The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change [Revised ed.] 0674133986, 9780674133983

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NUNC COGNOSCO EX PARTE

THOMAS J. BATA LI BRARY TRENT UNIVERSITY

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/classicliteraryiOOOOkerm

The Classic

ALSO BY FRANK KERMODE Puzzles and Epiphanies The Romantic Image Sense of an Ending Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne D. H. Lawrence

EDITED BY FRANK KERMODE The Living Milton: Essays by Various Hands The Metaphysical Poets

The Classic Literary Images of Permanence and Chang

Frank Kermode

The Viking Press ' New York

PM 5 to

. C6.K4-

Copyright © 1975 by Frank Kermode All rights reserved Published in 1975 by The Viking Press, Inc. 625 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022 The T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures Delivered at Eliot College in the University of Kent at Canterbury, November, 1973. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Kermode, John Frank. The classic. (The T. S. Eliot memorial lectures; 1973) Includes bibliographical references. 1. Classicism. 2. Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 1888-1965. What is a classic? I. Title. II. Series. pn 56.C6K4 80V.9 75-4824 ISBN 0-670-22508-8 Printed in U.S.A.

To Deborah and Mark

251966

The word ‘classic’ has a somewhat chilly sound.

Wolfflin

For every wight which that to Rome went, Halt not o path, nor alwey o manere.

Chaucer

There’s another rendering now; but still one text. All sorts of men in one kind of world, you see.

Melville, Moby Dick

r M THESE reflections had their origin in T. S. Eliot's paper m

JL.

‘

What is a Classic?’, which he delivered to the Virgil Society

in 1944. Having thought a good deal about that paper, and

about related essays, I was very glad to be able to oblige myself to ex¬ plore more systematically the implications of Eliot’s position, and to try to reconcile them with my own thoughts on the subject. The opportunity occurred when I was honoured by an invitation to deliver the T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures at the University of Kent. I am therefore much indebted to that University, and especially to the Master of Eliot College, who showed me extraordinary kindness during my days in Canterbury. Acknowledgements are also due to friends who, at various stages, commented upon and improved these lectures: fames Epperson, Stephen Fender, Basil Greenslade, Richard Poirier, f. B. Trapp, Keith Walker and Anita Van Vactor. Though she did not see them in the making, the lectures owe much to a habit, formed a very long time ago, of listening carefully to Frances Yates. Members of my graduate seminar at University College will notice that I have also listened to them. Finally I am most grateful to the authorities of Dartmouth College for enabling me to write the first draft of the lectures in the peaceful town of Hanover and with the handsome resources of the Baker Library. F. K.

9

The Classic

I alias inter caput extulit urhes, quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi

E

LIOT was, in the special sense to which I shall hereafter limit the word, an imperialist; ‘I am all for empires’, he once remarked.1 ‘Empire’ has, in his and related thought, connotations now grown somewhat unfamiliar; his sense of the term I shall have to enlarge upon before I can hope to make my own points about the classic, for the two notions are closely interwoven. But the inquiry ought to begin with the very title of Eliot’s essay. The question it puts is a very old one, for it must be asked in some form whenever there is in process any kind of secular canon-formation, any choice of authorities in matters of doctrine and style. The first writer known to have called such choices ‘classics’ is Aulus Gellius, a second-century author much con¬ cerned with correctness of various sorts. Classicus... scriptor, non proletarius: the classic writer is distinguished from the rabble. The social application of the term which Aulus is adapting has to do with one’s liability to pay taxes: a classic is a writer, so to speak, in the surtax class. Aulus added that classics would need to be of some antiquity (cohors antiquior vel oratorum vel poetarum)— naturally they have to come before you if you are to use them as models. The doctrine of classic as model or criterion entails, in some form, the assumption that the ancient can be more or less imme1 Transatlantic Review, Jan. 1924; quoted by R. Kojecky, T. S. Eliot’s Social Criticism, 1971, 53. The words occur in a letter to Ford Madox Ford on the occasion of his founding this new (and, as it turned out, shortlived) periodical. ‘I am all for empires, especially the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and I deplore the outburst of artificial nationalities ... all over the world.’ He goes on to say that the real nationalities have languages fit for literature; and that they should complement rather than conflict with one another. This neo-Dantean compro¬ mise between universalism and nationalism is—even despite the element of teasing (there was no longer an Austro-Hungarian Empire)—very characteristic; Eliot’s doctrine of the volgare illustre has, like Dante’s, powerful political and religious implications. Incidentally he will allow a language only one literature: ‘There can only be one English literature . . . there cannot be British literature, or American literature’ (T.R., i, 1924, 95-6). Later, on the evidence of‘Ameri¬ can Literature and the American Language’ (To Criticize the Critic, 1965), he changed his mind.

15

The Classic diately relevant and available, in a sense contemporaneous with modern—or anyway that its nature is such that it can, by strategies of accommodation, be made so. When this assumption is rejected the whole authority of the classic as model is being challenged, and then we have—whether in Alexandria or in twelfth- or seventeenth- or nineteenth- or twentieth-century Europe—the recurrent querelle between ancient and modern. What is being contested is a received opinion as to the structure of the past and of its relation to the present. It is a question of how the works of the past may retain identity in change, of the mode in which the ancient presents itself to the modern. The word ‘modern’ was apparently done without until the sixth century, but its invention made it possible to say, in a.d. 800, that Charlemagne had instituted a saeculum modernutn. The kind of change introduced by Charlemagne always involves a certain amount of quarrelling, but it constitutes not a querelle so much as a renovatio, a renovation of classical models, attended by a certain amount of clerical opposition. This modern is a renewal of the ancient. Still, renewing the past changes our sense of it. The greatest of the renovations, the one we call the Renaissance, did that too; it is also the best illustration of the truth that efforts to see the models clearly make them seem further off in time. Some of the difficulties of the subject arise from this paradox. The question in Eliot’s title was first asked, in so many words, by Sainte-Beuve in the causerie of 24 October 1850: ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un classique?’ Sainte-Beuve, in that brief essay, makes a few points about the ancient classic, cites Gellius, and praises the Renaissance for putting an end to much medieval confusion about the canon; but for the most part he is asking us to allow that there are a great many classics in the vernacular languages. His considered opinion of the ancient classic is to be sought else¬ where, in the lectures on Virgil which he wrote four years later in preparation for his disastrous tenure of the Chair of Latin at the College de France, and which he published as Etude sur Virgile in 1857. From the moment of his first appearance, says Sainte-Beuve, Virgil was ‘le poete de la Latinite tout entiere’. He gave a new 16

The Classic form not only to poetry but to civility—the passions, taste and sensibility. That we refer our culture to him and not to Homer is not an accident but a necessity of history. Ithaca is small, but Rome is Rome; and every nation thsct has sprung from Rome has always kept it in view. Direct cultural descent is paralleled by a genetic continuity; the Latin blood still flows, Rome is always the metropolis. And ‘Virgile est le poete du Capitole’. His sur¬ vival has been without discontinuity, and the increase of civiliza¬ tion only makes him better understood, especially in his repre¬ sentations of passion, piety and pity. So Sainte-Beuve began the lecture nobody would listen to. At the end of the next, which he was scarcely allowed even to deliver, he turned from Virgil, poet of the Latin metropolis, to Virgil the prophet who in 40 b.c. had foretold, in the Fourth Eclogue, the Augustan Peace. Later he became the very voice of that marvellous epoch, affirming, across all the decadence of empire that ensued, the values of a civilization brilliant, humane and pious. And the prophetic voice speaks of more than the old Rome: ‘La venue meme du Christ n’a rien qui etonne quand on a lu Virgile.’1 In these words he appropriates the old legend to his own use, and makes the Advent a stage in the development Latin civilization. It is in these Virgil lectures that Sainte-Beuve opens my princi¬ pal topic: Virgil as the classic of empire and the type of all classics. It is true that Sainte-Beuve has two ideas of the classic: it can be primarily an index of civility, or the product of indi¬ vidual genius, characterized by sanity, health and universality. On the basis of the first of these criteria he was able to make certain discriminations, for example relegating the age of Pope to the status of secondary classic because, though it possessed civility, it lacked perpetual contemporaneity. But Virgil is a classic in both senses: a great poet and also the poet ‘de la } Etude sur Virgile, edn. of 1891, 29-30, 68-9. It is known that Sainte-Beuve set great store by this work, wishing to prove that he might, as a professor, have renewed and enlarged the teaching of the classics. See Andre Billy, Sainte-Beuve: sa vie et son temps, 1952, ii, 153, reporting the author’s assistant Jules Levallois.

17

The Classic Latinite tout entiere’. Repeating his opinions in a letter to Matthew Arnold, he added that it was Virgil’s ability to make an ancient subject relevant to his historical moment that ensured the survival of the Aeneid.1 Here again we sense not only Latin solidarity but an admiration for a power that can preserve history as an integrated whole, include it in one enormous thought— the power that made Sainte-Beuve so great an admirer of Bossuet’s Discours sur VHistoire Universelle. It is this way of think¬ ing that entails the acceptance of Virgil as the very type of classic, the voice of a metropolitan whole of which we are but provincial parts. His correspondent Arnold did not wholly share these views; they implied perhaps a degree too much Aberglaube, certainly an over-valuation of the Latin races. Three years after receiving Sainte-Beuve’s letter he gave his own inaugural lecture as Pro¬ fessor of Poetry at Oxford, calling it ‘The Modern Element in Modern Literature’. He came straight to the point. Despite Dante’s views to the contrary, Virgil does not represent ‘the perfection of antiquity’. The right question to ask about him is very simple: Ts he adequate? Does he represent the epoch in which he lived, the mighty Roman world of his time, as the great poets of the great epoch of Greek life represented theirs, in all its fullness, in all its significance?’ And the answer is that he does not, partly because he chose a subject remote in time. That Arnold made the odd mistake of describing Homer as roughly contemporary with the Trojan War2 does not really affect the point. He was determined to disagree with Sainte-Beuve, and determined not to accept Virgil as the emblem of the classic and of a universal Latin culture. So he stresses his ‘incompleteness,’ and dwells on the ‘ineffable melancholy’ of the Aeneid rather than on its manners and its piety. To say that Virgil was not ‘adequate’ as the interpreter of the great period of Rome is far more serious than denying him that 1 Correspondance Generate, ed. J. Bonnerot, ix, 1959, 473-4. 2 Warren D. Anderson, Matthew Arnold and the Classical Tradition, 1965, 181, has some good remarks on this passage. 18

The Classic

slightly forbidding Arnoldian quality ‘cheerfulness’, for it strikes at the root of the whole imperialist doctrine, which SainteBeuve adumbrates, of Virgil’s universality as the classic of a perpetually renewed Latin civilization. Arnold does not feel that he has to discuss the perpetual or the prophetic Virgil at all, except by implication; instead he transfers the compliment of universality to fifth-century Athens, described as rational, cheer¬ ful, critical and modern. Like most people who speculate on this subject, he required of the classic that it should enable us to think of its age and our own together; but according to him this criterion allows one to call Marcus Aurelius, that ‘truly modern striver and thinker’, a classic, but not Virgil, who is relatively dead, trapped in an inaccessible past. There might, he says in a later essay, there might have been an alliance between pagan Rome and Christianity (such as others take Virgil to symbolize); but Christianity in fact turned out to be a solvent rather than a bond, and so, even in the time of the Antonines, it ‘was not to be’.1 We need a Greek rather than a Roman past; the classical ideal is Hellenist. Hellenism, rather than a renewed relation with metropolitan Rome, was the English Arnold’s cure for ‘provincialism’. He assumed, like the Latin imperialists, that the classic belongs to a privileged order of time and history. But whereas for SainteBeuve this order is continuous, almost genetic, because Latin, and, because French, institutionalized—a quality the English¬ man rather envied—for Arnold it is a Victorian version of fifthcentury Athens. What the two critics share are a belief in the modernity of the true classic, and the notion of provincialism, which implies a metropolis. With Arnold’s Hellenist substitute for metropolitan Latinity Eliot would have nothing to do—still less with Pater’s aesthetic version of it, which set up Winckelmann’s Antique as ortho¬ doxy, as constituting that permanence which all believers in the classic desire to find amidst change. We must, says Pater, take ‘the deeper view which preserves the identity of European 1 ‘Marcus Aurelius’, in Complete Prose Works, ed. R. H. Super, iii, 1962, 145.

19

t/

The Classic culture,’ and seek by new inventions that true modernity which conforms with the Antique, and renovates its union of body and spirit.1 With the view that the truly modern ought to be restora¬ tive of a primal unity one might have expected Eliot to agree; but Pater’s substitute for Latin empire had no political or ecclesiastical component, no imperial history; and that is why it proved unacceptable.2 3 Eliot, like Sainte-Beuve, was faithful to the Latin tradition. It is less easy for an Englishman or an American than for a Frenchman to profess citizenship of a Latin empire, but Eliot did so. ‘England is a “Latin” country,’ he pro¬ claimed in 1923.3 Twenty-six years later he qualified this a little: ‘When we consider the western world, we must recognize that the main cultural tradition has been that corresponding to the Church of Rome. Only within the last four hundred years has any other manifested itself; and anyone with a sense of centre and periphery must admit that the western tradition has been Latin, and Latin means Rome.. .. From this point of view, the separa¬ tion of Northern Europe, and ofEngland in particular, from com¬ munion with Rome represents a diversion from the main stream of culture.’4 In so far as we diverge we are provincial; in so far as we are still connected with that main stream we have claims to citizenship of the Empire. For of that Empire, despite our deviations, ‘we are all . . . still citizens’.5 This is, so to say, an Anglican modification of Sainte-Beuve. Eliot also accepted his criterion of the contemporaneity of the classic, and the concomitant doctrine: that history is, under all the appearance of change, a unity; that the modern is not abso¬ lutely new, but a renovation of a classic which the action of time 1 The Renaissance, edn. of 1925, 177 ff. 2 See Criterion, vii, 1928, 201, and Selected Essays, 1932, 393 ff. 3 Criterion, ii, 1923 (quoted by Curtius, European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard Trask, 1953, 35). 4 Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, 1949, 73. 6 ‘Virgil and the Christian World’, On Poetry and Poets, 1957, 130. See also his objections to the view which would class the study of Latin (and Greek) literature with Egyptology, in ‘The Classics and the Man of Letters’, Selected Prose, ed. J. Hayward, 1953, pp. 223-38. 20

The Classic has obscured, and which now reappears in a new relationship with the modern. His essay on the classic is, I think, more re¬ markable than Sainte-Beuve’s, partly because there was less a nonLatin could take for granted, partly because the context obliged him to make explicit ideas which had long dominated his think¬ ing about literature, and which were inexplicitly related to his thought on other subjects: history, religion and politics. In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, almost three decades before the Classic lecture, he had spoken of the mind of Europe as changing, but superannuating nothing; of a relation of old to new in which the existing order is modified by new work, the present joining and altering the past in some modality beyond chronological time, so that the poet must live ‘in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past’.1 ‘Tradition’ is the word for the continuum, ‘talent’ is the historical agent of renovation. The past has its set of significance—it is present to us; our understanding of it varies but without break¬ ing the set. Tradition is difficult to grasp because it is essentially unrelated to practice, much as love is ‘timeless, and undesiring./ Except in the aspect of time.’ But to see the timeless in relation to its temporal manifestations is as much the task of the critic as of the political philosopher or theologian. It is not his job to see literature ‘as consecrated by time, but to see it beyond time’.2 If he does this he will see that literature, like religion, has its metropolitan orthodoxies. Such a view of the past provides a common context for topics usually regarded as disparate. In its extreme moments it insists on an orthodoxy that ought to be discernible at any time whatever, because of its essential perpetuity. This is why Eliot was able, in After Strange Gods, to pronounce certain modern writers ‘hereti¬ cal’ ; the sense of the word is adapted to critical use, but the usage is literal, not metaphorical.3 Eliot also argued for a necessary diversity in religion and culture 1 Selected Essays, 13 ff. 2 The Sacred Wood, edn. of 1950, xvi. 3 After Strange Gods, 1934, 53. 21

The Classic (always taking them, at some level, to be aspects of the same thing) and he was, for good Dantean reasons, a champion of the vernaculars; but this diversity had to be consistent with the con¬ cept of a single cultural tradition, and that a Latin tradition. Such were the beliefs, and such the tensions between them, that animated his lecture ‘What is a Classic?’1 Excluding from consideration a multitude of uses the word has in ordinary language, and also the classic-romantic antithesis, Eliot here enumerates certain requirements for the classic. At the same time he insists that the possession of such qualities does not in itself make a literature more valuable; it merely makes it different in kind from and more central than such literatures as English, which do not have them, or have them only in an irregu¬ lar and scattered way. Indeed, since a classic can exhaust its language,2 it is not an unmixed blessing. He agreed with SainteBeuve that when English achieved a concentration of classic qualities, as in the eighteenth century, it did so at too high a price. Maturity is the essential quality, and the eighteenth cen¬ tury is limited in that respect, lacking amplitude and catholicity, and betraying restrictions of religious sensibility which produce ‘a kind of provinciality’. And although they do appear in ver¬ nacular literatures, the classic qualities are wholly present in one poet only, the metropolitan Virgil. Shakespeare and Milton are great poets, but they are not classics: ‘There is no classic in English.’ Virgil entered Roman history and the Latin language at precisely the right moment for both. His manners were mature, his style, in its complexity and simplicity, is such that only Dante and Racine among the moderns approach him. We of the English tradition may well rejoice that our language ‘has never completely realized itself in the work of one classic poet’, but we must at the same time understand that ‘the classic criterion is of vital importance to us’. There are ‘relative’ classics, certainly, 1 Reprinted in On Poetry and Poets, 1957, 53-71. 2 See, for a valuable critique of this position, Sean Lucy, T. 5. Eliot and the Idea of Tradition, i960, p. 13. 22

The Classic but the one ‘absolute’ classic, which accordingly makes an abso¬ lute demand on us, is Virgil. A true understanding of this absoluteness calls for more than a purely literary judgement. Virgil’s ‘comprehensiveness ... is due to the unique position in our history of the Roman Empire and the Latin language: a position which may be said to conform to its destiny. This sense of destiny comes to consciousness in the Aeneidd As Aeneas is to Rome, so is ancient Rome to Europe. ‘Thus Virgil acquires the centrality of the unique classic; he is at the centre of European civilization . . . the Roman Empire and the Latin language were not any empire and any language, but an empire and a language with a unique destiny in relation to ourselves; and the poet in whom that Empire and that language came to consciousness and expression is a poet of unique destiny.’ Our failure to use Virgil as a criterion Eliot calls ‘provincial’. He intends something more than a literary judge¬ ment, for the failure is a cultural failure to perceive the true structure of history; it implies the heretical assumption that ‘history is merely the chronicle of human devices which have served their turn and been scrapped’; it is ‘a provincialism, not of space, but of time’. And finally, Virgil’s relation with Dante is a true image of history and Virgil’s place in it: he ‘led Europe to¬ wards the Christian culture which he could never know’. We observe that Virgil, who was not a Christian, is held to have avoided the restriction of religious sensibility that afflicted Pope, who was. It is easy, by recalling Arnold’s dismissal of precisely the position Eliot takes for granted—the destiny of Virgil, his role as intermediary between the old and the new Rome—to see that the argument depends on a rival view of history not fully ex¬ pressed in the lecture.1 Arnold denied any alliance between pagan and Christian Rome, and consequently allowed Virgil no such historical import. Eliot believed in the union, and regarded 1 And, of course, on a belief that men should be subject to external authority in spiritual and other spheres—a belief he associates with Catholicism and Classicism in ‘The Function of Criticism’ (1923; Selected Essays, 26-7).

23

The Classic Dante’s encounter with Virgil as the full flowering of the original historical symbolism. Eliot called Dante ‘the most universal of poets in the modern languages’... ‘a patriot’ but ‘first a European’, and a poet who established the volgare illustre, ‘the perfection of a common language’; a poet of maturity, in comparison with whom even the greatest English poets are provincial. The literary relation he had in mind between Virgil and Dante—classics of the common speech—is obvious; but the relation between these poets is more than literary; it has a prophetic character. Eliot stated his view of this quite simply in a broadcast of 1951, called ‘Virgil and the Christian World’.1 Here he touches on the superstitious element in the European veneration of Virgil, discussing the famous prophecy of the Fourth Eclogue: magnus ab integro saeculorum nascitur or do. iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna; iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto . . .

Is Virgil simply being playful? Is he imitating Sibylline pro¬ phecy? The early Fathers did not think so, rejoicing in the parallel with Isaiah.2 Even that might be explained, or explained 1 On Poetry and Poets, 1957, 121-31. 2 For a characteristic modem historical explanation of the prophecy, see Harold Mattingley, ‘Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Insti¬ tutes, x, 1947, 14-19. Mattingley thinks an original version referred to ‘a child to be born of the marriage of Mark Antony and Octavia’; that is, the poem is an epithalamium. Later this was changed to fit the birth in 20 b.c. of Gaius Caesar, son of Octavian’s daughter Julia, whom Augustus adopted in 17 b.c. Mattingley adds that the poem was quoted continually in relation to the offspring of the emperors who preceded Constantine, agent of its official Christianization; always, of course, with the implication that a series of new times was about to begin, magnus ab integro saeculorum nascitur ordo. These accommodations of the timeless to the transient moments of politics would not seem important to a true mystical imperialist. On the early history of the interpretation of Virgo in the poem see Frances A. Yates, ‘Queen Elizabeth as Astraea’, in the same volume, 27-82. For a modem view that completes the process of demythologizing any connection between the Eclogue and imperial history, see William Berg, The Early Virgil, 197324

The Classic away, but no scholarship can prove that Virgil was not speaking more than he knew, and, in 40 b.c., prophesying the Incarnation. To speak more than one knows is, after all, precisely what is meant by being inspired. In any case, the Eclogue opened up the way for Virgil to influence the Christian world. His place is unique, ‘he makes a liaison between the old world and the new’. And Eliot describes the anima naturaliter Christiana of Virgil, com¬ mends the agrarian basis of the Georgies, and relates their ethos to that of the monasteries. Above all he commends the Virgilian prophecy of the imperium sine fine, which, even though never realized in history, was the historical destiny of Rome, the set of all future history. His ego nec metas rerum, nec tempora pono: Imperium sine fine dedi. . . Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento (hae tibi erunt artes) pacique imponere morem, parcere subiectis et debellare superbos . . .

Later the Roman Empire was transformed into the Holy Roman Empire, ‘of which we are all still citizens’. Virgil could not, in the ordinary way, have known that this was the sense of Anchises’s prophecy; but ‘Time has not proved Virgil wrong when he wrote nec tempora pono: imperium sine fine dedi.’ And here Dante enters again. He uses Virgil as guide only up to a point, and this is ‘an exact statement of Virgil’s relation to the Christian world’. We may say, in other words, that Dante understood more than Virgil, but Virgil was a great part of that which he understood. Obviously this doctrine or myth of the imperium sine fine, which underlies Eliot’s account of the classic, has a strong Latin and indeed Catholic bias. To say that Virgil expresses ‘the relatedness between two great cultures’ is to imply a metropolitan doctrine, to establish the centre of authority, culture and religion at Rome, where they are reconciled ‘under an all-embracing destiny’; the Virgilian fiatum is recognized as Christian provi¬ dence, the Empire as holy and sharing a centre with the Church. This metropolitanism is extended to poetry, where it is identified 25

The Classic by the qualities of maturity and civility. Eliot calls the Dido episode in Book VI ‘civilized’; Augustine wept at it, but then he was a provincial. It is not unusual to speak of the relation between Dante and Virgil as of world-historical significance ;x but such generaliza¬ tions usually lack Eliot’s emphasis on Rome and Virgil as per¬ petually central, and on Dante as illustrating the nature of this centrality. Whatever does not partake of it is, in the degree of its eccentricity, provincial. In the matter of poetry this raises the crucial difficulty that whatever may be said of politics and religion, language varies from epoch to epoch and province to province; it ceases to be Virgil’s language. Eliot’s answer to this objection is again founded on Dante’s, as we shall see later. For the moment let us simply say that the doctrine of the imperial classic undoubtedly acquires authority from the metro¬ politan power of Eliot’s own voice—how much authority may be estimated, I think, by comparing his version of it with that of Theodor Haecker, a writer whom Eliot called a ‘great critic and good European’, and to whom he acknowledged some indebted¬ ness.1 2 Haecker’s book, called in English Virgil, Father of the West, has a thesis similar to Eliot’s, yet it strikes one as dogmatic and insensitive. Haecker scorns all who suppose that ‘the essential nature of man’ ever changes ;3 that we are on the verge of a new epoch he admits, but providence will ensure not only that there will be religious continuity, but also that the Virgilian ‘type’ will prevail. (This is very unlike Eliot’s many warnings against barbarism, and the eventual restitution of civilization in forms we should find unacceptable.) For Haecker, Virgil is, as he says, ‘Western man himself’, and like everything else he derives his meaning from the Faith. All who write the history of the Middle Ages without being of the Faith ‘inevitably transmit falsehood’. 1 See, for example, Curtius, 358, and A. P. D’Entreves, Dante as Political Thinker, 1952, 93. a Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, 116. See also Selected Essays, 1951, 388, n. 1. * Compare Eliot: ‘Whether human nature changes or not, certainly everything about it changes’, Criterion, x, 1931, 715. 26

The Classic The truth proclaimed by Haecker is an old one: ‘A few short years before the Advent Virgil lived, that the foreseen measure of ancient paganism might be fulfilled’, and pagan heroism transformed, in the Augustinian mode, to Christian sanctity, the imperium romanum into the Church; for an understanding of this we are obliged to seek for grace. One sees that much in the book is concordant with Eliot’s own meditation—for example, the emphasis on Virgil’s agrarianism and the conjecture that one might think of him as co-founder, with St. Benedict, of monasticism—but there is much that Eliot surely, in his more Arnoldian mood, would have found provincial, e.g. the comparison of Virgil as a naturalist with Fabre, or the argument that nothing can make sense of the Dido story except the Christian doctrine of marriage as a sacrament, retrospectively applied. There are evidently many ways, some less serious than others, of generating comment from this set of notions. Haecker most resembles Eliot when he speaks of the classic as ‘the result of the chance meeting at a given moment’—he emphasizes given, I suppose, to suggest that this ‘chance’ is in fact the operation of grace—of the greatest poetic power with the greatest real theme. This occurred at Virgil’s historical moment, the Augustan Peace. Whatever deviates from the classical model thus established is labelled ‘heretical’; there is an odd catalogue of heresies, including art that is ‘realistic, idealistic, symbolist, realist, surrealist^ } As Aeneas is the father of the Empire, so Virgil is its sole classic. Proudly aware of the medievalism of his ideas, Haecker places Virgil among the Christian prophets and accepts the Fourth Eclogue and the Sixth Book as authentic prophecy. One substantial difference from Eliot suggests itself: Eliot thought Dante right in excluding Virgil from Paradise, but Haecker would surely have let him in.1 2 This is a useful diagram of the imperialist position: by the action of grace the ancient Roman Empire is revealed as a type of 1 Haecker thus echoes a theme of After Strange Gods, an exactly contemporary book. Incidentally, he also denies the possibility of a German classic. 2 Virgil, Father of the West, trans. A. W. Wheen, 1934, 4, 9,13-I4» 55~d27

The Classic the Holy Roman Empire and the Church; and the symbol of that action is Virgil. Whatever happens in history—decadences and renovations, incursions of barbarism, heresies more or less successful—the Empire remains unchanged. It is from this belief that Eliot derives his uni versalist or imperialist classic, the classic of ‘la Latinite tout entiere’, binding upon us even if by race, culture and language we are apparently not Latin at all. The Empire is the paradigm of the classic: a perpetuity, a transcendent entity, however remote

its

provinces,

however

extraordinary its

temporal vicissitudes. But as everyone knows there were enor¬ mous discrepancies between this mystique of Empire and the facts of imperial history; and these difficulties were met in ways that are often relevant to our discussion of the classic. The cult of Emperor and Empire has a long and complex history. In the pre-Constantinian Empire Christians acknow¬ ledged the authority of the state but refused divine honours to the emperor, and in consequence Constantine professed to abjure these honours. That he did not fully surrender his right to them is attested by the fact that his successors could still speak o£divinitas nostra and aeternitas mea\ and later, when the imperial cult was re-imported from the east, this had some bearing on the fluctuating struggle between Emperor and Pope,1 for it provided support to the propagandists of Empire who held that the Emperor was not appointed as a papal favour but was himself a vicar of God, and of independent succession. It was Constantine also, who, on a famous occasion, recited the Fourth Eclogue in a Greek translation which emphasized its character as a prophecy of the birth of Christ;2 so that Virgil, while continuing to be sacred to pagans, became also the prophet of the Christian Empire. Moreover it was at this time that the 1 See Louis Brehier and Pierre Battifol, Les survivances du culte imperial rotnain, 1920, 36-42. 2 Not everybody was convinced of the prophetic character of the Eclogue, or that, granted it was prophetic, Constantine had interpreted it correctly. St. Jerome did not believe it at all; Lactantius thought its Golden Age applied to the condition of the elect in his own time. 28

The Classic Christians invented a new propagandist historiography1 which was also to have remote historical consequences; for in updated forms it enabled the new nation-states of the post-Reformation period to give their claims to political and ecclesiastical auto¬ nomy an imperial resonance.2 Not only the theory of Empire but many of its historical consequences were adumbrated in the early years of its Christian career. There can, however, be no doubt that the most important impulse Constantine gave to the erratic history of the Empire was his migration eastward, which was ultimately responsible for the development of the concept of a Christian Europe separated from Eastern Christianity, and for the spurious Dona¬ tion of Constantine, written in the eighth century as a rationaliza¬ tion of the historical situation he produced, in which power seemed to belong to the popes. In the Donation Constantine is made to say that ‘the sacred see of blessed Peter shall be gloriously exalted above our empire’, and to resign Rome, the empire of the west, and the regalia, specified in detail, to Pope Sylvester; ‘for it is not right that an earthly emperor should have authority there where the rule of priests and the head of the Christian religion have been established by the Emperor of heaven’.3 When Leo III crowned Charlemagne in 800 he did so by the authority of the Donation; the crown belonged to him, and he gave it to Charlemagne as an ‘apostolic favour’, translating the imperium from the east, and from a Greek to a Frankish em¬ peror, who now by his benefaction became Emperor of the Romans. Charlemagne in fact refused the role written for him by the Pope and confined his interest to Latin Christendom, or Europe. He also thought the Pope’s job was to pray and expound the faith, while he did the governing. Though his successors accepted the papal view, that the Pope’s appointed Emperor was Emperor of all the Romans, east and west, Charlemagne’s 1 See The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, ed. A. D. Momigliano, 1963, 92. 2 See Chapter II. 3 Documents of the Christian Church, ed. Henry Bettenson, 1943, 135 ff.

29

The Classic attitude hints at future differences of opinion.1 The papal con¬ cept of Empire was greater in geographical extent, but included the doctrine of the subordination of the Emperor to the Pope. But Charlemagne, by virtue of his anointing, could be held to have divine authority independently of the Pope (a fact that was later to be emphasized by the importation of Byzantine theocratic rituals). Charlemagne further stressed the WesternLatin character of his empire by the nature of his renovatio Romani Imperii.2 His was a Latin empire, and since translatio studii accompanies translatio imperii the Carolingian ‘renascence’ was a revival of Latin learning in the interests of Western Christianity. The translated secular authority and the translated learning would be used to ensure a renovation of the old Roman civility, though the Carolingian revival was limited in scope, and the classics were valued mostly for pedagogical reasons; which is why it seems proper to place it in the order of ‘renascences’, as distinct, in the theory of Panofsky, from ‘renaissance’.3 Despite Charlemagne’s independent interpretation of his powers and responsibilities, the imperial doctrine was from the beginning substantially a papal invention. When the Empire passed from Frank to German at the coronation of Otto I by John XII in 962, the Pope was again exercising his right to transfer it, and the ceremony was described as translatio imperii a Francis ad Germanos. There followed, as usual, a translatio studii-, learning and the classic conformed to the imperial scheme. The reign of Otto began a period in which the Emperor maintained political ascendancy over the Pope, but papal coronation re¬ mained important; the developing theory of universal empire remained dependent on papal formulas.4 Otto III, who sought to 1 Walter Ullmann, A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages, 1965, 66 ff. 2 This was inscribed on the seal of Charlemagne: J. Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, edn. of 1904, 103 and n. 8 E. Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, i960. 4 Not until the Hohenstaufen emperors was it officially argued that the papal coronation was a formality rather than a benefaction, but that the Roman people had originally transferred universal power to the emperor (lex regia); Ullmann, 145. 30

The Classic renew the ancient extent and authority of the Empire and used on his seal the legend Renovatio Imperii Romanorum1 had cause to think the Donation spurious, but in 1001 made his own gift of Rome to Pope Sylvester II; this established Rome as ‘the head of the world’ in place of Byzantium, but also temporarily placed the popes in a position of dependency.2 The imperial ascend¬ ancy lasted until the time of Gregory VII; but, as Ullmann insists, the mystique of Empire was still dependent on papal ideology. Soon the Roman lawyers were to establish a doctrine of Empire independent of the papacy, but many of the concepts originally developed by the popes were to persist within it. There was translatio imperii, which would serve to explain not only that the Empire was in the gift of the Pope,3 but why the Roman Emperor was a Frank or a German; there was the translatio studii that accompanied it, and justified the renovationes, at different times and in different places, of the classical learning as well as the imperial authority. These ideas are essential to the mystique of Empire and classic, and they flourished despite the repeated querelles of Emperor and Pope. There was also the importance of Rome as metropolis, re-established by papal and eventually upheld by imperial authority; of the city as eternal and its Empire as perpetual, however battered by time. Its people were the people of God, their maiestas indestructible. In these beliefs pagan and Christian had been united;4 nor were they eliminated by the success of rival Christian theories about the historical role of Rome, such as that derived by St. Jerome from the Book of Daniel, which represented Rome as the fourth and last of the temporal kingdoms, the fifth being the kingdom of God. It was commonly believed that the final struggle with anti1 Ullmann, 93 ff. 2 Bryce, 146. 8 The right of the Pope to transfer the Empire from one unfit to govern was finally formulated by Innocent III (1160-1216), using Ecclesiastes 10: 8 as his text and the translation of Empire from the Greeks to the Franks at the corona¬ tion of Charlemagne as his precedent (Bryce, 219). 4 Br6hier and Battifol, 13. 31

The Classic Christ would take place in Rome, which belief implies an end;1 yet imperium semper est, just as ecclesia semper est. When the lawyers emerged as philosophers of Empire, the discrepancies between the idea and the actuality were quite evident, not least to the party which wanted to adapt the papal arguments to the imperial cause and prove that the emperor derived his authority directly from God without sacerdotal mediation. Ernst Kantorowicz provides a fascinating account of the subtleties and confusions of late medieval jurists on this question: they evolved a difficult philosophy of change, trying to solve a problem as old as the pre-Socratics, a problem still vexatious to all who discuss permanence whether in literature or politics. Their solution was Aristotelian: they applied to Empire what Aristotle said of the world at large, namely that time corrupted its dispositions but not its essence. The Empire, then, is like other entities, such as the Church, the fisc, the genera and the species—all are ‘eternal and perpetual with regard to their essence, even though the dispositions change frequently’.2 As Kantorowicz remarks, such formulas, like others derived from Aristotle by Christian thinkers, involve a problem of ‘double truth’. Their authors would certainly, in the confessional, have denied the eternity of the world; but as jurists they found the secular perpetuities of Aristotle very useful. Applying these notions to the Empire gave that institution a double existence, in time and outside it. ‘How can a thing change without losing its identity? If it remains the same it does not change; yet if it loses its identity, then it is no longer the thing that has changed.’ So Karl Popper states the Heraclitean problem. ‘It is essential to the idea of change that the thing which changes retains its identity while changing. And yet it must be something else.’3 The answer of Heraclitus was that all opposites are the same, though this of course is never apparent. The answer of the 1 P. E. Schramm, Kaiser, Rom und Renovatio, i, 1929, 29, quoted by C. T. Davis, Dante and the Idea of Rome, 1957, 10. 2 E. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 1957, 299. 8 Conjectures and Refutations, 1972, 142.

32

The Classic medieval lawyers was that dispositions change, but not essences.1 It might be said that such ingenuities are merely verbal, at best useless bits of political mysticism, at worst weapons in the endless dispute of Emperor and Pope; in fact one Catholic Dictionary calls the whole doctrine of imperium ‘a figment of Ghibelline lawyers’.2 Yet the survival of exalted notions of Empire throughout the changes of history, even when Rome itself was in ruins and emperors had less authority than many kings and princes (in theory their vassals), is a fact of history. And the learned would necessarily seek to reconcile the idea and the actuality. We look to Dante for the fullest and most permanent ex¬ pression of the medieval doctrine of Empire; moreover it would be difficult, without his example, to conceive of there being, in our time, a doctrine of the classic which balances a universalist ideal against the historical fact of national cultures, a Latin ideal against the need of a poet to speak his own vernacular. And Dante’s thought on these subjects, though undoubtedly diverse and curious, was unthinkable without the existence, the presence of Virgil. Eliot found in the Virgilian Dante the central state¬ ment of the relation, so far as poetry and poetics are concerned, between that which is timeless and that which acts in the aspect of time. Dante believed that the imperial authority derived from God, not from the Pope; Constantine had no right to give it away and by doing so created an evil that must, in time, be undone. For only under the sole rule of an emperor (who, possessing all, would have no motive of greed) could the popolo santo be led to its terrestrial felicity. The imperial dignity belonged to the 1 Compare Eliot: ‘To identify any particular form of government with Christianity is a dangerous error: for it confounds the permanent with the transitory, the absolute with the contingent. Forms of government, and of social organisation, are in constant process of change, and their operation may be very different from the theory they are supposed to exemplify’ (The Idea of a Christian Society, 1939, 57). 2 Catholic Dictionary, eds. Addis and Arnold, 17th edn., i960 (‘Holy Roman Empire’).

33

The Classic Roman people, the Emperor—whether Greek or Frankish or German, was still Romanus princeps, still, as Roman law and polity had always been, the instrument of God in the establish¬ ment of earthly peace.1 Whatever the temporal mutations of the Empire, the pro¬ phecies of Virgil were true for Dante, who is as much his pupil in the political treatise De Monarchia as in the Commedia. There was nothing fanciful about this. The Mirahilia Urbis Romanae recounts the appearance of the Emperor Augustus before the Virgin and Child; but Dante is not concerned with such con¬ ceits; he is extremely literal, even with respect to such poetic concepts as the Augustan Peace.2 For him the Virgo of Virgil’s Eclogue was Justice, and therefore, in a quite unconceited way, the figure of the sacrum imperium; and the prophecy of Aeneid VI is a literal account of the power of the Emperor. In practical terms it was necessary, according to Dante, for other rulers to recognize the Emperor’s secular power as absolute, and for the Pope to do likewise, as Christ3 and St. Paul had done. In the excited epistles he wrote on the occasion of Henry VII’s descent into Italy, he again cited the authority of Virgil and urged the Italians—a people of Trojan blood and Roman majesty, th epopolo santo—to seize the moment and establish the Empire in actuality.4 1 These views changed in detail from the Convivio to De Monarchia and the Paradiso, and such changes are of concern to Dante scholars, but they do not affect the substance of the present argument. See, for example, A. P. D’Entreves, Dante as Political Thinker, 1952; C. T. Davis, Dante and the Idea of Rome, 1957; and, for more summary accounts, Thomas G. Bergin, An Approach to Dante, 1965; and, especially valuable, U. Limentani, ‘Dante’s Political Thought,’ in The Mind of Dante, ed. Limentani, 1965, 113-37. 2 For the Augustan Peace, see Chapter II. 3 It was important to the argument that Jesus was a Roman citizen. Dante even argues for the legitimacy of Tiberius on the ground that if his title had been false Pilate would have had no jurisdiction over Christ, and our salvation, based on an illegal exercise of authority, inoperative. 4 It is sometimes argued that the failure and death of Henry were responsible for a change in Dante’s attitude; so D’Entreves, who thinks the treatise was written before the Commedia was begun, and that Dante turned his attention away from imperium to ecclesia and its corruptions (50).

34

The Classic Dante’s hopes were deceived, and it is easy for historians, at this distance, to call his imperial dream anachronistic; to say, for example, that the last hope of universal empire died with Frederick II in 1250. And indeed the situation was politically unpromising. Dante gave the Commedia the ‘ideal date’ of 1300, which was the year of the jubilee ordained by Boniface VIII, Pope of the triple tiara and the arrogant bull Unam Sanctam (1302); a bad time for imperialists. Yet given that the idea of Empire had already, despite the quarrels of Pope and Emperor about original authority, proved so durable, and that universalism was so strongly founded in scriptural and Virgilian texts, it cannot at that time have been obvious that all hope was gone. Dante, though in exile, was not alone in entertaining high hopes of Henry VII, though usually he was less sanguine; he believed that universal monarchy would come, but he did not necessarily expect it in his own lifetime.1 In any case, the failure of Dante’s practical politics is quite unimportant in the context of imperial doctrine. He was not writing political propaganda but describing the idea of Empire laid up in heaven, which is also the idea of earthly justice—the Saturnia regna, the return of Astraea. For all the philosophical and theological subtleties he adds to the argument, its patron remains Virgil; in so far as the old and the new are one empire Virgil is its voice, as he is the inspiration of Dante’s ‘solemn passion’ for the idea.2 Dante speaks of justice in a terrestrial paradise, a 1 See Limentani, 133-4. As it happens, Henry VII himself, though his theory of universal empire generally resembles that of the De Monarchia, would not have accepted Dante’s version of the imperial tradition; his empire began not in Troy but at the birth of Christ, when God transferred the imperium to Rome (C. T. Davis, 103). It is an historical irony that Henry VII appealed to Pope Clement V for a decision when the King of Sicily refused to appear before him on a charge of high treason; the Pope held (1313) that the Emperor had no power to summon a king resident in his own kingdom, and that one ruler could not commit high treason against another. Thus Dante’s ideal lord of the world was responsible for an important development away from universalism and towards nationalism (Ullmann, 197, If.). * E. Gilson, Dante the Philosopher, 1948, 162.

35

The Classic humana civilitas under the Emperor which is both timeless and immanent in time; that which, whatever its historical dis¬ positions—and, as Dante remarks, the human race depends on peace for its ‘best disposition’, as at the time of Christ’s birth1— remains an incorruptible essence, immune from the hostility of popes and the ambitions of kings. Of this metaphysical empire one could not speak without recourse to Virgil. But here is a difficulty, at any rate for poets; for Virgil wrote in Latin. Latin, being the grammatica, is also perpetual; but the Latin languages vary from age to age and from province to province. Dante accordingly faced, some six hundred years before his modern English disciple, the problem of a Latin Empire whose citizens used many vernaculars; and, even more crucial, the problems of a vernacular poet who professes fidelity to an absolute Latin classic. In his treatise De Vulgari Eloquentia Dante tries to account for the diversity of human languages, and even confers a measure of theoretical equality on them, by anticipating Saussure on the arbitrary character of linguistic signs.2 But in the end he prefers Italian, indeed something very close to his own Tuscan,3 to other modern Latin languages, partly because, as used by the best modern poets including himself, it is ‘sweeter’, but also be¬ cause it appears to have stayed closer than the others to the grammatica. Perhaps this is why he can speak of Virgil as repre¬ senting the height of‘our language’.4 But in spite of this use of Latin as the parent of languages and the criterion by which one chooses among them, Dante eventually takes a much more 1 De Monarchia, I, 15-16. 2J. Cremona, ‘Dante’s Views on Language,’ in The Mind of Dante, ed. U. Limentani, 142 ff. I have drawn freely on this essay. 3 He thought the language of the Sicilian School closest to the volgare illustre and his own, but was unaware that these poets came to him only in Tuscan adapta¬ tions. 4 La lingua nostra, Purg., vii, 17. Cecil Grayson, ‘Nobilior est Vulgaris: Latin and Vernacular in Dante’s Thought,’ in Centenary Essays on Dante, ed. Colin Hardie, 1965, 74 ff., thinks this means ‘human language’ in general rather than ‘the Italian language’.

36

The Classic positive position on the values of the vernacular. He argues that Latin was an artificial compound of the vernaculars at an earlier stage of their history; the vernaculars, on the other hand, are natural. So that although Latin is incorruptible and perhaps more beautiful, the vernacular is nobler: nobilior est vulgaris.1 From this paradox derives the important concept of the volgare illustre. This is a kind of essential vernacular; Dante did not want it to have the status of the artificial grammatica, but thought of it as a kind of ideal Italian underlying the dialects. What he wanted, in his modern world, was a language which was not Latin, but a natural equivalent of Latin, a language that would serve the poet and the Empire as Latin had served Virgil and the Empire of his time. That language, that noble vernacular, was Dante’s own. The ‘illustrious vulgar’ seems to stand somewhere between the incorruptible grammatica and the timebound, changing vernacu¬ lars we speak, participating in both the perpetuity of the one and the incessant changes caused in the other by human use. It constitutes a valuable means of access to the classic for poets who value it, but who could not conceivably abandon the natural force of their vernaculars. It is beyond question, I think, that— stripped of the tortuous speculations Dante was obliged to proffer in its defence—it underlies Eliot’s view of the relation between the vernacular poet and Virgil. For all his other in¬ debtedness, he thinks first, when speaking of Dante, of his language—‘very near in feeling to medieval Latin’, linguistically as well as geographically nearer the centre than Chaucer or Villon; lucid, simple, distinct. Dante is the master of the ver¬ nacular and so ‘the one universal school of style for the writing of poetry in any language’, Latin included.2 Nobilior est vulgaris: in defining the language of poetry, as in defending the idea of 1 On this point Dante completely changed his mind between the Convivio and De VulgariEloquentia, and there is much scholarly argument as to how this came about. 2 ‘The Italian of Dante is somehow our language’, ‘What Dante Means to Me’ (1950) in To Criticize the Critic, 125 ff.

37

The Classic Empire, Dante cleared the path for a poet who always empha¬ sized the need for a purified vernacular,1 and considered it not as divorced from, but strongly allied with, the Latin tradition. ‘The classic must, within its formal limitations, express the maximum possible of the whole range of feeling which repre¬ sents the character of the people who speak that language,’ says Eliot; and only when it has ‘this comprehensiveness in relation to its own language’ and ‘an equal significance in relation to a number of foreign literatures’ can we speak of its universality. The path to comprehensiveness and universality lies, then, through the ‘illustrious vulgar’. So Dante and Eliot, both of whom believed that ‘our classic, the classic of all Europe, is Virgil,’ wrote in their vernaculars, and believed nevertheless that each literature has its greatness ‘because of its place in a larger pattern, a pattern set in Rome’. The same might be said, by an imperialist, of the greatness of the nation-states, to which the languages belong; and so the Empire and the classic remain indivisible. Eliot said Kipling had a vision which was ‘almost that of an idea of empire laid up in heaven’.2 So had he; and a similar vision of the classic. Thus Virgil is accommodated to an age of vernaculars, an age of nations. His historical survival had always depended upon processes of accommodation, on centuries of apologetic and exegetical effort. To make him speak in a manner acceptable to times later than and different from his own it was necessary to treat him either as divinely inspired, or as having wrapped his knowledge in a poetic integument that only subtle interpretation could remove. Either way he was a prophet; in the vulgar 1 Hence the exquisitely apt allusion in ‘Little Gidding’ to Mallarme’s line ‘donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu’. It is only through Dante that we can perceive the connection between tins preoccupation of Eliot’s and his adherence to the ‘noble faith’ of the divine right of kings (John Bramhall, Selected Essays, 35o). 2 On Poetry and Poets, 1957, 245. The phrase remembers Plato on the good society (‘a pattern laid up in heaven’, Republic, ix)—which Eliot quoted earlier in Greek (Criterion, xiv, 1935, 435).

38

The Classic imagination he degenerated into a magician.1 And either way he was, for the learned, the object of their allegorical inquiries. Of course there was a continuous tradition of respect; without that nothing could have been accomplished. Virgil had been an object of veneration in the old religion; Seneca (Ep., 108) re¬ garded him as an oracle, and Hadrian is said to have consulted the sortes; poets worshipped at his tomb. The early centos are attempts to accommodate his magical text; and as centos pro¬ liferated, allegory flourished. Virgil became the ‘prophet of the Gentiles’.2 As Comparetti observes, poetry was not really the point; Virgil was useful for rhetorical and philological exercise, but above all as a source of recondite meanings.3 Allegory has always been one of the instruments by which old texts are accommodated to modern cultures, as when the Stoics allegorized Homer, or Alexandrian exegetes the Bible. A tech¬ nique successful in moralizing Ovid found little difficulty with Virgil. The influential allegorization of Fulgentius in the fifth century, itself founded on earlier suggestions, was an important factor in Virgil’s survival, and established a tradition which lasted well into the Renaissance, though Fulgentius, treating the story of the epic as an account of the vicissitudes of the soul in the course of its earthly life, says nothing about imperium. The school of Chartres, in the ‘renascence’ of the twelfth century, was greatly concerned to establish the authority of pre-Christian authors— notably Plato—by allegorical means; and for Bernardus Silvestris the journey of Aeneas becomes an allegory of what the human soul undergoes in the body, while his descent to the underworld figures a liberation from sense and an education in philosophy.4 And so forward, by way of Landino of the Floren¬ tine Academy, into the Renaissance, which tried to establish 1 For this see D. Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. 1908, and J. W. Spargo, Virgil the Necromancer. 2 W. F. Jackson Knight, Roman Vergil, 1944, 3ioff. 3 Comparetti, 73. 4 See Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century, 1972, 56, 72, 106. Wetherbee remarks that Abelard went so far as to place ‘the Sibylline prophecy of Vergil’s fourth eclogue higher in authority than the prophecies of the Old Testament’, 40 n. 39

The Classic many others besides Virgil as prisci theologi, pagans who had wrapped the truths of religion in mysteries and allegories.1 There are, to speak very broadly, two ways of maintaining a classic, of establishing its access to a modern mind. The first of these depends on philology and historiography—it asks what the classic meant to its author and his best readers, and may still mean to those who have the necessary knowledge and skill. The second is the method of accommodation, by which I mean any method by which the old document may be induced to signify what it cannot be said to have expressly stated. The chief instru¬ ment of accommodation is allegory, if we use the word in a sense wide enough to include prophecy. This is an ancient method. The other approach, more modern and scientific, took time to develop. We sometimes think of the Renaissance as a sort of humanist philological house-cleaning, as indeed it was; and we think of it as the moment when antiquity could first be seen in historical perspective, a culture remote in time but admired and imitated, separated from our own by a medium aevum. But we should be wrong to say that this modernity of view precluded the use of allegory, either in the interpretation or the imitation of ancient texts. Jean Seznec’s book describes the emergence of the pagan gods in recognizably antique form; but it also describes the con¬ tinued production and proliferation of mythographical hand¬ books which again obscure and allegorize the antique in order to accommodate it to the peculiar requirements of the modern.2 Even after these handbooks had been jettisoned the allegorical tradition survived, albeit feebly, into an age of reason and philology, though, as I shall suggest in the next chapter, the imperialist allegory eventually lost interest. How, in more modern times, it came to be revived—how Virgil came again to be the voice of the timeless Empire—I do not know. The reasons 1 For fifteenth-century Florentine speculation on the prisca theologia see D. P. Walker, ‘Orpheus the Theologian and Renaissance Platonists’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xvi, 1953, 100-20. 2 The Survival of the Pagan Gods, 1953.

40

The Classic may be many and complicated. There may have been some reaction against a later Hellenism; a strain of post-Romantic medievalism and the revival of interest in Dante; the example of other occultist schools of interpretation; a desire for political or critical systems consonant with and modelled upon the Church. In its modern form it continues to diminish the importance of actual history, and takes only as much as it wishes from the philologists and ancient historians. The metaphysical imperium, which has not changed from its first Trojan manifestation to the present moment, is hardly a matter for chroniclers. A man who thinks that Empire is just one more obsolete word in the history of political ideas, that the survival of Virgil as the poet of the sac¬ rum imperium is merely a curiosity of poetic fortune, is one who attributes to chance what his opponents attribute to the opera¬ tion of providence. Proponents of this view need not be accused of a naive optimism about the actual course of history; their position resembles that of Dante, or of Petrarch, who thought the whole of history between Constantine and his own day a dark age, but did not doubt that Rome would one day revive, and match, in actuality, the great and unchanged idea of Empire. That religious men who conceive themselves to be living in a decadence, on the threshold of another dark age, should cling to the same hope is not after all surprising. ‘The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail.’ So Eliot, in the peroration of Thoughts After Lambeth; and of course he was neither alone nor without justification in his belief. But he also believed that these gulfs and eddies in the stream of time were one thing, the perpetuities—Church, Empire— another. And Virgil joins them in their aevum, exempt from the action of time, the diminutions of scientific philology. He need not be called the greatest of poets, for that is not the point; and he is never merely a great poet among others, as he was—at best, indeed—for some of Eliot’s distinguished contemporaries. He is different in kind, the criterion of the literary order as imperium is of the political; the still point of the tradition. Virgil alone can vindicate Eliot’s intuition of a structure of literary history homo41

The Classic logous with that of world-history. And Virgil is also necessary to the idea of Europe, of the populus Komanus which is the Christian people. Eliot in fact chose the Catholicism of his own province; he was born to its illustrious vernacular. But he deplored from the outset its Robinson Crusoe attitudes to metropolitan civility, ‘the crankiness, the eccentricity, which frequently affects writers outside of the Latin traditions’ and which gives us poets of genius (Blake) rather than classics (Dante).1 And in all the years of the Criterion he struggled to make our mind, provincial and vernacular though it is, part of the mind of Europe; of which mind Virgil was jigura and foun¬ der. It would be easy to show that far less worthy historical myths have been used in the same way as this of the imperial Virgil— that if one has a licence to ignore events and probabilities it is easy enough to make the myth work in any circumstances.2 But Eliot’s myth is not only powerful but civil and intelligent; it makes history itself metropolitan. He knew perfectly well that an ancient text, if it is to appear, at some arbitrary moment of time, contemporary, must suffer accommodation; and that the idea of Empire itself must do so; but these temporal adjustments do not concern him, except as they may be part of his social responsibility, or his responsibility as poet of the vernacular. What we have finally to consider is whether in ‘What is a Classic?’ Eliot was answering the kind of question we ask a generation later, and whether his answers mean anything to us. I think they do; for at the root of the matter, for all of us, is the relation of permanence and change. In the course of one of his 1 The Sacred Wood, 156-8. 2 The perennial applications of thirteenth-century Joachimite thought afford an instance. Another is the vitality of the Pronosticatio of Lichtenberger; it provides ample evidence of its timebound character, and applies only to the 1480s; but it was still being accommodated to the events of 1916. As D. Kurze observes, the ‘strictly contingent and time-dependent individuality of the work is bal¬ anced, in part, by the more or less free and ubiquitous applicability of its main substance—Prophecy’; see ‘Prophecy and History’, Journal of the Warburg and CourtauldInstitutes, xxi, 1958, 63-85. 42

The Classic Criterion commentaries Eliot discusses some remarks made by Ernst Curtius on the ‘views of a contemporary sociologist named Mannheim, of whose work I am ignorant’—a state of affairs he was of course soon to correct. Curtius notices that for Mannheim and others there seems to exist ‘a crude antithesis between Change and Value on the one side, and Permanence (Dauer) and Valuelessness on the other’. And Eliot remarks on the antiquity of this antithesis. At present, he goes on, one sees how it has turned into a pseudo-scientific antithesis of static and dynamic: ‘One of the consequences, as it seems to me, of our failure to grasp the proper relation of the Eternal and the Transient, is our over-estimation of the importance of our own time.’ The emphasis is Eliot’s. ‘The doctrine of progress still dominates us . . . we ask whether any particular past age has done anything for us\ if not, it is regarded as pure waste. The notion that a past age or civilization might be great in itself, precious in the eye of God, because it succeeded in adjusting the delicate relation of the Eternal and the Transient is completely alien to us ... a just perception of the permanent relations of the Enduring and the Changing should . . . make us realize our own time in better proportion to times past and times to come . . f1 This may not be quite our language, but I think the problem it expresses is ours. It can be argued, as we shall see, that to re¬ quire the classic to speak to us directly in our time, rather than to demand of ourselves the effort to speak to the classic in its time, is an instance of what Eliot calls ‘overestimation of the importance of our own time’, and of ourselves. Yet the fact is inescapable that a much humbler tradition than Eliot’s—work¬ ing through time, across generations—is the proximate cause of there being any classics—old books which people still read—at all. And this means that over and over again in time those old books are accommodated to the sense of readers whose language and culture is different. Here we deal in dispositions, not essences. The paradox—that there is an identity but that it changes—is made more difficult by the certainty that it can in some measure 1 Criterion, xii, 1932, 74-5. 43

The Classic

be redeemed from change, by an effort of interpretation rather than of simple accommodation, the establishment of‘relevance’. It seems that on a just view of the matter the books we call classics possess intrinsic qualities that endure, but possess also an openness to accommodation which keeps them alive under endlessly varying dispositions. If we think that history makes no sense, or sense of quite another kind, we shall be inclined to dispute, or dismiss as with¬ out import, the doctrine of the perpetuity of the classic. This is the origin of querelles. But we do not want a quarrel; we want a just estimation of the permanent relations between the endur¬ ing and the transient, the essence and the disposition. That, at bottom, is the problem of the classic. Eliot’s essay has launched us on an inquiry into this problem. He offers us a paradigm. There is one universal classic, a poet almost universally and at all times admired. We may neverthe¬ less prefer other poets. Virgil wrote a foreign language, a language fewer and fewer of us know well or know at all. He even ‘exhausted’ that language, depleted its potential for poetry. What we owe to Dante is not only that he explained, with beautiful accuracy, the position of Virgil in world history, but also that he found for modern literature a language as noble as Latin (nobilior, he ventured to assert) which should be fit for a culture continuous with that of Rome and yet consistent with political and linguistic nationality. Such a culture survives not in the immutability of the old empire and the old language, but in the changingness of the new; yet the continuity is preserved, however difficult it may be to justify it in theory. Dante wanted an internationalism compounded of nationalisms, exactly as if he had founded the Criterion; he sought a universal human civility; if this civility ideally calls for a lost language of grace, the nearest provision one can make, in time, is the ‘illustrious vulgar’, capable, in the hands of the provincial poet who under¬ stands the metropolitan character of culture but speaks another tongue, of robustness and severity, splendour and transparency; in short, of imperial civility and vernacular power. Every poet in a major language may consider himself as using a volgare 44

The Classic illustre, or hochsprache and so, in his own vernacular, sharing the language of Virgil.1 Is it possible to validate the classic in its relation to the pro¬ vincial and the modern without this kind of metaphysical or mythical thinking about language and history? The popolo santo is a myth, and so are the translations and renovations that com¬ plicate like epicycles the original myth of Empire. But how, without mythologizing, are we to explain that the classic retains its identity without refusing to subject itself to change, without losing itself in an abysm of unintelligibility and irrelevance? If I can answer that question at all it will not be until the last chapter; there are more myths, more epicyclical variants, that must be considered before we can contemplate the full conflict of permanence and change, of classic and modern.

1 I have here borrowed some phrases from an essay I wrote on the seventh centenary of Dante in 1966 (reprinted in Continuities, 1968, 233 ff.). There is a reference to Auerbach, Literary Language and its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, 1965. Hochsprache is Auerbach’s version of volgare illustre, a vulgar language capable of imperial civility.

45

Urbem, quam dicunt Roman . . . putavi. . . . . huic nostrce similem . . .

V

IRGIL is not exempt from historical change; like the Empire he might grow merely secular. If one ceased to read him, or even ceased to venerate him, he could be

pushed into the past. In this chapter I want to talk about how that happened: how imperialism was reduced to a weaker myth, Augustanism, while Virgil was handed over from the allegorists to the philologists. Marvell’s Mower Damon, complaining that Juliana neglects him, needs a mirror to assure himself of his good looks. Nor am I so deform’d to sight, If in my Sithe I looked right; In which I see my Picture done. As in a crescent Moon the Sun.

If we look at the source of this reflection, in Virgil’s Second Eclogue, we at once see that something subtle has happened. Virgil’s Corydon looks at himself reflected in the calm ocean, and quite likes what he sees: nec sum adeo informis. Marvell remem¬ bers this, but makes his mower’s mirror a scythe, a curved, partial, interestingly distorted image. Virgil’s swain is a shepherd, not a mower, but that is not the extent of the change. Virgil simply flattens the sea and makes it a mirror; Marvell turns the scythe-blade into a luminous reflecting fragment. There is in the elegant deformity of Marvell’s and the Mower’s image, an indication of a new allusiveness, a hint that something modern, transient, anomalously attractive, is declaring itself at the expense of the inherited antique. It is, in its way, a little emblem of the relation of Change to Permanence, as well as of that moving distortion of the classic line that we sometimes, at our own risk, call baroque, or precieux;1 in any case, of one way the classic changes. 1J. B. Leisliman, The Art of Marvell’s Poetry, 1966, 140, seems to have been the first to point out the Virgil allusion. P. Legouis (Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 3rd edn., rev. Pierre Legouis and Elsie Duncan-Jones, 1971, 264) adds that in the same poem Marvell’s description of the heatwave is ‘a much heightened version of Virgil’s’ in the same Eclogue, (8-9, 12-13). It is also a conceited version. The catalogue of Damon’s gifts to

49

The Classic A generation or so earlier, the youthful Milton had written, in his hymn ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, a different kind of allusion to Virgil. At the birth of Christ Peace returns to earth: And waving wide her myrtle wand, She strikes a universal peace through sea and land.

This is the Augustan Peace, prophesied by Virgil and provi¬ dentially arranged to accommodate the Nativity; though a fact of history it is also a type of the full and perfect peace that is to come.* 1 Milton uses the figure resourcefully, but the Virgilian allusion—an easily accessible one, as we can tell from the casual¬ ness with which Shakespeare uses it in Antony and Cleopatra2— is more direct, has less independence and freedom, than Marvell’s. Here is a hint of change in the fortunes of the classic. Milton, who would never attempt the serious levity of Marvell’s allusion, was later to abandon altogether, or at any rate totally transform, Virgilian or imperial history. How he changed3 we may see from the Virgilian allusions in Paradise Regained; and this will help to make a distinction between two ways of attacking the myth of the imperial classic; for whereas Marvell amends it with a secular and modern wit, Milton abandons it for a Hebraic or Scriptural alternative. Both methods are hostile to imperialism, and Marvell’s is closer to its successor, Augustanism. Bishop Newton reports that Milton’s widow, when asked Juliana also derives from the Second Eclogue, 36-51. There is no better measure of the assured allusiveness of Marvell’s use of the classical model than a com¬ parison between these two poems. The tone of Marvell’s is so different that the fact of his having the Eclogue in mind at all might escape any but the researcher’s eye. 1 Rosemond Tuve, Images and Themes in Five Poems by Milton, 1957, 37 ff-> has an extended study of Milton’s references to the pax Augusta. The concept, linking this peace with the Advent, is as old as Eusebius and the Christian Empire. 2 It is Octavius, later Augustus, who says, before the battle of Actium, ‘The time of universal peace is near’ (Antony and Cleopatra, IV, vi, 5), speaking, like his poet, more than he knows. 8 See William Haller, ‘The Tragedy of God’s Englishman’, in Reason and Imagination, ed. J. A. Mazzeo, 1962, 201-12, for an account of the change.

50

The Classic whether her husband did not often read Homer and Virgil, replied with indignation that he had no need to steal from these authors, for the Holy Spirit visited him nightly. He had not, however, forgotten his Virgil when he wrote Paradise Regained. Its opening lines recall the four-line overture of Aeneid, i: Tile ego qui quondam . . .’: ‘I who erewhile . .

And though the hero

must gain the victory by patience rather than action, as did Job, his great exemplar and type, he also has a mission, and the mission, like that of Aeneas, is to establish a kingdom, an empire. God, sending forth his son to the temptations, argues that the experience will ‘lay down the rudiments/Of his great warfare’ (i, 157-8), remembering Virgil’s dura rudimenta (Aeneid, xi, 157) from Evander’s lament over his dead son Pallas. Fifty lines later Jesus, claiming that ‘above my years/The Law of God I read’ (i, 206-7) recalls Aeneid, ix, 311: ante annos animumque gerens curamque virilem, spoken of lulus, who had a man’s courage and, though still a boy, bore, beyond his years, the responsibility of a man. Less than twenty lines later a fuller Virgilian weight is felt in the description given by Jesus of the purposes of his ministry; his task, he has decided, will be to teach the erring soul, Not willingly misdoing, but unaware Misled; the stubborn only to subdue, (i, 224-6)

The reference is to the prophecy of Anchises in Virgil’s sixth Look—the prophecy of imperium. But there is a change; the military virtue of Virgil (regere . . . imponere—‘these shall be your arts’) is transformed into patient ministry. ‘The stubborn only to subdue’ is a pacific transformation oidebellare superbos; if anybody thinks Milton did not have the actual words of Anchises in mind, let him turn to the triumphal hymn of the angels at the end of the poem. They celebrate this new victory and remember an old one; ‘him long of old/Thou didst debel (iv, 605). You cannot use the rare English verb

debel

without

thinking of Virgil. One of the principal temptations to which Jesus is subjected is, precisely, the classic imperium, Rome and its Empire, which 5i

The Classic Aeneas founded. Satan’s description of it employs the ancient topic, encomium urbis, the praise of Rome as the Eternal City—a rhetorical device directly descended from the prophecy of Anchises. It is a vision of Empire: ‘All nations now to Rome obedience pay,/To Rome’s great emperor’ (iv, 80-1); and Satan adds that Jesus might well prefer such ‘civility of manners, arts and arms’ (83) to the brute military strength of Parthia. But to Jesus the offer of the throne of Tiberius is not a serious temp¬ tation. He condemns the Romans as decadent and luxurious; it is not his mission to free That people victor once, now vile and base, Deservedly made vassal, who once just, Frugal and mild, and temperate, conquered well, But govern ill the nations under yoke . . . (iv, 131-5)

Milton’s hero thus specifically rejects the Virgilian imperium sine fine, the Empire, as later he rejects its classics. In so doing Milton not only shows a natural preference for the republican epoch of Roman history, but remembers the doctrine of translatio imperii (accepting it despite its papal origin)—power is rightly trans¬ ferred from those who use it unworthily. He refers to the doctrine both in his History of Britain and his Defensio Secunda.1 But his use of it does not imply any adherence to the perpetuity of empire, an essence impervious to the action of history. In Milton’s opinion the Roman Empire proper ‘expir’d under the assault of Alaric.2 Nor did he share the Eusebian and Eliza1 See Poems of Milton, eds. John Carey and Alastair Fowler, 1968, footnote on P.R., iv, 133 (1142). Milton, in the History, reports the legendary foundation of Britain by a Trojan refugee, though without much credence (Complete Prose Works of John Milton, v, 1971, 9 ff). However, he concurs with the opinion of Camden (and of Shakespeare, in Cymbeline) that the Roman occupation did us some good (‘they beate us into some civilitie’, 61) though regretting that they communicated later a taste for luxury (85). 2 History, 127. In De Doctrina Christiana he allows it a very attenuated existence: the Empire fell when Augustus took away Roman liberty, and it is ‘now quite feeble and inert’. III, xxi. No question here of its possessing an intemporal and incorruptible form of existence.

52

The Classic bethan view of the achievements of Constantine; rather he held that Emperor in contempt and thought the feigned Donation responsible for the arrogance and luxury of the Roman Church. As for his having united the ecclesiastical and temporal estates, ‘I am not’, says Milton, ‘of opinion to thinke the Church a Vine in this respect, because, they take it, she cannot subsist with¬ out clasping about the Elme of worldly strength, and felicity, as if the heavenly City could not support it selfe without the props and buttresses of secular Authoritie’.1 He was aware that his opinion of Constantine was shared by Dante; but he had no interest in Dante’s imperialist mystique nor of course in his political purpose of restoring the power of the Roman Emperor. The allusions to Virgil in Paradise Regained are further testi¬ mony against any nostalgia for the great myth of undivided and perpetual imperium. I suppose it might be argued that Milton’s transformations of the Roman text involuntarily re-enact that transformation of the old into the new Rome that Virgil was thought to symbolize; so that for all his rejection of the pagan heroism and the pagan prophecy of Empire, Milton gives them a certain figural quality simply by referring to them as what must be transcended. But this ambiguity was historically un¬ avoidable; he tried but failed to solve it by the anathema on pagan learning—that splendid fundamentalist denial of anything that smacks of a prisca theologia or of later1 Romanist accommo¬ dations—in Christ’s rejection of the final intellectual temptation. So it would take a lot of ingenuity to make much of an imperialist out of Milton. He certainly wrote, in Paradise Re¬ gained and elsewhere, of a kingdom without end, but this king¬ dom was the kingdom of Christ, closer to the millennialism of the Fifth Monarchy men than to the mysticism of the true imperialist; which was foreign to his way of thinking, involving as it must a sort of historical synchrony, a view of empire as nunc stans—a condition Milton did not even allow to eternity.2 1 Of Reformation, Complete Prose Works, i, 1953, 5542 Barbara Lewalski, in her interesting article, ‘Time and History in Paradise Regained’, The Prison and the Pinnacle, ed. B. Rajan, 1973, 49-81, shows that

53

The Classic By early 1649, when he wrote the Tenure, he had lost all patience with monarchy, a fortiori with claims to absolute monarchy, which are of imperial derivation. Unlike the Tudor apologists, he did not think of Henry VIII as having revived an ancient right of the Emperor (to summon and take part in General Councils of the Church); he saw him only as the selfish instigator of an in¬ complete Reformation, which must now be carried through. When Rome is discredited so is its invention, the imperator Romanorum; both as are reduced to mere history, the history of a fraud. So the provincial heresy of Puritanism divides the future from the past, and rejects, so far as they can be rejected, the traditions of authority and civility associated with the urbs aeterna, the metropolis. For Milton certainly is, in one of the senses in which Eliot uses the word, provincial. (That the Latinity of his language is for Eliot an aspect of Milton’s provincialism is a typical paradox, resolved by the Dantean reflection that the need of Empire is served, not by imitation Latin, but by the volgare illustre.) To Milton the ‘Britannick Empire’, as he calls it in Of Reformation* 1 is neither Trojan nor Roman; Israel is its figura, its classic the scriptures—this last a point strongly endorsed by the Jesus of Paradise Regained.2 The presence of a powerful Virgilian strain in the poem is best explained by the revolutionary need to confute and transcend the pagan poet, to treat his empire and his heroes as mere Milton rejected the Christian commonplace of an eternity excluding the possi¬ bility of change (and so of time); he did not agree with Walter Charleton that God’s realm ‘knows no distinction of tenses’. And the Jesus of the poem looks upon history as affording prophecies and types, but as necessarily incomplete. 11, 614. 2 The paradox of the classically learned Milton rejecting the classics is an old one; Jerome cannot help quoting Virgil, even though he asks,‘What has Horace to do with the Psalter, or Vergil with the Gospel...?’ (quoted by Comparetti, 83). On the defence of ‘humane’ learning against Puritan attack, see R. F. Jones, ‘The Humanistic Defence of Learning’ in Reason and Imagination, ed. J. A. Mazzeo, 1962, 71-92; and see Howard Schultz, Milton and Forbidden Knowledge, 1955.

54

The Classic ignorant shadows of the truth: ‘false, or little else but dreams,/ Conjectures, fancies, built on nothing firm.’ (iv, 291-2). The sort of kingdom Jesus intends cannot be conjectured from pagan texts at all; the type is different and opposed. That is why Satan cannot, as he ironically confesses, tell whether the king¬ dom of which Jesus speaks is ‘real or allegoric’; he goes on to make a complicated Aristotelian joke about its being eternal, ‘as without end,/ Without beginning’ (iv, 390-2). Milton, in short, cites Virgil and all other classics only to reject them, to explain that the new truth is different. That much granted, Milton could afford to believe that there had been a translatio of sorts—from error to truth; the people of Rome yield to the people of England the title of populus Christianus. For England ‘had this grace and honour from GOD to bee the first that should set up a Standard for the recovery of lost Truth’, he observed, agreeing with other commentators on both sides of the Atlantic.1 Milton says this, or something like it, so often that we cannot doubt his conviction of the English destiny—a sort of transcendence of the Virgilian fatum; provi¬ dentially led through the dangers of its history, its ‘mighty sufferings’ as he calls them,2 England will introduce the new epoch. It is the notion Areopagitica most memorably expresses, in the vision of a London swarming with the artisans of truth: ‘Now once again by all concurrence of signs, and by the generall instinct of holy and devout men . . . God is decreeing to begin some new and great period in his Church, ev’n to the reforming of Reformation it self: what does he then but reveal Himself to his servants, and as his manner is, first to hisEnglish-men?’3 Here, as always, the translatio imperii, however new in style, is accom¬ panied by translatio studii, its old companion; hence all those studious spirits in London, working not like the hated ‘antiquitarians’ on the Fathers, and on the polluted records of the early Christian Empire, but on the Scriptures. The passions and 1 Of Reformation, i, 525. 2 The Judgement of Martin Bucer, ii, 438. 3 Areopagitica, ii, 553.

55

The Classic controversies of the forties, the sense of living in the Last Days, the dry heat of his own temperament, made Milton a narrower humanist than Erasmus. England, as one of the remoter provinces, was less likely than some to foster metropolitan mysticism. The fact that English, unlike Roman law, was unsympathetic to absolutism provided an important check on royal aspirations, which reached their destined end only with the execution of Charles I. Feudalism, which shaped the conditions of English kingship, implies a con¬ tract, which theocratic kingship rejects; and from the thirteenth century onwards lawyers warned Englishmen of the dangers of substituting for a legal system which held, in Bracton’s words, that ‘the King was to be under God and the law’, the Roman law which held that he was under God only.1 The perpetuity of Empire was a juristic myth, so it is not surprising that in England, up to the sixteenth century, when there was a deliberate attempt to import European conceptions of law and kingship, little attention was paid to it. Sir John Fortescue, writing in the later years of the fifteenth century on the governance ofEngland, was clear that the Empire had possessed only historical importance, and that now it had none: it made a fair start with Julius and Augustus, but then ‘beganne to fall doune, and hath ffallen alwey sythyn, in to suche decay, that nowe the lordeshippes off the emperour bith not so gret, as be the lordeshippes off some kynge, wich, while the senate was hole, was subget to the emperour’.2 There was, nevertheless, a slowly increasing tendency to adopt in England juristic claims that were properly associated with imperial doctrine. One such was the doctrine of the translatability of the maiestas populi Romani, of which every nation that had belonged to the original Empire was held to partake. The power of the Emperor might then be regarded as vested in the 1 See Ullmann, chap. 5. 2 Sir John Fortescue, The Governance ofEngland, ed. C. Plummer, 1885, chap,

xvi. 56

The Classic king; the lawyers, by turning their attention from imperium to regnum, were preparing the foundations of the post-Reformation nation-state, and the characteristic Renaissance tensions between nationalism and universalism. The slogan rex est imperator in suo regno, much used in France during the thirteenth century, was heard across the Channel in a state which had no theocratic tradition of kingship comparable to the French. The lawyers of Richard II styled him ‘entire emperor of all this realm’; the claim may have been made even earlier for Henry II.1 An imperialist might hear in this, as in the contemporary heresy of Wyclif, the first warnings of separatism and provincialism to come. But it was useful to be able to claim for kings the power of the Emperor; and the lore and propa¬ ganda of Empire could be similarly borrowed, especially at a time when religious allegiance to Rome was ending, and sovereigns with new churches needed to assert the continuity and the sacredness of their newly acquired authority. For this reason the adaptation of imperial themes to nationalist propaganda grew more systematic and elaborate in the sixteenth century. The successes of the Emperor Charles V pointed the way. He came not only nearer to being a universal overlord than any emperor before or after him, but used every means to adver¬ tise and assert his supremacy. Though he had some differences with the papacy he was a convinced Catholic and a supporter of the Tridentine reforms; committed therefore against Lutheran¬ ism, he was also, up to the moment of his abdication, a symbol of supranational authority. In support of these policies he revived the imagery and ritual of ancient Empire: he was Augustus, bringing in the Virgilian Golden Age, and as Virgil was to Augustus so were the great artists of the time to Charles. In painting, triumphal arch, in pageant, show and poem, they brought before the eye and ears ofEurope the reality of Catholic 1 Kantorowicz, 51, and Ernest Barker, Traditions of Civility, 1948, 112 ff. ‘There was a belief that true sovereignty . . . had been derived from an appropriation by each kingdom of rights originally confined to the Empire’ (J. N. Figgis, The Divine Right of Kings, 1934. 43 n. 3)57

The Classic Empire.1 The propagandists of local empire—rex est imperator in suo regno—were quick to see the possibilities, to translate the imperial claims and the imperial imagery. The French, with their long tradition of theocratic kingship, and special claim to imperial descent, were especially insistent; the myth of Empire supported Henry IV, and reached its apogee with Louis XIV, for whom the most recondite and fanciful imperial images were revived and made to blaze forth anew in art, show and ritual.2 But the English also wanted their share of this heritage. Like other European nations, they claimed descent from a Trojan refugee; the legend was a useful way of establish¬ ing a sort of proto-Latinity in the royal house, much as the legend of the visit of Joseph of Arimathea established its protoChristianity. The Empire was founded in Troy, and the Tudor dynasty partook of it from the beginning. The renovatio of English Church and Empire found its Eusebius in Foxe, its Virgil in Spenser. Many of Elizabeth’s subjects dissented from the practical application of these claims, and later they were, of course, in more extreme forms, a contributory factor in the Civil War. But her artist-propagandists, beneficiaries of the translatio studii which accompanied the renovation, took every opportunity to domesticate the imperium. Astraea had been for Dante a figure of the sacred empire, and Astraea, Virgo, could readily be identi¬ fied with Elizabeth, empress in her kingdom. The modern reconstruction of this Elizabethan cult of Empire was begun many years ago in an extraordinary article by Frances Yates.3 The cult of Elizabeth as Empress-Virgo owed 1 Since this was written a useful survey of the imperial imagery of Charles V has appeared in Roy Strong, Splendour at Court, 1973, chap. 3. For the funda¬ mental study see Frances Yates, ‘Charles Quint et l’idee d’Empire’, in Fetes et Ceremonies au temps de Charles Quint, ed. J. Jacquot, i960, 57-97. 2 For a dazzling account of some aspects of the cult of Le Roi Soleil see E. Kantorowicz, Oriens Augusti—Lever du Roi, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 17, 1963, 119-77. * ‘Queen Elizabeth as Astraea’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, x, 1947. This and other works by Dr Yates, on the Elizabethan cult and also on the

58

The Classic much to the example of Charles V, but every opportunity was taken to adapt it to the circumstances of England. The version of ecclesiastical history proposed by Foxe and the other Elizabethan apologists* 1 emphasized the parallel between Elizabeth and the English-born Constantine, blaming the papacy for the subse¬ quent decay of Empire, and particularly for the usurpation of the Emperor’s right to summon and attend Councils; as head of the Church Elizabeth had that right, and commanded the bishops. So Elizabeth had restored the primitive Church and united it with the English realm: an Astraea whose arrival signals the return of justice to earth, she was That virtuous Virgo bom for Britain’s bliss; That peerless branch of Brute; that sweet remain Of Priam’s state: that hope of springing Troy.

Ariosto had made Charles V the herald of Astraea; but England had the goddess herself. ‘Let her reduce the Golden Age again.’ Dr Yates concludes that a nostalgia for ‘universal concepts of empire’ is never far below the surface. Certainly there were those who were skilful in exploiting it. The imagery of the Fourth Eclogue once again formed the basis of an imperial cult. It continued to do so: Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson were im¬ perialist propagandists; the royalist medal struck on the occasion of the execution of Charles I displays a phoenix (emblem of the imperialist allegories of Charles V, are to be collected into a volume and pub¬ lished in 1975. 1 In addition to Yates, see William Haller, Foxes Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation, 1963 : ‘Acets and Monuments ... was the most elaborate expression of the apocalyptic expectancy with which the returned exiles and their party greeted Elizabeth at her accession’ (124). For Foxe gave aid to other theorists than the imperialists, as his immense influence in the following century, both in England and America, demonstrates. His book was dedicated to the Queen. For more detail on the apocalyptic, imperial and Astraean imagery, see Roy Strong, ‘The Popular Celebration of the Accession Day of Queen Elizabeth IJournal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xxi, 1958, 86-103, and his Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I, 1963. For Spenser in relation to the apologia for the Tudor church, see my ‘Spenser and the Allegorists’, and ‘ The Faerie Queene, I and V’, in Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, 1971, 12-59.

59

The Classic perpetuity) and bears the legend Caelo demittitur alto.1 So these abstract, vernacular, provincial claims to sacrum imperium con¬ tinue to be supported by its earliest source, in the classic Virgil. Spenser does not sound very like Virgil, but that The Faerie Queene is an imperialist, Astraean, and so ultimately Virgilian poem has been convincingly demonstrated;2 in one sense he is the most Virgilian of English poets.3 We speak of family resem¬ blances, and these are not always very close—Charlemagne and Frederick II and Charles V and Elizabeth were, after all, not very like Augustus. The classic, like the Empire, must be thought of as ‘timeless . . . except in the aspect of time’. But the aspect of time makes for differences of disposition. The eschatology and political mythology of his narratives have a direct and topical reference to current English affairs. Like Virgil he asserts the conformity of myth and fact; his knights have quests or missions like that of Aeneas, and at the end of them there is a Beast or a City or both, apocalypse and urbs aeterna, but his Gloriana is the reigning queen—or empress, as he usually calls her. What obscures, for us, the Virgilianism of the poem is its 1 Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 413. The phoenix appears on a coin of Hadrian’s, and on one of Constantine’s. Later, in the fourteenth century, Cola di Rienzo, a disciple of Dante, used it in his propaganda for a mystical im¬ perialism, a renovatio urbis, which had a strong tinge of Italian nationalism (Yates, 37). The Charles I medal is in an old imperial tradition, but perhaps derives more directly from contemporary French imagery. A design for a jetton (1644) celebrating the first Lit de Justice of Louis XIV shows, among other imperial emblems, a phoenix, and is inscribed Caelo dimittitur alto (Kantorowicz, Oriens Augusti, 169). 2 See n. 1 on p. 59. 8 See M. Y. Hughes, Virgil and Spenser, University of California Publications in English, ii, 1928-9, 265-418, for what is still the best general treatment of the Virgilian elements. Hughes mentions the effect of Landini’s allegory in the Disputationes Camaldulenses: ‘Aeneas is made perfect by contemplation of God and ... disciplined for the mystical experience by the perturbations of the active life’ (405). an interpretation Spenser certainly had in mind; and speaks of the process by which ‘the epic of Augustan Rome became a parable of the struggle of “the resolved soul and created pleasure” ’ (406). He has nothing to say, how¬ ever, of the importance of the Virgo figure.

60

The Classic freight of symbolism and its allegory—yet this is the necessary agent of the survival, and the accommodation to Christianity, of the pagan inheritance, both the sapienta veterum and the Em¬ pire of which Virgil announced, perhaps unwittingly, the trans¬ figuration. We cannot think of Spenser as even trying to achieve a lucid modern historicist view of Virgil, or of antiquity in general. I have mentioned Seznec’s book, which gives a vivid idea of the mythographical and mythopoeic opportunities and con¬ fusions that beset him; for it is worth adding the poets of the time were concerned not only with arcane interpretations, but thought the invention of classical or pseudo-classical myths and metamorphoses a perfectly proper activity.1 Furthermore, new allegorical methods were added to those which survived; there was a cult of the puzzling, of the dark meaning under its pleasing integument of story or picture. Spenser, as he himself announces, has his share of dark conceits. Had this not been so he would not have been a worthy poet of the renovation, the classic of another translated empire. It was no doubt for other reasons than his imperialism that Spenser seemed to Milton ‘sage and serious’. The theory of Empire was for him just as ‘antiquarian’ as that of episcopacy. It was associated with Divine Right, with what he regarded as false traditions concerning Constantine, and with the continuity and compatibility of pagan and Christian; he rejected it, just as on mature reflection he rejected legendary British history and the myth of Trojan origins. Milton, in fact, was a rejector. For example, he allowed that the Old Law was a ‘shadowy type’ of truth (P.L., xii, 303), but it existed only to be confirmed in its antitype and simultaneously superseded; and with a great deal 1 In addition see D. J. Gordon, ‘Chapman’s Hero andLeander , English Miscellany (Rome), iv, 41-94, on the use of mythology and the invention of new allegori¬ cal figures and myths (as various as Teras, Eronusis, and Ceremony). Other relevant works are Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, 1958, on neo-Platonic allegorical transformations, and E. H. Gombrich, ‘leones Symbolicae,' in Symbolic Images, 1972. The number of Ovidian and other myths adapted or transformed for allegorical purposes by Spenser is very considerable.

6l

The Classic of biblical, and all ceremonial, typology, he would have nothing at all to do.1 For the light of the scriptures was, under the new dispensation, clear and literal, and ought to be represented as such by a Christian poet. And broadly speaking he could see no use, after the coming of Christ, for types—those great instru¬ ments for the defeat of temporal flux—except in matters of eschatology. All the more certainly, then, is Virgil, as provider of the pagan types of empire, heroism and national destiny, superseded; Milton uses him, not in the old way, but in order to demonstrate his supersession. We are told that Mantuan in his Mariana, a brief epic of 1481, makes Gabriel quote the Fourth Eclogue to Mary at the Annunciation; and that in Sannazaro’s De Partu Virginis the angel finds her reading the Sibylline Books.2 It is impossible to think of the mature Milton having anything to do with such inventions. They belong to a rejected imperialism, to a wrong view of the classic. Perhaps one can best explain the character of Milton’s substi¬ tute for the old imperialism by returning to the comparison between Milton and his younger friend and contemporary Marvell. We should remember that Marvell was probably abroad during the years of controversy and civil war, and that in any case he was perhaps temperamentally averse from the millennialist enthusiasm with which Milton announced the reform of Reformation, the imminence of the rule of the saints in the kingdom of Christ, and the special destiny of the English people. That the English people were the people of God he believed, but not because they were descended from Rome. For imperialism he substitutes a Fifth Monarchy doctrine, however much he scorned its more proletarian manifestations. It suited the temper of the man, and of the times. These, on one view, were bad; but the worse the times, the nearer the end; renovation and decadence are twins. And in either case, whether this was end or beginning, the overthrow of anti-Christ and the 1 See William Madsen, From Shadowy Types to Truth, 1968, 70. 2 B. Lewalski, Milton s Brief Epic, 1966, 60-1.

62

The Classic reception of the regnum Christi were clearly the business of the English. The apocalyptic confidence of the early forties could no more than perpetual Empire survive exposure to actual history. The elect people backslid. Milton’s millennial feeling had already waned before the forties were out, and in the Christian Doctrine the elect nation is simply the historical Israel; Christ’s coming is unforeseeable, and in any case has nothing to do with any temporal kingdom.1 On the eve of the Restoration the lastminute remedies Milton proposed were of a constitutional kind. The Ready and Easy Way proposes a balanced aristocratic regime as the only one that, ‘with as much assurance as can be of human things’ hoped for, may last ‘even to the coming of our true and rightful and only to be expected King’.2 But the tone is secular for the most part, and the proposed solution Polybian. The old eschatological fervour, which substituted a Hebraic for a classical model of Empire, had burnt out. Fallen on evil days, Milton meditated the regnum Christi of some unforeseeable future, and, in Samson Agonistes, the ironical distance between human opinion and the obscure operations of providence. Marvell, as his Mower perhaps showed us, belongs to a less diagrammatic, more obviously modern world. He was once called ‘a notable English Italo-Machavillian’3 and his political thought has been represented as dominated by Machiavelli,4 a historian very different from Foxe. He was, to use the simple formula, less concerned with how men ought to be than with how they are. He became a practical politician, admired for his honesty, hated for his cunning. His comments on political matters are sometimes enigmatic or sardonic; and he supported, 1 Michael Fixler, Milton and the Kingdoms of God, 1964, 26, 214. 2 Complete Poems and Major Poems, ed. M. Y. Hughes, 1957, 891. 8 P. Legouis, Andrew Marvell, 1965, 106 n. 4J. A. Mazzeo, Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies, 1964, which con¬ tains a very interesting essay on ‘Cromwell as Machiavellian Prince in Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode” ’ (166-82). Mazzeo argues that the ambiguities of the Ode are a reflection of ethical ambiguities studied in Machiavelli, and play with Machiavellian concepts offortuna and virtu.

63

The Classic at various times, Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, and Charles II. Yet this was not simple Vicar-of-Brayism. John Wallace1 identi¬ fies Marvell as a ‘loyalist’; one who like Clarendon wanted, and waited patiently for, the interregnum to end, and so quite logically thought Cromwell should be king. After Cromwell he thought it equally consistent to be loyal to the new king. This is a way of respecting ‘the ancient rights’ very different from Milton’s, or, for that matter, Spenser’s. No doubt it in¬ volves a belief in a divine plan, but it is a plan patient, devious, unpredictable, to be sought in the upheavals and peripeties of actual history, rather than in some myth of dispositions, or some three- or five- or seven-fold division of the ages; a plan more confused and complex than the young Milton could have con¬ templated. Wallace quotes Lord Fairfax on the death of the king: But if the Power deuine permited this His Will’s the Law & ours must acquiesse.* 8

And this seems close to Marvell’s view. He had none of Milton’s confidence that it was proper to kill the king—he thought, rather, that the king had ancient rights, but that ‘those do hold or break,/As men are strong or weak.’ Justice will not succeed in its complaint against Fate. Soon after the Ode he celebrated, in The First Anniversary, the monarchical virtues of Cromwell; and now his words do awake some of the eschatological motifs never far from the mind in those years. But the tone is different. Cromwell, he says, will bring on faster the Last Days, which have been delayed by his enemies—Catholics, Anabaptists and the rest. The apocalyptic quality of this panegyric is qualified in a most un-Miltonic way: ‘If these the times, then this must be the man.’ There is no cause to doubt that Marvell felt strongly about Cromwell, but the millennium, or restored golden age, is for him a matter of rhetoric rather than of policy. Good policy is a proper compliance with destiny. When power reverted to the Stuarts, Marvell complied; and other poets were at hand to 1 John Wallace, Destiny His Choice, 1968. 8 Wallace, 42.

64

The Classic adapt the old imperial and apocalyptic figures to Charles II— ‘such a king’, said Marvell later of his statue, ‘as no chisel can mend’. What finally distinguishes the tone of Marvell from that of Milton is that he has some historical patience, a willingness to accept the unideal character of events; it may not be proper to call this Machiavellian, but it certainly is, in a recognizable sense, modern, if only in the way that Thucydides, in Arnold’s notor¬ ious comparison, was more modern that Sir Walter Ralegh. So, too, with Marvell’s own attitude to the past. He is willing to enforce, in the Ode, certain classical parallels; he alludes to Lucan and Horace with something like the obliquity we noted in the Virgilian reference of the Mower. For these poets also celebrated, at a crucial moment of history, the destruction of ancient rights, and the casting of the State into another mould. By these and other devices, he enforces rather than diminishes the immediacy of the poem’s relation to the particular moment of crisis it celebrates. It is pinned to a particular month; Crom¬ well is coming from Ireland and going off, rightly or wrongly, on his Scottish campaign. He will succeed; but that will not restore the golden age. So far from establishing universal peace, military success creates a need for endless vigilance. The future to be considered is secular, political; meanwhile certain ancient rights have been repressed, the king has died well, but his man¬ ners were those of an ancien regime, now superseded. Fate is not the ally of kingdoms old. The power ofEliot’s essay on Marvell, contrasting so markedly with his vacillating treatment of Milton, testify to his conviction that Marvell is not only more modern but less provincial, less of an enthusiastic dissenter in his learning, his wit, and his diction. What a relief to discover that not all the upholders of the Commonwealth were ‘the flock of Rabbi Zeal-of-the-land Busy or the United Grand Junction Ebenezer Temperance Association’ l1 Marvell is, in short, more civilized, ‘more Latin, more refined’, than Milton, or indeed than any succeeding poet. 1 Selected Essays, 1932, 294.

65

The Classic This does not affect the truth that he is a lesser poet than Milton or Dry den; but his ‘equipoise’ makes him, ‘in the best sense, a classic’.1 Eliot admired in Marvell the assurance of his attitude to the classical past, to which he would allude with a familiar obliquity, as of mature acquaintance; respecting the essence but varying the disposition. ‘Wit’, ‘reason’, ‘urbanity’—these are some of the terms he tries out on Marvell, confessing their inadequacy; he has these qualities nowhere more than in the Ode, which celebrates what to Eliot was the great crisis of English civilization, much as Virgil celebrates the crisis of the entire civilization of which ours is a provincial part. Milton was of a different, more enthusiastic breed; he may have begun with something of this urbane poise and wit, this authentic Latinity; but he never shows it after Comus. Marvell, though not a true imperialist, nevertheless belonged to a saving metropolitan tradition. It included the just exercise of the volgare illustre. Milton, on the other hand, for all his linguistic cultivation, had rejected metropolitan Rome in favour of a provincial millennium described not as timeless except in the aspect of time, but as to come in the course of time, after the imminent final collapse of the last of the temporal empires. Like all who divided time into Augustine’s seven or Daniel’s four or Joachim’s three ages, he was, despite his gifts and his learning, outside the tradition of imperial civility, in which tradition alone may the classic be found. That Marvell, though honoured as a classic, should be called a lesser poet than Milton reminds us of some of the discriminations made in Eliot’s essay. Mature in Eliot’s sense, having the metro¬ politan and Latin qualities he requires, a poet may yet be in other respects a lesser poet than one who lacks these benefits. Perhaps the great English poets must always be at some remove from the central Latin tradition; it is a consequence of our inhabiting, willy-nilly, a province, and one which embodies a culture his¬ torically anti-Romanist and much given to Dissent. But to be at a remove from is not the same as being at odds with some1 Ibid., 302.

66

The Classic thing; and Marvell is closer to the mind of Europe than Milton and other poets undoubtedly great but outside the classical tradition. Even if it is allowed that wit, magniloquence, and a mature sense of the metropolitan past confer the title of classic on Marvell, it must nevertheless be admitted that in his modernity he aban¬ doned the imperial theme. So, in his different way, did Milton. In its original Virgilian form it seems to be sounded very little in late seventeenth-century England. What happened was that it was transformed into something very much more familiar, something we have vaguely in mind when we use the term ‘Augustan’. Augustanism is a secularized, a demythologized imperialism; or, as Eliot would say, we are now dealing with a relative, not an absolute classic. The introduction of ancient models in architecture, art and poetry, the development of the modern capital city, all contri¬ buted to a state of affairs in which it became possible to think of one’s society as having achieved in its arts and manners a con¬ dition comparable to that of Augustan Rome. No longer a transcendent entity, Rome could be seen, remote but more sharply defined, at the end of a long historical perspective, and visible enough to serve as a model. Neoclassicism succeeds im¬ perialism. The new Rome will be as aware of its differences as of its similarities; it may use the old Rome to measure them, and it may also use it as a reminder that civil felicity may soon decay. Eliot’s opinion, that a society may, in so far as it succeeds in matching its model, forfeit other kinds of greatness, was also that of Dryden when he compared the second temple to the first, or spoke of the giant race before the flood, one of whom— Jonson—initiated English Augustanism by drawing, in Poetaster, a parallel between the literary civilization of ancient Rome and modern London. Although this is a new relationship, somewhat different from that implied by perpetual empire and temporal translations, the notion of translations survived. Power moved westward, and so did learning. In France this theory was held as early as the 67

The Classic thirteenth century, when Chretien de Troyes stated it expressly; but the full sense of translated empire and learning could not be had until the seventeenth century. We do not speak of a French Augustan age perhaps because the cult of Louis XIV was truly imperial, and drew on the accumulated imagery ofall the Augusti. The greatness of the age, a scope of achievement and a modernity peculiar to itself, make inappropriate an expression that implies a certain dependency. Early in the century there was a modernist movement with an abolitionist programme: ilfaut ecrire a la moderne, said the philosophical libertine Theophile, rather than in the manner of la sotte antiquite.1 And later in the century there occurred the most famous of all the querelles. But these anti-passeiste manifestations are really proofs of the security of France’s metropolitan claim. French classicism in the great century was not, as Curtius remarks, an artificial imitation of antique models, but an expression of the national mind; the rules it adopted were not antiquarian but rationally French, not old inventions renovated, but nature methodized.2 Eliot defines the ‘classical moment’ as ‘a moment of stasis, when the creative impulse finds a form which satisfies the best intellect of the time, a moment when a type is produced’.3 Such a moment may arrive when there is no great writer; but in France it did not. The French grand siecle was not a classical age without a classic. When Voltaire contemplated the westward translation of the arts he saw that the age of Louis XIV had inherited the destiny of the age of Leo X, to which it had passed from the ages of Alexander and Augustus. He thus associates the flowering of the arts and learning with the names of great rulers, studium with imperium. Similar claims were made in England. Denham gives a simple version of the translatio studii in his Progress of Learning. Temple alludes to it in his contribution to the English querelle of 1 Antoine Adam, Grandeur and Illusion, 1972, 146. Adam tells us also (144) that Theopile wrote Latin ‘with consummate elegance’. 2 Curtius, 265. 3 Criterion, iii, 1924, 231-2. Quoted by R. Kojecky, T. 5. Eliot’s Social Criticism, 1971, 56.

68

The Classic

Ancient and Modern. It was not a recondite topic. Yet the question as to when England achieved her Augustan epoch turns out to be less than simple. An Augustan age, as we have already gathered, need not have a writer of the greatest genius, though it may have a degree of general civility in excess of periods which do possess such writers. The distinction between a classic age and a classic author was perceived as early as the eighteenth century by Warton in his Essay on the Genius and Poetry of Pope; only three English poets were ‘in the first class’—i.e. classics, and they were Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton; but the Augustan (classical) age occurred in the reigns of William III and Anne.1 Such an age ought, in the manner of Voltaire, to be associated with a ruler worthy to be regarded as the inheritor of translated empire, and a patron of the arts; for more than mere dignity is required, and poets are quick to quote Martial’s Sint Maecenates, non deerunt... Marones—‘Give us Maecenases and we won’t be short of Virgils.’ Because of the arduousness of these requirements, a lack of uniformity in the contemporary culture, or the manifest defects of rulers as patrons, nobody, from 1660 to our own day, has found it easy to say positively when the English Augustan age occurred. The fact of her sex, inconvenient in this respect as it was useful in others, prevented Spenser from calling Elizabeth Augustus, as he would no doubt have liked to. In the event, the first English monarch to be so called was Charles II, though Waller had earlier awarded the title to Cromwell. Dryden, in Astraea Redux (1660), was the first to bestow it on the King with Virgilian allusions; a few years later, amid the perhaps not wholly serious apocalyptics of Annus Mirabilis,2 he used the old name Augusta for London, as Pope later did in Windsor Forest; and at the con1 H. Erskine-Hill, ‘Augustans on Augustanism,’ Renaissance and Modern Studies, xi, 1967, 55-83. See also W. J. Bate, ‘The English Poet and Burden of the Past,’ in the collection edited by Wasserman (see n. 3 below). 8 This is not to deny that the poem alludes elaborately to various apocalyptic prophecies and typological conjectures.

69

The Classic elusion of Absalom and Achitophel he remembered the old Augustan touchstone from the Fourth Eclogue: ‘Henceforth a series of new times began’ (1028). Much English Augustanism has a note of irony, which becomes very savage in the Dunciad, where Settle is ‘Th’ Augustus born to bring Saturnian times’. Charles II was no Augustus; he could not assert his father’s claim to imperial Divine Right, and as a patron he was only fit¬ fully generous. Atterbury and

Oldmixon did call his the

Augustan age, but Swift was right to condemn this as absurd.1 The most famous discussion is Goldsmith’s; in 1759 he gave the Italians their Augustan age under Leo X and the French theirs under Louis XIV, so far following Voltaire; about the English period he was less decided, but settled for the period of Addison, Swift and Pope;2 and this, being a time when men of genius enjoyed the patronage of the most powerful, was a more usual choice. In recent years historians have renewed the controversy as to which period deserves the title.3 One thing only seems certain: our classic age was conscious of lacking much by comparison with its model. The parallel might flatter, but it was also a source of uneasiness. Swift, for example, remembered that after it flourished Rome declined and fell. He deplored a growth in English luxury and corruption which seemed to resemble that of the ancient Empire; and he had a strong nostalgia for the Repub¬ lic. The arrival of the Hanoverians gave a fortuitous turn to the question, especially as George II had been named Augustus at 1 SeeJ. W. Johnson, The Formation of English Neo-Classical Thought, 1967, 21. 2 SeeJohnson, 26-7. 8 See R. Wellek, ‘The Term and Concept of “Classicism in Literary History”’, in Aspects of the Eighteenth Century, ed. E. Wasserman, 1965, 105-28; Johnson’s book, and his essays ‘The Classics and John Bull’ (England in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century, ed. H. T. Swedenberg, 1972) and ‘What was NeoClassicism?’, Journal of British Studies, ix, 1969, 49-70, with a rejoinder by Donald Greene, ‘What indeed was Neo-Classicism?’, same journal, x, 1970, 69-79- H. Erskine-Hill’s essay is cited above. Ian Watt’s‘Two Historical Aspects of the Augustan Tradition’, in Studies of the Eighteenth Century, ed. R. F. Brissenden, 1968, is enlivening.

70

The Classic the font. In his time the word Augustus became, with an obvious irony distilled in Pope’s Epistle to Augustus, an insult; the relation of the present age to that of Virgil was at best parodic. The translatio studii, as Aubrey Williams demonstrated, became for Pope a translatio stultitiae; having used the old notion in a fairly conventional way in the Essay on Criticism (III) he inverted it in describing the progress westward not of Logos but of Dulness, of the uncreating word.1 The Dunciad is, characteristically, a mock-epic, an indication that the times were simply a parody of the antique ideal; and the fear of another ‘Gothic invasion’ of darkness is related to Swift’s dread of luxury and enthu¬ siasm. A classical age of this kind is not Christian-imperialist, and has small place for the old Christian Virgil.2 Ian Watt is probably right when he says that it was the Augustans’ obsession with social stability, their love of order and the civic arts, that pro¬ duced what we enjoy most of their legacy—for example, city buildings and parks; the poetry we value not so much for its parallel agrarian conservatism as for its premonitions of a later alienation. In short, we associate the period with civility or urbanity more than with art. Most of us now, when we think of the epoch of English classicism, have in mind a longer stretch of time, that includes Jonson and Inigo Jones. But they were expert in the imagery of imperial classicism, supporters of the imperialist claims of the Stuarts. Their Augustanism was the cult of a king who inherited some of the divine right of the Augusti. What is properly thought of as Augustanism is a cult rather of the Rome of Augustus, of the urbanity of its poets, of the builders who turned the brick into marble. So it seems reasonable to make a broad distinction be¬ tween two types of English classicism: imperial and Augustan. The old imperialist motive, the ‘metaphysical’ empire, has 1 Pope’s Dunciad, 1952, 42 ff. 2 In fact the progress of Dulness westward (and so from Smithfield to George II’s court at St. James) parodies the journey of Aeneas from Troy to Latium, and thence to Rome; so that what is established is an anti-Augustan age.

71

The Classic little place in the eighteenth century, nor has the old ‘meta¬ physical’ Virgil. Cowley had early given him his new character: very polished, an emblem of aristocratic mesure: one who matured and refined poetry, rather than an imperial leader and a symbol of the union of two epochs of empire. ... the Mantuan Swan, Virgil the Wise, Whose verse walks highest but not flies. Who brought green Poesie to her perfect Age; And made that Art which was a Rage. (Motto to Miscellanies)

This is to reduce Virgil to something like the level of Malherbe or Denham. Cowley wrote these lines in the 1650s, about the time Marvell is likely to have written ‘Damon the Mower’; he lacks Marvell’s allusive power, but the poem indicates with just as much certainty the eclipse of the old Virgil, and the beginning of a second-order classicism. One of the distinguishing marks of such a period—an Augus¬ tan as distinct from an imperial age—is what I have called ‘accommodation’ (a loose term that covers all manner of allegorical and mythological strategies) as a way of maintaining the relevance of the classics. The old handbooks to interpretation and reconstruction were jettisoned; a few scholars, Upton for example, knew them, but in general Spence’s Polymetis replaced Ripa’s Iconologia. Where allegory persisted it was simpler; if not, it looked eccentric. Thus Bishop Warburton’s elaborate allegori¬ cal interpretation oiAeneid, vi as a veiled account of theEleusinian mysteries is intended to demonstrate that Virgil wished to pro¬ mote correct views of the doctrine of future rewards and punish¬ ments as an instrument of public order; he says nothing at all about imperium or Dante.1 It is not without interest that Gibbon’s 1 Warburton discovers an initiation, a katabasis; and, rejecting older views of the Golden Bough as a means to wisdom, explains it as the myrtle wreath used to crown the Eleusinian initiates. The trials of Aeneas represent the lesser and the greater mysteries, and the object of the whole is to legitimate Aeneas as lawgiver and founder of a properly constituted state. (The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated, 1737-41, reprinted 1811, II, iv, 77 ff.) It would be worth

72

The Classic first publication in English was a refutation of Warburton’s thesis; as the name of Gibbon suggests, these were times when the fall, rather than the perpetuity, of the Roman Empire was the fashionable subject.* 1 A Gothick political mysticism may have helped to preserve Virgil, but now he was a literary figure, what Addison called a ‘very nice and delicate’ model,2 and, since the literate held his text in common, an agent of class solidarity. The Messiah of Pope suggests another narrowing of interest, and is perhaps a good instance of that limitation of sensibility ‘in the scale of religious feeling’ which Eliot detected in the period; here the old imperial pieties are supplanted by a provincial Hebraism. Pope explains the affinity between the Fourth Eclogue and Isaiah as due to Sibylline intermediaries, and claims to have written his poem in order to demonstrate that ‘the images and descriptions of the Prophet are superior to those of the Poet’. Johnson con¬ trived to translate the Messiah into Latin with few reminiscences of Virgil3 and the whole exercise evidently belongs to a period which did not conceive of the Poet as Prophet, or concern itself with the Christian universalist myth of Virgil. Addison remarks at the beginning of his Discourse on Ancient and Modern Learning (1739) that ‘The present Age seems to have a very true Taste of polite Learning, and perhaps takes the Beauties of an ancient Author, as much as ’tis possible for it at so great a Distance of Time. It may therefore be some Entertainment to us to consider what Pleasure the Contemporaries and Country¬ men of our old Writers found in their Works, which we at present are not capable of; and whether at the same Time the Moderns mayn’t have some Advantages peculiar to themselves, and discover several Graces that arise merely from the Antiquity of an Author.’ This essay, in itself rather slight, makes an imporinvestigating the antecedents of this book. Incidentally, the edition of 1811 coincided with a revival of interest in the occult. 1 Critical Observations on the Sixth Book of the Aeneid, 1770. 2 Miscellaneous Works, ed. A. C. Guthkelch, 1914, ii, 451. 3 See Elizabeth Nitchie, Vergil and the English Poets, 19x9, 170-1.

73

The Classic tant point. Addison assumes that the ideal way to read the classics is to get as close as possible to reading them as contem¬ poraries did. He has to admit there must be quite a lot in Homer and Virgil—topical allusions (think, he says, how hard Absalom and Achitophel will be a hundred years from now), allusions to contemporaries, familiarity with the scenery and contemporary visual art—that was easily accessible to their first auditors and is not to us. Their most obvious advantage is their superior know¬ ledge of the language, its ‘Sound and Harmony’. ‘Time has quite worn out, or decay’d, several Beauties of our ancient Authors’, he says. And in his account the compensations seem trivial. In the ancient tongues vulgarisms are less detectable (‘we are not much offended with the low Idiotisms of a dead Language’) and the use in poetry of such names as Cato, Pompey and Marcellus does not have the lowering effect that English proper names would undoubtedly produce. For this and similar reasons Virgil and Horace contrive to appear ‘very sublime, but at the same time very natural’.1 A selfconsciously classical age will not read Virgil as a prophet who, knowingly or otherwise, wraps his message in allegorical devices, an oracle requiring interpretation. Nor is Virgil in any sense felt to be a contemporary. He lived a long time ago. We can get some, even much, of his meaning, but of course we must also lose much; there is no sense of theAeneidas a poem that can generate an indefinite number of senses, available perhaps at different epochs; there is one sense, and time has made it partly inaccessible. It is a closed book, not an open text. The only compensation is that remoteness and inaccessibility have their antiquarian charms. The reading of Virgil henceforth depends primarily on philol¬ ogy, supplemented by a cultivated taste for the antique which is a world away from the sophisticated and passionate revivalism of the sixteenth century. The agents of survival are now school¬ masters and dons, imparting to their pupils the knowledge necessary to a partial understanding of Virgil in his historical 1 Guthkelch, 447-63.

74

The Classic context. Demythologized, his importance now lies only there; or, as Cowley thought, in his refinement, or as Arnold believed, in his ineffable melancholy. From the imperialist point of view this attitude, for all its elegance, is what Eliot calls a ‘provincialism of time’. But that point of view depends on theological and political assumptions that never entered Addison’s head, any more than it would have occurred to him to think Dante an important poet.1 To put it another way, Addison is not deeply troubled by the problem of change, whereas Eliot, like the medieval jurists, is always deal¬ ing—in his own way, though it ultimately derives from theirs— with that very problem. We have here two very different classicisms, and it is not surprising that Eliot, having noted his respect for the eighteenth-century variety, should go on to qualify it as narrow and provincial. This disagreement about the classic may sound rather abstract, but in a sense it affects us all in a quite practical way. For there is a continuing conflict between critics who hold, in a more or less sophisticated form, the views of Addison, which I can crudely summarize as representing the classic as a closed book that learning can partly open, and those who assert that the classic is a more or less open text from which new readings may generate, not the charms of an antiquity imperfectly understood, but important new senses. The first party requires the reader to use his learning in order to approximate to a reading of the classic possible to an informed contemporary of the author’s; the second holds that the classic has meanings contemporary with us which, quite possibly, an informed contemporary could not have discovered. The first party practises hermeneutics, the 1 His Remarks on Italy (1705) are lavish in comment on antiquities and on poetry, but not even in the section on Florence does he so much as mention Dante. This neglect is not surprising. Spence called Dante ‘Gothic’; Goldsmith excused his failings by saying he had had to address ‘a barbarous people in a method suitable to their apprehensions’, so using ‘a strange mixture of good sense and absurdity’. Horace Walpole found him ‘extravagant, absurd and disgusting, in short a Methodist parson in Bedlam’. See Oswald Doughty, ‘Dante and the English Romantic Poets’, English Miscellany (Rome), ii, 1951, 125-69.

75

The Classic second an extremely elaborate form of accommodation. Her¬ meneutics is an old science, but its name was first invented in the eighteenth century. It is the alternative to accommodation. The preservation of Homer as a sacred book in later periods, when the sense of the text was at odds with the moral and intellectual assumptions of the day, gave rise to the accommodating allegori¬ cal readings of the Stoics; this method was adopted by Alexan¬ drian

Christians,

and

eventually

by

Christian

interpreters

generally. But, as Dilthey remarked, when, in the steps of Schleiermacher, he introduced his scientific hermeneutics, the early Church needed not only to introduce the theology of the Logos backwards into the Old Testament (a typological and accommodatory exercise), but also to take account of the possi¬ bility of interpretative excess, as by the Gnostics (a hermeneutic precaution). Rules of interpretation were promulgated, and these rules were the elements of hermeneutics, the science ‘upon which all security in history depends’. Dilthey also noted the peculiar difficulties introduced into the subject at the time of the Reformation. Protestants committed, as for example Milton was, to the virtually impossible position that the Scriptures were self-explanatory, had among their other problems that of resist¬ ing wanton interpretations offered by the wilder sects, when the guidelines of the Romanist tradition were abandoned. Mean¬ while, other scholars were trying to put together, from bits and pieces, a past pagan civilization, and by their labours creating that historical understanding which replaces accommodation. In these circumstances the central problem emerged more clearly, and there was the famous puzzle of the hermeneutic circle: you need to understand the whole to understand the parts, the parts to understand the whole. ‘This circle is logically un¬ breakable, but we break it in practice every time we understand.’1 How do we leap over the break? It was Schleiermacher’s in¬ fluential opinion that ‘everything in a given text which requires 1 H. A. Hodges, Wilhelm Dilthey: An Introduction, 1944, 27; I depend on this book, and on the text of Dilthey’s ‘The Rise of Hermeneutics’ translated by Fredric Jameson in New Literary History, iii, 1972,229-44. 76

The Classic fuller interpretation must be explained and determined ex¬ clusively from the linguistic domain common to the author and his original public’. That might seem to be the end of allegory, a full endorsement of Addison’s assumptions; but Addison did not know about the circle, and Schleiermacher’s task was more difficult. He saw that to break the circle more was needed than mere archaeological and philological slogging—nothing less, in fact, than an act of interpretative genius, of ‘divination’. Only thus can the interpreter reach his ultimate goal, which is to understand an author better than he understood himself. This act of divination must be an intuition of a whole, in relation to which the parts may, as it were, be understood as provinces of an integral empire; and so the logical rigour of Schleiermacher and Dilthey reconstitutes the ghosts of empire and province, just as they revive the notion of the author who speaks better than he knew. In our time, and in the field of our principal interest, the hermeneutic point of view has been most forcibly stated by E. D. Hirsch, who strongly and subtly asserts the view that the sole meaning of a work is its author’s. Considering the case of the medieval interpreter who would have denied Schleiermacher’s view that everything must be explained from the original lin¬ guistic domain, he allows that there is a kind of choice between the two, a choice to be made according to some personal cri¬ terion of‘the best meaning’. But for him the best meaning is the one the author meant; every meaning must have a meaner, and who should that be if not the author? (Thus he reinstates the cogito, just as the French critics were thinking they had driven it out.) Hirsch’s view is that to deny the author the best meaning is to be imprisoned in our own culture; thus he retorts upon the other party the charge of temporal provincialism. He will have nothing to do with the Heideggerian position that such im¬ prisonment is in any case inevitable.1 This is a modern humanist view of the matter. It rejects 1 Validity in Interpretation, 1967: ‘Three Dimensions of Hermeneutics,’ New Literary History, iii, 1972, 122-47.

77

The Classic medieval solutions which allow for both change and the preser¬ vation of identity, so that the best meaning might well be Virgil s, although he may not have known that he meant it. Yet if I understand him correctly Hirsch does leave room for a compro¬ mise. Examining Schleiermacher’s rule concerning the original linguistic domain, he allows that it is not applicable to all texts. The example he gives is of legal texts which are ‘meant to apply to objects and situations which did not exist when the law was formulated and which thus could not be comprehended or com¬ prehensible within that original linguistic domain’.1 But he does not, as perhaps, at some risk to his whole thesis, he ought to have done, consider whether literary texts, and religious texts, may not share the characteristics of his example, may not have been meant in an analogous way—as laws are meant to be interpreted as applicable in circumstances which could not possibly be fore¬ seen at the time of their drafting. It seems obvious that the ‘medievalist’ position is precisely that Hirsch’s amendment to Schleiermacher applies to classics as well as to laws, and that both classes of document are exempted from the temporal restrictions that apply to other texts. This is of course a more open position, and it should be said that it is more open not only to inspired reading but to nonsense. All such readings, whether nonsensical or not, would, on Mr. Hirsch’s theory, have to do not with meaning but with significance; in this way he consistently distinguishes between the things, inter¬ esting or silly, that people say about texts, and what the texts really mean. But I cannot help adding that his ‘meaning’ is very like ‘essence’, and his ‘significance’ like ‘disposition’, so we are once again back to the imperial classic, its meaning somehow timeless, its significances apprehensible in the aspect of time, though only by an act of divination. At the beginning of this chapter I sought by examples to dis¬ tinguish between the Virgil of Marvell and the Virgil of Milton. Although Marvell is aware of the imperial implications of his 1 Validity in Interpretation, 201. 78

The Classic great subject in the ‘Horatian Ode’ he is conscious of new rules in a new epoch; the ancient rights are annulled in the lines on the execution of Charles, which occur exactly in the middle of the poem; that is what it is ‘about’. We move into a new kind of history; power has no longer the sanction of transcendent empire and is maintained by the erect sword. The birth-throes of the original empire are remembered in the echoes of Lucan and Horace’s Actium Ode; but they are decisively placed in the past, the objects of an allusiveness graver, but not different in kind, from that of ‘Damon the Mower’ to the Second Eclogue. Milton’s rejection of the old imperialist typology is different; he replaces it with a rival theory of history. The future he wanted was a successor to, not a version of, the old imperium; and he was concerned not with the best meaning of Virgil but the sole meaning of Scripture. This, on the imperial view, is Hebraic and provincial. For anything like a sense of metropolitan imperialism in England one has to look to the late Elizabethan period, with Spenser as its classic; it is not altogether satisfactory. The eight¬ eenth century, the classical age that produced no true classic, is not imperialist but Augustan. Its Rome is historical, remote, a model of civility and a source of irony, a warning against the probable onset of decadence and another dark age. Augustanism is indeed a small light if seen against the great blaze of a fuller imperialism: Queen Anne against Louis XIV. The search for the best meaning of Virgil now became pre¬ dominantly philological; but the allegorical tradition did not quite die. Occultisms of many kinds maintained the tradition of sapientia veterum; Virgil no longer attracted the best of their attention, at least until the modern renovation of imperialism described in my first chapter. Meanwhile any reader of Shake¬ speare criticism could assure us that the intense cultivation of philological severity has no effect whatever on the extravagance of allegorical interpretation. If, as Dilthey observed, Flacius was able in 1567 to set a middle course between sectarian extravagance and Tridentine rigour in the pursuit of the best meaning of Scripture, then it seems we have need in our time of such a man as Flacius, and of such a book as his Clavis.

79

The Classic Eliot’s myth of the classic provides, at the least, a way of thinking about the difficulties we encounter when we ask what happens when modern minds engage ancient texts. From day to day we must cope with the paradox that the classic changes, yet retains its identity. It would not be read, and so would not be a classic, if we could not in some way believe it to be capable of saying more than its author meant; even, if necessary, that to say more than he meant was what he meant to do. The imperialist formula recognizes this, but runs the risk of being thought a piece of trivial mysticism. Yet some such way of thinking seems necessary to any view of the classic that will allow us to be its contemporaries, to any view of literature that preserves our right of immediate access to the venerable works of the past. My third chapter has to do with a classic which, after yet another translation, signifies its own uneasy awareness of the precarious nature of modern to ancient, province to empire; and in my last I hope to take up the other issue here involved, namely the senses in which the classic may be said to be open to the modern reader, or, if you like, his share in the production of its meanings.

80

Ill magnus ab integro saeculorum nascitur ordo

T

HE philosopher Berkeley once wrote an Essay towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain complaining of the corruption and degeneracy of life and art in England at

the time of the South Sea Bubble. In his disillusionment he decided to establish a college in Bermuda or anyway in the New World; and from 1728 to 1731 he lived in Rhode Island, plan¬ ning this abortive project. What he had in mind we learn from his ‘Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America’, written in 1726.1 The Muse, disgusted at an Age and Clime Barren of every glorious Theme, In distant Lands now waits a better Time, Producing subjects worthy Fame: . .. In happy Climes, the Seat of Innocence, Where Nature guides and Virtue rules, Where Men shall not impose for Truth and Sense, The Pedantry of Courts and Schools: There shall be sung another golden Age, The rise of Empire and of Arts, The Good and Great inspiring epic Rage, The wisest Heads and noblest Hearts. Not such as Europe breeds in her decay; Such as she bred when fresh and young. When heav’nly Flame did animate her Clay, By future Poets shall be sung. Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way; The four first Acts already past, A fifth shall close the Drama with the Day; Time’s noblest Offspring is the last.2 1 The date was established by B. Rand, Berkeley s American Sojourn, 1932, which also gives details of Berkeley’s extensive connections with American places of learning, including Harvard, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania. The University of California at Berkeley is in a district specially named after him, and, I am told, takes pride in being the westward limit of the studium. 2 Text from A. A. Luce, The Life of George Berkeley, 1949, 96 (omitting second

83

The Classic These verses are usually, by American writers, called ‘famous’, but may not be so well known in England. They apply the old translation topos, as Augustan England declines into stockjobbing, graft and luxury, to the New World. We note that in the final stanza Berkeley has grafted an Hebraic Fifth Monarchy on to the Roman imperium, by means of his figure of a five-act play. The association of the New World with the westward course of Empire was older than Berkeley. The Reformation, it was sometimes noted, spread westward;

Humphrey Gilbert said

that ‘the course of Gods word and religion . . . from the begin¬ ning has moved from the East, towards, and at last unto the West, where it is like to end . . f* 1 Herbert perhaps had it in mind when he wrote: Religion stands on tip-toe in our land, Ready to pass to the American strand.2

But the Latin imperium was by now largely incorporated in a more Hebraic idea. The early settlers of New England were Miltonic in their fervour: ‘It is well known unto the godly and judicious how ever since the first breaking out of the lighte of stanza). The poem was first published in the Miscellany, 1752. Berkeley imposes the translatio on his classical source, Horace, Ep., XVI, which bears it very well. 1 C. L. Sanford, The Quest for Paradise, 1961, 53. Cotton Mather opens his Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) with an epic statement of the translatio: ‘I write the wonders of the Christian Religion, flying from the depravations of Europe, to the American Strand . . .’ Cotton occasionally quotes Virgil, but he was also a reader of Foxe, and gave Book Five the title ‘Acts and Monuments’ (edn. of 1852, reissued 1967, I, 25, 26; II, 177). 2 Perhaps the first hint of a New World translatio is in Dante’s story of the westward voyage of Ulysses in Inferno, xxvi, which contains the memorable exhortation Fatti nonfoste a viver come brutiJMa per seguir virtute e conoscenza. See, on this unsuccessful voyage, E. Barker, ‘Dante and the Last Voyage of Ulysses’, Traditions of Civility, 1948, 53-73. For the commonplace character of the notion in America see also Benjamin T. Spencer, The Quest for Nationalism, 1957, 22-3, and Edwin Fussell’s Frontier: American Literature and the American West, 1965, 5-6. The opening of the American West was generally associated with the topic of the translatio.

84

The Classic the gospell in our honourable Nation ofEngland (which was the first of Nations, whom the Lord adorned ther with after that gross darknes of popery which had covered and overspread the Christian world) what warrs, and opposissions ever since Satan hath raised . . . against the Saints.’ So William Bradford in his Of the Plimmoth Plantation, in 1647.1 New England imported Foxe: the reign of anti-Christ was approaching its end, and if England, first converted by Joseph of Arimathea in the reign of Tiberius, was having a bad time, here were some Englishmen who had come into the promised land; reformation was evi¬ dently stirring, and to whom should God announce it but to his New Englishmen? Regnum Angliae, regnum Dei, proved an adaptable saying.2 3 America was slow to adopt anything like a modern, pragmatic historiography; the Foxian patterns could appeal to the learned Jonathan Edwards a century later, and Edwards gave a strongly Miltonic tone to his version of the religious translation 1 Quoted in Peter Gay, A Loss of Mastery, 1966, 33-4. Plymouth, originally distinct from the Massachusetts Bay community, had no Royal Charter and no direct relation to the English Church; it formed a Federation with the later colonists in 1643. But the apocalyptic form of history was endemic in Puritan¬ ism, and the myth of the importance of England in Reform was not yet one they would wish to omit. 2 Gay, chap. I. 3 The Sun of Righteousness has long been going down from east to west; and probably when the time comes of the church’s deliverance from her enemies, so often typified by the Assyrians, the light will rise in the west, until it shines through the world, like the sun in its meridian brightness. .. . And if we may suppose that this glorious work of God shall begin in any part of America, I think if we consider the circumstances of the settlement of New England, it must needs appear the most likely of all American colonies, to be the place whence this work may principally take its rise. And if these things are so, it gives more abundant reason to hope that what is now seen in America, and especially in New England, may prove the dawn of that glorious day: and the very uncommon and wonderful circumstances and events of this work, seem to me strongly to argue that God intends it as the beginning or forerunner of something vastly great. Quoted by Ursula Brumm, American Thought and Religious Typology, 1970,

.

90

85

The Classic In the South it was easier to maintain a balance between the pagan classic and the Christian religion,1 but even in the North, at the height of Puritan scripturalism, the need for Latin learning was recognized; the Boston Latin School and Harvard College were founded only a decade and a half after the arrival of the Pilgrims. In the eighteenth century the Roman studium, as Berkeley—who made valuable benefactions to Harvard and Yale—would have understood it, underwent a New World renovation. The early years of the Republic were America’s imperial age, an age of classical mottoes, pseudonyms, medals and statuary. Washington had busts of Caesar and Alexander, of Sallust and Terence and Horace, of Aeneas carrying his father out of Troy.2 Jefferson studied the ancient monuments and declared his passion for the Maison Carree at Nimes. The Great Seal of the United States bears the Virgilian mottoes Novus ordo seclorum, and Annuit coeptis,3 ‘God has favoured our beginnings’; they appear to this day on the back of the dollar bill. Similarly, the dime bears the image of the Roman fasces, emblem of authority in the classical republic; and the Jefferson nickel has a Roman portrait of the great man with, on the obverse, his neoclassical house, Monticello. The classical quality of the Constitution was reflected in adaptations of Roman iconography, and even of Roman cere¬ mony; Washington proceeded from Mount Vernon to New York through triumphal arches displaying, like those of Charles V two and a half centuries earlier, a version of the Roman eagle, though constructed of shrubbery, perhaps as a reminder of the personal simplicities and the Sabine retreat, of which there was a contemporary cult; and as he crossed the Schuylkill a machine placed a civic crown on his head. The mottoes of many statues 1 R. E. Gummere, The American Colonial Mind and the Classical Tradition, 1963,

.

37

2 Gummere, 15. 8 Audacibus adnue coeptis, Georgies, i, 40, Aeneid, ix, 625. These are, respectively, an invocation to Caesar and a prayer to Jupiter; the Americans, having got what they wanted, apparently had no need of prayer, so they changed the mood and tense of the verb.

86

The Classic are Latin. As Howard Mumford Jones, who records these and other like facts, observes, ‘It is remarkable in what degree the public iconography of the nation—the statues that crown the domes of state capitols, the figures of justice in our courthouses, the emblems of peace, or plenty, or progress or some other gen¬ eral ideal—are classical females in a republic that was never part of Greece or Rome.’1 The directly classical era, imbued with the spirit of the Roman renovation, may be said to have ended only with the administration of John Quincy Adams (1825-9). The imperial confidence of Americans, expressed as a blend of the old imperialism, of Danielic and New Testament apocalyptic prophecy, rested also on the translatio—on the conviction that the truth of religion and of the old civilization had been trans¬ ferred to a new world. The wilderness itself, easily related to a biblical type, had regenerative powers, and promoted in the people a republican frugality and health, which should be an example to the world. (Something of this myth survived, though in an etiolated form, the tremendous impact of industrial tech¬ nology.2) But there were forces at work to undermine that confidence, and to render the relation of the new to the old world more problematical. One was the old Augustan fear that a civilization reached its highest point by means of an impulse which, con¬ tinuing, could cause its decline. In 1801 an anonymous writer could draw an exact parallel between the inevitable decline of the Roman Empire and the inevitable ‘causes which operated in the order of things, to separate the United States from Great 1 Howard Mumford Jones, O Strange New World, 1963, 232; see the whole chapter called ‘Roman Virtue’ (VII). As C. L. Sanford remarks, the classical revival was both provincial and cosmopolitan. The colossal statue of Washing¬ ton by Greenough, now in the Smithsonian Museum, shows him in a classical attitude, wearing a toga. See also Sanford, 156 ff. 2 See Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden, 1964. Indeed, American historians frequently find traces of the old religious imperialism in the foreign and domestic policies of the modem technological and secular United States— notably in the ‘messianic interventions’ of the twentieth century, and in the cult of progress.

87

The Classic Britain’. But another remembers the danger as well. ‘The arts of Greece, the arms of Rome, the pride of England will be ours. May God avert the rest!’ exclaimed Estwick Evans in 1818.1 2 And in Europe the other great Revolution went awry. In 1785 Richard Price had called the American Revolution the most important step, next to the introduction of Christianity itself, in the fulfilment of the ‘old prophecies’ of an Isaian empire of peace; the same millennial fervour beset the English Romantics, and Wordsworth (whose later poem ‘Laodamia’ has some claim to be amongst the most Virgilian of English poems, though not in any imperial sense) remembered the Fourth Eclogue: I sang Saturnian rule Returned—a progeny of golden years Permitted to descend and bless mankind. [Exc., iii, 756-8)*

But neither the imperial nor the Isaian monarchy manifested itself in America, or in France. The novus ordo apparently could not be founded on the translated Roman Empire, however con¬ taminated by millennial prophecy; the Augustan dread of decline was justified. It could be blamed on the importation of English and European corruption, or, more fundamentally, on ‘causes which operated in the order of things’; but less and less could native new world yeoman virtue be depended upon to check it, even though the Americans could assert, in place of their old claim to be the latest manifestation of empire, the advantages of their independence of European history. The consequence was that America, especially in the North, chose in the early nineteenth century a new past which was not classical but Hebraic. This did not alter the deep-seated convic¬ tion of an imperial destiny, but it gave it a missionary quality. The proclamation of godly revolution by the new evangelists— 1 Mumford Jones, 250, 331. 2 See M. H. Abrams, ‘English Romanticism: the Spirit of the Age’, in Roman¬ ticism Reconsidered, ed. N. Frye, 1963, 26-72, and, more expansive, Natural Supernaturalism, 1971.

88

The Classic the conquest of the world by American benevolence, powered by American technology and commerce—was accompanied by an assurance that America alone could avoid the errors which caused the decline of earlier empires. ‘I cannot but view the Millennium’, said one Seth Williston, ‘as constituting a very practical subject.’1 If some lamented change and feared the destruction the machine must bring to the garden, others were so confident of the American future that even the Wall Street crash of 1857 was regarded as a miraculous intervention in human affairs, its purpose the conversion of Wall Street business¬ men.2 This future, like the one devised by the colonists, was founded on a past, a past that provided prophetic types; it was assumed that since such prophecies had been fulfilled in the past they would be so in the future. Thus the evangelism of the nineteenth century converted to its own purposes the typological historio¬ graphy which had comforted and inspired the ‘handful of halfstarved fanatics’, as Henry James calls them, who, in establishing their seventeenth-century commonwealth, laid the foundations ‘of a mighty empire’.3 And those who were not infected by evangelical fervour, but who contemplated, from the middle of the nineteenth century, the problematical past of America, and its novus ordo in a future indescribably altered by money and machines, continued to reflect on the continuing significance of the old types. Much has been written, of late, about seventeenth-century typology.4 Strictly speaking, a type is distinguished from a sym¬ bol or allegory in that it is constituted by an historical event or person (as Christ makes Jonah the type of his resurrection, and St. Paul the crossing of the Red Sea by the Israelites a type of 1 Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America, 1965, 54. 2 Miller, 90. 8 Henry James, Hawthorne, 1879, 68. 4 See especially William Madsen, From Shadowy Types to Truth, 1968, for Milton and European typology; Ursula Brumm, American Thought and Religious Typology, 1970.

89

The Classic baptism). A type can therefore be identified only when fulfilled by its antitype, a later event in a providentially structured history; the Old Covenant is a type of the New. The main field of operation is the Old Testament. Christian typology begins in Paul and the Gospels; Mark is sometimes regarded as minutely typological in his treatment of the narrative. Even Milton, devotee of the ‘single sense’ of scripture, allowed that this sense might be ‘a compound of the historical and typical’.1 Types are essentially what Auerbach has in mind when he speaks of fgurae, events or persons that are themselves, but may presage others. Their purpose, to put it too simply, is to accom¬ modate the events and persons of a superseded order of time to a new one. A writer conscious of standing on a watershed between past and present might well be interested in typology, though his use of the word hype’ might not have the exactness required by scholars, and he might let it be contaminated by other devices for accommodating an old veiled sense to a new order of time. Hawthorne, who uses the word frequently, certainly uses it loosely, and on occasion allows it to run into the senses of others, such as ‘allegory’ and ‘emblem’. In any case, Americans had already loosened up the concept— Jonathan Edwards, a student of Locke and Newton, extended it to natural phenomena, and influenced the Transcendentalism of Emerson, who influenced Hawthorne. For Emerson the agency by which the types were recognized was not theological; it was the imagination—‘a second sight’, looking through facts, and using them as types or words for thoughts which they signify.2 Thus types manifest themselves in nature no longer with the exact and clear fulfilment demanded by the ancestors but as the expression in natural form of something belonging to a higher realm. Another sentence of Emerson’s is characteristic not only in the application of the word ‘type’, but also in that of the word ‘influence’: ‘Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that 1 De Doctrina Christiana, I, xxx, 7. 2 Quoted by Brumm, 106. 90

The Classic propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence.’1 Hawthorne, though he knew about Mather’s stricter typology, was capable of calling the steam-engine ‘the type of all that go ahead’, which has an Emersonian fluidity of designation. He was thus not alone in seeing the past in the light not of inherited certainties, but rather of cultivated uncertainties, the light of the imagination. Hawthorne was not concerned with the novelist’s devices of verisimilar representation, which are an obeisance to a principle of reality incompatible with his purposes. As he says in the Preface to The House of the Seven Gables, he wrote Romances intended ‘to connect a bygone age with the very present that is flitting away from us, with the legend that is ‘prolonging itself. . . down into our own broad daylight’, its significance rendered by that daylight dubious and obscure, suggestive and not positive. In ‘My Kinsman Major Molineux’ he had spoken of ‘the moon creating, like the imaginative power, a beautiful strange¬ ness in familiar objects’, a Coleridgean or Emersonian figure appropriate to the intellectual freedom he must exercise to see the shadow of the past—history, tradition and legend—as it lies on the critical present. It shares with, and imparts, a tremulous character to the passing moment, to the uncertainties of the present as it seeks the future in the past. Hawthorne has, in extraordinary degree, the ‘modernist’ sense of a future whose relation to the past is far more than ever before ambiguous; which makes his own moment typical of a transition from one structure of society, and one system of belief and know¬ ledge, to another, in which the past and its types must be trans¬ formed. For the word itself implies an event to be fulfilled in the future, and that future no one could now predict. Consequently its current senses imposed themselves in very curious ways on the old ones. Etymologically ‘type’ derives from the Greek tuptein, to.incise or inscribe; for centuries it was believed that God had provided two books, the Bible and Nature, and that Nature too 1 Brumrn, 108.

91

The Classic was inscribed with divine hints—the plants bore each a sign indicating its use, just as history revealed God’s will to men. Before those times were effectively over the characters of print¬ ing had come to be called types; each was inscribed with the letter which was its function. And since the type is the fount of innumerable identical letters, the word has also the sense of the central or original member of its class. Types were engraved with an instrument called a puncheon (‘an instrument driven so as to make a hole or impression’, says Johnson’s Dictionary) and one tapped it with a mallet or maul. These tools provide the family names used by Hawthorne in The House of the Seven Gables, Pyncheon and Maule.1 So Haw¬ thorne was, for his purposes, punning discreetly on the printing sense of ‘type’. But the word lent itself to all manner of uses beyond printing—in numismatics and botany, in philosophy, and more generally, says the O.E.D., for the general form of a class of beings, such as a family: thus Motley can say, ‘His face had lost all resemblance to the type of his heroic ancestors.’ It was also used to mean ‘armorial bearings’. The earliest photographers called their plates ‘types’, partly no doubt because they were in a sense engraved by light, partly because they were the source of many identical examples. Daguerre’s method, invented in 1839, does not allow of replica¬ tion, but he called his device the Daguerreotype; it was a silver plate sensitized by iodine, exposed to light, and developed by exposure to mercury. Daguerreotypes enjoyed a great vogue in the forties; one made of Hawthorne in 1848 survives.2 They were 1 It is true that Thomas Maule wrote The Truth Held Forth and Maintained in 1695—a Quaker attack on the Puritan establishment and its witch-hunts that Hawthorne would have known; and that the Rev. Thomas Pyncheon elicited from the novelist an apology for the use of his name. This only shows how serviceable were the names Hawthorne invented. 2 It is reproduced in Proceedings in Commemoration of the One Hundredth Anniver¬ sary of the Birth of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1904, 13. Millicent Bell remarks, not unjustly, that the daguerreotype brings out a certain harshness in Hawthorne’s face; it lacks the ideality of such portraits as those of Cephas G. Thompson (1850) and George P. A. Healey (1852), also reproduced in the Proceedings. Hawthorne, who meditated and wrote so much about portraits and their rela92

The Classic valued for their delicacy, but also for their accuracy; they eliminated the style and flattery of the portrait painter, on the fallibility of whom Hawthorne commented, while sitting for his own portrait in May 1850: ‘There is no such thing as a true portrait; they are all delusions and I never saw any two alike.’* 1 This was written three months after he finished The Scarlet Letter, and shortly before he began The House of the Seven Gables. The daguerreotype also made unnecessary that sequence of operations by which a portrait is made reproducible in the form of an engraving, every workman in the chain adding his own distortions. Hawthorne was to complain, in The Marble Faun, of the loss entailed in the sculptor’s use of assistants who worked on the marble, and to argue for the force and accuracy of the hasty sketch as against the finished work. The daguerreotype required no intervention whatsoever of human art; Hawthorne valued it for the same reasons as those later advanced in Ivins’s remarkable book:2 only in the photograph does one abolish the need to accommodate the image to the syntax of the medium. Without intervention by the human mind the truth is wholly inscribed; hence a daguerreotypist might well name himself Holgrave. This is the modern version of Maule (which was his original name); the maul made reliable types in an older fashion. Hol¬ grave works with broad daylight, not with the wavering, hesitating, varying means used by artists in the past. The old picture of the Colonel changes, or rather ‘tradition’, that great agent of hesitation, of the tentative, in Hawthorne, alleges that it does, much as the types change and hesitate in the modern age to which they so doubtfully belong. But Holgrave, with his tion to truth, might have endorsed her views (Millicent Bell, Hawthorne s View of the Artist, 1962, 88) and might even have had his own experience in mind when writing about Holgrave’s daguerreotype of Jaffrey. 1 American Notebooks, edn. of 1911, 372-3. 2 William M. Ivins, Jr., Prints and Visual Communication, 1953, chap. iii. At the very moment of the advent of the daguerreotype, in 1840, the portrait painter Samuel F. B. Morse hailed it as ‘Rembrandt perfected’, because no longer de¬ pendent on ‘the uncertain hand of the artist’ (Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria, 1972, 62).

93

The Classic new techniques, seems to stand for a present and a future which will disown such mystery and uncertainty. So the names of his principal characters assure us that, in The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne was brooding on past and present types. However, the time of that book was a time of other speculations on type, and these involved altogether new views both of the past and the future. Recall that the novel was published in the same year as In Memoriam, 1850, and you will at once remember Tennyson’s types. First he laments the apparent cruelty of Nature: ... so careful of the type she seems. So careless of the single life—

and then he retracts this, denying Nature even this degree of care: So careless of the type? But no. From scarped cliff and quarried stone She cries, A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, all shall go. (In Memoriam, lv, lvi)

These lines were probably written in 1839, and the editors ex¬ plain the importance of Lyell’s Geology, first published in 1830. Later came Chambers’s Vestiges of the Creation (1844); and the types, in Tennyson’s sense, were henceforth of general concern. Fossil evidence of the extinction of types grew incontrovertible; the doctrine of special creation—each unchangeable type brought into existence simultaneously by a divine fiat about 6,000 years ago—grew much harder to defend. The past sud¬ denly lengthened enormously. Yet there was room for optimism; there might in a future also inconceivably lengthened be better types. So Tennyson in his Epilogue to the poem reflects on Hallam as ‘a nobler type,/Appearing ere the time was ripe’, a piece of metabiological thinking that had both antecedents and successors.1 1 The view that there might be ‘a gradual evolution of creative power mani¬ fested by a gradual ascent towards higher types’ was Sedgwick’s, though he had been anticipated, in a more mystical way, by Oken and Schelling. See A. E.

94

The Classic There was severe opposition to such speculations, not only from those who were committed to special creation for funda¬ mentalist reasons, but also from scientists of great distinction. Cuvier died in 1832, but his doctrine of the immutability of species was strongly supported; this ‘fixist’ position required as a geological corollary the theory that fixed types were eliminated by catastrophes (of which he counted up to twenty) each followed by a new special creation, there being no continuity between these new types and the fossil remains of their pre¬ decessors. A pupil of Cuvier’s, Louis Agassiz, having already made a reputation as a geologist and biologist, emigrated to the United States. He settled in Boston, and at once grew famous, giving, between 1846 and 1850, a series of immensely popular lectures on biology at the Lowell Institute. Hawthorne, like everyone else of any note, knew Agassiz, who shortly became an important Harvard Professor and the best known (if not the best) of American palaeontologists. He followed Cuvier in declaring that no evidence existed to indicate that one animal could develop from another, or to show that there was any genetic connection between the species of suc¬ cessive strata. ‘Species’, he said, ‘do not pass insensibly one into another, but . . . appear and disappear unexpectedly, without direct relation to their precursors.’1 The form of each species he calls the type, explaining in the preface to his textbook that this was common parlance.2 He reconciled his science with the Bible: Lovejoy, ‘The Argument for Organic Evolution before The Origin of Species, 1830-58,’ in Bentley Glass, O. Temkin and W. L, Straus, Jr., Forerunners of Darwin, 1745-1859. In Section XXVI of his Essay on Classification, ed. E. Lurie, 1962, 115-17, Agassiz seems to claim the expression ‘prophetic type’ as his own invention: ‘Prophetic types... are those which in their structural complications lean towards other combinations fully realized in a later period.’ See, on embryological types, E. Lurie, Louis Agassiz, i960. It was the rigour of Cuvier’s fixism that eclipsed the earlier Naturphilosophie of Oken and Schelling—and also of Goethe, who, it will be remembered, half-thought he might discover the Urpjlanz on his trip to Sicily. 1 L. Agassiz and A. A. Gould, Principles of Zoology, 1848, edn. of 1851, p. 16. 2 Principles, 18-19: ‘It is common to speak of the animal which embodies most fully the character of a group, as the type of that group.’

95

The Classic ‘The records of the Bible, together with human tradition, teach us that man and the animals associated with him were created by the word of God . . . and this truth is confirmed by the revelations of science, which unequivocally indicate the direct interventions of creative power.’1 There is thus no parental line of descent between the faunas of different epochs, and none, of course, between animals and man. Agassiz, though a valued correspondent of Darwin, not sur¬ prisingly rejected The Origin of Species; in a posthumously pub¬ lished paper he finally reasserted the truth of all species to their type, and denied analogies from embryology, arguing that the metamorphoses of the foetus ‘have never been known to lead to any transition of one species into another’.2 The metamorphoses of the embryo simply culminate in its compliance with its type. Striking at Darwin’s weakest point, he affirmed that the mechan¬ isms of heredity were badly understood, and that ‘qualities both good and bad are dropped as well as acquired, and the process ends sometimes with the degradation of the type, and the survival 1 Principles, 182. Assertions of this kind are also frequent in the opening chapter. The Creation was ‘the execution of a plan fully matured in the beginning, and undeviatingly pursued, the work of a God infinitely wise, regulating Nature according to immutable laws, which He himself has imposed on her.’ (34.). A fuller statement occurs in the Essay on Classification, which appeared in 1857, on the eve of Darwinism, though of course—like the Principles—after Chambers (1844). (See Essay on Classification, ed. Edward Lurie, 1962, 8-12.) Both works assume that what the biologist studies is something thought, which must therefore have a Thinker: ‘The character of the connections between organized beings and the physical conditions under which they live is such as to display thought; these connections are therefore to be considered as established, determined and regulated by a thinking being.’ They must have been fixed for each species at its begin¬ ning . . .’ (Classifications, 16). Agassiz cleaves to Cuvier’s catastrophism (59 ff.) as the only explanation of changes between epochs. Principles (26) even uses the analogy of nature as a book in which we study an author. A useful introduction to Agassiz, and selection of his work, is Guy Davenport’s The Intelligence of Louis Agassiz, 1963. Pound’s interest is reflected in Gists from Agassiz, 1953, and the Rock-Drill cantos, as well as in the earlier ABC of Reading (1934). 2 Life and Correspondence of Louis Agassiz, ed. Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, 1886, 778.

96

The Classic of the unfit rather than the fittest’. Sexual selection may have had no regard for strength or beauty: ‘fine progeny are not in¬ frequently the offspring of weak parents, and vice versa.’ In allowing himself to speak of acquired characteristics Agassiz has in mind variations within the species, deviations from the type. He changed his views a little, but did not give them up; a great practical scientist, he stood uneasily at the end of one age and the beginning of another, as much in glaciology (he dis¬ covered the Ice Age but denied the inferences others made from his work) as in zoology. So great was his influence in America (especially in the South, where his characterization of Negroes as of a different type from Caucasians made him popular for essentially non-scientific reasons) that he delayed the American reception of Darwinism.1 After his death in 1873, commerce, which had, as we have seen, already been chosen by evangelists as the agent of the millennium, exploited the Spencerian ‘sur¬ vival of the fittest’ in its philosophy of Social Darwinism; though Richard Hofstadter, the historian of that movement, argues that it would have happened anyway, since Agassiz was losing his following, and his Harvard colleague Asa Gray, some¬ what eclipsed by the glamour of the Swiss naturalist, was taking it over; he had attacked Agassiz openly in his review of The Origin of Species.2 With Agassiz departed the last hope of a science which could regard natural history as a phenomenal representation of the operations of divine providence; which thought of itself as ‘interpreting a system that is his not ours’, a system which is a 1 The North was nevertheless predisposed to Darwinism by the success of Herbert Spencer and ‘the survival of the fittest’; and preachers such as Henry Ward Beecher and Philips Brooks anyway wanted to abandon the fundament¬ alist position on Genesis. The South, much more preoccupied with fixed types and degeneration, took a more conservative attitude. The judgement at the Scopes trial of 1925 prohibited the teaching of evolution in Tennessee schools, and the ban was lifted only quite recently. On this characteristic repudiation of ‘Yankee’ thought, hardening as time went by, see W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South, 1941, Book II, section 12. 2 R. Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915, 1945, 4-6.

97

The Classic record either of God’s deeds or of his prophecies.1 No longer could the types be regarded as divine inscriptions, as parts of a mystery both stable and divinely systematic. But for a few years in the late forties, immediately before Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, the acknow¬ ledged scientific leader of the New England community, though already under attack from more revolutionary biologists, argued with every appearance of modernity and authority that they could. And so the types of Agassiz might join, in a man’s mind, with those of Emerson and those of Cotton Mather and those of Daguerre; a unique and critical moment in the history of the concept, on the threshold of a new age and a new order. It is curious that the general opinion of Hawthorne scholars should be that expressed by E. Wagenknecht when he remarks that although Hawthorne knew Agassiz personally he had ‘no more interest than Dickens’ in ‘the great scientific discoveries and speculations of the nineteenth century’.2 One could begin the refutation of this view by mentioning Hawthorne’s indisputable interest in mesmerism and phrenology; for these were all of great general interest at the time, and were regarded by many intelligent people as sciences. The fact that they have since been stripped of this distinction is not to the point. It is true that he was most concerned with the social and moral or imaginative aspects of these pseudo-sciences, but that is what one would expect. His fiancee, Sophia Peabody, was treated for her head¬ aches by a mesmerist who, being also a dentist, is reflected in Holgrave. Hawthorne was troubled by the sexual suggestive¬ ness of this therapeutic situation, wondering, in a letter to Sophia, whether it did not amount to ‘an intrusion into thy holy of holies’3—an unpardonable sin, whatever the scientific status of 1 Lurie, Louis Agassiz, 307. On the prophetic types, Lurie, 162; and 94 above. 2 Nathaniel Hawthorne, Man and Writer, 1961, 27. Wagenknecht, incidentally, is wrong to say that Agassiz is the only modern scientist mentioned by Hawthorne in his writings; see the Conclusion of The Marble Faun for a reference to Cuvier. 3 Taylor Stoehr, ‘Hawthorne and Mesmerism’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, xxxiii, 1969, 42-4. Also, for the contemporary interest in mesmerism, spirit¬ ualism and the like, see Howard Kerr, Mediums and Spirit-Rappers and Roaring Radicals, 1972.

98

The Classic the practice; and, says Taylor Stoehr in his important article, ‘During the 1840’s Hawthorne returned again and again, in his stories and his notebooks, to this idea of one soul immorally dominating another, by means of some mysterious exercise of the will’.1 He did so again in all his major novels, from The Scarlet Letter to The Marble Faun. However, the present point is not Hawthorne’s interest in this moment of medical science, but the probability that he was far from indifferent to the new senses given to the concept of types by the authority of Agassiz, which had come to complicate the older typologies. The proof is to be found in The House of the Seven Gables. We have seen that the names of the characters— Pyncheon, Maule, Holgrave—all allude to aspects of that com¬ plicated word. A similarly oblique hint at another is provided by the Pyncheon hens. These degenerate birds are ordinarily treated as a sort of arch decorative parallel to the Pyncheons, similarly declined; and indeed they are that; but there is so much about the hens in the novel that to limit their function thus is to call Hawthorne immoderate, tedious and obvious. What seems to have happened is this: when all Boston was discussing Agassiz and the fixity of types, Hawthorne remembered and returned to what had for¬ merly been the locus classicus of such discussions among educated men, namely the Natural History of Buffon. Years before he had borrowed the fourth volume of the translation in the Salem Library2 and so acquainted himself with views that were of special interest to Americans. Buffon believed the types to be invariant—an elephant was always an elephant, and never turned into anything else—but allowed that within the type changes might be wrought by time. 1 Stoehr, 54. 2 Marion L. Kesselring, Hawthornes Reading, 1949, 45. Hawthorne quotes Buffon in a magazine article of May 1836 (Hawthorne as Editor, ed. A. Turner, 1941, 192). Another book he borrowed was Lavater’s Physiognomy, I do not profess to have mastered the whole vast bibliography of modern Hawthorne scholarship, but I have come across no inquiry into any interest he may have had in Lavater. That it existed seems a highly probable conjecture.

99

The Classic These changes were degenerative; thus an animal that was removed from its native habitat, or domesticated, would grow smaller. In particular he believed, and argued in his fourth volume, that this degeneration occurred in European species when they were transplanted to the New World. Some of the celebrity, or notoriety, of these opinions was doubtless owing to Jefferson’s careful refutation of them in his Notes on Virginia. Obviously Buffon’s inversion of the familiar terms of the translatio was totally unacceptable to Jefferson, especially since man was included among the species that degenerated in the West. What about the mammoths? To fore¬ stall the damaging reply that there certainly had been mammoths, but that they existed no longer, Jefferson insists on the vastness of the continent, and the certainty that there are mammoths around somewhere, the species having been created invariant and in¬ extinguishable;1 and these alone refuted Buffon’s contention that in America ‘la nature vivante est beaucoup moins agissante, beaucoup moins forte’.2 And so Jefferson defended not only nature but America against ‘this new theory of the tendency of nature to belittle her productions on this side the Atlantic’.3 In doing so he produced a patriotic wartime version of the old translatio topic: England is in decline, ‘The sun of her glory is fast descend¬ ing to the horizon. Her philosophy has crossed the channel, her freedom the Atlantic, and herself seems passing to that awful dissolution whose issue is not given human foresight to scan.’4 What has all this to do with the Pyncheon hens? Buffon, in his fourth volume, uses the domestic hen to illustrate his thesis. The hen, he explains, is not native to the new world, and this, in addition to decline by domestication, has caused it greatly to diminish in size. In the wild, he argues, the type is as large as a crow, but the American examples have shrunk to the size of a 1 Nature allows no ‘link in her great work so weak as to be broken’. (Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 1944, 208.) 2 Jefferson, 205. 3 Jefferson, 213. 4 Jefferson, 215. For a more extensive account of the controversy, see Daniel J. Boorstin, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson, 1948, 81 ff. IOO

The Classic pigeon. The sexual force of the cocks is also much diminished by the Atlantic passage; ideally, each should have a seraglio of fifteen hens.1 Buffon then passes to a consideration of the native turkey. The House of the Seven Gahles is undoubtedly a serious and topical book—which is what Melville meant when he spoke of its ‘apprehension of the absolute condition of present things’;2 and Hawthorne was animated by a powerful sense of the histori¬ cal crisis through which he was living, and to which he referred, with

conscious

geological

extravagance,

in

The Blithedale

Romance: ‘It was impossible . . . not to imbibe the idea . . . that the crust of the earth in many places was broken, and its whole surface portentously heaving; that it was a day of crisis, and that we ourselves were in the critical vortex’ (XVI). It is as if a Cuvierian catastrophe, an epochal alteration of types, was upon him.3 Yet he also saw that there was an element of the ridiculous in what he was attempting in The House of the Seven Gables: ‘Sometimes, when tired of it, it strikes me that the whole is an absurdity, from beginning to end; but the fact is, in writing a romance, a man is always, or always ought to be, careening on the utmost verge of a precipitous absurdity, and the skill lies in coming as close as possible, without actually tumbling over.’4 The Pyncheon hens are an instance of such careening. There had been no connection between the Pyncheons of the Old and the New Worlds for two centuries (IV), and the same 1 Buffon, Histoire Naturelle (15 vols.), 1749-67, iv, 290. Agassiz also used the chicken, to illustrate the point that an embryo chicken is nevertheless a chicken and nothing else, ‘though if there existed in Nature an adult bird as imperfectly organized as the chicken on the day, or the day before it was hatched, we should assign it to an inferior rank’. 2 In chap, civ of Moby Dick Melville ventures into palaeontology, citing Cuvier on the ‘antichronical’ fossil whale which has ‘left. . . pre-adamite traces in the stereotype plates of nature’. He implies a certain belief in catastrophism. The following chapter denies the sperm whale has declined in size. 3 It is worth mentioning that in 1850 Hawthorne read Winckelmann, arbiter of the classical epoch and type. 4 Quoted by Wagenknecht, 57.

IOI

The Classic is of course true of their hens. They were ‘pure specimens of a breed which had been transmitted down as an heirloom in the Pyncheon family, and were said, while in their prime, to have attained almost the size of turkeys’. Hepzibah preserves an old eggshell almost as large as that of an ostrich. But now ‘the hens were scarcely larger than pigeons’, which made it ‘evident that the race had degenerated, like many a noble race besides, in consequence of too strict a watchfulness to keep it pure’. Chan¬ ticleer has only two wives, and there is only one chicken. Thus the lapse of years, the lack of outbreeding, and ‘a climate so unlike that which had fostered it,’ had ‘wrought important changes in the physical system’ of the hens as well as of Jaffrey, so much reduced in size from his ancestor or type, Judge Pyncheon (VIII). The point is one that Hawthorne often makes in a more general way. The English breed has changed in New England, the people are more nervous, quicker. In The Scarlet Letter he contrasts the delicate modern Bostonian woman with her seventeenth-century ancestress; he has in mind a necessary degeneracy from all OldWorld types that Americans choose to preserve in the new habitat, whether they are noble families, their coats of arms, or their English gardens, across which might burst, as again in The Scarlet Letter, some enormous New World squash. But the hens make the point diagrammatic as well as comic. The cock is the size of a partridge, the hens the size of quails. The chicken looks small enough to be still in the egg, yet experienced enough to have been ‘the founder of the antiquated race’, a kind of walking embryo which has ‘aggregated into itself the ages, not only of these living specimens of the breed, but of all its forefathers and foremothers’. It is, in short, the type, and it cannot but recall Agassiz’s insistence on the typological importance of the embryo in the tenth chapter of his textbook, and his often repeated opinion that the embryo recapitulates the geological order of extinct types, at the same time being unambiguously what it now is.1 Holgrave tells Phoebe that the chicken is ‘a symbol of 1 Essay on Classification, sec. xxv.

102

The Classic the life of the old house, embodying its interpretation likewise, although an unintelligible one, as such clews generally are. It was a feathered riddle, a mystery hatched out of an egg . .(X). The breed is saved by Phoebe; only what is not true to the Pyncheon type—as, we are told repeatedly, Phoebe and Clifford are not— can save the breed. Non-Pyncheon (i.e. American) women save the Old-World stock of the Pyncheons from wickedness, degeneracy, and ultimately extinction. For change is the law of the New World, and it is the failure to accept it, to avoid a habitual and too rigid reference back to the old, that hinders the fulfilment of a destiny appropriate, spiritually and materially only, to a new order. About these matters Hawthorne is complex and hesitant, as always; the shadows of that old world are varyingly obtrusive, beyond elimination. Here his hesitancy is, in Henry James’s sense, play¬ ful, but the play is on the old and new, on Buffonian degeneracy (which is an evolutionary instrument) and the acceptance of a world in which certain types ought not to survive—in which families decline from the patriciate to the proletariat, and it is reasonable to speak of the necessity to rebuild houses in every generation. Yet they do survive, in their riddling way, faded like the old carpets and the old claims to inheritance (the old map laying claim to the New World). Their degeneracy may be measured by the contrast between the feebleness of the bred-out Old-World flowers (‘the antique and hereditary flowers’ (VI)) and the luxuriance of the ancient beans discovered by Holgrave, still true to the original type;1 like the English cookbooks, and the ancient coffee-beans; or like Jaffrey, as base as, though less powerful than, his ancestor; or like the hereditary disease of the family, or their facial characteristics, transformed yet recog¬ nizable. These are the qualities that inhibit the future; which may mean that instead of offering a nomadic utopia of steamtrain and telegraph and loving spirituality, it may simply impose a journey back to a place very like the one where the journey 1 Agassiz mentions ancient Egyptian wheat which, taken from tombs, will sprout and grow (Principles, 136). 103

The Classic began, as it is for Clifford and Hepzibah. Perhaps virtue grows under a republic; but change is more rapid and aimless, corrup¬ tion easier. There is another typological joke in The House of the Seven Gables; only as such can the repetitive theme of the urchin’s visits to Hepzibah’s shop be explained. He has designs on her whole stock of‘natural history’, those gingerbread animals made in moulds, or types. All the Jim Crows come from one type (Hawthorne had some sympathy with Agassiz’s view of the Negro question), though there may be an exemplar with a broken foot, or an elephant that collapses into untyped ginger¬ bread. (Buffon, as I’ve said, held that an elephant was always only and completely an elephant, but that individual elephants, by time or accident, may diverge from the type.1) Hawthorne is playing a typological game with his gingerbreads, his lead soldiers, his sugar candies. With one of those tricks of explicit¬ ness that makes for reticence, by pretending to make a limited joke when he is making one of much broader implication, he says that ‘this remarkable urchin, in truth, was the very emblem of old Father Time, in respect of his all-devouring appetite for men and things’ (VIII). He ‘ingulfs’ creation. And finally, in the last chapter, Phoebe gives him the whole stock; no doubt the types, the moulds, remain, but as fossils of an older epoch; there are no more exemplars. As an emblem of time the urchin is supported by Jaffrey’s watch and by the sundial, whose ‘shadow looks over the shoulder of the sunshine’ (XIII).2 Time destroys the exemplar; what resists it, though perhaps not without variation in the exemplar, is the type. This is, in a sense, Hawthorne’s subject, the degree to which withered ‘bygones’ must be a part of the 1 See A. O. Lovejoy, ‘Buffon and the Problem of Species’, in S. Glass, O. Temkin, and W. L. Straus, Jr., Forerunners of Darwin: 1745-1859, 103. 2 The story called ‘The Artist of the Beautiful’ is relevant; the artist is a watch¬ maker, not trusted in his trade, because art—the creation of the beautiful which belongs to the noumenal, not the phenomenal world—has nothing to do with materiality and time.

104

The Classic present and future. They are of the old world, types of it, whether they are human, vegetable, social—for armorial bear¬ ings are types too, yet their owners preserve them, like genetic traits, into a plebeian future. One sees why Melville stressed the modernity of the book, and why Hawthorne used so many devices to foster its uncertainty, its ambiguity, its hesitancy, allowing the text to waver in authority, equivocating about tradition and history, falsely emphasizing some points and letting others slip by unstressed. So congenitally unassertive that one mistrusts all his assertions, he resigns the narrative to ‘tradition’ or to Holgrave, or, with quiet ostentation, withdraws all his authority, will not distinguish between tradition, history, truth. Certainly he inscribes the old types on his narrative, but it bears them not in the manner of a daguerreotype but as Clifford’s soap-bubble bears the images of the world, which the reader must interpret as he can; in Hawthorne the reader’s share is always a great one. These bubble inscriptions have none of the positiveness that characterizes a biblical type, or the old signature on a plant; they belong to modern books that are like bubbles, ‘little impalpable worlds. .. with the big world depicted in hues bright as imagination, on the nothing of the surface’. The rela¬ tion of these signifiers to what they signify is wholly problematic, and every man may look at them with pleasure or with anger, destroy them with the touch of a finger or a stick. To provide these fragile modern typologies is the work of the artist who inhabits a new world in flight from old certainties, an artist of the age of the steam-engine, of mesmerism, of the new inconceiv¬ able past as well as the unknowable future. Holgrave’s arts—writing and daguerreotyping—don’t occupy him entirely; he also does many jobs that are part of the materialism of the modern world. But though he is a modern worker, he has the inherited Maule powers, now redeemed from superstition and made scientific as mesmerism, yet still deriving ‘from the type of his ancestors’. Hawthorne calls these powers ‘sympathetic’, and unlike his double in the inset tale, Holgrave will not use them to harm a Pyncheon woman. That he belongs to a new age, and enjoys its considerable discontinuity with the 105

The Classic old, is frequently emphasized, at any rate until the book’s strange conclusion. He is modern, rootless, so much so that the text takes on an unusual note of authority in condemning him for desiring too revolutionary a change, too violent an abandon¬ ment of the past, too ready a belief in the ‘golden era’ about to begin. ‘Altogether in his culture, and want of culture—in his crude, wild and misty philosophy, and the practical experience that counteracted some of its tendencies; in his magnanimous zeal for man’s welfare, and his recklessness of whatever the ages had established in man’s behalf; in his faith and in his infidelity; in what he had, and in what he lacked—the artist might fitfully stand forth as the representative of many compeers in his native land’ (XII). In Holgrave we see how millennial and translational myths survive the supersession of their Old-World cultural and religious contexts. Henry James rightly found in him something of Hawthorne himself, ‘American of the Americans’, one whom ‘the idea of long perpetuation and survival always appeared to have filled . . . with a kind of horror’;1 but he is also, like Haw¬ thorne, shadowed by the perpetuities he has rejected. Later Hawthorne was to meditate, in The Marble Faun, on Rome as an image of those perpetuities: timeless, the type of the City and of human civility, yet, in the aspect of time, a place of filth, corruption and superstition. In Holgrave’s New England the perpetuities are less evident. The types survive in their shadowy way, culturally or genetically transmitted; but Hol¬ grave is one who records the whole, on a modern photographic plate, with as little interference from past portraiture as may be. And yet his daguerreotypes of Jaffrey repeat the Gothic evil of the old portrait. And he himself, as I have said, inherits some of the dangerous powers of the old type of artist, now called ‘mag¬ netic’ or ‘sympathetic’ or the like. It is by a story, a work of art, that he goes near to mesmerizing Phoebe; typically, it is a story about mesmerism. To be an artist at all is to involve oneself in making a new version of old types, to exercise the power that makes portraits, and some mirrors, so ominous. Holgrave’s 1 James, 156. 106

The Classic desire to destroy the past, dissolve the continuity between generations by destroying family houses, establish a democracy without a history, is frustrated in the end, though his present is to the past as daguerreotype is to portrait, the new house to the old, mesmerism, or ‘magnetism’, or ‘influence’, to witchcraft and Maule’s curse. The text of the novel imitates him in this; its Gothic materials —lost maps, inherited curses—its magic, its confusion of the ‘traditionary’ and the historical, its allegories cunningly too clear or too obscure—are all evasions of narrative authority, and imply that each man must make his own reading. The types inscribed on it are shifting, unstable, varying in force, to be fulfilled by the determinations of the reader; in strong contrast, then, to the old Puritan types. So the text belongs to its moment and implicitly declares that the modern classic is not, like the book of God or the old book of Nature, or the old accommodated classic, of which the senses, though perhaps hidden, are fully determined, there in full before the interpreter. In the making of it the reader must take his share. This is the sense in which The House of the Seven Gables justifies Henry James’s remark that Hawthorne, though he inherited the Puritan conscience and some of its modes of operation, nevertheless altered it: in Hawthorne that conscience ‘was only, as one may say, intellectual; it was not moral or theological. He played with it . . J1 Of course this is serious play, and the same qualification must be borne in mind when one endorses James’s other observation, that Hawthorne’s imagination is ‘profane’.2 We are told twice that Holgrave lives by a new law; it is a profane law, typically related to the Covenant of Grace only as that was to the Covenant of Works; indeed less so, since the catastrophe of the times, represented by palpable changes in society, in history, in art, has made all typologies problematical. This is the topic with which Hawthorne plays in The House of the Seven Gables. He had done so with much more direct allusion 1 James, 57. 2 James, 10. 107

The Classic to older typology in its greater predecessor, The Scarlet Letter. But that too is a bubble of fugitive typologies, consciously modern, carefully unauthoritative, open to multiple interpreta¬ tion because the modern world is so. The Letter itself is, of course, a type, variously engraved and susceptible to multiple interpretation. God may, as the charac¬ ters of the novel believe, have inscribed the world with types; inscribing this world, the novel, with types is a much less certain proceeding. It is for the reader to make sense of the inscriptions, by his own imaginative collaboration. Once again, tradition is part of the chorus of voices that confuse all relations between the words of the text and what they refer to, much as the mirror distorts, and the armour, and the forest pool. In such a book text and reality stand in no enantiomorphic relation; the text continually questions its own references; the types with which it is inscribed are of very uncertain provenance and meaning, for the simple senses of the old typology and the old pneumatology are suspended. ‘Indistinctness and duplicity of impression’ are words applicable not only to Dimmesdale but to the text itself, and Hawthorne uses many means to enforce them. Here, then, is another work that contemplates the ancient assumptions from over the threshold of the modern; the old contracts between signifier and signified, between the authoritative maker and the reader certain that there is a right interpretation, are boldly broken. Such a text must continually draw attention to itself as something written, as open and plural, itself a type of things to come, in a time when all books must be read with a difference. Chillingworth is a herbalist, expert therefore in the doctrine of signatures, belonging to a time in which nature proclaimed, to the scholar, its divinely instituted structures and senses—a world, then, very unlike what the intrusive voice in the text calls ‘the opaque substance of today’. The types of the book of God have grown ambiguous. ‘Awful hieroglyphics’ are written on the cope of heaven—as our forefathers believed and tradition reports; but Dimmesdale interprets them in a sense peculiar to himself. He alone, says the text, was responsible for the reading. So with the text itself; the truths written on its firmament are 108

The Classic the responsibility of each reader. We proceed, as it were, from truth to shadowy types. The letter itself varies in meaning; the text undercuts traditional interpretations in the light of what it calls ‘modern incredulity’, in the light of the ‘refined present’ and its lost certainties. The past grows obscure, like those ‘halfobliterated coats of arms’ brought over from the Old World, like the Governor’s garden, dominated by the new, extrasystematic pumpkin. Whether it is a rosebush or the wilderness, the symbol hesitates, grows occult to the modern eye. The interpretative light falls differently, from the imagination and not from heaven. Is the forest what the text will allow us to believe, an emblem or type of the ‘moral wilderness’, or of pastoral sympathy, which it also proposes? What are we encouraged to make of the brook, the old tree? Of the Black Man, through whom nature is associated with the demonic? Is Chilling worth diabolical, or is that a naive opinion and what he himself, in a remarkable ex¬ pression which, more than any other, tells us how Hawthorne must be read, calls a ‘typical illusion’? ‘The reader’, says the text as it draws to its end, ‘may choose among these theories.’ May we choose to say that in associating nature and sex with evil, with the breaking of a law and a necessary punishment, the Old World erred? That its strict antithesis between nature and grace made no allowance for the extraordinary overdetermination of nature? All that is, at least, licit. Dimmesdale, returning from his moment with Hester in the mock-paradise of the forest, becomes almost comically an enemy of grace; and yet in his experience sin seems to produce a certain abundance of grace, and we can say (though we can also deny) that had he not sinned he could not have preached as he did. Pearl is the crucial instance, embodying the oxymoron ‘native grace’, and variously proposed as elf, child of sin, witch-child, child of Misrule; a visitor, nevertheless, from the ‘spiritual world’ (XIII), and the agency by which her mother is prevented from founding a new Antinomian, and so in a measure naturalist, religion. The child is repeatedly associated with mirrors and reflections; the mirror is the type of the type, but in Hawthorne, 109

The Classic it is usually mysterious or distorting, denying the possibility of a simple relation between image and reality, sign and referent. So we cannot know where we have her. Is she an allomorph of the ambiguous letter itself? A natural child excluded, for most of the book, from the human family that is held together by grace? A Florimell both true and false? Anyway, Pearl plays her part in enforcing the submission of Dimmesdale, and not only enters the restricted family of grace but disappears to the Old World, with its types of nobility, its dark armorial bearings; while Hester, still wearing her own type, rejoins the community on new terms. Pearl drifts back to the world of types; Hester is a prophetic type of the New World. The fulfilment of this type must be obscure, and between the theories that she is a type of natural disorder, or, like Holgrave, of ‘a new order peculiar to herself’, the text can only say ‘the reader may choose’. Out of these problematically inscribed types, and within certain limits, we make the book according to the order or dis¬ order of our own imagination. Dimmesdale’s sermon can be thought of as the true type of the text itself. Men may have a truth, we are told, but be unable to communicate it for lack of the Pentecostal gift, ‘symbolizing, it would seem, not the power of speech in foreign and unknown languages, but that of address¬ ing the whole human brotherhood in the heart’s native language’ (XI). Dimmesdale, for all his black heart, admits to having this power (XVII). And when he preaches his sermon the text gives us not one word of it, in any language (XXII), though it speaks to each man in his own way, prophesying the high destiny of the New World. This Pentecostal sermon is the text’s comment on itself: guilty, inspired, all things to all men, obscurely prophesy¬ ing a future empire under a new law. So the book speaks of itself, and, over and over again, of types (e.g. X, XIV, XXIII, XXIV) and typical illusions. Hester is ‘a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe’; yet she is also, like Hallam, and in the spirit of a very modern typology, a prophetic type, shadowing a future woman free of the old law in a time when ‘a new truth would be re¬ vealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and no

The Classic woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness’; this Antinomian prophecy we are invited to associate with Anne Hutchinson. Prevented by her sin from establishing such a religion in her own time, Hester may be prophetess of another time, her type may find its antitype in a new world liberated from the past.1 The text does not assert these prophecies and types; it is too deliberately unauthoritative to say anything so positive. Yet in the end Hester’s A takes the place of the old armorial bearings on the tomb; a new type, a new-world-type, to be interpreted by the imagination, by the choosing reader, in place of the fixed senses of the old, though the inscription, ironically, uses the old precise heraldic language: ‘On a field, sable, the letter A, gules.’2 Much more might be said of the deliberate hesitations of Hawthorne, the acuity of his sense of the transitional moment, and the manner in which he sought to invent a modern book, mimetic only in the most unstable way, aware of itself, ponder¬ ing its relation to the past and also the future. In his last com¬ pleted novel he undertook a more explicit encounter with the past at its imperial centre, the Rome of The Marble Faun, far from what he calls the ‘broad and simple daylight’ of modern New England. Since Hawthorne cannot have his Holgravian way, and every half-century destroy by fire a town’s accumula¬ tion of guilt and filth, he sees the Eternal City as the Sibylline recipient of a ‘grievous boon of immortality’. Coexistent with this immemorial and perpetually present past is the present of Kenyon’s own new world: ‘In that fortunate land, each genera¬ tion has only its own sins and sorrows to bear. Here, it seems as if all the weary and dreary Past were piled upon the back of the Present’ (XXXIII). Yet Rome is also the centre of‘that central clime, whither the eyes and the heart of every artist turn’ (VI). Perhaps they ought not to; Hilda, by growing so perfect a copy1 For a more positive statement of the relation between Hester and Anne Hutchinson, see Michael J. Colocurcio, ‘Footsteps of Anne Hutchinson: The Context of The Scarlet Letter’, E.L.H., xxxix, 1972, 459-94. 2 An adaptation of Marvell’s conceit at the end of ‘The Unfortunate Lover’— ‘In a field sable a lover gules.’

Ill

The Classic ist of the Old, abandons the gift with which she might have enriched her own New World. What is remarkable is Hawthorne’s double vision of Rome. It is the urhs aeterna, centre of perpetual Empire, beside which all other places are provincial (XXIV). It is the monument of a past when Italy was ‘yet guiltless of Rome’ (XXVI), stretching back to the date of the faun and dryad, and, in art, to the obelisk in the Piazza del Popolo, oldest of things, even in Rome (XII). It is the classic Rome, closer to us than those Gothic centuries between, which ‘look further off than the Augustan age’ (XVIII). It is the Rome of St. Peter’s seen in its entirety, ‘the world’s cathedral’ (XII). But it is also the Rome that ‘lies, a long-decaying corpse’ (XXXVI), among centuries of filth and squalor, amid ‘the grime and corruption which paganism had left there, and a perverted Christianity had made more noisome’ (XLV); the Rome of malaria, foul air; the Rome in which even the Carnival, though partaking of the city’s perpetuity, is mean and degenerate. At the end of his career Hawthorne rediscovers the Rome that is timeless yet exists in the aspect of time. Hilda’s ambiguous relation with the art, and with the religion, of Rome, is that of the new to the old Empire, the one more spiritual but also, even in being less evil, less connected to humanity and to art. On the one hand there is the corruption of Donatello’s nature, which is also the birth of his soul, and the creative decadence of Miriam;1 on the other the priggishness of Kenyon, the New-World chastity of Hilda. There is the provin¬ ciality of America, its obvious past never more than a generation or two back, with no use for marble, and a taste for vulgar and rootless iconographies, satirized by Kenyon when he jokes about a possible American equivalent for the fountain of Trevi—the ancient deities pulled down, and thirty-one spouts, one for each state, pouring into one vast basin, symbolizing ‘the grand reser¬ voir of national prosperity’ (XVI). Yet Rome represents that 1 Brumm, 147, suggests that Donatello is an emblem of the antique, and Miriam of the Renaissance which, in rediscovering it, corrupted, and also Christianized it.

112

The Classic heritage of sin, the loss of natural joy, which, it is suggested, though as usual the suggestion is contested, may make of history a fortunate fall, from which ‘we might rise to a far loftier paradise’ (L). The law of the imperium was like that of the Puritans, power¬ ful, persistent, yet requiring to be broken in the New World. As the great type of Empire, Rome is both beautiful and sinister, unforgettable and yet to be expelled from the memory. It is perpetual, only its dispositions changing; yet there is a modern empire, founded in the West by that ‘handful of half-starved fanatics’, which will reject this classic perpetuity and, changing essentially, make an art which is itself an art of change. For the classic of the modern imperium cannot be, as the Bible had been, and Virgil too, a repository of certain, unchanging truths. Truth in art—itself a dangerous and perhaps ambiguously evil activity—will have the hesitancy, the instability, of the atti¬ tude struck by the New World, provincial and unstable itself, towards the corrupt maturity of the metropolis. This is why one cannot even try to read Hawthorne, that great inventor of American attitudes to the metropolitan past, as one is still urged to read Virgil. To say that the meaning of The Scarlet Letter, or of The House of the Seven Gables, is the meaning Hawthorne meant, is pointless; his texts, with all their varying, fading voices, their controlled lapses into possible inauthenticity, are meant as invi¬ tations to co-production on the part of the reader. In this sense it may be said that the texts of the once innocent new empire in the West of necessity lose their innocence; the accommodations needed by the old classics after a lapse of years are required by these modern classics from every reader, from the very beginning of their existence. This had to be so, if there were to be a New-World art, which, itself reticent and opaque, could hint at the true relation between the old imperium and the new. Here, then, is the classic of that renovatio that accompanied the westward translation of empire and learning; over it, in some always incalculable degree, lies the shadow of the past, as it lay over all former renovations; though here the forces of discon-

The Classic tinuity are so much greater. This new classic is not an Aeneid that suffers, without openly inviting, accommodation, as times change and empires move; for without the co-operation of the reader’s imagination it can hardly exist at all, except for readers so naive as to be contented with what, as a simple tale, must seem ill-told. By this route, we reach the modern classic, which offers itself only to readings which are encouraged by its failure to give a definitive account of itself. Unlike the old classic, which was expected to provide answers, this one poses a virtually infinite set of questions. And when we have learnt how to ask some of the questions we may discover that the same kinds of question can also be put to the old classic. The modern classic, and the modern way of reading the classic, are not to be separated. Some of the consequences of this change I shall discuss in the final chapter.

IV atque hie ingentem comitatum adfluxisse novorum invenio admirans numerum .. .

H

ORACE provided a rule of thumb, sensible so far as it goes, when he said: est vetus atque prohus, centum qui perfecit annos; he did not know the word ‘classic’ in the

literary sense, but Pope was right to put it into his imitation of Horace’s line: Who lasts a century can have no flaw, I hold that Wit a Classic, good in law.1

What they leave out is any account of the temporal agencies of survival, the most important of which is a more or less continuous chorus of voices asserting the value of the classic; and of course they say nothing about the difficulties that arise in consequence of periodic changes in language, generic expectation, ideology, and so forth. The imperialist view of the classic accommodates all these, as we have seen. It does so by modifications of the basic model (renovations, translations, and the like) and by other means we can broadly call allegorical. But ultimately it rests on the notion of a moment privileged, timeless yet capable of contem¬ poraneity with all others, a classic in which all lesser classics par¬ ticipate. If we were to think of theirs as a scientific theory we should reject it either as we reject Ptolemaic astronomy (because discrepancies between the model and observational data require too many new rules—epicycles, translationes—for the model itself to remain credible; a new model is required) or more simply be¬ cause it is not, as Popper would say, testable. It is easy to see that such criteria have no relevance. And yet such models change, by other and perhaps obscurer laws. We are less able to rest easy with the imperial model in its purity. A new model would require us in the first place to abandon the notion of the absolute classic and consider, more simply, the Horatian case, the text which continues to be read several genera¬ tions after it was written. A classic, then, is a book that is read a long time after it was written; one might want to qualify this by adding ‘without institutional constraint’, ‘by the competent’ and perhaps other rules. Once we made this new start we can see some 1 Ep., II, i, 39; Imitations of Horace, 1st Ep. of 2nd Book, 55-6.

The Classic of the problems in quite a different light. Translationes become transitions from a past to a present system of beliefs, language, generic expectations; renovations become very specific attempts to establish the relevance of a document which has had a good chance of losing it. The querelle persists, but with major changes in the historiographical assumptions of the two sides. These are some of the topics I have to consider in this last chapter. There are others, all related to the ones I have mentioned; the most important is the extreme variety of response characteris¬ tic of the modern reading of the classic. But I daresay it is best to approach these questions by way of a single familiar text; and I have chosen Wuthering Heights for what I take to be good reasons. It meets the requirement that it is read in a generation far separated from the one it was presented to; and it has other less obvious advantages. It happens that I had not read the novel for many years; furthermore, although I could not be unaware that it had suffered a good deal of interpretation, and had been the centre of quarrels, I had also omitted to read any of this secondary material. These chances put me in a position unfamiliar to the teacher of literature; I could consider my own response to a classic more or less untrammelled by too frequent reading, and by knowledge of what it had proved possible, or become customary, to say about it. This strikes me as a happy situation, though some may call it shameful. Anyway, it is the best way I can think of to arrive at some general conclusions about the classic, though I daresay those conclusions will sound more like a programme for research than a true ending to this briefer exercise. I begin, then, with a partial reading of Wuthering Heights which. represents a straightforward encounter between a competent modern reader (the notion of competence is, I think, essential, however much you may think this demonstration falls short of it) and a classic text. However, in assuming this role, I could not avoid noticing some remarks that are not in the novel at all, but in Charlotte Bronte’s Biographical Notice of her sisters, in which she singles out a contemporary critic as the only one who got her sister’s book right. ‘Too often,’ she says, ‘do reviewers remind us of the mob of Astrologers, Chaldeans and Soothsayers gathered 118

The Classic before the “writing on the wall”, and unable to read the charac¬ ters or make known the interpretation.’ One, however, has accurately read the Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin of an original mind and can say with confidence, “This is the interpretation thereof” This latterday Daniel was Sidney Dobell, but a modern reader who looks him up in the hope of coming upon what would after all be a very valuable piece of information is likely to be dis¬ appointed. Very few would dream of doing so; most would mistrust the critic for whom such claims were made, or the book which lent itself to them. Few would believe that such an inter¬ pretation exists, however frequently the critics produce new ‘keys’. For we don’t think of the novel as a code, or a nut, that can be broken; which contains or refers to a meaning all will agree upon if it can once be presented en clair. We need little persuasion to believe that a good novel is not a message at all. We assume in principle the rightness of the plurality of interpretations to which I now, in ignorance of all the others, but reasonably confident that I won’t repeat them, now contribute. When Lockwood first visits Wuthering Heights he notices, among otherwise irrelevant decorations carved above the door, the date 1500 and the name Hareton Earnshaw. It is quite clear that everybody read and reads this (on p. 2) as a sort of promise of something else to come. It is part of what is nowadays called a ‘hermeneutic code’; something that promises, and perhaps after some delay provides, explanation. There is, of course, likely to be some measure of peripeteia or trick; you would be surprised if the explanation were not, in some way, surprising, or at any rate, at this stage unpredictable. And so it proves. The expectations aroused by these inscriptions are strictly generic; you must know things of this kind before you can entertain expectations of the sort I mention. Genre in this sense is what Leonard Meyer (writing of music) calls ‘an internalized probability system’.1 Such a system could, but perhaps shouldn’t, be thought of as constituting some sort of contract between reader and writer. Either way, the in1 Leonard B. Meyer, Music, the Arts and Ideas, 1967, 8 (speaking of musical styles).

The Classic scriptions can be seen as something other than simple elements in a series of one damned thing after another, or even of events rela¬ tive to a story as such. They reduce the range of probabilities, reduce randomness, and are expected to recur. There will be ‘feedback’. This may not extinguish all the informational possi¬ bilities in the original stimulus, which may be, and in this case is, obscurer than we thought, ‘higher’, as the information theorists say, ‘in entropy’. The narrative is more than merely a lengthy delay, after which a true descendant of Hareton Earnshaw re¬ occupies the ancestral house; though there is little delay before we hear about him, and can make a guess if we want. When Hareton is first discussed, Nelly Dean rather oddly des¬ cribes him as ‘the late Mrs. Linton’s nephew’. Why not ‘the late Mr. Earnshaw’s son’? It is only in the previous sentence that we have first heard the name Linton, when the family of that name is mentioned as having previously occupied Thrushcross Grange. Perhaps we are to wonder how Mrs. Linton came to have a nephew named Earnshaw. At any rate, Nelly’s obliquity thus serves to associate Hareton, in a hazy way, with the house on which his name is not carved, and with a family no longer in evi¬ dence. Only later do we discover that he is in the direct Earnshaw line, in fact, as Nelly says, ‘the last of them’. So begins the pro¬ vision of information which both fulfils and qualifies the early ‘hermeneutic’ promise; because, of course, Hareton, his inheri¬ tance restored, goes to live at the Grange. The two principal characters remaining at the end are Mr. and Mrs. Hareton Earn¬ shaw. The other names, which have intruded on Earnshaw— Linton and Heathcliff—are extinct. In between there have been significant recursions to the original inscription—in Chapter XX Hareton cannot read it; in XXIV he can read the name but not the date. We could say, I suppose, that this so far tells us nothing about

Wuthering Heights that couldn’t, with appropriate changes, be said of most novels. All of them contain the equivalent of such inscriptions; indeed all writing is a sort of inscription, cut memor¬ ably into the uncaused flux of event; and inscriptions of the kind I am talking about are interesting secondary clues about the nature 120

The Classic of the writing in which they occur. They draw attention to the literariness of what we are reading, indicate that the story is a story, perhaps with beneficial effects on our normal powers of percep¬ tion; above all they distinguish a literary system which has no constant relation to readers with interests and expectations altered by long passages of time. Or, to put it another way, Emily Bronte’s contemporaries operated different probability systems from ours, and might well ignore whatever in a text did not comply with their generic expectations, dismissing the rest some¬ how—by skipping, by accusations of bad craftsmanship, inex¬ perience, or the like. In short, their internalized probability systems survive them in altered and less stringent forms; we can read more of the text than they could, and of course read it differ¬ ently. In fact, the only works we value enough to call classic are those which, and they demonstrate by surviving, are complex and indeterminate enough to allow us our necessary pluralities. That ‘Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin’ has now many interpreta¬ tions. It is in the nature of works of art to be open, in so far as they are ‘good’; though it is in the nature of authors, and of readers, to close them. The openness of Wnthering Heights might be somewhat more extensively illustrated by an inquiry into the passage describing Lockwood’s bad night at the house, when, on his second visit, he was cut off from Thrushcross Grange by a storm. He is given an odd sort of bed in a bedroom-within-a-bedroom; Catherine Earnshaw slept in it and later Heathcliff would die in it. Both the bed and the lattice are subjects of very elaborate ‘play’; but I want rather to consider the inscriptions Lockwood examines before retiring. There is writing on the wall, or on the ledge by his bed: it ‘was nothing but a name repeated in all kinds of characters, large and small—Catherine Earnshaw, here and there varied to

Catherine Heathcliff, and then again to Catherine Linton . When he closes his eyes Lockwood is assailed by white letters ‘which started from the dark, as vivid as spectres—the air swarmed with Catherines’. He has no idea whatever to whom these names belong, yet the expression ‘nothing but a name’ seems to suggest that they all belong to one person. Waking from a doze he finds 121

The Classic the name Catherine Earnshaw inscribed in a book his candle has scorched. It is true that Lockwood has earlier met a Mrs. HeathclifF, and got into a tangle about who she was, taking first Heathcliff and then Hareton Earnshaw for her husband, as indeed, we discover she, in a different sense, had also done or was to do. For she had a merely apparent kinship relation with Heathcliff—bearing his name as the wife of his impotent son and having to tolerate his ironic claim to fatherhood—as a prelude to the restoration of her true name, Earnshaw; it is her mother’s story reversed. But Lockwood was not told her first name. Soon he is to encounter a ghost called Catherine Linton; but if the scribbled names signify one person he and we are obviously going to have to wait to find out who it is. Soon we learn that Mrs. Heathcliff is Heathcliff’s daughter-in-law, nee Catherine Linton, and obviously not the ghost. Later it becomes evident that the scratcher must have been Catherine Earnshaw, later Linton, a girl long dead who might well have been Catherine Heathcliff, but wasn’t. When you have processed all the information you have been waiting for you see the point of the order of the scribbled names, as Lockwood gives them: Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Heath¬

cliff, Catherine Linton. Read from left to right they recapitulate Catherine Earnshaw’s story; read from right to left, the story of her daughter, Catherine Linton. The names Catherine and Earn¬ shaw begin and end the narrative. Of course some of the events needed to complete this pattern had not occurred when Lockwood slept in the little bedroom; indeed the marriage of Hareton and Catherine is still in the future when the novel ends. Still, this is an account of the movement of the book: away from Earnshaw and back, like the movement of the house itself. And all the movement must be through Heathcliff. Charlotte Bronte remarks, from her own experience, that the writer says more than he knows, and was emphatic that this was so with Emily. ‘Having formed these beings, she did not know what she had done.’ Of course this strikes us as no more than common sense; though Charlotte chooses to attribute it to Emily’s ignorance of the world. A narrative is not a transcription 122

The Classic of something pre-existent. And this is precisely the situation represented by Lockwood’s play with the names he does not understand, his constituting, out of many scribbles, a rebus for the plot of the novel he’s in. The situation indicates the kind of work we must do when a narrative opens itself to us, and contains information in excess of what generic probability requires. Consider the names again; of course they reflect the isolation of the society under consideration, but still it is remarkable that in a story whose principal characters all marry there are effectively only three surnames, all of which each Catherine assumes. Fur¬ thermore, the Earnshaw family makes do with only three Christian names, Catherine, Hindley, Hareton. Heathcliff is a family name also, but parsimoniously, serving as both Christian name and surname; always lacking one or the other, he wears his name as an indication of his difference, and this persists after death since his tombstone is inscribed with the one word Heath-

cliff. Like Frances, briefly the wife of Hindley, he is simply a sort of interruption in the Earnshaw system. Heathcliff is then as it were between names, as between families (he is the door through which Earnshaw passes into Linton, and out again to Earnshaw). He is often introduced, as if characteristic¬ ally, standing outside, or entering, or leaving, a door. He is in and out of the Earnshaw family simultaneously; servant and child of the family (like Hareton, whom he puts in the same position, he helps to indicate the archaic nature of the house’s society, the lack of sharp social division, which is not characteristic of the Grange). His origins are equally betwixt and between: the gutter or the royal origin imagined for him by Nelly; prince or pauper, American or Lascar, child of God or devil. This betweenness persists, I think: Heathcliff, for instance, fluctuates between poverty and riches; also between virility and impotence. To Catherine he is between brother and lover; he slept with her as a child, and again in death, but not between latency and extinction. He has much force, yet fathers an exceptionally puny child. Domestic yet savage like the dogs, bleak yet full of fire like the house, he bestrides the great opposites: love and death (the necrophiliac confession),

culture 123

and

nature

(half-civilized

The Classic ferocity’) in a posture that certainly cannot be explained by any generic formula (‘Byronic’ or ‘Gothic’). He stands also between a past and a future; when his force expires the old Earnshaw family moves into the future associated with the civilized Grange, where the insane authoritarianism of the Heights is a thing of the past, where there are cultivated distinctions between gentle and simple—a new world in the more civil south. It was the Grange that first separated Heathcliff from Catherine, so that Earnshaws might eventually live there. Of the children—Hareton, Cathy, and Linton—none physically re¬ sembles Heathclilf; the first two have Catherine’s eyes (XXXIII) and the other is, as his first name implies, a Linton. Cathy’s two cousin-marriages, constituting an endogamous route to the civilized exogamy of the south—are the consequence of Heathcliff’s standing between Earnshaw and Linton, north and south; earlier he had involuntarily saved the life of the baby Hareton. His ghost and Catherine’s, at the end, are of interest only to the super¬ stitious, the indigenous now to be dispossessed by a more rational culture. If we look, once more, at Lockwood’s inscriptions, we may read them thus (see facing page). Earnshaws persist, but they must eventually do so within the Linton culture. Catherine burns up in her transit from left to right. The quasi-Earnshaw union of Heathcliff and Isabella leaves the younger Cathy an easier passage; she has only to get through Linton Heathcliff, who is replaced by Hareton Earnshaw, Hareton has suffered part of Heathcliff’s fate, moved, as it were, from Earnshaw to Heathcliff, and replaced him as son-servant, as gratuitously cruel; but he is the last of the Earnshaws, and Cathy can both restore to him the house on which his name is carved, and take him on the now smooth path to Thrushcross Grange. Novels, even this one, were read in houses more like the Grange than the Heights, as the emphasis on the ferocious piety of the Earnshaw library suggests. The order of the novel is a civilized order; it presupposes a reader in the midst of an educated family and habituated to novel reading; a reader, moreover, who be¬ lieves in the possibility of effective ethical choices. And because 124

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The Classic this is the case, the author can allow herself to meet his proper expectations without imposing on the text or on him absolute generic control. She need not, that is, know all that she is saying. She can, in all manner of ways, invite the reader to collaborate, leave to him the supply of meaning where the text is indeter¬ minate or discontinuous, where explanations are required to fill narrative lacunae. Instances of this are provided by some of the dreams in the book.1 Lockwood’s brief dream of the spectral letters is followed 1 My subsequent reading in Wuthering Heights criticism (which has certainly substantiated my vague sense that there was a lot of it about) has taught me that the carved names, and Lockwood’s dreams, have attracted earlier com¬ ment. Dorothy Van Ghent’s distinguished essay asks why Lockwood, of all people, should experience such a dream as that of the ghost-child, and decides that the nature of the dreamer—‘a man who has shut out the powers of dark¬ ness’—is what gives force to our sense of powers ‘existing autonomously’ both without and within. (The English Novel: Form and Function, 1953.) Ronald E. Fine suggests that the dreams are ‘spasms of realism’ and that Emily Bronte arranged the story to fit them, or as he says, lets the dreams generate the story. He emphasizes their sexual significance, and the structural relations between them, explained by the generative force of a basic dream of two lovers seeking to be reunited (‘Lockwood’s Dream and the Key to Wuthering Heights’, Nine¬ teenth Century Fiction, xxiv, 1969-70,16-30). Ingeborg Nixon suggests that ‘the names must have been written by Catherine after her first visit to Thrushcross Grange as a child . . . but they form a silent summary of the whole tragic dilemma’; they indicate three possibilities for Catherine, who of course chooses Linton. This is to give the inscriptions the most limited possible ‘hermeneutic’ sense, reading them back into a possible chronology and ignoring their larger function as literary or defamiliarizing signs (‘A note on the Pattern of Wuthering Heights’, English Studies, xlv, 1964). Cecil W. Davies notices that ‘Heathcliff ’is an Eamshaw name, and argues that this makes him ‘in a real, though non-legal sense, a true inheritor of Wuthering Heights’ (‘A Reading of Wuthering Heights’, Essays in Criticism, xix, 1969). Doubtless C. P. Sanger’s justly celebrated essay (‘The Structure of Wuthering Heights’ (1926)) is partly responsible for the general desire to fit everything that can be fitted into legal and chronological schemes; but the effect is often to miss half the point. All these essays are re¬ printed, in whole or in part, in the Penguin Critical Anthology, Emily Bronte, ed. J.-P. Petit, 1973. Other collections include one by Miriam Allott in the Macmillan Casebook series (1970), Thomas A. Vogler’s Twentieth-Century Interpretations of 'Wuthering Heights’ (1965) and William A. Sale’s Norton edition (1963). 126

The Classic by another about an interminable sermon, which develops from hints aboutjoseph in Catherine’s Bible. The purport of this dream is obscure. The preacher Jabes Branderham takes a hint from his text and expands the seven deadly sins into seventy times seven plus one. It is when he reaches the last section that Lockwood’s patience runs out, and he protests, with his own allusion to the Bible: ‘He shall return no more to his house, neither shall his place know him any more.’ Dreams in stories are usually given a measure of oneiric ambiguity, but stay fairly close to the narrative line, or if not, convey information otherwise useful; but this one does not appear to do so, except in so far as that text may bear obscurely and incorrectly on the question of where Hareton will end up. It is, however, given a naturalistic explanation: the rap¬ ping of the preacher on the pulpit is a dream version of the rapping of the fir tree on the window. Lockwood once more falls asleep, but dreams again, and ‘if possible, still more disagreeably than before’. Once more he hears the fir-bough, and rises to silence it; he breaks the window and finds himself clutching the cold hand of a child who calls herself Catherine Linton. He speaks of this as a dream, indeed he ascribes to it ‘the intense horror of nightmare’, and the blood that runs down into the bed¬ clothes may be explained by his having cut his hand as he broke the glass; but he does not say so, attributing it to his own cruelty in rubbing the child’s wrist on the pane; and Heathcliff immedi¬ ately makes it obvious that of the two choices the text has so far allowed us the more acceptable is that Lockwood was not dream¬ ing at all. So we cannot dismiss this dream as ‘Gothic’ ornament or commentary, or even as the kind of dream Lockwood has just had, in which the same fir-bough produced a comically extended dream-explanation of its presence. There remain all manner of puzzles: why is the visitant a child and, if a child, why Catherine

Linton? The explanation, that this name got into Lockwood’s dream from a scribble in the Bible is one even he finds hard to accept. He hovers between an explanation involving ‘ghosts and goblins’, and the simpler one of nightmare; though he has no 127

The Classic more doubt than Heathcliff that ‘it’—the child—was trying to enter. For good measure he is greeted, on going downstairs, by a cat, a brindled cat, with its echo of Shakespearian witchcraft. It seems plain, then, that the dream is not simply a transforma¬ tion of the narrative, a commentary on another level, but an integral part of it. The Branderham dream is, in a sense, a trick, suggesting a measure of rationality in the earlier dream which we might want to transfer to the later experience, as Lockwood partly does. When we see that there is a considerable conflict in the clues as to how we should read the second tapping and relate it to the first we grow aware of further contrasts between the two, for the first is a comic treatment of 491 specific and resistible sins for which Lockwood is about to be punished by exile from his home, and the second is a more horrible spectral invasion of the womb-like or tomb-like room in which he is housed. There are doubtless many other observations to be made; it is not a question of deciding which is the single right reading, but of dealing, as reader, with a series of indeterminacies which the text will not resolve. Nelly Dean refuses to listen to Catherine’s dream, one of those which went through and through her ‘like wine through water’; and of those dreams we hear nothing save this account of their power. ‘We’re dismal enough without conjuring up ghosts and visions to perplex us,’ says Nelly—another speaking silence in the text, for it is implied that we are here denied relevant information. But she herself suffers a dream or vision. After Heathcliff’s return she finds herself at the signpost: engraved in its sandstone—with all the permanence that Hareton’s name has on the house—are ‘Wuthering Heights’ to the north, ‘Gimmerton’ to the east, and ‘Thrushcross Grange’ to the south. Soft south, harsh north, and the rough civility of the market town (something like that of Nelly herself) in between. As before, these inscriptions provoke a dream apparition, a vision of Hindley as a child. Fearing that he has come to harm, she rushes to the Heights and again sees the spectral child, but it turns out to be Hareton, Hindley’s son. His appearance betwixt and between the Heights and the Grange was proleptic; now he is back at the Heights, a stone in his hand, 128

The Classic threatening his old nurse, rejecting the Grange. And as Hindley turned into Hareton, so Hareton turns into HeathclifF, for the figure that appears in the doorway is HeathclifF. This is very like a real dream in its transformations and displace¬ ments. It has no simple narrative function whatever, and an abridgement might leave it out. But the confusion of generations, and the double usurpation of Hindley by his son and HeathclifF, all three of them variants of the incivility of the Heights, gives a new relation to the agents, and qualifies our sense of all narrative explanations offered in the text. For it is worth remarking that no naturalistic explanation of Nelly’s experience is offered; in this it is unlike the treatment of the later vision, when the little boy sees the ghost of HeathclifF and ‘a woman’, a passage which is a preparation for further ambiguities in the ending. Dreams, visions, ghosts—the whole pneumatology of the book is only indeterminately related to the ‘natural’ narrative. And this serves to muddle routine ‘single’ readings, to confound explanation and expectation, and to make necessary a full recognition of the intrinsic plurality of the text. Would it be reasonable to say this: that the mingling of generic opposites—daylight and dream narratives—creates a need, which we must supply, for something that will mediate between them? If so, we can go on to argue that the text in our response to it is a provision of such mediators, between life and death, the barbaric and the civilized, family and sexual relations. The principal instru¬ ment of mediation may well be HeathclifF: neither inside nor out, neither wholly master nor wholly servant, the husband who is no husband, the brother who is no brother, the father who abuses his changeling child, the cousin without kin. And that the chain of narrators serve to mediate between the barbarism of the story and the civility of the reader—making the text itself an inter¬ mediate term between archaic and modern—must surely have been pointed out. What we must not forget, however, is that it is in the com¬ pletion of the text by the reader that these adjustments are made; and each reader will make them differently. Plurality is here not a prescription but a fact. There is so much that is blurred and tenta129

The Classic tive, incapable of decisive explanation; however we set about our reading, with a sociological or a pneumatological, a cultural or a narrative code uppermost in our minds, we must fall into division and discrepancy; the doors of communication are sometimes locked, sometimes open, and Heathcliff may be astride the thresh¬ old, opening, closing, breaking. And it is surely evident that the possibilities of interpretation increase as time goes on. The con¬ straints of a period culture dissolve, generic presumptions which concealed gaps disappear, and we now see that the book, as James thought novels should, truly ‘glories in a gap’, a hermeneutic gap in which the reader’s imagination must operate, so that he speaks continuously in the text. For these reasons the rebus—Catherine

Earnshaw, Catherine Heathcliff, Catherine Linton—has exemplary significance. It is a riddle that the text answers only silently; for example it will neither urge nor forbid you to remember that it resembles the riddle of the Sphinx—what manner of person exists in these three forms?—to which the single acceptable and probable answer involves incest and ruin. I have not found it possible to speak of Wuthering Heights in this light without, from time to time, hinting—in a word here, or a trick of procedure there—at the new French criticism. I am glad to acknowledge this affinity, but it also seems important to dissent from the opinion that such ‘classic’ texts as this—and the French will call them so, but with pejorative intent—are essentially naive, and become in a measure plural only by accident. The number of choices is simply too large; it is impossible that even two com¬ petent readers should agree on an authorized naive version. It is because texts are so naive that they can become classics. It is true, as I have said, that time opens them up; if readers were immortal the classic would be much closer to changelessness; their deaths do, in an important sense, liberate the texts. But to attribute the entire

potential of plurality to that cause (or to the wisdom and cunning of later readers) is to fall into a mistake. The ‘Catherines’ of Lockwood’s inscriptions may not have been attended to, but there they were in the text, just as ambiguous and plural as they are now. What happens is that methods of repairing such indeter130

The Classic minacy change; and, as Wolfgang Iser’s neat formula has it, ‘the repair of indeterminacy’ is what gives rise ‘to the generation of meaning’.1 Having meditated thus on Wuthering Heights I passed to the second part of my enterprise and began to read what people have been saying about the book. I discovered without surprise that no two readers saw it exactly alike; some seemed foolish and some clever, but whether they were of the party that claims to elucidate Emily Bronte’s intention, or libertarians whose purpose is to astonish us, all were different. This secondary material is volumi¬ nous, but any hesitation I might have had about selecting from it was ended when I came upon an essay which in its mature authority dwarfs all the others: Q. D. Lea vis’s ‘A Fresh Approach to Wuthering Heights’.2 Long-meditated, rich in insights, this work has a sober force that nothing I say could, or is intended to, diminish. Mrs. Leavis remarks at the outset that merely to assert the classic status of such a book as Wuthering Heights is useless; that the task is not to be accomplished by ignoring ‘recalcitrant elements’ or providing sophistical explanations of them. One has to show ‘the nature of its success’; and this, she at once proposes, means giving up some parts of the text. ‘Of course, in general one attempts to achieve a reading of a text which includes all its elements, but here I believe we must be satisfied with being able to account for some of them and concentrate on what remains.’ And she decides that Emily Bronte through inexperience, and trying to do too much, leaves in the final version vestiges of earlier creations, ‘unregenerate writing’, which is discordant with the true ‘realistic novel’ we should attend to. She speaks of an earlier version deriving from King Lear, with Heathcliff as an Edmund figure, and attributes to this layer some contrived and unconvincing scenes of cruelty. Another layer is the fairy-story, Heathcliff as the prince transformed into a beast; 1 ‘Indeterminacy and the Reader’s Response’, in Aspects of Narrative, ed. J. Hillis Miller, 1971, 42. 2 F. R. Leavis and Q. D. Leavis, Lectures in America, 1969, 83-152.

The Classic another is the Romantic incest-story: Heathcliff as brother-lover; and nearer the surface, a sociological novel, of which she has no difficulty in providing, with material from the text, a skilful account. These vestiges explain some of the incongruities and in¬ consistencies of the novel—for example, the ambiguity of the Catherine-Heathcliff relationship—and have the effect of obscur¬ ing its ‘human centrality’. To summarize a long and substantial argument, this real novel, which we come upon clearly when the rest is cut away, is founded on the contrast between the two Catherines, the one willing her own destruction, the other edu¬ cated by experience and avoiding the same fate. Not only does this cast a new light on such characters as Joseph and Nelly Dean as representatives of a culture that, as well as severity, inculcates a kind of natural piety, but enables us to see Emily Bronte as ‘a true novelist... whose material was real life and whose concern was to promote a fine awareness of human relations and the prob¬ lem of maturity’. And we can’t see this unless we reject a good deal of the text as belonging more to ‘self-indulgent story’ than to the ‘responsible piece of work’ Emily was eventually able to perform. Heathcliff we are to regard as ‘merely a convenience’; in a striking comparison with Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin, Mrs. Leavis argues that he is ‘enigmatic . . . only by reason of his creator’s indecision’, and that to find reasons for thinking other¬ wise is ‘misguided critical industry’. By the same token the famous passages about Catherine’s love for Heathcliff are dis¬ missed as rhetorical excesses, obstacles to the ‘real novel enacted so richly for us to grasp in all its complexity’.1 Now it seems very clear to me that the ‘real novel’ Mrs. Leavis describes is there, in the text. It is also clear that she is aware of the danger in her own procedures, for she explains how easy it would be to account for Wuthering Heights as a sociological novel by discarding certain elements and concentrating on others, 1 For a different approach to Mrs. Leavis’s reading see D. Donoghue, ‘Emily Bronte: On the Latitude of Interpretation’, Harvard English Studies, i, ed. M. W. Bloomfield, 1970; reprinted in Emily Bronte, ed. J.-P. Petit, 1973, 296-314. 316.

132

The Classic which, she says, would be ‘misconceiving the novel and slighting it’. What she will not admit is that there is a sense in which all these versions are not only present but have a claim on our atten¬ tion. She creates a hierarchy of elements, and does so by a peculiar archaeology of her own, for there is no evidence that the novel existed in the earlier forms which are supposed to have left vestiges in the only text we have, and there is no reason why the kind of speculation and conjecture on which her historical argu¬ ment depends could not be practised with equal right by pro¬ ponents of quite other theories. Nor can I explain why it seemed to her that the only way to establish hers as the central reading of the book was to explain the rest away; for there, after all, the others are. Digging and carbon-dating simply have no equiva¬ lents here; there is no way of distinguishing old signs from new; among readings which attend to the text it cannot be argued that one attends to a truer text than all the others. It is true that ‘a fine awareness of human relations’, and a certain maturity, may be postulated as classic characteristics; Eliot found them in Virgil. But it is also true that the coexistence in a single text of a plurality of significances from which, in the nature of human attentiveness, every reader misses some—and, in the nature of human individuality, prefers one—is, empirically, a requirement and a distinguishing feature of the survivor, centum

qui perfecit annos. All those little critics, each with his piece to say about King Lear or Wuthering Heights, may be touched by a venal professional despair, but at least their numbers and their variety serve to testify to the plurality of the documents on which they swarm; and though they may lack authority, sometimes perhaps even sense, many of them do point to what is there and ought not to be wished away. A recognition of this plurality relieves us of the necessity of a

Wuthering Heights without a Heathcliff, just as it does of a Wuthering Heights that ‘really’ ends with the death of Catherine, or for that matter an Aeneid which breaks off, as some of the moral allegorists would perhaps have liked it to, at the end of Book VI. A reading such as that with which I began Chapter i is of course extremely selective, but it has the negative virtue that 133

The Classic it does not excommunicate from the text the material it does not employ; indeed, it assumes that it is one of the very large number of readings that may be generated from the text of the novel. They will of course overlap, as mine in some small measure does with that of Mrs. Lea vis. And this brings me to the point: Mrs. Leavis’s reading is privileged; what conforms with it is complex, what does not is confused; and presumably all others would be more or less wrong, in so far as they treated the rejected portions as proper objects of attention. On the other hand, the view I propose does not in any way require me to reject Mrs. Leavis’s insights. It supposes that the reader’s share in the novel is not so much a matter of knowing, by heroic efforts of intelligence and divination, what Emily Bronte really meant—knowing it, quite in the manner of Schleiermacher, better than she did—as of responding creatively to indeterminacies of meaning inherent in the text and possibly enlarged by the action of time. We are entering, as you see, a familiar zone of dispute. Mrs. Leavis is rightly concerned with what is ‘timeless’ in the classic, but for her this involves the detection and rejection of what exists, it seems to her irrelevantly or even damagingly, in the aspect of time. She is left, in the end, with something that, in her view, has not changed between the first writing and her reading. I, on the other hand, claimed to be reading a text that might well signify differently to different generations, and different persons within those generations. It is a less attractive view, I see; an encourage¬ ment to foolishness, a stick that might be used, quite illicitly as it happens, to beat history, and sever our communications with the dead. But it happens that I set a high value on these, and wish to preserve them. I think there is a substance that prevails, however powerful the agents of change; that King Lear, underlying a thousand dispositions, subsists in change, prevails, by being patient of interpretation; that my Wuthering Heights, sketchy and provocative as it is, relates as disposition to essence quite as surely as if I had tried to argue that it was Emily Bronte’s authorized version, or rather what she intended and could not perfectly execute. 134

The Classic This tolerance to a wide variety of readings’ is attacked, with considerable determination, by E. D. Hirsch, committed as he is to the doctrine that the object of interpretation is the verbal meaning of the author; I think he would be against me in all details of the present argument. For example, he says quite firmly that inter¬ pretations must be judged entire, that they stand or fall as wholes; so that he could not choose, as I do, both to accept Mrs. Leavis’s ‘realist’ reading and to reject her treatment of Heathcliff.1 But as I said in Chapter 2, Hirsch makes a mistake when he allows that the

determinations’ (hestimmungen) of literary texts are more

constrained than those of legal texts; and a further difficulty arises over his too sharp distinction between criticism and inter¬ pretation. In any case he does not convince me that tolerance in these matters represents ‘abject intellectual surrender’; and I was cheered to find him in a more eirenic mood in his later paper. He is surely right to allow, in the matter of meaning, some element of personal preference; the ‘best meaning’ is not uniform for all. This being so one sees why it is thought possible, in theory at any rate, to practise what is called ‘literary science’ as distinct from criticism or interpretation: to consider the structure of a text as a system of signifiers, as in some sense ‘empty’, as what, by the intervention of the reader, takes on many possible significances.2 To put this in a different way, one may speak of the text as a system of signifiers which always shows a surplus after meeting any par¬ ticular restricted reading. It was Levi-Strauss who first spoke of a ‘surplus of signifier’ in relation to shamanism, meaning that the patient is cured because the symbols and rituals of the doctor offer him not a specific cure but rather a language ‘by means of which unexpressed, and otherwise inexpressible, psychic states can be immediately expressed’.3 Levi-Strauss goes on to make an elabor1 Validity in Interpretation, 168. 2 F. Jameson, The Prison-House of Language, 1972, 195, compares the FregeCamap distinction between Sinn (unchanging formal organization) and Bedeutung (the changing significance given to the text by successive generations of readers). 3 Structural Anthropology, 1968, 198.

135

The Classic ate comparison with modern psychoanalysis. But as Fredric Jameson remarks, the importance of the concept lies rather in its claim for the priority of the signifier over the signified: a change which itself seems to have offered a shamanistic opportunity for the expression of thoughts formerly repressed.1 The consequences for literary texts are much too large for me to enter on here; among them, of course, is the by-passing of all the old arguments about ‘intention’. And even if we may hesitate to accept the semiological method in its entirety we can allow, I think, for the intuitive rightness of its rules about plurality. The gap between text and meaning, in which the reader operates, is always present and always different in extent.2 It is true that authors try, or used to try, to close it; curiously enough, Barthes reserves the term ‘classic’ for texts in which they more or less succeed, thus limiting plurality and offering the reader, save as accident prevents him, merely a product, a consumable. In fact what Barthes calls ‘modern’ is very close to what I am calling ‘classic’, and what he calls ‘classic’ is very close to what I call ‘dead’. There is, in much of the debate on these matters, a quality of outrageousness, of the outre, and there is no reason why this should not be taken into account. We should, however, recall that in any

querelle it is the modern that is going to display it most palpably. The prime modern instance is the row between Raymond Picard and Roland Barthes, which followed the publication of Barthes’s

Racine in 1963. The title of Picard’s brisk pamphlet puts the point of the quarrel with a familiar emphasis: Nouvelle Critique ou nouvelle imposture (1965), and it contrives to make Barthes sound like the critic, deplored by all though read by few, who said that Nelly Dean stood for Evil. Barthes makes of the violent but modest drama of Racine something unrestrainedly sexual; if the text doesn’t fit his theory he effects a ‘transformation’; he 1 Jameson, 1972, 196. 2 ‘. . . commentaries or interpretations are generated out of an ontological lack in the text itself... a text can have no ultimate meaning . . . the process of interpretation ... is properly an infinite one’ (Jameson, 176, paraphrasing Jacques Derrida). 136

The Classic uses neologisms to give scientific dignity to absurdities, and makes of the work under consideration ‘an involuntary rebus, interesting only for what it doesn’t say’.1 Barthes’s reply is splendidly polemic; the old criticism takes for granted its ideology to the degree that it is unconscious of it; its vocabulary is that of a schoolgirl (specifically, Proust’s Gisele, Albertine’s friend) seventy-five years ago. But the world has changed; if the history of philosophy and the history of history have been transformed, how can that of literature remain con¬ stant? Specifically the old criticism is the victim of a disease he calls

asymbolie; any use of language that exceeds a narrow rationalism is beyond its understanding. But the moment one begins to con¬ sider a work as it is in itself, symbolic reading becomes unavoid¬ able. You may be able to show that the reader has made his rules wrong or applied them wrongly, but errors of this kind do not invalidate the principle. And in the second more theoretical part of this very notable document Barthes explains that in his usage a symbol is not an image but a plurality of senses; the text will have many, not through the infirmity of readers who know less history than Professor Picard, but in its very nature as a structure of signifiers. ‘L’oeuvre propose, l’homme dispose.’ Multiplicity of readings must result from the work’s ‘constitutive ambiguity’, an expression Barthes borrows fromjakobson. And if that ambiguity itself does not exclude from the work the authority of its writer, then death will do so: ‘By erasing the author’s signature, death establishes the truth of the work, which is an enigma.’2 I have suggested that the death ofreaders is equally important, as a solvent of generic constraints. However much we know about history we cannot restore a situation in which a particular set of arbitrary rules of a probability system is taken for granted, inter¬ nalized. To this extent I am firmly on Barthes’s side in the dispute; and I have found much interest in his later attempts—which don’t, however, command anything like total agreement—to describe the transcoding operations by which, in contemplating the classic, 1 Picard, 135. 2 Barthes, Critique et Verite, 1966, 52-3. 137

The Classic we filter out what can now be perceived as mere ideological deposits and contemplate the limited plurality that remains.1 Barthes denies the charge that on his view of the reading process one can say absolutely anything one likes about the work in question; but he is actually much less interested in defining con¬ straints than in asserting liberties. There are some suggestive figures in his recent bookLe Plaisir du texte{1973), from which we gather that authorial presence is somehow a ghostly necessity, like a dummy at bridge, or the shadow without which Die Frau ohne Schatten must remain sterile; and these are hints that dia¬ chrony, a knowledge of transient dispositions, may be necessary even to the nouvelle critique competently practised. Such restric¬ tions on criticism a outrance can perhaps only be formulated in terms of a theory of competence and performance analogous to that of linguistics. Though I am more than half-persuaded (largely by Dr. Jonathan Culler) that such a theory could be constructed, I am certainly not to speak of it now. It will suffice to say that in so far as it is thought possible to teach people to read the classics it is assumed that knowledge of them is progressive. The nature of that knowledge is, however, as Barthes suggests, subject to change. Secularization multiplies the world’s structures of proba¬ bility, as the sociologists of religion tell us, and ‘this plurality of religious legitimations is internalized in consciousness as a plurality of possibilities between which one may choose’.2 It is this pluralism that, on the long view, denies the authoritative or authoritarian reading that insists on its identity with the intention of the author, or on its agreement with the readings of his con¬ temporaries; or rather, it has opened up the possibilities, ex¬ ploited most aggressively by the structuralists and semiologists, of 1 The ‘cultural code’ of SjZ (1970) serves some of the purposes of Mrs. Leavis's archaeological categories, though she is inclined to retain the period elements that he drops. a P. L. Berger, ‘Secularization and the Problem of Plausibility,’ extracted from The Sacred Canopy (1967) in Sociological Perspectives, ed. K. Thompson and J. Tunstall, 1971, 446-59; developing the thesis of Berger and T. Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, 1967. 138

The Classic regarding the text as the permanent locus of change; as something of which the permanence no longer legitimately suggests the presence and permanence of what it appears to designate. I notice in a very recent book on The Early Virgil—though it is by no means a Formalist or Structuralist study—what seems a characteristic modern swerve in the interpretation of the Fourth Eclogue; the author believes that the puer is the poem itself, that the prophecy relates to a new golden age of poetry, an age which the Eclogue itself inaugurates; and this, like the author’s remarks on the self-reflexiveness of the whole series of eclogues, seems modern, for it insists in some measure on the literarity of the work, its declared independence of the support of external reference. Even the arithmological elements in its construction serve to con¬ firm it in this peculiar status.1 And we see how sharply this form of poetic isolation differs from the privileged status accorded the Eclogue by the ‘imperialist’ critics of my first chapter: there would be, for Mr. Berg, no question of Christian prophecy in the Eclogue—there is not even any question of a reference to some recent or impending political event involving Antony or Octavius or Pollio himself. By the same token no interpretation of Virgil which depends on the assumption, in however sophisti¬ cated a form it may be presented, that his imperium was to be trans¬ formed into the Christian Empire, his key words—amor, fatum,

pietas, labor—given their full significance in an eternal pattern of which he could speak without actual knowledge, would be acceptable to this kind of criticism. When we say now that the writer speaks more than he knows we are merely using an archaism; what we mean is that the text is under the absolute control of no thinking subject, or that it is not a message from one mind to another. The classic, we may say, has been secularized by a process which recognizes its status as a literary text; and that process inevitably pluralized it, or rather forced us to recognize its inherent plurality. We have changed our views on change. We may accept, in some form, the view proposed by Michel Foucault, that our period1 William Berg, The Early Virgil, 1973. 139

The Classic discourse is controlled by certain unconscious constraints, which make it possible for us to think in some ways to the exclusion of others. However subtle we may be at reconstructing the con¬ straints of past epistemes, we cannot ordinarily move outside the tacit system of our own; it follows that except by extraordinary acts of divination we must remain out of close touch with the probability systems that operated for the first readers of the

Aeneid or of Wuthering Heights. And even if one argues, as I do, that there is clearly less epistemic discontinuity than Foucault’s crisis-philosophy proposes, it seems plausible enough that earlier assumptions about continuity were too naive. The survival of the classic must therefore depend upon its possession of a surplus of signifier; as in King Lear or Wuthering Heights this may expose them to the charge of confusion, for they must always signify more than is needed by any one interpreter or any one generation of interpreters. We may recall that, rather in the manner of Mrs. Leavis discarding Heathcliff, George Orwell would have liked

King Lear better without the Gloucester plot, and with Lear having only one wicked daughter—‘quite enough’, he said. If, finally, we compare this sketch of a modern version of the classic with the imperial classic that occupied me earlier, we see on the one hand that the modern view is necessarily tolerant of change and plurality whereas the older, regarding most forms of pluralism as heretical, holds fast to the time-transcending idea of Empire. Yet the new approach, though it could be said to secu¬ larize the old in an almost Feuerbachian way, may do so in a sense which preserves it in a form acceptable to changed probability systems. For what was thought of as beyond time, as the angels, or the majestas populi Romani, or the imperium were beyond time, inhabiting a fictive perpetuity, is now beyond time in a more human sense; it is here, frankly vernacular, and inhabiting the world where alone, we might say with Wordsworth, we find our happiness—our felicitous readings—or not at all. The language of the new Mercury may strike us as harsh after the songs of Apollo; but the work he contemplates stands there, in all its native plurality, liberated not extinguished by death, the death of writer and reader, unaffected by time yet offering itself to be read 140

The Classic under our particular temporal disposition. ‘The work proposes; man disposes.’ Barthes’s point depends upon our recalling that the proverb originally made God the disposer. The implication remains that the classic is an essence available to us under our dis¬ positions, in the aspect of time. So the image of the imperial classic, beyond time, beyond vernacular corruption and change, had perhaps, after all, a measure of authenticity; all we need do is bring it down to earth.

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251966