of literally believing the human world is subject to the powers of another world. [I wonder whether JK was a Christian. I wonder whether this is why he describes the poem in such positive glowing terms, ignoring the rage and hatred and bitterness and destruction.]

JK is confident that everything in the poem is ‘true to life’, as if that is the measure of an epic poem, when, quite obviously, the opposite is true. From its characters to its diction an epic poem is meant to be a supremely heightened and idealised vision of the lives of gods and heroes.

JK thinks the Aeneid contains many moral messages [as literary critics in the 1950s optimistically believed literature, in general, did.] He thinks the poem displays a Greek moral – avoid excess – and a Roman one – be true (to gods, homeland, family). This is a neat antithesis, but very simplistic.

Thus JK interprets book 4, the love affair with Dido, as describing an unwise relapse by both the protagonists into excessive love, which led them both to abandon their duties to their people and cities, and then led to an excessive counter-reaction when she killed herself at being jilted.

A comparable example of excess occurs at the bitter end of the poem when Aeneas lets his instinct for moderation and forgiveness be overwhelmed by bitterness at Turnus for killing sweet Pallas. This so blinds him with anger that he slaughters his opponent instead of forgiving him.

Following straight on from this observation, JK rather contradicts himself by going on to talk about Virgil’s sweetness and tenderness. He points out, accurately enough, that this quality can sometimes be found in the epic similes which sometimes provide homely human or natural imagery to counterpoint the extreme emotions of fierce battles. He singles out the epic simile which compares Vulcan hammering out the armour for Aeneas to a humble housewife who works all night weaving (8.407 to 415). JK says this is typical of the way Virgil’s deeper meanings ‘softly’ emerge from the text. [It’s a very tendentious example, because many of Virgil’s similes are the opposite of gentle and soft, and depict destructive natural forces, rampaging gods or wild animals.]

As an example of the subtlety and depth Virgil brings to so many aspects of the story, JK compares it with another poem which describes the sack of Troy which was published during his lifetime. In this one, Menelaus comes across Helen hiding from the attacking Greeks and is tempted to kill her – but Venus intervenes to say what a waste that would be since she will still make a perfectly good wife. JK says this is simple and blunt, almost humorously practical and limited.

But in Virgil’s version, it is Aeneas who comes across Helen hiding from the ransack and is momentarily tempted to kill her. By changing the male protagonist of this moment, the scene is transformed and now becomes charged with all kinds of poignancy, Aeneas having all kinds of mixed feelings about the woman responsible for the destruction of everything he holds dear. Then, when Venus intervenes, it is not just as the love goddess as she is in the earlier version, but as Aeneas’s mother, counselling motherly tenderness. She says no humans are to blame for any of this, not Helen nor Paris: it is entirely the gods’ concoction. Thus Venus evokes a complex broil of emotions in Aeneas to turn away anger and bring forgiveness. I thought JK is a Christian because he says this reimagined scene has ‘a moral depth and a certain universality which are almost Christian’ (page 16) and claims that Virgil gets ‘nearer to ultimate truth’ than any poet before him. JK is concerned to make Virgil a sensitive spiritual person, like himself.

JK goes on to generalise about the nature of great poetry. He claims the great poets collect an ‘enormous amount of observations of life’ and then condense it under strong pressure so that when they compose even a few words, they have a great power of suggestion and persuasion. JK claims this is one way in which Virgil developed a style capable of communicating ‘universal truth’.

And it is this which allowed Virgil to condense into a single statement the experience of many generations, in fact of the entire civilisations of the Greeks and the Romans.

JK elaborates this thought by pointing out that Virgil read very widely and remembered everything he read, and so was able to keep in touch with many people, past and present, and ‘be friends with them’. [It feels mean ganging up on a man who was severely injured in the Great War, but this is baby talk.]

Thus JK claims Virgil ‘lived in an ideal world of poetry’. He reorganised the existing ‘poetic thought-world’. Which is why his poetry is so allusive, and works on so many levels.

JK then declines into the kind of hero worship which afflicts so much older Shakespeare criticism. He claims Virgil was sensitive ‘to all points of view’ and all kinds of people, ‘even wicked ones’. Only he could reach the underlying sense of his story. His allusive method helped him tell ‘the truth of art’ not ‘the trivial truth of fact’ [a trite antithesis which, I think, comes from F.R. Leavis].

JK claims Virgil created portraits with a few ‘inspired brush strokes’ rather than detailed realism showing every wrinkle.

Virgil’s wide reading meant that every line and character and plot development contains multiple references to all previous narratives. Thus Virgil’s Aeneas contains bits of the Aeneas who appears in Homer, plus aspects of Homer’s Achilles, Odysseus, Hector, some of Hercules, and also flashes of Augustus.

JK says Virgil uses ‘hundreds’ of phrases of Epicurus in the Aeneid but violently disagreed with Epicurus’s fiercely materialistic philosophy and so sometimes uses Epicurus’s phrases to describe the idealist notions of his philosophical enemy, Plato.

He describes the way the golden bough which Aeneas has to find and pluck in order to visit the underworld almost certainly is a quote from a Greek poem published during Virgil’s lifetime, in which the works of Plato are described as a ‘golden bough, sparkling all round with every virtue’. JK says this is indicative of the importance, for Virgil, of moral goodness leading to ‘spiritual discernment’. [Recurrence of JK’s central obsession with morality and spirituality.]

Virgil spent 11 years writing the Aeneid. He intended to devote a further 3 years to revising it, but died before he could do so. He was a perfectionist. Sometimes he wrote only one line a day. JK points out there are many places in the poem which require a final revision and completion, places where ‘a period of time or a distance’ contradicts what he says elsewhere. [I’ve flagged up some of these discrepancies in my summaries.]

There are discrepancies of fact, like how the Trojans managed to transport the vast amount of treasure and household gods and fabrics and so on which are regularly described, in just 20 ships which they knocked together after the sack of Troy. The reason is the imagery and symbolism are more important than any practical consideration. After all [JK banally comments] it’s not as if anyone believes any of this is true!

And the battle scenes sometimes contain irreconcilable details, techniques and weapons. Specifically, sometimes the warriors fight like Homeric heroes, sometimes like Caesar’s legions. This anachronism, says JK, is deliberate. Virgil is like a portrait painter who tries to capture not the face in front of him but all previous stages of the sitter’s life. And so his poem tries to capture all previous phases of warfare, up to and including the present, in so doing reaching down to show ‘what all war is like.’

The reader new to epic poetry may be taken aback by the exaggerations, of the heroes’ size and strength. But JK hastens to assure us these are not ‘childish’, no, no, they are ‘serious and important symbolic means’ ‘for expressing deep and true meanings.’

[By this stage you can see how JK’s fetishising of the concept of the ‘true’, assigning it ‘depth’ and ‘universal’ meaning, are a kind of magnet. Whatever point he sets out to make, his discourse is drawn back to the magnetic pole of what a genius Virgil is, how he expresses ‘deep’ and ‘universal’ truths. How these truths anticipate the ‘universal truth’ of Christianity. How he encapsulates all time, how he understands all types of people. This is, to be blunt, an inadequate mental system or ideology with which to describe such a vast multifaceted work of art. It is sentimental because it keeps relapsing back into the same comforting hymns of praise. Often JK’s introduction reads like a eulogy. It is more compliments than criticism, in any analytical sense.]

JK picks two moments which distinguish the two protagonists: Turnus holds a bowl of water and it boils over into steam. He is too fiery. Aeneas hold a bowl of water and it reflects rays of light off it; as the water settles the rays settle. Turnus is described as emitting flames and sparks when he gets ferocious for battle. He will burn bright and burn out.

JK points to the many descriptions of dawn or nightfall to illustrate how Virgil used the same basic event but cast it in an infinite variety of words, the start or endings of words being chosen for their sound and how they complement similar words nearby.

Virgil employed several types of rhythm, some governed by long and short syllables, some by stress accents, some by vowel sounds. The delicate interplay of these different systems across numerous lines creates ‘the music of Virgil’.

The translator knows more than anyone that Virgil’s art is subtle because it is often difficult to understand exactly what he means. Often his elliptical and allusive statements need to be expanded in prose in order to convey the full richness of implication and the challenge for the translator is knowing when to hold back and not fully explicate the allusions or implications which he is aware of.

JK tells us Virgil is capable of great variety of tone from ‘apocalyptic majesty’ to a ‘still, small voice’ [characteristic of JK to use a Christian phrase]. Virgil’s general tone is of dignity and formality but he sometimes uses colloquialism and, rarely, something like slang.

The aim of JK’s translation is to let the story tell itself in an impersonal English, removing his own personal style as much as anyone can. But oddities are sometimes permitted because Virgil himself is sometimes ‘odd’. In his day, using Latin for literature was still experimental and hadn’t become as smooth as it was to be even a generation later, for Ovid, for example. It is hard to know exactly how some of the unevennesses in his poems were received in his time, and so difficult to know exactly how to translate them in modern English.

Suddenly JK switches tack from a narrow consideration of Latin style to consider the poem’s place in the entire Western tradition. He announces that the Aeneid was the principle and best known secular book in the Western world. Soon after his death, Virgil began to be worshipped as a divinity. He was awarded a place in Christian worship and art as soon as such things came to be arranged. His imagery in the Eclogues – the picture of a shepherd sitting under a tree piping love songs – influenced every European literature.

The compactness of some of Virgil’s sayings led to the Sortes Vergilianae, where people opened a page of Virgil at random and place their finger blindly on the text and then interpreted its secret meaning. Apparently, Charles I did this before the Battle of Naseby.

On the final page JK’s introduction collapses into hero-worshipping cliché and waffle. ‘The power of Virgil’s poem is like a seed in the ground pushing up into the light; and it is still growing‘ – the force of that last clause meant to convey the impression that the author is ‘still growing’ with it, as if he is part of this great triumphal procession. This is high-sounding bilge.

JK notes that some critics, even in Virgil’s day, wrote against him – this could be interesting if JK quoted any of them and explained what Virgil’s critics said against him, but instead JK collapses into inexcusably weak poetic prose, here, as throughout his introduction, preferring his high-sounding references and allusions to any solid ideas or analysis. Yes, there have been critics of his adored hero, but:

disparagement of Virgil’s overwhelming reputation has always sooner or later collapsed like the walls of Jericho.

This is brainless hero worship. JK compounds this descent into humanistic hogwash by saying it is likely that ‘Virgil, the poet of fidelity, still likes mankind’s fidelity to him‘. This is dire sentimentality devoid of meaning or interest.

In the short introduction to his thorough and useful glossary (pages 343 to 361) JK makes the interesting point that the Aeneid contains nearly 900 names, most of them names of human beings or divinities, though many are place names. Typical of JK not to be precise enough to say how many in each category, which might have led onto interesting analysis. Interesting but doesn’t follow through.

Summary

Over-ripe, out-of-date impressionistic tripe, all-too-pleased with the sound of its own references (the walls of Jericho etc), while palming the reader off with hardly any hard ideas and a dogged determination to make Virgil sound like a gentle, high-minded spiritualist instead of the far more complex, contradictory, daunting and unpleasant poet he actually is, Jackson Knight’s introduction is a typical slice of the high-minded tripe which dominated conservative criticism in the 1950s and 60s.

Roman reviews

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by Simon on September 7, 2022  •  Permalink
Posted in Ancient history, Literary criticism, Literature, Poetry, Translation
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Posted by Simon on September 7, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/09/07/introductions-to-the-aeneid-1-w-f-jackson-knight/

What is Waugh satirising in ‘Love Among The Ruins’?

Maybe it’s worth taking a moment to explain what Waugh was targeting in his 1953 satirical novella Love Among The Ruins. This essay is in three parts:

  1. Waugh’s conservative values
  2. The state of Britain after the war i.e. Labour represent everything Waugh detests
  3. Specific topics satirised in Long Among the Ruins

1. Waugh’s conservative values

Elitist

Waugh was an elitist in the literal sense of believing that Britain should be run by its hereditary elite, the landed gentry and aristocracy. He thought they were the best educated, the most responsible and, because of their ties to the land and to grand houses, mansions and parishes across the country, were  the most representative of a kind of mystical ideal of the English population and English values.

Snob

Waugh was a snob. It is well-documented that he liked to hobnob with the aristocracy and namedrop and social climb as much as possible. His father was ‘only’ the managing director of a medium-sized publishing company, so Waugh was a long way lower on the social ladder than the lords and viscounts and earls that he liked to litter his novels with.

Catholic elitism

Waugh was a Christian who showed an unusual interest in church architecture and ritual as a boy, even before he was sent to one of the country’s most High Church public schools (Lancing). A number of his friends converted to Catholicism in the late 1920s so there was a certain inevitability about his Christian traditionalism eventually manifesting itself in his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1930.

Waugh’s Catholicism was linked with his other values in a multi-faceted belief in old, traditions, the values of country living, the natural innate superiority of the landowner to his tenants and farmers. He valued luxurious good living, grand country houses, fine wines, the best food, the impeccable manners of the highest in society, and the aristocratic values of nonchalance and superiority.

Catholic belief

Beyond that, however, Catholicism was based on certain inflexible, timeless values. To start with, on the sanctity of human life. This meant no abortion or euthenasia. It is not for man to determine the start or end of human life. All human life is sacred. God is at the centre of all systems of value, underpinning all morality. Removing God, declaring an overtly atheist ideology, begins the process of undermining human life and all morality. Various forms of state-approved murder soon follow, abortion and assisted suicide being the two most obvious.

Individual responsibility and expression

Connected with all this is Waugh’s conservative idea of individualism. In the kind of society Waugh liked, one that implemented a low-tax, laissez-fair regime which allowed the aristocracy and upper middle class to flourish, there was lots of scope for the privileged in society, for the grand old families in their country houses and the bright young things they sent to public school and on into London’s party and cocktail bar circuit, to develop charming idiosyncracies and eccentricities.

In a sense, Waugh’s fiction is devoted to the oddballs, eccentrics and chancers who are able to flourish in the wealthy, blessed, privileged, over-educated and under-worked circles which he described. Take the outrageous practical joker Basil Seal in Put Out More Flags or the eccentric Apthorpe in Men at Arms, or, in a slightly different vein, the camp aesthetes Anthony Blanche (Brideshead) and Everard Spruce (Flags).

For Waugh, it is only his idealised conservative society that true individualism, individual tastes, aestheticism and connoisseurship are able to flourish.

The British Empire

On the global stage i.e. in international politics, Waugh saw Britain and the British Empire as embodying the finest values of civilisation, gentlemanly democracy and individual freedom. In his travel book Remote People it is very striking that Waugh unequivocally supports the right of the white settlers in Kenya to live the life of Riley at the expense of the native African population. He mocks the British Empire as everyone of  his generation did, confident in the knowledge that it was here to stay forever. Its actual dismantling after the war came as a great shock.

The international alternatives

In Waugh’s fiction English gentlemanliness is contrasted with:

  1. the irritating, bubble-gum and Coca Cola trashiness of American soldiery (in Sword of Honour) and of superficial, vacuous American consumer culture (in The Loved One)
  2. the terrifying totalitarianism of the post-war communist states, with their utterly amoral commitment to seizing complete power and reducing entire populations to modern slavery (embodied in the Yugoslav communists in Unconditional Surrender)

So that’s a brisk run through Waugh’s conservative Catholic values. Now let’s set these values against the reality of Britain in 1950, when he wrote the first draft of Love Among The Ruins.

2. The state of Britain after the war i.e. the Labour government represented everything Waugh detested

The impact of the Second World War

The Second World War was a disaster for all Waugh’s values. Britain went bankrupt, was only kept afloat by ruinous loans from America, and emerged from the war with her role greatly diminished, a diminution symbolised by the relinquishing of India (and Pakistan) in 1947.

Not only the country but large numbers of landed families were financially ruined, first by the collapse in the economy, in particular the agricultural sector many relied on, and also by the collapse in value of the stocks and shares in British companies whose dividends they’d lived on between the wars and whose value now plummeted.

The Labour Party’s socialist policies

But the greatest cataclysm was the coming to power of the Labour Party in the 1945 general election. The Labour Party embodied everything Waugh despised, disliked and even hated about the modern world. It was the antithesis of everything he valued. In those days the Labour Party contained real socialists who genuinely wanted to nationalise everything, to impose state control of huge sectors of industry (coal, steel, shipbuilding) and the professions (doctors).

Nationalisation

In its first five years in power the Labour government enacted a broad swathe of socialist policies. It nationalised the coalmining industry and the trains. More was promised in a government which pledged to take over ‘the commanding heights’ of the economy. Owners of private companies the length of the land were forcibly bought out.

The theft of private property

Conservatives like Waugh saw this not as contributing to some vague notion of social justice but the very real confiscation of people’s property and businesses.

The faceless bureaucracy

The new ministries set up to run the economy were stuffed with bureaucrats and ideologues. Quite quickly the bureaucracy of the nationalised industries became a joke. ‘The man from the ministry’ came to symbolise the interfering, know-nothing, centralised bureaucracy which conservatives like Waugh contrasted with the personalised relations between landed gentry and local tenants and populations whose names and faces and traditions and values they knew and shared, which Waugh depicted in his idealised version of rural patriarchy. Human interaction was replaced with uncaring forms and procedures.

The NHS

The Labour government’s most famous achievement was the creation of the National Health Service but people tend to forget the immense amount of pressure, which could easily be seen as state intimidation, which was brought to bear on the medical profession. Again, to a conservative like Waugh this meant that a personal relationship with a local doctor who had individual responsibility to run his own practice and, for example, to carry out works of charity, to moderate his fees according to patients’ ability to pay, was replaced by outsiders parachuted into a large, faceless bureaucratic system.

This attitude – the preference for individual and established relationships over modern bureaucratic arrangements – is typified in a passage from The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold where the narrator describes Pinfold’s relationship with his local doctor:

Mr. Pinfold seldom consulted his doctor. When he did so it was as a ‘private patient’. His children availed themselves of the National Health Act but Mr. Pinfold was reluctant to disturb a relationship which had been formed in his first years at Lychpole. Dr. Drake, Mr. Pinfold’s medical attendant, had inherited the practice from his father and had been there before the Pinfolds came to Lychpole. Lean, horsy and weather-beaten in appearance, he had deep roots and wide ramifications in the countryside, being brother of the local auctioneer, brother-in-law of the solicitor, and cousin of three neighbouring rectors. His recreations were sporting. He was not a man of high technical pretensions but he suited Mr. Pinfold well. (Chapter one)

The way the local doctor has deep roots is obviously described, but let us dwell on the phrase ‘his medical attendant’. The implication is that Pinfold prefers Dr Drake because he is more like a servant than a bossy, hurried NHS doctor would be.

To summarise: in a broad swathe of Labour Party policies a conservative like Waugh saw nothing of ‘social justice’ being implemented but only that individual relationships, individual responsibilities and individual freedom of action were being taken away by an overbearing state and replaced by surly, bad-mannered state interference.

Rationing

Rationing had been introduced under Winston Churchill’s wartime government and, of course, destroyed at a stroke the wonderful world of fine wines and expensive meals depicted in Waugh’s 1930s novels. As Waugh himself points out, one aspect of his nostalgia fest Brideshead Revisited, is the description of sumptuous meals and fine vintages which the author, writing in tightly rationed, blacked out Britain of 1943, could only fantasise about.

Waugh like many Britons hoped that rationing would end with the end of the war but it didn’t. In fact it intensified as Britain’s ruined economy struggled to rebuild itself in a world which was also ruined. Rationing was extended to more foods and services, in a world which began to seem like it was going to be grey and shabby forever.

Shabby housing

The most visible sign of the war was the ruins to be found in every British city. The Labour government came to power promising a huge programme of housebuilding and this overlapped with ambitious plans by developers and architects to implement new continental ideas of town planning and design.  A series of new towns was conceived, designed and built. Every town and village in the land acquired a penumbra of council houses built on council estates.

Unfortunately many of these developments quickly developed bad reputations, council estates for poverty and chavvy behaviour, the new town towns for being soulless concrete jungles. Tower blocks which looked gleaming symbols of modernity in the architecture magazines turned out to be badly designed, badly built, quickly stained. The windows leaked and the lifts broke.

In his post-war correspondence Waugh summed up all these changes with the satirical notion that Britain was being changed into a new state named ‘Welfaria’.

3. Specific topics satirised in Long Among the Ruins

The name of the new state, ‘New Britain’, has a suitably Orwellian, totalitarian overtone.

The replacement of traditional oaths with ones using ‘State’ instead of God indicate how the genuine source of morality and meaning in Waugh’s Catholicism has been replaced by the corrupt, fallible, pretentious and doomed-to-fail worship of the State (in oaths such as ‘Great State!’, ‘State be with you’ and ‘State help me’).

But the state has usurped not just God but all kinds of relationships, large and small. It is symptomatic that Miles Plastic is an orphan because parents interfere with the upbringing of children, do it well or badly, introduce an element of personal duty and responsibility, and also introduce that human variety and individuality which Waugh values.

The abolition of individualism

In his satirical New Britain, the State interferes everywhere to abolish individualism. So instead of individuals the State’s aim is to produce millions of identikit citizens. Hence the throwaway reference to the way everyone in New Britain speaks with the same ‘flat conventional accent of the age’.

For Waugh, this is a nightmare vision, the death of colourful individualism and the soul-destroying reduction of all human beings to the same, dull, identikit lowest common denominator.

And not just people. Where there had been a plethora and range of goods and services now there is only one brand of everything, the State brand (exactly as in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four with its Victory brand of goods). Thus the State wines and State sausages and State clothes of Waugh’s fantasy.

The abolition of personal responsibility

The abolition of individual responsibility is, of course, the target satirised in the long opening passage about Mountjoy Prison, in which Waugh satirises the belief that criminals are not responsible for their actions, society is, so that any given crime is not the fault of the criminal but indicates a failure of the welfare system. And hence the satirical details, which flow from it, such as prisoners who are clearly old lags now living in the lap of luxury with prisons replaced by lovely houses in beautiful grounds and nothing more taxing than sessions of ‘Remedial Repose’ to attend and the governor isn’t called a prison governor but ‘Chief Guide’.

(The State confiscation of private property is included in the satire of Mountjoy prison when we learn  that Mountjoy Castle had been the ancestral seat of a maimed V.C. of the Second World War, who had been sent to a Home for the Handicapped when the place was converted into a gaol. Obviously the fact that the former owner was a war hero is designed to maximise the reader’s outrage at this typical act of State theft.)

The abolition of personal responsibility is further demonstrated by the way Miles’s criminal act of burning down the RAF barracks where he was stationed and burning to death half the inhabitants is dismissed by the State’s psychologist as perfectly natural adolescent behaviour.

The failure of modern architecture and town planning

It typifies the socialist removal of individuality and character and texture and colour and interest that once Miles is rehabilitated, he is not sent to a named specific town but to ‘the nearest Population Centre’ which has the generically futuristic name of ‘Satellite City’

It is also symptomatic that all the architects’ grand plans have resulted in a shoddy, half-built reality. The so-called ‘Dome of Security’ has blacked out windows, broken lifts and shabby rooms. All around it the rest of the gleaming modern town has failed to be built at all and instead the Dome is surrounded by slums made of huts, the use of the word ‘huts’ suggesting not even English habitations but African shanties.

There were no workers’ flats, no officials’ garden suburb, no parks, no playgrounds yet. These were all on the drawing boards in the surveyor’s office, tattered at the edges, ringed by tea cups; their designer long since cremated. (p.441)

It is similarly symptomatic that when Miles moves in with Clara they share a cramped compartment of a world war Nissen Hut. More than a decade after the war the coalition government has miserably failed to build adequate homes for the population.

The rise of State murder

It is no surprise that the busiest part of the local authority is the Euthenasia Department. In other words, the socialist regime has created a society which people would rather die than live in. For a Catholic like Waugh euthenasia is a sin. Only God decides when people should die. The State offering people the service of assisted suicide is not only repugnant to secular liberal values, but a sin.

State sterilisation

Same goes for sterilisation. A good Catholic believes in using no form of contraceptive device and abortion is a sin. From the same point of view, seeking to permanently sterilise people, or yourself, is a crime against nature and against God.

The irreligious amorality of modern science

The entire idea that the ‘heroine’ of the story should be beautiful but with a lush curly beard caused by the side effects of an operation to be sterilised combines at least two elements: disgust at the notion that women should sterilise themselves in order to further their career (Clara is sterilised in order to become a better ballet dancer); and the beard idea is a ludicrous satire on the unintended side-effects of modern science, in this case the fictional ‘Klugmann’s Operation’.

After the war there was a boom in the idea that ‘modern science’ would solve our social problems. As a Catholic Waugh takes a pessimistic view of human nature and of humanity’s ability to change or cure itself. Only God can do that via divine grace.

On this view there is something both blasphemous and pathetic about modern science’s hubristic claims to be able to cure the modern world. Much the same critical worldview underpins and informs C.S. Lewis’s post-war satire and fable That Hideous Strength (1945).

For Christians like Waugh and Lewis almost all the ills of the modern world stem from man’s foolish attempts to deny the reality of God and try to set up mankind in God’s place.

On a more mundane level, the inevitable failure of modern science is embodied in a) the side effects of the Klugmann Operation i.e. Clara growing a beard; and then b) the grotesque results of the ‘plastic surgery’ carried out to remedy this, which replaces Clara’s soft and beautiful face with an inflexible mask of tough, salmon-coloured rubber. Yuk.

The feeble replacement of Christmas

It’s a small detail but indicative of the whole situation that the State thinks it can simply ‘replace’ the word Christmas and Christmas trees with ‘Santa-Claus-tide’ ‘Goodwill Trees’. It’s pathetically unimaginative in itself but also indicates a deeper failure to understand the nature of human society, the way traditions and beliefs are handed down through the generations. It is exactly as shallow and doomed to fail as the French revolutionaries’ trying to replace the Catholic Church with the cult of the Supreme Being or Lenin and Stalin’s attempts to replace the Russian Orthodox Church faith in The Soviet or the Great Leader. Abolishing the church and Christian festivals masquerades as liberal and progressive but is the precise opposite: destroying history, destroying tradition, destroying diversity, destroying people’s freedom to choose their beliefs and ideas, all swept away in the name of one, centralised, totalising ideology of Unity and Progress.

Summary

Some of Waugh’s points are still relevant today. Even people on the progressive wing of politics lament the depersonalising affect of bureaucracy and form-filling which came in with the welfare state and has never gone away. None of us remember the profound poverty and immiseration of the 1930s which the nationalisation of key industries, the establishing of a welfare state and a national health service were designed to address.

It’s possible, therefore, to profoundly disagree with Waugh’s politics (such as they are) but sympathise with this or that detail of his complaint. Then again, like any satire on a dystopian future, even when it’s intended to be biting we can distinguish the political point (which we might disagree with) from the satirical humour (which we still find funny).

In some ways, then, the text is a handy checklist of issues or topics which a Christian conservative like Waugh objected to in the post-war world and post-war politics. It’s a useful primer on the conservative point of view which was, of course, to triumph in the 1951 general election, when Labour were thrown out and Winston Churchill’s Conservatives returned with a majority. And a primer on the perennial concerns of the conservative frame of mind.

And to return to its literary effects – although, in the end, Love Among The Ruins fails as a story, it is entertaining enough, especially in the dense opening passages, for the vigour of its attack and satirical vehemence.

Credit

Love Among the Ruins by Evelyn Waugh was published by Chapman and Hall in 1953. All references are to its place in the 2018 Penguin paperback edition of the Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh.

Related link

Evelyn Waugh reviews

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Posted by Simon on January 12, 2022

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Jorge Luis Borges on Franz Kafka (1981)

In 1981 Cardinal published a collection of all the short stories which Kafka published during his lifetime, from the first story in 1904, to the last ones published just after his death in 1924 – a working life of precisely 20 years. They are all here in new translations by J.A. Underwood. The edition is interesting because it gives a brief textual explanation before the major stories, explaining when they were written, and when published.

It also contains a brief three-page essay on Kafka by the great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, which can be summarised as follows:

Why Kafka wanted his works destroyed

Borges starts with Kafka’s injunction to Max Brod to burn his works. He compares this to Virgil’s request to his friends to destroy the manuscript of the Aeneid. As a practising author Borges gives a nice interpretation of both men’s wishes to destroy their masterworks, namely they didn’t want them actually to be destroyed, but

longed to disburden themselves of the responsibility that a literary work imposes on its creator.

Anyone familiar with The Trial or The Castle can immediately see how this applies to Kafka; they’re great works but they’re nowhere near finished and the effort to review, reorder and restructure them, and then to write all the linking passages and the final chapters required to bring them to a successful conclusion would daunt a lesser man and was clearly beyond Kafka. All he felt was the guilt and shame of failure.

Kafka’s works are like:

a parable or series of parables on the theme of the moral relationship of the individual with his God and with  his God’s incomprehensible universe.

They are less like what we call literature and closer to an ancient religious work like the Book of Job. Borges emphasises Kafka’s religious, and specifically Jewish, motivation. He thinks Kafka saw his work as an act of faith, and he did not want his writings to demotivate others (as they surely must have).

Borges goes further and suspects Kafka could a) only dream nightmares and b) was interested or hypnotised by delay and failure, which is why he produced a body of work solely about nightmares, and about nightmares which never reach a conclusion but are endlessly delayed… Borges thinks Kafka’s own imaginative vision wore him out.

And knowing how it wore him down, is why Kafka wanted the works burned, so as not to discourage others from seeking for happiness. (This is the same sort of terminology Brod uses in his defence of not burning the works in his afterword to The Trial).

When Borges first read Kafka

Borges slips in a memory of his own youth when he first came across Kafka; He was reading an avant-garde magazine full of modish experiments with text and font and layout but which also included a story by Kafka which, to his eternal shame, he thought insipid and so ignored.

Kafka’s Jewishness

Borges thinks Kafka’s Judaism is central. He thinks Kafka was as much in awe of his father as Israel is of its punishing God. He thinks Kafka’s Jewishness ‘set him apart from humanity’ and was ‘a torment to him’. So far so fairly basic.

Hierarchy and infinity

More interestingly, Borges goes on to speculate that Kafka’s work is underpinned by two big ideas, subordination and infinity. In almost all his stories we find hierarchies and those hierarchies tend to be infinite. Thus:

  • the hero of America roams across the land of the free until he is admitted to the great Nature-Theatre of Oklahoma which is an infinite stage, no less populous than the world
  • the hero of The Trial tries to understand the nature of the hierarchy of the Court and the authorities who have arrested him and are managing his case, but every step of the investigation only reveals how impenetrably vast and never-ending the hierarchy is
  • the hero of The Castle is summoned to work for authorities at a castle who never acknowledge him or his task

Infinity and incompletion

Borges says some critics complain about the fact that all three novels are unfinished and lament the absence of the chapters which would complete them. Borges says this is to misunderstand Kafka, to misunderstand that his subject was precisely the infinity of obstacles his heroes had to overcome. The novels are incomplete because it is ‘essential’ to their artistic purpose that they remain incomplete.

Borges compares the impossibility of completing a Kafka novel to Zeno’s paradox about the impossibility of movement.

Suppose Zeno wishes to walk to the end of a path. Before he can get there, he must get halfway there. Before he can get halfway there, he must get a quarter of the way there. Before traveling a quarter, he must travel one-eighth; before an eighth, one-sixteenth; and so on. Describing the task in this way requires Zeno to perform an infinite number of tasks which is, of course, impossible. (Wikipedia)

Intolerable situations

Moving swiftly on, Borges suggests that Kafka’s greatest gift was for inventing intolerable situations. Anyone thinking of The Metamorphosis or In the Penal Colony would agree.

But Borges instances something a little different, which is the way the tremendous imaginative power of some of Kafka’s engrave themselves on our minds.

Leop­ards break in­to the tem­ple and drink all the sac­ri­fi­cial ves­sels dry; this happens over and over and, in the end, it can be predicted in ad­vance and so becomes in­cor­po­rat­ed in­to the rit­ual.
(The Zürau Aphorisms)

These short parables from early in Kafka’s career describe something different from the longer works: it is something to do with infinity and paradox, but harder to define, and less amenable to the kind of sociological interpretations which the novels are routinely subjected to.

Invention over craft

Borges makes a few controversial claims right at the end of this short essay:

Kafka’s craft is perhaps less admirable than in his invention, certainly in the way that all the stories feature basically the same character, Homo domesticus, ‘so Jewish and so German’, so desperate to keep his place in his bank or office or profession or employment.

He says ‘plot and atmosphere are the essential characteristics of Kafka’s work and not the convolutions of the story or the psychology of the hero.

We can quickly agree that few of the novels or stories have a ‘plot’ in the conventional sense of a beginning, middle and an end. His most famous stories tend to record a steady decline in circumstances and psychology until the protagonist dies.

When Borges writes that Kafka’s work doesn’t bother much with the psychology of the hero, I suppose what he means is that none of his protagonists are changed by events in the way that a classical novel is all about the change and growth in thinking and opinions of its main characters. The protagonists psychologise at very great length indeed, but, in a sense, it is always the same problem they are worrying over, and they are permanently caught in the same predicament or trap which shows no real psychological development or change.

Which is why Borges concludes that the short stories are superior to the novels, because they capture this atmosphere and this plight with greater purity and force.

Personally, I disagree. I think everyone should read The Trial because it gives you the essence of the Kafkaesque – and that the stories, being far more diverse, strange, varied and complex than the novels, tend to confuse and perplex your view of who Kafka is: the more you read of him, the less confident you become about being able to make useful generalisations.

Borges reviews

Kafka reviews

Dates are dates of composition.

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Selected Poems by John Dryden edited by Donald Thomas (1993)

John Dryden was the most successful poet, playwright, critic, translator and man of letters of his time, that time being roughly the late-1660s through to his death in 1700.

Early life

Dryden was born into a Puritan family in Northamptonshire in 1631. He was sent to the prestigious Westminster private school in 1645, the year Charles I’s army was defeated at the Battle of Naseby. In 1649 Charles I was executed in front of the Banqueting House in Whitehall, just a few hundred yards from Dryden’s classroom. Dryden went up to Cambridge in 1650 and four years later returned to London to work as clerk to his cousin, Sir Gilbert Pickering, who was Cromwell’s Lord Chamberlain. When Lord Protector Cromwell died in 1658, Dryden wrote a set of Heroic Stanzas in praise of him, but when Charles II was restored to the throne eighteen months later, Dryden wrote a poem celebrating this event too – Astraea Redux.

To modern eyes this abrupt switching of allegiances might look like hypocrisy, but the editor of this selection of Dryden’s poetry makes two points:

  1. Dryden was merely following the mood of the entire nation which switched, with surprising speed and conviction, in favour of the restoration of Charles II.
  2. Stepping back from the politics, what these two early examples of his work show is Dryden’s natural predilection to be a poet of politics and political power.

Marriage and public poetry

In the mid-1660s Dryden made a fashionable marriage to Lady Elizabeth Howard but he was not making money. He decided to make a conscious career decision to commit himself to ‘the poetry of public life and political argument’, to writing poems on public occasions and poems about political life. The first great example was Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders 1666, 1,200 lines of verse divided into 304 quatrains.

Three points.

1. The obvious one is that the poem deals with major public events – in the first half some of the sea battles which were part of the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665 – 1667), in the second half the Great Fire of London. It isn’t love poetry or elegiacs or pastoral poetry.

2. Second, Dryden rewrote history to cast Charles as the hero of the age. The poem emphasises Charles’s wisdom and strategic prowess during the war, and his heroism during the fire, and how his prayer to God for help was answered. Dryden was a conservative: he believed in hierarchy and the monarch and law and order. All his poetry supports the existing order against the constant threat of factions and politicking which, he feared, would lead to anarchy and civil war. Annus Mirabilis earned Dryden his reward. In 1668 he was made Poet Laureate with an annual salary of £200 and a barrel of sack, and two years later was appointed Historiographer Royal (although he continued to be for many years, relatively hard up). Here’s Dryden sucking up to Charles:

This saw our King; and long within his breast
His pensive counsels ballanc’d too and fro;
He griev’d the Land he freed should be oppress’d,
And he less for it than Usurpers do.

His gen’rous mind the fair Ideas drew
Of Fame and Honor, which in dangers lay;
Where wealth, like Fruit on precipices, grew,
Not to be gather’d but by Birds of prey…

He, first, survey’d the Charge with careful eyes,
Which none but mighty Monarchs could maintain…

His pensive counsels, his grieving for his country (abused by the Dutch), his generous mind, ready to pluck fame and honour from their dangerous precipice, his ‘careful’ eyes (careful in the modern sense but also full of care and responsibility), trademark of a mighty monarch… and so on. Top brown-nosing, Dryden deserved his £200 a year.

3. Thirdly, Annus Mirabilis wasn’t an original work – it was a polemical riposte or reply to an earlier work by someone else. It was part of a literary dialogue. In 1661 a seditious pamphlet titled Mirabilis Annus: The Year of Prodigies had predicted God’s vengeance on a nation which tolerated a sinful king and a wicked government, and was followed by other pamphlets using the same title. Dryden’s poem is a deliberate and polemical response. It isn’t a Wordsworthian inspiration from within the poet’s mind. It is arguing a case about the nature of Charles’s rule and society in the 1660s.

This is what becoming a ‘poet of political argument’ meant – that his works more often than not actively engaged in public debates and controversies, often as direct replies to previous publications by other writers with contrary views.

Drama

But public poetry wasn’t the only string to Dryden’s bow. In 1663 he published his first play, The Wild Gallant, and for the next 20 years produced a stream of comedies (Marriage-a-la-Mode) and heroic tragedies (All For Love, The Conquest of Granada). Some of these were original works but, rather as with the political poems, it’s notable how many weren’t. All For Love is based on Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and The State of Innocence is a dramatised version of Paradise Lost. These are pretty obvious large-scale copyings, but Dryden was also to be criticised throughout his career for plagiarising lines and entire passages from other poets.

This volume includes some of the many prologues and epilogues he wrote to his plays, as well as poems addressed to specific actors and fellow playwrights such as George Etherege and William Congreve.

Satire: Absalom and Achitophel

Writing plays under the Restoration required a thick skin since new works were savaged by scores of wits and self-appointed critics. The plays themselves often contained scabrous satire about the values of the times and sometimes lampooned specific individuals. To write and publish almost anything involved exposing yourself to extremes of ridicule and abuse.

So that by the time the Popish Plot (1678) had evolved into the Exclusion Crisis (in which leading Whig politicians three times tried to pass an Act of Parliament excluding Charles II’s Catholic brother, the future James II, from the succession) Dryden had developed a thick skin and a razor-sharp pen. And he used it, as the king’s Poet Laureate, to savage and ridicule the king’s Whig enemies. The result was his masterpiece, Absalom and Achitophel.

In the Bible (the second book of Samuel, chapters xiv to xviii) handsome young Absalom is encouraged by the sinister old politician Achitophel to rebel against his father, King David. In Dryden’s work scheming old Achitophel is a portrait of the Earl of Shaftesbury, who had emerged as leader of the radical Whigs and led the three attempts to exclude James II from the succession. Absalom stands for King Charles’s illegitimate son, James Duke of Monmouthshire, charming but gullible, who was egged on by the canny Shaftesbury to position himself as the rightful, Protestant heir to the throne. Various other key political figures appear under Biblical names and the poem leads up to a grand speech by King David from the throne which echoes Charles’s final speech to his recalcitrant Parliament before he dissolved it for good in 1681.

Horace versus Juvenal

When it came to satire, Thomas makes the point that Dryden, like many others, drew a distinction between the satires of Horace – which were designed to laugh men out of their follies – and those of Juvenal, which expressed what he called his saeva indignatio, his fierce contempt for the vices of his time.

Horace is often amiable and funny; Juvenal is rarely funny, instead his satire is full of wit and attack. Absalom and Achitophel is a Juvenalian satire. It is grounded in the grim and bitter reality of the political struggles of the Exclusion Crisis and aims to give insightful, psychologically perceptive and devastating criticisms of its key characters. It is not intended to be funny. But Dryden was just as capable of a completely different style of satire, the laughable and ludicrous.

The mock heroic: Mac Flecknoe

As 17th century literary critics discovered and popularised classical ideas about poetry, so the notion spread that the highest achievement a poet could aspire to was to write a great Epic Poem, in the lineage of Homer and Virgil. Dryden was no exception:

A Heroic Poem, truly such, is undoubtedly the greatest Work which the Soul of Man is capable to perform.

He nurtured ambitions to write some kind of national epic tracing the history of Britain and dedicated to his hero Charles II as Virgil had dedicated the Aeneid to the Emperor Augustus. But it was not to be. His long-meditated epic was never written. Instead Dryden ended up helping to develop the anti-epic, written in the so-called mock heroic style. This consisted in applying all the trappings of the epic poem – lofty diction, elaborate similes, mythological trappings, men mighty as gods – to subjects which were low and pathetic, in order to create a comic disjuntion, to create burlesque and travesty.

Dryden’s early poem, Annus Mirabilis, had already used many of the exaggerated trappings of heroic poetry, notably the extended epic simile and the direct involvement of heavenly powers (or gods or angels).

Heavenly powers

To see this Fleet upon the Ocean move,
Angels drew wide the Curtains of the Skies:
And Heav’n, as if there wanted Lights above,
For Tapers made two glaring Comets rise.

Extended epic simile

So Lybian Huntsmen on some Sandy plain,
From shady coverts rouz’d, the Lion chace:
The Kingly beast roars out with loud disdain,
And slowly moves, unknowing to give place.

But if some one approach to dare his Force,
He swings his Tail, and swiftly turns him round:
With one Paw seizes on his trembling Horse,
And with the other tears him to the ground.

So far, so epic but, as Thomas explains, the mock epic, like the epic itself, needs to address one central theme – and Annus Mirabilis is more bitty, more of a series of episodes or incidents strung together, impressively so, but it is a scattered work.

It’s this idea of uniting everything in one central theme which is what makes MacFlecknoe Dryden’s masterpiece of the mock-heroic. Basically, it is a hilarious 217-line demolition of one of Dryden’s rivals in the theatre, the poet Thomas Shadwell, renowned for being dull and unimaginative, who is transmuted via Dryden’s mock-heroic style into a monstrous burlesque figure.

The aim of the mock-heroic is to attribute to a trivial person or subject such ludicrously over-inflated actions and qualities as to make them appear ridiculous. Thus the poem describes the not-very-successful poet Thomas Shadwell in superhuman terms and attributes to him a royal progress and coronation, garlanded with biblical and imperial comparisons. But his ‘throne’ is set up among the brothels of Barbican and instead of the royal orb he holds a Mighty Mug of Ale in his hand, and every other ‘epic’ detail of the poem is carefully undermined and burlesqued.

The name Mac Flecknoe derives from the comic notion that Shadwell is the son (‘mac’ in Gaelic) of Richard Flecknoe, an even more obscure poet, who appears in the poem declaiming a grand abdication speech before comically disappearing down through a trapdoor, leaving Shadwell the undisputed ruler of the land of Nonsense. It is all blown up to enormous proportions in order to be mocked and ridiculed.

Dryden was extremely proud of Mac Flecknoe because it was, at that point, the most complete and finished example of its kind in English. Relatively brief though it is, it was to form a template or inspiration for the mock epics of a later generation, most notably Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock (1712) and then his enormous satire on the literary world, The Dunciad (1728).

Poetry of religion 1. Religio Laici

Dryden published two major poems about religion.

Religio Laici or a Layman’s Faith (1682) consists of 456 lines of rhymed couplets arguing against the fashionable Deism of the time and defending the Church of England against Roman Catholicism. It is characteristic of Dryden, as we’ve seen, that many of his works are responses to previous publications and Religio Laici is a good example. An English translation had recently appeared of a theological book by a Frenchman, Father Richard Simon, A Critical History of the Old Testament which laid out the many ways in which the text of the Old Testament is compromised and imperfect. In the Catholic Father’s view, Protestantism relied too heavily on the (highly imperfect) text of the Bible; it was wiser for Christians to base their faith on the unbroken traditions of the (Catholic) church as an institution.

Dryden’s poem directly addresses Father Simon’s ideas and points out that, if the Biblical text can err, so can tradition. Both need to be supplemented or informed by God’s revelation. In this, Dryden was defending the Anglican media via between the extreme reliance on the Bible of the Puritans and deference to a tradition cluttered with saints and absurd legends which characterised Catholicism.

Several things strike me about Religio Laici. For a start it is preceded by an enormous preface which is longer (4,317 words) then the poem itself (3,573 words). And this brings out just how disputatious a poet Dryden was. Even after he has cast his elaborate series of arguments into verse, he cannot stop, but has to repeat or anticipate them in a long prose preface.

Having just struggled through the poem twice, with the help of notes, I think I’ve understood most of its meaning. But when I studied English at university it was a standard strategy to read any text on at least two levels – on one level for the overt sense or meaning; but at the same time, alert for key words, themes or ideas which recur and work on the reader at a less logical level, by virtue of their repetition.

So the third or fourth time I read the word ‘safe’, I began to realise that although Religio Laici consists of a series of theological points, at a deeper level it works on a polarity between the twin extremes of safety and danger. To put it more clearly, Religio Laici doesn’t come from an era when a person could speculate about religion and God and the Bible in calm and comfort. On the contrary, Puritan views had, in living memory, contributed to a catastrophic civil war which had led to the execution of the king, the overthrow of traditional institutions and a military-religious dictatorship. And, more recently, scare rumours about a Catholic plot to murder the king and seize control of the state had led to a mood of hysterical witch-hunting. So speculation about religious belief in Dryden’s time was fraught with danger.

Seen against this background, Dryden’s use of the word ‘safe’ points to the fundamental message of the poem which is that all speculations on this subject should remain private, personal and moderate, in order to preserve the peace of the realm. He espouses moderation in belief and behaviour because he and his generation are acutely aware what lack of moderation leads to.

And after hearing what our Church can say,
If still our Reason runs another way,
That private Reason ’tis more Just to curb,
Than by Disputes the publick Peace disturb.
For points obscure are of small use to learn:
But Common quiet is Mankind’s concern.

Poetry of religion 2. The Hind and The Panther

However, just five years later Dryden published The Hind and the Panther, A Poem in Three Parts (1687) a much longer and more complex poem. At 2,600 lines it is much the longest of Dryden’s original poems (i.e. excluding the long translations he made at the end of his life) and it comes as quite a surprise because he now rejects the theological position of the earlier poem and wholeheartedly embraces Roman Catholicism.

Dryden converted to Roman Catholicism in 1687, a couple of years into the reign of the openly Roman Catholic king James II in 1685, much to the disgust and mockery of his many enemies. The Hind and the Panther is divided into three distinct parts and derives its title from part one, which presents an extended allegory or animal fable in which the different religious denominations in the England of the day appear as animals, namely Roman Catholic as ‘A milk-white Hind, immortal and unchanged’, the Church of England as a panther, the Independents as a bear, the Presbyterians as a wolf, the Quakers as a hare, the Socinians as a fox, the Freethinkers as an ape, and the Anabaptists as a boar.

Critics from Dryden’s day to our own praise the skilful use of verse, vocabulary and imagery, but lament the fact that the animal fable was a poor way to convey complex theological arguments and positions, which would have been much more effective if plainly stated. Dr Johnson commented that it was a good poem despite its subject matter.

Translator

Unfortunately for Dryden, his new patron, the Roman Catholic King James II, only lasted three years on the throne before being booted out by the so-called Glorious Revolution. He was replaced by William III who was not just a Protestant but a Calvinist, a humourless man ruthlessly focused on the essentials of international power politics, and completely indifferent to art, culture, plays or poems. All officials in William’s new court were required to take oaths of allegiance including clauses pledging allegiance to the Church of England. As a newly devout Catholic Dryden couldn’t do this and so he was sacked as Poet Laureate and, in one of the supreme ironies of literary history, replaced by the man he had expended such labour ridiculing in Mac Flecknoe, Thomas Shadwell.

Deprived of all public offices Dryden now had to live by his pen and – after the public poems of the 1660s and 70s, his many plays, the satires of the Exclusion Crisis and the poetry of religious debate, in his final decade Dryden turned to a new area of activity – literary translation.

In 1693 he published translations of the satires of Juvenal and Persius which he prefaced with a Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire. In 1697 his translation of the works of Virgil, including a complete translation of the Aeneid, was published by subscription and brought him the notable sum of £1,400. And in 1700 he published Fables Ancient and Modern which included translations into contemporary English of tales from Chaucer, Ovid and Boccaccio.

Heroic couplets

In Thomas’s account, the 1610s and 20s produced poets who liked far-fetched comparisons and irregular verse forms, such as John Donne (died in 1631) or George Herbert (d.1633). Later generations dubbed them the ‘metaphysical poets’ (the expression was first used by Dr Johnson in 1780 but in fact Dryden himself had already referred, in an essay, to Donne’s ‘metaphysicals’). The Caroline poets of Charles I’s court similarly wrote lyrics and other forms in sometimes complex metres and forms, although with markedly less convoluted similes and metaphors.

But the future lay with neither of these groups but with the much more open, smooth and regular form of the rhyming couplet. The medium of two rhyming iambic pentameters had long ago been used by Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales.

Bifel that, in that seson on a day,
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At night was come in-to that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a companye,
Of sondry folk, by aventure y-falle
In felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde;
(Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, lines 19 to 26)

and couplets were a familiar device in Elizabethan theatre to bring a speech in unrhymed verse up to a kind of boom-boom conclusion.

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
(Claudius in Hamlet, Act 3, scene 3)

Many of Robert Herrick’s short poems from the 1630s are in rhyming couplets, and so on. But the use of nothing but rhyming couplets over extended texts was revived in the mid-17th century by poets like Edmund Waller (1606 to 1687) and Sir John Denham (1615 to 1669). Denham is remembered for his bucolic poem, Cooper’s Hill with its lulling melliflousness. These are its best-known lines, two out of a long series of smoothly rhyming couplets:

O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example, as it is my theme!
Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without o’er-flowing, full.

Relaxing, isn’t it? Dryden’s achievement was to take the rhyming couplet, use it for extended poems, and hugely expand its potential, turning it into a versatile medium for panegyric, satire, political argument, theological debate or straightforward narrative. In the right hands these couplets have all sorts of potential. Individual lines can be used to make sharp distinctions or antitheses:

They got a Villain, and we lost a Fool.

Or in this description of the Duke of Buckingham, who would do anything for amusement.

Beggar’d by fools, whom still he found too late:
He had his jest, and they had his estate.

The couplet lends itself to expressing maxims or pearls of wisdom, the end-rhyme of the second line giving it a kind of proverbial or didactic power:

What cannot praise effect in mighty minds,
When flattery soothes, and when ambition blinds!

But the obvious risk with the rhyming couplet is that each set of paired lines becomes a unit in itself, the temptation being to provide a boom-boom payoff at the end of every second line, so that each couplet ends up standing alone, and reading them becomes like having hiccups – every ten seconds another clever rhyme, so that an extended poem comes to feel like a sequence of same-shaped bricks, and that this becomes wearing and tedious over the long haul.

But Thomas demonstrates how Dryden expanded the form’s potential by breaking through this barrier, to create units of meaning across multiple lines, letting the logic of his thought overflow the potential boundaries of the couplet to create what are, in effect, fluid verse paragraphs. These are particularly suitable to argufying and putting a point of view:

What shall we think! Can people give away
Both for themselves and sons, their native sway?
Then they are left defenceless to the sword
Of each unbounded arbitrary lord:
And laws are vain, by which we right enjoy,
If kings unquestion’d can those laws destroy.

They’re still rhyming couplets but the thought, the argument flows through them, so that it no longer feels like a series of stops and starts. Moreover, the way the logic of the argument flows over the cat’s eyes or bumps of each couplet’s end-rhyme creates a complex mental pleasure – the reader processes the cleverness of the rhyme but doesn’t stop at it because the flow of the argument carries you forward. There’s a kind of counterpointing, or two rhythms going on at the same time, which is not unlike musical counterpoint.

Related reviews

Poetry

History

Restoration art

Restoration drama

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by Simon on September 9, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in English literature, Literary criticism, Poetry
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Posted by Simon on September 9, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/09/09/john-dryden-selected-poems-donald-thomas/

Introduction to The Plays of William Wycherley by W.C. Ward (1893)

Old literary criticism is often valuable because it sees works of literature in the round, as a whole. Its judgements are often mature, made by people who have seen a lot of life and often had other full-time careers, as lawyers, politician and so on. So their opinions are aware of and take into account a range of audiences and their essays are written in a language designed to be accessible to all literate readers.

All this contrasts with the highly professionalised nature of contemporary literary criticism, generally written by people who have little or no experience of life beyond the academy; written in fierce competition with other academics and so often focusing on narrow and highly specific aspects of works or genres where the author desires to carve out a niche; and written in a jargon which has become steadily more arcane and removed from everyday English over the past forty years or so.

This kind of modern literary criticism is contained in expensive books destined to be bought only by university libraries, or in remote articles in any one of hundreds of subscription-only specialist journals. It is not, in other words, designed for the average reader. Nowadays, literary criticism is an elite discourse.

Older criticism can also be humane and funny, and can afford to be scathingly critical of its authors, in a way modern po-faced and ‘professional’ criticism often daren’t.

The 1893 edition of The Plays of William Wycherley which Project Gutenberg chose for their online library includes an introduction to Wycherley’s plays by the edition’s editor, W.C. Ward, followed by an extended biographical essay by Thomas Babington Macauley which dates from even earlier, from the 1850s.

(If this appears very old fashioned a) it is, and b) several of the Wikipedia articles about Wycherley appear to be cut and pastes of the relevant articles from the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.)

Introduction by WC Ward

Comedies of Manners Ward describes the Restoration comedies as Comedies of Manners, contrasting them with Shakespeare’s plays which he calls Comedies of Life.

Aristocratic audiences Restoration comedies only illustrate one aspect of life, and that the most superficial – the courtly badinage of aristocrats having affairs. They were initially designed for a tiny, upper-class clientele, and kept that sense of targeting a select audience which ‘gets’ its attitude and in-jokes.

Displays of wit The plays were designed to display Wit and Ingenuity – all other human activities, all other human emotions and psychology, are simply omitted in pursuit of these goals. Their dialogue is not intended to reveal the characters’ psychology or development. It exists solely to display the author’s Wit and to further the ‘Plot’, which also exists solely to demonstrate the author’s ingenuity.

Robot characters The characters are not people, they are ‘simulacra… puppet semblances of humanity’. They only copy human behaviour insofar as is required to further the clockwork plots.

This narrow mechanical aspect of the characterisation is, in Ward’s view, paradoxically a redeeming factor when we come to consider the plays’ indecency and immorality.

Licentiousness always superficial The very fact that the characters are barely human, are really flashy automata, means that their licentiousness and cynicism has no real depth. It doesn’t affect us in the way the same speeches put into the mouths of real characters would affect us, because we know they are the baseless vapourings of toys.

Designed to amuse Ward also defends the plays against the frequent charge of licentiousness by pointing out that they are designed solely to amuse and make us laugh – they don’t even have the deeper ambition of Ben Jonson’s comedies, ‘to laugh us out of vice’.

Antidote to lust And, Ward says, the kind of superficial laughter they prompt on every page is in fact an antidote to lustful thoughts. The plays do not inflame the audience with genuinely licentious and immoral thoughts because the characters are so one-dimensional and the plots are so extravagantly ludicrous that real sexual thoughts never enter our heads.

Virtue triumphs Other critics charge that Restoration comedies only being Virtue on stage to be mocked and ridiculed, which is a bad thing. Ward admits that most of the characters lose no opportunity to mock honesty, hard work, sobriety, the law, business, chasteness and loyalty and fidelity and love. All true. But at the same time, love does eventually triumph (after a superficial fashion) the qualities of loyalty and virtue do, in the end, triumph.

Women of virtue And each play contains at least one female character, and sometimes a man, who is significantly less cynical than the other characters and becomes almost a defender of virtue. For example, Alithea in The Country Wife and Fidelia in The Plain Dealer are unironic emblems of Goodness and Virtue – and they and their values do, eventually, win the day.

Marriage mocked Other critics lament the way the sanctity of Marriage is routinely mocked, at length, continuously, throughout all the plays. Ward puts the defence that when you look closely, the specific examples of marriage being mocked are the marriages of ludicrous characters such as Pinchwife or Vernish. (This defence, in my opinion, is nowhere near adequate; all the characters mock marriage as a school for adulterers and cuckolds far more powerfully and continuously than Ward acknowledges.)

Wycherley’s poetry Ward goes on from Wycherley’s plays to discuss Wycherley’s poetry, which was published in two volumes late in his life and about which he is entertainingly rude. The poems are, in Ward’s opinion (and everyone else’s – he quotes Wycherley’s contemporaries) utterly worthless, beneath criticism. ‘Wycherley had no spark of poetry in his whole composition’.

It’s good to have this confirmed, as I thought the short poems which appear scattered through Wycherley’s plays were utterly lifeless.

Wycherley’s character As to his character:

It is not to be doubted that Wycherley participated in the fashionable follies and vices of the age in which he lived. His early intrigue with the Duchess of Cleveland was notorious.

The success of his plays drew him into aristocratic court circles which really did value the behaviour he describes.

Alexander Pope Late in life, Wycherley became a kind of mentor to the very young Alexander Pope, when the later was only 16 or 17 years old, and their correspondence, and also memoirs written about the great John Dryden, show that Wycherley was loved as a good friend by many of his contemporaries.

Essay by Thomas Babington Macauley

According to Joseph E. Riehl’s book about Charles Lamb and his critics, Macauley wrote his criticism of the Restoration dramatists at least in part as an attack or counter to Charles Lamb’s strong defence of them. Macauley argued that Restoration comedy is degrading to human relationships, and that it promoted ‘evil, perverted or shameful conduct’. I sympathise.

In the 22-page essay on the Gutenberg website, Macauley describes Wycherley’s life and character in some detail, with comments on the plays. Key points are:

Early life Wycherley was born in 1640. Young Wycherley was sent to France as a teenager, where he converted to Catholicism. After the Restoration of 1660, he went to Oxford, left without a degree, studied law at the Inns of Court just long enough to be able to make comic butts of lawyers and their hangers-on, as in The Plain Dealer.

Religious conversion Shrewdly, Wycherley converted back from Catholicism to Anglicanism. Macauley has a droll sense of humour and a nice turn of phrase:

The somewhat equivocal glory of turning, for a short time, a good-for-nothing Papist into a very good-for-nothing Protestant is ascribed to Bishop Barlow.

The Restoration court He gives a vivid sense of the promiscuity of Charles’s court:

The Duchess of Cleveland cast her eyes upon [Wycherley] and was pleased with his appearance. This abandoned woman, not content with her complaisant husband and her royal keeper, lavished her fondness on a crowd of paramours of all ranks, from dukes to rope-dancers.

The Dutch Wars He comments scornfully on the Dutch Wars:

The second Dutch war, the most disgraceful war in the whole history of England, was now raging. It was not in that age considered as by any means necessary that a naval officer should receive a professional education. Young men of rank, who were hardly able to keep their feet in a breeze, served on board the King’s ships, sometimes with commissions and sometimes as volunteers.

The Royal Navy There’s debate about whether Wycherley – like many other completely unqualified ‘gentleman’ – volunteered for the navy, but it would be nice to think so and that it gave verisimilitude to his depiction of Captain Manly and the sailors in The Plain Dealer.

The Country Wife he describes as:

one of the most profligate and heartless of human compositions… the elaborate production of a mind, not indeed rich, original or imaginative, but ingenious, observant, quick to seize hints, and patient of the toil of polishing.

Marriage and prison Wycherley was such a royal favourite that Charles appointed him tutor to his illegitimate son, the Duke of Richmond. However, Wycherley ruined his reputation with the king and swiftly lost the post of tutor by unwisely marrying the Countess of Drogheda, ‘a gay young widow’ in 1679. She was jealous and kept a close eye on him till she died young in 1685. He hoped he would leave her a fortune, but she left him a long and ruinous legal case. Possibly as a result of this, Wycherley was thrown into the Fleet prison where he languished for seven long years. The story goes that the newly crowned King James II (ascended the throne 1685) happened to see a performance of The Plain Dealer, asked about the author, was shocked to discover he was in gaol, paid his debts and settled an annuity on him.

Released, he was nonetheless impoverished, unable to sustain his old lifestyle, and unable to write another play. In 1704, after 27 years of silence, a volume of poetry appeared – ‘a bulky volume of obscene doggerel’.

Alexander Pope It was in the same year he formed the friendship with the young sickly hunchback Alexander Pope, who he mentored, took about town, and who in turn offered to rewrite and ‘improve’ the older man’s verse. Quite quickly Pope realised how dire Wycherley’s poetry was and that nothing could save it. Quite a few of their letters survive which shed light on both men.

Literary reputation Rests entirely on his last two plays, The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer. His characters are often little more than mouthpieces for the contrived wit of the time.

It was alleged he was a slow and painstaking author, but Pope claims he wrote The Plain Dealer in three weeks! Having just read both his hit plays, I am inclined to believe the slow and painstaking version. They both feel slow and laboured.

In truth, his mind, unless we are greatly mistaken, was naturally a very meagre soil, and was forced only by great labour and outlay to bear fruit which, after all, was not of the highest flavour.

Widow Blackacre Macauley is correct to say:

The widow Blackacre [is] beyond comparison Wycherley’s best comic character

In full flood she struck me as being almost a female Falstaff. But these few words of praise don’t stop Macauley taking every opportunity to damn Wycherley:

The only thing original about Wycherley, the only thing which he could furnish from his own mind in inexhaustible abundance, was profligacy.

Degrading French originals By which he means his low, mean, degraded subject matter. Macauley accuses him of taking the fine and graceful character of Agnes in the French play L’Ecole des Femmes and turning her into the degraded imbecile Mrs Pinchwife in The Country Wife.

Wycherley’s indecency is protected against the critics as a skunk is protected against the hunters. It is safe, because it is too filthy to handle and too noisome even to approach.

Similarly, Macauley accuses him of taking the light and chaste character of Viola in Twelfth Night and turning her into the much narrower and lewder Fidelia, an attempt at loyalty and fidelity who in fact acts as a pimp for her master; and of taking the misanthropic but essentially noble character Alceste in Moliere’s Le Misanthrope and turning him into the much cruder and more vengeful Manly.

So depraved was his moral taste, that, while he firmly believed that he was producing a picture of virtue too exalted for the commerce of this world, he was really delineating the greatest rascal that is to be found even in his own writings.

Wow. Not the kind of unashamed contempt a modern literary critic would allow themselves. These two pretty old essays bring Wycherely’s life and times and character and works to life far more vividly than anything else I’ve read about him. And hence the value of older literary criticism. It tends to paint a fuller picture of the man, the times and the works. And not be afraid to give pungent judgements.

Related links

Reviews of Wycherley’s plays

Other Restoration comedies

1 Comment
by Simon on July 27, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Comedy, Literary criticism, Theatre
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Posted by Simon on July 27, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/07/27/william-wycherley-w-c-ward/

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