Besides his plein-air seascapes, Manet also painted an interior scene on a five-foot-wide canvas. Called The Luncheon, it was posed in the dining room of their rented house, that of a retired sailor, and featured a portrait of Leon KoMa standing in the foreground. Wearing a straw boater, a dark blazer and the same vacant expression familiar from so many of Manet's portraits, the young man stands before a table littered with the remains of a meal of oysters. Seated at the table behind him, smoking a cigar and enjoying both a coffee and an amber-colored digestif, is the painter Auguste Rousselin, a regular visitor to Boulogne and one of Manet's friends from their days together in the studio of Thomas Couture. In the bottom left-hand corner of the canvas, looking very out of place in this domestic scene, is a medieval helmet and a pair of swords. Manet may have been inspired to paint these bits of armor in part by the ex-ample of a friend, Antoine Vollon, who had just scored a success at the r868 Salon with Curiositis, a still life of helmets and swords that had been commis-sioned by Nieuwerkerke. Yet Manet's painting was quite different from Vol-lon's crisp delineation of Nieuwerkerke's pieces of armor. In many respects it was, like Le DOeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia, a defiant reworking of artistic tradition. Helmets such as the one depicted in the corner of his canvas were a staple of nineteenth-century French art. Many masterpieces of French Neo-classicism, such as those by David and Ingres, featured heroic male figures nude but for their helmets and the occasional strategic fold of toga. Through the first half of the nineteenth century the numerous students and imitators of David and Ingres proceeded to paint so many helmet-clad heroes from ancient Greece and Rome that a new term, pompier, was born to describe them. Pom-pier literally meant "fireman"—derived from pamper, "to pump"—and the term made reference, supposedly, to how the antique helmets of these Neo-classical heroes resembled the headgear worn by the French fireman of the pe-riod.' The term quickly became a derogatory one and, by dint of its similarity to the word pompeux ("pompous"), soon connoted the pretentious and the overblown. Nonetheless, in 1868 the pompier spirit was still alive and well at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where the most recent topic for the Prix de Rome had been The Death of Astyanax. However, the style was one with which Manet, who favored top hats over plumed helmets, had scant sympathy. Manet placed the helmet and swords on the retired sailor's armchair, where they form a kind of historical and sartorial counterpoint to Leon's straw boater and Auguste Rousselin's pearl-gray top hat. Also on the chair, directly in front of the helmet, Manet painted a black cat—a sly allusion to the most famous and controversial black cat in the history of art. Rather than arching its back as in Olympia, though, the cat in The Luncheon turns its back on the heroic-looking helmet and goes about the business of industriously licking its privates.
and
Throughout the month of July the mercury had rarely dipped below the mid-8os Fahrenheit, and on July 21 a temperature of 101 degrees was recorded. The country endured deaths from sunstroke, fires on the moor-lands, dried-up springs, parched meadows and, on everyone's part, extreme
physical enervation. "We are not used to being roasted, melted, exhaled," wrote the editor of The Illustrated London News at the beginning of August, "and most of us find a dash of unpleasantness in the process.' The newspapers urged men to keep cool by drinking their tea cold and by wearing wet cabbage leaves inside their top hats.' Women meanwhile adopted French fashions: straw hats topped off dresses made of light materials such as muslin and "gauze de Chambery," all in pale fawns and grays rather than the dark colors more familiar in London's streets and parks.' Even with the theaters and opera houses closed for the season, London offered much for a painter of modern life to appreciate. Attractions included Cremorne Gardens in Chelsea, with its open-air dance floor, and the Zoological Gardens on the north side of Regent's Park. The famous Crystal Palace, moved by the Brighton Railway Company to its new home in the suburb of Sydenham, played host, in 1868, to an exhibition of the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain at which an inventor named John Stringfellow unveiled a triplane with a one-horsepower steam engine and two twenty-one-inch propellers. Most spectacular of all, perhaps, was the Metropolitan Railway, opened in 1863, which ran underground for four miles between Paddington Station and King's Cross. Passengers sat in open carriages as steam trains conducted them through brick-lined tunnels at speeds of twenty miles per hour. These were precisely the kind of inventions, the sooty and thronging emblems of modern life, that Thomas Couture had urged his students to take as the subjects for their paintings.
Sunday, May 29, 2016
SPQR- final excerpts
The majority of those who lived in the provinces, or even in Italy, had only the vaguest idea, if any, of what the imperial palace was like or how the emperor’s administration operated. Only a tiny number would ever have seen the living emperor. They would, however, have seen his image over and over again, on the coins in their purses and in his portraits that continued to flood the Roman world. The atmosphere was not so different from that of a modern dictatorship, with the ruler’s face peering out from every shopfront, street corner and government department. It even occasionally was converted into edible form, stamped into the biscuits distributed at religious sacrifices, as a few of the surviving biscuit moulds make clear. In fact, the second-century CE scholar, teacher and courtier Marcus Cornelius Fronto, in a letter to his grandest pupil, Marcus Aurelius, treated the spread of imperial images as a source of pride, even if he was sniffy about the artistic talents on display in the spontaneous initiatives of the ordinary people. ‘In all the banks, shops, bars, gables, colonnades, windows everywhere,’ he wrote, ‘portraits of you are on public display, even if they are badly painted and modelled and carved in crude, almost worthless style.’
The emperor’s face was ubiquitous, but it could be represented very differently. Only those with their eyes half shut could have failed to spot a dramatic change near the beginning of the second century CE in how the ruler looked. With the accession of Hadrian in 117 CE, after more than a hundred years of imperial portraits with no trace of facial hair (only a little stubble, if they were supposed to be in mourning), emperors started to be portrayed with full beards, a trend that lasted throughout the rest of the century and well after the period covered by this book. It is a guaranteed way of dating all those imperial heads that now line museum shelves: if they are bearded, they are after 117 CE.
This change cannot have been merely a whim of fashion or, as one ancient writer predictably speculated, a device for Hadrian to cover his spots. But the reason for it remains puzzling. Was it an attempt to emulate the Greek philosophers of the past? Hadrian was a well-known admirer of Greek culture, as was the philosophical Marcus Aurelius. So was it part of an attempt to intellectualise Roman imperial power, to re-present it in Greek terms? Or did it point in the opposite direction, harking back to the tough military heroes of earliest Rome, even before the era of Scipio Barbatus in the early third century BCE, when to sport a beard seems already to have been something remarkable in a Roman? It is impossible to know, and no ancient writing that survives ever explains the new beards. But, at the very least, they hint that within the palace someone was thinking hard about the imperial image, right down to the facial hair, and, for whatever reason, was prepared to make a break from tradition.
and
It is largely the legacy of the two main monotheisms of the ancient world – Judaism and its offshoot Christianity – that has encouraged us to see the invention of new gods, the adjustment and the extension of the pantheon and the fluidity of the boundary between humans and gods as faintly ludicrous. Christians, in particular, both ridiculed the very notion that the obviously human emperor was divine and occasionally paid with their lives for their refusal to give him any kind of religious honour. But that is not to say that the divine status of the emperor was unproblematic for pre-Christian Romans or that there were no debates and disagreements about just how godlike the human ruler, let alone his family, was. It was another awkward balancing act bequeathed to his successors by Augustus, who straddled the boundary between the human and the divine with greater success than some of those who followed.
Some imperial claims to divine status were always thought undeniably wrong. For most inhabitants of the Roman Empire, it would have been a crass category mistake and a hyperbolic affront for an emperor to declare himself a living god, as if there were no difference between himself and Jupiter. The Romans were hardly stupid: they knew the difference between bona fide Olympians and a living emperor. If it is true (rather than a vicious slur) that Gaius turned the Temple of Castor and Pollux in the Forum into the vestibule of his residence on the Palatine above and sat there between the statues of the gods to enjoy the worship of anyone who chose to give it, then that was a memorable symbol of imperial megalomania and it broke all the official protocols of imperial worship. It was likewise an abuse of power for an emperor to attempt to stretch the official Roman pantheon to accommodate dead babies, boyfriends and even favourite sisters; Hadrian was no better on this score than Nero or Gaius in having his young male companion, Antinous, made a god after his mysterious death by drowning in the Nile in 130 CE. The theology of the emperor and the imperial family was far more subtle than this and has to be seen in two parts: first the divine status of the living emperor, second that of the dead.
Throughout the Roman world, the living emperor was treated very like a god. He was incorporated into rituals celebrated in honour of the gods, he was addressed in language that overlapped with divine language, and he was assumed to have some similar powers. Augustus’ name, for example, was included in the wording of some religious litanies. Runaway slaves could claim asylum by clinging to a statue of the emperor, just as to a statue of a god. At the town of Gytheum, near Sparta in the Peloponnese, a surviving inscription lays out in great detail the procedures for a regular festival to be held over several days, with processions around the town, musical contests and sacrifices, honouring a pair of local benefactors, the ruling emperor, Tiberius, and various members of his family, the Republican general Titus Quinctius Flamininus, as well as the traditional Olympian deities.
There may well have been many people, especially far outside the city of Rome, for whom the emperor was about as remote, and powerful, a figure as an Olympian deity, and who did not see much difference between the two. But wherever the formal details were spelled out, a careful distinction was drawn between the emperor and the Olympians. In Gytheum, for example, and elsewhere, a technical but crucial difference was expressed. The animal sacrifices were to be performed to the traditional gods, but they were performed on behalf of or for the protection of the living emperor and his family; the emperor, in other words, was still under the protection of the Olympian gods rather than being their equal. In Rome, it was usually the numen, or the ‘power’, of the living emperor that received sacrifice, not the emperor himself. More widely, the package of honours offered to the imperial family in the Greek world were known as isotheoi timai: that is, honours equivalent (iso-) to those of the gods (theoi), but not identical. It was always transgressive to ignore the difference between the gods and the living emperor, however godlike he might be.
It was not the same when they were dead. Following the pattern of Julius Caesar, the senate might choose to incorporate a dead emperor or one of his close relations into the official pantheon; for it was a decision that was, formally at least, in the hands of the senate and a posthumous power over their ruler that some senators must have enjoyed. In this case the distinction between gods and emperors was negligible; there were priests and temples, sacrifices carried out to them, not on their behalf, and some wonderful surviving images that literally put the imperial gods in the Olympian heavens (see plate 20). But the differences were not entirely eroded. Roman writers, intellectuals and artists repeatedly wondered about the nature of the transition from emperor to god and how someone who had been a human being one day was divine the next. In a way reminiscent of the modern Catholic Church’s requirement of authenticated miracles in making a new saint, they claimed to ask for proof or witnesses; the appearance of a comet apparently demonstrated the apotheosis of Julius Caesar, but the stories of Livia’s suspiciously large cash reward to the senator who was prepared to say that he had seen Augustus ascend to heaven suggest some uncertainty about the process.
The transition was fraught enough to prompt jokes and satire. According to Suetonius, Vespasian continued his down-to-earth line in self-deprecating wit right up until his last words: ‘Oh dear, I think I’m becoming a god …’
and
The truth is that for two centuries after the crucifixion of Jesus sometime in the early 30s CE, Christianity is hard to pin down. It started as a radical Jewish sect, but how and when it became clearly separated from Judaism is impossible to say. It is not even certain when ‘Christians’ started regularly to use that name for themselves; it may originally have been a nickname applied by outsiders. They were for many years small in number. The best estimate is that by 200 CE there were around 200,000 Christians in the Roman Empire, of between 50 and 60 million people, though they may have been more visible than that figure suggests, as they were overwhelmingly concentrated in towns; the word ‘pagan’ was their term for anyone who was not a Christian or a Jew, and it implied anything from ‘outsider’ to ‘rustic’. And they held a whole variety of views and beliefs about the nature of god and of Jesus and about the basic tenets of Christian faith that were gradually, and with great difficulty, pared down to the range of Christian orthodoxies (still not a single one) that we know today. Was Jesus married with children? What exactly happened at the crucifixion? Did he die or not?, many wondered, not unreasonably.
From time to time in the first two centuries CE, Roman authorities punished the Christians. There was at this period no general or systematic persecution; there was no sign of that until the mid third century CE. In practice, most of the early generations of Christians lived un-troubled by the intervention of the state. Yet they were occasionally scapegoated, as when Nero decided to shift the blame for the great fire of Rome in 64 CE on to them. They were plausible candidates perhaps, as some Christians were prophesying that the world would shortly end in flames. The letters between Pliny and Trajan suggest that there was some Roman legislation that, whether explicitly or implicitly, outlawed the religion, though we know no more than that. Pliny’s uncertainty and puzzlement are reflected on some other occasions when Romans chose to punish Christians in different parts of the empire, from Gaul to Africa.
Whatever the letter of the law or the precise circumstances of any individual trial, there was an irreconcilable clash between traditional Roman values and Christianity. Roman religion was not only polytheistic but treated foreign gods much as it treated foreign peoples: by incorporation. As far back as the takeover of Veii in the early fourth century BCE, Rome had regularly welcomed the gods of the conquered. There were from time to time controversies and anxieties about this; the priests of the Egyptian goddess Isis found themselves expelled from the city of Rome on more than one occasion. But the basic rule was that as the Roman Empire expanded, so did its pantheon of deities. Christianity was, in theory, an exclusive monotheism, which rejected the gods who for centuries had guaranteed the success of Rome. In practice, for every Perpetua who went bravely, or in Roman eyes stubbornly, to her death, there were probably hundreds of ordinary Christians who chose to sacrifice to the traditional gods, cross their fingers and ask for forgiveness later. But on paper there could be no accommodation.
The same was true, in a sense, of Judaism. But to a remarkable and in some ways unexpected degree, the Jews managed to operate within Roman culture. For the Romans, Christianity was far worse. First, it had no ancestral home. In their ordered religious geography, Romans expected deities to be from somewhere: Isis from Egypt, Mithras from Persia, the Jewish god from Judaea. The Christian god was rootless, claimed to be universal and sought more adherents. All kinds of mystical moments of enlightenment might attract new worshippers to (say) the religion of Isis. But Christianity was defined entirely by a process of spiritual conversion that was utterly new. What is more, some Christians were preaching values that threatened to overturn some of the most fundamental Greco-Roman assumptions about the nature of the world and of the people within it: that poverty, for example, was good; or that the body was to be tamed or rejected rather than cared for. All these factors help to explain the worries, confusion and hostility of Pliny and others like him.
At the same time, the success of Christianity was rooted in the Roman Empire, in its territorial extent, in the mobility that it promoted, in its towns and its cultural mix. From Pliny’s Bithynia to Perpetua’s Carthage, Christianity spread from its small-scale origins in Judaea largely because of the channels of communication across the Mediterranean world that the Roman Empire had opened up and because of the movement through those channels of people, goods, books and ideas. The irony is that the only religion that the Romans ever attempted to eradicate was the one whose success their empire made possible and which grew up entirely within the Roman world.
The emperor’s face was ubiquitous, but it could be represented very differently. Only those with their eyes half shut could have failed to spot a dramatic change near the beginning of the second century CE in how the ruler looked. With the accession of Hadrian in 117 CE, after more than a hundred years of imperial portraits with no trace of facial hair (only a little stubble, if they were supposed to be in mourning), emperors started to be portrayed with full beards, a trend that lasted throughout the rest of the century and well after the period covered by this book. It is a guaranteed way of dating all those imperial heads that now line museum shelves: if they are bearded, they are after 117 CE.
This change cannot have been merely a whim of fashion or, as one ancient writer predictably speculated, a device for Hadrian to cover his spots. But the reason for it remains puzzling. Was it an attempt to emulate the Greek philosophers of the past? Hadrian was a well-known admirer of Greek culture, as was the philosophical Marcus Aurelius. So was it part of an attempt to intellectualise Roman imperial power, to re-present it in Greek terms? Or did it point in the opposite direction, harking back to the tough military heroes of earliest Rome, even before the era of Scipio Barbatus in the early third century BCE, when to sport a beard seems already to have been something remarkable in a Roman? It is impossible to know, and no ancient writing that survives ever explains the new beards. But, at the very least, they hint that within the palace someone was thinking hard about the imperial image, right down to the facial hair, and, for whatever reason, was prepared to make a break from tradition.
and
It is largely the legacy of the two main monotheisms of the ancient world – Judaism and its offshoot Christianity – that has encouraged us to see the invention of new gods, the adjustment and the extension of the pantheon and the fluidity of the boundary between humans and gods as faintly ludicrous. Christians, in particular, both ridiculed the very notion that the obviously human emperor was divine and occasionally paid with their lives for their refusal to give him any kind of religious honour. But that is not to say that the divine status of the emperor was unproblematic for pre-Christian Romans or that there were no debates and disagreements about just how godlike the human ruler, let alone his family, was. It was another awkward balancing act bequeathed to his successors by Augustus, who straddled the boundary between the human and the divine with greater success than some of those who followed.
Some imperial claims to divine status were always thought undeniably wrong. For most inhabitants of the Roman Empire, it would have been a crass category mistake and a hyperbolic affront for an emperor to declare himself a living god, as if there were no difference between himself and Jupiter. The Romans were hardly stupid: they knew the difference between bona fide Olympians and a living emperor. If it is true (rather than a vicious slur) that Gaius turned the Temple of Castor and Pollux in the Forum into the vestibule of his residence on the Palatine above and sat there between the statues of the gods to enjoy the worship of anyone who chose to give it, then that was a memorable symbol of imperial megalomania and it broke all the official protocols of imperial worship. It was likewise an abuse of power for an emperor to attempt to stretch the official Roman pantheon to accommodate dead babies, boyfriends and even favourite sisters; Hadrian was no better on this score than Nero or Gaius in having his young male companion, Antinous, made a god after his mysterious death by drowning in the Nile in 130 CE. The theology of the emperor and the imperial family was far more subtle than this and has to be seen in two parts: first the divine status of the living emperor, second that of the dead.
Throughout the Roman world, the living emperor was treated very like a god. He was incorporated into rituals celebrated in honour of the gods, he was addressed in language that overlapped with divine language, and he was assumed to have some similar powers. Augustus’ name, for example, was included in the wording of some religious litanies. Runaway slaves could claim asylum by clinging to a statue of the emperor, just as to a statue of a god. At the town of Gytheum, near Sparta in the Peloponnese, a surviving inscription lays out in great detail the procedures for a regular festival to be held over several days, with processions around the town, musical contests and sacrifices, honouring a pair of local benefactors, the ruling emperor, Tiberius, and various members of his family, the Republican general Titus Quinctius Flamininus, as well as the traditional Olympian deities.
There may well have been many people, especially far outside the city of Rome, for whom the emperor was about as remote, and powerful, a figure as an Olympian deity, and who did not see much difference between the two. But wherever the formal details were spelled out, a careful distinction was drawn between the emperor and the Olympians. In Gytheum, for example, and elsewhere, a technical but crucial difference was expressed. The animal sacrifices were to be performed to the traditional gods, but they were performed on behalf of or for the protection of the living emperor and his family; the emperor, in other words, was still under the protection of the Olympian gods rather than being their equal. In Rome, it was usually the numen, or the ‘power’, of the living emperor that received sacrifice, not the emperor himself. More widely, the package of honours offered to the imperial family in the Greek world were known as isotheoi timai: that is, honours equivalent (iso-) to those of the gods (theoi), but not identical. It was always transgressive to ignore the difference between the gods and the living emperor, however godlike he might be.
It was not the same when they were dead. Following the pattern of Julius Caesar, the senate might choose to incorporate a dead emperor or one of his close relations into the official pantheon; for it was a decision that was, formally at least, in the hands of the senate and a posthumous power over their ruler that some senators must have enjoyed. In this case the distinction between gods and emperors was negligible; there were priests and temples, sacrifices carried out to them, not on their behalf, and some wonderful surviving images that literally put the imperial gods in the Olympian heavens (see plate 20). But the differences were not entirely eroded. Roman writers, intellectuals and artists repeatedly wondered about the nature of the transition from emperor to god and how someone who had been a human being one day was divine the next. In a way reminiscent of the modern Catholic Church’s requirement of authenticated miracles in making a new saint, they claimed to ask for proof or witnesses; the appearance of a comet apparently demonstrated the apotheosis of Julius Caesar, but the stories of Livia’s suspiciously large cash reward to the senator who was prepared to say that he had seen Augustus ascend to heaven suggest some uncertainty about the process.
The transition was fraught enough to prompt jokes and satire. According to Suetonius, Vespasian continued his down-to-earth line in self-deprecating wit right up until his last words: ‘Oh dear, I think I’m becoming a god …’
and
The truth is that for two centuries after the crucifixion of Jesus sometime in the early 30s CE, Christianity is hard to pin down. It started as a radical Jewish sect, but how and when it became clearly separated from Judaism is impossible to say. It is not even certain when ‘Christians’ started regularly to use that name for themselves; it may originally have been a nickname applied by outsiders. They were for many years small in number. The best estimate is that by 200 CE there were around 200,000 Christians in the Roman Empire, of between 50 and 60 million people, though they may have been more visible than that figure suggests, as they were overwhelmingly concentrated in towns; the word ‘pagan’ was their term for anyone who was not a Christian or a Jew, and it implied anything from ‘outsider’ to ‘rustic’. And they held a whole variety of views and beliefs about the nature of god and of Jesus and about the basic tenets of Christian faith that were gradually, and with great difficulty, pared down to the range of Christian orthodoxies (still not a single one) that we know today. Was Jesus married with children? What exactly happened at the crucifixion? Did he die or not?, many wondered, not unreasonably.
From time to time in the first two centuries CE, Roman authorities punished the Christians. There was at this period no general or systematic persecution; there was no sign of that until the mid third century CE. In practice, most of the early generations of Christians lived un-troubled by the intervention of the state. Yet they were occasionally scapegoated, as when Nero decided to shift the blame for the great fire of Rome in 64 CE on to them. They were plausible candidates perhaps, as some Christians were prophesying that the world would shortly end in flames. The letters between Pliny and Trajan suggest that there was some Roman legislation that, whether explicitly or implicitly, outlawed the religion, though we know no more than that. Pliny’s uncertainty and puzzlement are reflected on some other occasions when Romans chose to punish Christians in different parts of the empire, from Gaul to Africa.
Whatever the letter of the law or the precise circumstances of any individual trial, there was an irreconcilable clash between traditional Roman values and Christianity. Roman religion was not only polytheistic but treated foreign gods much as it treated foreign peoples: by incorporation. As far back as the takeover of Veii in the early fourth century BCE, Rome had regularly welcomed the gods of the conquered. There were from time to time controversies and anxieties about this; the priests of the Egyptian goddess Isis found themselves expelled from the city of Rome on more than one occasion. But the basic rule was that as the Roman Empire expanded, so did its pantheon of deities. Christianity was, in theory, an exclusive monotheism, which rejected the gods who for centuries had guaranteed the success of Rome. In practice, for every Perpetua who went bravely, or in Roman eyes stubbornly, to her death, there were probably hundreds of ordinary Christians who chose to sacrifice to the traditional gods, cross their fingers and ask for forgiveness later. But on paper there could be no accommodation.
The same was true, in a sense, of Judaism. But to a remarkable and in some ways unexpected degree, the Jews managed to operate within Roman culture. For the Romans, Christianity was far worse. First, it had no ancestral home. In their ordered religious geography, Romans expected deities to be from somewhere: Isis from Egypt, Mithras from Persia, the Jewish god from Judaea. The Christian god was rootless, claimed to be universal and sought more adherents. All kinds of mystical moments of enlightenment might attract new worshippers to (say) the religion of Isis. But Christianity was defined entirely by a process of spiritual conversion that was utterly new. What is more, some Christians were preaching values that threatened to overturn some of the most fundamental Greco-Roman assumptions about the nature of the world and of the people within it: that poverty, for example, was good; or that the body was to be tamed or rejected rather than cared for. All these factors help to explain the worries, confusion and hostility of Pliny and others like him.
At the same time, the success of Christianity was rooted in the Roman Empire, in its territorial extent, in the mobility that it promoted, in its towns and its cultural mix. From Pliny’s Bithynia to Perpetua’s Carthage, Christianity spread from its small-scale origins in Judaea largely because of the channels of communication across the Mediterranean world that the Roman Empire had opened up and because of the movement through those channels of people, goods, books and ideas. The irony is that the only religion that the Romans ever attempted to eradicate was the one whose success their empire made possible and which grew up entirely within the Roman world.
Huxley on tombs
“The skeleton,” as we all know, “was invisible in the happy days of pagan art.” And invisible it remained, in spite of Christianity, for most of the centuries that followed. Throughout the Middle Ages, the knights, the mitered bishops, the ladies who warm their feet on the backs of little dogs—all are reassuringly in the flesh. No skulls adorn their tombs, no bones, no grisly reapers. Artists in words may cry, “Alas, my heart will break in three; Terribilis mors conturbat me.” Artists in stone are content to carve the likeness of a sleeper upon a bed. The Renaissance comes and still the sleep persists, tranquil amid the sculptured dreams of a paradise half earthly, half celestial.
But by the middle of the sixteenth century a change has taken place. The effigy no longer sleeps, but opens its eyes and sits up—ideally noble, as on the Medicean tombs, or soberly a portrait, like any one of those admirable busts in their round niches between the pilasters of a classical design. And at the base, below the Latin inscription, it not infrequently happens (at any rate in Rome and after 1550) that a little skull, in bone-white marble, reminds the onlooker of what he himself will soon be, of what the original of the portrait has already become.
Why should the death’s head have become fashionable at this particular moment of history? The religiously minded might surmise that it had something to do with the Counter Reformation; the medically minded, that it was connected with that sixteenth-century pandemic of syphilis, whose noseless victims were a constant reminder of man’s latter end; the artistically minded, that some mortuary sculptor of the time had a taste for, and a happy knack with, bones. I do not venture to decide between the possible alternatives, but am content to record the fact, observable by anyone who has been in Rome, that there, after the middle of the century, the skulls indubitably are.
As the years pass these reminders of mortality assume an even greater importance. From being miniatures they grow in a short time into full-blown, death-sized replicas of the thing behind the face. And suddenly, imitating those bodiless seraphs of medieval and Renaissance painting, they sprout a pair of wings and learn to fly. Meanwhile the art of the late Renaissance has become the Baroque. By an aesthetic necessity, because it is impossible for self-conscious artists to go on doing what has been supremely well done by their predecessors, the symmetrical gives place to the disbalanced, the static to the dynamic, the formalized to the realistic. Statues are caught in the act of changing their positions; pictorial compositions try to break out of their frames. Where there was understatement, there is now emphasis; where there was measure and humanity, there is now the enormous, the astounding, the demigod and the epileptic sub-man.
Consider, for example, those skulls on the monuments. They have grown in size; their truth to death is overpowering and, to heighten the effect of verisimilitude, the sculptor has shifted them from their old place on the central axis and now shows them, casual and unposed, in profile or three-quarters face, looking up to heaven or down into the grave. And their wings! Vast, wildly beating, windblown—the wings of vultures in a hurricane. The appetite for the inordinate grows with what it feeds upon, and along with it grow the virtuosity of the artists and the willingness of their patrons to pay for ever more astounding monuments. By 1630 the skull is no longer adequate as a memento mori; it has become necessary to represent the entire skeleton.
The most grandiose of these reminders of our mortality are the mighty skeletons which Bernini made for the tombs of Urban VIII and Alexander VII in St. Peter’s. Majestic in his vestments and intensely alive, each of the two Popes sits there aloft, blessing his people. Some feet below him, on either side, are his special Virtues—Faith, Temperance, Fortitude, who knows? In the middle, below the Pontiff, is the gigantic emblem of death. On Urban’s tomb the skeleton is holding (slightly cock-eyed, for it would be intolerably old-fashioned and unrealistic if the thing were perfectly level) a black marble scroll inscribed with the Pope’s name and title; on Alexander’s the monster has been “stopped,” as the photographers say, in the act of shooting up from the doorway leading into the vault. Up it comes, like a rocket, at an angle of sixty or seventy degrees, and as it rises it effortlessly lifts six or seven tons of the red marble drapery, which mitigates the rigidities of architecture and transforms the statically geometrical into something mobile and indeterminate.
The emphasis, in these two extraordinary works, is not on heaven, hell, and purgatory, but on physical dissolution and the grave. The terror which inspired such works as the Dies Irae was of the second death, the death inflicted by an angry judge upon the sinner’s soul. Here, on the contrary, the theme is the first death, the abrupt passage from animation to insensibility and from worldly glory to supper with the convocation of politic worms.
Bernini’s tombs are by no means unique. The Roman churches are full of cautionary skeletons. In Santa Maria sopra Minerva, for example, there is a small monument attached to one of the columns on the north side of the church. It commemorates a certain Vizzani, if I remember rightly, a jurisconsult who died some time before the middle of the seventeenth century. Here, as in the wall monuments of the High Renaissance, a bust looks out of a rounded niche placed above the long Latin catalogue of the dead man’s claims upon the attention of posterity. It is the bust, so intensely life-like as to be almost a caricature, of a florid individual in his middle forties, no fool evidently, but wearing an expression of serene and unquestioning complacency. Socially, professionally, financially, what a huge success his life has been! And how strongly, like Milton, he feels that “nothing profits more than self-esteem founded on just and right”! But suddenly we become aware that the bust in its round frame is being held in an almost amorous embrace by a great skeleton in high relief, whizzing diagonally, from left to right, across the monument. The lawyer and all his achievements, all his self-satisfaction, are being wafted away into darkness and oblivion.
Of the same kind, but still more astounding, are the tombs of the Pallavicino family in San Francesco a Ripa. Executed by Mazzuoli at the beginning of the eighteenth century, these monuments are among the last and at the same time the most extravagant outflowerings of the Baroque spirit. Admirably carved, the usual Virtues keep guard at the base of each of the vast pyramidal structures. Above them, flapping huge wings, a ten-foot skeleton in bronze holds up for our inspection a pair of oval frames, containing busts of the departed Pallavicini. On one side of the family chapel we see the likenesses of two princely ecclesiastics. Death holds them with a studied carelessness, tilting their frames a little, one to the left, the other to the right, so that the grave ascetic faces look out, as though through the ports of a rolling ship. Opposite them, in the hands of another and, if possible, even more frightful skeleton, are two more members of the family—an elderly princess, this time, and her spouse. And what a spouse! Under the majestic wig the face is gross, many-chinned, complacently imbecile. High blood pressure inflates the whole squat person almost to bursting point; pride keeps the pig-snout chronically pointing to the skies. And it is Death who now holds him aloft; it is Corruption who, with triumphant derision, exhibits him, forever pilloried in marble, a grotesque and pitiable example of human bumptiousness.
Looking at the little fat man up there in the skeleton’s clutches, one reflects, with a certain astonishment, that some Pallavicino must have ordered and presumably paid for this strange monument to a departed relative. With what intentions? To display the absurdity of the old gentleman’s pretensions to grandeur? To make a mock of everything he had lived for? The answer to these questions is, at least in part, affirmative. All these Baroque tombs were doctrinally sound. The heirs of popes and princes laid out huge sums to celebrate the glories of their distinguished forebears—but laid them out on monuments whose emphatically Christian theme is the transience of earthly greatness and the vanity of human wishes. After which they addressed themselves with redoubled energy to the task of satisfying their own cravings for money, position and power. A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor and survival, a thing beyond the bounds of possibility. The men of the Baroque differed from those of other epochs not in what they actually did, not even in what they thought about those doings, but in what they were ready to express of their thoughts. They liked an art that harps on death and corruption, and were neither better nor worse than we who are reticent about such things.
The fantastic dance of death in San Francesco a Ripa is almost the last of its kind. Thirty years after it was carved, Robert Blair could achieve a modest popularity by writing such lines as these:
But eighteenth-century sculptors made no attempt to realize these gruesome images. On graves and monuments Death no longer comments upon the mad pretensions of his victims. Broken columns, extinguished torches, weeping angels and muses—these are now the emblems in vogue. The artist and his patron are concerned to evoke sentiments less painful than the horror of corruption. With the nineteenth century we enter an age of stylistic revivals; but there is never a return to the mortuary fashions of the Baroque. From the time of Mazzuoli until the present day no monument to any important European has been adorned with death’s heads or skeletons.
We live habitually on at least three levels—the level of strictly individual existence, the level of intellectual abstraction and the level of historical necessity and social convention. On the first of these levels our life is completely private; on the others it is, at least partially, a shared and public life. Thus, writing about death, I am on the level of intellectual abstraction. Participating in the life of a generation to which the mortuary art of the Baroque seems odd and alien, I am on the level of history. But when I actually come to die, I shall be on the first level, the level of exclusively individual experience. That which, in human life, is shared and public has always been regarded as more respectable than that which is private. Kings have their Astronomers Royal, emperors their official Historiographers; but there are no Royal Gastronomers, no Papal or Imperial Pornographers. Among crimes, the social and the historical are condoned as last infirmities of noble minds, and their perpetrators are very generally admired. The lustful and intemperate, on the contrary, are condemned by all—even by themselves (which was why Jesus so much preferred them to the respectable Pharisees). We have no God of Brothels, but the God of Battles, alas, is still going strong.
Baroque mortuary sculpture has as its basic subject matter the conflict, on one important front, between the public and the private, between the social and the individual, between the historical and the existential. The prince in his curly wig, the Pope in his vestments, the lawyer with his Latin eulogy and his smirk of self-satisfaction—all these are pillars of society, representatives of great historical forces and even makers of history. But under smirk and wig and tiara is the body with its unsharable physiological processes, is the psyche with its insights and sudden graces, its abysmal imbecilities and its unavowable desires. Every public figure—and to some extent we are all public figures—is also an island universe of private experiences; and the most private of all these experiences is that of falling out of history, of being separated from society—in a word, the experience of death.
Based as they always are upon ignorance—invincible in some cases, voluntary and selective in others—historical generalizations can never be more than partially true. In spite of which and at the risk of distorting the facts to fit a theory, I would suggest that, at any given period, preoccupation with death is in inverse ratio to the prevalence of a belief in man’s perfectibility through and in a properly organized society. In the art and literature of the age of Condorcet, of the age of Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx, of the age of Lenin and the Webbs there are few skeletons. Why? Because it was during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that men came to believe in progress, in the march of history toward an ever bigger and better future, in salvation, not for the individual, but for society. The emphasis is on history and environment, which are regarded as the primary determinants of individual destiny. Indeed, among orthodox Marxians they are now (since the canonization of Lysenko and the anathema pronounced on “reactionary Morganism”) regarded as the sole determinants. Predestination, whether Augustinian or Mendelian, whether karmic or genetic, has been ruled out, and we are back with Helvetius and his shepherd boys who can all be transformed into Newtons, back with Dr. Watson and his infinitely conditionable infants. But meanwhile the fact remains that, in this still unregenerate world, each of us inherits a physique and a temperament. Moreover the career of every individual man or woman is essentially non-progressive. We reach maturity only to decline into decrepitude and the body’s death. Could anything be more painfully obvious? And yet how rarely in the course of the past two hundred and fifty years has death been made the theme of any considerable work of art! Among the great painters only Goya has chosen to treat of death, and then only of death by violence, death in war. The mortuary sculptors, as we have seen, harp only on the sentiments surrounding death—sentiments ranging from the noble to the tender and even the voluptuous. (The most delicious buttocks in the whole repertory of art are to be found on Canova’s monument to the last of the Stuarts.)
In the literature of this same period death has been handled more frequently than in painting or sculpture, but only once (to my knowledge, at least) with complete adequacy. Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyitch is one of the artistically most perfect and at the same time one of the most terrible books ever written. It is the story of an utterly commonplace man who is compelled to discover, step by agonizing step, that the public personage with whom, all his life, he has identified himself is hardly more than a figment of the collective imagination, and that his essential self is the solitary, insulated being who falls sick and suffers, rejects and is rejected by the world and finally (for the story has a happy ending) gives in to his destiny and in the act of surrender, at the very moment of death, finds himself alone and naked in the presence of the Light. The Baroque sculptors are concerned with the same theme but they protest too much and their conscious striving for sublimity is apt to defeat its own object. Tolstoy is never emphatic, indulges in no rhetorical flourishes, speaks simply of the most difficult matters and flatly, matter-of-factly of the most terrible. That is why his book has such power and is so profoundly disturbing to our habitual complacency. We are shocked by it in much the same way as we are shocked by pornography—and for the same reason. Sex is almost as completely private a matter as death, and a work of art which powerfully expresses the truth about either of them is very painful to the respectable public figure we imagine ourselves to be. Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations. And nothing is more desolating than a thorough knowledge of the private self. Hence the utility of such books as Ivan Ilyitch and, I would venture to add, such books as Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.
And here let me add a parenthetical note on the pornography of the age which witnessed the rise of the ideas of progress and social salvation. Most of it is merely pretty, an affair of wish-fulfillments—Boucher carried to his logical conclusion. The most celebrated pornographer of the time, the Marquis de Sade, is a mixture of escapist maniac and philosophe. He lives in a world where insane phantasy alternates with post-Voltairean ratiocination; where impossible orgies are interrupted in order that the participants may talk, sometimes shrewdly, but more often in the shallowest eighteenth-century way, about morals, politics and metaphysics. Here, for example, is a typical specimen of Sadian sociology. “Is incest dangerous? Certainly not. It extends family ties and consequently renders more active the citizen’s love of his fatherland.” In this passage, as throughout the work of this oddest product of the Enlightenment, we see the public figure doing his silly best to rationalize the essentially unrationalizable facts of private existence. But what we need, if we are to know ourselves, is the truthful and penetrating expression in art of precisely these unrationalizable facts—the facts of death, as in Ivan Ilyitch, the facts of sex, as in Tropic of Cancer, the facts of pain and cruelty, as in Goya’s Disasters, the facts of fear and disgust and fatigue, as in that most horrifyingly truthful of war books, The Naked and the Dead. Ignorance is a bliss we can never afford; but to know only ourselves is not enough. If it is to be a fruitful desolation, self-knowledge must be made the road to a knowledge of the Other. Unmitigated, it is but another form of ignorance and can lead only to despair or complacent cynicism. Floundering between time and eternity, we are amphibians and must accept the fact. Noverim me, noverim Te, the prayer expresses an essentially realistic attitude toward the universe in which, willy-nilly, we have to live and to die.
Death is not the only private experience with which Baroque art concerns itself. A few yards from the Pallavicino tombs reclines Bernini’s statue of Blessed Ludovica Albertoni in ecstasy. Here, as in the case of the same artist’s more celebrated St. Teresa, the experience recorded is of a privacy so special that, at a first glance, the spectator feels a shock of embarrassment. Entering those rich chapels in San Francesco and Santa Maria della Vittoria, one has the impression of having opened a bedroom door at the most inopportune of moments, almost of having opened The Tropic of Cancer at one of its most startling pages. The posture of the ecstatics, their expression and the exuberance of the tripe-like drapery which surrounds them and, in the Albertoni’s case, overflows in a kind of peritoneal cataract onto the altar below—all conspire to emphasize the fact that, though saints may be important historical figures, their physiology is as disquietingly private as anyone else’s.
By the inner logic of the tradition within which they worked, Baroque artists were committed to a systematic exploitation of the inordinate. Hence the epileptic behavior of their gesticulating or swooning personages, and hence, also, their failure to find an adequate artistic expression for the mystical experience. This failure seems all the more surprising when one remembers that their period witnessed a great efflorescence of mystical religion. It was the age of St. John of the Cross and Benet of Canfield, of Mme. Acarie and Father Lallemant and Charles de Condren, of Augustine Baker and Surin and Olier.
All these had taught that the end of the spiritual life is the unitive knowledge of God, an immediate intuition of Him beyond discursive reason, beyond imagination, beyond emotion. And all had insisted that visions, raptures and miracles were not the “real thing,” but mere by-products which, if taken too seriously, could become fatal impediments to spiritual progress. But visions, raptures and miracles are astounding and picturesque occurrences; and astounding and picturesque occurrences were the predestined subject matter of artists whose concern was with the inordinate. In Baroque art the mystic is represented either as a psychic with supernormal powers, or as an ecstatic, who passes out of history in order to be alone, not with God, but with his or her physiology in a state hardly distinguishable from that of sexual enjoyment. And this in spite of what all the contemporary masters of the spiritual life were saying about the dangers of precisely this sort of thing.
Such a misinterpretation of mysticism was made inevitable by the very nature of Baroque art. Given the style in which they worked, the artists of the seventeenth century could not have treated the theme in any other way. And, oddly enough even at times when the current style permitted a treatment of the less epileptic aspects of religion, no fully adequate rendering of the contemplative life was ever achieved in the plastic arts of Christendom. The peace that passes all understanding was often sung and spoken; it was hardly ever painted or carved. Thus, in the writings of St. Bernard, of Albertus Magnus, of Eckhart and Tauler and Ruysbroeck one may find passages that express very clearly the nature and significance of mystical contemplation. But the saints who figure in medieval painting and sculpture tell us next to nothing about this anticipation of the beatific vision. There are no equivalents of those Far Eastern Buddhas and Bodhisattvas who incarnate, in stone and paint, the experience of ultimate reality. Moreover the Christian saints have their being in a world from which non-human Nature (that mine of supernatural beauties and transcendent significances) has been almost completely excluded. In his handbook on painting Cennini gives a recipe for mountains. Take some large jagged stones, arrange them on a table, draw them and, lo and behold, you will have a range of Alps or Apennines good enough for all the practical purposes of art. In China and Japan mountains were taken more seriously. The aspiring artist was advised to go and live among them, to make himself alertly passive in their presence, to contemplate them lovingly until he could understand the mode of their being and feel within them the workings of the immanent and transcendent Tao. As one might have expected, the medieval artists of Christendom painted mere backgrounds, whereas those of the Far East painted landscapes that are the equivalent of mystical poetry—formally perfect renderings of man’s experience of being related to the Order of Things.
This experience is, of course, perfectly private, non-historical and unsocial. That is why, to the organizers of churches and the exponents of salvation through the State, it has always seemed to be suspect, shady and even indecent. And yet, like sex and pain and death, there it remains, one of the brute facts with which, whether we like them or not, we have to come to terms. Maddeningly, unbearably, an occasional artist rubs our noses in his rendering of these facts. Confronted by the pornographies of suffering, of sensuality, of dissolution, by The Disasters of War and The Naked and the Dead, by Tropic of Cancer, by Ivan llyitch and even (despite their ludicrous sublimity) by the Baroque tombs, we shrink and are appalled. And in another way there is something hardly less appalling in the pornographies (as many good rationalists regard them) of mysticism. Even the consolations of religion and philosophy are pretty desolating for the average sensual man, who clings to his ignorance as the sole guarantee of happiness. Terribilis mors conturbat me; but so does terribilis Vita.
Those Pans and Nymphs ye wot of, and perchance
Some tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so,
The Savior at his sermon on the mount,
St. Praxed in a glory, and one Pan
Ready to twitch the Nymph’s last garment off,
And Moses with the tables.
Why should the death’s head have become fashionable at this particular moment of history? The religiously minded might surmise that it had something to do with the Counter Reformation; the medically minded, that it was connected with that sixteenth-century pandemic of syphilis, whose noseless victims were a constant reminder of man’s latter end; the artistically minded, that some mortuary sculptor of the time had a taste for, and a happy knack with, bones. I do not venture to decide between the possible alternatives, but am content to record the fact, observable by anyone who has been in Rome, that there, after the middle of the century, the skulls indubitably are.
As the years pass these reminders of mortality assume an even greater importance. From being miniatures they grow in a short time into full-blown, death-sized replicas of the thing behind the face. And suddenly, imitating those bodiless seraphs of medieval and Renaissance painting, they sprout a pair of wings and learn to fly. Meanwhile the art of the late Renaissance has become the Baroque. By an aesthetic necessity, because it is impossible for self-conscious artists to go on doing what has been supremely well done by their predecessors, the symmetrical gives place to the disbalanced, the static to the dynamic, the formalized to the realistic. Statues are caught in the act of changing their positions; pictorial compositions try to break out of their frames. Where there was understatement, there is now emphasis; where there was measure and humanity, there is now the enormous, the astounding, the demigod and the epileptic sub-man.
Consider, for example, those skulls on the monuments. They have grown in size; their truth to death is overpowering and, to heighten the effect of verisimilitude, the sculptor has shifted them from their old place on the central axis and now shows them, casual and unposed, in profile or three-quarters face, looking up to heaven or down into the grave. And their wings! Vast, wildly beating, windblown—the wings of vultures in a hurricane. The appetite for the inordinate grows with what it feeds upon, and along with it grow the virtuosity of the artists and the willingness of their patrons to pay for ever more astounding monuments. By 1630 the skull is no longer adequate as a memento mori; it has become necessary to represent the entire skeleton.
The most grandiose of these reminders of our mortality are the mighty skeletons which Bernini made for the tombs of Urban VIII and Alexander VII in St. Peter’s. Majestic in his vestments and intensely alive, each of the two Popes sits there aloft, blessing his people. Some feet below him, on either side, are his special Virtues—Faith, Temperance, Fortitude, who knows? In the middle, below the Pontiff, is the gigantic emblem of death. On Urban’s tomb the skeleton is holding (slightly cock-eyed, for it would be intolerably old-fashioned and unrealistic if the thing were perfectly level) a black marble scroll inscribed with the Pope’s name and title; on Alexander’s the monster has been “stopped,” as the photographers say, in the act of shooting up from the doorway leading into the vault. Up it comes, like a rocket, at an angle of sixty or seventy degrees, and as it rises it effortlessly lifts six or seven tons of the red marble drapery, which mitigates the rigidities of architecture and transforms the statically geometrical into something mobile and indeterminate.
The emphasis, in these two extraordinary works, is not on heaven, hell, and purgatory, but on physical dissolution and the grave. The terror which inspired such works as the Dies Irae was of the second death, the death inflicted by an angry judge upon the sinner’s soul. Here, on the contrary, the theme is the first death, the abrupt passage from animation to insensibility and from worldly glory to supper with the convocation of politic worms.
Of the same kind, but still more astounding, are the tombs of the Pallavicino family in San Francesco a Ripa. Executed by Mazzuoli at the beginning of the eighteenth century, these monuments are among the last and at the same time the most extravagant outflowerings of the Baroque spirit. Admirably carved, the usual Virtues keep guard at the base of each of the vast pyramidal structures. Above them, flapping huge wings, a ten-foot skeleton in bronze holds up for our inspection a pair of oval frames, containing busts of the departed Pallavicini. On one side of the family chapel we see the likenesses of two princely ecclesiastics. Death holds them with a studied carelessness, tilting their frames a little, one to the left, the other to the right, so that the grave ascetic faces look out, as though through the ports of a rolling ship. Opposite them, in the hands of another and, if possible, even more frightful skeleton, are two more members of the family—an elderly princess, this time, and her spouse. And what a spouse! Under the majestic wig the face is gross, many-chinned, complacently imbecile. High blood pressure inflates the whole squat person almost to bursting point; pride keeps the pig-snout chronically pointing to the skies. And it is Death who now holds him aloft; it is Corruption who, with triumphant derision, exhibits him, forever pilloried in marble, a grotesque and pitiable example of human bumptiousness.
Looking at the little fat man up there in the skeleton’s clutches, one reflects, with a certain astonishment, that some Pallavicino must have ordered and presumably paid for this strange monument to a departed relative. With what intentions? To display the absurdity of the old gentleman’s pretensions to grandeur? To make a mock of everything he had lived for? The answer to these questions is, at least in part, affirmative. All these Baroque tombs were doctrinally sound. The heirs of popes and princes laid out huge sums to celebrate the glories of their distinguished forebears—but laid them out on monuments whose emphatically Christian theme is the transience of earthly greatness and the vanity of human wishes. After which they addressed themselves with redoubled energy to the task of satisfying their own cravings for money, position and power. A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor and survival, a thing beyond the bounds of possibility. The men of the Baroque differed from those of other epochs not in what they actually did, not even in what they thought about those doings, but in what they were ready to express of their thoughts. They liked an art that harps on death and corruption, and were neither better nor worse than we who are reticent about such things.
The fantastic dance of death in San Francesco a Ripa is almost the last of its kind. Thirty years after it was carved, Robert Blair could achieve a modest popularity by writing such lines as these:
Methinks I see thee with thy head low laid,
While surfeited upon thy damask cheek
The high-fed worm, in lazy volumes rolled,
Riots unscared.
We live habitually on at least three levels—the level of strictly individual existence, the level of intellectual abstraction and the level of historical necessity and social convention. On the first of these levels our life is completely private; on the others it is, at least partially, a shared and public life. Thus, writing about death, I am on the level of intellectual abstraction. Participating in the life of a generation to which the mortuary art of the Baroque seems odd and alien, I am on the level of history. But when I actually come to die, I shall be on the first level, the level of exclusively individual experience. That which, in human life, is shared and public has always been regarded as more respectable than that which is private. Kings have their Astronomers Royal, emperors their official Historiographers; but there are no Royal Gastronomers, no Papal or Imperial Pornographers. Among crimes, the social and the historical are condoned as last infirmities of noble minds, and their perpetrators are very generally admired. The lustful and intemperate, on the contrary, are condemned by all—even by themselves (which was why Jesus so much preferred them to the respectable Pharisees). We have no God of Brothels, but the God of Battles, alas, is still going strong.
Baroque mortuary sculpture has as its basic subject matter the conflict, on one important front, between the public and the private, between the social and the individual, between the historical and the existential. The prince in his curly wig, the Pope in his vestments, the lawyer with his Latin eulogy and his smirk of self-satisfaction—all these are pillars of society, representatives of great historical forces and even makers of history. But under smirk and wig and tiara is the body with its unsharable physiological processes, is the psyche with its insights and sudden graces, its abysmal imbecilities and its unavowable desires. Every public figure—and to some extent we are all public figures—is also an island universe of private experiences; and the most private of all these experiences is that of falling out of history, of being separated from society—in a word, the experience of death.
Based as they always are upon ignorance—invincible in some cases, voluntary and selective in others—historical generalizations can never be more than partially true. In spite of which and at the risk of distorting the facts to fit a theory, I would suggest that, at any given period, preoccupation with death is in inverse ratio to the prevalence of a belief in man’s perfectibility through and in a properly organized society. In the art and literature of the age of Condorcet, of the age of Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx, of the age of Lenin and the Webbs there are few skeletons. Why? Because it was during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that men came to believe in progress, in the march of history toward an ever bigger and better future, in salvation, not for the individual, but for society. The emphasis is on history and environment, which are regarded as the primary determinants of individual destiny. Indeed, among orthodox Marxians they are now (since the canonization of Lysenko and the anathema pronounced on “reactionary Morganism”) regarded as the sole determinants. Predestination, whether Augustinian or Mendelian, whether karmic or genetic, has been ruled out, and we are back with Helvetius and his shepherd boys who can all be transformed into Newtons, back with Dr. Watson and his infinitely conditionable infants. But meanwhile the fact remains that, in this still unregenerate world, each of us inherits a physique and a temperament. Moreover the career of every individual man or woman is essentially non-progressive. We reach maturity only to decline into decrepitude and the body’s death. Could anything be more painfully obvious? And yet how rarely in the course of the past two hundred and fifty years has death been made the theme of any considerable work of art! Among the great painters only Goya has chosen to treat of death, and then only of death by violence, death in war. The mortuary sculptors, as we have seen, harp only on the sentiments surrounding death—sentiments ranging from the noble to the tender and even the voluptuous. (The most delicious buttocks in the whole repertory of art are to be found on Canova’s monument to the last of the Stuarts.)
In the literature of this same period death has been handled more frequently than in painting or sculpture, but only once (to my knowledge, at least) with complete adequacy. Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyitch is one of the artistically most perfect and at the same time one of the most terrible books ever written. It is the story of an utterly commonplace man who is compelled to discover, step by agonizing step, that the public personage with whom, all his life, he has identified himself is hardly more than a figment of the collective imagination, and that his essential self is the solitary, insulated being who falls sick and suffers, rejects and is rejected by the world and finally (for the story has a happy ending) gives in to his destiny and in the act of surrender, at the very moment of death, finds himself alone and naked in the presence of the Light. The Baroque sculptors are concerned with the same theme but they protest too much and their conscious striving for sublimity is apt to defeat its own object. Tolstoy is never emphatic, indulges in no rhetorical flourishes, speaks simply of the most difficult matters and flatly, matter-of-factly of the most terrible. That is why his book has such power and is so profoundly disturbing to our habitual complacency. We are shocked by it in much the same way as we are shocked by pornography—and for the same reason. Sex is almost as completely private a matter as death, and a work of art which powerfully expresses the truth about either of them is very painful to the respectable public figure we imagine ourselves to be. Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations. And nothing is more desolating than a thorough knowledge of the private self. Hence the utility of such books as Ivan Ilyitch and, I would venture to add, such books as Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.
And here let me add a parenthetical note on the pornography of the age which witnessed the rise of the ideas of progress and social salvation. Most of it is merely pretty, an affair of wish-fulfillments—Boucher carried to his logical conclusion. The most celebrated pornographer of the time, the Marquis de Sade, is a mixture of escapist maniac and philosophe. He lives in a world where insane phantasy alternates with post-Voltairean ratiocination; where impossible orgies are interrupted in order that the participants may talk, sometimes shrewdly, but more often in the shallowest eighteenth-century way, about morals, politics and metaphysics. Here, for example, is a typical specimen of Sadian sociology. “Is incest dangerous? Certainly not. It extends family ties and consequently renders more active the citizen’s love of his fatherland.” In this passage, as throughout the work of this oddest product of the Enlightenment, we see the public figure doing his silly best to rationalize the essentially unrationalizable facts of private existence. But what we need, if we are to know ourselves, is the truthful and penetrating expression in art of precisely these unrationalizable facts—the facts of death, as in Ivan Ilyitch, the facts of sex, as in Tropic of Cancer, the facts of pain and cruelty, as in Goya’s Disasters, the facts of fear and disgust and fatigue, as in that most horrifyingly truthful of war books, The Naked and the Dead. Ignorance is a bliss we can never afford; but to know only ourselves is not enough. If it is to be a fruitful desolation, self-knowledge must be made the road to a knowledge of the Other. Unmitigated, it is but another form of ignorance and can lead only to despair or complacent cynicism. Floundering between time and eternity, we are amphibians and must accept the fact. Noverim me, noverim Te, the prayer expresses an essentially realistic attitude toward the universe in which, willy-nilly, we have to live and to die.
Death is not the only private experience with which Baroque art concerns itself. A few yards from the Pallavicino tombs reclines Bernini’s statue of Blessed Ludovica Albertoni in ecstasy. Here, as in the case of the same artist’s more celebrated St. Teresa, the experience recorded is of a privacy so special that, at a first glance, the spectator feels a shock of embarrassment. Entering those rich chapels in San Francesco and Santa Maria della Vittoria, one has the impression of having opened a bedroom door at the most inopportune of moments, almost of having opened The Tropic of Cancer at one of its most startling pages. The posture of the ecstatics, their expression and the exuberance of the tripe-like drapery which surrounds them and, in the Albertoni’s case, overflows in a kind of peritoneal cataract onto the altar below—all conspire to emphasize the fact that, though saints may be important historical figures, their physiology is as disquietingly private as anyone else’s.
By the inner logic of the tradition within which they worked, Baroque artists were committed to a systematic exploitation of the inordinate. Hence the epileptic behavior of their gesticulating or swooning personages, and hence, also, their failure to find an adequate artistic expression for the mystical experience. This failure seems all the more surprising when one remembers that their period witnessed a great efflorescence of mystical religion. It was the age of St. John of the Cross and Benet of Canfield, of Mme. Acarie and Father Lallemant and Charles de Condren, of Augustine Baker and Surin and Olier.
All these had taught that the end of the spiritual life is the unitive knowledge of God, an immediate intuition of Him beyond discursive reason, beyond imagination, beyond emotion. And all had insisted that visions, raptures and miracles were not the “real thing,” but mere by-products which, if taken too seriously, could become fatal impediments to spiritual progress. But visions, raptures and miracles are astounding and picturesque occurrences; and astounding and picturesque occurrences were the predestined subject matter of artists whose concern was with the inordinate. In Baroque art the mystic is represented either as a psychic with supernormal powers, or as an ecstatic, who passes out of history in order to be alone, not with God, but with his or her physiology in a state hardly distinguishable from that of sexual enjoyment. And this in spite of what all the contemporary masters of the spiritual life were saying about the dangers of precisely this sort of thing.
Such a misinterpretation of mysticism was made inevitable by the very nature of Baroque art. Given the style in which they worked, the artists of the seventeenth century could not have treated the theme in any other way. And, oddly enough even at times when the current style permitted a treatment of the less epileptic aspects of religion, no fully adequate rendering of the contemplative life was ever achieved in the plastic arts of Christendom. The peace that passes all understanding was often sung and spoken; it was hardly ever painted or carved. Thus, in the writings of St. Bernard, of Albertus Magnus, of Eckhart and Tauler and Ruysbroeck one may find passages that express very clearly the nature and significance of mystical contemplation. But the saints who figure in medieval painting and sculpture tell us next to nothing about this anticipation of the beatific vision. There are no equivalents of those Far Eastern Buddhas and Bodhisattvas who incarnate, in stone and paint, the experience of ultimate reality. Moreover the Christian saints have their being in a world from which non-human Nature (that mine of supernatural beauties and transcendent significances) has been almost completely excluded. In his handbook on painting Cennini gives a recipe for mountains. Take some large jagged stones, arrange them on a table, draw them and, lo and behold, you will have a range of Alps or Apennines good enough for all the practical purposes of art. In China and Japan mountains were taken more seriously. The aspiring artist was advised to go and live among them, to make himself alertly passive in their presence, to contemplate them lovingly until he could understand the mode of their being and feel within them the workings of the immanent and transcendent Tao. As one might have expected, the medieval artists of Christendom painted mere backgrounds, whereas those of the Far East painted landscapes that are the equivalent of mystical poetry—formally perfect renderings of man’s experience of being related to the Order of Things.
This experience is, of course, perfectly private, non-historical and unsocial. That is why, to the organizers of churches and the exponents of salvation through the State, it has always seemed to be suspect, shady and even indecent. And yet, like sex and pain and death, there it remains, one of the brute facts with which, whether we like them or not, we have to come to terms. Maddeningly, unbearably, an occasional artist rubs our noses in his rendering of these facts. Confronted by the pornographies of suffering, of sensuality, of dissolution, by The Disasters of War and The Naked and the Dead, by Tropic of Cancer, by Ivan llyitch and even (despite their ludicrous sublimity) by the Baroque tombs, we shrink and are appalled. And in another way there is something hardly less appalling in the pornographies (as many good rationalists regard them) of mysticism. Even the consolations of religion and philosophy are pretty desolating for the average sensual man, who clings to his ignorance as the sole guarantee of happiness. Terribilis mors conturbat me; but so does terribilis Vita.
Thursday, May 19, 2016
Huxley on vulgarity
For the most self-conscious and intelligent artists of the last decades of the nineteenth century, too frank an acceptance of the obvious actualities of life, too hearty a manner and (to put it grossly) too many "guts" were rather vulgar. Vivre? Nos valets le feront pour nous. (Incidentally, the suicide rate took a sharp upward turn during the 'sixties. In some countries it is nearly five times what it was seventy years ago.) Zola was the master footman of the age. That vulgar interest in actual life! And all those guts of his—was the man preparing to set up as a tripe-dresser? A few aging ninetyites survive; a few young neo-ninetyites, who judge of art and all other human activities in terms of the Amusing and the Tiresome, play kittenishly around with their wax flowers and stuffed owls and Early Victorian bead-work. But, old and young, they are insignificant. Guts and an acceptance of the actual are no longer vulgar. Why not? What has happened? Three things: the usual reaction of sons against fathers, another industrial revolution and a rediscovery of mystery. We have entered (indeed, we have perhaps already passed through) a second heroic age of economics. Its Homers, it is true, are almost without exception skeptical, ironic, denunciatory. But this skepticism, this irony, this de-nunciation are as lively and vehement as that which is doubted and denounced. Babbitt infects even his detractors with some of his bouncing vitality. The Romantics, in the same way, possessed an energy proportionate to that of their enemies, the economic heroes who were creating modern industrialism. Life begets life, even in opposition to itself. Vivre? Nos valets le feront pour nous. But the physicists and psychologists have revealed the universe as a place, in spite of everything, so fantastically queer, that to hand it over to be enjoyed by footmen would be a piece of gratuitous humanitarianism. Servants must not be spoiled. The most refined spirits need not be ashamed in taking a hearty interest in the rediscovered mystery of the actual world. True, it is a sinister as well as a fascinating and mysterious world. And what a mess, with all our good intentions, we have made and are busily making of our particular corner of it! The same old industrial corpse—to some extent disinfected and galvanically stimulated at the moment into a twitching semblance of healthy life—still rots by the wayside, as it rotted in Villiers' time. And as for Gotama's carrion—that of course is always with us. There are, as ever, excellent reasons for personal despair; while the reasons for despairing about society are actually a good deal more cogent than at most times. A Mallarmean shrinking away into pure poetry, a delicate Henry-Jamesian avoidance of all the painful issues would seem to be justified. But the spirit of the time—the indus-trially heroic time in which we live—is opposed to these re-tirements, these handings over of life to footmen. It demands that we should "press with strenuous tongue against our palate" not only joy's grape, but every Dead Sea fruit. Even dust and ashes must be relished with gusto. Thus, modern American fiction, like the modern American fact which it so accurately renders, is ample and lively. And yet, "Dust and ashes, dust and ashes" is the fundamental theme and final moral of practically every modern American novel of any distinction. High spirits and a heroic vitality are put into the expression of despair. The hopelessness is almost Rabelaisian.
III
It was vulgar at the beginning of the nineteenth century to mention the word "handkerchief" on the French tragic stage. An arbitrary convention had decreed that tragic personages must inhabit a world, in which noses exist only to distinguish the noble Romans from the Greeks and Hebrews, never to be blown. Arbitrary conventions of one sort or another are essen-tial to art. But as the sort of convention constantly varies, so does the corresponding vulgarity. We are back among the relativities. In the case of the handkerchief we have a particular and rather absurd application of a very widely accepted artistic convention. This convention is justified by the ancient meta-physical doctrine, which distinguishes in the universe two principles, mind and matter, and which attributes to mind an immeasurable superiority. In the name of this principle many religions have demanded the sacrifice of the body; their devotees have responded by mortifying the flesh and, in extreme cases, by committing self-castration and even suicide. Literature has its Manichaeans as well as religion: men who on principle would exile the body and its functions from the world of their art, who condemn as vulgar all too particular and detailed accounts of physical actuality, as vulgar any attempt to relate mental or spiritual events to happenings in the body. The inhabitants of their universe are not human beings, but the tragical heroes and heroines who never blow their noses. Artistically, the abolition of handkerchiefs and all that handkerchiefs directly or indirectly stand for has certain ad-vantages. The handkerchiefless world of pure mind and spirit is, for an adult, the nearest approach to that infinitely com-fortable Freudian womb, toward which, as toward a lost paradise, we are always nostalgically yearning. In the handker chiefless mental world we are at liberty to work things out to their logical conclusions, we can guarantee the triumph of justice, we can control the weather and (in the words of those yearning popular songs which are the national anthems of Wombland) make our Dreams come True by living under Skies of Blue with You. Nature in the mental world is not that collection of tiresomely opaque and recalcitrant objects, so bewildering to the man of science, so malignantly hostile to the man of action; it is the luminously rational substance of a Hegelian nature-philosophy, a symbolic manifestation of the principles of dialectic. Artistically, such a Nature is much more satisfactory (because so much more easy to deal with) than the queer, rather sinister and finally quite incompre-hensible monster, by which, when we venture out of our ivory towers, we are instantly swallowed. And man, than whom, as Sophocles long since remarked, nothing is more monstrous, more marvelous, more terrifyingly strange (it is hard to find a single word to render his deinoteron)—man, too, is a very unsatisfactory subject for literature. For this creature of inconsistencies can live on too many planes of existence. He is the inhabitant of a kind of psychological Woolworth Building; you never know—he never knows himself—which floor he'll step out at tomorrow, nor even whether, a minute from now, he won't take it into his head to jump into the elevator and shoot up a dozen or down perhaps twenty stories into some totally different mode of being. The effect of the Manichaean condemnation of the body is at once to reduce this impossible skyscraper to less than half its original height. Confined henceforward to the mental floors of his being, man becomes an almost easily manageable subject for the writer. In the French tragedies (the most completely Manichaean works of art ever created) lust itself has ceased to be corporeal and takes its place among the other abstract symbols, with which the authors write their strange algebraical equations of passion and conflict. The beauty of algebraical symbols lies in their universality; they stand not for one particular case, but for all cases. Manichaeans, the classical writers confined them-selves exclusively to the study of man as a creature of pure reason and discarnate passions. Now the body particularizes and separates, the mind unites. By the very act of imposing limitations the classicists were enabled to achieve a certain universality of statement impossible to those who attempt to reproduce the particularities and incompletenesses of actual corporeal life. But what they gained in universality, they lost in vivacity and immediate truth. You cannot get something for nothing. Some people think that universality can be paid for too highly.
To enforce their ascetic code the classicists had to devise a system of critical sanctions. Chief among these was the stigma of vulgarity attached to all those who insisted too minutely on the physical side of man's existence. Speak of handkerchiefs in a tragedy? The solecism was as monstrous as picking teeth with a fork. At a dinner party in Paris not long ago I found myself sit-ting next to a French Professor of English, who assured me in the course of an otherwise very agreeable conversation that I was a leading member of the Neo-Classic school and that it was as a leading member of the Neo-Classic school that I was lectured about to the advanced students of contemporary Eng-lish literature under his tutelage. The news depressed me. Classified, like a museum specimen, and lectured about, I felt most dismally posthumous. But that was not all. The thought that I was a Neo-Classic preyed upon my mind—a Neo-Classic without knowing it, a Neo-Classic against all my de-sires and intentions. For I have never had the smallest ambi-tion to be a Classic of any kind, whether Neo, Palaeo, Proto or Eo. Not at any price. For, to begin with, I have a taste for the lively, the mixed and the incomplete in art, preferring it to the universal and the chemically pure. In the second place, I regard the classical discipline, with its insistence on elimination, concentration, simplification, as being, for all the formal difficulties it imposes on the writer, essentially an escape from, a getting out of, the greatest difficulty—which is to render adequately, in terms of literature, that infinitely complex and mysterious thing, actual reality. The world of mind is a comfortable Wombland, a place to which we flee from the bewildering queerness and multiplicity of the actual world. Matter is incomparably subtler and more intricate than mind. Or, to put it a little more philosophically, the consciousness of events which we have immediately, through our senses and intuitions and feelings, is incomparably subtler than any idea we can subsequently form of that immediate consciousness. Our most refined theories, our most elaborate descriptions are but crude and barbarous simplifications of a reality that is, in every smallest sample, infinitely complex. Now, simplifications must, of course, be made; if they were not, it would be quite impossible to deal artistically (or, for that matter, scientifically) with reality at all. What is the smallest amount of simplification compatible with compre-hensibility, compatible with the expression of a humanly sig-nificant meaning? It is the business of the non-classical naturalistic writer to discover. His ambition is to render, in literary terms, the quality of immediate experience—in other words, to express the finally inexpressible.
III
It was vulgar at the beginning of the nineteenth century to mention the word "handkerchief" on the French tragic stage. An arbitrary convention had decreed that tragic personages must inhabit a world, in which noses exist only to distinguish the noble Romans from the Greeks and Hebrews, never to be blown. Arbitrary conventions of one sort or another are essen-tial to art. But as the sort of convention constantly varies, so does the corresponding vulgarity. We are back among the relativities. In the case of the handkerchief we have a particular and rather absurd application of a very widely accepted artistic convention. This convention is justified by the ancient meta-physical doctrine, which distinguishes in the universe two principles, mind and matter, and which attributes to mind an immeasurable superiority. In the name of this principle many religions have demanded the sacrifice of the body; their devotees have responded by mortifying the flesh and, in extreme cases, by committing self-castration and even suicide. Literature has its Manichaeans as well as religion: men who on principle would exile the body and its functions from the world of their art, who condemn as vulgar all too particular and detailed accounts of physical actuality, as vulgar any attempt to relate mental or spiritual events to happenings in the body. The inhabitants of their universe are not human beings, but the tragical heroes and heroines who never blow their noses. Artistically, the abolition of handkerchiefs and all that handkerchiefs directly or indirectly stand for has certain ad-vantages. The handkerchiefless world of pure mind and spirit is, for an adult, the nearest approach to that infinitely com-fortable Freudian womb, toward which, as toward a lost paradise, we are always nostalgically yearning. In the handker chiefless mental world we are at liberty to work things out to their logical conclusions, we can guarantee the triumph of justice, we can control the weather and (in the words of those yearning popular songs which are the national anthems of Wombland) make our Dreams come True by living under Skies of Blue with You. Nature in the mental world is not that collection of tiresomely opaque and recalcitrant objects, so bewildering to the man of science, so malignantly hostile to the man of action; it is the luminously rational substance of a Hegelian nature-philosophy, a symbolic manifestation of the principles of dialectic. Artistically, such a Nature is much more satisfactory (because so much more easy to deal with) than the queer, rather sinister and finally quite incompre-hensible monster, by which, when we venture out of our ivory towers, we are instantly swallowed. And man, than whom, as Sophocles long since remarked, nothing is more monstrous, more marvelous, more terrifyingly strange (it is hard to find a single word to render his deinoteron)—man, too, is a very unsatisfactory subject for literature. For this creature of inconsistencies can live on too many planes of existence. He is the inhabitant of a kind of psychological Woolworth Building; you never know—he never knows himself—which floor he'll step out at tomorrow, nor even whether, a minute from now, he won't take it into his head to jump into the elevator and shoot up a dozen or down perhaps twenty stories into some totally different mode of being. The effect of the Manichaean condemnation of the body is at once to reduce this impossible skyscraper to less than half its original height. Confined henceforward to the mental floors of his being, man becomes an almost easily manageable subject for the writer. In the French tragedies (the most completely Manichaean works of art ever created) lust itself has ceased to be corporeal and takes its place among the other abstract symbols, with which the authors write their strange algebraical equations of passion and conflict. The beauty of algebraical symbols lies in their universality; they stand not for one particular case, but for all cases. Manichaeans, the classical writers confined them-selves exclusively to the study of man as a creature of pure reason and discarnate passions. Now the body particularizes and separates, the mind unites. By the very act of imposing limitations the classicists were enabled to achieve a certain universality of statement impossible to those who attempt to reproduce the particularities and incompletenesses of actual corporeal life. But what they gained in universality, they lost in vivacity and immediate truth. You cannot get something for nothing. Some people think that universality can be paid for too highly.
To enforce their ascetic code the classicists had to devise a system of critical sanctions. Chief among these was the stigma of vulgarity attached to all those who insisted too minutely on the physical side of man's existence. Speak of handkerchiefs in a tragedy? The solecism was as monstrous as picking teeth with a fork. At a dinner party in Paris not long ago I found myself sit-ting next to a French Professor of English, who assured me in the course of an otherwise very agreeable conversation that I was a leading member of the Neo-Classic school and that it was as a leading member of the Neo-Classic school that I was lectured about to the advanced students of contemporary Eng-lish literature under his tutelage. The news depressed me. Classified, like a museum specimen, and lectured about, I felt most dismally posthumous. But that was not all. The thought that I was a Neo-Classic preyed upon my mind—a Neo-Classic without knowing it, a Neo-Classic against all my de-sires and intentions. For I have never had the smallest ambi-tion to be a Classic of any kind, whether Neo, Palaeo, Proto or Eo. Not at any price. For, to begin with, I have a taste for the lively, the mixed and the incomplete in art, preferring it to the universal and the chemically pure. In the second place, I regard the classical discipline, with its insistence on elimination, concentration, simplification, as being, for all the formal difficulties it imposes on the writer, essentially an escape from, a getting out of, the greatest difficulty—which is to render adequately, in terms of literature, that infinitely complex and mysterious thing, actual reality. The world of mind is a comfortable Wombland, a place to which we flee from the bewildering queerness and multiplicity of the actual world. Matter is incomparably subtler and more intricate than mind. Or, to put it a little more philosophically, the consciousness of events which we have immediately, through our senses and intuitions and feelings, is incomparably subtler than any idea we can subsequently form of that immediate consciousness. Our most refined theories, our most elaborate descriptions are but crude and barbarous simplifications of a reality that is, in every smallest sample, infinitely complex. Now, simplifications must, of course, be made; if they were not, it would be quite impossible to deal artistically (or, for that matter, scientifically) with reality at all. What is the smallest amount of simplification compatible with compre-hensibility, compatible with the expression of a humanly sig-nificant meaning? It is the business of the non-classical naturalistic writer to discover. His ambition is to render, in literary terms, the quality of immediate experience—in other words, to express the finally inexpressible.
Sunday, May 15, 2016
Thomas Dewey by Wolcott Gibbs
He held out for a while, but when the procession of supplicants began to clog the halls of his office, he saw that it was no good; he shouldered the cross. The cold fact seems to be that Dewey became the nominal choice of the New York Republican Party for one of those reasons which make practical politics such a fascinating study for the lay-man. For years the New York delegation had gone to the national convention with its members hopelessly split, some favoring this man, some that. Last year the better minds decided that this was all nonsense and that it would be a good idea if everybody went to Philadelphia agreed on one man. Then, if he didn't go over on the first couple of ballots, the state chairman would be in a position to handle his delegation as a solid block in further negotiations. What happened, it seems, was that the dummy candidate decided to run in earnest, on a fine, expansive scale worthy of William Jennings Bryan. "We drafted this monkey," says one humble worker in the vineyard, "and, by Jesus, he took it serious." This would not be a particularly alarming situation for the New York strategists if the primaries in other states hadn't made it clear that a good many romantic citizens were also inclined to take Dewey serious—so many, in fact, that at the moment it is quite pos-sible that he will go to Philadelphia so firmly established as the People's Candidate that the boys in the back room, who would al-most prefer to run Mr. Beebe, will have to climb on the band wagon. Incidentally, they will not be able to tempt him with the lesser role of the Vice-Presidency. Dewey says emphatically that he is not interested in anything but the White House, explaining to one interviewer that it would be impossible for him to live suitably in Washington on $15,000 a year. "I can't afford it," he said. "It costs money to be a Vice-President."
* * *
What Dewey would be like in the White House can only be deduced rather arbitrarily from his history up to now. His early Life in Owosso, as previously noted, was suitable but dull, and so were his years in college, where he won singing and debating contests, got an adequate B grade in his studies, but was on the whole practi-cally indistinguishable from his contemporaries. Dewey's actual career, it might be said, dates from the summer of 1925, when, on a bicycle tour of France, he decided to grow a mustache. It turned out to be a dream—bushy, dramatic, an italicized swearword in a dull sentence. From then on, things began to happen. Later that year, he went to work prosaically for a law firm in New York, but he rose rapidly and by 1931, when he was twenty-nine, he was earning $8,000 a year. Furthermore, according to Rupert Hughes, whose biography of Dewey compares very favorably with some of Albert Payson Terhune's hymns to the collie, he "was handling most of the litiga-tion in his office." This statement is rather crossly denied by fellow-employees of the period, but there may be prejudice here, and anyway he was doing all right. The big break, however, came when he served on a case with George Z. Medalie and impressed him so vehemently that when Medalie took the post of United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, he offered Dewey a job at a salary around $3,500 as one of the sixty assistants on his staff Dewey, whose indif-ference to money is such that he can remember offhand how much he was making at any given day in his life, even for singing in choirs, politely declined that, as well as a subsequent bid of $6,000. He finally accepted only when Medalie had raised the ante to $7,500 and the position to that of chief assistant. In the two years and nine months that followed, the United. States Attorney's office successfully prosecuted such middle-sized kings of the underworld as Legs Diamond and Waxey Gordon, and a lot of minor nobility, including James Quinlivan, a vice cop whose moral fervor had netted him $8o,000 in three years, and James J. (Cupid) McCormick, the clerk in charge of the Marriage License Bureau, where, it seems, the pickings were also very nice.
Dewey established his first offices in the Woolworth Building, where he set up elaborate defences against the hosts of darkness, in-cluding a twenty-four-hour police guard inside the building, secret entrances, and a special untappable cable connected directly with the main office of the Telephone Company. After examining some four thousand applicants, he picked four chief assistants, sixteen assistants, ten accountants, and nine investigators. Then, with the Governor and the Mayor, he called on the public to come forward with information on racketeering, assuring witnesses of protection. The first, and rather discouraging, fish to fall into this net was a nineteen-year-old boy whom Dewey's agents caught breaking windows, but soon the big ones began to come along. The biggest unquestionably was Lucky Luciano, who, in the eyes of casual newspaper readers, soon came to bear the same relation to organized prostitution that, the late John D. Rockefeller once bore to petroleum. Luciano's tentacles were everywhere, his income was fabulous, there wasn't a sporting lady in New York who didn't shiver in her chemise at the mention of his name. Rupert Hughes, giving a little shudder himself, called him "the deadliest and most evil genius in the whole country." There are those, even among his enemies, who claim that Luci-ano never got a dollar from prostitution in his life, and it is known that he was doing nothing more deadly than making book at Sara-toga when he was surprised to learn that Dewey had crowned him King of Vice. Nevertheless, sex being what it is, the trial was a tre-mendous artistic success. In addition to revealing the gay and pro-vocative names which most of the girls had thought up for themselves, the testimony was gratifyingly explicit and gave the public a good working picture of the technical structure of a pretty complicated business. A lot of the entertainment also lay in the relations between Mr. Dewey and his staff and the witnesses who eventually won the case for the prosecution. From the beginning, the young women were treated with exceptional tenderness and chivalry, even though one of the investigators persisted in wearing gloves through-out the trial and several of them were rather ungallantly mystified when their clients insisted they were virgins. As the girls began to come through with the right kind of testimony, they were shown even more consideration. They were set up in apartments and hotels around town, given spending money, taken to the movies, on shopping trips, out to cocktails, and even to night clubs. This last practice, however, fell into disrepute when one of them, in the company of an assistant prosecutor, was observed by the opposition having a fine, though somewhat incoherent, time at Leon & Eddie's.
* * *
What Dewey would be like in the White House can only be deduced rather arbitrarily from his history up to now. His early Life in Owosso, as previously noted, was suitable but dull, and so were his years in college, where he won singing and debating contests, got an adequate B grade in his studies, but was on the whole practi-cally indistinguishable from his contemporaries. Dewey's actual career, it might be said, dates from the summer of 1925, when, on a bicycle tour of France, he decided to grow a mustache. It turned out to be a dream—bushy, dramatic, an italicized swearword in a dull sentence. From then on, things began to happen. Later that year, he went to work prosaically for a law firm in New York, but he rose rapidly and by 1931, when he was twenty-nine, he was earning $8,000 a year. Furthermore, according to Rupert Hughes, whose biography of Dewey compares very favorably with some of Albert Payson Terhune's hymns to the collie, he "was handling most of the litiga-tion in his office." This statement is rather crossly denied by fellow-employees of the period, but there may be prejudice here, and anyway he was doing all right. The big break, however, came when he served on a case with George Z. Medalie and impressed him so vehemently that when Medalie took the post of United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, he offered Dewey a job at a salary around $3,500 as one of the sixty assistants on his staff Dewey, whose indif-ference to money is such that he can remember offhand how much he was making at any given day in his life, even for singing in choirs, politely declined that, as well as a subsequent bid of $6,000. He finally accepted only when Medalie had raised the ante to $7,500 and the position to that of chief assistant. In the two years and nine months that followed, the United. States Attorney's office successfully prosecuted such middle-sized kings of the underworld as Legs Diamond and Waxey Gordon, and a lot of minor nobility, including James Quinlivan, a vice cop whose moral fervor had netted him $8o,000 in three years, and James J. (Cupid) McCormick, the clerk in charge of the Marriage License Bureau, where, it seems, the pickings were also very nice.
Dewey established his first offices in the Woolworth Building, where he set up elaborate defences against the hosts of darkness, in-cluding a twenty-four-hour police guard inside the building, secret entrances, and a special untappable cable connected directly with the main office of the Telephone Company. After examining some four thousand applicants, he picked four chief assistants, sixteen assistants, ten accountants, and nine investigators. Then, with the Governor and the Mayor, he called on the public to come forward with information on racketeering, assuring witnesses of protection. The first, and rather discouraging, fish to fall into this net was a nineteen-year-old boy whom Dewey's agents caught breaking windows, but soon the big ones began to come along. The biggest unquestionably was Lucky Luciano, who, in the eyes of casual newspaper readers, soon came to bear the same relation to organized prostitution that, the late John D. Rockefeller once bore to petroleum. Luciano's tentacles were everywhere, his income was fabulous, there wasn't a sporting lady in New York who didn't shiver in her chemise at the mention of his name. Rupert Hughes, giving a little shudder himself, called him "the deadliest and most evil genius in the whole country." There are those, even among his enemies, who claim that Luci-ano never got a dollar from prostitution in his life, and it is known that he was doing nothing more deadly than making book at Sara-toga when he was surprised to learn that Dewey had crowned him King of Vice. Nevertheless, sex being what it is, the trial was a tre-mendous artistic success. In addition to revealing the gay and pro-vocative names which most of the girls had thought up for themselves, the testimony was gratifyingly explicit and gave the public a good working picture of the technical structure of a pretty complicated business. A lot of the entertainment also lay in the relations between Mr. Dewey and his staff and the witnesses who eventually won the case for the prosecution. From the beginning, the young women were treated with exceptional tenderness and chivalry, even though one of the investigators persisted in wearing gloves through-out the trial and several of them were rather ungallantly mystified when their clients insisted they were virgins. As the girls began to come through with the right kind of testimony, they were shown even more consideration. They were set up in apartments and hotels around town, given spending money, taken to the movies, on shopping trips, out to cocktails, and even to night clubs. This last practice, however, fell into disrepute when one of them, in the company of an assistant prosecutor, was observed by the opposition having a fine, though somewhat incoherent, time at Leon & Eddie's.
Friday, May 13, 2016
Final: Liebniz and Spinoza
In early years of the Enlightenment, Leibniz achieved popularity as the spokesperson of a soft-core version of the new faith in reason. In the eyes of many, his Theodicy in particular seemed to promise a happy third way between the hard truths of science and the seemingly out-moded doctrines of orthodox belief. Unfortunately, popularity brought scrutiny, and scrutiny soon led to scorn. With Spinoza largely forgotten and the profound nature of the challenge he represented still poorly understood, Leibniz's metaphysical system baffled most of its readers. Like a dialogue with every other line removed, the monadology lay exposed to incomprehension and ridicule, which it promptly received in undue measure. In England, where resentments over the priority dispute with Newton still festered, Leibniz became the butt of satire from wits such as Jonathan Swift. The unkindest cuts, however, came from France. "Can you really maintain that a drop of urine is an infinity of monads, and that each one of these has ideas, however obscure, of the entire universe?" scoffed Voltaire. As the Enlightenment stumbled through revolution and reaction, both Leibniz and Spinoza emerged from obscurity in strange new incarnations. Spinoza's most popular and enduring persona dates from an evening in 1765 when Gotthold Ephraim Lessing picked up a dusty copy of the Opera Posthuma and discovered between its covers a mystical pantheist. The most infamous atheist of the seventeenth
century became the "God-intoxicated man" of Novalis. Even today, the dreamy, reclusive spiritualist dominates the public image of Spin-oza. The political revolutionary who sought to overthrow theological tyranny and deconstruct the very idea of spirituality has long been forgotten. The battered ghost of Leibniz found new life, too—in a pair of separate and curiously incompatible incarnations. On the one hand, the author of the Monadology was celebrated as a "literary" philosopher, the inventor of "the unconscious," and the purveyor of a magical and romantic vision that could take us well beyond the limits of scientific rationality. On the other hand, somewhat later, Leibniz was hailed as a pioneering logician. Russell and others who sought to place the study of logic at the foundation of philosophy claimed to see in Leibniz's metaphysics an astonishingly prescient and coherent application of fundamental principles of logic.
In the histories of philosophy that dominate the trade, it was Immanuel Kant who sealed the fate of the two greatest philosophers of the seventeenth century. In his effort to tame philosophy into a discipline suitable for the modern academy, Kant trained his attention on the methods whereby philosophers purported to justify their claims to knowledge. He divided his immediate predecessors into two groups: the empiricists, who allegedly relied on sense experience to base their claims to knowledge, and the rationalists, who were said to derive their truths from pure reason. According to Kant's peculiar scheme, Leibniz and Spinoza wound up playing on the same side of history. Together with Descartes—the man Leibniz loathed and Spin-oza regarded as seriously confused—they became the three rational-ists. Leading the empiricist opposition was John Locke—the same whom Leibniz regarded as a wobbly crypto-Spinozist. He was joined by the Irish philosopher George Berkeley, whose view that physical objects are only ideas in the head strikes most readers as distinctly unempirical, and David Hume, whose ideas about the mind and causality look remarkably like those of Spinoza. Hegel, who very much liked to see history move along in groups of three, strongly championed Kant's version of events; and the British, who were pleased to see a trio of their greatest philosophers were of the period lined up against three continental musketeers, more than happy to go along with the story, too. As a result, in philosophy classes to the present, where irony tends to be a scarce commodity in any case, Spinoza and the man who dedicated his life to expunging Spinoza's name from the world's memory are presented as happy partners on the same side of a debate about the epistemological foundations of academic philosophy. Only very recently have scholars begun to rescue Leibniz and Spinoza from the revisionist schemes of their philosophical successors. In the conventional histories of philosophy, Leibniz and Spinoza ultimately fall victim not to progress but to the idea of progress—an idea that first gained currency toward the end of the eighteenth cen-tury and that has since been taken up with gusto by all those who have a stake in presenting philosophy as a respectable, quasi-scientific discipline. Once we set aside suspect narratives of the history, how-ever, it becomes clear that, far from being left behind by their modern successors, Leibniz and Spinoza remain unsurpassed today as representatives of humankind's radically divided response to the set of experiences we call modernity. Much of modern thought simply wanders in the space between the two extremes represented by the men who met in The Hague in 1676. The active response to modernity inaugurated by Spinoza has sup-plied the basic theory for the modern, liberal political order, as well as the underpinnings of modern science. Its aim is to show us how to be moral in a secular society, and how to seek wisdom where nothing is certain. In its religious or mystical moments, it is the experience of a new kind of divinity—or perhaps the revival of one that was lost to the western world during the period of theocratic rule. Its effects are easily discerned even in thinkers who publicly derided Spinoza—Locke, Hume, Voltaire, and Nietzsche, to name some examples. And yet, although the world we live in is perhaps better and more originally described by Spinoza, the reactive form of modernity that began with Leibniz has in fact become the dominant form of modern philosophy. Anxious over the apparent purposelessness of the world revealed by modern science; bitter about the threatened demo-tion of humankind from its special place in nature; alienated from a society that seems to recognize no transcendent goals; and unwilling to assume personal responsibility for happiness—a needy humankind has reinvented the Leibnizian philosophy with abandon over the past three centuries. Kant's attempt to prove the existence of a "noumenal" world of pure selves and things in themselves on the basis of a critique of pure reason; the nineteenth-century-spanning efforts to reconcile teleol-ogy with mechanism that began with Hegel; Bergson's claim to have discovered a world of life forces immune to the analytical embrace of modern science; Heidegger's call for the overthrow of western meta-physics in order to recover the truth about Being; and the whole "postmodern" project of deconstructing the phallogocentric tradition of western thought—all of these diverse trends in modern thought have one thing in common: they are at bottom forms of the reaction to modernity first instantiated by Leibniz. All begin with the conviction that there is some vital aspect of experience which escapes modern thought. All maintain that the purpose of life begins where modernity ends. All claim to discover the special and elusive meaning of existence through an analysis of the putative failures of modern thought. And all remain indissolubly attached to precisely that which they oppose. Leibniz's latter-day followers call the extramodern mystery at the core of existence any number of names: Being, Becoming, Life, the Absolute, the Will, nonlinear rationality, and more. But it is no differ-ent in principle from what Leibniz calls the principle of activity, the immortal soul, and, finally, the monad. The modern Leibnizians pro-duce an equally diverse set of labels for that to which they are opposed: mechanism, instrumental reason, the Enlightenment, west-ern metaphysics, phallogocentrism, and so on. But their nemeses are in the end the same thing that Leibniz calls materialism, the philosophy of the moderns, "the opinions of certain recent innovators," or, in moments of clarity, Spinozism.
LIKE ALL GOOD philosophers, Leibniz and Spinoza must eventually come to a rest somewhere outside of history. The two men who met in 1676 in fact represent a pair of radically different philo-
sophical personality types that have always been part of the human experience. Spinoza speaks for those who believe that happiness and virtue are possible with nothing more than what we have in our hands. Leibniz stands for those convinced that happiness and virtue depend on something that lies beyond. Spinoza counsels calm atten-tion to our own deepest good. Leibniz expresses that irrepressible longing to see our good works reflected back to us in the praise of others. Spinoza affirms the totality of things such as it is. Leibniz is that part of us that ceaselessly strives to make us something more than what we are. Without doubt, there is a little piece of each in every-body; equally certain is the fact that, at times, a choice must be made. Leibniz was a man whose failings were writ as large as his outsized virtues.Yet it was his greed, his vanity, and above all, his insatiable, all too human neediness that made his work so emblematic for the species. With the promise that the cruel surface of experience conceals a most pleasing and beautiful truth, a world in which everything happens for a reason and all is for the best, the glamorous courtier of Hanover made himself into the philosopher of the common man. If Spinoza was the first great thinker of the modern era, then perhaps Leibniz should count as its first human being. Spinoza, on the other hand, was marked from the start as a rara avis. Given his eerie self-sufficiency, his inhuman virtue, and his contempt for the multitudes, it could not have been otherwise.Yet the message of his philosophy is not that we know all that there is to know; but rather that there is nothing that cannot be known. Spinoza's teaching is that there is no unfathomable mystery in the world; no other-world accessible only through revelation or epiphany; no hidden power capable of judging or affirming us; no secret truth about everything. There is instead only the slow and steady accumulation of many small truths; and the most important of these is that we need expect nothing more in order to find happiness in this world. His is a philosophy for philosophers, who are as uncommon now as they have always been.
century became the "God-intoxicated man" of Novalis. Even today, the dreamy, reclusive spiritualist dominates the public image of Spin-oza. The political revolutionary who sought to overthrow theological tyranny and deconstruct the very idea of spirituality has long been forgotten. The battered ghost of Leibniz found new life, too—in a pair of separate and curiously incompatible incarnations. On the one hand, the author of the Monadology was celebrated as a "literary" philosopher, the inventor of "the unconscious," and the purveyor of a magical and romantic vision that could take us well beyond the limits of scientific rationality. On the other hand, somewhat later, Leibniz was hailed as a pioneering logician. Russell and others who sought to place the study of logic at the foundation of philosophy claimed to see in Leibniz's metaphysics an astonishingly prescient and coherent application of fundamental principles of logic.
In the histories of philosophy that dominate the trade, it was Immanuel Kant who sealed the fate of the two greatest philosophers of the seventeenth century. In his effort to tame philosophy into a discipline suitable for the modern academy, Kant trained his attention on the methods whereby philosophers purported to justify their claims to knowledge. He divided his immediate predecessors into two groups: the empiricists, who allegedly relied on sense experience to base their claims to knowledge, and the rationalists, who were said to derive their truths from pure reason. According to Kant's peculiar scheme, Leibniz and Spinoza wound up playing on the same side of history. Together with Descartes—the man Leibniz loathed and Spin-oza regarded as seriously confused—they became the three rational-ists. Leading the empiricist opposition was John Locke—the same whom Leibniz regarded as a wobbly crypto-Spinozist. He was joined by the Irish philosopher George Berkeley, whose view that physical objects are only ideas in the head strikes most readers as distinctly unempirical, and David Hume, whose ideas about the mind and causality look remarkably like those of Spinoza. Hegel, who very much liked to see history move along in groups of three, strongly championed Kant's version of events; and the British, who were pleased to see a trio of their greatest philosophers were of the period lined up against three continental musketeers, more than happy to go along with the story, too. As a result, in philosophy classes to the present, where irony tends to be a scarce commodity in any case, Spinoza and the man who dedicated his life to expunging Spinoza's name from the world's memory are presented as happy partners on the same side of a debate about the epistemological foundations of academic philosophy. Only very recently have scholars begun to rescue Leibniz and Spinoza from the revisionist schemes of their philosophical successors. In the conventional histories of philosophy, Leibniz and Spinoza ultimately fall victim not to progress but to the idea of progress—an idea that first gained currency toward the end of the eighteenth cen-tury and that has since been taken up with gusto by all those who have a stake in presenting philosophy as a respectable, quasi-scientific discipline. Once we set aside suspect narratives of the history, how-ever, it becomes clear that, far from being left behind by their modern successors, Leibniz and Spinoza remain unsurpassed today as representatives of humankind's radically divided response to the set of experiences we call modernity. Much of modern thought simply wanders in the space between the two extremes represented by the men who met in The Hague in 1676. The active response to modernity inaugurated by Spinoza has sup-plied the basic theory for the modern, liberal political order, as well as the underpinnings of modern science. Its aim is to show us how to be moral in a secular society, and how to seek wisdom where nothing is certain. In its religious or mystical moments, it is the experience of a new kind of divinity—or perhaps the revival of one that was lost to the western world during the period of theocratic rule. Its effects are easily discerned even in thinkers who publicly derided Spinoza—Locke, Hume, Voltaire, and Nietzsche, to name some examples. And yet, although the world we live in is perhaps better and more originally described by Spinoza, the reactive form of modernity that began with Leibniz has in fact become the dominant form of modern philosophy. Anxious over the apparent purposelessness of the world revealed by modern science; bitter about the threatened demo-tion of humankind from its special place in nature; alienated from a society that seems to recognize no transcendent goals; and unwilling to assume personal responsibility for happiness—a needy humankind has reinvented the Leibnizian philosophy with abandon over the past three centuries. Kant's attempt to prove the existence of a "noumenal" world of pure selves and things in themselves on the basis of a critique of pure reason; the nineteenth-century-spanning efforts to reconcile teleol-ogy with mechanism that began with Hegel; Bergson's claim to have discovered a world of life forces immune to the analytical embrace of modern science; Heidegger's call for the overthrow of western meta-physics in order to recover the truth about Being; and the whole "postmodern" project of deconstructing the phallogocentric tradition of western thought—all of these diverse trends in modern thought have one thing in common: they are at bottom forms of the reaction to modernity first instantiated by Leibniz. All begin with the conviction that there is some vital aspect of experience which escapes modern thought. All maintain that the purpose of life begins where modernity ends. All claim to discover the special and elusive meaning of existence through an analysis of the putative failures of modern thought. And all remain indissolubly attached to precisely that which they oppose. Leibniz's latter-day followers call the extramodern mystery at the core of existence any number of names: Being, Becoming, Life, the Absolute, the Will, nonlinear rationality, and more. But it is no differ-ent in principle from what Leibniz calls the principle of activity, the immortal soul, and, finally, the monad. The modern Leibnizians pro-duce an equally diverse set of labels for that to which they are opposed: mechanism, instrumental reason, the Enlightenment, west-ern metaphysics, phallogocentrism, and so on. But their nemeses are in the end the same thing that Leibniz calls materialism, the philosophy of the moderns, "the opinions of certain recent innovators," or, in moments of clarity, Spinozism.
LIKE ALL GOOD philosophers, Leibniz and Spinoza must eventually come to a rest somewhere outside of history. The two men who met in 1676 in fact represent a pair of radically different philo-
sophical personality types that have always been part of the human experience. Spinoza speaks for those who believe that happiness and virtue are possible with nothing more than what we have in our hands. Leibniz stands for those convinced that happiness and virtue depend on something that lies beyond. Spinoza counsels calm atten-tion to our own deepest good. Leibniz expresses that irrepressible longing to see our good works reflected back to us in the praise of others. Spinoza affirms the totality of things such as it is. Leibniz is that part of us that ceaselessly strives to make us something more than what we are. Without doubt, there is a little piece of each in every-body; equally certain is the fact that, at times, a choice must be made. Leibniz was a man whose failings were writ as large as his outsized virtues.Yet it was his greed, his vanity, and above all, his insatiable, all too human neediness that made his work so emblematic for the species. With the promise that the cruel surface of experience conceals a most pleasing and beautiful truth, a world in which everything happens for a reason and all is for the best, the glamorous courtier of Hanover made himself into the philosopher of the common man. If Spinoza was the first great thinker of the modern era, then perhaps Leibniz should count as its first human being. Spinoza, on the other hand, was marked from the start as a rara avis. Given his eerie self-sufficiency, his inhuman virtue, and his contempt for the multitudes, it could not have been otherwise.Yet the message of his philosophy is not that we know all that there is to know; but rather that there is nothing that cannot be known. Spinoza's teaching is that there is no unfathomable mystery in the world; no other-world accessible only through revelation or epiphany; no hidden power capable of judging or affirming us; no secret truth about everything. There is instead only the slow and steady accumulation of many small truths; and the most important of these is that we need expect nothing more in order to find happiness in this world. His is a philosophy for philosophers, who are as uncommon now as they have always been.
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
Alexander Woollcott by Wolcott Gibbs
from Backwards Ran Sentences:
Charles Brackett, a devoted admirer, described him in one of his novels as "a competent old horror with a style that combined clear treacle and pure black bile," while Harpo Marx spoke of his idol considered sheerly as an artist. "He is just a big dreamer;" said Mr. Marx, "with a good sense of double-entry bookkeeping." Elsie Janis's mother, struggling to define the effect that Mr. Woollcott has on people who aren't altogether used to him, said that in many ways he was like a fine old olive, and S. N. Behr-man, who twice permitted him to play himself on the stage, caused one of his heroines to express herself crossly. "Oh, Sig, Sig," she cried, "if you'd been a woman, what a bitch you would have made!" Back in 1921, George Jean Nathan wrote a scurrilous article about him in the Smart Set entitled "The Seidlitz Powder of Times Square," and once, Howard Dietz, afflicted by prose more beautiful than he could bear, called him Louisa M. Woollcott, thus speaking for thousands who had also been troubled without ever quite knowing what was the matter with them. These tributes for the most part have come from the more articulate of the eight hundred. The rest have usually contented themselves with describing him simply and passionately as a monster, or at the very least as a man of absurdly mixed ancestry. The caricaturists have also been severe, which is probably un-grateful of them, for Mr. Woollcott is a persistently obliging model, one wartime associate on the Stars and Stripes, the A.E.F. weekly newspaper, even hinting that he was by no means above using his sergeant's chevrons to compel gifted privates to draw pictures of him. His face, of course, could not have been more helpfully designed for their purposes. Florence Atwater, one of Booth Tarkington's darkly observant little girls, once came close to his total effect, al-though at the time she was speaking of her grandfather's cook. "Her face is sort of small," she said, wrestling with the inexpressible, "but the other parts of her head are terribly wide." Mr. Woollcott's small features occupy the front part of a head which is at least wider than most. He has a rather beaked nose and a tight mouth and a negligible mustache, all closely grouped. His eyes are made strange and fierce by thick glasses. A clever child could easily draw him and, as a matter of fact, many have, although usually under the impression that they were turning out owls.
-
It has also called forth a certain amount of criticism, a few serious thinkers being of the opinion that Mr. Woollcott's interests are rather peripheral, to put it mildly. There have been moments of embarrassment when his proteges have backfired on him.
-
He loves Neshobe as proudly and jealously as young Bonaparte loved Corsica. The island is a perpetual source of wonder to the simple Ver-mont natives who circumnavigate it cautiously in motorboats and observe the inmates, who are frequently to be seen lying like seals along the rocky shore. The general opinion apparently is that Ne-shobe is a sort of Hollywood nudist camp, and this leads to odd con-fusions. Thornton Wilder has been mistaken for Jack Benny, and MacArthur, sun-bathing in the nude, was once pleased to hear him-self identified as Irving Berlin and sang "All Alone" loud and clear in gratitude. A few years ago, Mr. Woollcott himself, inadequately wrapped in a dressing gown and wearing a limp, enormous straw hat, was reading one day on the dock when a boatload of sightseers drifted by. Their voices came to him quite plainly over the water. "Who on earth is that?" he heard one lady cry in startled and even rather horrified tones. "I'm not sure," said another voice doubtfully, "but I think it's Marie Dressler."
Charles Brackett, a devoted admirer, described him in one of his novels as "a competent old horror with a style that combined clear treacle and pure black bile," while Harpo Marx spoke of his idol considered sheerly as an artist. "He is just a big dreamer;" said Mr. Marx, "with a good sense of double-entry bookkeeping." Elsie Janis's mother, struggling to define the effect that Mr. Woollcott has on people who aren't altogether used to him, said that in many ways he was like a fine old olive, and S. N. Behr-man, who twice permitted him to play himself on the stage, caused one of his heroines to express herself crossly. "Oh, Sig, Sig," she cried, "if you'd been a woman, what a bitch you would have made!" Back in 1921, George Jean Nathan wrote a scurrilous article about him in the Smart Set entitled "The Seidlitz Powder of Times Square," and once, Howard Dietz, afflicted by prose more beautiful than he could bear, called him Louisa M. Woollcott, thus speaking for thousands who had also been troubled without ever quite knowing what was the matter with them. These tributes for the most part have come from the more articulate of the eight hundred. The rest have usually contented themselves with describing him simply and passionately as a monster, or at the very least as a man of absurdly mixed ancestry. The caricaturists have also been severe, which is probably un-grateful of them, for Mr. Woollcott is a persistently obliging model, one wartime associate on the Stars and Stripes, the A.E.F. weekly newspaper, even hinting that he was by no means above using his sergeant's chevrons to compel gifted privates to draw pictures of him. His face, of course, could not have been more helpfully designed for their purposes. Florence Atwater, one of Booth Tarkington's darkly observant little girls, once came close to his total effect, al-though at the time she was speaking of her grandfather's cook. "Her face is sort of small," she said, wrestling with the inexpressible, "but the other parts of her head are terribly wide." Mr. Woollcott's small features occupy the front part of a head which is at least wider than most. He has a rather beaked nose and a tight mouth and a negligible mustache, all closely grouped. His eyes are made strange and fierce by thick glasses. A clever child could easily draw him and, as a matter of fact, many have, although usually under the impression that they were turning out owls.
-
It has also called forth a certain amount of criticism, a few serious thinkers being of the opinion that Mr. Woollcott's interests are rather peripheral, to put it mildly. There have been moments of embarrassment when his proteges have backfired on him.
-
He loves Neshobe as proudly and jealously as young Bonaparte loved Corsica. The island is a perpetual source of wonder to the simple Ver-mont natives who circumnavigate it cautiously in motorboats and observe the inmates, who are frequently to be seen lying like seals along the rocky shore. The general opinion apparently is that Ne-shobe is a sort of Hollywood nudist camp, and this leads to odd con-fusions. Thornton Wilder has been mistaken for Jack Benny, and MacArthur, sun-bathing in the nude, was once pleased to hear him-self identified as Irving Berlin and sang "All Alone" loud and clear in gratitude. A few years ago, Mr. Woollcott himself, inadequately wrapped in a dressing gown and wearing a limp, enormous straw hat, was reading one day on the dock when a boatload of sightseers drifted by. Their voices came to him quite plainly over the water. "Who on earth is that?" he heard one lady cry in startled and even rather horrified tones. "I'm not sure," said another voice doubtfully, "but I think it's Marie Dressler."
Saturday, May 07, 2016
Steiglitz by Janet Malcolm
Steiglitz almost single-handedly dislodged photography from its position at the turn of the century as a kind of genteel hobby, and propelled it directly into the mainstream of modern art. This achievement was carried out in two stages, buttressed by two ideas. At the time, the most advanced photographers were modelling their work on Symbolist, Impressionist, and Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and Stieglitz's first move (in 1902.) was to give this tendency a name—the Photo-Secession. Like Lawrence Alloway's coinage "Pop Art," the label gave definition and direction to something that was not all that definite and direct, and provided both practitioners and public with a point of departure. Today, the Photo-Secession is largely viewed as a misguided attempt to make photography an art form by turning it into a bastard form, and in the light of sub-sequent achievements—by Strand, Evans, Kertesz, Cartier-Bresson, and other modern masters—the portentous, misty landscapes and the blurred, symbolic portraits (achieved by out-of-focus lenses and manipulated negatives and prints) of sad, gowned women [4] and marmoreal, naked children look strained and enervated. But if one goes back to the photography before the Photo-Secession—to the ludicrous anecdotal "art photographs" like Rejlander's "The Two Ways of Life", and to the boring geography-book pictures of foreign cities and landscapes—the pictorial school assumes its proper significance. Although photography soon went "straight" (i.e., photographers put their lenses back into focus and stopped scratching their negatives and smearing their prints with gum bichromate), it has retained the pictorial formalism brought to it by the Photo-Secessionists. What has changed is the literal-ness of photography's relationship to painting: photographs no longer exhibit the surface qualities of paintings and drawings. But they do retain paintings' formalism, which Stieglitz saw, correctly, as the key to photography's liberation from its mechanical basis and its transformation into an art. His own early photographs--alive and spontaneous in a way that none of his contemporaries could match—invariably displayed this quality in its strictest application. Pictorial formalism as a pre-requisite for all else was the real Lesson of the Master. Stieglitz's second, and truly extraordinary, idea was that of showing the most advanced painting and sculpture of the day at the gallery he had rented at 291 Fifth Avenue to display the work of the Photo-Secessionists Picasso, Cezanne, Picabia, Rodin, Brancusi, Marin, Hartley, Dove, Maurer, and O'Keeffe were among the artists (then almost unknown in America) that Stieglitz began showing a good eight years before the Armory Show of 1913 "brought" modern art to America. During most of its existence, 291 was the only place in New York where modern art was regularly exhibited, and Stieglitz's pioneering in this regard has been widely acknowledged. What has been insufficiently acknowledged is the importance for photography that lay in the hanging of strange and difficult abstractions alongside the Whistler-like and Redon-like Photo-Secession works. This established photography's association with mod-ernism, which we now take for granted but which was scarcely a historical necessity. It was, rather, a historical accident—the fact that a man of Stieglitz's extraordinary intellectual forward-ness (his personal forwardness is something else again) should have entered photography when he did, when there were com-bination photography-and-bicycling clubs and a museum would as soon have hung a potholder as a photograph. That the Museum of Modern Art formed a department of photography in 1940, that most museums now show photographs, and that an almost automatic interest in photography exists among people who consider themselves advanced—all this goes back to him. Stieglitz was born in 1864, in Hoboken, of German-Jewish parents, and he grew up in a well-to-do, culture-centered household in which, Miss Norman writes, "neither the question of 'being Jewish' nor the meaning of the term was dis-cussed." In 1881, his father decided that he had made enough money (four hundred thousand dollars) and took his wife and six children to Europe for an indefinite period. Alfred enrolled as a student of mechanical engineering at the Berlin Polytechnic, but soon washed out. One day, he saw a camera in a shop window and bought it; before long, he was studying photog-raphy at the Polytechnic with a professor of photo-chemistry named Herman Wilhelm Vogel. In 1887, he won first prize in a "holiday work" competition of the London Amateur Photogra-pher for a picture he took in Italy and called "A Good Joke." The judge was Peter Henry Emerson, one of the earliest of out-of-focus pictorialists and a champion of the idea of photogra-phy as an art form (but who, in a curious reversal, suddenly changed his mind, declaring in 1891, in a black-bordered pam-phlet entitled The Death of Naturalistic Photography, that photography "must always rank the lowest of all the arts," adding, "I deeply regret that I have come to this conclusion"). In 1887, however, Emerson was still enamored of photography, and he was so impressed with Stieglitz's work that he wrote and told him that his entries were the only good ones in the entire competition.
and
Here and there in Stieglitz's writings one gets a whiff of the hidden connection, and in one place—an account of the circumstances under which he took his great photograph "The Steerage"—one feels that one has almost grasped it. He begins with characteristic pettishness:
In June 1907 my wife, our daughter Kitty, and I sailed for Europe. My wife insisted on going on a large ship, fashionable at the time. Our initial destination was Paris. How distasteful I found the atmosphere of first class on that ship, especially since it was impossible to escape the nouveaux riches. I sat in my steamer chair much of the time the first days out with closed eyes. In this way it became possible to avoid seeing faces that gave me the cold shivers. But those strident voices. Ye gods!
Stieglitz presently gets up and takes a walk on the deck. Then, happening to glance down into the steerage, he sees his great picture:
The scene fascinated me: a round straw hat; the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right; the white drawbridge, its railings made of chain; white suspenders crossed on the back of a man below; circular iron machinery; a mast that cut into the sky, completing a triangle. I stood spellbound for a while. I saw shapes related to one another—a picture of shapes and, under-lying it, a new vision that held me: simple people; the feeling of ship, ocean, sky; a sense of release that I was away from the mob called "rich." Rembrandt came into my mind and I wondered would he have felt as I did.
Stieglitz was able to race back to his cabin, grab his camera, and take the picture (God is good to artists: no one had moved) that is one of photography's masterpieces [7]. The peripatetic account of its creation—the abrupt transformation of the languid snob into the super-artist--is one of art history's illuminations.
and
Here and there in Stieglitz's writings one gets a whiff of the hidden connection, and in one place—an account of the circumstances under which he took his great photograph "The Steerage"—one feels that one has almost grasped it. He begins with characteristic pettishness:
In June 1907 my wife, our daughter Kitty, and I sailed for Europe. My wife insisted on going on a large ship, fashionable at the time. Our initial destination was Paris. How distasteful I found the atmosphere of first class on that ship, especially since it was impossible to escape the nouveaux riches. I sat in my steamer chair much of the time the first days out with closed eyes. In this way it became possible to avoid seeing faces that gave me the cold shivers. But those strident voices. Ye gods!
Stieglitz presently gets up and takes a walk on the deck. Then, happening to glance down into the steerage, he sees his great picture:
The scene fascinated me: a round straw hat; the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right; the white drawbridge, its railings made of chain; white suspenders crossed on the back of a man below; circular iron machinery; a mast that cut into the sky, completing a triangle. I stood spellbound for a while. I saw shapes related to one another—a picture of shapes and, under-lying it, a new vision that held me: simple people; the feeling of ship, ocean, sky; a sense of release that I was away from the mob called "rich." Rembrandt came into my mind and I wondered would he have felt as I did.
Stieglitz was able to race back to his cabin, grab his camera, and take the picture (God is good to artists: no one had moved) that is one of photography's masterpieces [7]. The peripatetic account of its creation—the abrupt transformation of the languid snob into the super-artist--is one of art history's illuminations.
Friday, May 06, 2016
Backwards Ran Sentences: on Beebe
When Lucius Beebe came to the Herald Tribune from the Boston Transcript, in June, 1929, he was twenty-seven years old, six feet four inches tall, and weighed in the neighborhood of a hundred and eighty pounds. His blond hair was closely cropped, and he looked strongly Germanic, like an especially rubicund officer in the Potsdam Guard. When he was introduced to Stanley Walker, the city editor, he said “sir” in a tone of booming deference, to the grateful amazement of the Tribune staff, which was not itself inclined to be punctilious.
Mr. Walker had never seen a reporter of such baroque design, but he was no man to recoil from the unknown, and he hired Beebe for thirty-five dollars a week. Thus began a career which may be tritely described as unique in American journalism, although it can never be said that Mr. Beebe was much of a reporter. He had an apathy about facts which verged closely on actual dislike, and the tangled wildwood of his prose was poorly adapted to describing small fires and negligible thefts. His splendid plumage and a certain jovial condescension in his manner were probably a source of either terror or indignation to the homely citizens who provide the bulk of routine news. We hear of him, in a top hat and opera cape, arriving fashionably late for the annual dinner of the Landscape Gardening Society, and there is a story that he attended a fire in a morning coat.
Nor was he always very clear about his assignments. Told to cover a banquet of the New York Central Railroad Engineers, he appeared somehow at one sponsored by the Caledonian Club, and after lingering only long enough to get a prepared copy of the principal speech, went back to his office to report that the President of the Central had incomprehensibly chosen to talk to his men about Scotland. He was astonished by the clamor which the publication of this item aroused, being clearly of the opinion that one damn dull dinner was very much like another.
Tuesday, May 03, 2016
The Girls of Slender Means
were stuck in Burma, that war was generally felt to be a remote affair. A few shorthand-typists at the May of Teck Club started to apply for safer jobs—that is to say, in private concerns, not connected with the war like the temporary Ministries where many of them had been employed. Their brothers and men-friends in the forces, not yet de-mobilised, by a long way, were talking of vivid enterprises for the exploitation of peace, such as buying a lorry and building up from it a transport business.
from the novel by Muriel Spark.
How spare this is and pinned together with articles of faith and suggestions of grace earned, evil salted in youth and what I imagine is supposed to be spasmodic holiness. Absolutely inchoately devout, her sentences ring with dispassionate observation. That combination is unnerving.... but the taut length and her playful plot make the novel buoyant and memorable.
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