During the 19th Century, composers began to set poems to music. In these “art songs” or Lieder, the piano accompaniment accentuated the emotions and complemented the meaning of the poem. Although Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte (1816) was the first cycle of art songs, Schubert was the composer who definitively established the genre. He was followed by Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, and Mahler. In the British Isles, a golden age of art song occurred in the first 20 years of the 20th Century. Young composers, many trained in the German tradition, set to music both the lines they had learned in school and the poems of their contemporaries. The illustration is a wood cut from 1903 by Wassily Kandinsky.
Songs
Art songs (Kunstlieder in German) are often distinguished from folk songs (Volkslieder): art songs are musical settings for poetry that has been published in print, whereas the words and melodies for folk songs are handed down orally. However, some poets wrote ballads in the style of traditional folk songs, and some folk songs can be poetically complex. Art songs are also differentiated from popular songs by being “through-composed” (durchkomponiert) so that the melody varies with the meaning of the words, whereas popular songs typically use a simple repetitive rhythm. The accompaniment is typically more complex in art songs than in popular songs, often running in counterpoint to the voice. The words to art songs are created prior to the music, whereas words and music for popular songs are usually created simultaneously. Modern art songs are typically written for a solo voice with piano. However, in the Renaissance, similar songs (ayres) were written for lute accompaniment. Some composers, such as Mahler and Vaughan-Williams, arranged their original piano setting for full orchestra. All distinctions tend to be fuzzy, and no one type of song is necessarily better than another. As stated in the Oxford Dictionary of Music (Kennedy et al., 2012) in the entry for “song”
Brave the man or woman who will make a didactic value‐judgement between Dives and Lazarus, Gretchen am Spinnrade and Smoke gets in your eyes.
Poetry and Music
Human speech has its own rhythm – prosody – and this can be heightened or regularized in poetry (Menninghaus et al. 2018). This is what makes poetry more appealing when recited out loud than when read silently. Listening to art song adds another dimension to the perceptual experience: one must attend both to the words and to the music (Campbell, 2023). Since it can be difficult to adjust the melody of the music to the rhythm of the poetry, some poets would prefer their poems not be set to music. Whitner (1957) quotes Victor Hugo who wrote on a manuscript of his verse, “Commit no nuisance along these poems by setting them to music.” Nevertheless, in the better art songs, the music heightens the emotions of the words and makes their meaning more vivid and memorable.
The history of English Song (e.g., Kimball, 2005) suggests two Golden Ages. During the first (1580-1630) poems were set to music, with the lute being the typical accompaniment. In the second (the first half of the 20th Century), the songs were accompanied by piano. The following sections consider nine English art songs composed during first two decades of the 20th Century. Each is presented as text, as recitation, and as song, with some also presented as music alone.
Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal
Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white; Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk; Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font: The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.
Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost, And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.
Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars, And all thy heart lies open unto me.
Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.
Now folds the lily all her sweetness up, And slips into the bosom of the lake: So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip Into my bosom and be lost in me.
This poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) was extracted from his long narrative poem The Princess (1847), wherein Princess Ida forswears the world of men and establishes a university for women. The story was likely derived from Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, and was itself adapted by Gilbert and Sullivan into the operetta Princess Ida. The 14-line unrhymed poem is spoken by the Princess as she cares for the wounded Prince in Canto VII of the poem. As she invokes the sunset, she realizes that she feels more deeply for him than she had thought. The reference to Danaë, the beautiful young woman who was impregnated by Zeus in the form of a shower of golden rain, accentuates the underlying erotic feelings in the lines.
The following illustration shows Gustav Klimt’s Danaë (1907):
The following is a recitation of the poem by Simon Russell Beale
Roger Quilter (1877-1953) set the poem to music in 1902. The following is a performance by baritone Benjamin Luxon accompanied by David Willison on piano.
And the following is a transcription of Quilter’s song-setting by Steven Hough.
Aedh wishes for the cloths of heaven
Had I the heaven’s embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) published this poem in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). The speaker is Yeats using the persona of Aedh (a name that means “fire” in Irish), a lovelorn, visionary poet. The poem, clearly related to Yeats’s unrequited love for Maud Gonne, is recited by Greg Wise:
Thomas Dunhill (1877-1946) published a cycle of songs from Yeats’ The Wind among the Reeds in 1904, later revising them for orchestral accompaniment in 1912. The following is a performance by tenor Ian Bostridge with Julius Drake on piano:
The following is the poem in calligraphy as published by the Cuala Press, established in 1908 by Elizabeth Yeats, the poet’s brother.
Bright is the Ring of Words
Bright is the ring of words When the right man rings them, Fair the fall of songs When the singer sings them.
Still they are carolled and said – On wings they are carried – After the singer is dead And the maker buried.
Low as the singer lies In the field of heather, Songs of his fashion bring The swains together.
And when the west is red With the sunset embers, The lover lingers and sings And the maid remembers.
The poem comes from Songs of Travel (1896) by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894). Faute de mieux the following is my recitation of the poem:
Stevensons considered the poems as “songs,” and Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) set the words to music in 1904 as part of The Vagabond and Other Songs. The following is a performance by baritone Bryn Terfel with Malcom Martineau on piano:
The score at the song’s end illustrates the complexity of the accompaniment:
Down by the Salley Gardens
Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet; She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet. She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree; But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.
In a field by the river my love and I did stand, And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand. She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs; But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.
William Butler Yeats published this poem in 1889. He extrapolated it from a few lines of an old song sung by a peasant woman in County Sligo. The word “salley” is a variant of a “sallow,” which is another word for the willow tree (Latin Salix). These trees were cultivated to provide materials for baskets, fences and roofs. A weir is a low dam of rocks or wood built across a river to raise the level of the upstream water. Settling and other irregularities can cause portions of the weir to rise above the water level, and become covered in grass. The grass on the weirs thus suggests an islet of rest in the turbulent waters flowing around it. The following is a recitation of the poem by Jim Norton:
Herbert Hughes (1882-1937), an Irish composer, set the poem in 1909 to the tune of a traditional Irish air called The Maids of Moune Shore. The following is a classical performance of this setting by the contralto Kathleen Ferrier with Phyllis Spurr on piano:
And another by countertenor Daniel Taylor accompanied by Sylvain Bergeron on lute. This performance gives the impression of a Renaissance Ayre.
The following is a performance of the Hughes tune adapted for cello (Gerald Peregrine) and violin (Lynda O’Connor):
Loveliest of Trees the Cherry Now
Loveliest of trees the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now of my three score years and ten, twenty will not come again. And take from seventy years a score, It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom, Fifty Springs is little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow.
This poem, published by A. E. Housman (1859-1936) in his A Shropshire Lad (1896), has been widely anthologized and set to music numerous times. The following is a recitation by Emma Fielding:
George Butterworth (1895-1916) was the first composer to set the poem to music in 1912. The following is a performance by Benjamin Luxon with David Willison on piano:
Sonnet 18
Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And Summer’s lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And oft’ is his gold complexion dimm’d; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d: But thy eternal Summer shall not fade Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou growest: So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
All the art songs considered so far used poems published in the years just before the composers set the music. The composers also used earlier poems – particularly those from the late 16th to early 17th Centuries. William Shakespeare (1564-1616) published his sonnets in 1609. The following is a recitation of his 18th Sonnet by Hugh Grant:
Frederick Septimus Kelly (1881-1916) was born in Australia and educated in England. As well as studying music, he was a gold medalist in rowing at the 1908 Olympics. His setting for Shakespeare’s sonnet was published in 1912. According to Banfield (1885, p 141),
The treatment of the opening line, the searching for a comparison, is particularly happy: the intermediate dominant of the relative minor leads in as if with a gradual concentration of the mind.
The following is a performance by baritone Stephen Varcoe with Clifford Benson on piano:
To Gratiana Dancing and Singing
See! with what constant motion Even and glorious, as the sun, Gratiana steers that noble frame, Soft as her breast, sweet as her voice, That gave each winding law and poise, And swifter than the wings of Fame.
She beat the happy pavement By such a star-made firmament, Which now no more the roof envies; But swells up high with Atlas ev’n, Bearing the brighter, nobler Heav’n, And in her, all the Dieties.
Each step trod out a lovers thought And the ambitious hopes he brought, Chain’d to her brave feet with such arts, Such sweet command and gentle awe, As when she ceas’d, we sighing saw The floor lay pav’d with broken hearts.
So did she move: so did she sing: Like the harmonious spheres that bring Unto their rounds their music’s aid; Which she performed such a way, As all th’enamour’d world will say: The Graces danced, and Apollo play’d.
Richard Lovelace (1617-1657) was a Cavalier Poet who fought on the side of Charles I during the English Civil War (1642–1651). Most of his poems, many dedicated to various idealized mistresses such as Althea, Lucasta, and Gratiana (Cousins, 1988), were collected and published posthumously. The following is a reading of the poem by Cavaet from Librivox.
William Denis Browne (1888–1915), an English composer, set Lovelace’s poem (omitting the second verse) to music in 1913. He based his melody on an Allmayne (a dance form originating in Germany, also called Allemande) from the 17th-Century Virginal Book of Elizabeth Rogers. The following is a performance by tenor Ian Bostridge with Julius Drake on piano:
Sea-Fever
I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by, And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking, And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.
I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied; And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying, And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life, To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife; And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.
John Masefield (1878-1967) joined HMS Conway, a naval training ship in 1891 and spent much of his life in the 1890s at sea. This poem comes from his first book, Salt-Water Ballads (1902). The poems from this first volume were published together with later poems in 1916 as Salt-Water Poems and Ballads, which was profusely illustrated by Charles Pears (1873-1958). This is Pears’s depiction of the first two lines of Sea-Fever:
The following is a recitation of the poem by Terence Stamp:
John Nicholson Ireland (1879-1962) set Masefield’s poem to music in 1913. The following is a performance by baritone Bryn Terfel with Malcolm Martineau on piano:
Epitaph
Here lies a most beautiful lady, Light of step and heart was she: I think she was the most beautiful lady That ever was in the West Country.
But beauty vanishes; beauty passes; However rare, rare it be; And when I crumble who shall remember This lady of the West Country?
Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) published this brief but powerful poem in The Listeners and Other Poems (1912). In 1934 he made a recording of this and other poems. The following represents my best effort to decrease the high levels of noise:
Ivor Gurney (1890-1937), an English poet and composer, set the poem to music in 1920. The following is a performance by the baritone Benjamin Luxon with David Willison on piano:
Lament
Many of the composers active during the early years of the 20th Century died in World War I. William Denis Browne died at Gallipoli in 1915. William Septimus Kelly and George Butterworth both died in the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Ivor Gurney was irrevocably affected by his injuries during the war, and spent much of his time afterwards in psychiatric hospitals. Two weeks before he died at the Battle of the Somme, Kelly began writing a Lament. His original piano score was recently adapted for orchestra by Christopher Latham. The following is an arrangement for violin and piano with Latham playing the violin and Tamara Anna Cislowska playing the piano:
References
Banfield, S. (1985). Sensibility and English song: critical studies of the early 20th century. Cambridge University Press.
Böker-Heil, N., Fallows, D., Baron, J., Parsons, J., Sams, E., Johnson, G., & Griffiths, P. (2001). Lied. Grove Music Online.
Campbell, S. (2023). “Oh for heaven’s sake, do I need to explain this really?” Translation skopoi in live art song concerts. Translation Review, 116(1), 1–12.
Cousins, A. D. (1988). Lucasta, Gratiana, and the amatory wit of Lovelace. Parergon, 6(2), 97–104.
Kennedy, M., & Kennedy, J. B., Rutherford-Johnson, T. (2012). The Oxford dictionary of music (Sixth edition). Oxford University Press.
Kimball, C. (2005). Song: a guide to art song style and literature. Hal Leonard Corporation.
Whitner, M. E. (1957). The modern art song in English. The American Music Teacher, 6(4), 2–23.
Bai Juyi: Pearls Falling on Jade
Bai Juyi (白居易, pinyin Bǎi Jūyì, or Po Chü-i in Wade-Gilles transliteration, 772-846 CE) was a Chinese poet. In 815, after inappropriately advising the emperor, he was exiled from the capital Chang’an to JiuJiang on the Yangtze River. One night, at a farewell party on the river for a friend, he heard a musician playing the pipa. Entranced by her music, he found out that she had once been a sought-after courtesan in the capital. After her beauty had faded away, she had retired to the provinces, where she played her music and lamented her lost youth. Moved by her plight, Bai Juyi composed his Pipa Xing (琵琶行, “Ballad of the Pipa”). The illustration shows a drawing of the poet and the pipa player from a scroll by Guo Xu (1456–1532).
Life of the Poet
Bai Juyi was born in Northern China and came to the capital Chang’an to pass his examinations for the civil service in 800. There he became close friends with the novelist and poet Yuan Zhen (779-831) (Tan, 2025). He soon became a prolific and popular poet, with the courtesy name Lètiān (樂天, happiness of heaven: optimism) (Waley, 1949). Bai Juyi and his predecessors, Li Bai, Wang Wei and Du Fu, are considered the four great poets of the Tang Dynasty (Geng, 2021). He became renowned in Japan where he was known as Haku Rakuten from the Japanese transliteration of his courtesy name (白楽天). In 815, the prime minister Wu Yuanheng was brutally assassinated because he would not agree to the demands of some rebellious warlords. Bai Juyi wrote a memorial calling upon the emperor to seek out and punish the assassins. However, the politics were complicated. Bai Juyi was considered presumptuous – it was not for him, a tutor in the imperial household, to advise the emperor. He was exiled and demoted to a minor position (“master of the horse”, essentially an adjutant) in Jiujiang, then known as Jiangzhou (Waley, 1949, pp 101-104). While there, he heard the playing of a pipa near the river and wrote his famous poem The Ballad of the Pipa. Bai Juyi was allowed to return to Chang’an in 1819. He then served for periods of time as governor of Hangzhou and governor of Suzhou. Bai Juyi was a devoted Chan Buddhist and when he grew old, he retired to a Buddhist monastery near the Longmen caves famous for their colossal statues of Buddha (carved in 672 and 676). At the monastery he was able to compile a full collection of his poems before his death.
The following illustration shows in the upper left a statue of Bai Juyi at the Pipa Pavilion in Jiujiang, in the upper right a posthumous portrait of the poet by Chen Hongshou, a 17th Century painter, and at the bottom a view of the Longmen caves.
Translating the Ballad of the Pipa
The poem is written in rhyming couplets with 88 lines each of 7 characters for a total 616 characters. It is preceded by a preface of 138 characters. The following is the poem in elegant regular-script calligraphy by Guo Dingjing (17th Century CE), now in the Princeton University Art Museum:
The Chinese text of the poem is readily available, as is an early English translation by Witter Bynner in his book The Jade Mountain (1929). Several other English translations have been published: Fuller, 2018, pp 283-289; Giles, 1888, pp 157-160; Harris, 2009, pp 21-26; Watson, 1984, pp 249–252; Xu et al, 1987, pp 292-296: Xu, 1994, pp 18-121; Yip, 2004, pp 288-297. Other translations are available on the internet: Phil Multic and Gan Siowck Lee.
The poem is difficult to translate since its sound patterns are as important as its meaning (Peng, 2023; Yu & Chang, 2024). This post will provide some sense of the Chinese sound patterns of Bai Juyi’s poem with recitations by Pu Cunxin and accompanying pipa by Wu Yuxia, taken from a production by China Global Television Network. After Giles’ s initial prose version, most English translations have use blank verse and made some attempt to imitate the sounds of the original. The translation of Xu Yuanzhong (1987, 1994) uses rhyming hexameter couplets. The translations in red accompanying the character-by-character transcriptions in this post are mine; they are heavily indebted to the other available translations.
The Setting
Bai Juyi provides his poem with a preface that sets the time and the place. During his banishment to JiuJiang, while saying farewell to a visitor one evening on the banks of the Yangtze, he hears the music of a pipa. He finds out that the player had once been a famous musician and courtesan at the court in Chang’an. However, as she had grown old, her beauty had faded, and she had retired unhappily to the provinces. Bai Juyi is struck by the similarity of his fate to hers, and mourns their mutual fall from grace:
Moved by her story, he writes a long poem about the pipa player on the river far from Chang’an
Jiujiang, which had once been known as Jiangzhou, is a city on the Yangtze River. The region of the river near Jiujiang was sometimes known as the Xunyang River. The Yangtze River, the third longest river in the world, is about 1.5 km wide at Jiujiang. Lake Pongyi, which was once called Pengli Lake, the largest freshwater lake in China, drains into the Yangtze at the eastern edge of the city:
Bai Juyi is throwing a farewell party for his departing friend on a small pleasure boat on the river. As shown in the following illustration from Hangzhou in eastern China, these small rowboats still provide spaces for celebrations on the waters. In Jiujiang it is autumn: the maple leaves have turned scarlet, and the plumes of the silver grass have reached their peak.
The following illustration shows a scroll with calligraphy of Pipa Xing by Wen Zhengming (1470-1559) at the National Palace Museum, Taipei. At the top is the painting at the beginning of the scroll. In the middle is an enlargement of the boat with the poet and his guest listening to the pipa player. At the bottom is the beginning of the calligraphy in semi-cursive (or running) script. The first line (on the left) has the title:
Beginning of the Ballad
The initial lines of the ballad describe the autumn leaves and the silver grass. The farewell party begins but there is no music:
The opening scene of the poem was portrayed in a silk-painting (34 x 41 cm) in an album by Qiu Ying (1494-1552) now at the Palace Museum in Beijing:
The Pipa
As the party laments the absence of music, the sound of a pipa is heard across the water from another boat. The partygoers are completely entranced. They call out and ask the musician to play for them. She agrees but holds the pipa up to hide her face.
The pipa is a Chinese plucked string instrument very similar to the European lute (Wong, 2011). Both instruments have their origin in the Middle East. The pipa came to China via the Silk Roads during the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE). The instrument typically has 4 strings though some old pipas have 5. Though early pitas have as few as 4 frets, modern pitas can have up to 30. Though occasionally round, the body of the pipa is usually pear-shaped. Traditionally the pipa was played for small intimate groups, but in modern times electronic amplification has allowed pipa virtuosos to play for larger audiences. The following illustration shows some ancient pitas and a photograph of Liu Dehai (1937-2020), one the greatest pipa players of recent times.
The following is a performance of “Xunyang Moonlit Night” (浔阳月夜, Xúnyáng yuè yè) by Liu Dehai.
The Music
The poem then provides a bravura description of the music of the pipa:
These are some of the most famous lines of poetry in China. They have been variously translated. The following version by Xu Yuan-Zhong (1984; 1987) uses the same rhyme scheme as the Chinese poem:
The thick strings loudly thrummed like the pattering rain The fine strings softly tinkled in murmuring strain. When mingling loud and soft notes were together played, ’Twas like large and small pearls dropping on plate of jade.
Witter Bynner (1929) uses blank verse in his translation:
The large strings hummed like rain, The small strings whispered like a secret, Hummed, whispered—and then were intermingled Like a pouring of large and small pearls into a plate of jade.
And the following translation is by Isabel Wong (2011), a musician rather than a poet:
The lowest string hummed like pouring rain; The higher strings whispered as lover’s pillow talk. Humming and whispering intermingled I,ikc the sound of big and small pearls gradually falling into a jade plate.
The architects of the Oriental Pearl Tower (1994) in Shanghai based their design on Bai Juyi’s image of pearls falling onto jade:
Following the music of the pearls, the pipa provides the quiet song of an oriole, and then like a freezing brook the music slows to a stop:
After a brief pause the pipa plays a wild crescendo that sounds like the charge of armored warriors, and then suddenly the player stops.
The Life of the Pipa Player
During the ensuing silence, the pipa player tells her story. She was once a highly acclaimed musician in Chang’an. Her beauty and her talent were the toast of the court.
This description of the life of a successful musician and courtesan in Chang’an has been translated in many ways. One version is especially vivid. In 1917, Ezra Pound (1885-1972) published Three Cantos in Poetry Magazine, and again in the American edition of his book Lustra. This was the beginning of a set of Cantos that ultimately numbered 109. These initial three cantos – often called the Ur-Cantos – were extensively revised when Pound published A Draft of XVI Cantos in 1925. Much of the original Canto II is no longer evident in the new sequence. The general theme of Ur-Canto II was the “poetics of loss” (Carr, 2018). Pound describes the ruins of the ducal palace in Mantua, and mourns the loss of most of the music of the troubadours. And then he provides a brief description of the setting of Bai Juyi’s poem and the words of pipa player:
Yin-yo laps in the reeds, my guest departs, The maple leaves blot up their shadows, The sky is full of autumn, We drink our parting in saki. Out of the night comes troubling lute music, And we cry out, asking the singer’s name, And get this answer: “Many a one Brought me rich presents; my hair was full of jade, And my slashed skirts, drenched in expensive dyes, Were dipped in crimson, sprinkled with rare wines. I was well taught my arts at Ga-ma-rio, And then one year I faded out and married.” The lute-bowl hid her face. We heard her weeping.
It was not until much later that Pound’s allusion to Bai Juyi was recognized (e.g. in Weinberger, 2007, p 128; discussed on the Pound Cantos Project website)
Pound had no knowledge of the Chinese language. In his book Cathay (1915), he “translated” a set of 15 Chinese poems based on the notes of Ernest Fenollosa who had studied Chinese poetry with the Japanese professors Mori and Ariga. Despite his lack of training in Chinese, Pound intuitively grasped the essence of the poems (see discussion by Yip, 1969). The brief excerpt from Ur-Canto II is typical of his translations. The meaning is clear though the words are not the same as in the original.
In Pound’s poem, Yin-yo is the Japanese transliteration of Chinese characters for the Xunyang River (Romaji, Jinyō-kō), and Gamaryo is the Japanese version of 蟆陵, which literally translated is “Toad Hill” (Fuller, 2017, p 286). This is the region in Chang’an city near the burial site of the Confucian scholar Dong Zhongshu (179–104 BCE). In Bai Juyi’s poem, the pipa player says that this is where she grew up (and learned how to play the pipa).
To return to the poem: The pipa player’s high life did not last forever. Her brother went off to the army, her mother died, her looks faded, and she was no longer as sought after as before. She married a tea-merchant and came to live in Jiangzhou. Her husband is usually away on business. Alone on her boat she plays the pipa and remembers happier days.
Listening to her story Bai Juyi feels an intense sympathy: he too has fallen from grace and now lives alone far away from the capital. The musician plays a final intense song:
We do not know the music that Bai Juyi found so moving. The following is a piece entitled Night Thoughts composed and played by Wu Man (1963- ), who studied with Liu Dehai.
Wu Man’s composition derives from a famous poem by Li Bai, who spent much of his later life in exile from the capital. The following translation is by Xu Yuan-Zhong (1984, p 125).
靜夜思A Tranquil Night
床前明月光 Before my bed a pool of light 疑是地上霜 Is it hoarfrost upon the ground 舉頭望明月 Eyes raised I see the moon so bright 低頭思故鄉 Head bent in homesickness I’m drowned
The Life of the Poem
Bai Juyi’s poem was popular among calligraphers and artists. The following is a scroll by Wen Boren (1502-1575) now in the Cleveland Museum.
And the next illustration is a painting by Lu Zhi (1495-1576), from a calligraphy scroll now in the National Museum of Asian Art at the Smithsonian Institution. The boats near the lower shore are as lost as the poet and the pipa player:
And the following is an illustration by Hua Zhangyi from a retelling of Bai Juyi’s poem (Liu Yang, & Hua Zhangyi, 2024) for children: the poet dedicates his poem to the pipa player.
Peng, Y. (2023). A comparative study on two English translations of Song of a Pipa Player from the perspective of translation aesthetics. Frontiers in Humanities and Social Sciences, 3(4), 36-40.
Tan, M. A. (2025). Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen. In Z. Zhang & V. H. Mair (Eds.) Routledge Handbook of Traditional Chinese Literature (pp. 151–161). Routledge.
Waley, A. (1949, reprinted 2005). The Life and Times of Po Chu-i. Routledge.
Watson, B. (1984) The Columbia book of Chinese poetry: from early times to the thirteenth century. Columbia University Press.
Weinberger, E. (Ed.). (2007). The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry. Carcanet.
Wong, I. (2011). The Music of China. In Capwell, C., Nettl, B., Bolman, P., Dueck, B., Rommen, T., Wong, I., & Turino, T. (Eds.). Excursions in World Music, 6th Edition. (pp 88-131). Taylor & Francis
Xu, Y., Loh, B., & Wu, J. (1987). 300 Tang poems: a new translation. The Commercial Press.
Xu Yuan Zhong (1994). Songs of the immortals: an anthology of classical Chinese poetry. Penguin Books in association with New World Press.
Yip, W. (1969). Ezra Pound’s Cathay. Princeton University Press.
Yip, W. (2004). Chinese Poetry: An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres. (2nd ed., Revised). Duke University Press.
Yu, Y., & Chang, C. (2024). Text complexity and translation styles from the perspective of individuation: a case study of the English translations of Pipa Xing. Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, 11(1), Article 159.
Antonello da Messina: Sicilian Master
Antonello da Messina (~1430-1479) was born in Messina, Sicily. While studying in Naples, he became aware of a technique of painting using oil-based pigments that had originated in the Netherlands with Jan van Eyck (~1390-1441) and his followers. Antonello soon became a master of this new method. He was an expert portraitist able to capture his sitters’ distinct identities and depths of feeling. The illustration shows a painting from 1473, that was once thought to be a self-portrait, but there is no real evidence for this. Although many of Antonello’s works have been lost, three absolute masterpieces have survived: Saint Jerome in his Study, The Virgin Annunciate, both dated to around 1474, and Saint Sebastien from about 1478.
Learning How to Paint with Oils
In his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1568), Giorgio Vasari considered Antonello da Messina as pivotal in the transition between tempera and oil painting in Italy. The use of linseed oil in painting began in northern Europe, most particularly in Flanders. First used for painting wood carvings, by around 1400 oil-based pigments were being used for panel paintings. Jan van Eyck is often considered the pioneer of this new technique (Ferrari, 2013). Oil-paints dried more slowly than tempera and were more easily mixed. These advantages led to more exact representations of color and texture. The oil medium allowed for “pictorial second thoughts, enabling the picture to be modified as work on it progressed” (Pope-Hennessy, 1966, p 60). Furthermore, the surface of oil paintings is glossy rather than matte: oil paintings appear to glow with internal light.
Antonello first became aware of some of these new paintings when he was apprenticed to Niccolo Colantonio in Naples in the mid to later 1440s. Alfonso the Magnanimous (1396-1458), king of Aragon, Sicily and Naples, possessed the beautiful Lomellini Triptych by Jan van Eyck that is now long lost (Borchert, 2019). This was described by Bartholomeo Facio in 1456:
His is a remarkable picture in the most private apartments of King Alfonso, in which there is a Virgin Mary notably for its grace and modesty, with an Angel Gabriel, of exceptional beauty and with hair surpassing reality, announcing that the Son of God will be born of her; and a John the Baptist that declares the wonderful sanctity and austerity of his life, and Jerome like a living being in a library done with rare art (quoted by Borchert, 2019, p 36).
The lost triptych was likely a small devotional painting like van Eyck’s 1437 Dresden Triptych (below). Only 33 cm high, this triptych could be folded up and carried by a travelling merchant for use as a portable altar during daily prayer. The Lomellini triptych was probably of similar size but with an annunciation at the center and Saints Jerome and John in the wings.
Antonello was clearly impressed by this and other Flemish paintings in Alfonso’s collection. Vasari claimed that he therefore travelled to Flanders to study with Jan van Eyck:
Having arrived in Bruges, he became very intimate with the said Johann, making him presents of many drawings in the Italian manner and other things, insomuch that the latter, moved by this and by the respect shown by Antonello, and being now old, was content that he should see his method of coloring in oil; wherefore Antonello did not depart from that place until he had gained a thorough knowledge of that way of coloring, which he desired so greatly to know. And no long time after, Johann having died, Antonello returned from Flanders in order to revisit his native country and to communicate to all Italy a secret so useful, beautiful, and advantageous.
Unfortunately, this would have been impossible. Jan van Eyck died in 1441, when Antonello was only 11 years old. However, nothing is known about Antonello in the 1450s. He might therefore have travelled to Bruges during this time and studied with some of van Eyck’s followers (Wright, 1980). As well as learning about oil-painting from the Flemish artists, Antonello may have taught them, in exchange, some of the new Italian insights into perspective (Edgerton, 1975).
Another possibility is that Antonello interacted with Petrus Christus (1410-1476), one of van Eyck’s most prominent disciples, in Italy rather than Flanders. There is some evidence that the two painters may have been present at the same time in Milan at the court of Francesco Sforza (Ainsworth & Martens, 1994, p 61).
Antonello returned home to Sicily in 1460, and worked there for several years but nothing is really known about his whereabouts in the late 1460s. Perhaps he travelled at that time to Bruges and interacted there with Petrus and other painters, such as Hans Memling (1430-1494). There are striking similarities between Petrus’ Portrait of a Man (1465?) on the left side of the following illustration and Antonello’s later portrait from 1473.
The following illustration shows Antonello’s Salvator Mundi from 1465 on the left and a similar painting by Hans Memling from 1475. It appears too close a likeness not to have been the result of personal interaction between the artists.
Compared to the paintings of the Flemish painters, Antonello’s are more natural, more distinctive and more emotional. They express themselves. We sense a real person rather than an image.
Antonello stayed in Venice for a brief period beginning in late 1475. While there, he interacted with Venetian artists such as Giovanni Bellini (1430-1516) and Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506). An apocryphal story tells how Bellini posed as a nobleman and had his portrait painted by Antonio so that he could observe the technique of oil painting (Cardona & Villa, 2019, p 29).
An important development that occurred in Venice in the late 15th Century was oil-painting on canvas rather than wood. Sail-canvas was in ready supply in this maritime city. Canvas did not crack or warp like wood, and its light weight allowed for much larger paintings. Though Antonello did not paint on canvas, Bellini painted some of his late paintings on canvas, and oil on canvas became the usual technique for the next generation of Venetian painters such as Giorgione (1470-1510), and Titian (1488-1576).
In 1476, Antonello was offered a position on the Sforza court in Milan, but he declined and returned to Messina. He died there in 1479, having provided a dowry for his daughter and placed his son Jacobello in charge of his studio. Jacobello’s only surviving painting is signed Jacobus Antonelli, filius non humani pictoris (son of a painter who was more than human) (Cardona & Villa, 2019, p 39).
Over the years, many of Antonello’s works vanished. Some were destroyed in the earthquakes to Messina was prone. Others were lost in the bombing of World War II. Many of his paintings were small and easily lost. Only about 40 paintings remain.
Renaissance Portraits
During the later Middle Ages, the rich and the powerful wished to gain some hold on immortality by having their portraits painted. Initially this was done by giving an altarpiece to a church and having themselves included in the painting as the donors. Over time, painters began to provide portraits independently of the church. Jan van Eyck was again one of the most prominent of the early portraitists. The following illustration shows two of his portraits, both from around 1433. The sitter on the left is holding a ring. This could indicate that the sitter is a goldsmith, that he has just become engaged to be married, or that he has assumed a position of authority requiring the use of a signet ring. On the left the sitter is wearing is a striking blue chaperon, and on the right a marvelous red turban. The latter may be a self portrait.
Antonello learned from the Flemish painters, and became the “first Italian painter for whom the independent portrait was an art form in its own right” (Pope-Hennessy, 1966, p 60). He became particularly adept at presenting the individuality of the eyes. In this he was a believer in Saint Jerome:
Speculum mentis est facies, et taciti oculi cordis fatentur arcana. The face is the mirror of the mind and, without speaking, confesses the secrets of the heart.
The following illustration shows four of his portraits. The upper left is from the late 1460s and the others from the early 1470s. One of Antonello’s characteristic effects was to add is signature in a cartellino on a ledge at the bottom of the image (the two lower portraits). This trompe l’oeil representation of a folded piece of paper perhaps guarantees the veracity of the portrait: if the artist can represent a scrap of paper that well, then he must have captured the likeness exactly. The typical message on the cartellino read “Antonello messianeus me pinxit” together with a date (Renzo Villa in Cardona & Villa, 2019, pp 81-107)
We consider ourselves able to read both character and emotion in the human face. For example, in the preceding portraits we might find mockery/amusement, diffidence/cunning, disdain/skepticism, and truculence/stubbornness. Indeed, the last portrait is often known as Il Condottiero, the name for an Italian mercenary leader.
The following is an evaluation of the portrait at the lower left by Nicola Gardini, an Italian novelist (in Cardona & Villa, 2019, p 289):
The face is the theatre. And it is doubly so. On the one hand, it provides a stage where events or a story, no matter how slight, can unfold: the eyebrows arch, the eyelids are lowered, a rebellious tuft of eyebrow hairs stands up, a wart is displayed in the centre of his forehead, which creases into furrows that extend down to the side. There is no fixity: that face reveals an ex-pression, a current frame of mind or psychological circumstance. On the other hand, the mask, the moral core of the expression, the underlying truth behind events elevating the circumstance to a natural truth. This is where the man reveals himself, both as he is and as he appears with all his distinctive features: the smugness, the miserly smile (Antonello has managed to make his eyebrows smile far more than his mouth), a sense of condescension and satisfaction, his robustness, that air of good health, cleanliness, prosperity … Clearly pleased with himself and full of self-worth, this man certainly knows a thing or two. And he keeps as far away as he can from death.
However, we should be careful. Though we can recognize the most striking of human emotions, we often miss subtle changes. And we are more often wrong than right about the underlying character.
The portrait in the upper left is particularly appealing. Though it has been considered the portrait of a sailor or a pirate, it is almost certainly a portrait of a Sicilian aristocrat, willing to have his representation immortalized by the talented artist. He is not dressed in a modern maritime uniform but wearing a Sicilian woolen cape or cappuloro (Cardona & Villa, 2019, p 32). The Sicilian novelist Leonardo Sciasia notes that we recognize the face but really do not know the person behind it:
Who does the unknown man resemble? A mafioso from the countryside or one from the best neighborhoods, the member of parliament who sits on the right, or on the left, the peasant or the lawyer? He looks like the writer of these notes (it’s been said), and he certainly looks like Antonello. And just try to pin down the social status and the individual human nature of this personage. Impossible. Is he a noble or a plebeian? A notary or a farmer? A gentleman or a lout? A painter, a poet, an assassin? “He resembles.” There you have it. (translated and quoted by Ingrid Rowland, 2024, pp 21-22)
Antonello’s portraits are easily approachable. They all make clear eye contact:
Antonello is also a sensitive to the humanity of the viewer, who is given consistent points of entry into the work. These entry points are established not only with eye contact, but with the parapet, which gives a clear boundary between observer and observed, and the cartellino, which looks as if one has just unfolded it. (House, 2025, p 41)
When Antonello was in Venice in 1475-6, he was able to show the Venetian painters the techniques of oil-based portraits. The following are two portraits by Giovanni Bellini. The Portrait of a Young Man on the left dates to around the time of Antonello’s visit. It is clearly similar to Antonello’s paintings. The Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan is from 1501. Antonello’s technique has been supplemented by the amazing color sense that characterizes Venetian painting. Interestingly, Bellini has added to his masterpiece a painted cartellino in the style of Antonello:
Ecco Homo
Antonello used the abilities he had developed in portraiture to create representations of the face of Christ that are utterly convincing in their humanity and depth of feeling. One of his favorite themes was that of Ecco Homo (Behold the man) as described in the Gospel of John:
Then Pilate therefore took Jesus, and scourged him.
And the soldiers platted a crown of thorns, and put it on his head, and they put on him a purple robe,
And said, Hail, King of the Jews! and they smote him with their hands.
Pilate therefore went forth again, and saith unto them, Behold, I bring him forth to you, that ye may know that I find no fault in him.
Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns, and the purple robe. And Pilate saith unto them, Behold the man! (John 19 1-5)
The following illustration shows two of Antonello’s paintings of Ecco Homo, the left from 1476 and the right from 1470.
Saint Sebastian
Saint Sebastian was a 3rd Century Roman Christian martyred during the Diocletian Persecutions. Initially, he was shot with arrows, but this miraculously did not kill him, and he was nursed back to health by Saint Irene. Later, he was clubbed to death and thrown into the Cloaca Maxima – Rome’s main sewer. During the Middle Ages, Saint Sebastian was invoked as a defender against the plague. If he could survive being shot with arrows, surely he could help those who were afflicted by the disease. Depictions of Saint Sebastian allowed painters to portray the nude male body. Antonello’s depiction is probably the most sensuous of the early representations of the saint. In recent years, the saint has become a gay icon and the patron of the Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender-Queer communities.
Antonello’s Saint Sebastian was painted in the mid 1470s for the altar of the Church of San Guliano in Venice at the height of one of the plague epidemics to which Venice was so susceptible (Humphrey, 1993, pp 195-229). The altarpiece also contained a representation of Saint Christopher, probably painted by Antonello’s son, and a carved sculpture of Saint Rocco, another saint who offered protection from the plague. The latter was also the patron of the Scuola di San Rocco which was established in 1478. The altarpiece did not last long: the statue and the painting of Saint Christopher have been lost, and Antonello’s painting is now in Dresden.
Antonello’s painting owed much to an earlier altar triptych of Saint Sebastian (1470). However, Antonello’s saint is much more convincing than Bellini’s flatly outlined figure.
The Saint stands in a serenely ordered space that recalls the paintings of Piero della Francesca, who wrote a treatise De prospectiva pingendi (On the Perspective of Painting) in the mid 1470s. Perhaps Antonello visited him in Urbino during his travels (Campbell, 2021). House (2025, p 131) quotes Roberto Longhi as claiming that Antonello assimilated Piero’s teachings and brought them to Venice.
On the left a guard sleeps in a marvel of foreshortening. Elsewhere the people of the city converse, and go about their appointed ways. Though the saint is being martyred, everything is as it should be according to divine perspective.
Saint Jerome
Jerome (342-420) CE) was a Christian saint who in his youth spent a prolonged period of ascetic penance in the deserts of Syria. Legend has it that during this time he removed a thorn from the paw of a lion, and that the lion then became his lifelong companion. After his sojourn in the desert, he came to Rome where he translated the Bible into Latin, and made extensive commentaries on scripture. His version of the Bible – the Vulgate (from versio vulgata, the commonly used version) – remains the official Latin version of the Bible in the Catholic Church. Jerome became the patron saint of translators, librarians, and students.
Jerome became a popular subject in the paintings of the early Renaissance. The following illustration shows on the left a painting of Saint Jerome by Jan van Eyck that was likely finished by Petrus Christus in 1442, and on the right a 1444 painting by Niccolo Colantonio, with whom Antonello was apprenticed in Naples.
The late Middle Ages ushered in the “Humanities” as a field of study. Initially, this concerned the language, history and philosophy of the Greek, Roman and Hebrew civilizations. The goal of these studies was to facilitate a deeper interpretation of Biblical texts. Study of the humanities (humanitas) was thus considered a handmaiden to the study of divinity (divinitas). Saint Jerome with his immense knowledge of the ancient languages came to personify this new field of study. Over the years the Humanities expanded to include study of all texts. The Humanities then became was distinguished from both Theology – the study of sacred rather than secular scriptures –and the Sciences – the study of observed data.
Antonello painted his Saint Jerome in his Study in 1474. The painting is not large (46 by 36 cm) but it is intricately detailed (Jolly, 1983):
The painting shows Jerome reading in his study, as revealed through a monastery doorway. In the foreground the partridge, peacock, and water-bowl symbolize worldliness, immortality and ascetic purity. His lion can be seen in the shadows to the right of the study. A peaceful countryside rests beyond the monastic windows:
The following illustration shows some of the details in the painting. The landscape seen through the window on the left contains people walking with a dog, rowing a boat, and riding a horse – all going about their normal lives independently of the saint in his isolated study.
The Italian writer Elizabetta Rasy (In Cardona & Villa, 2019, p 78) comments on the figure of the saint
Unlike Jan van Eyck’s Saint Jerome blissfully reading with his cheek resting on his hand, Antonello’s saint is not particularly relaxed nor is he sitting properly. In fact, he seems to be almost on the edge of his seat. stretching his arms out towards the book rest like someone carrying out an action or making an effort. Reading may not always be an effort, but it is certainly an action. It is this very tension that gives rise to the power of a figure who does not appear conventionally devotional or indeed anything like the kind old monk depicted by Colantonio, Antonello’s master.
She further comments on the painting’s tension between reality and imagination (in Cardona & Frederico Villa, 2019, p79):
Yet the entire space of the work suggests something else. Let’s take look at the lion. Instead of holding his paw out for the saint to remove the famous thorn or sitting crouched at his feet, he is roaming aimlessly in the corridor, nothing like a lion, not even the lion in the legend, but more like those animals appearing in dreams, in places and in ways they shouldn’t, like incongruous presences. That lion standing in the shade, a forest but of an elegant marble corridor, is an apparition that shifts the entire scene into the realm of dreams. Over on the other side is a paper label attached to the wooden wall of Jerome’s cell, in plain sight. Is it the artist’s signature? A message for the observer? No, it is impossible to read those words, they are just a series of illegible scribbles that do not belong to any human alphabet. Have you ever tried to read something in your dreams? It’s impossible. Those forever unknowable words are written in the language of the most secret nocturnal images. This is the time-less stance of Antonello’s Saint Jerome in the study: every element in this setting, saint included, is here, now, near, tangible and shamelessly real. Yet every element in the entire conspicuously asymmetrical space of the picture is mysterious and represents a distant Beyond that enchants us and draws us out.
Virgin Annunciate
During the Middle Ages in Europe the veneration of the Virgin Mary underwent an extraordinary growth. This was partly related to the writings of Bernard de Clairvaux, who experienced visions of the Virgin, and who founded the Cistercian Order, and partly the need for solace during the terrible years of the Black Death. If the plague had been sent by a God of Justice and Judgment, the people could not really appeal to him for relief. So they asked the Virgin Mary to intercede, the divine feminine being far more compassionate than the male. Many of the great cathedrals were named after Notre Dame or Santa Maria. The virgin appeared to her followers, and, at the sites of these visions, shrines were established to attract pilgrims. Walsingham in Norfolk, England is one of the earliest Marian shrines
Artists celebrated the many different aspects of Mary’s life from the Annunciation to the Assumption (Verdon, 2005). One of the most popular subjects was the Annunciation as described in the Gospel of Luke (1:26-31):
….the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth,
To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary.
And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.
And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be.
And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God.
And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus.
The paintings typically showed Gabriel interrupting Mary as she read from the scriptures The angel is usually on the left and in profile; the virgin on the right and turned toward the viewer. The following illustration shows the 1333 Annunciation Altarpiece of Simoni Martin and Lippo Lemmi now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The words of the angel float across the gold background through the olive branch of divine peace and the lily of virgin purity:
Ave [Maria] gratia plena dominus tecum Hail [Mary] full of grace, the lord is with you.
Sometimes the annunciation was painted on two panels and that representing Mary was called the Vergine Annunziata (Virgin Annunciate). Antonello da Messina was the first painter to represent the Virgin Annunciate alone.
His 1476 painting shows the virgin in a simple blue shawl. The background is dark rather than gold. Mary looks down and to the left at a kneeling Gabriel who is not represented, and perhaps not clearly visible in the real world. Her expression is as enigmatic at that of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa (1506). Mary’s right hand is lifted partly in surprise, partly in reluctance. Her right hand gathers her shawl close.
The painting represents the miraculous moment of the incarnation, of the divine becoming human. The following are comments by Klaus Krüger (2015):
The image presents the Virgin in a tranquil, clearly structured composition. The strict symmetry and frontality are reminiscent of an icon. Only the implied movement of the right hand, which reaches forward into the pictorial space, and the direction of the Virgin’s gaze, which almost imperceptibly follows the turning of her body, subtly indicate that a scenic incident, namely the Annunciation, is taking place. Antonello radically reduces the event of the Annunciation by depicting only the very moment in which the Virgin receives the Word of God, and with it the divine fruit of her womb. The actual descent of the divine Logos remains imperceptible to the eyes. It can only be inferred from Mary’s reaction and from the reflection of the light that shines on her from above, and which appears to radiate all the more intensely against the dark background. The actual subject of the image is thus the paradoxical manifestation of the invisible in the visible, of light amidst darkness, of the Word in the flesh, in sum: of the divine in the temporal.
Humanism
As the Middle Ages developed into the Renaissance, the study of the Humanities, which initially were concerned with the languages in which the scriptures were written, broadened to include philosophy, ethics and history. Scholars became more familiar with the ancient texts, and took to heart the statemen of Protagoras (490-420 BCE) that “Man is the measure of all things.” They found that they could order their lives through the exercise of human reason as well as or instead of through faith in divine instruction. The Humanities thus gave birth to the philosophy of Humanism (Davies, 2001, pp 125-135).
Renaissance Humanism was facilitated by several developments. Beginning in the mid 15th Century, the printing press gave people ready access to books and ideas. No longer were thoughts locked up in the libraries of the church. The new sciences provided ways to look at the world in relation to human beings rather than as divinely determined. And painting became more realistic, the spaces more three-dimensional, and the faces more human.
Antonello da Messina infused his paintings with this new humanism. His portraits show real people who run the gamut of human emotions. His depictions of Christ show a man of sorrow rather than a suffering God. His saints live out their lives in a world that is seen from a human rather than a divine perspective. His Virgin Mary is a wonderfully realized young woman rather than a pious saint.
Cardona, C., & Villa, G. C. F. (2019). Antonello da Messina. Skira Editore.
Davies, T. (2001). Humanism. Routledge.
Edgerton, S. Y. (1975). The Renaissance rediscovery of linear perspective. Basic Books.
Ferrari, S. (2013). Van Eyck. Prestel.
House, A. S. (2025). Antonello da Messina and the history of art. Routledge
Humfrey, P. (1993). The altarpiece in Renaissance Venice. Yale University Press.
Jolly, P. H. (1983). Antonello da Messina’s Saint Jerome in His Study: an iconographic analysis. Art Bulletin, 65(2), 238-253.
Krüger, K. (2015). Mute mysteries of the divine logos: on the pictorial poetics of incarnation. In Melion, W. S., & Wandel, L. P. (Eds.). Image and Incarnation: the early modern doctrine of the pictorial image. (pp 76–108). Brill.
Pope-Hennessy, J. (1966). The Portrait in the Renaissance. Phaidon.
Robb, D. M. (1936). The iconography of the Annunciation in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. The Art Bulletin, 18(4), 480–526.
Rowland, I. D. (2024). The lies of the artists: essays on Italian art, 1450-1750. MIT Press.
Vasari, G. (1568). The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Antonello da Messina. Translation on website of Adriene De Angelis.
Verdon, T. & Rossi F. (2005). Mary in Western art. Pope John Paul II Cultural Center
von Rohr Scaff, S. (2002). The Virgin Annunciate in Italian Art of the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance. College Literature, 29(3), 109–123.
In 1901, Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) wrote an essay on the inadequacy of language in the form of a letter (Ein Brief) from the fictional Philip Lord Chandos to the actual Francis Bacon (1561-1626), a famous English philosopher of science, essayist and statesman. The letter is a response to Bacon’s inquiry about the two years of unexpected silence that following Chandos’ early success as a poet. Chandos replies that he has “completely lost the ability to think or to speak of anything coherently.” He feels a deep sympathy with the world, but finds no words whereby to express this experience. He seeks but has not yet, found a language “in which inanimate things speak to me and wherein I may one day have to justify myself before an unknown judge.” The illustration shows a 1916 portrait of von Hofmannsthal by Karl Bauer.
Synopsis of the Letter
Chandos thanks Bacon for his concern. He says he is no longer the same person who wrote his early poems. He remembers that he had planned to write about the reign of Henry VIII. “Was ist der Mensch, daß er Pläne macht!” (But what is man that he should make plans!). Another scheme that he had entertained was a collection of Apothegmata that he would have called Nosce te ispsum (Know thyself). However, his thoughts ran ahead of his actions, and the world that was once open to him now evades his grasp:
Wie soll ich es versuchen, Ihnen diese seltsamen geistigen Qualen zu schildern, dies Emporschnellen der Fruchtzweige über meinen ausgereckten Händen, dies Zurückweichendes murmelnden Wassers vor meinen dürstenden Lippen? Mein Fall ist, in Kürze, dieser: Es ist mir völlig die Fähigkeit abhanden gekommen, über irgend etwas zusammenhängend zu denken oder zu sprechen.
(This and the following audio clips are from a recitation of Ein Brief by Martin Ploderer.)
How shall I try to describe to you these strange spiritual torments, this rebounding of the fruit-branches above my outstretched hands, this recession of the murmuring stream from my thirsting lips? My case, in short, is this: I have lost completely the ability to think or to speak of anything coherently.
The German language has two ways to express the idea of loss. The common translation of “to lose” is verlieren. Another way to say that something “has come away from my hands” – ist mir abhanden gekommen. Any blame is on that which has been lost rather than on the loser. A famous use of this idiom is in Mahler’s 1902 setting of Rückert’s Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (I am lost to the world).
Chandos’ inability to think or speak is not complete. He is still able to take care of his estate. He has just lost the ability (or the will) to communicate poetically.
Chandos describes an intense, almost mystical, involvement with even the most mundane of his experiences:
Es wird mir nicht leicht, Ihnen anzudeuten, worin diese guten Augenblicke bestehen; die Worte lassen mich wiederum im Stich. Denn es ist ja etwas völlig Unbenanntes, und auch wohl kaum Benennbares, das in solchen Augenblicken, irgendeine Erscheinung meiner alltäglichen Umgebung mit einer überschwellenden Flut höheren Leben wie ein Gefäß erfüllend, mir sich ankündet. Ich kann nicht erwarten, daß Sie mich ohne Beispiel verstehen, und ich muß Sie um Nachsicht für die Kläglichkeit meiner Beispiele bitten. Eine Gießkanne, eine auf dem Feld verlassene Egge, ein Hund in der Sonne, ein ärmlicher Kirchhof, ein Krüppel, ein Kleines Bauernhaus, alles dies kann das Gefäß meiner Offenbarung werden. Jeder dieser Gegenstände und die tausend anderen ähnlichen, über die sonst ein Auge mit selbstverständlicher Gleichgültigkeit hinweggleitet, kann für mich plötzlich in irgendeinemMoment, den herbeizuführen auf keine Weise in meiner Gewalt steht, ein erhabenes undrührendes Gepräge annehmen, das auszudrücken mir alle Worte zu arm scheinen.
It is not easy for me to indicate wherein these good moments subsist; once again words desert me. For it is, indeed, something entirely unnamed, even barely nameable which, at such moments, reveals itself to me, filling like a vessel any casual object of my daily surroundings with an overflowing flood of higher life. I cannot expect you to understand me without examples, and I must plead your indulgence for their absurdity. A pitcher, a harrow abandoned in a field, a dog in the sun, a neglected cemetery, a cripple, a peasant’s hut, all these can become the vessel of my revelation. Each of these objects and a thousand others similar, over which the eye usually glides with a natural indifference, can suddenly, at any moment (which I am utterly powerless to evoke), assume for me a character so exalted and moving that words seem too poor to describe it. Even the distinct image of an absent object, in fact, can acquire the mysterious function of being filled to the brim with this silent but suddenly rising flood of divine sensation.
Chandos concludes the letter by thanking Bacon for his kindness:
Sie waren so gütig, Ihre Unzufriedenheit darüber zu äußern, daß kein von mir verfaßtes Buch mehr zu Ihnen kommt, »Sie für das Entbehren meines Umgangs zu entschädigen«. Ichf ühlte in diesem Augenblick mit einer Bestimmtheit, die nicht ganz ohne ein schmerzliches Beigefühl war, daß ich auch im kommenden und im folgenden und in allen Jahren dieses meines Lebens kein englisches und kein lateinisches Buch schreiben werde: und dies ausdem einen Grund, dessen mir peinliche Seltsamkeit mit ungeblendetem Blick dem vor Ihnen harmonisch ausgebreiteten Reiche der geistigen und leiblichen Erscheinungen an seiner Stelle einzuordnen ich Ihrer unendlichen geistigen Überlegenheit überlasse: nämlich weil dieSprache, in welcher nicht nur zu schreiben, sondern auch zu denken mir vielleicht gegeben wäre, weder die lateinische noch die englische, noch die italienische oder spanische ist,sondern eine Sprache, in welcher die stummen Dinge zuweilen zu mir sprechen, und in welcher ich vielleicht einst im Grabe vor einem unbekannten Richter mich verantworten werde.
You were kind enough to express your dissatisfaction that no book written by me reaches you any more, “to compensate for the loss of our relationship.” Reading that, I felt, with a certainty not entirely bereft of a feeling of sorrow, that neither in the coming year nor in the following nor in all the years of this my life shall I write a book, whether in English or in Latin: and this for an odd and embarrassing reason which I must leave to the boundless superiority of your mind to place in the realm of physical and spiritual values spread out harmoniously before your unprejudiced eye: to wit, because the language in which I might be able not only to write but to think is neither Latin nor English, neither Italian nor Spanish, but a language none of whose words is known to me, a language in which inanimate things speak to me and wherein I may one day have to justify myself before an unknown judge.
Fictional Context
Hofmannsthal wrote his essay in the form of a letter from Philip Lord Chandos to Francis Bacon. The letter is dated August 22, 1603. James I had just assumed the throne of England. Shakespeare was at the height of his career: Hamlet was performed in 1600, Othello in 1603, and Measure for Measure in 1604. The work of Copernicus on the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543) had marked the beginning of the Scientific Revolution. Knowledge was becoming free of doctrine, and art becoming independent of religion.
Francis Bacon was an English statesman and philosopher of science. His Novum Organum of 1620 described how new knowledge could be induced from observations rather than deducted from axioms. He also wrote essays on a variety of topics in philosophy and religion. In 1603 there was a young Baron Chandos: Grey Bridges (1580-1621), a politician and a possible author of an anonymous collection of essays entitled Horae Subsecivae (Spare Time). The following illustration shows portraits of Bacon (left, Paul van Somer, 1617) and Bridges (right, William Larkin, 1615). However, Grey Bridges was not a poet. Though Bacon is an actual person, the Lord Chandos of Hofmannstahl’s letter is completely fictional.
Though not an actual person, Lord Chandos serves as an effective counterpoint to Bacon, representing the aesthetic approach to life as opposed to the scientific. Both forces had become strong in English Society at the time of the fictional letter.
Personal Context
The Lord Chandos of the letter is far more similar to Hofmannsthal than to any young Jacobean lord. Hofmannsthal had begun his career as a lyric poet. His poetry was “romantic” in its stress on the individual’s emotional response and “symbolist” in its search for meanings beyond reality. The 1892 poem Erlebnis (Experience) describes a vision of death and time:
Mit silbergrauem Dufte war das Tal Der Dämmerung erfüllt, wie wenn der Mond Durch Wolken sickert. Doch es war nicht Nacht. Mit silbergrauem Duft des dunklen Tales Verschwammen meine dämmernden Gedanken, Und still versank ich in dem webenden, Durchsichtgen Meere und verließ das Leben. Wie wunderbare Blumen waren da, Mit Kelchen dunkelglühend! Pflanzendickicht, Durch das ein gelbrot Licht wie von Topasen In warmen Strömen drang und glomm. Das Ganze War angefüllt mit einem tiefen Schwellen Schwermütiger Musik. Und dieses wußt ich, Obgleich ichs nicht begreife, doch ich wußt es: Das ist der Tod. Der ist Musik geworden, Gewaltig sehnend, süß und dunkelglühend, Verwandt der tiefsten Schwermut. Aber seltsam! Ein namenloses Heimweh weinte lautlos In meiner Seele nach dem Leben, weinte, Wie einer weint, wenn er auf großem Seeschiff Mit gelben Riesensegeln gegen Abend Auf dunkelblauem Wasser an der Stadt, Der Vaterstadt, vorüberfährt. Da sieht er Die Gassen, hört die Brunnen rauschen, riecht Den Duft der Fliederbüsche, sieht sich selber. Ein Kind, am Ufer stehn, mit Kindesaugen, Die ängstlich sind und weinen wollen, sieht Durchs offne Fenster Licht in seinem Zimmer – Das große Seeschiff aber trägt ihn weiter, Auf dunkelblauem Wasser lautlos gleitend Mit gelben, fremdgeformten Riesensegeln.
And a translation by J. D. McClatchy (2008, pp 24-5):
At dusk a silvery fragrance filled the valley, As when the moon is viewed through a veil of cloud. But it was not yet night. In the darkening valley That fragrance drifted through my shadowy thoughts And silently I sank into the wavering, Diaphanous sea, and left my life behind. What wondrous flowers had bloomed there, Cups of colors darkly glowing! And a thicket Amidst which a flame like topaz rushed, Now surging, now gleaming in its molten course. All of it seemed filled with the deep swell Of a mournful music. This much I knew, Though I cannot understand it—I knew That this was Death, transmuted into music, Violently yearning, sweet, dark, burning, Akin to deepest sadness. Yet how strange! A nameless longing after life now wept Inside my soul without a sound, wept As one might weep who on a galleon With giant gilded sails of an evening slides Over the indigo waters past a town, His native town. And there he spies again The streets, hears the fountains plash, breathes In the scent of lilacs, and sees himself again, A child standing on the shore, wide-eyed, Anxious and close to tears, and looks then through An open window to see a light on in his room— But the huge ship is bearing out to sea Without a sound over the indigo waters With its giant gilded unearthly sails.
As the 19th Century came to an end, Hofmannsthal began to feel uneasy about his writing, which no longer seemed to capture what he wanted to say about the world.
There is no question that Chandos’ crisis reflects a crisis of Hofmannsthal’s own; after a decade of astonishing facility and productivity, Hofmannsthal suddenly finds himself unsure of his own verbal mastery. (Bennett, 1988, p 129)
Hofmannsthal composed only a few isolated poems after 1898 (Kovach, 2002, p 86; Schaber, 1970). However, unlike the fictional Lord Chandos, he did not forsake writing. Rather he turned to drama and to opera. His 1903 play Elektra was successful, and was converted into an opera in 1909 with music by Richard Strauss. Over the next two decades continued to write libretti for Strauss operas, among them Der Rosenkavalier (1911) and Ariadne auf Naxos (1912/1916), and Arabella (1933).
Hofmannsthal stopped trying to figure out what is the mystery of life, and began to consider how people live their lives. Toward the end of Act I of Der Rosenkavalier, the Marschallin remarks
Das alles ist geheim, so viel geheim. Und man ist dazu da, daß man’s entragt. Und in dem “Wie” da liegt der ganze Untershied—
It’s all a mystery, so much is mysterious. And we are here to endure it. And in the How, there lies the whole difference—
McClatchy (2008) used this quotation as the epigraph to a selection of Hofmannsthal’s writings.
The following is a photograph of Hofmannsthal and Strauss from 1912:
The Paradox of the Letter
Many critics have noted that, given that his inability to think or speak coherently, Lord Chandos could not possibly have written his letter to Francis Bacon:
Perhaps the most peculiar thing about the Chandos letter is its inherent paradox. While the fictitious author claims to be unable to employ language effectively, the essay itself is a masterpiece of literary artistry. The images are bright, colorful, and vibrant. The selection of words and the organization of ideas are flawless. Each sentence, each phrase is constructed with care and precision, is impregnated with life and meaning. The whole is ordered so as to allow each detail to convey its message with power. In short, it is not the work of a spiritually disturbed Chandos, but of the virtuoso Hofmannsthal. (Bangerter, 1977, p 28)
The Chandos letter, taken literally, rests on the impossible condition, the absurdity, in fact, that a man in Chandos’ condition could write any letter, not to mention one involving such complexity of thought. When Chandos states that he has completely lost the ability to think or speak coherently, he precludes the possibility of writing anything, including the letter in which he makes such a statement. The point is that Chandos, who is an invented figure, did not write the letter, Hofmannsthal did. Hofmannsthal, who does not have Chandos’ problem of disorientation, is able to compose the letter that he imagines Chandos would have written had he been able to write. (Daviau, 1971, p 30)
The letter describes the state of mind of a man who can no longer communicate what he experiences to others. Hofmannsthal has to imagine what this was like. It remains problematic that one so capable of communication could really understand what it is like to have lost that ability.
The Language Crisis
For Chandos expressing his experiences in language has become impossible. Any attempt to do so leads to a whirlpool of words:
Es zerfiel mir alles in Teile, die Teile wieder in Teile und nichts mehr ließ sich mit einem Begriff umspannen. Die einzelnen Worte schwammen um mich; sie gerannen zu Augen die mich anstarrten und in die ich wieder hineinstarren muß: Wirbel sind sie, in die hinabzusehen mich schwindelt, die sich unaufhaltsam drehen und durch die hindurch man ins Leere kommt.
For me everything disintegrated into parts, those parts again into parts; no longer would anything let itself be encompassed by one idea. Single words floated round me; they congealed into eyes which stared at me and into which I was forced to stare back – whirlpools which gave me vertigo and, reeling incessantly, led into the void.
Chandos’ description of his difficulty with language relates to the Sprachkrise (language crisis) experienced by Austrian philosophers and writers at the beginning of the 20th Century (Gray, 1986). This was clearly not an aspect of writing in England in 1603: at that time, the English language had no reservations about its ability to discover knowledge or to portray beauty. As the 19th Century came to an end, however, our trust in language was beginning to crumble. Hofmannsthal wished to consider this problem in the context of a time when poets and scientists still had full command of their words.
With the industrial revolution, the place of art in society changed. Poetry was no longer the darling of the aristocracy – elevated thoughts in elevated language. To continue to have any meaning, poetry needed to become more like everyday speech and to consider everyday problems.
Chandos’s letter suggests a real pessimism about the possibility of revivifying language, indicating both that the future lies with a language which is no language and that, until this language is found, the only possibility is silence. Chandos’s pessimism can be seen in the list of objects which, in an imaginative desert, still ignite in him an occasional and momentary vision of eternity: a watering can, a deserted harrow in the fields, a dog in the sun, a wretched churchyard, a cripple, a peasant cottage. All of these ciphers suggest tiredness, desertedness, decrepitude and pathos: all seem residues of a lost unity rather than pointers to a unity to come. A similar sense of pessimism about the possibility of revivifying language, a similar sense that all that remains are a few isolated and arbitrary symbols, runs through the writings of Eliot, Yeats and Rake. Eliot ends The Waste Land by shoring a few arcane fragments of language against the ruin of the present. (Sheppard, 1976, p 324).
The language crisis extended beyond poetry. At about the same time as Hofmannsthal’s letter, Franz Mauthner (1849-1923) published his Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (Contributions to a Critique of Language, 1901-2). This called into question the very basis of language as a means of representing reality. Gray (1986, p 335) remarks
Mauthner conceives of language as a fundamentally metaphorical, and thus “mendacious,” phenomenon. The very act in which language is created, the transformation of sense data into articulated sounds, is an act of metaphorization. Due to this inherent metaphoricity, language cannot express “truth,” which, for Mauthner, can only consist in the perfect identity of language with the objective reality it is intended to express.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was significantly affected by the work of Mauthner, though he was less pessimistic about the possibilities of language. He mentions Mauthner in his Tactatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922, 4.0031)
Alle Philosophie ist “Sprachkritik”. (Allerdings nicht im Sinne Mauthners.) All philosophy is “Critique of language” (but not at all in Mauthner’s sense)
The following illustration shows portraits of Mauthner (from the 1900s) and Wittgenstein (from the 1920s)
Though mainly related to poetic language, Hofmannsthal’s letter also suggests the more general problem of the relationship between language and experience:
Chandos’ crisis points to what was to become a central philosophical preoccupation of the twentieth century, reflected in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein as well as in more recent developments such as Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction: namely, the demonstration that language can no longer be relied on as a valid signifier of a reality which exists outside itself, and in fact that we cannot ever experience a “reality” which is not already mediated by our language. (Kovach, 2002, p 94)
Like Staring into the Sun
Although Chandos concentrates on his linguistic difficulties, he also describes his recent experiences as overwhelming:
Ja, es kann auch die bestimmte Vorstellung eines abwesenden Gegenstandes sein, der dieunbegreifliche Auserwählung zu Theil wird, mit jener sanft oder jäh steigenden Flut göttlichen Gefühles bis an den Rand gefüllt zu werden.
Even the distinct image of an absent object, in fact, can acquire the mysterious function of being filled to the brim with this silent but suddenly rising flood of divine sensation.
Though he does not acknowledge it, these experiences are inherently mystical. And as such they are perhaps ineffable. Far be it for human minds to put into words the experience of the divine. The concluding proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
However, an experience that cannot be put into words – something that is impossible to understand – can be terrifying. The mystical vision of Lord Chandos is not easy to bear. In a postscript to Elizabeth Costello (2003) J. M. Coetzee imagined what it might have been like to be Chandos’ wife, who tried to share his experiences. She writes a follow-up letter to Bacon, stressing how much they need his help:
All is allegory, says my Philip. Each creature is key to all other creatures. A dog sitting in a patch of sun licking itself, says he, is at one moment a dog and at the next a vessel of revelation. And perhaps he speaks the truth, perhaps in the mind of our Creator (our Creator, I say) where we whirl about as if in a millrace we interpenetrate and are interpenetrated by fellow creatures by the thousand. But how I ask you can I live with rats and dogs and beetles crawling through me day and night, drowning and gasping, scratching at me, tugging me, urging me deeper and deeper into revelation — how? We are not made for revelation, I want to cry out, nor I nor you, my Philip, revelation that sears the eye like staring into the sun. Save me, dear Sir, save my husband! (Coetzee, 2003, p 229)
Envoi
The Letter of Lord Chandos has had far-reaching effects. Many writers have provided responses to the letter (e.g. Fraser, 1990; Spahr et al., 2002; Quignard, 2020). None have completely resolved the issues that were raised in Hofmannsthal’s letter. Modernism found a way to allow poetry in an age where language had to communicate present truth rather than talk beautifully about lofty ideas. However, we still have not really found a way to combine beauty with truth. And we have come to realize that there is much in this world that we still do not understand and cannot describe in words. We can keep trying.
References
Bangerter, L. A. (1977). Hugo von Hofmannsthal. F. Ungar.
Bennett, B. (1988). Hugo von Hofmannsthal: the theaters of consciousness. Cambridge University Press.
Coetzee, J. M. (2003). Elizabeth Costello: eight lessons. Secker & Warburg.
Daviau, D. G. (1971). Hugo von Hofmannsthal and The Chandos Letter. Modern Austrian Literature, 4(2), 28–44.
Fraser, J. (1990) In defence of language; if it needs it. University of Toronto Quarterly, 59, (2), 269-286
Gray, R. T. (1986). Aphorism and Sprachkrise in turn-of-the-century Austria. Orbis Litterarum, 41(4), 332–354.
Hofmannsthal, H. von (1902). Ein Brief. Der Tag. Berlin, Nr. 489, 18. Oktober 1902 (Teil 1); Nr. 491, 19. Oktober 1902 (Teil 2). Available at Projekt Gutenberg-DE. English translation by T. Stern & J. Stern (1952, reprinted, 2008). In J. D. McClatchy (Ed.) The whole difference: selected writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal. (pp. 69-79). Princeton University Press. Available at Washington University website.
Kovach, T. A. (2002). A companion to the works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Camden House.
McClatchy, J. D. (Ed.) (2008). The whole difference: selected writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Princeton University Press
Quignard, P. (2020). La réponse à Lord Chandos. Éditions Galilée.
Schaber, S. C. (1970). The Lord Chandos Letter in the light of Hofmannsthal’s lyric decade. Germanic Review, 45(1), 52–58.
Sheppard, R. (1976). The crisis of language. In Bradbury, M., & McFarlane, J. W. (Eds.). Modernism: 1890-1930. (pp 323-336). Penguin.
Spahr, R., Spiegel, H., & Vogel, O. (Eds) (2002). Lieber Lord Chandos: Antworten auf einen Brief. S. Fischer.
Wittgenstein, L. (1921, translated by C.K. Ogden, 1922, revised translation by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, 1961, reprinted 2005). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Routledge.
T. S. Eliot: The Cocktail Party
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) wrote The Cocktail Party in 1948. The play begins with people making foolish conversation at a cocktail party but soon proceeds to a discussion of what it means to be married to another person, and what is required to become a saint. It was initially performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1949 with Alec Guiness as the Unidentified Guest and Irene Worth as Celia, the prospective saint, and then moved to Broadway in 1950, where it received a Tony Award for Best Play. Critical reviews were mixed, but audiences were more enthusiastic. The play was revived briefly in 1968 with Guinness as both director and actor.
Synopsis
The play opens on the remnants of a cocktail party. The hostess Lavinia Chamberlayne had been called away, and her husband Edward had tried to cancel the party, but had been unable to contact some of the invitees: two elderly guests Julia and Alex, two youngsters, Celia and Peter, and one unidentified guest not known to the others, who enjoys his gin and water and listens bemused to the cocktail chatter. The party soon breaks up, but Edward asks the unidentified guest to stay behind because he needs someone to talk to. He confesses that Lavinia has left him. After some discussion he realizes that, although he has toyed with the idea of freedom, he wants her to return. The unidentified guest promises to bring Lavinia back the next day and leaves, singing a verse from the Irish song One-Eyed Riley:
Unidentified Guest: As I was drinkin’ gin and water, And me bein’ the One-Eyed Riley, Who came in but the landlord’s daughter And she took my heart entirely.
You will keep our appointment?
Edward: I shall keep it.
Unidentified Guest: Tooryooly toory-iley, What’s the matter with One-Eyed Riley
This and subsequent audio clips are from the Decca recording of the play. Some sections of the play were omitted for the recording which was limited to the length of two LPs.
Other guests return with various excuses, but mainly because they wish to talk to Edward. Peter wants his advice about Celia, with whom he has become enamoured though she does not return his feelings. Edward suggests that Peter accept the fact that that romance is not going anywhere, and that Peter should go to California to pursue his dreams of working in film. After Peter leaves, Celia returns to talk to Edward, and we realize that she and Edward have been having an affair. However, now that Lavinia has apparently left Edward and made him available, Celia realizes that she does not wish to continue their relationship.
The next afternoon everyone returns to the Chamberlayne’s. Lavinia in brought back to Edward as promised by the unidentified guest. The other guests have been summoned by telegram. Peter has decided to leave to work in films in California. Celia says goodbye to Peter and to the Chamberlaynes, Lavinia and Edward are left alone to discuss their relationship. Lavinia suggests that her husband should see a psychiatrist.
The play then skips to several weeks later at the consulting offices of the unidentified guest, who it turns out is the psychiatrist Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly. We find out the Julia and Alex have worked with Sir Henry to get Edward, Lavinia, and Celia to come to his office. Initially Sir Henry talks with Edward alone and then Lavinia is brought in. Lavinia and Edward discuss their relationship. Lavina knew about Edward’s affair, but Edward had not realized that Lavinia had at the same time been infatuated with young Peter. Both now have no one to love but themselves, and they decide to return home together.
Celia then comes in to consult with Sir Henry. She explains that she has begun to feel “an awareness of solitude,” a separation from a world with which she has become disillusioned. Furthermore, she has experienced a “sense of sin” that does not seem to have much to do with morality. Rather it appears to be a feeling that he is not doing what she was meant to do. She needs something to devote herself to. Sir Henry agrees to help her find her calling. After Celia leaves, Julia and Alex return and the three toast together, first to Lavinia and Edward with the “words for the building of the hearth,” and then to Celia with the “words for those who go upon a journey.”
The Guardians mention Peter as also needing their help. Perhaps he might represent a separate road to salvation – that of the artist.
The final act of the play occurs two years later just before another cocktail party at the Chamberlaynes. The same people are there as in the first act. We learn that Lavinia and Edward remain together, and that Peter has become successful in films. Alex reports that Celia had joined an austere Christian nursing order and had gone to Kinkanja to care for patients dying from a pestilence. Agitators had convinced the natives that they could only stop the pestilence by slaughtering the Christians. During the subsequent insurrection, Celia had been crucified on an anthill. Lavinia asks Sir Henry why he appears unconcerned about this, and he confesses that when he first met Celia he had a premonition of her violent death, He had not known exactly how this would occur, but he had acquiesced to Celia’s decision and prepared her for her destiny.
Julia, Alex and Sir Henry leave to attend another party. The other guests remain as the Chamberlayne’s cocktail party begins.
The following illustration shows a 1948 photograph of Eliot by Walter Stoneman on the left and photographs of Alec Guiness and Irene Worth from the original New York production on the right.
Sources for the Play
In his 1951 essay on Poetry and Drama, Eliot noted that he had used Euripides’ Alcestis (438 BCE) “as a point of departure” for The Cocktail Party. In Euripides, in gratitude for the hospitality shown to him, Apollo had granted king Admetus the privilege of living past the time the Fates had decreed for his death. The only problem was that someone else had to die in his place. Admetus’ devoted wife Alcestis agrees to take his place. Apollo tries to get Thanatos, the God of Death, not to take Alcestis, but Death is implacable. Apollo then asks Heracles to wrestle with Death and brings Alcestis back to Admetus. Eliot clearly takes from Euripides the story of Edward and Lavinia’s relationship. And we must presume that the unidentified guest in the first act is Heracles, a hero who liked to drink and to sing.
As the play progresses, the ideas of Heraclitus (c 500 BCE) come to the fore (Jones, 1960, p 132; Lesher, 2013). Just before he returns Lavinia to Edward, the unidentified guest points out that everything and everyone changes – you cannot step twice into the same river.
Ah, but we die to each other daily. What we know of other people Is only our memory of the moments During which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same Is a useful and convenient social convention Which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.
In his play Eliot grafts onto these Classical ideas the Christian narrative of Celia’s martyrdom. In this, Sir Henry takes the role of a Priest, who stands in place of God, rather than that of a Hero, who acts for the Gods. Celia confesses to him that she has felt a “sense of sin” – something that is completely Christan, and incompatible with Classical ideas. Sir Henry informs Celia of her options and the dangers she might face, before allowing her to choose her vocation. His
ability to foresee Celia’s death is similar to the doctrine of free will, in which God can see what will happen, but where the choice is still up to the individual (Rexine, 1965, p 25)
Eliot may have also used several modern sources for the ideas he considered in The Cocktail Party. Two recent productions had used a supernatural being to alter the course of human events. In Frank Capra’s 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey’s guardian angel Clarence Odbody talks him out of suicide and convinces him to return to his family (Llorens-Cubedo, 2022). In Eliot’s play the supernatural intervention is more austere, and the outcome ultimately tragic, despite the play being called a comedy. In J. B. Priestley’s 1947 play The Inspector Calls, a police inspector interrupts a family dinner party and points out to those present how their actions had led to the death of a young woman. As the play ends, the inspector vanishes: he was simply a voice asking for justice. Priestley calls out the entitled; Eliot reconciles them to their fate. Alec Guinness had acted as one of the family in the first production of Priestley’s play. In J.-P. Sartre’s play Huis Clos (“No Exit,” performed in 1944, published in 1947) one of the main characters exclaims L’enfer, c’est les autres (“Hell is other people”). In The Cocktail Party Eliot has Edward rebut this claim:
There was a door And I could not open it. I could not touch the handle. Why could I not walk out of my prison? What is hell? Hell is oneself, Hell is alone, the other figures in it Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.
Edward’s description of his state of mind fits more easily with the existentialist idea that we alone are responsible for our actions. As Sartre said in L’existentialisme est un humanisme (“Existentialism is a Humanism,” 1946), we are “condemned to be free”
The Path to Sainthood
In the second act of the play, Sir Henry, with the assistance of Julia and Alex, reconciles Lavinia and Edward to their life together, and sets Celia on her path to sainthood. Carol Smith (1967, pp 157-158) points out that there are two ways to salvation in Christianity:
In the history of Christian mysticism from the time of the writings attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, there have traditionally been two paths by which the soul could come to God—the Negative Way and the Affirmative Way. Followers of the Negative Way believe that God may be reached by detaching the soul from the love of all things that are not God, or, in the terms Eliot most frequently chose to use, by following the council of St. John of the Cross to divest oneself of the love of created beings. The Way of Affirmation, on the other hand, consists of the recognition that because the Christian God is immanent as well as transcendent, everything in the created world is an imperfect image of Him. Thus, all created things are to be accepted in love as images of the Divine. The Way of Affirmation, while less rigorous, has its own implicit difficulties, for the price of loving created beings ultimately involves suffering and loss.
Sir Henry brings Lavinia and Edward together and points out to themthat they both had felt a lack of love in their marriage, both had sought out relationships with others, and both had realized that these relationships had no hope of success. They must become reconciled to their own limitations; they must relearn how to live lovingly with each other. Theirs is the Affirmative Way.
Celia presents a completely different problem for Sir Henry. She has two symptoms. The first is “an awareness of solitude:”
I don’t mean simply That there’s been a crash: though indeed there has been. It isn’t simply the end of an illusion In the ordinary way, or being ditched. Of course that’s something that’s always happening To all sorts of people, and they get over it More or less, or at least they carry on. No. I mean that what has happened has made me aware That I’ve always been alone. That one always is alone. Not simply the ending of one relationship, Not even simply finding that it never existed— But a revelation about my relationship With everybody. Do you know – It no longer seems worth while to speak to anyone!
The second is “a sense of sin”
It’s not the feeling of anything I’ve ever done, Which I might get away from, or of anything in me I could get rid of—but of emptiness, of failure Towards someone, or something, outside of myself; And I feel I must . . . atone—is that the word?
Sir Henry informs her that she can return to normal life
The condition is curable. But the form of treatment must be your own choice: I cannot choose for you. If that is what you wish, I can reconcile you to the human condition, The condition to which some who have gone as far as you Have succeeded in returning. They may remember The vision they have had, but they cease to regret it, Maintain themselves by the common routine, Learn to avoid excessive expectation, Become tolerant of themselves and others, Giving and taking, in the usual actions What there is to give and take. They do not repine; Are contented with the morning that separates And with the evening that brings together For casual talk before the fire Two people who know they do not understand each other, Breeding children whom they do not understand And who will never understand them.
Or
There is another way, if you have the courage. The first I could describe in familiar terms Because you have seen it, as we all have seen it, Illustrated, more or less, in lives of those about us. The second is unknown, and so requires faith— The kind of faith that issues from despair. The destination cannot be described; You will know very little until you get there; You will journey blind. But the way leads towards possession Of what you have sought for in the wrong place.
Celia chooses the second option – the negative way to salvation – and Sir Henry makes the necessary arrangements.
The Guardians
In The Cocktail Party the characters of Julia, Alex, and Sir Henry bring about the most important elements of the plot. The word “guardian” comes up initially when Edward is describing to Celia how some force within him – his “tougher self” – prevents him from changing the course of his life. Later in their conversation Celia wonders whether Julia might be serving as her guardian. At the end of the play’s second scene, Edward and Celia make a toast to the “Guardians.” We are never sure of their roles. They might be angels or magi: spiritual advisers who intervene in a person’s life to make sure that some transcendent goal is attained (Hammerschmidt, 1981). Though the appear to serve some greater good, we are not completely sure that they are not demonic. For want of any clear name, they have come to be known as the “Guardians.”
The fact that Sir Henry sings a song about “One-Eyed Riley” raises the idea the “In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king” (Jones, 1960, p 151). This old proverb was collected by Erasmus in his Adagia (1500) – in regione caecorum rex est luscus – but its origins go back at least as far as the Genesis Rabbah (~500 CE). The following illustration (I believe from the 1968 revival at the Chichester Festival) emphasizes this aspect of the guardians: Sir Henry has a monocle, and one of Julia’s eyes is patched. The Guardians are offering a libation to the success of their charges:
Alex: The words for the building of the hearth.
Sir Henry: Let them build the hearth Under the protection of the stars.
Alex: Let them place a chair each side of it.
Julia: May the holy ones watch over the roof, May the Moon herself influence the bed.
Alex: The words for those who go upon a journey.
Sir Henry: Protector of travellers Bless the road.
Alex: Watch over her in the desert. Watch over her in the mountain. Watch over her in the labyrinth. Watch over her by the quicksand.
Julia: Protect her from the Voices Protect her from the Visions Protect her in the tumult Protect her in the silence.
A Meaningless Martyrdom
In the short final act of the play, we learn that Celia had joined an austere nursing order and had travelled to Kinkanja to care for dying patients. The natives had somehow come to believe that she was the cause rather than the cure for the pestilence. Celia had then been crucified on an anthill. Her death appears as meaningless as it was horrible:
And just for a handful of plague-stricken natives Who would have died anyway
Sir Henry appears undisturbed by her death. When challenged by Lavinia he remarks
When I first met Miss Coplestone, in this room, I saw the image, standing behind her chair, Of a Celia Coplestone whose face showed the astonishment Of the first five minutes after a violent death. If this strains your credulity, Mrs. Chamberlayne, I ask you only to entertain the suggestion That a sudden intuition, in certain minds, May tend to express itself at once in a picture. That happens to me, sometimes. So it was obvious That here was a woman under sentence of death. That was her destiny. The only question Then was, what sort of death? I could not know; Because it was for her to choose the way of life To lead to death, and, without knowing the end Yet choose the form of death. We know the death she chose. I did not know that she would die in this way; She did not know. So all that I could do Was to direct her in the way of preparation. That way, which she accepted, led to this death. And if that is not a happy death, what death is happy?
The story of Celia’s death borders on the absurd. The idea that human life is essentially absurd had just been introduced by Albert Camus in his 1942 book Le mythe de Sisyphe (“The Myth of Sisyphus”). The main idea is that human life is much like that of Sisyphus, who tried to stop death and make man immortal. His punishment was to roll an immense boulder up to the top of a hill. Just before it reaches the summit, the boulder rolls back down into the valley and Sisyphus must begin his task again. This he must do for all eternity. At the end of his essay Camus remarks that
Je laisse Sisyphe au bas de, la montagne! On retrouve toujours son fardeau. Mais Sisyphe enseigne la fidélité supérieure qui nie les dieux et soulève les rochers. Lui aussi juge que toutest bien. Cet univers désormais sans maître ne lui paraît ni stérile ni futile. Chacun des grains de cette pierre, chaque éclat minéral de cette montagne pleine de nuit, à lui seul, forme un monde. La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un cœur d’homme. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.
[I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy].
The following illustration shows a 1920 painting of Sisyphus by the German painter Franz von Stuck:
In the late 1940s and the 1950s plays like Genet’s The Maids (1947), Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano (1950) and Becket’s Waiting for Godot (1950) ushered in the theatre of the absurd, wherein human beings learned to survive in a world without meaning. Eliot’s play is a harbinger of this type of drama: Celia’s fate is absurd – her death served no useful purpose.
The Magus Zoroaster
Sir Henry tries to explain his lack of concern about Celia’s death by quoting from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820). The lines are spoken by Mother Earth who encourages Prometheus to tell his story but to be aware that there are two worlds – one in which we live, and one which contains our unfulfilled dreams and ideas
Ere Babylon was dust The magus Zoroaster, my dead child, Met his own image walking in the garden. That apparition, sole of men, he saw. For know there are two worlds of life and death: One that which thou beholdest; but the other Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit The shadows of all forms that think and live Till death unite them and they part no more!
The next lines (unquoted by Sir Henry) are
Dreams and the light imaginings of men, And all that faith creates or love desires, Terrible, strange, sublime and beauteous shapes.
Zoroaaster was a mythical Persian religious leader (magus) who may have lived around 1000 BCE. The story of the meeting with his double marks a time when he realized that he had to live up to what he was meant to be (Ranald & Ranald, 1961).
The story of Zoroaster and his image of what he was meant to be was depicted by the Mexican surrealist painter Leonora Carrington in 1960: The following illustration shows her painting. The two enlargements on the right show the supernatural powers (bull and lion), and the mirror writing on the ground that quotes from Shelley. The latter has been lightened and mirror-inverted to make the text legible. The conflict between goodness and evil appear to be represented by the bird and snake at the feet of Zoroaster.
The Problems of Sainthood
As the 20th Century came to an end, the idea of the saint devoting himself or herself to the poor and dying became a little tarnished. Probably the most famous of the modern saints was Mother Teresa (1910-1997), who devoted her life to the poor of Calcutta.
The journalist Christopher Hitchens criticized her contributions in a TV program entitled Mother Teresa: Hell’s Angel (1994). The following are two excerpts:
Mother Teresa’s cult of death and suffering depends for its effect on the most vulnerable and helpless: abandoned babies, say, or the terminally ill, who supply the occasion for charity and the raw material for compassion. (near minute 6).
The Teresa cult is now a missionary multinational with an annual turnover over tens of millions. If concentrated in Calcutta, that would certainly support a large hospital and perhaps even make a noticeable difference. But Mother Teresa has chosen instead to spread her franchise very thinly. To her the convent and the catechism matter more than the clinics. (near minute 28)
This was followed by a book and articles (Hitchens, 1995; 2003). Hitchens was also dismayed that Teresa and the Catholic Church continued to reject birth control – something that would have been fare more effective in reducing the number of abandoned babies that Teresa cared for. Despite Hitchens’ comments, the Catholic Church rapidly advanced Mother Teresa to sainthood: she was beatified in 2003 and canonized in 2016.
Hitchens’ critiques have been supported by others (Larivée et al, 2013; Bandyopadhyay, 2018). Perhaps the most significant defect in her mission in Calcutta was that she did not provide even the rudiments of modern medical care. Compassion is essential to medicine, but dying patients should not be denied the benefit of pharmacological pain relief. Mother Teresa also seemed to represent an obsolete approach to rectifying the ills of poverty. Some adjustment of the world’s inequalities would be of far more benefit than simply treating the poor with compassion. Giving charity to those whom we exploit does not remove the stain of the exploitation.
The following illustration shows saint and critic:
Personal Epilogue
Jones (1960, p 123) quoted from a 1945 interview of T. S. Eliot by J. P. Hogan
When, in an interview, Eliot was asked, ‘How would you, out of the bitter experience of the present time, wish mankind to develop?’ he answered: ‘I should speak of a greater spiritual consciousness, which is not asking that everybody should rise to the same conscious level, but that everybody should have some awareness of the depths of spiritual development and some appreciation and respect for those more exceptional people who can proceed further in spiritual knowledge than most of us can.’
I remember being quite taken by Celia when I first read the play as a young man. I had developed some modicum of spiritual consciousness and feelings similar to those reported by Celia – an awareness of solitude and a sense of sin. I wondered whether I might meet someone like Sir Henry Harcout-Reilly who would show me what I should do with my life. I never saw a production of the play, and I never met anyone that might have been my Guardian. And although when I first read of Celia’s death it seemed noble and right, I now feel it was foolish and mistaken.
References
Bandyopadhyay, R. (2018). Volunteer tourism and religion: the cult of Mother Teresa. Annals of Tourism Research, 70, 133–136.
Camus, A. (1942). Le mythe de Sisyphe. Gallimard. English translation by J. O’Brien (1955). The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Alfred A. Knopf.
Eliot, T. S. (1950). The cocktail party: a comedy. Faber & Faber.
Eliot, T. S. (1951). Poetry and drama. Atlantic Monthly (February 1951).
Hammerschmidt, H. (1981). The role of the “Guardians” in T.S. Eliot’s Cocktail Party. Modern Drama, 24(1), 54–66.
Hitchens, C. (1994). Mother Teresa: Hell’s Angel. Channel 4 Television Program directed by Jenny Morgan, with text by Christoher Hitchens and Tariq Ali.
Hitchens, C. (1995). The missionary position: Mother Teresa in theory and practice. Verso.
Hitchens, C. (2003). Mommie dearest. The pope beatifies Mother Teresa, a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud. Slate Magazine. October 20, 2003.
Larivée, S., Sénéchal, C., & Chénard, G. (2013). Les côtés ténébreux de Mère Teresa. Studies in Religion, 42(3), 319–345.
Lesher, J. H. (2013). The self in conflict with itself: a Heraclitean theme in Eliot’s The Cocktail Party. In Knippschild, S., & García Morcillo, M. (Eds.) Seduction and power: antiquity in the visual and performing arts. (pp 122-132). Bloomsbury Academic.
Llorens-Cubedo, D. (2022). The Cocktail Party and It’s a Wonderful Life. The T.S. Eliot Studies Annual, 4(1), 229–252.
Priestley, J. B. (1947). An inspector calls: a play in three acts. Heinemann.
Ranald, M. L., & Ranald, R. A. (1961). Shelley’s Magus Zoroaster and the image of the Doppelgänger. Modern Language Notes, 76(1), 7–12.
Rexine, J. E. (1965). Classical and Christian foundations of T. S. Eliot’s Cocktail Party. Books Abroad, 39(1), 21–26.
Sartre, J.-P. (1947). Huis clos; suivi de Les mouches. Gallimard.
Sartre, J.-P. (1946). L’existentialisme est un humanisme. Nagel.
Smith, C. H. (1967). T. S. Eliot’s dramatic theory and practice: from Sweeney Agonistes to the Elder Statesman. Princeton University Press.
Wu Wei: Effortless Action
One of the central ideas in the Daodjing of Laozi is the idea of wu wei (無為, simplified 无为; wúwéi). This has been translated in many ways: “non-action,” “actionlessness,” “effortless action,” and “doing nothing.” The 37th chapter of the Daodjing considers wu wei an attribute of the eternal Dao. The 48th chapter promotes wu wei as a human virtue. The illustration shows wu wei in regular script (left) and in cursive (right).
Being True to Oneself
A foundational concept in Daoism is自然, zìrán. This word is composed of 自 (self, oneself, from, since) and 然 (right, correct, so, in this manner). Almost impossible to translate, the word has been variously rendered simply as “self-so” (Ziporyn, 2009) or more abstractly as “as-it-is-ness” (Fu, 1973, p 382). The meaning contains the idea of acting “naturally” or “spontaneously.” An underlying concept is “authenticity” – one’s action should be true to one’s nature.
Laozi uses the word in the ending to Chapter 25 of the Daodejing (with translation by Wu, 2016):
人法地，地法天，天法道，道法自然
Man follows the ways of Earth; Earth follows the ways of Heaven; Heaven follows the ways of Dao; Dao follows its own ways.
Several aspects of zìrán need consideration. First, the Dao acts through all things. As well as ordering the cosmos, the Dao acts through each individual object it contains. Human beings must ultimately follow their own zìrán. Zhuang Zhou, commonly known as Zhuangzi (莊子), a Daoist philosopher from the 4th Century BCE, begins his writings with a description of all the different things in the universe from the mythological great Peng bird to the morning mushroom, and recommends that one must act “on the rectitude (正, zhèng) of Heaven and Earth” (Lynn, 2022, p 8). Guo Xiang (郭象, 265-312 CE) commented on this section of the Zhuangzi
“Heaven and earth” is just a blanket term used to indicate all beings. It is all individual beings that form the very substance of heaven and earth, and it is each being’s self-so [ziran] that aligns true to itself. “Self-so” [ziran] means what is so of itself [ziran], without being done by anyone or for any purpose. Thus, Peng’s ability to fly high and the sparrow’s ability to stay low, the great tree’s ability to last long and the mushroom’s ability to perish quickly, all these are done spontaneously, all are self-so [ziran] (Ziporyn, 2009, p 132.)
Second, the concept of zìrán does not mean that all things passively accept their lot in the universe. Misha Tadd (2019) argues that zìrán has as much to do with “authority” as with “authenticity.” We need to be true to our ideal selves: to seek what we should be rather than accept what we are.
Third, the idea of acting “naturally” means acting in accord with the Dao. However, human beings do not need to return to the simple state of primitive societies to do so (Tadd, 2019, p 4). Although the idea of the “noble savage” was popular when the Daodejing was initially translated into Western languages, Laozi was not being nostalgic for a lost Eden; rather he was imagining a future utopia (Stamatov, 2023).
Yet Nothing is Left Undone
How the Dao “follows its own ways” is described in the 37th chapter of the Daodejing. This is the final chapter in the section of the book that deals with the nature of the Dao
The commonly accepted version of the Daodejing is divided into two parts. The first 37 chapters are concerned with the Dao (way), and the next 44 with the nature of De (virtue). Some recently discovered early versions reverse the ordering of the two parts (Chan, 2025). However, for our purposes it is appropriate to follow the traditional order and to understand the nature of the Dao before we propose a way for human virtue.
The last chapter pf the first part states that the eternal Dao – the principle that governs the universe – exercises its power by means of wu wei. The following is the Chinese text of Chapter 37 together with a translation by Wu (2016) and calligraphy by Ken Wong:
Dao in its eternity does nothing, yet nothing is not done. If lords and kings can all abide by that, all things will change of themselves. As they change, their desires start to grow; I calm them down with the nameless pristine timber. Calmed by the nameless pristine timber, they will have no more desire. Desireless and calm, the world will correct its own course.
The phrase 無名之樸 is usually translated as “nameless simplicity” (e.g., Fischer, 2023). The character 樸 (pǔ), another version of which is 朴, generally means “simple.” However, it once meant “unworked wood” – hence the “nameless pristine timber” of Wu’s translation.
The famous first line is shown below in a character-by-character translation:
The translation of wu wei (無為) is problematic. A simple translation is “doing nothing” but that is not Laozi’s meaning. In Chapter 37 the Dao does nothing and yet somehow everything is done. The following are suggested translations of wu wei: “non-action” (Moeller, 2016), “effortless action” (Slingerland, 2003), “unself-conscious action” (Lynn, 2022, p 3), “non-contrivance” (Fischer, 2023, p 27), and “no purposive action” (Hansard, 2003).
Loy (1985) proposed that wu wei represent “nondual action:” the activity of an individual that has no self (with intentions and goals) but is rather part of a universal self. This can eliminate the problem of free will in a deterministic universe:
whenever “I” act it is not “I” but the whole universe that “does” the action or rather is the action. If we accept that the universe is self-caused, then it acts freely whenever anything is done. Thus, from the nondualist perspective, complete determinism turns out to be equivalent to absolute freedom.
Slingerland (2003, p 7) comments
It is important to realize, however, that wu-wei properly refers not to what is actually happening (or not happening) in the realm of observable action but rather to the state of mind of the actor. That is, it refers not to what is or is not being done but to the phenomenological state of the doer. … It describes a state of personal harmony in which actions flow freely and instantly from one’s spontaneous inclinations—without the need for extended deliberation or inner struggle—and yet nonetheless accord perfectly with the dictates of the situation at hand, display an almost supernatural efficacy, and (in the Confucian context at least) harmonize with the demands of conventional morality.
Fischer (2023, p 27) describes the mental concomitant of wu wei:
It describes the state of acting genuinely, unselfconsciously, or, as we might say, “from the heart,” as opposed to doing something self-consciously, because others expect you to, or because you are coerced.
Decreasing Day by Day
In the 48th chapter of the DaodejingLaozi proposes wu wei as the ideal of human behavior. The following is the Chinese text together with a translation by Wu (2016):
To pursue learning you increase day by day; to pursue Dao you decrease day by day. Decrease and yet again decrease, till you reach the state of Non-doing. Do nothing and yet nothing is not done. The world is often won without busying around; When busying around occurs, the world cannot be won.
The third line repeats the first line of Chapter 37 as an injunction for human behavior. We must follow the same principle as the Dao. Although it is easy to say that the Dao can act according to its own self, how exactly human beings can do so is clear. The chapter states that the world can only be won without 事 (shì, business/work/responsibility).
The Zhuangzi provides several examples of acting in accord with wu wei, the most famous example being butcher Ding. The story is introduced with the comments:
The flow of my life is always channeled by its own boundaries, but the mind bent on knowledge never is. A flow channeled by its own boundaries is endangered when forced to follow something that is not, and trying to rescue it with the doings of the knowing mind only makes the danger worse. (Ziporyn, 2009, p 21).
King Hui of Liang was very impressed with the skill of his butcher Ding who was able to cut up an ox with remarkable speed and agility. When asked how he had become so adept, Ding replied:
What I love is the Course [Dao], something that advances beyond mere skill. When I first started cutting up oxen, all I looked at for three years was oxen, and yet still I was unable to see all there was to see in an ox. But now I encounter it with the spirit rather than scrutinizing it with the eyes. My understanding consciousness, beholden to its specific purposes, comes to a halt, and thus the promptings of the spirit begin to flow. I depend on Heaven’s unwrought perforations and strike the larger gaps, following along with the broader hollows. I go by how they already are, playing them as they lay. So my knife has never had to cut through the knotted nodes where the warp hits the weave, much less the gnarled joints of bone. A good cook changes his blade once a year: he slices. An ordinary cook changes his blade once a month: he hacks. I have been using this same blade for nineteen years, cutting up thousands of oxen, and yet it is still as sharp as the day it came off the whetstone. For the joints have spaces within them, and the very edge of the blade has no thickness at all. When what has no thickness enters into an empty space, it is vast and open, with more than enough room for the play of the blade. That is why my knife is still as sharp as if it had just come off the whetstone, even after nineteen years. (Ziporyn, 2009, p 22).
One might simply understand that through years of study and practice the cook had become so proficient at his that eveything was performed by learned reflex, without any need for consciousness. However, consicuousness still played a role: the cook continued:
Nonetheless, whenever I come to a clustered tangle, realizing that it is difficult to do anything about it, I instead restrain myself as if terrified, until my seeing comes to a complete halt. My activity slows, and the blade moves ever so slightly. Then all at once, I find the ox already dismembered at my feet like clumps of soil scattered on the ground. I retract the blade and stand there gazing at my work arrayed all around me, dawdling over it with satisfaction. Then I wipe off the blade and put it away. (Ziporyn, 2009, p 22)
After long thought and much practice we can become adept at anything. We behave automatically. However, consciousness still plays a role, slowing us down when problems arise, preventing mistakes that occur when one becomes more convinced of one’s skill than warranted.
The Art of Rulership
Laozi considers how leaders can best govern their people in Chapter 17 of the Daodjing. The following is the Chinese text and the translation of Wu (2009):
The best ruler is one whose presence is unknown; the second best is one who is beloved and praised; the next best is one who is feared; the next is one who is despised.
Where there is insufficient good faith, there is loss of faith.
Relax and spare your words. When the goal is achieved and the job is done, everyone says, “We did it.”
Laozi favors the ruler who exercises wu wei, who allows his ministers to exercise their responsibilities, and who lets his people to be true to their own selves: 自然, ziran. Another translation of the final line is: The people all say: “We have done it by ourselves.” (Lin, 1977)
These ideas on government were extensively discussed in the Huainanzi, a collection of writings collected to assist the Prince of Huainan in the 2nd Century BCE (Ames,1981). The following is from one of the essays entitled The Art of Rulership:
Thus, the ruler in possession of the Way extinguishes thought and dispenses with guessing, and waiting in limpidity and vacuity, he uses words that do not boast and takes action that does not rob subordinates of responsibility. He makes demands of fulfilment according to claims made. He lets them get on with their duties without telling them how; he expects them to fulfil their duties without instructing them. He takes not knowing as his Way and being at a loss as to what to do as his treasure. Acting in this way, each of the various officials has his appointed tasks. (Ames, 1981, p 202)
The Concept of Flow
Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi (1934-2021), a Hungarian-American psychologist, became interested in why people can become so completely involved in difficult, time-consuming and sometimes dangerous activities, that they lose all sense of self and time. He described the experience as one of “flow” (Csíkszentmihályi, 1990). Nakamura and Csíkszentmihályi (in Csíkszentmihályi, 2014, p 240) describe the following subjective characteristics of being “in flow:”
Intense and focused concentration on what one is doing in the present moment
Merging of action and awarenessLoss of reflective self-consciousness (i.e., loss of awareness of oneself as a social actor)
A sense that one can control one’s actions; that is, a sense that one can in principle deal with the situation because one knows how to respond to whatever happens next
Distortion of temporal experience (typically, a sense that time has passed faster than normal)
Experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding, such that often the end goal is just an excuse for the process.
Athletes during peak performance, musicians during virtuoso recitals, and scientists formulating a new theory all experience this state of flow. Other terms that have been used to describe it are “in the zone” or “being locked in.” The individual in the flow is fully conscious of what is going on, but there is little if any self-consciousness. The game is being played, the music is being made, the theory is being grasped.
This state can only come after one has become an expert. Only when the actions can occur automatically, can consciousness move to a higher level – directing the strategy of the game rather than making individual movements, conveying the meaning rather than playing the notes, finding the underlying pattern rather than simply recording what is happening.
A person in a state of flow is very similar to a person acting according to the principle of wu wei (De Pryker, 2011). Both are acting effortlessly and without self-consciousness. In both action and awareness are fused. There are differences – flow empowers the individual self, whereas wu wei leads to a decrease in personal desires as one seeks greater union with the universal self. Nevertheless, the two states are far more similar than different.
In recent years, the concepts of wu wei have been used to promote higher achievements in sports (Kee et al. 2021) and to find happiness in normal human behavior through “effortless living” (Gregory, 2018). A major difficulty is in deciding how to attain wu wei. One must become highly skilled and then become so completely involved in something that one loses oneself in the endeavor. One can try to be “mindful,” to live in the present, to eliminate personal desires, but such advice is imprecise.
The Flow of Calligraphy
Chapters 37 and 48 of the Daodejing – the chapters that are crucial to the concept of wu wei are shown below in the calligraphy of the 13th Century Zhao Mengfu in regular script, and of the 14th Century Sheng Mao in clerical script):
The esthetics of Chinese calligraphy depends on the flow from one character to another. The true calligrapher follows the principle of wu wei and writes effortlessly. Chiang Yee (1973, p 117) describes the essential characteristics of Chinese calligraphy:
The beauty of Chinese calligraphy is essentially the beauty of plastic movement, not of designed and motionless shape. A finished piece of it is not a symmetrical arrangement of conventional shapes, but something like the co-ordinated movements of a skilfully composed dance —impulse, momentum, momentary poise, and the interplay of active forces combining to form a balanced whole.
Envoi
We can conclude with some comments of the poet and Trappist monk Thomas Merton in his introduction to his free translations from the Zhuangzi (2004, p 21):
The true character of wu wei is not mere inactivity but perfect action—because it is act without activity. In other words, it is action not carried out independently of Heaven and earth and in conflict with the dynamism of the whole, but in perfect harmony with the whole. It is not mere passivity, but it is action that seems both effortless and spontaneous because performed “rightly,” in perfect accordance with our nature and with our place in the scheme of things. It is completely free because there is in it no force and no violence. It is not “conditioned” or “limited” by our own individual needs and desires, or even by our own theories and ideas.
And an excerpt from his translation (p. 69):
If man, born in Tao, Sinks into the deep shadow Of non-action To forget aggression and concern, He lacks nothing His life is secure.
References
Ames, R. T. (1981) Wu-wei in “The art of rulership” chapter of Huai Nan Tzu: its sources and philosophical orientation. Philosophy East and West, 31(2), 193-213
Chan, A. K. L. (2025). Laozi. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Chiang, Y. (1973). Chinese calligraphy: an introduction to its aesthetic and technique (3rd ed.). Harvard University Press.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: the psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2014). Flow and the foundations of positive psychology. Springer Netherlands.
De Prycker, V. (2011). Unself-conscious control: broadening the notion of control through experiences of flow and wu-wei. Zygon, 46(1), 5–25.
Fischer, P. (2023). The annotated Laozi: a new translation of the Daodejing. State University of New York at Albany.
Fu, C. W.-H. (1973). Lao Tzu’s conception of Tao. Inquiry (Oslo), 16(1–4), 367–394.
Gregory, J. (2018). Effortless living: wu-wei and the spontaneous state of natural harmony. Inner Traditions.
Hansen (2003). Wuwei: taking no action. In Cua, A. S. (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Chinese philosophy. (pp 784-786). Routledge.
Kee, Y. H., Li, C., Zhang, C.-Q., & Wang, J. C. K. (2021). The wu-wei alternative: Effortless action and non-striving in the context of mindfulness practice and performance in sport. Asian Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 1(2–3), 122–132.
Liu, X. (2015). Laozi’s philosophy: textual and conceptual analyses. In X. Liu (Ed.), Dao Companion to Daoist Philosophy (pp. 71–100). Springer Netherlands.
Loy, D. (1985). Wei-Wu-Wei: nondual action. Philosophy East & West, 35(1), 73–86.
Lynn, R. J. (2022). Zhuangzi: a new translation of the sayings of Master Zhuang as interpreted Columbia University Press.
Merton, T. (2004). The way of Chuang Tzu. Shambhala.
Moeller, H. G. (2015). Basic aspects of daoist philosophy. International Communication of Chinese Culture, 2 (2), 99–107.
Slingerland, E. G. (2003). Effortless action: Wu-wei as conceptual metaphor and spiritual ideal in early China. Oxford University Press.
Wu, C. Q. (2016). Thus spoke Laozi: a new translation with commentaries of Daodejing. University of Hawaii.
Ziporyn, B. (2009). Zhuangzi: the essential writings with selections from traditional commentaries. Hackett
Laurence Cossé: Le Coin du Voile
Laurence Cossé’s 1996 novel Le coin du voile (A corner of the veil) describes the effects of a new and irrefutable proof for the existence of God. A priest who had resigned his calling to spend months in prayer and abstinence submits the proof for publication in Outlooks, the lay journal of the French Casuists. All those who read it are completely convinced. On seeing its effects, the Provincial of the Casuists decides to keep the proof secret until its effects can be more clearly understood. Finally, the Secretary of State at the Vatican arranges for all those who had read the proof to retire from any contact with the public and for the proof to be kept hidden. The proof becomes a pontifical secret – “a piece of information the Holy Father must not learn under any circumstance.”
The novel, published by Gallimard in 1996, received generally positive reviews, and won several French literary prizes. Readers were charmed by the story but had some difficulty deciding on its basic nature: was it a philosophical fable, a religious thriller, a gentle satire, or an outright farce? The book touches lightly on serious matters: Burns. (1999) called it “casually profound” and Dumort (1997) considered it an “un opéra-bouffe sans la musique.” Cobb (2005, p 156) complimented the author for her “insightful reflections on the moral springs that move real human beings.” Some critics would have preferred more depth (Eder, 1999; McInerny, 1999), but this seems akin to wishing that Voltaire wrote like Diderot.
The book has been translated into English (A Corner of the Veil), German (Der Beweis, The Proof), Italian (La sesta prova, The Sixth Proof; La prova nascosta, The hidden proof) and Spanish (La punta del velo). The following illustration shows some of the covers. The French paperbacks use details from paintings by Paul Gauguin (Self Portrait with the Yellow Christ, 1891) and Michelangelo (Separation of the Earth from the Waters, Sistine Chapel, 1512). The cover of the English translation shows the ceiling of a gothic cathedral (Exeter) with a corner being pulled back to reveal the radiance of heaven.
The Casuists
The Novel begins one evening with Father Bertrand Beaulieu, editor of the Casuist journal Regards (translated as Outlooks by Linda Asher), going through his correspondence. The Casuists are clearly the Jesuits, and the journal is clearly the publication Études, established in 1856 by the French Jesuits.
The Society of Jesus was founded in Paris in 1534 by the Spanish nobleman Ignatius of Loyola and six fellow students at the University of Paris. The largest of the Catholic religious orders, it is widely involved in education, missionary work, and humanitarian activities.
Soon after the order was established, the Council of Trent (1545-1563) revised the Catholic Church’s position on the Sacrament of Penance and the process of confession. Sinners were no longer able to purchase indulgences to escape the consequences of their sins. Instead, priests listened to sinners’ confessions, assessed their remorse, provided absolution, and outlined appropriate acts of penance to make amends. This led to a need for more sophisticated moral reasoning, since many human acts cannot easily be judged according to the commandments available in the scriptures. Several Jesuits contributed extensively to the new moral philosophy, most especially Antonio Escobar y Mendoza (1589–1669) who treatise Summula casuum conscientiae (1627) outlined how moral judgments could be made on a case-by-case basis by applying knowledge of the law, ethics, and scripture. This approach came to be known as casuistry, and the Summula became the confessor’s handbook.
Unfortunately, some of the casuist proposals, most particularly concerning the differentiation between intentions and acts, could easily lead to moral laxity. Sinners could be excused for the bad consequences of their acts because their intentions had been good. Escobar was a strict adherent to the Jesuit rules of poverty, chastity and obedience, but sinners found it easy to abuse his moral reasoning. Thus it was said that Escobar “purchased heaven dearly for himself, but gave it away cheap to others.” Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) took Escobar to task in his Lettres Provinciales. For example, he pointed out that the casuist could reason that although it is wrong to kill someone because of hatred, one could do so blamelessly if one professed fear for one’s own safety. Escobar’s logic was no match for Pascal’s wit. “Casuistry” soon came to mean the use of clever but unsound reasoning to excuse moral culpability; indeed, “Jesuitical” took on the same connotation The following illustration shows Escobar on the left and Pascal on the right:
Nowadays, however, casuistry has returned to favor as a way to approach complex moral decisions (Jonson, 2005).
Six Pages in a Brown Envelope
In his pile of correspondence, Father Beaulieu recognizes the crazy writing on a cheap brown envelope. The sender had written to him multiple times before, each time with a different proof for the existence of God, each time failing to convince anyone. Beaulieu puts the envelope at the bottom of the pile, but later that evening finally opens it, and dutifully reads the contents:
Dix heures vingt-cinq. Enfin. Il ne restait plus que la lettre brune. Beaulieu l’ouvrit, exaspéré d’avance. Mon Dieu, le nombre de cinglés que Vous mettez au monde. L’écriture était effrayante, une espèce de broderie ne laissant pas la moindre marge à droite ni à gauche, pas plus qu’en haut ni en bas. Il n’y avait que six feuillets, ce soir, moins que les autres fois. Beaulieu prit un carré de chocolat dans le tiroir de son bureau et commença à lire. Six pages plus loin, il tremblait. Cette fois la preuve n’était ni arithmétique, ni physique, ni esthétique, ni astronomique, elle était irréfutable. La preuve de l’existence de Dieu était faite.
[Ten twenty-five. Finally. Only the brown letter left to go. Beaulieu opened it, already exasperated. Dear God, the number of madmen You put into the world. The handwriting was dreadful, a kind of embroidery that left no margin right or left, top or bottom. There were only six sheets tonight, fewer than the other times. Beaulieu took a square of chocolate from the desk drawer and started reading. Six pages farther, he was trembling. This time the proof was neither arithmetical, nor physical, nor esthetical, nor astronomical; it was irrefutable. The proof of God’s existence had been achieved. (p 15)]
Beaulieu is overwhelmed. He prostrates himself on the floor as he did on the day of his ordination. After an hour he rises and visits his friend Hervé Montgaroult, a Jesuit professor whose specialty is cataphatic ontology. “Cataphatic” (from Greek cata an intensifier and phanai speak) deals with the affirmative description of the divine (e.g., God is love) as opposed to “anaphatic” (apo other) which uses negative descriptions (e.g., God is unknowable).
Proof for the Existence of God
When Beaulieu presents the professor with the proof, Montgaroult protests that “No proof of the existence of God has ever held up,” and begins to review all the historical proofs. Beaulieu finally stops him, and leaves his with the six handwritten pages, insisting that he just read.
The most famous of the historical proofs for the existence of God are the Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), an Italian Dominican who taught at the University of Paris (Pasnau, 2024). These five proofs are included in both his Summa Theologica and in his Summa contra Gentiles.
Aquinas’ first proof, which argues for God as the “prime mover,” derives from Aristotle. Things are in motion; whatever is in motion must have been put into motion by something else, which itself must have been moved by something else, and so on. Since this chain of events cannot go on forever, there must be a prime mover that can move things without being moved. This must be God.
Aquinas therefore contradicted the claims of Ibn Rushd (1126-1198, also known as Averroes), a Muslim commentator on Aristotle, who argued that the chain of events does go on forever, and that God created a world that is eternal (Ben Ahmed & Pasnau, 2025; Dales, 1990, p 45). In 1484 painting by Benozzo Gozzoli, The Triumph of Thomas Aquinas, now in the Louvre, celebrates Aquinas’ victory over Averroes:
The painting derives its iconography from an earlier work probably painted in about 1330 by Lippo Memmi (Polzer, 1993) to celebrate the canonization of Thomas Aquinas in 1323.
The upper section of the painting shows God blessing those that have revealed the truth: the Apostle Paul with the sword, Moses with the tablets and the four Evangelists who wrote the gospels, each with their symbolic creature (angel, lion, ox, eagle). Gods states:
Bene scripsisti de me, Thomma [You have written well about me, Thomas].
In the center of the painting Thomas Aquinas, flanked by Aristotle and Plato, holds his Summa contra Gentile, which begins with an epigraph from Proverbs 8:7:
Veritatem meditabitur guttur meum et labia mea de testabuntur impium. [For my mouth shall speak truth; and wickedness is an abomination to my lips]
The first words of the Summa are
Multitudinis usus, quem in rebus nominandis sequendum philosophus censet, com muniter” obtinuit, ut sapientes dicantur qui res directe ordinant et eas bene gubernant [The usage of the multitude, which, according to the Philosopher (Aristotle) is to be followed in giving names to things, has commonly held that they are to be called wise who order things rightly and govern them well.]
The books below the central book show quotations from the Summa Theologica (see Polzer, 1993, p 43, for details).
Below Aquinas lies the vanquished Averroes. His book states:
Et faciens causas infinitas in primum librum Aristotelis physicorum [And making infinite causes in the first book of Aristotle’s Physics]
Below him is written
Vere hic est lumen ecclesie [Truly this is the light of the church]
And below this, Pope Pius II and his clergy teach the revelations of Aquinas to the assembled believers.
Aquinas is right and Averroes is wrong. Not because of logic, but because Aquinas’ conclusions fit with the teachings of the Church.
The other four proofs of Aquinas are:
Causality: God is the first cause that prevents an infinite chain of cause and effect.
Contingency: God is the necessary being from which all other derive
Degree: God is the criterion by which one can determine what is good, beautiful and true.
Teleology: God is the ultimate end to which the universe is progressing.
Another famous proof for God, which Aquinas disputed, is the Ontological Proof of Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109). Since everyone can conceive of a being than which no greater can be thought, such a being must exist since existence is necessary to greatness.
Many other logical proofs for the existence of God have been proposed (Restivo, 2021, pp. 99-112). In a recent novel, Rebecca Goldstein (2010) considered 36 different arguments for the existence of God.
However, it is doubtful that anyone has ever been convinced to believe in God because of logical argument. Rather such proofs are a put together subsequent to belief:
A proof of God’s existence ought really to be something by means of which one could convince oneself that God exists. But I think that what believers who have furnished such proofs have wanted to do is give their “belief” an intellectual analysis and foundation, although they themselves would never have come to believe as a result of such proofs. (Wittgenstein, 1980, 85e)
Nevertheless, after Beaulieu leaves, the skeptical Montgaroult reads the six pages, and is instantly convinced. He spends the night wandering around the streets of Paris in a mystical daze. He is particularly happy about how the new proof solves the age-old problem of evil.
God was no longer mysterious. Evil was no longer a mystery. God was no longer either heart-breaking or heartbroken, and the question that for centuries had woken men in the night would no longer arise, the hideous question of whether He had or had not a role in evil. (p 29)
Religious Qualms
The next morning, Beaulieu and Montgaroult meet with Hubert Le Dangeolet, the Provincial of the Casuists in France. He is skeptical. His first impression is that his two visitors have lost their minds. He decides not to read the proof, and locks it up in his safe. He arranges for two other Casuists, internationally known theological experts, one from Belgium and one from Switzerland, to come to Paris the next day to assess the proof.
Beaulieu visits Martin Mauduit, the author of the proof. The name “Mauduit” is not far removed from maudit (cursed or damned). Once a priest, Martin had resigned his vocation because he felt that he could discover a new understanding of God through thought. He realized that his first attempts at new proofs for the existence of God, which he had submitted to the journal Outlooks, were abject failures. But then, after weeks of prayer and abstinence, he had woken one morning to find on his floor a six-page proof that he had no memory of writing. The proof had not been reasoned out; it had simply been revealed.
Mauduit is described as
A small man in his sixties, frail and bald. His smile and his eyes, the assurance and joy in these features alone, recalled someone—Bertrand remembered whom almost instantly: Bishop Gaillot. The churchman about whom every French person, even his warmest supporters, had wondered in 1995 whether he was Saint Francis of Assisi or Narcissus. (pp 60-61)
Bishop Jacques Gaillot (1935-2023) was Bishop of Évreux from 1982 to 1995, at which time he was removed from his position by Pope John Paul II because of his unorthodox and outspoken positions on abortion, immigration, homosexuality, and Palestine. He came to be known as the ‘Red Cleric.’
The next day, the two experts come to Paris, read the proof, are completely convinced, and weep tears of joy. Le Dangeolet realizes that the proof is real but still remains cautious.
I’ve got to keep a cool head and a free mind. The people who have read the proof are immediately possessed by it. They no longer have the slightest objectivity. I’ve seen four of our colleagues topple over, one after the other. We can’t have our whole Casuist province in France slipping into a way of life that is positively Franciscan, and the ecstatic branch at that. (p 112)
He contacts Waldemar Waldenhag, the Father General of the Jesuit Order.
Political Upheavals
Secrets are hard to keep. Before long the government becomes aware that the Casuists possess a new proof for the existence of God. The Prime Minister of France, Jean-Charles Petitgrand, pays a clandestine visit to Le Dangeolet. He is shown the proof. He does not read it, but is completely convinced of its veracity simply by being in its presence. He decides to change his life. He retires from politics:
For the ten or fifteen years he had left to live, he would praise the Eternal One, simply, through love for his roses, for his wife, and for his fellow man. (p 107)
He issues a press release describing his resignation as due to “a sudden irruption of meaning into my life” (p 261). An advisor summarizes for the cabinet ministers what the future might hold:
Within six months, within a year, we have to imagine France as one huge monastery. Everything that today is the motivating force of the advanced liberal societies—the spirit of enterprise, the quest for wealth, the concern for efficiency, the work ethic . . . briefly, what others might call the every-man-for-himself, the activism, the copycat greed, money as guiding light—at the announcement of the proof that God exists, all of that will no longer seem important to our fellow citizens. God becomes a certainty in our midst. How do we react? We spend all our time on Him. We just about cease to work. We earn much less money, but what does it matter? We no longer yearn to change apartments, go off on vacation, send our children to American business schools. We no longer chase after money. If we do work, it’s just enough for what we need to eat and be clothed, to have a roof over our heads. Most of our time we spend meditating, praying. We study Scripture. We succor the poor, we comfort the lonely. We gaze on nature. We feel we’re opening our eyes for the first time. We breathe. (pp 146-147)
The ministers are aghast; the reader is amused. However, this description of a society concerned only with God is not an exaggeration. It must give us pause. Whatever our religious beliefs, do we really wish to put an end to human striving?
Other problems are also considered. The proof was given to the Christians, and apparently the God whose existence is now verified is the Christian God. What will those who profess belief in other Gods think of this?
The politicians confer with Le Dangeolet. A decision is made to keep the new proof secret until the Church and the State can assess its possible effects.
A Visit to Rome
Le Dangeolet, Mauduit, and the four casuists who have read the proof travel to Rome to meet with Father General Waldemar Waldenhag. He is cautious about the proof.
Doubt about the existence of God was the only formula viable for mankind. People who wanted to believe could believe; those who preferred not to didn’t have to. No greater certainty for the one than for the other. A mutual respect—except for the periods of certainty. Certainty, on whichever side, breeds fanaticism. That’s not all it breeds, but it never fails to breed that. Look at the Crusaders, the Inquisitors, as well as the atheist revolutionaries: all of them slashed and burned and guillotined, completely confident they were doing the right thing. In the end, doubt is the only counterweight to human madness. It’s reason, that’s what doubt is. (pp 232-233)
Nevertheless, Waldenhag ultimately decides to read the six pages. He really wishes to know if the proof might solve the age-old problem of evil. How does a priest explain to someone subject to undeserved suffering how an omnipotent and benevolent God has allowed this to happen?
I want to know why, how, and in the name of what superior plan the good and all-powerful God of the Gospel lets nations tear each other’s guts out, lets the earth crack open in the middle of cities, and lets children die of hunger. I’ve ‘explained’ it a thousand times, using those enormously sophisticated arguments inherited from Thomism that you know as well as I do, and I’ve done it with such assurance that I must have convinced people sometimes. But for me, the mystery of evil sticks in my craw. (p 237)
And after reading the pages he is as convinced as the others. The problem of evil in the universe appears to be explained
The Problem of Evil
When we consider the arguments for and against the existence of God, the problem of evil (and the suffering that it causes) is generally the atheist’s most effective argument (Mackie, 1982; van Inwagen, 2006; Speak, 2014; Perrine, 2025). If God is omniscient, he cannot be unaware of our suffering; if He is omnipotent, he must be able to intervene in the world; if He is omnibenevolent, he should act to prevent our suffering. If we accept these characteristics of God, the very fact that there is suffering in our world is incompatible with His existence. If he truly were omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent, there would be no suffering.
In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), David Hume described the problem of evil by referring back to ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BCE)
Epicurus’s old questions are yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil? (Hume, 1779, part X)
Over the years theists have proposed many different arguments for the existence of evil. These justifications (or exonerations) of God go by the name of “theodicies.” None of these are convincing (Picton, 2013, pp 361-364). Ultimately, one is left with the idea that God operates at levels beyond human comprehension. We are not able to see the grand scheme of things. Nevertheless, He has assured us through scripture that he knows what is best, and that he will take care of us.
Panentheism
The next morning Waldenhag tells Le Dangeolet some snippets of what was in the six pages proving the existence of God. This is the only time in the book that the reader is given any idea of what is in the proof:
With the world God created totality of being.
Everything that is has no other meaning but being.
Through the Creation, God explores in Himself the free play of being, of all being: good, evil, sense and nonsense, splendor and horror mixed.
What is, is nothing else but God in the process of being.
We are grounded in God, each person for what he is.
These principles are closely related to the process theology of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) and to the panentheism of Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000) and Arthur Peacocke (1924-2006) – illustrated from left to right in the following figure.
The main idea of process theology is that God is the universe becoming itself. This occurs through an outpouring of God’s love and goodness into the world. Since the process is intelligible rather than mysterious, science becomes the study of God in all his manifestations. Process theology also provides a way of reconciling the existence of God with the presence of suffering in the world. God and the universe are in the process of becoming. Evil and suffering are present to the extent that this process is as yet incomplete. The following quotation is from Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929, p 532):
There are thus four creative phases in which the universe accomplishes its actuality. There is first the phase of conceptual origination, deficient in actuality, but infinite in its adjustment of valuation. Secondly, there is the temporal phase of physical origination, with its multiplicity of actualities. In this phase full actuality is attained; but there is deficiency in the solidarity of individuals with each other. This phase derives its determinate conditions from the first phase. Thirdly, there is the phase of perfected actuality, in which the many are one everlastingly, without the qualification of any loss either of individual identity or of completeness of unity. In everlastingness, immediacy is reconciled with objective immortality. This phase derives the conditions of its being from the two antecedent phases. In the fourth phase, the creative action completes itself. For the perfected actuality passes back into the temporal world, and qualifies this world so that each temporal actuality includes it as an immediate fact of relevant experience. For the kingdom of heaven is with us today. The action of the fourth phase is the love of God for the world. It is the particular providence for particular occasions. What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world. By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world. In this sense, God is the great companion — the fellow-sufferer who understands.
Panentheism is a type of pantheism wherein God exists both within and beyond the world (Clayton & Peacocke, 2004, Attfield, 2019; Culp, 2023). Evil exists but only to the extent that the universe is as yet incompletely actualized. Burns (2019) proposes that God exists in two ways – one as the force that causes the actualization of the universe (“God the World”) and the second as the force that maximizes the good in the world (“God the Good”). This approach provides some purpose to the world and to human striving. Everything moves towards the good. Without this aspect process theology can become heartless. To return to Hume we might have a very pessimistic view of our world:
Look round this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organised, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind Nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children! (Hume, 1979, part XI)
The Biblical text justifying process theology and panentheism comes from Paul’s sermon on the Hill of Mars in Athens
God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands;
Neither is worshipped with men’s hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things;
And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation;
That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us:
For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said. (Acts 17:24-28)
In A Corner of the Veil, Waldenhag interprets what he has read in terms of the God the Father and God the Son
The Father accepts everything, since He is the source of everything. But He suffers everything. There is no distance between the suffering of man and the suffering of God. And the Father risks everything in His creation. Because it is totality, creation carries within itself the germs of its own destruction. The Father is at stake there. The Son saves not only mankind, but in some way He also saves the Father. He justifies the Father’s creation. (pp 254-255)
Although convinced by the proof, he still has concerns
Man informed of the proof will finally be free, his consciousness much elevated and his actions disinterested. On the other hand, knowing that God is in everything carries the risk of legitimizing any and all behavior. . . . the brute may be confirmed in his brutality, the sadistic husband confirmed in his sadism, and so on. Amorality could take hold of mankind. (p 255)
This concern might perhaps be alleviated if we agree with Burns’ concept that God is both the world becoming itself and the world becoming good.
Epilogue
At the end of the book, the Casuists present the proof to the Secretary of State for the Vatican. The final decision is not the publish the proof. All those who have read the proof will be enjoined not to repeat it to anyone. The marvelous new proof will become a pontifical secret:
Qu’est-ce qu’un secret pontifical? — C’est une information que le Saint-Père ne doit connaître sous aucun prétexte.
[What is a pontifical secret? A piece of information the Holy Father must not learn under any circumstances. (p 269)]
Ben Ahmed, F. & Pasnau, R. (2025). Ibn Rushd [Averroes].The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Burns, E. (1999). Apocalypse now. New York Times Book Reviews. August 1, 1999
Burns, E. D. (2019). How to prove the existence of God: an argument for conjoined panentheism. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 85(1), 5–21.
Clayton, P., & Peacocke, A. R. (Eds). (2004). In whom we live and move and have our being: Panentheistic reflections on God’s presence in a scientific world. William B. Eerdmans.
Cobb, K. (2005). The Blackwell guide to theology and popular culture. Blackwell
Cossé, L. (1996). Le coin du voile. Gallimard.
Cossé, L. (translated by Asher, L., 1999). A corner of the veil. Scribner.
Culp, J. (2023). Panentheism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Dales, R. C. (1990). Medieval discussions of the eternity of the world. E.J. Brill.
Dumort, J. (1997), Le coin du voile. La Jaune et la Rouge. No 523.
Jonsen, A. R. (2005). Practical reasoning and moral casuistry. In Schweiker, W. (Ed.) The Blackwell companion to religious ethics. (pp 53-60). Blackwell.
Mackie, J. L. (1982). The miracle of theism: arguments for and against the existence of God. Clarendon Press.
Picton, T. W. (2013). Creature and Creator: intersections between science and religion. Picton.
Polzer, J. (1993). The “Triumph of Thomas” panel in Santa Caterina, Pisa. Meaning and date. Mitteilungen Des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 37(1), 29–70.
Restivo, S. P. (2021). Society and the death of God. Routledge.
Speak, D. (2014). The problem of evil. Polity Press.
Van Inwagen, P. (2006). The problem of evil. Oxford University Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (translated by P. Wench & edited by Wright, G. H. von, 1980). Culture and value. University of Chicago Press.
W. H. Auden: September 1, 1939
Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) and Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) arrived in the United States of America on January 26, 1939. The ostensible reason for their visit was to write a book on the United States, to be published by the Hogarth Press with the title Address Not Known. The two writers had just completed a book on China, Journey to a War, which was to come out in March. However, other reasons played a larger role in their decision to emigrate. Both writers were tired of the hypocrisy, complacency and insularity of British literary life. Auden claimed, “An artist ought either to live where he has live roots or where he has no roots at all.” (Davenport-Hines, 1995, p 180). In New York City they took lodging in the George Washington Hotel at Lexington and 23rd St., had their photographs taken by Carl van Vechten, visited with Thomas Mann and his family in Princeton, wrote reviews for American magazines, and gave readings of their work. At one of these readings in April, Auden met the 18-year-old Chester Kallman (1921-1975), and fell deeply in love. The two were to remain together for the rest of Auden’s life. In June, Auden and Kallman departed on a two-month trip by Greyhound Bus across the United States, that served as their honeymoon. They visited New Orleans, stayed for a while with Frieda Lawrence in Taos, and ended up in Laguna Beach in California. On August 28, 1939, they arrived back in Manhattan.
The Beginning of World War II
In the early morning hours of September 1, 1939, Hitler’s German troops invaded Poland. One week earlier, Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had agreed on a mutual non-aggression treaty – the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. These negotiations had also included a secret agreement to divide up Poland between the two powers, and to allow the USSR to invade Finland and the Baltic countries.
The Munich Agreement of September, 1938, had allowed the German annexation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. In March, 1939, a fascist Slovak State was proclaimed and Germany took over the remaining areas of what had once been Czechoslovakia. Alarmed by Hitler’s complete disregard of the Munich agreements, the United Kingdom agreed to an Anglo-Polish Alliance which would assure mutual assistance in the event of German aggression. On September 3, 1939, Britain therefore gave Germany an ultimatum requiring them to withdraw their troops from Poland. The deadline passed, and later that day Neville Chamberlain declared the United Kingdom at war with Germany. Undeterred, Germany continued its invasion. The photograph shows Hitler reviewing German troops as they crossed the border into Poland.
Auden’s Poem
The beginning of the war was for Auden the culmination of a decade of increasing despair. He expressed his thoughts in a remarkable and controversial poem entitled September 1, 1939. This was first published in The New Republic in October, 1939, and then in the book Another Time in 1940.
The poem consists of 9 stanzas, each 11 lines long. There are three stresses per line, with no dominant rhythm. The rhyme scheme is variable both in terms of the lines that rhyme and the type of rhyme: slant rhymes, assonance, and alliteration are as common as perfect rhymes, and internal rhymes as frequent as end-rhymes. Each stanza is composed of one sentence. The poem is similar in many ways to Yeats’ poem about the Easter uprising in Dublin, Easter, 1916, with its ringing call to rebellion:
All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.
Both poems deal with a poet’s personal response to a world-changing event. Both poems are driven by a pulsating trimeter rhythm, and adorned with multiple and various rhymes.
After September 1, 1939 was published, Auden had second thoughts, particularly about the line that ends the penultimate stanza. In his preface to Bloomfield’s 1964 bibliography of his works he stated
A critic is entitled, of course, to prefer an earlier version to a later, but some seem to think that an author has no right to revise his work. Such an attitude seems to me mad. Most poets, I think, will agree with Valéry’s dictum: “A poem is never finished, only abandoned”. To which I would add: “Yes, but it must not be abandoned too soon”. In some cases, too, one finds that tinkering is no good and the whole poem must go. Rereading a poem of mine, 1st September, l939, after it had been published, I came to the line
We must love one another or die
and said to myself: “That’s a damned lie! We must die anyway”. So, in the nest edition, I altered it to
We must love one mother and die.
This didn’t seem to do either, so I cut the stanza. Still no good. The whole poem, I realised, was infected with an incurable dishonesty and must be scrapped.
Although the poem was omitted from Auden’s Collected Poems (1976), it continues to be read and studied (Brodsky, 1986; Hecht, 1993, pp 152-170; Fuller, 1998, pp 290-293; Mendelson, 1999, pp 73-77; Sansom, 2019). It may not be perfect but it says much that is important and, for the most part, says it very well. This essay reviews various aspects of the poem, and provides a recitation of each stanza by Tom O’Bedlam.
Fifty-Second Street
I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-Second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night.
The opening of the poem may have its roots in the beginning of a 1930 poem by Ogden Nash, Spring Comes to Murray Hill, which Auden had recently read. Murray Hill is a neighborhood in midtown Manhattan.
I sit in an office at 244 Madison Avenue And say to myself you have a responsible job havenue? Why then do you fritter away your time on this doggerel? If you have a sore throat you can cure it by using a good goggeral, If you have a sore foot you can get it fixed by a chiropodist, And you can get your original sin removed by St. John the Bopodist,
However, Nash’s blithe insouciance had transformed in Auden’s poem to a keen anxiety. For which there are no cures. And spring had long passed. Now came the fall.
In the 1930s, Fifty-Second Street between 5th and 6th Avenues in Manhattan became a center for jazz. During prohibition, the five-story brownstone buildings had provided spaces in their narrow ground floors for speakeasies. With the repeal of prohibition, these developed into bars and jazz clubs. The spaces were long, narrow, dark and windowless. They typically placed a mirrored bar on one wall and tables or booths on the other. At the far end was a tiny stage upon which small groups of musicians could play. This fostered a new jazz sound, more intimate than that of the big bands. Some famous musicians performing on the street were Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davies. The following is a night photograph of the clubs on 52nd Street:
On September 1, 1939, Auden went alone to the Dizzy Club on 52nd Street. Chester Kallman and his friend Harold Norse had discovered this gay bar a few nights before and recommended it. Auden went there alone, searching for solace in the company of strangers. Norse (1989) recalled
The dive was the sex addict’s quick fix, packed to the rafters with college buys and working-class youths under twenty-five. From street level you stepped into a writhing mass of tight boys in tighter pants … With floppy shoelaces, creased suit and tie, ash-stained, he must have looked out of place, though with his rosy California tan and sun-bleached hair he could, in the right light, pass for twenty-five. He didn’t go to pick up a boy; however, aware of the age difference and shy. he would have selected one of the two unused corner tables at the rear of the bar, which was usually deserted except for those too drunk to stand, from which he could observe boys kissing and groping under the bright lights, packed like sardines pickled in alcohol. (pp 78-79)
The “low dishonest decade” of the 1930s had been ushered in by the Wall Street Crash in October, 1929. Unemployment and despair soon spread across the world. Liberal hopes for a better world fell by the wayside. Autocratic companies used foreign wars to mobilize their people. In 1932, Japan invaded Manchuria. In 1933, Adolph Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany. In 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia. In 1936, the Nationalist military forces rebelled against the Republican government of Spain precipitating the bloody Spanish Civil War, which ended with the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco in 1939. While the fascist governments of Italy and Germany provided assistance to the Nationalist and the communist government of the USSR supported the Republicans, the liberal democracies of Western Europe decided not to intervene. In 1937, Japan invaded China. In March, 1938, Germany annexed Austria. In September, 1938, the Munich Agreement allowed Germany to take control of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia in return for future restraint. According to Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, this brought “Peace for our time.” However, Hitler paid no attention to the agreement, and went ahead with the occupation of the western half of Czechoslovakia in March 1939.
In some notes made during in his early months in New York City but only published much later, Auden remarked on the failure of all the “clever hopes” for peace and justice
If one reviews the political activity of the world’s intellectuals during the past eight years, if one counts up all the letters to the papers which they have signed, all the platforms on which they have spoken, all the congresses which they have attended, one is compelled to admit that their combined effect, apart from the money they have helped to raise for humanitarian purposes (and one must not belittle the value of that) has been nil. As far as the course of political events is concerned they might just as well have done nothing. (Auden, 1993, p 20)
Radio “waves” from all parts of the world, both where it was “darkened” night and where it was “bright” day, brought news of broken treaties and warnings of impending war. Listeners found it hard to hear and even harder to talk about it. One sensed an “unmentionable odour of death.”
Those to Whom Evil Is Done
Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.
What was it that had “driven a culture mad”? Auden sometimes longed for the simplicity of life in the Middle Ages. He believed that Luther had changed all this by insisting on an individual rather than communal approach to God, and by dissociating salvation from good works. Perhaps the madness of the modern age was its selfishness: its complete lack of fellow feeling. In his later preface to the first volume of Poets of the English Language (1950), Auden wrote
Luther denied any intelligible relation between Faith and Works, Machiavelli any intelligible relation between private and public morality, and Descartes any intelligible relation between Mauer and Mind. Allegory became impossible as a literary form, and the human Amor seemed no longer a parable of the Divine Love but its blasphemous parody.
There has been no time since its own when the literature of the Middle Ages could appeal to readers as greatly as it can today, when the dualism inaugurated by Luther, Machiavelli, and Descartes has brought as to the end of our tether and we know that either we must discover a unity which can repair the fissures that separate the individual from society, feeling from intellect, and conscience from both, or we shall surely die by spiritual despair and physical annihilation.
Auden had spent 10 months in Berlin in 1928-29 and had visited Germany multiple times during the 1930s. He loved the sexual and intellectual freedom of Weimar Germany. But this came crashing down with the rise of Hitler, who became Chancellor in 1933 and anointed himself Führer a year later. No one can really tell how Hitler came to be the embodiment of evil. Jungian psychoanalysis proposed that we internalize our early social experiences as “imagos” (later known as archetypes) which later drive our behavior. Hitler’s father was domineering and violent, and Hitler’s schooling in Linz was punitive and severe. Both may have contributed to the subconscious “psychopathic god” that drove the Führer.
The final couplet of the stanza presents the obverse of the moral law. We should love our neighbors as ourselves. For if we do them evil, they will repay us. Human history has passed through multiple cycles of evils done and revenges taken. The punitive reparations demanded of Germany after the end of World War I were a contributing factor to the onset of World War II.
What Dictators Do
Exiled Thucydides knew All that a speech can say About Democracy, And what dictators do, The elderly rubbish they talk To an apathetic grave; Analysed all in his book, The enlightenment driven away, The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again.
Thucydides (460-400 BCE) was an Athenian general. After losing a battle with the Spartans in 424 BCE, he was exiled from Athens. He then travelled through various regions of Greece, and wrote an account of the ongoing Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE). This History of the Peloponnesian War, which covered events up to 411 BCE, includes a famous speech given by the Athenian leader in memory of those that died in defence of the state: Pericles’ Funeral Oration, which among other things considers the process of democracy:
We have a form of government, not fetched by imitation from the laws of our neighbouring states; (nay, we are rather a pattern to others, than they to us); which, because in the administration it hath respect not to a few, but to the multitude, is called a democracy. Wherein, though there be an equality amongst all men in point of law for their private controversies; yet in conferring of dignities one man is preferred before another to public charge, and that according to the reputation, not of his house, but of his virtue; and is not put back through poverty for the obscurity of his person, as long as he can do good service to the commonwealth. (translated by Thomas Hobbes in 1628)
The speech was not as clear as it might have been. Auden considered most of it “elderly rubbish” spoken at the “apathetic grave” of the soldiers that had died. However, it does point out that democracy requires that certain men become leaders, and that these leaders then enact laws and arrange to have them enforced. The main problem with democracy is that some leaders come to power because of popularity rather than wisdom, because of propaganda rather than policy. People vote for their leaders as much on the basis of emotion as on reason. Pericles was a charismatic leader. He had encouraged Athenian imperialism, which denied freedom to all but the ruling state, and which ultimately led to war with Sparta. Democracy comes a cropper if the wrong leader is selected. We need to be “managed” but sometime we choose the wrong manager. Once Hitler was elected, he declared himself dictator.
Blind Skyscrapers
Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse: But who can live for long In an euphoric dream; Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism’s face And the international wrong.
The skyline of New York in the 1930s was filled with new skyscrapers. These magnificent buildings demonstrated the tremendous power of capitalism. No one had made buildings as tall as these since the Tower of Babel. Yet the Great Depression showed that raw capitalism was doomed to fail. For a few years after the Wall Street Crash, the skyscrapers that had been conceived and financed before the crash were completed. After 1935 no new skyscrapers were built in New York City until 1961.
However, the “Collective Man” had shown that he could build great things even exploited. What might he do if free? Perhaps the “euphoric dreams” mentioned to in Auden’s poem allude to the New Deal that was enacted from 1933 to 1938 by the government of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The “new” idea was that everyone should work together for the common good.
The following photograph below shows the night view south from the main building of the Rockefeller Center which was completed in 1933. Visible on the right is the Empire State Building (1931), the tallest building in the world until the World Trade Center was built in 1970. On the left is the Art Deco Chrysler Building (1930). In the right foreground, with the striking vertical stripes, is 500 Fifth Avenue (1930).
Looking at the mirrors of the bar, Auden could see the faces of the two main political forces at work in the world: western Europe with its colonial empires, and Russia with its dreams of international communism. Both were starting to fall apart. Gandhi was attempting to bring independence to India through satyagraha (nonviolent resistance). And in Russia, the show trials and executions of Stalin’s Great Purge had already begun.
Lost in a Haunted Wood
Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good.
The bars on 52nd Street were set up to make the patrons feel at home. Like a “fort,” the bar was closed off from the outside world. The lights stayed on through the night and the music played into the early hours of the morning. The following is Coleman Hawkins’ Body and Soul, recorded in 1939 with RCA (Radio Corporation of America).
The following illustration shows the interior of the Onyx bar, whose neon sign shows on the left side of the earlier photograph of 52nd Street. Without the people, it is a quiet and lonely space, with mirrors reflecting dolefully back on each other.
The stanza concludes with the mute despair of children lost in a frightening world. The fairy tales with their “haunted” woods are right.
What Mad Nijinsky Wrote
The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone.
Auden had found some respite from the recent propaganda and demagoguery by reading through the Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky (1889-1950), written during the winter of 1918-1919 but only published in 1936. The diary was composed when Nijinsky was living in Switzerland with his wife Romola; and slowly but surely becoming mad.
Nijinsky had become a dancer with Les Ballets Russes, and the lover of its impresario Sergei Diaghilev. His most famous performance was in 1912 as the faun in a ballet that he himself choregraphed for Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un Faune (1894), itself based on the 1876 poem by Stéphane Mallarmé about the sensuous dreams of a young faun. The following are contemporary photographs by Adolph de Meyer, showing the Nijinsky reclining with his flute as the music begins and then dancing in a stylized manner evocative of ancient Greek paintings.
When Nijinsky married the Hungarian aristocrat Romola de Pulszky in 1913, Diaghilev summarily dismissed him from the Ballet Russes, and took as a lover another beautiful young man, the choreographer, Léonide Massine. As Nijinsky lapsed into schizophrenia, Romola continued to care for him.
The diaries jump haphazardly from one topic to the next. Auden quotes a comment about Nijinsky that follows from a discussion of Georges Clemenceau, the Prime Minister of France.
I know that Clemenceau is honest; he is the policy of France. He is a hard-working man, but he was mistaken when he sent France to her death. He is a man who seeks goodness, a child with a tremendous brain. Some politicians are hypocrites like Diaghilev, who does not want universal love, but to be loved alone. I want universal love. (Nijinsky, 1936, p 27).
Madness brings the truth to light. Human beings want to be loved, but find it difficult to love one another. Most of us are like Diaghilev: selfishness is “bred in the bone.”
Brodsky (1986, p 345-6) points out the intricacy of the rhymes in this stanza. Most importantly “Diaghilev” pararhymes with “love.” But this end-rhyme is preceded by the internal consonant rhymes on the “v” of “Craves what it cannot have.”
Who Can Speak for the Dumb?
From the conservative dark Into the ethical life The dense commuters come, Repeating their morning vow; “I will be true to the wife, I’ll concentrate more on my work,” And helpless governors wake To resume their compulsory game: Who can release them now, Who can reach the deaf, Who can speak for the dumb?
In this stanza Auden recounts how commuters come to the city promising themselves to do better. But the city lacks leaders who can release them from their mundane lives. The ending has its source in the advice given by his mother to King Lemuel in Proverbs:
It is not for kings, O Lemuel, it is not for kings to drink wine; nor for princes strong drink: Lest they drink, and forget the law, and pervert the judgment of any of the afflicted. Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more. Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction. Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy. (Proverbs 31: 4-9)
We are in need of kings who can comfort those who suffer, who can talk to the deaf and speak up for the dumb.
We Must Love One Another or Die
All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die.
This stanza provides tentative answers to the questions posed in the preceding stanza. Auden had been concerned about the role of the poet in modern society. Soon after Yeats had died in January 1939, and Auden had written In Memory of W. B. Yeats, publishing it in The New Republic in March. The poem famously claimed that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Nevertheless, it also claimed that poetry provided “a mouth.” This recitation is by Auden.
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.
In September 1, 1939, Auden voices what is needed to undo the lies to which we have become accustomed. Fuller (1998, p 292) suggests that the “folded lie” is “a kind of kenning for the newspaper tucked under the arm of the commuter of stanza 7.” Auden admired Old English poetry which often combined two words to give the extended meaning of one: poetical periphrasis or “kenning” (from ken, know). A second lie is the romantic idea that everything we do is for the best. And a third lie is what we are told by those in authority. The syntax of the second half of the stanza is difficult. The following is the interpretation of Anthony Hecht (1993, pp 166-7):
What follows after the colon is the truth that the poet, armed only with his “voice,” has taken upon himself to reveal. It is a double secret, enraging both to the individual and to the corporate group of “Collective Man” which constitutes “Authority.” “There is no such thing as the State” is not merely an attack upon the likes of Hitler and Stalin, and the superstates over which they tyrannize; it declares that government itself is no more than a useful fiction, one which ought to allow us as much independence and freedom from itself as possible. but there is a balancing corollary which is, at the same time, the inverse of this proposition: it is that “no one exists alone.” And this means that we are, of necessity, bound to one another, not wholly independent, and thus part of the fictive State. Both those with authority and those without it are caught in this dilemma, both citizens and police.
And so we come to the crux of the poem and line that Auden later regretted.
We must love one another or die.
Auden claimed that it made no sense. We die whether we love or not. But this is a simplistic interpretation. Surely the poet is saying that we must love one another or fail to be truly human: without love we are dead to our real selves. Or even more directly: we must either love one another or wind up killing each other.
Auden had made similar comments before. Fuller (1998, p 292) quotes from Auden’s revisions for a 1939 production of Auden and Isherwood’s 1936 play The Ascent of F6:
Man is an animal that has to love or perish.
I think that years afterward, Auden considered his younger self hopelessly naïve for telling people on the brink of a war that would lead to 80 million deaths to “love one another.” Invoking the moral law would do little to stop the advancing Panzer divisions.
In his 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater, Lyndon Johnson used a commercial wherein the image of a young girl picking petals from a daisy leads into the image of an exploding atomic bomb, as Johnson speaks a garbled version of Auden’s line:
*We must either love each other, or we must die.
Johnson won by a landslide. Perhaps poetry does make some things happen.
Defenceless under the Night
Defenceless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.
Auden was not clear what he should do now that war was beginning. How can one person change the world other than by standing up for what is right, telling others of one’s fears, and hoping that justice will prevail? The image of small lights flashing out their messages of good will likely comes from E. M Forster’s essay What I Believe, published in The Nation in 1938 and then as a pamphlet in 1939. Forster gave his famous “two cheers for democracy:” “one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.” However, he also believed in an aristocracy of “the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky.” And in the darkest times
the brighter shine the little lights, reassuring one another, signalling: “Well, at all events, I’m still here. I don’t like it very much, but how are you?” Unquenchable lights of my aristocracy! Signals of the invincible army! “Come along—anyway, let’s have a good time while we can.” I think they signal that too.
I think that Auden was skeptical about how effective these lights would be. While composing the poem, he changed “little lights” to “ironic lights.” Nevertheless, the poem ends with a prayer that he may show an “affirming flame.”
The idea of tiny lights flashing in the darkness was used by George H. W. Bush in a 1988 campaign speech to promote charitable giving as a better way of taking care of those in need than government handouts.
I have spoken of a thousand points of light, of all the community organizations that are spread like stars throughout the Nation, doing good. We will work hand in hand, encouraging, sometimes leading, sometimes being led, rewarding.
Upping the ante to a thousand does little in the way of convincing anyone that the rich will provide all the help that the poor will need.
The New Year Letter
A few months after September 1, 1939, Auden composed his New Year Letter, a long poem in tetrameter rhyming couplets to celebrate the beginning of 1940. His hopes for his “ironic points of light” were turning to “flares of desperation:”
Around me, pausing as I write, A tiny object in the night, Whichever way I look, I mark Importunate along the dark Horizon of immediacies The flares of desperation rise From signallers who justly plead Their cause is piteous indeed (Auden, 1976, p 224)
Auden had been intrigued by the possibilities of communism but had recognized its failure. He now began to turn back toward religion as a way to organize society. By the end of 1940, he was once again taking communion in the Anglican Church, which in the United States was called Episcopalian. There was no mystical moment of conversion, just a slowly increasing agreement with Christian beliefs (Carpenter, 1981, pp 283-8, 297-302).
The following quotation from the ending to Auden’s New Year Letter summarized much of the import of September 1, 1939, and hinted at his ongoing return to Christianity:
Our road Gets worse and we seem altogether Lost as our theories, like the weather, Veer round completely every day, And all that we can always say Is: true democracy begins With free confession of our sins. In this alone are all the same, All are so weak that none dare claim “I have the right to govern,” or “Behold in me the Moral Law,” And all real unity commences That all have wants to satisfy And each a power to supply. We need to love all since we are Each a unique particular That is no giant, god, or dwarf, But one odd human isomorph; We can love each because we know All, all of us, that this is so: Can live since we are lived, the powers That we create with are not ours. (Auden, 1976, p 241)
The idea that “all have wants to satisfy and each a power to supply” is a simple description of communism. Yet communism does not work. We need some other way to facilitate the moral law. This can perhaps be obtained in the idea of an immanent God, one who lives through us when we allow it:
For in him we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28)
September 11, 2011
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, there was a resurgence of interest in Auden’s September 1, 1939. Several newspapers reprinted the poem and it was recited on the radio. Written about a war that began in a September more than 70 years before, the poem helped people to explore the uncertainty, grief and fear that they were once again experiencing. It also provided some comfort in the idea that, even though the world had face terrible problems in the past, justice had always prevailed. Stephen Burt (2003) wrote
“September 1,1939” represents one mind, and many minds, united by a civic emergency, by illimitable apprehension, by a newly evident international enemy, and by the sudden, urgent, and disquietingly general search for an explanation—not just any explanation, but one that uses data we already have. It gropes for appropriate response to “evil,” while resorting neither to bellicose or to confidently pacifist rhetoric, enunciating instead a sustained uncertainty. The poem speaks at once to our feeling of catastrophic helplessness and, in its middle stanzas, to the understandable feeling that when anything bad happens to us (or to our society) it could be partly our fault. Moreover, it uses that feeling to claim that its resources, poetry’s resources, have at this time a special civic purpose: they can enunciate a collective confession and thus draw the just, the ironic light-bearers, together for good.
Growing Old
Auden continued to write poetry until his death. He was always unsure of his work. He revised many of his earlier poems (Quesenbery, 2008). He continued to disown September 1, 1939, and another long poem entitled Spain that he had written 2 years earlier. Neither poem is perfect. Yet both poems give voice to the feelings of the time in which they were written.
In the postscript to the poem The Cave of Making written in memory of his friend Louis MacNeice (1907-1963), Auden considered how poets so often fail to write what they should have. The “you” refers to Auden – he is talking to himself.
You hope, yes, your books will excuse you, save you from hell; nevertheless, without looking sad, without in any way seeming to blame (He doesn’t need to, knowing well what a lover of art like yourself pays heed to), God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.
The illustration shows a 2014 drawing of Auden’s face (based on photographs from the 1960s) by Caroline Binch. The deep furrows are a result of Touraine‐Solente‐Golé syndrome, a genetic disorder causing hypertrophy of the skin and bones (Aronson & Ramachandran, 2011). In Auden’s words, his face “looked like a wedding cake left out in the rain” (Carpenter, 1981, p 423). The face seems to manifest his anxiety about not getting the words completely right.
References
Aronson, J. K., & Ramachandran, M. (2011). The diagnosis of art: W. H. Auden’s face. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 104(1), 38–40.
Auden, W. H. (1940). Another time: poems. Faber.
Auden, W. H. (edited by Mendelson, E, 1976). Collected poems. Random House.
Auden, W. H. (edited by Mendelson, E, 1993). The prolific and the devourer. Ecco Press.
Auden, W. H., & Pearson, N. H. (1950). Poets of the English language. Viking.
Bloomfield, B. C. (1964). W.H. Auden, a bibliography: the early years through 1955. University of Virginia.
Brodsky, J. (1986). On “September 1, 1939” by W. H Auden. In Less than one: selected essays. (pp 304-356). Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Burt, S. (2003). “September 1, 1939” revisited: or, poetry, politics, and the idea of the public. American Literary History, 15(3), 533–559.
Carpenter, H. (1981). W. H. Auden: a biography. Allen & Unwin.
Davenport-Hines, R. P. T. (1995). Auden. Heinemann.
Fuller, J. (1998). W.H. Auden: a commentary. Faber and Faber.
Hecht, A. (1993). The hidden law: the poetry of W. H. Auden. Harvard University Press.
Mendelson, E. (1999). Later Auden. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
Nijinsky, V. (edited by R. Nijinsky, 1936). The diary of Vaslav Nijinsky. Simon & Schuster.
Norse, H. (1989). Memoirs of a bastard angel. William Morrow.
Sansom, I. (2019). September 1, 1939: a biography of a poem. HarperCollins.
Wallace Stevens: Toward a Supreme Fiction
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) was an American modernist poet. Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and educated at Harvard and the New York Law School, he worked as an executive for The Hartford Insurance Company in Connecticut. The photograph by Sylvia Salmi was taken in the 1940s, at which time he was vice-president of the company. In his free time Stevens wrote poems, publishing his first book Harmonium in 1923. Throughout his life he considered poetry as the “supreme fiction,” something that could replace religion in human life, and provide us with a more complete understanding than that provided by science or philosophy. In 1942 he published a set of poems entitled Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, to illustrate the nature and power of poetry.
The Romantic Revolution
In the late 18th and early 19th Century, artists and writers insisted that art should stress individual creativity rather than formal learning, and that the emotional response to the world was more important that the rational. Not everyone appreciated the new poetry. In 1820, the satirist Thomas Love Peacock described TheFour Ages of Poetry: the iron age of wherein rude bards celebrated the exploits of their chieftains, the golden age of Homer, the silver age of civilized verse lasting from Virgil to Dryden, and the current brass age wherein poets described their feelings. His invective was venomous: he described the characteristics of romantic poetry as
harmony, which is language on the rack of Procrustes; sentiment, which is canting egotism in the mask of refined feeling; passion, which is the commotion of a weak and selfish mind; pathos, which is the whining of an unmanly spirit; and sublimity, which is the inflation of an empty head.
Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote a response to Peacock in 1821, but he died in 1822, and A Defense of Poetry was not published until 1840. Shelley distinguished two kinds of mental action: reason (Greek logizein, logic, analysis) and imagination (Greek poiein, poetry, synthesis).
Reason is the enumeration of qualities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those qualities, both separately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance.
He proposed that it is through the imagination that we obtain new knowledge:
The functions of the poetical faculty are twofold: by one it creates new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good.
And at the end of his essay, he claimed
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
The word hierophant, used initially in the context of the Eleusinian Mysteries, comes from the Greek hieros (sacred, holy) and phainein (show, reveal).
Shelley embodied these ideas in his 1819 Ode to the West Wind (full text available). This poem describes the west wind of autumn that blows the leaves from the trees and heralds the coming winter. It ends
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
Shelley was not alone in considering poetry as a great system for creating knowledge and understanding. In his prophetic books, William Blake described Los as the personification of the creative imagination, in despair at the state of the world following the Industrial Revolution. In the 1820 book Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, Los is driven by his demonic Spectre to destroy the present state of England (personified by the Giant Albion), and reforge a new world. The following is Blake’s representation of Los from page 6 of Jerusalem:
Los proclaims
I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create (Blake, Jerusalem, 1820, p 10)
Modern Ideas of Poetry
Shelley and the Romantic poets were soon criticized for being too idealistic, too removed from the real world, and too emotional. The following quotation is from a critique of Shelley by George Santayana (1863-1952), a poet and philosopher who taught at Harvard when Wallace Stevens was an undergraduate there. Stevens and Santayana became friends, exchanged poems and stayed in contact long after Stevens graduated (Mariani, 2016, pp 21-23). Santayana claimed that Shelley
could never put together any just idea of the world: he merely collected images and emotions, and out of them made worlds of his own. His poetry accordingly does not well express history, nor human character, nor the constitution of nature. What he unrolls before us instead is, in a sense, fantastic; it is a series of landscapes, passions, and cataclysms such as never were on earth, and never will be. (Santayana, 1913, pp 181-2)
After Romanticism, the Realists had their day. And as the 20th Century began, Modernism came to the fore. Modernists poets tended toward the everyday rather than the fantastic, irony rather than idealism, objectivity rather than passion, and innovation rather than derivation. In his 1942 poem Of Modern Poetry, Stevens remarked
It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place. It has to face the men of the time and to meet The women of the time. It has to think about war And it has to find what will suffice. It has To construct a new stage.
Despite being critical of Shelley’s poetry, Santayana nevertheless largely agreed with his idea that poetry creates our understanding of the world. He described the “great function of poetry:”
to repair to the material of experience, seizing hold of the reality of sensation and fancy beneath the surface of conventional ideas, and then out of that living but indefinite material to build new structures, richer, finer, fitter to the primary tendencies of our nature, truer to the ultimate possibilities of the soul. (Santayana, 1900, p 271).
Santayana realized that the creative imagination works in science as well as poetry:
Science and common sense are themselves in their way poets of no mean order, since they take the material of experience and make out of it a clear, symmetrical, and beautiful world (Santayana, 1900, p 271).
He also proposed that poetry and religion were closely related:
Poetry raised to its highest power is then identical with religion grasped in its inmost truth; at their point of union both reach their utmost purity and beneficence, for then poetry loses its frivolity and ceases to demoralize, while religion surrenders its illusions and ceases to deceive. (Santayana, 1900, p 290).
These last two quotations recall Shelley’s A Defense of Poetry:
Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred
These ideas were not accepted by all modernist poets. W. H. Auden (1907-1973) had much more restrained views on the function of poetry:
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth. (Auden, In Memory of W. B. Yeats, 1940)
Wallace Stevens, however, thought about poetry in much the same way as Shelley and Santayana (Italia, 1993). In his essay The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet in his 1951 collection The Necessary Angel, Stevens quotes Shelley extensively:
He speaks of poetry as created by “that imperial faculty whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man.” He says that a poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. It is “indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge . . . the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds . . . it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life.” In spite of the absence of a definition and m spite of the impressions and approximations we are never at a loss to recognize poetry. As a consequence it is easy for us to propose a center of poetry, a vis or noeud vital, to which, in the absence of a definition, all the variations of definitions are peripheral. (Stevens, 1951, pp 44-45).
Stevens’ conception of the poet was very similar to Shelley’s:
what makes the poet the potent figure that he is, or was, or ought to be, is that he creates the world to which we turn incessantly and without knowing it and that he gives to life the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive of it. (Stevens, 1951, p 31)
Stevens used the term “fiction” to describe the creative process of poetry. “Fiction” comes from the Latin fictus the past participle of fingere meaning to shape, form, devise, feign; “poetry” comes from the Greek poeisis meaning a fabrication or creation, which is itself derived from poiein, to make or compose.
Stevens’ proposal of poetry as the process primarily responsible for our understanding of the world is similar in may ways to the Martin Heidegger’s ideas about Hölderlin’s poetry, though neither writer could have been aware of the other:
The poet names the gods and names all things with respect to what they are. This The poet names the gods and names all things with respect to what they are. This naming does not merely come about when something already previously known is furnished with a name; rather, by speaking the essential word, the poet’s naming first nominates the beings as what they are. Thus they become known as beings. Poetry is the founding of being in the word. (Heidegger, 1941, p 58)
What we can express in words we can hope to understand. Poetry is unlike other modes of expression used in religion, law, or science. Poetry is particularly and vividly close to experience, and because of its attention to sound and metaphor it makes that experience memorable. In his essay On the Contribution of Poetry to the Search for Truth, Hans-Georg Gadamer, a student of Heidegger, points out that poetry brings experience “near” to us:
A genuine poem …allows us to experience “nearness” in such a way that this nearness is held in and through the linguistic form of the poem. What is the nearness that is held there? Whenever we have to hold something, it is because it is transient and threatens to escape our grasp. In fact our fundamental experience as beings subject to time is that all things escape us, that all the events of our lives fade more and more, so that at best they glow with an almost unreal shimmer in the most distant recollection. But the poem does not fade, for the poetic word brings the transience of time to a standstill. (Gadamer, 1986, p 114)
Gadamer realizes, however, that poetry is but one of many linguistic modes used to gain understanding of the world:
Language gives all of us our access to a world in which certain special forms of human experience arise: the religious tidings that proclaim salvation, the legal judgment that tells us what is right and what is wrong in our society, the poetic word that by being there bears witness to our own being. (Gadamer, 1986, p 115)
Supreme Fictions
Stevens first used the term “supreme fiction” in his 1923 poem A High-Toned Christian Woman (Brazeal, 2007). The main them of the poem (full text available) is that human creativity knows no hierarchy: poetry is as valuable as religion, jazz improvisations as important as choral hymns, and bawdy merriment as meaningful as moral laws. The poem begins
Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame. Take the moral law and make a nave of it And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus, The conscience is converted into palms, Like windy citherns hankering for hymns. We agree in principle. That’s clear. But take The opposing law and make a peristyle, And from the peristyle project a masque Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness, Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last, Is equally converted into palms, Squiggling like saxophones.
Stevens is indulging is word games: “nave” leads to “knave,” “palm” recalls “psalm,” and the “supreme fiction” brings to mind the “supreme being” who created everything, the creator free of any church, the godhead of Deists and Revolutionaries.
Stevens had given up his belief in the Christian God but still felt the need for something to believe in. That it might be possible to believe in a fiction was suggested in his 1942 poem Asides on an Oboe (full text available) which begins
The prologues are over. It is a question, now, Of final belief. So, say that final belief Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.
Two ideas – the concept of a supreme fiction by which the poetic imagination could create and understand a world, and the need of human beings to believe in something – ran through all of Steven’s thought and poetry. In the Adagia (an unpublished collection of aphorisms), he claimed
The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly (Stevens, 1997, p 903)
Unfortunately, although the word “fiction” means an imaginative creation, it also carries the connotation that it is untrue. In this regard, Stevens’ statements become contradictory since we cannot believe in something that we know to be untrue (Brazeal, 2007). Stevens is using William James’ idea of the will to believe. But, as Brazeal points out, it was not James’s view that we could just believe in anything. Rather we could believe in what we thought was true even though we had not yet fully proven it.
Stevens discussed the problems about believing in a fiction in a 1942 letter to Henry Church about Notes to a Supreme Fiction:
One evening, a week or so ago, a student at Trinity College came to the office and walked home with me. We talked about this book. I said that I thought that we had reached a point at which we could no longer really believe in anything unless we recognized that it was a fiction The student said that that was an impossibility. that there is as no such thing as believing in something that one knew was no true. It is obvious, however, that we are doing that all the time. There are things with respect to which we willingly suspend disbelief, if there is instinctive in us a will to believe, or if there is a will to believe, whether or not it is instinctive, it seems to me that we can suspend disbelief with reference to a fiction as easily as we can suspend it with reference to anything else. There are fictions that arc extensions of reality. There are plenty of people who believe in Heaven as definitely as your New England ancestors and my Dutch ancestors believed in it. But Heaven is an extension of reality (Stevens & Stevens, 1996, p 430)
Some resolution of these contradictions may be found in the way we consider fiction. Any worthwhile work of fiction must be “true to life.” If it has no relevance to real life, it is not worth reading. This is likely the meaning of Stevens’ fiction – something created by the human imagination that represents what could or does happen in real life as accurately and completely (as “truly”) as it can. Michael Frayn has discussed some of the complex relations between truth and fiction (2006).
Notes toward a Supreme Fiction
In 1942 Stevens published Notes toward a Supreme Fiction with Cummington Press, a fine press founded by Harry Duncan in 1939 in Cummington, Massachusetts. 273 copies of the 45-page book were hand-printed, 80 of which were signed by Stevens. A second edition of 330 copies was published in 1943. The book was dedicated to Henry Church, a patron of the arts, whose fortune derived from his father’s patent for baking soda (with the brand name Arm and Hammer). The design for the book’s title page was by Alessandro Giampietro. Stevens told Henry Church in a 1942 letter
that the straight lines in the designs of the book represent direction and that the circles mean comprehension. (Stevens & Stevens, 1996, p 418)
The poem (full text available) consists of a prologue of 8 lines, three sections containing ten poems, each composed of 7 unrhymed tercets (21 lines), and an epilogue in the same form as the preceding poems. The printing was set up so that the title, dedication (to Henry Church), prologue, section titles and the poems were each printed on a separate page.
The title informs us that this is not the definitive description of the supreme fiction. The poetry provides notes – either in the sense of early observations or in the sense of musical notes that can form an overarching harmony. Furthermore, it is “a” supreme fiction – the creation of Stevens rather than of the ultimate creation of everything.
The prologue is addressed to something not clearly identified, probably the creative imagination with which the poet interacts to bring forth understanding – the “vivid transparence” that leads to “peace.” Older poets would have called it their “muse.”
And for what, except for you, do I feel love? Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man Close to me, hidden in me day and night? In the uncertain light of single, certain truth, Equal in living changingness to the light In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest, For a moment in the central of our being, The vivid transparence that you bring is peace.
The three sections of the book are entitled
It must be abstract It must change It must give pleasure
These titles denote the essential characteristics of any worthwhile fiction.
A detailed commentary is beyond the scope of this essay, which will limit itself to a few of the poems. Many scholars have provided more extensive analyses: Kermode (1960, pp 111-119), Sukenik (1967, pp 136-163), Vendler (1969, pp 168-205), Bloom (1977, pp 167-218), Cook (2007, pp 214-236), Bates (2007).
The first poem in the first section (It must be abstract) is addressed to an “ephebe,” the name for a young man in training in Ancient Athens.
Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea Of this invention, this invented world, The inconceivable idea of the sun.
You must become an ignorant man again And see the sun again with an ignorant eye And see it clearly in the idea of it.
The poet urges to ephebe not to accept what he has been taught – not to believe in the gods – but to make his own understanding of the world
The death of one god is the death of all. Let purple Phoebus lie in umber harvest, Let Phoebus slumber and die in autumn umber,
Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was A name for something that never could be named. There was a project for the sun and is.
There is a project for the sun. The sun Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be In the difficulty of what it is to be.
Umber is an earth-brown pigment, but the word derives from the Latin ombra, shadow, and suggests the shades of the dead. The epithet “gold flourisher” describe the sun’s essential characteristics: the sun as an abstraction.
The final poem in the first section considers the idea of what man must become. The poet envisions a man in clothes too big for his body seeing the world clearly without regard to what religion requires or what humanity desires
Cloudless the morning. It is he. The man In that old coat, those sagging pantaloons,
It is of him, ephebe, to make, to confect The final elegance, not to console Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound.
The 5th poem of the second section (It must change) describes a deserted plantation on a tropical island – likely in the Florida Keys, which Stevens visited many times in 1920s and 1930s.
On a blue island in a sky-wide water The wild orange trees continued to bloom and to bear, Long after the planter’s death. A few limes remained,
Where his house had fallen, three scraggy trees weighted With garbled green. These were the planter’s turquoise And his orange blotches, these were his zero green,
A green baked greener in the greenest sun. These were his beaches, his sea-myrtles in White sand, his patter of the long sea-slushes.
Before the recurrent hurricanes had ruined the plantations, the Florida Keys were famous for the limes used to make Key lime pie. Stevens’ poem about the planter illustrates how our conception of the world must take into account its transience. And find this beautiful. The poem’s third verse is remarkable for its portrayal of the sound of the waves upon the beach.
This poem concludes with a eulogy to the planter. Because he is no more, the eulogy is expressed in negative terms:
An unaffected man in a negative light Could not have borne his labor nor have died Sighing that he should leave the banjo’s twang.
Vendler (1969, p 170) transcribes the verse without the negatives:
He lived in a positive light, a man deeply affected by his islands, and therefore he could bear his labor, and could die, in spite of exile and desire, sighing that he should have to leave even so simple and small a pleasure as his banjo’s twang.
The 6th poem of the second section deals with birds:
Bethou me, said sparrow, to the crackled blade, And you, and you, bethou me as you blow, When in my coppice you behold me be.
Ah, ke! The bloody wren, the felon jay, Ke-ke, the jug throated robin pouring out, Bethou, bethou, bethou me in my glade.
There was such idiot minstrelsy in rain, So many clappers going without bells, That these bethous compose a heavenly gong.
One voice repeating, one tireless chorister, The phrases of a single phrase, ke-ke, A single text, granite monotony
Stevens was a connoisseur of birds and could whistle a multiplicity of birdsongs (Cook, 2007, p 224). The following are some typical songs of the birds mentioned in the first two verses
Sparrow:
Wren:
Bluejay:
Robin:
As the poem provides its brilliant rendition of the different birds, it makes passing references to other birds that have found their way into poems. “Coppice” is a reference to Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush; “pouring forth” and “glade” are quoted from Keat’s Ode to a Nightingale.
Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy!
Stevens cannot resist the wordplay between the “jug-jug” sound of the robin and “pouring out” from a jug.
However, Stevens notes that most birdsong is monotonous. Because it does not change it is not like the supreme fictions of a poet. Stevens criticizes the tendency of the Romantic poets to liken themselves to birds or to other natural phenomena. The “bethous” that he monotonously repeats are a reference to Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind.
Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Stevens’ poem concludes
These are of minstrels lacking minstrelsy, Of an earth in which the first leaf is the tale Of leaves, in which the sparrow is a bird
Of stone, that never changes. Bethou him, you And you, bethou him and bethou. It is A sound like any other. It will end.
The birdsongs are not supreme fictions because they never change.
In the 8th poem of the second section (It must change) Stevens imagines how Shelley’s Ozymandias, who thought he could impose his order on the world, could have been seduced by the beautiful Nanzia Nuncio so that the constant order that the king of kings desired could give way to changing fictions:
I am the woman stripped more nakedly Than nakedness, standing before an inflexible Order, saying I am the contemplated spouse.
Speak to me that, which spoken, will array me In its own only precious ornament. Set on me the spirit’s diamond coronal.
Clothe me entire in the final filament, So that I tremble with such love so known And myself am precious for your perfecting.
Then Ozymandias said the spouse, the bride Is never naked. A fictive covering Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind.
In the 7th poem of the third section (It must give pleasure), Stevens contrasts politics, the imposing or order on the world, to poetry, the discovery of order in the world. And finds pleasure in the changing order of the seasons (Lensing, 2007):
But to impose is not To discover. To discover an order as of A season, to discover summer and know it,
To discover winter and know it well, to find Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all, Out of nothing to have come on major weather,
It is possible, possible, possible.
The final poem of the third section is a paean to the world we live on, affectionately referred to as the “fat girl,” the earth in all its plenitude and beauty, and “my green, my fluent mundo.” A world that we can only understand through feeling and through fiction:
That’s it: the more than rational distortion, The fiction that results from feeling. Yes, that.
They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne. We shall return at twilight from the lecture Pleased that the irrational is rational,
Until flicked by feeling, in a gildered street, I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo. You will have stopped revolving except in crystal.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction concludes with an epilogue in which Stevens compares the poet to the soldier. Stevens may have thought this necessary in a poem written during war. However, the epilogue really does not work. Poets lay down their lines but not their lives for what they believe in. Stevens claims that poetry can give meaning to the soldier’s sacrifice. But as James Merrill pointed out in his 1985 poem Page from the Koran:
How gladly with proper words,” said Wallace Stevens “The solider dies.” Or kills.
Death Comes for Philosopher and for poet
George Santayana resigned from Harvard University in 1911 and spent the rest of his life in Europe. He was financially supported by a small inheritance from his mother and by the royalties from his books, among which was the best-selling novel The Last Puritan (1935). His portrait by Samuel Johnson Woolf graced the cover of Tim magazine in 1936.
At the beginning of World War II, the philosopher was living in Rome. It soon became difficult to transfer money from his American publishers to Italy. In 1941, rather than undergo the stress of travelling during wartime, the 77-year-old obtained lodgings with the Sisters of the Little Company of Mary, who ran the small Calvary Hospital next door to the ancient Basilica Santo Stefano Rotondo. Since the sisters also managed a hospital in Chicago, Santayana’s publishers could pay the sisters in Chicago for his upkeep in Rome (McCormick, 1987, p 420). Santayana continued to live with the sisters after the war. Despite being a confirmed atheist, he enjoyed the liturgy, austerity and tranquility of his Catholic surroundings. Robert Lowell later commented that Santayana believed that “There is no God and Mary is His mother” (in the poem For George Santayana (1863-1952) in Life Studies, 1959). Nevertheless, Santayana maintained his scepticism to the end and insisted on being buried in non-consecrated ground.
In the summer of 1952, Wallace Stevens wrote a poem about the old philosopher. Santayana died from stomach cancer before the poem was published later that year. As well as describing his situation in Rome, Stevens’ poem makes multiple allusions to Santayana’s 1923 Scepticism and Animal Faith (Griswold works through these references on his website). The poem (full text available) begins
On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street Become the figures of heaven, the majestic movement Of men growing small in the distances of space, Singing, with smaller and still smaller sound, Unintelligible absolution and an end –
The threshold, Rome, and that more merciful Rome Beyond, the two alike in the make of the mind. It is as if in a human dignity Two parallels become one, a perspective, of which Men are part both in the inch and in the mile.
How easily the blown banners change to wings… Things dark on the horizons of perception Become accompaniments of fortune, but Of the fortune of the spirit, beyond the eye, Not of its sphere, and yet not far beyond,
The human end in the spirit’s greatest reach, The extreme of the known in the presence of the extreme Of the unknown. The newsboys’ muttering Becomes another murmuring; the smell Of medicine, a fragrantness not to be spoiled…
The bed, the books, the chair, the moving nuns, The candle as it evades the sight, these are The sources of happiness in the shape of Rome, A shape within the ancient circles of shapes, And these beneath the shadow of a shape
In a confusion on bed and books, a portent On the chair, a moving transparence on the nuns, A light on the candle tearing against the wick To join a hovering excellence, to escape From fire and be part only of that which
Fire is the symbol: the celestial possible.
The “more merciful Rome” of the second stanza is heaven and the parallel lines becoming one represent death as a transition to eternity.
The poem ends:
It is a kind of total grandeur at the end, With every visible thing enlarged and yet No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns, The immensest theatre, and pillared porch, The book and candle in your ambered room,
Total grandeur of a total edifice, Chosen by an inquisitor of structures For himself. He stops upon this threshold, As if the design of all his words takes form And frame from thinking and is realized.
The “inquisitor of structures” may refer to Santayana’s likening architecture to poetry:
Every human architect must do likewise with his edifice; he must mould his bricks or hew his stones into symmetrical solids and lay them over one another in regular strata, like a poet’s lines. (Santayana, 1900, p 261)
Griswold suggests that the final lines relate to Santayana’s
The ultimate reaches of doubt and renunciation open out for it, by an easy transition, into fields of endless variety and peace, as if through the gorges of death it had passed into a paradise where all things are crystallised into the image of themselves, and have lost their urgency and their venom. (Santayana, 1923, p 76
The following is Steven’s recitation of the poem
Wallace Stevens himself developed stomach cancer less than 3 years after Santayana (Mariani, 2016, pp 394-402). The cancer was inoperable and a gastroenterostomy was performed at St Francis Catholic Hospital in Hartford. During his recuperation Stevens met the hospital’s chaplain Father Arthur Hanley and talked to him about poetry and religion. Stevens was discharged but re-admitted a few months later. During this second and final hospitalization he agreed to be baptized by Father Hanley (Hanley 1977). Stevens had been brought up as a Lutheran as an adult he had questioned the need for any organized religion. Although Stevens was prone to irony, it appears that his final conversion was sincere. Perhaps he took to heart the words of his friend Santayana:
Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through a long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness. (Santayana, 1923, pp 69-70)
The Internal Paramour
One of Stevens’ last poems Final Soliloquy of the Internal Paramour was published in the Hudson Review in 1951:
Light the first light of evening, as in a room In which we rest and, for small reason, think The world imagined is the ultimate good.
This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. It is in that thought that we collect ourselves, Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:
Within a single thing, a single shawl Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth, A light, a power, the miraculous influence.
Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves. We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.
Within its vital boundary, in the mind. We say God and the imagination are one… How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.
The following is Stevens’ recitation of the poem
Stevens does not directly identify his internal mistress. She shares qualities with the idea of the self that, like a shawl, we wrap tightly about us. This formulation is related to Santayana’s description of the self:
If I exist, I am a living creature to whom ideas are incidents, like aeroplanes in the sky; they pass over, more or less followed by the eye, more or less listened to, recognised, or remembered; but the self slumbers and breathes below, a mysterious natural organism, full of dark yet definite potentialities; so that different events will awake it to quite disproportionate activities. The self is a fountain of joy, folly, and sorrow, a waxing and waning, stupid and dreaming creature, in the midst of a vast natural world, of which it catches but a few transient and odd perspectives. (Santayana, 1923, p 146).
However, the mistress is also the creative imagination that proposes our understanding of the world: “an order, a whole, a knowledge.” The creation of this supreme fiction may be like God speaking the words “Let there be light!” The crucial comment, “We say, God and the imagination are one …” refers to one of Stevens’ Adagia:
Proposita: 1. God and the imagination are one. 2. The thing imagined is the imaginer. The second equals the thing imagined and the imaginer are one. Hence, I suppose, the Imaginer is God. (Stevens, 1997, p 914)
The poem harks back to the prologue of Notes to a Supreme Fiction, which described the poetic process as a meeting between the poet and his creative self:
In the uncertain light of single, certain truth, Equal in living changingness to the light In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest, For a moment in the central of our being
References
Bates, M. J. (2007). Stevens and the supreme fiction. In Serio, J. N. (Ed.). The Cambridge companion to Wallace Stevens. (pp 48-61). Cambridge University Press.
Blake, W. (1820, reprinted with commentary by Paley, M. D., 1991). Jerusalem: the emanation of the giant Albion. Princeton University Press
Bloom, H. (1977). Wallace Stevens: the poems of our climate. Cornell University Press.
Carroll, J. (1987). Wallace Stevens’ supreme fiction: a new romanticism. Louisiana State University Press.
Cook, E. (2007). A reader’s guide to Wallace Stevens. Princeton University Press.
Frayn, M. (2006). Is it true about Lensky? The truth-functions of fiction and the fiction-functions of truth. In The human touch: Our part in the creation of a universe. (pp. 236-269). Faber & Faber.
Gadamer, H.-G. (translated by Walker, N. & edited by Bernasconi, R., 1986). The relevance of the beautiful and other essays. Cambridge University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1941, translated by Hoeller, K., 2000). Elucidations of Hölderlin’s poetry. Humanity Books.
Italia, P. G. (1993). Of minstrels lacking minstrelsy: Shelley and Wallace Stevens’ “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction.” Wallace Stevens Journal, 17(2), 168–179.
Kermode, J. F. (1960). Wallace Stevens. Oliver & Boyd.
Lensing, G.S. (2007). Stevens’ seasonal cycles. In Serio, J. N. (Ed.). The Cambridge companion to Wallace Stevens. (pp 118-132). Cambridge University Press.
McCormick, J. (1987). George Santayana: a biography. Alfred A. Knopf
Mariani, P. L. (2016). The whole harmonium: the life of Wallace Stevens. Simon & Schuster.
Stevens, W. (1954). The collected poems of Wallace Stevens. Alfred A. Knopf.
Stevens, W. (1997). Collected poetry and prose. Library of America.
Stevens, W., & Stevens, H. (1996). Letters of Wallace Stevens. University of California Press.
Sukenick, R. (1967). Wallace Stevens: musing the obscure: readings, an interpretation and a guide to the collected poetry. New York University Press. Available at wallacestevens.org.
Tompsett, D. (2012). The “Supreme Fiction” as the transvaluation of religion with poetry. In Wallace Stevens and Pre-Socratic Philosophy: metaphysics and the play of violence. (pp. 131–152). Routledge.
Vendler, H. H. (1969). On extended wings: Wallace Stevens’ longer poems. Harvard University Press.
Rembrandt: Self-Portraits
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-1669) was one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age, that century following the establishment of the Dutch Republic free of Spanish rule. Among his many works were about 80 self-portraits – about 40 paintings, 30 etchings and 7 drawings – far more than any other painter before him. These works were created for several purposes: to provide examples of his art for prospective buyers, to work out techniques for visually representing emotions and ideas, and to record the passage of his own life. The illustration shows a small self-portrait from 1630, painted on copper: the discerning gaze.
Life
Rembrandt was born in Leiden, located between the cities of Amsterdam and The Hague. His surname “Harmenszoon van Rijn” means son of Harmen from the Rhine. As a young man, Rembrandt was apprenticed to Jacob van Swanenberg and later to Pieter Lastman, both of whom had spent time in Italy and were aware of the new baroque painters, such as Caravaggio, who painted with sharp contrasts between light and dark. Though he opened a studio in Leiden in 1625, Rembrandt moved in 1631 to Amsterdam to find a more wealthy clientele. There he became a sought-after portraitist for the rich and famous. He also painted large group portraits such as The Night Watch (1642). In 1634 Rembrandt married Saskia van Uylenburgh, and moved into a series of evermore luxurious residences. Four children were born but only the last – a son, Titus, born in 1641 – survived infancy. After Saskia died in 1642, Rembrandt had relationships with his housekeeper, Geertge Dircx, and with Hendrickje Stoffels, with whom he had a daughter, Cornelia, in 1654. Despite his continued success, Rembrandt’s taste for the good life – a fine residence furnished with beautiful objets d’art – led to bankruptcy in 1656. Though his financial difficulties persisted, Rembrandt continued to paint both portraits and large commissioned works, such as The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Deijman (1656) and The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild (1662) and until his death in 1669. One of his last paintings was The Return of the Prodigal Son.
Self-Portraits
Artists have always produced self-portraits (Hall, 2014; Rudd, 2021). Medieval illuminators included miniatures of themselves at work. Artists of the early Renaissance included images of themselves in the background of their history paintings. As the Renaissance flourished, artists became recognized as divinely gifted individuals, and representations of the actual artist became as valuable as his representations of the world. Another factor contributing to the rise of self-portraits was the developing technology for manufacturing mirrors of glass to replace those of polished metal.
In the 17th Century, the market for portraits expanded beyond the aristocracy to the growing middle class. A major purpose of the self-portrait was thus to demonstrate to prospective buyers how well the artist could capture the true likeness of a person. Buyers could see for themselves both the image and its subject. Furthermore, if the artist were famous, a self-portrait would become valuable in itself. Buyers could then obtain a portrait of a person more famous than themselves.
The self-portrait also provided the artist with a means to examine how best to depict the inner life of a subject. The artist could try to capture in paint the way that he knew he was feeling. The exercise would also allow him to recognize such feelings in others and become a better portraitist.
A final purpose of the self-portrait would be to increase the artist’s awareness of his own identity. Rembrandt made many more self-portraits than any other artist before him. These images provide a record of how he appeared as he grew older. More importantly, they provide a record of how he felt.
Why did Rembrandt show such an untiring interest in his own features? It is true that in the beginning his face often served as a convenient model for studies in expression. Thus he may have come into the habit of looking at himself with a painter’s eye. But this reason alone cannot explain the tremendous quantity and the deep significance of his self-portrait production …. Rembrandt seems to have felt that he had to know himself if he wished to penetrate the problem of man’s inner life. The phenomenon of the soul attracted him as strongly in his own personality as it did in that of others, and such profound self-realization was, it seems, indispensable for his access to the spiritual and the transcendental. (Rosenberg, 1964, pp 37).
This idea that self-portraits were a means of self-realization (see also Chapman, 1990, and Osmond, 2000) has been criticized as anachronistic (see van der Wetering’s essay in White & Buvelot. 1999). Such a purpose might be appropriate to those of us living after the Romantic Revolution and Freudian Psychoanalysis, but would have seemed foreign to an artist in the 17th Century. In those days one thought about the salvation of one’s soul rather than the improvement of one’s self. Nevertheless one might be skeptical of this skepticism. Human beings have always sought to understand themselves better. It seems to me that Rembrandt was certainly intrigued by how he was changing, and how his inner self was reacting to the changes. Painting these effects could help him to know himself.
Rembrandt’s self-portraits may have also allowed him to invent himself as well. In his various costumes and guises, he could see how he might be at a different time, or in a different context:
No one demonstrates better than Rembrandt that self-portraiture is more invention than reflection. This is evident not just in his imaginary, romantic, and historical guises but in every way that he chose to present himself. However, if his self-portraits are not pure reflection they are also emphatically not fiction. For whatever the, element of invention (and justification, compensation, even delusion, all of which must be operative but which I, for the most part, would not presume to analyze), conviction stands behind each of Rembrandt’s images. The seventeenth-century individual, however much engaged in self-fashioning and self-cultivation, was sustained by belief in the authenticity of his personality (Chapman, 1990, p 7).
Tronies and Portraits
Many of Rembrandt’s early self-portraits can be considered tronies (Hirschfelder, 2000). The Dutch term tronie, derived from the Gaulish word trugna for nose, means a depiction of a bust, head or face, especially one with a definite expression or in a particular costume. The primary purpose of such a picture was not to portray the sitter, but rather to represent an idea (the transience of life, the beauty of youth, etc), illustrate an emotion (anger, humor, etc), or display a particular fashion (Renaissance dandy, noble warrior, etc). Tronies probably developed from the practice of painting heads with particular characteristics for insertion into larger historical compositions (Schwartz, 1989). After a while, however, tronies became sought after as “character studies” independently of any larger painting. Many of Rembrandt’s tronies used himself as a subject. The following are two etchings from about 1630, one demonstrating surprise and the other anger:
Schwartz (1988) remarks that the sitter for a portrait presents himself to the painter in a particular way whereas the anonymous sitter for a tronie is asked by the painter to represent something. The painter of the tronie is in control not the subject. Rembrandt worked extensively with tronies in his early years in Leiden. This experience helped him in his portraits to depict the inner emotions as well as the outward presentation of his subjects:
a crucial aspect of Rembrandt’s new and seemingly unprecedented portrait style is the direct result of his transposing certain elements of the tronie mode onto that of the portrait. From his work in Leiden, Rembrandt arrived at a system or vocabulary of physiognomic characterization that comes directly from the face paintings and …was at odds with the other portraiture of the time in important ways. While it would be superficial psychologizing to claim that Rembrandt painted “character,” “inner man,” or “the human soul” —a persistent myth from which we have not yet fully escaped— it is nonetheless clear that Rembrandt’s portraits used many of the same techniques that create the centripetal quality tronies in order to suggest a general sense of “inwardness.” If he did not paint specific “character,” Rembrandt had learned pictorial strategies by which to allude to character in general, to “passion” with a minimum of “action.” (Schwartz, 1988, p 104)
Slowly the tronies began to morph into real self-portraits. The following illustration shows an etched self-portrait from about 1630 and one of the first of his painted self-portraits from 1628. Here we have the young artist with his smoldering eyes and unruly hair: the very portrait of an unrecognized genius. The background of this portrait and of the one at the beginning of this essay are light colored. Backgrounds generally became darker as he grew older. Perhaps he became more aware of Caravaggio’s paintings; perhaps life itself became darker.
Standard-Bearers
The Eighty-Years’ War (1568-1648) was the prolonged revolt of the Dutch people against Spain, which since 1482 had controlled the Netherlands as part of the Hapsburg Empire. The conflict brought out a tremendous sense of patriotism. Every district in every town established its own civil guard, led by a captain and his lieutenant. The company’s standard-bearer or ensign was the person selected to carry the standard into battle. Ensigns were bachelors, since their duty was to defend the standard with their lives. Typically, these young men dressed themselves in finery, cutting as dashing a figure as possible to display of their company’s ardor.
In 1636, Rembrandt painted himself in the role of a standard-bearer (Bikker, 2024). It is a bravura painting (left below). Rembrandt stands with his right arm akimbo, its silken sleeve jutting defiantly out of the picture plane. The ensign’s drooping moustache balances the jaunty plume of his cap. The lighting comes strikingly from the left, and shadows cloud the right side of the painting. Many years later in 1654, Rembrandt painted a more subdued portrait of a real standard-bearer, the wealthy Amsterdam bachelor Floris Soop (right, below).
In Praise of the Renaissance
Rembrandt was far more interested in the fashions and flamboyance of the Renaissance than he was in the costumes and reticence of his own age. His portraits of others often showed his sitters in somber black, their faces highlighted by pure white collars. But not his self-portraits. The lower part of the following illustration shows an etching (1639) and a painting (1640) of himself with his elbow resting upon a window sill or balustrade.
Rembrandt’s pose is clearly adapted from Titian’s 1509 portrait of a man, at one time considered to be the poet Ariosto (upper left). Rembrandt probably saw this painting, which in 1639 was in the collection of Alfonso Lopez, an art dealer in Amsterdam. He was likely also aware of Dürer’s 1498 self-portrait in a similar pose, perhaps by way of a print. Rembrandt’s etching would have been reversed in the printing process so that in the etching Rembrandt is looking to his left rather than to his right.
Rembrandt as Painter
One of the most intriguing of Rembrandt’s self-portraits (1652) shows the artist in a simple brown robe, likely his work-attire, staring defiantly at the viewer with his arms on his hips. Hall (2014, p 157) notes that the pose is the same as that in Holbein’s famous portrait of Henry VIII of England (1540). However, the styles of the two portraits are completely different. Rembrandt’s focus is on the face whereas Holbein’s is on the costume. Rembrandt’s face shows clear emotions – curiosity, pride, confidence – whereas Henry’s face is passive:
The following comments on Rembrandt’s self portrait are from Chapman (1990, p 87):
he wears a brown painter’s smock, belted with a sash, over a black jerkin and a collarless white shirt. Instead of the brimmed hat he has the more customary black artist’s berry. His drab brown garb, his muted hands, and the overall dark tonality of the painting focus our attention on his face and his direct, authoritative gaze. The aggressive informality of this portrait must have seemed shocking at the time. With a disarming sense of real presence, Rembrandt stands frontally, his arms akimbo, his thumbs tucked under his belt. His proud, confrontational worker’s stance conveys a self-assurance matched only in a few of the late paintings. In short, Rembrandt presents himself with unprecedented inner authority.
A Fall from Grace
When Saskia died in 1642, Rembrandt employed Geertge Dircx as a nurse and housekeeper. Their relationship soon became intimate but ended acrimoniously when Rembrandt began an affair with Hendrickje Stoffels in 1849. Geertge sued Rembrandt for breech of promise and was awarded alimony. Rembrandt never married Hendrickje, probably to ensure that Titus would inherit something from Saskia’s family. The church was sufficiently upset with this common-law arrangement that they investigated Hendrickje for “fornication.” Thus the decade of the 1640s was for Rembrandt a period of anxiety (White, 2022, pp 118-121). One way to handle this was the defiance evident in the self-portrait that we just considered.
As the 1650s began, financial difficulties began to add to Rembrandt’s family problems. Never one to skimp when he wanted something, Rembrandt began to lose money when the first Anglo-Dutch War (1652-54) caused an economic depression and patrons no longer had money to spend on portraits. In 1656, he was declared bankrupt and his possessions were auctioned off to pay his creditors (White, 2022, pp 162-175). Rembrandt moved to a small rented house. He continued to paint.
In 1658, Rembrandt painted his largest self-portrait. This painting, now part of the Frick Collection in New York, is unusual in many aspects. The artist is dressed in what appears to be an artist’s smock, but one that is bright gold in color and unmarked by any paint. The smock is tied at the waste with a red sash. This outfit may have been one of the costumes left over from previous paintings of oriental potentates. The colors, the rough brushwork, and the frontal pose are reminiscent of those used by Titian and other Venetian painters (Clark, 1964, p 130). Chapman (1990, pp 88-95) also notes that the main colors of the painting – black, white, yellow and red – are those chosen by the great Greek painter Apelles, the “Prince of Painters.”
In the portrait, Rembrandt holds a baton in his left hand. This may simply be a painter’s mahlstick, a rod with a padded leather ball at its end, held against the painting to support and steady the brush hand. However, in the painting, it gives the impression of a royal scepter. Indeed, the whole painting seems to depict a “Philosopher King” (Clark, 1964, p 130), serenely unaffected by the vicissitudes of the world. Undoubtedly, this is what Rembrandt wished he could be at that time.
The two portraits that follow the Frick portrait, both from 1659, the larger one in London and the smaller in Edinburgh, both use the same costume: a dark coat with a turned-up collar and Rembrandt’s by now trademark beret. They show an artist coping with his problems, bordering on despair but ultimately not giving in. His collar is turned up against life’s cold.
The Kenwood Portrait
After Hendrikje died in 1663. Rembrandt spent the last years of his life alone. During this time, he made several self-portraits. Most of these show a highlighted face upon dark background. One self-portrait differs strikingly from the others: the large self-portrait in the Iveagh Bequest at Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath.
Rembrandt is dressed with a red smock and a white shirt, but has also put on a coat with fur collar. Perhaps the studio is cold. He wears a bright white cap like an artist’s halo. He holds in his left hand a palette and mahlstick. Radiographic examination of the painting shows that it initially represented the painter’s left hand in the act of painting. Rembrandt was right-handed and this right left reversal would have resulted from seeing himself in a mirror (White & Buvelot, 1999, p 220). Rembrandt revised the painting to show the artist’s left hand holding the palette. The artist’s right hand is lost in the darkness. Self-portraits find it hard to represent the hand that paints the portrait.
The background is light in color and shows two large circles. The nature of these circles is a matter of much dispute (Porter, 1988; White & Buvelot, 1999; Gerson, 1968, p 130). One idea is that they might represent the outlines of a map showing the world in two hemispheres. However, the circles are further apart than usual in such representations. Another explication considers a famous story about Giotto. Thinking to hire the young painter, Pope Benedict IX sent one of his courtiers to obtain some evidence of Giotto’s painterly abilities. Giotto took a brush and quickly drew a perfect red circle on a piece of paper without moving his arm and without using a compass. This small piece of paper convinced the pope. Perhaps Rembrandt is claiming his two perfect circles as evidence of his own ability. Another idea is that the two circles represent in abstract form the ideas of theory and practice, with Rembrandt standing as the artistic genius who mediates between the two.
John Fowles’ novel Daniel Martin (1977) concludes with its protagonist Daniel standing before Rembrandt’s self-portrait in Kenwood House. He had just said farewell to Jenny, his young girlfriend, and was about to return to Jane, his old love:
The sad, proud old man stared eternally out of his canvas, out of the entire knowledge of his own genius and of the inadequacy of genius before human reality. Dan stared back. The painting seemed uncomfortable in its eighteenth-century drawing-room, telling a truth such decors had been evolved to exclude. The supreme nobility of such art, the plebeian simplicity of such sadness; an immortal, a morose old Dutchman; the deepest inner loneliness, the being on trivial public show; a date beneath a frame, a presentness beyond all time, fashion, language; a puffed face, a pair of rheumy eyes, and a profound and unassuageable vision.
Dan had been working as a script-writer in Hollywood. Although he had always wanted to write a novel, he has not had the will power to leave his easy job and devote himself to more meaningful writing.
Dan felt dwarfed, in his century, his personal being, his own art. The great picture seemed to denounce, almost to repel. Yet it lived, it was timeless, it spoke very directly, said all he had never managed to say and would never manage to say—even though, with the abruptness of that dash, he had hardly thought this before he saw himself saying the thought to the woman who would be waiting for him on the platform at Oxford that evening; telling her also what had gone before, a girl and a past walking into winter trees, knowing she would understand. He had lied a little to Jenny, to make it easier for her. But that was his secret now, his shared private mystery; which left him with the imagining of the real and the realizing of the imagined. Standing there before the Rembrandt, he experienced a kind of vertigo: the distances he had to return. It seemed frightening to him, this last of the coincidences that had dogged his recent life; to have encountered, so punctually after a farewell to many more things than one face, one choice, one future, this formidable sentinel guarding the way back.
Dan finds solace in the portrait. He must make the necessary decisions and he must choose his path for the right reasons.
He could see only one consolation in those remorseless and aloof Dutch eyes. It is not finally a matter of skill, of knowledge, of intellect; of good luck or bad; but of choosing and learning to feel. Dan began at last to detect it behind the surface of the painting; behind the sternness lay the declaration of the one true marriage in the mind mankind is allowed, the ultimate citadel of humanism. No true compassion without will, no true will without compassion.
Daniel Martin found much to see in the portrait (Horlacher, 2018, Vieth, 1991). So, we presume, did John Fowles, since much of the novel is based on his personal experience. Other viewers may find other messages in the portrait, depending on the context their own lives. The great genius of Rembrandt’s self-portraits is their ability to communicate to us what we need to know.
An Infinite Regress
In a review of some of Rembrandt’s portraits, T. J. Clark (2014) remarked that
what we are looking at in a self-portrait is the image a painter saw in a mirror. It seems to follow that the kind of attention we are shown is special, not to say exotic: the look of someone looking is at himself looking. The trouble is that we can only decide where to put an end to that final phrase by pure fiat.
The end of this infinite regress might come when we become part of the looking, share some part of the artist’s self, see some part of ourselves in the image, and come face to face with Rembrandt.
A Lifetime of Self-Portraits
We do not know why Rembrandt painted so many self-portraits. Susan Osmond (2000) considered various reasons: as an exercise in representing faces and their emotions, in response to a demand from patrons for images of the famous artist, and to try out for himself a new persona. She concluded
Perhaps, knowing all too well that a single portrait can convey only certain selected aspects of a person at a particular point in his life, he wanted, as an artist, to take at least one subject through a lifetime, and the one he could explore most intimately was himself. Every painting has to have some unifying mood or theme, so in this respect Rembrandt had to approach each self-portrait with some sort of “programme,” but this does not rule out self-searching and examination in the process. It only limits its scope – and that probably left the artist hankering for more. In his early years, he likely knew that using himself as a model for tronies would help his face become a household item and increase his reputation. As time went on, while a ready market remained for his self-portrayals, his internal motivation may have altered or at least broadened. At times, he used the self-portrait as a forum to broadcast a persona. At others, in showing himself playing a role such as the prodigal son, a potentate, or an artist of the past, he could by allusion make comments about aspects of his inner state or his status in the flow of history. In most of the late works, contemplation of himself as an individual and as a representative of humanity seems to have played a major part.
Horlacher, S. (2018). “The sad, proud old man stared eternally out of his canvas…”: media criticism, scopic regimes and the function of Rembrandt’s “Self-Portrait with Two Circles” in John Fowles’s novel Daniel Martin. Anglia, 136(4), 705–732.
Porter, J. C. (1988). Rembrandt and his circles: self portrait at Kenwood House. In Fleischer, R. E., & Scott, S. C. (Eds) The Age of Rembrandt: studies in seventeenth-century Dutch painting. (pp 188-212). Pennsylvania State University.
Rosenberg, J. (1964). Rembrandt: life and work. Phaidon.
Rudd, N. (2021). The self-portrait. Thames & Hudson.
Schwartz, F. (1989). The motions of the countenance: Rembrandt’s early portraits and the tronie. RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 17/18, 89-116.
Vieth, L. S. (1991). The re-humanization of art: pictorial aesthetics in John Fowles’s “The Ebony Tower” and “Daniel Martin.” Modern Fiction Studies, 37(2), 217–233.
White, C. (2022). Rembrandt (3rd edition). Thames & Hudson Ltd.
White, C., & Buvelot, Q. (1999). Rembrandt by himself. National Gallery Publications
