Ezra Pound (1885-1972) came to London in the summer of 1908. He cobbled together a living as a reviewer and editor for magazines such as The New Age and Poetry. He served as the midwife for modernism by arranging the publication of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.). Sometimes charming, sometimes arrogant, Pound antagonized many of his colleagues in both England the America. His Homage to Sextus Propertius, a set of poems based on the work of the Latin poet, published in Poetry 1918, was panned. Pound left for Europe in the spring of 1921. His publication of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) served as his farewell to London. The illustration shows a photographic portrait by E. O. Hoppé taken in 1918 and published in 1920.

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

The book was published in a limited edition of 200 copies by the Ovid Press, founded by the Jewish poet and printer John Rodker in 1919. Though only active for about three years, the press published T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and James Joyce. The book was elegantly printed with each poem preceded by abstract drop caps designed by Edward Wadsworth. The following illustration shows the beginnings of the first two poems:

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley was reprinted in the 1923 edition of Personae and then again in 1958 together with Homage to Sextus Propertius in Diptych Rome-London. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is divided in two, the first part containing 12 poems and the second 5, with an Envoi separating the two. The full text is available at Wikisource. This post, which will comment on some of the poems, is much indebted to the work of Espey (1955), Berryman (1983), and Ruthven (2020, pp 125-147). Pound was intelligent, fluent in several languages and widely read. He assumed his readers knew as much as he did, and failed to understand why they did not appreciate the significance of his work, which, though sometimes achingly beautiful, was often intractably obscure.

 

Ode pour l’élection de son sepulchre

The first poem in the book is Pound’s proposal for his own epitaph. Its title comes from a long poem by Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585), wherein he asks not to be memorialized by a marble tomb but to be buried in the nature that he loved. A short excerpt together with a translation by Curtis Page (1903) that uses rhyme but loses much of the sense:

Pound’s poetry was nothing like Ronsard’s (and even less like that of Page). He tried to write poetry that conveyed the truth of his time. He failed. He therefore requests an epitaph that recognizes his defeat. From the last stanza we learn that this poem is dated to the poet’s 30^th year. In a subsequent revision he changed this to the 31^st. This would then be 1916, the date when Pound published Lustra.

For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime”
In the old sense. Wrong from the start –

No, hardly, but, seeing he had been born
In a half savage country, out of date;
Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;
Capaneus; trout for factitious bait:

ἴδμεν γάρ τοι πάνθ᾽ ὅσ᾽ ἐνὶ Τροίῃ
Caught in the unstopped ear;
Giving the rocks small lee-way
The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year.

His true Penelope was Flaubert,
He fished by obstinate isles;
Observed the elegance of Circe’s hair
Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials.

Unaffected by “the march of events”,
He passed from men’s memory in l’an trentiesme
De son eage; the case presents
No adjunct to the Muses’ diadem.

The following is Pound’s recitation of the poem from a recording made at Harvard University in 1939:

The notion in the first stanza that Pound had tried “to resuscitate the dead art of poetry” alludes to Dante’s Ma qui la morta poesì resurga, (Purgatorio I, 7, 1321). In the last stanza, Pound quotes from the Testament (1461) of François Villon, a comic poem that serves, like Ronsard’s Ode, as the poet’s will. Pound felt victimized by society, in much the same way as the medieval poet. In 1923, Pound wrote a short opera based on Villon’s poem.

The second stanza refers to Capaneus, one of the “Seven Against Thebes.” A giant with immense strength, he claimed that even Zeus could not defeat him. Nevertheless, he was killed by a divine thunderbolt as he stormed the walls of Thebes. Pound shared his defiance.

The Greek quotation that begins the third stanza (transliterated as ídmen gár toi pánth᾽ ós᾽ ení Troíē refers to Homer’s rendition of the song of the sirens in the Odyssey XII: 189: “For we know all the suffering that was endured on the plains of Troy.” The next stanza refers to characters in the Odyssey: Penelope and Circe. Pound had begun to consider himself as a modern Odysseus. In 1917 published the first three parts of what were to become his life work: The Cantos. His idea was to create a sequence of modern poems that covered everything we understood about life, much like the Dante’s Divine Comedy. He later abandoned these “ur Cantos,” and began the project again with an episode from the Odyssey that had originally formed part of the original third canto. He then published A Draft of XVI Cantos in 1925.

This first poem of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is intriguing for its bilingual rhymes: Τροίῃ and leeway, Flaubert and hair, trentiesme and diadem.

Exactly who is speaking in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is not easy to determine (Bush, 1990; Wong, 2000). Pound created Mauberley as a persona separate from himself. In the first poem of the book this writer provides a eulogy for the poet E.P., who we can only assume was the youthful and idealistic Ezra Pound, who “died” unappreciated in 1916. In the first part of the book Mauberley then goes on to consider the state of literary London after that death. Lacking the emotional energy of the young E.P., Mauberley speaks in a detached manner. Occasionally the mask slips.

The second poem in the sequence tries to explain Pound’s failure as a result of the public’s taste rather than the artist’s lack of talent:

The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!

The “age demanded” chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the “sculpture” of rhyme.

The following is Pound’s recitation of this poem recorded in Washington in 1958:

By “the classics in paraphrase” Pound is referring to his versions of the poems of Propertius in Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919). Pound had attempted to convey the meaning of the poems rather than providing an exact translation. He had done the same with his translations from Chinese in Cathay (1915) but there were no pedantic Chinese scholars to criticize those poems.

In the third stanza, Pound distinguishes between statues made by means of plaster moulds from those sculpted from stone or alabaster. He likens prose to the cinema. For someone whose motto became Make it New (1934), he was decidedly antagonistic to new art forms. Ruthven (2020, p 130) quotes him as claiming “The Cinema is not art” in 1918.

 

There died a myriad

The most devastating event of Pound’s sojourn in London was World War I. Pound was acutely aware of the lives wasted by this terrible war. Pound’s friend Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who had sculpted a striking Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound in 1914, was killed in action in June 1915. Pound published a book on the sculptor’s works and thoughts in 1916: Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir. The following illustration shows a 1909 self-portrait of Gaudier-Brzeska and his sculpted portrait of Pound:

The fourth and fifth poems in the initial section of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley provide an elegy for the young men who died in World War I. These remarkably moving poems are the most memorable of the whole book. So much so that one can forget how well written they are.

IV

These fought, in any case,
and some believing, pro domo, in any case ..

Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later …

some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some pro patria, non dulce non et decor …

walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;

usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
Fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before

frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.

V.

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.

The following is Pound’s recitation of these poems, recorded in Washington in 1958:

The initial part of poem IV bases both its rhythm and its sense on the Lament for Adonis (around 100 BCE) by Bion of Smyrna (Espey, 1955, p 44). Near the end of the lament, the Loves pay tribute to the dead Adonis:

This flung upon him arrows,
that a bow, this a feather, that a quiver.
One hath done off Adonis’ shoe,
others fetch water in a golden basin,
another washes the thighs of him,
and again another stands behind and fans him with his wings.

Pound quotes from Horace Ode III: 2: 13: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (Sweet and fitting is it to die for fatherland). There was nothing sweet or fitting about death in the trenches of World War I. He also used the Latin phrase pro domo (for the home) as one of the reasons that the soldiers went to war. Latin made everything seem necessary.

Pound points to two main forces that led to the catastrophe of World War I: usury and lies. This is the first mention of “usury” in Pound’s poetry. He had become convinced by the economic writings of Clifford Hugh Douglas (1879-1952) that endeavors financed by interest-bearing loans cannot lead to anything new or good because banks will not risk take risks with their investments (see Kenner, 1971, pp 301-317). Far better for endeavors to be financed by the government by means of “social credit.” Pound later became fixated on the idea of usury as leading to the downfall of civilization, for example in his Canto XLV (1937)

Almost like an ancient prophet, Pound foresees the collapse of the British Empire using the powerful consonance of “bitch” and “botch.” However, the empire persisted between the wars, finally falling into pieces after World War II.

And what did these young men die for? Ruthven (2020, p 133) suggests that the last two lines of the fifth poem indicate

The bric-à-brac of an ancient and once vital tradition: but the civilization these men have died for is little more than a museum of shabby objets d’art.

The following is a different interpretation from Tearle (2019, p 65):

If ‘statues’ and ‘books’ are meant to be read as metonymic stand-ins for ‘art’ or ‘culture’ more generally, then our response to these lines is likely to be mixed. Does Pound think art is worth dying for, or not? Th e men who gave their lives in the First World War were not, aft er all, dying merely to defend the cheapened modern art which Pound’s poem laments, but all art of all ages. And ‘broken statues’ and ‘battered books’ hardly sound like modern art, but classical art that has been allowed to fall into ruin. In other words, Pound’s lines cast the soldiers as men defending something which the populace could not even be bothered to maintain, but which the artistic champion in him felt was worth dying for. Th e men who had sent Pound’s generation off to war had also been those who had allowed several thousand years of Western culture to fall into decline.

Envoi

After the memorial to those who died in the war, Pound presents several satirical portraits of people he had met during his time in London. Despite occasionally beautiful lines, they are for the most part not worth reading. But then, Pound inserts a poem entitled Envoi to mark the end of the first part of his book. An “envoi” (from envoyer, send) is a writer’s farewell message to the reader. It began in French medieval poetry and was famously used at the end of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c 1385), The following is Chaucer’s Middle English and a modern translation. He hopes that God will allow him to write a comedy now that his tragedy is finished:

Pound bids his book farewell, believing it has nothing to say, but that it has born witness to the beautiful. The following is the text and a recitation by Pound from his 1939 recording at Harvard University:

Go, dumb-born book,
Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes:
Hadst thou but song
As thou hast subjects known,
Then were there cause in thee that should condone
Even my faults that heavy upon me lie
And build her glories their longevity.

Tell her that sheds
Such treasure in the air,
Recking naught else but that her graces give
Life to the moment,
I would bid them live
As roses might, in magic amber laid,
Red overwrought with orange and all made
One substance and one colour
Braving time.

Tell her that goes
With song upon her lips
But sings not out the song, nor knows
The maker of it, some other mouth,
May be as fair as hers,
Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers,
When our two dusts with Waller’s shall be laid,
Siftings on siftings in oblivion,
Till change hath broken down
All things save Beauty alone.

Pound is describing his experience hearing the young soprano Raymonde Collignon singing Go Lovely Rose (Berryman, 1983, pp 141-143; Hesse, 1981). This is a musical setting by Henry Lawes (1596-1662) of a poem by Edmund Waller (1606-1687). The following is the poem

Go, lovely rose!
Tell her that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.

Tell her that’s young,
And shuns to have her graces spied,
That hadst thou sprung
In deserts, where no men abide,
Thou must have uncommended died.

Small is the worth
Of beauty from the light retired;
Bid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desired,
And not blush so to be admired.

Then die! that she
The common fate of all things rare
May read in thee;
How small a part of time they share
That are so wondrous sweet and fair!

And this is a modern performance by Ellen Hargis accompanied by Paul O’Dette on lute

In the Envoi, the persona of Mauberley appears to conclude his comments on literary London by quoting a poem from the now-dead poet E.P.

This is one place where there is no doubt who is speaking. It is Pound himself, suddenly stepping from behind the wavering figure of Mauberley and all the veils of irony, to speak out personally, even confessionally, into a situation which he had seemed to contrive just so as not to speak in his own person at all. This wonderfully dramatic moment is signalized by the sudden appearance of a wholly unexpected metre and style, flowing, plangent, and cantabile, so wholly traditional in every respect that the voice of the poet seems to be the anonymous voice of the tradition of English song. (Davie, 1967, p 325)

Pound hopes that his book description of the singer’s grace might somehow excuse its writer’s faults and make the singing long remembered. Then he imagines he might fix the rose in amber so that it might never fade or die. And finally, he notes that though singer and poet will pass away, the beauty of the song will not.

 

Mauberley

Part II of the book is entitled Mauberley (1920). If the reader has had problems knowing what persona is present the poems of the Part I, he will almost certainly be completely lost in Part II. The poems in this section are perhaps best interpreted as the work of a poet who, after suffering critical rejection, has changed his style so that it no longer suffers from his youthful enthusiasms. However, this has caused the poems to become so cryptic as to almost unintelligible: outlines without color or shape. The following is the first poem:

Turned from the “eau-forte
Par Jaquemart”
To the strait head
Of Messalina:

“His true Penelope
Was Flaubert”,
And his tool
The engraver’s

Firmness,
Not the full smile,
His art, but an art
In profile;

Colourless
Pier Francesca,
Pisanello lacking the skill
To forge Achaia.

The following is a recitation by Pound from his 1939 recording at Harvard University:

Scholars agree that the fist two lines refer to the etching by Jules Jacquemart (1837–1880) that serves as a frontispiece to the book Émaux et Camées (Enamels and Cameos) by Théophile Gautier (1811-1872). Gautier wrote in a precise and unsentimental manner, The title of Gautier’s book indicates the author’s preference for the skill of a craftsman creating objets d’art to the excesses of the Romantics and their grand themes. The brief lines in the first poem in this Mauberley section are similar to those in Gautier’s poem L’Art (Espey, 1955, pp 45-46), the last four quatrains (with my loose translations) of which are:

However, no one is certain what Pound meant by the “strait head of Messalina.” Pound appears to have had in mind some portrait of Messalina (17-48 CE), the third wife of the emperor Claudius. Much younger than her husband she was rumored to have satisfied her desires by working clandestinely in a Roman brothel. Berryman (1977) suggested that Pound might have been referring to etchings of a bust of Messalina in the Louvre or of a head in Munich as presented in Bernoulli’s Römische Ikonographie (pp 188, 193). Moody (2007, p 383) proposed Aubrey Beardsley’s stark black-and-white 1895 etching of Messalina Returning Home (from the brothel) (Wilson, 2020). The various candidate etchings are shown below. Neither interpretation makes much sense, other than that the Messalina etchings are outlines without shading. Perhaps Pound is indicating that the poet Mauberley, chastised for his youthful excesses, has now drained his work of any form. This fits with the final stanza wherein he likens his new art to Piero della Francesca without the color, or Pisanello without the talent that let him make medallions as fine as those from ancient Greece (Achaia).  

The following is a 1447 medallion of Pisanello showing s portrait of Cecilia Gonzaga, the daughter of Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, Marquess of Mantua, on one side, and a representation of a virgin taming a unicorn on the obverse:

Luini in porcelain

The poems in Part II, cryptic and allusive, cannot be understood without access to scholarly annotations. The final poem recalls the description of Raymonde Collignon singing Go Lovely Rose in the Envoi that separates the two parts of the book. This final poem describes the singer rather than the song. Mauberley imagines the singer as a small porcelain medallion, perhaps like one of Gautier’s cameos, or one of Pisanello’s bronzes:

Luini in porcelain!
The grand piano
Utters a profane
Protest with her clear soprano.

The sleek head emerges
From the gold-yellow frock
As Anadyomene in the opening
Pages of Reinach.

Honey-red, closing the face-oval,
A basket-work of braids which seem as if they were
Spun in King Minos’ hall
From metal, or intractable amber;

The face-oval beneath the glaze,
Bright in its suave bounding-line, as,
Beneath half-watt rays,
The eyes turn topaz.

The poem likens the singer to a painting by Bernardino Luini (1480-1532) who worked with Leonardo da Vinci. Pound is likely referring to his painting Head of a Girl in the Wallace Collection (Berryman, 1977, p 299). This was part of a set of frescos in Villa La Pelucca near Milan (about1523) which were transferred to canvas in 1822.

Pound also compares the singer to Venus Anadyomene (rising from the sea), a name for Aphrodite (which may derive from aphros, sea foam”), the  goddess of love. In particular, to a sculpted head of Venus in the Leconfield Collection (Petworth House), illustrated as Plate 83 in the art encyclopedia entitled Apollo (1904) compiled by Solomon Reinach (Berryman, 1977, p 301).

His final image is that of a fresco fragment from Minoan Crete, commonly called La Parisienne, also described in Reinach.

The following illustration shows these three heads, all of which have survived long beyond the age of their creation. All have intricately braided hair, as we must presume did Raymonde Collignon:

As described in a letter to the editor of Padieuma, the half-watt lamp was a special type of light bulb that gave a “warmer” lighting than the usual incandescent bulb. It would have highlighted the singer’s “topaz” eyes. Topaz is frequently yellow, but occasionally blue or even red.

Once one has understood the allusions, the poem has a cryptic beauty. However, it still pales before the description of the singing as presented in Envoi.

 

Exile

In early 1921, shortly after the publication of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Pound left for Europe. The journal The New Age bid him an ambiguous farewell:

Mr. Ezra Pound has recently gone abroad, perhaps for one year, perhaps for two, perhaps for good. Following the old and, in my opinion, the bad example first set by a man of letters, Landor, Mr. Pound has shaken the dust of London from his feet with not too. emphatic a gesture of disgust, but, at least, without gratitude to this country. I can perfectly well understand, even if I find it difficult to approve. Mr. Pound has been an exhilarating influence for culture in England; he has left his mark upon more than one of the arts, upon literature, music, poetry and sculpture; and quite a number of men and movements owe their initiation to his self-sacrificing stimulus; among them being relatively popular successes as well as failures. With all this, however, Mr. Pound, like so many others who have striven for the advancement of intelligence and culture in England, has made more enemies than friends, and far more powerful enemies than friends. Much of the Press has been deliberately closed by cabal to him; his books have for some time been ignored or written down; and he himself has been compelled to live on much less than would support a navvy. His fate, as I have said, is not unusual: I could parallel it near home and with more than one instance. Taken by and large, England hates men of culture until they are dead.

After two years in Paris, during which time he edited T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), Pound moved to Rapallo in Italy where he stayed in self-imposed exile. While in Rapallo, he resumed work on The Cantos, a sprawling poetic work that by his death had extended to some 117 poems, the last of which remain uncompleted.

A man of towering intellect and enviable talent, he fashioned for himself an ego that considered only himself. He wrote only in accord with his own judgment, and lost the feedback of his fellows. Becoming fascinated by the economics of C. H. Douglas, he began to attribute all the ills of the world to the Jews.

During World War II, he made propaganda broadcasts for the Italian government, denouncing the Allied Governments and the Jews (Casillo, 1988). After the war he was indicted for treason, but judged mentally unfit to stand trial. He spent 12 years in St Elizabeth’s Psychiatric Hospital in Washington, D.C. There was never any definite diagnosis for what was wrong with him (Torrey, 1984). After being released in 1958, he returned to Italy, where he lived until his death in 1972.

Despite the keenness of his mind and the tremendous breadth of his reading, he could not see clearly, could not communicate his ideas so that they could be easily understood, and could not abide by any criticism. He became exiled in himself. This process began with Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.

 

References

Bernoulli, J. J. (1886). Römische Ikonographie. Teil 2, Die Bildnisse der Römischen Kaiser, I. Das Julisch-Claudische Kaiserhaus. Verlag von W Speman.

Berryman, J. B. (1977). The art of the image: allusions in Pound’s “Medallion.” Paideuma, 6(3), 295–308.

Berryman, J. B. (1983). Circe’s craft: Ezra Pounds’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. UMI Research Press.

Bush, R. (1990). “It draws one to consider time wasted”: Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. American Literary History, 2(1), 56–78.

Casillo, R. (1988). The genealogy of demons: anti-Semitism, fascism, and the myths of Ezra Pound. Northwestern University Press.

Davie, D. (1967). Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. In Ford, B (Ed) The Pelican Guide to English Literature; Volume 7 The Modern Age. (pp 315-329).

Espey, J. J. (1955). Ezra Pound’s Mauberley: a study in composition. Faber and Faber.

Hesse, E. (1981). Raymonde Collignon, or (apropos Paideuma, 7-1&2, pp. 345-6): the duck that got away. Paideuma, 10(3), 583–584

Kenner, H. (1971). The Pound era. University of California Press.

Kotin, J. (2023). Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era: FAQ. nonsite website.

Moody, A. D. (2007). Ezra Pound: poet: a portrait of the man and his work. Volume I The young genius. Oxford University Press.

Pound, E. (1920). Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Ovid Press.

Pound, E. (1926). Personæ: the collected poems of Ezra Pound. James Laughlin.

Pound, E. (1958). Diptych Rome-London. Officina Bodoni (reprinted in 1994, New Directions).

Reinach, S. (1904). Apollo: histoire génerale des arts plastiques professée en 1902-1903 à l’École du Louvre. Librairie Hachette et Cie.  English translation

Ronsard, P. de (translated by Page, C. H., 1903). Songs & sonnets of Pierre de Ronsard, gentleman of Vendomois. Houghton Mifflin.

Ruthven, K. K. (2020). A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Personæ (1926). University of California Press.

Tearle, O. (2019). Battered books: Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. In The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem. (pp. 59–76). Bloomsbury Publishing.

Torrey, E. F. (1984). The roots of treason: Ezra Pound and the secret of St. Elizabeths. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Wong, K. A. (2000). Blurring of poet and persona in Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.” Paideuma, 29(3), 193–205.

Wilson, S. (2020). Aubrey Beardsley’s Messalina: going, or coming? Audrey Beardsley Society.

 

Robert Desnos (both ‘s’ pronounced, 1900-1945) was a Surrealist French poet. During World War II, after initially serving in the French army, Desnos became an active member of La Résistance. The illustration shows a photograph taken in 1943. On 22 February 1944, Desnos was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Auschwitz. From there he was transferred to the Flōha labor campe, and finally, in April 1945, to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. Though Theresienstadt was liberated on 8 May, Desnos died there of typhus on 8 June. Contrée (“Against the Grain”), a book of 25 poems celebrating the land of France and its resistance to oppression, was published in 1944.

Rrose Sélavy

In 1921, the young poet Robert Desnos met André Breton (1896-1966) and became an enthusiastic participant in the automatic writing sessions of the Surrealist Movement. During this time, he also became smitten with Rrose Sélavy, the altera ego of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). The name is a pun for Eros, c’est la vie (“love is life”), or arroser la vie (“give a toast to life”). In 1922, Desnos published under the title Rrose Sélavy multiple brief wordplays, puns and spoonerisms, supposedly dictated to him by Rrose while the poet slept (Conley, 2002, pp 15-44). Breton described them as “words making love” (les mots font l’amour) (Desnos, 1999, p 159).

The following are three of the wordplays: 

Rrose Sélavy voudrait bien savoir si l’amour, cette colle à couches, rend plus durs les molles couches [Rrose Sélavy would like to know if love is the fly-paper that hardens the soft foundation.]

La solution d’un sage est la pollution d’un page. [The solution of a sage is the pollution of a page. (page in the sense of both book-page and page-boy)]

Est-ce que la caresse des putains excuse la paresse des culs teints? [Does the whore’s caress excuse the laziness of dyed buttocks?]

The following illustration shows a photograph of Desnos by Man Ray (1925) and a painting by Georges Malkine (1928).

 

Desnos and Breton denounced each other in 1929. Desnos continued to write poetry though his days of automatic sleep-writing were over. During the 1930s many of his works were dedicated to the love of his life Youki (Lucie Badoud), who had been the muse and model for the Japanese artist Tsuguharu Fujita. Her nickname was the Japanese word for “snow.”

World War II

During the initial period of the war when very little happened – la drôle de guerre (phoney war) – Desnos enlisted in the army. When Germany invaded France in May 1940, he was captured, released, and then demobilised. He became a journalist at the newspaper Aujourd’hui, but continued to write poetry. Those poems that were more overtly anti-fascist were published clandestinely using pseudonyms. He participated in La Résistance by providing them with information secretly available to the newspaper, and arranging counterfeit papers for Jews and others sought by the occupying Germans. In February 1944, he was apparently betrayed by someone he had offended, and deported. The following illustration shows a photograph by Dora Maar taken in 1943, and an engraving portrait by Gaston Roux that was used for the volume État de veille (State of Alert) published by Robert Godet in 1943.

 

Contrée

Robert Godet published Contrée after Desnos was deported. The meaning of the title is complex. Both the French “contrée” and the English “country” derive from the Latin (terra) contrata which means “(the land) spread out before one.” In both languages the words came to mean the land around a town or city: rural rather than urban. In English, “country” was also used to denote the political entity that governs a defined region, a meaning that in French was taken by “pays.” The word “contrée” can also be the feminine past participle of the verb “contrer” meaning “act against” or “counter.” Adès (2017) translates this as “against the grain.” For Desnos “(la terre) contrée” suggests both the enduring land, and its rebellion against the current government.

The following illustration shows the etching of Dora Maar by Picasso that was included in the book, the title page, and then the first poem (La cascade). The etching shows a woman seated with her legs crossed on a chair made of books (Swan, 2017). The woman appears to be seen from both front and back; some have suggested that this double perspective might represent an embracing couple. Youki thought that the etching represented “a knight leaning on a stack of books” (Swan 2017, p 5). Picasso arranged for parts of the etching to be printed with each of the poems in the book. This may represent the desecration of the body of France by the Germans.

According to Conley (2003, p 124), Contrée contains one poem for every hour of the day and concludes with an epitaph. Although some of the poems are in free verse, most are formal in structure: nine poems are sonnets. Translations are difficult since one must find some compromise between form and meaning. Kulik (Desnos, 1984, 2004) uses free verse and finds exact meanings; Adès (2017) uses rhymes when Desnos does, albeit not always in the same order. The following sections present five of the poems from the book in the original French (Desnos, 1999; also Rimes website), and in the English translation of Timothy Adès (2017). Each poem is recited by Yvon Jean.  

 

La cascade

Quelle flèche a percé le ciel et le rocher?
Elle vibre. Elle étale, ainsi qu’un paon, sa queue
Ou, comme la comète à minuit vient nicher,
Le brouillard de sa tige et ses pennes sans noeuds.

Que surgisse le sang de la chair entr’ouverte,
Lèvres taisant déjà le murmure et le cri,
Un doigt posé suspend le temps et déconcerte
Le témoin dans les yeux duquel le fait s’inscrit.

Silence ? nous savons pourtant les mots de passe,
Sentinelles perdues loin des feux de bivouac
Nous sentirons monter dans les ténèbres basses
L’odeur du chèvrefeuille et celle du ressac.

Qu’enfin l’aube jaillisse à travers tes abîmes,
Distance, et rayon dessine sur les eaux,
Présage du retour de l’archer et des hymnes,
Un arc-en-ciel et son carquois plein de roseaux.

The following is a reading by Yvon Jean

 

The Waterfall

What arrow split the sky and pierced the rock?
Vibrant, it spreads its peacock tail and flaunts
Its blurry shaft and sleek unblemished flights,
The way the midnight comet finds its mark.

The flesh is opened. For the blood to rise,
While lips suppress the murmurs and the cries,
A finger bids time stop, pre-occupies
The witness who records it with his eyes.

Silence? And yet we know the passwords well.
We strayed from our camp-fires, we sentinels:
Drifting from shady corners we can smell
Salt surf aromas, honeysuckle smells.

Dawn bursts on far-off depths; a sunbeam limns
Upon the waves, at last, a sketch that leads
Back the returning archer and his hymns:
A rainbow, with its quiver full of reeds.

This poem, the first in the collection, seems on the surface to be like the love poems of the French Renaissance, wherein the lover sought to capture his beloved with the arrows of desire. However, the poem describes “the political pursuit of armed Resistance fighters hidden in the landscape of France” (Conley, 2003, p 131). Near a waterfall someone has been wounded, blood flows, passwords are given, and eventually the maquisards returns to their hideout and dawn arrives. The imagery for the waterfall is striking: the waterfall is likened to the tale of a peacock or a comet. Because of Desnos’ love of wordplay, one must wonder whether the word paon should recall païen meaning “pagan” – one who does not follow the established faith.

 

Le paysage

J’avais rêvé d’aimer. J’aime encor mais l’amour
Ce n’est plus ce bouquet de lilas et de roses
Chargeant de leurs parfums la forêt où repose
Une flamme à l’issue de sentiers sans détour.

J’avais rêvé d’aimer. J’aime encor mais l’amour
Ce n’est plus cet orage où l’éclair superpose
Ses bûchers aux châteaux, déroute, décompose,
Illumine en fuyant l’adieu au carrefour.

C’est le silex en feu sous mon pas dans la nuit,
Le mot qu’aucun lexique au monde n’a traduit
L’écume sur la mer, dans le ciel ce nuage.

À vieillir tout devient rigide et lumineux,
Des boulevards sans noms et des cordes sans noeuds.
Je me sens me roidir avec le paysage.

The following is a reading by Yvon Jean

 

The Countryside

I dreamed of loving. Still I love, but now
Love is no more that rose and lilac spray
Whose perfume filled the woods where each pathway
Led on directly to the blazing glow

I dreamed of loving. Still I love, but now
Love’s not that storm whose lightning kindled high
Towers, unhorsed, unhinged, and fleetingly
Would set the parting of the ways aglow.

Love is the flint my footstep sparks at night,
The word no lexicon can render right,
Foam of the sea, the cloud across the sky.

Old age makes all things fixed and luminous:
Knots are unravelled, streets anonymous;
Set in our ways, the countryside and I.

The countryside of Contrée stands in ironic contrast to that espoused by Vichy propaganda. Conley (200 3, p 1260 remarks

Under Pétain liberty, equality, and fraternity became outmoded concepts replaced with the moralizing, hierarchical values of work, family, and the notion of a mythical homeland led by the patriarchal Marshal.

Desnos remembers the springtime of his life when love blossomed, and the stormy time that followed when the war began. Now the country has hardened into resistance. Love still exists but it is now the flint that attempts to ignite rebellion.

 

La peste

Dans la rue un pas retentit. La cloche n’a qu’un seul
battant. Où va-t-il le promeneur qui se rapproche
lentement et s’arrête par instant? Le voici devant
la maison. J’entends son souffle derrière la porte.

Je vois le ciel à travers la vitre. Je vois le ciel où les
astres roulent sur l’arête des toits. C’est la grande
Ourse ou Bételgeuse, c’est Vénus au ventre blanc, c’est
Diane qui dégrafe sa tunique près d’une fontaine de lumière.

Jamais lunes ni soleils ne roulèrent si loin de la
terre, jamais l’air de nuit ne fut si opaque et si
lourd. Je pèse sur ma porte qui résiste…

Elle s’ouvre enfin, son battant claque contre le
mur. Et tandis que le pas s’éloigne je déchiffre
sur une affiche jaune les lettres noires du mot « Peste ».

The following is a reading by Yvon Jean:

The Plague

In the road a footstep echoes. The bell has only one
clapper. Where’s he going, the walker, coming
slowly nearer and briefly stopping? Now he’s outside
the house. I hear him breathing behind the door.

I see the sky through the glass. I see the sky where the
stars run on the rooftops. It’s the great
Bear or Betelgeuse, it’s Venus the white-bellied,
it’s Diana unfastening her tunic near a fountain of light.

Never did moons or suns run so far from the
earth, never was the night air so dense and so
heavy. I lean on my door which resists…

It opens at last, it swings and knocks against the
wall. And while the footstep moves away I decipher
on a yellow poster the word in black letters, “Plague”

The poem is written in free verse with the line-endings arbitrarily placed between article and noun, adverb and adjective. The world is out of joint. Never were the heavens so far from the earth. An unseen walker labels the house wherein we live in terror as infested by the plague. The label is ambiguous. Does it represent the oppression of the occupiers or the paralyzing fear of the oppressed? On another level the yellow poster recalls the yellow star that French Jews were required to wear.

 

La voix

Une voix, une voix qui vient de si loin
Qu’elle ne fait plus tinter les oreilles,
Une voix, comme un tambour, voilée
Parvient pourtant, distinctement, jusqu’à nous.
Bien qu’elle semble sortir d’un tombeau
Elle ne parle que d’été et de printemps,
Elle emplit le corps de joie,
Elle allume aux lèvres le sourire.

Je l’écoute. Ce n’est qu’une voix humaine
Qui traverse les fracas de la vie et des batailles,
L’écroulement du tonnerre et le murmure des bavardages.

Et vous ? Ne l’entendez-vous pas?
Elle dit « La peine sera de courte durée »
Elle dit « La belle saison est proche ».

Ne l’entendez-vous pas?

The following is a reading by Yvon Jean

 

The Voice

A voice, a voice coming from so far away
That it no longer rings in the ears,
A voice, like a drumbeat, muffled
Reaches us even so, distinctly.
Though it seems to issue from a tomb
It speaks only of summer and spring,
It fills the body with joy,
It kindles a smile on the lips.

I’m listening. It’s only a human voice
Coming across the din of life and of battles,
The crash of thunder and the babble of talk.

What about you? Don’t you hear it?
It says “The pain will be short-lived”
It says “The beautiful season is near”.

Don’t you hear it?

This poem is a poem of hope. In the noise of battle and the babble of talk, a voice promises that beauty will return. The voice is not loud, it is like the “still small voice” of God who promised Elijah that Israel would be delivered from its oppressors (1 Kings 19: 12).

 

L’épitaphe

J’ai vécu dans ces temps et depuis mille années
Je suis mort. Je vivais, non déchu mais traqué.
Toute noblesse humaine étant emprisonnée
J’étais libre parmi les esclaves masqués.

J’ai vécu dans ces temps et pourtant j’étais libre.
Je regardais le fleuve et la terre et le ciel
Tourner autour de moi, garder leur équilibre
Et les saisons fournir leurs oiseaux et leur miel.

Vous qui vivez qu’avez-vous fait de ces fortunes ?
Regrettez-vous les temps où je me débattais ?
Avez-vous cultivé pour des moissons communes ?
Avez-vous enrichi la ville où j’habitais ?

Vivants, ne craignez rien de moi, car je suis mort.
Rien ne survit de mon esprit ni de mon corps.

The following is a reading by Yvon Jean:

 

The Epitaph

I’ve lived today, and since antiquity
Been dead. I lived intact, but I was prey.
Man’s nobler side was jailed and put away;
Among the slaves in face-masks, I was free.

I’ve lived today, and nonetheless been free.
I watched the river and the earth and sky
Turn round me, and they kept their harmony;
Honey and birds, a seasonal supply.

How did you use these gifts, you there alive?
Did you misuse the days I spent in toil?
Did you make common cause and till the soil
To harvest? Did you make my city thrive?

Don’t fear me, you who live: I’m dead and gone:
Not soul nor body, nothing lingers on.

The sense of the poem stems from the ideas of mortality of the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BC), epitomized in the Latin epitaph used by many of his followers:

Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo (I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care).

Desnos agrees that today he lives, that before that was dead, and that after he dies nothing will remain. He cares not for before or after but concentrates on today. Despite the awfulness of the time into which he was born, he strives to remain free and to live in harmony with the world. He asks his readers if they using their talents for the common good or resigning themselves to servitude. The meaning of the poem is encapsulated in the line

J’ai vécu dans ces temps et pourtant j’étais libre

 

Imprisonment and Death

After his arrest and interrogation by the Gestapo in February, 1943, Desnos was sent to the transit camp in Compiègne. Youki visited him there and provided him with a care package. However, in April, Desnos and 1700 other prisoners were sent on to Auschwitz. From there, he was transferred to Buchenwald and then in May to the Flossenbūrg  concentration camp in Bavaria. Soon after his arrival Desnos was transferred to the Flōha sub-camp for where he worked for 11 months (Humphreys, 2002). During his stay there he wrote a few last poems usually at the request of his co-prisoners. On 14 April 1945, as the Allied Forces advanced into Germany, SS leader Heinrich Himmler ordered all concentration camps to be closed. After a forced march, Desnos arrived in Theresienstadt (Terezin) in Czechoslvakia on May 7. Germany surrendered on May 8, and all the guards left the camp at Theresienstadt. A period of chaos and starvation ensued. On June 4 a French-speaking Czech medical student Josef Stuna, assigned to help at the camp recognized Desnos. They talked about poetry, but Desnos was terribly sick with typhus, and died on June 8. The following photograph shows Desnos in a group of prisoners at Theresienstadt. He is in the center, leaning on the shoulder of a companion dressed in a black coat.

 

Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation

In 1962 a memorial to the 200,000 people who died in concentration camps after being deported from France during World War II was constructed behind the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris on the eastern tip of Île de la Cité. The memorial, designed by Georges-Henri Pingusson, has an entrance is marked by two concrete blocks. Inside is the tomb of an unknown deportee. Along both walls of a narrow chamber leading underground are 200,000 crystals meant to symbolize each of the deportees who died in the concentration camps. The actual numbers were less than 200,000.  Among those deported were 75,000 Jews; of these only about 2,500 survived. Of the 88,000 deported on political rather than racial grounds, about 53,000 survived (Wieviorka, 2016, p 417). On the walls inside the memorial are brief quotations from several French writers: Paul Élard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Robert Desnos. The following illustration shows the memorial and the two quotations from Desnos:

The first quotation is from the ending of a poem published in 1944:

Car ces cœurs qui haïssaient la guerre battaient pour la liberté au rythme même des saisons et des marées, du jour et de la nuit.

For these hearts that hated war were beating for liberty to the very rhythm of the seasons, the tides, day and night.  (Adès translation).

The second quotation came from what was incorrectly assumed to be his last poem (Conley, 2003, pp 203-207; Desnos/Adès, 2017, p 93). This was quoted in Czech in a brief article in a Czech newspaper on 1 July 1945 that announced the death of the French poet at Theresienstadt. Translated back into French the poem read

J’ai rêvé tellement fort de toi,
J’ai tellement marché, tellement parlé,
Tellement aimé ton ombre,
Qu’il ne me reste plus rien de toi.

Il me reste d’être l’ombre entre les ombres,
L’ombre qui viendra et reviendra
Dans ta vie ensoleillée.

The poem was thought to be addressed to France. However, the lines actually came from a 1926 prose poem that Desnos wrote for his love at the time: the singer Yvonne George

J’ai tant rêvé de toi, tant marché, parlé, couché avec ton fantôme qu’il ne me reste plus peut-être, et pourtant, qu’à être fantôme parmi les fantômes et plus ombre cent fois que l’ombre qui se promène et se promènera allégrement sur le cadran solaire de ta vie. 

I’ve dreamed of you so much, walked, talked, slept with your phantom so much that all that’s left to me perhaps, is to be a phantom among phantoms and a hundred times more shadowy than that shadow walking in joy, now and in time to come, across the sun-dial of your life. (Adès translation).

 

Springtime

Desnos’ real ‘last poem,’ written on 6 April 1944 in the Flossenbūrg camp (Desnos/Dumas, 1999, p 1259; Desnos/Adès, 2017, pp 512-513) was:

Printemps

Tu, Rrose Sélavy, hors de ces bornes erres
Dans un printemps en proie aux sueurs de l’amour,
Aux parfums de la rose éclose aux murs des tours,
à la fermentation des eaux et de la terre.

Sanglant, la rose au flanc, le danseur, corps de pierre
Paraît sur le théâtre au milieu des labours.
Un peuple de muets d’aveugles et de sourds
applaudira sa danse et sa mort printanière.

C’est dit. Mais la parole inscrite dans la suie
S’efface au gré des vents sous les doigts de la pluie
Pourtant nous l’entendons et lui obéissons.

Au lavoir où l’eau coule un nuage simule
À la fois le savon, la tempête et recule
l’instant où le soleil fleurira les buissons.

The following is a reading by Yvon Jean

Springtime

Rrose Sélavy, beyond these bounds you stray.
Meanwhile the waters and the earth ferment;
The rose on fortress-walls pours out its scent;
Love has its sweats and springtime is their prey.
 
The rose has torn the stone-limbed dancer’s side.
While others plough and sow, he treads the boards.
The public, blind and deaf and dumb, applauds
This rite of spring, when he has danced and died.
 
The word that’s writ in soot is wiped away
At the wind’s whim by fingers of the rain.
Nevertheless we hear it and obey.
 
Down at the wash-place where these waters run,
A cloud portrays both soap and hurricane,
Retreating when the thickets bloom in sun.
(Adès translation).

The poem hearkens back to the days of his youth when Desnos was in love with words and with Rrose Sélavy, and looks forward to the days when spring would dispel the darkness that was Europe during the Nazi era. Desnos was forever the optimist. He used to read the palms of his co-prisoners and he would always find happiness in their futures (Desnos/Caws, 2007, p 1280). An apocryphal story is that he read the palms of a group of prisoners slated for the gas chambers and that his description of their future lives so confused the guards that the prisoners were not executed.

 

References:

Poems and translations

Desnos, R. (translated by Forché, C., & Kulik, W. T., 1991). The selected poems of Robert Desnos. Ecco Press.

Desnos, R. (translated by Kulik, W, 1994). Contré = Country: twenty-five poems. Windhover Press (University of Iowa).

Desnos, R. (edited by Dumas, M.-C., 1999). Œuvres. Gallimard.

Desnos, R. (translated by Kulik, W, 2004). The voice of Robert Desnos: selected poems. Sheep Meadow Press.

Desnos, R. (edited by Caws, M. A., 2007) Essential poems and writings of Robert Desnos. Black Widow Press

Desnos, R. (translated by Adès, T., 2017). Robert Desnos: Surrealist, Lover, Resistant: collected poems. Arc Publications.

 Others

Conley, K. (2003). Robert Desnos, surrealism, and the marvelous in everyday life. University of Nebraska Press.

Humphreys, K. (2002). Robert Desnos. In Leroux, J.-F. (Ed.) Modern French poets. (Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 258). Gale

Kulik, W. (1990). On Desnos. The American Poetry Review, 19(3), 29-31.

Swan, R. (2019). Contrée: Picasso’s visual fragmented tailpieces emphasise the poetry of Robert Desnos. Knowledge Commons.

Wieviorka, O. (translated by J. M. Todd, 2016). The French Resistance. Harvard University Press.

Chinese calligraphy began over 3000 years ago. Over the years several distinct styles of writing evolved: oracle, bronze, seal, clerical, regular, semi-cursive (running) and cursive (grass). The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) overturned the respect shown to these traditional modes. However, calligraphy flourished in the format of the big-character posters (大字报, dàzì bào). In the years following the revolution, Chinese calligraphy became more abstract. One of the most important modern calligraphers is Wang Dongling (王冬龄). Among his many achievements is a new writing style that he calls “chaos script” 亂書 luànshū.

A Calligrapher’s Life

Wang Dongling was born in 1946 in Rudong about 175 km north of Shanghai. He studied fine arts in Nanjing, graduating in 1966 in time for the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. He was able to survive through this upheaval by creating big-character posters, an experience which gave him a fearful sense of freedom. He was intrigued by the traditional calligraphy that was being trashed by the revolutionaries, and in 1968 began to study with Lin Zanshi (1898-1989) in Wujiang just east of Shanghai (Barrass, 2002, p 164). This grand old calligrapher, a master of the cursive script, was known for his “iron line.” Lin survived the purges by providing calligraphy for the propaganda of the party and the poetry of Mao Zedong. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, Wang enrolled in the Zhejiang Academy of Art (now the National Academy of Art) in Hangzhou, where he studied with Lu Weizhao (1899-1980) and Sha Menghai (1900-1992). After graduating from the academy, he spent some time as a visiting fellow at the University of Minnesota and at the University of California at Santa Cruz in the United Sates. He is presently a Professor of Calligraphy at the National Academy of Art in Hangzhou.

 

Influences

The following illustration shows calligraphy by two of his teachers: Lin Zanshi on the right and Sha Menghai on the left. Lin Zanshi wrote out the poem Going up the Hill by the Tang poet Du Mu (803–852) in 1975 using his iron line. The poem reads (Barrass, 2002, p 142)

A slanting stony path rises far up the chilly hill
To where men live amidst the fleecy clouds
I stop my carriage to admire the maple grove at dusk,
Where frozen leaves are redder than the flowers of early spring.

In the 1980s, Sha Menghai wrote a poem about the view from his office in the Academy of Art (Barrass, 2002, p 138)

Red apricot blossom and pink butterflies can be seen over the wall
While outside the window there are green willows and yellow orioles
To best enjoy the spring breezes, join those who walk along
Su Dongpo’s causeway across the West Lake.

East-West Interactions

Wang was also influenced by Western abstract art. He developed a highly fluid calligraphy and combined that with the freedom of Western abstraction. The following is a work called 史記 (shǐ jì, History and Memory, 68 cm square) from 1990 (Hertel, 2016):

The black calligraphy provides a basic structure for the abstract ecstasy of the colors. Though very freely written, the calligraphy still has definite meaning.

Wang also promoted direct contact between Chinese calligraphy and Western culture (Hertel, 2016). The following illustration shows Chinese calligraphy on a Western background (1999). Wang has written the character for passion/feeling (感 gǎn) on a two-page spread from a German arts magazine and then repeated the calligraphy on an identical spread.

He then placed the two sheets side by side, but with the left-hand one turned upside down. His intention was to illustrate how ‘feeling’ becomes ‘passion’ when, for example, on is ‘head-over-heels’ in love. (Barrass, 2002, p 168).   

The following illustration shows another example of the interaction between East and West. In 2012, Wang wrote out the Heart Sutra on a magazine illustration (25 by 20 cm) of one of Edward Weston’s 1936 nude photographs of Charis Weston in the Oceano dunes (Iezzi, 2016). The juxtaposition is intriguing. The nude body was not a subject for Chinese artists. The main message of the Heart Sutra is that everything is “emptiness” (śūnyatā). Nothing that we perceive is real.

Large-Character Calligraphy

Wang was very adept at making large-character calligraphic works (大字书, dàzì shū). Unlike previous artists, he allowed the characters to overlap and to extend beyond the borders of the paper, and he let the ink to spread freely. The following illustration shows two large-character works (about 178 cm high) about flowers dancing from his 2013 exhibition.

The following illustration shows on the left a large work (272 by 142 cm) entitled The Void, about the nature of the Dao created by Wang in 2000 (Barrass, 2002, p 170). The background contains calligraphy of the first two chapters of the Daodejing, written in a style similar to the “iron line” of his teacher Lin Zanshi. In the center is the character that represents absence or nothingness (無, simplified 无, wú) written in a script based on the oracle script. The right section of the illustration shows the evolution of the character from ancient times.

The following is the Chinese text of the beginning of the first chapter of the Daodejing (Wikibooks) with a recent English translation by Fischer (2023). The character 無 begins the second line:

道可道，非常道。名可名，非常名。
無名天地之始；有名萬物之母。

The way that can be (fully) conveyed is not the abiding Way; a name that can be (fully) descriptive is not an abiding name.

“Formlessness” is the name of the beginning of Heaven and Earth; “form” is the name of the mother of the myriad things.

 

Photographic Experiments

Using photosensitive paper and calligraphy written upon transparencies, Wang (2013) was able to create impressive white on black creations. The following is a gelatin silver print (51 x 61 cm) of Love Cloud (爱雲)

The following is calligraphy on a photographic print (51 by 69 cm) composed of four separate views of a lotus pond (Wang Dongling, 2023): Li Shangyin – Newly Washed After the Rains, the Bamboo Dock is Transformed (李商隱 – 竹塢無塵水檻清, Zhú wù wú chén shuǐ kǎn qīng)

Chaos Script

Over recent years Wang has developed a fluid cursive script called chaos script (亂書 luànshū) that breaks all the rules of traditional calligraphy (Festi & Hou, 2023). In cursive script the characters may run into each other vertically. In chaos script the characters overlap both vertically and horizontally, and can extend beyond the edges of the paper. The calligraphy is created with a long-handled brush writing on paper laid out on the ground. The resultant work shows a slow alternation of dark and light as the ink intermittently dries in the brush and must be replenished. The following illustrations show the Heart Sutra as written in regular script by Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322 CE) and in chaos script in 2016 by Wang Dongling (Ferrell et al, 2026, p 126).

The following are comments by Wang on chaos script (Wang Dongling, 2016):

Chaos Script came about gradually, over a long process of creative practice. In Chaos Script, the strokes of cursive script overlap and interweave, creating what appears to be unreadable abstract images. But the execution of Chaos Script in fact still adheres to the rules of traditional calligraphy. It is not haphazard—it appears chaotic but is actually not so. I settled on the name of Chaos Script after some deliberation. Luan evokes disorder and mess, but it also implies zhi (“control,” “govern”)—after chaos comes control. In poetry, there is a famous line [by Bai Juyi (772-846)]: “Riotous blossoms [luanhua] gradually enchant the travelers’ vision.” Chaos has a feeling of nature.

Cahos calligraphy is as much related to painting as to writing. In an essay in the catalogue of Wang’s 2016 exhibition, Britta Erickson remarks

The closest comparison to Wang’s long cascades of intertwined lines that comes to mind are the vines painted by Wu Changshi 吴昌碩 (1844-1927), Professor Wang’s teacher’s teacher. One of the greatest calligraphers of the twentieth century, Wu Changshi employed calligraphic scripts in rendering natural forms. His loose, twisting renderings of vines brought together the artist’s understanding of nature, and of calligraphy, and he would allow the vines to be cropped by the paper’s edge, so that the viewer would then consider the wide spaces into which those vines stretched, beyond the frame of the painting. Wang Dongling’s Chaos Script similarly engages the mind to extrapolate beyond the paper’s edge to consider the breadth of the world into which his writing expands. The expanse can feel infinite.

The following illustration shows the transition from Wu Changshi on the left through Wang’s teacher Lu Weizhao (1899-1980) to Wang’s chaos script on the right.

Wu’s painting represents Wisteria. The inscription reads

The branches are messy and overflowing, [but] please do not chop off the vines!

The painting by Lu Weizhao depicts Bamboo and Rock (1962).

Wang’s example of chaos script is his 2019 calligraphy of the famous poem Quiet Night Thoughts by the Tang poet Li Bai (701-762):

床前明月光     Chuáng qián míngyuè guāng
疑是地上霜     Yí shì dìshang shuāng
舉頭望明月     Jǔtóu wàng míngyuè
低頭思故鄉     Dītóu sī gùxiāng

A pool of moonlight on my bed this late hour
like a banket of frost on the world.
I lift my eyes to a bright mountain moon.
Resigned, remembering my home, I bow.
(translation Sam Hamill, 2013, p 94).

 

Calligraphy as Performance

Chaos script lends itself easily to performance. It is an art based on action. The following are comments by Gao Shiming (2023):

Writing becomes simple ink, markings, and traces, and the physicality and emotional tenor of the writing becomes the centre of everything. Wang’s chaos script crystallises action. When that action stops, the state and meaning of that movement linger. This state of action is a dance that arises when the mood strikes. The impulse to write chaos stems from writing in an uninhibited state of disorientation and overwhelm. In the state of writing generated by the dialectic between chaos and order, a calligrapher loses himself yet finds contentment.

The following shows a video of Wang Dongling writing out the first two chapters of the Daodejing in chaos script at the Asia Society Museum in New York in 2018.

And the following illustrations shows the calligraphy in its final form:

 

References

Barrass, G. S. (2002). The Art of Calligraphy in Modern China. British Museum Press.

Ferrell, S., Kong, W., Hiro, R. I., Little, S., Moon, V., &Ng, L. W. (2026). Line, form, qi: calligraphic art from the Fondation INK collection. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Festi, G. & Weihuan Hou. (2024). Contemporary reinventions of Chinese calligraphy. A semiotic exploration. Ocula (Online), 25(3). https://doi.org/10.57576/ocula2024-6

Fischer, P. (2023). The annotated Laozi: a new translation of the Daodejing. State University of New York at Albany.

Gao Shiming (2023). Chaos script – the dialectic between order and chaos. China Academy of Art

Hamill, S. (2013) Crossing the Yellow River. Three hundred poems from the Chinese. Tiger bark Press.

Hertel, Shao-Lan. (2016). Lines in translation: cross-cultural encounters in modernist calligraphy, early 1980s-early 1990s. Yishu, 15(4), 6–28.

Iezzi, A. (2016). “Chinese modern calligraphy” as a reflection of Chinese contemporary culture: a comparison between modernism (Wang Dongling) and avant-garde (Xu Bing). Italian Association for Chinese Studies. Selected Papers 1, 75-116

Wang Dongling (2013). The origins of abstraction. Exhibition in Beijing.  

Wang Dongling (2016). Writing Chaos. 亂書. Exhibition Catalogue published by Ink Studio, Beijing.  

Wang Dongling (2024). The joy of being. 信可樂也 Exhibition Catalogue published by iPRECIATION, Singapore.

 

During the 19^th 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 20^th 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 20^th Century), the songs were accompanied by piano. The following sections consider nine English art songs composed during first two decades of the 20^th 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 16^th to early 17^th Centuries. William Shakespeare (1564-1616) published his sonnets in 1609. The following is a recitation of his 18^th 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 17^th-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:

Arthur L Wood provides a much clearer recitation:

 

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 20^th 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.

Masefield, J. (illustrated by Pears, C., 1916). Salt-water poems and ballads. Macmillan Co.

Menninghaus, W., Wagner, V., Knoop, C. A., & Scharinger, M. (2018). Poetic speech melody: A crucial link between music and language. PloS One, 13(11), e0205980.

Whitner, M. E. (1957). The modern art song in English. The American Music Teacher, 6(4), 2–23.

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 17^th 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 (17^th 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.

 

References

Bynner, W. & Kiang Kang-Hu, (1929). The jade mountain: a Chinese anthology, being three hundred poems of the T’ang dynasty, 618-906. Alfred A. Knopf.

Carr, H. (2018). The Ur-Cantos. In R. Parker (Ed.) Readings in the Cantos. (pp 9-32). Clemson University Press.

Fuller, M. (2018). An Introduction to Chinese Poetry: From the Canon of Poetry to the Lyrics of the Song Dynasty. Harvard University Asia Center.

Geng, L. (2021). The four great Tang poets. In A Comprehensive Study of Tang Poetry II (pp. 1–42). Routledge.

Giles, H. A. (1884, revised 1923). Gems of Chinese Literature. Bernard Quaritch

Harris, P. (2009). Three hundred Tang poems. Alfred A. Knopf (Everyman’s Library)

Liu Yang, & Hua Zhangyi, (2024). 琵琶行 (Pipa Song). CITIC Press.

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.

Pound, E. (1915). Cathay. Elkin Mathews.

Pound, E. (1917a). Three Cantos II. Poetry, 10 (4), 180-188

Pound, E. (1917b). Lustra of Ezra Pound: with earlier poems. Alfred A. Knopf.

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 (~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 15^th 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 3^rd 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 15^th 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. 

References

Ainsworth, M. W., & Martens, M. P. J. (1994). Petrus Christus: Renaissance master of Bruges. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Barbera, G., Christiansen, K., & Bayer, A. (2005). Antonello da Messina: Sicily’s Renaissance master. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Borchert, T.-H. (2019). The impact of Jan van Eyck’s lost Lomellini-Triptych and his Genoese patrons. Colnaghi Studies, 4, 30-61.

Campbell, C. (2021). Unknowables. Antonello da Messina. London Review of Books, 43 (19) October 7.

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.

Wright, J. (1980). Antonello da Messina: the origins of his style and technique. Art History, 3, 41-60.

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.

This is a recitation of the poem by Wort Krämer

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 19^th 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 20^th 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 19^th 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 (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 20^th 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.

Jones, D. E. (1960). The plays of T.S. Eliot. Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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.

Shelley, P. B. (1820). Prometheus unbound: a lyrical drama in four acts. C. & J. Ollier.

Smith, C. H. (1967). T. S. Eliot’s dramatic theory and practice: from Sweeney Agonistes to the Elder Statesman. Princeton University Press.

 

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 37^th chapter of the Daodjing considers wu wei an attribute of the eternal Dao. The 48^th 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 4^th 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 37^th 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:

道恆無為而無不為。
侯王若能守之，萬物將自化。
化而欲作，
吾將鎮之以無名之樸。
無名之樸，夫亦將不欲。
不欲以靜，天下將自定。

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 48^th chapter of the Daodejing Laozi proposes wu wei as the ideal of human behavior. The following is the Chinese text together with a translation by Wu (2016):

為學日益，為道日損。
損之又損，以至於無為。
無為而無不為。
取天下常以無事，
及其有事，不足以取天下。

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):

太上，不知有之；其次，亲而誉之；
其次，畏之；其次，侮之。
信不足焉，有不信焉。
悠兮其贵言。功成事遂，百姓皆谓：我自然。

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 2^nd 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:”  

1. Intense and focused concentration on what one is doing in the present moment
2. Merging of action and awarenessLoss of reflective self-consciousness (i.e., loss of awareness of oneself as a social actor)
3. 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
4. Distortion of temporal experience (typically, a sense that time has passed faster than normal)
5. 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 13^th Century Zhao Mengfu in regular script, and of the 14^th 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 (3^rd 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.

Lin, P. J. (1977, open access 2020). A Translation of Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching and Wang Pi’s Commentary. (Volume 30 in University of Michigan Chinese Studies). University of Michigan.

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.

Stamatov, A. (2023). The Laozi’s ideal state: nostalgia, utopia, state of nature. Religions, 14(10), 1243.

Tadd, M. (2019). Ziran: authenticity or authority? Religions, 10(3), 207.

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’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)]

 

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