In considering this mighty reversal during my talk this evening, I make no attempt to unravel the multiplicity of sociological, historical, political, anthropological, and demographic factors contributing to it. Still less do I wish to develop any literary theory, or to seem to pit one poet against another. Art is not a competition. Rather, I should like to offer, as a writer, some comments and conjectures through literature itself. That is, to trace this change through the work of poets and writers themselves, in whom consciousness of it has been acute and continuous. Indeed, the testimony is so vast that it allows tonight only of a few selected indications.
The scene last September in the piazza at Milan may be the last such observance that will occur—the last public tribute to the poet as a recognized requirement of society. (I might add that a young relative of Montale’s expressed the view to me at the time that the occasion was exploited by the attending politicians. However that may be, we can’t have it every way: at least they acknowledged by their presence that there was something there to exploit.)
I hope not to be misunderstood in speaking of the function of the poet. It is not, of course, the business of an artist to give satisfaction as if he were some sort of home appliance, but to enlarge our sensation and perception of life. In contrast to this role of the poet in past societies, W. H. Auden told us that his own passport gave his profession as “writer,” because “poet” would have embarrassed people and would have been implausible since, in his words, “everybody knows that nobody now can earn a living by writing poetry.” Auden goes on to give four categories of special difficulty for the artistic vocation, and particularly the literary one, in our times:
Loss of belief in the eternity of the physical universe
Loss of belief in the significance and reality of sensory phenomena
Loss of belief in a norm of human nature requiring the same kind of man-fabricated world as its home
The disappearance of the public realm as the sphere of revelatory personal deeds.2
These are all categories of loss—loss for which, in the domain of the arts, nothing fundamental has been substituted. Loss has ever been a constant, in literature, as in life. Every civilized person is familiar with Virgil’s beautiful invocation of the tears that underlie human transience—tears that Juvenal considered the noblest of human attributes. But the dimensions, character, and acceleration of loss in the contemporary world have created a context of loss amounting to a black hole of the spirit. In the poetry of Montale, loss is a dominant preoccupation—loss of a cat, a shoehorn, a landscape, an attitude, of solitude, of silence. Even his famous simile of the faith that burned like a stubborn log in a fire is of something consuming itself—literally, to ashes. Beyond this, it can be said that at times the poems of Montale approach a veritable celebration of loss.
In a pronouncement central to his thought and work—and also to his times, which are our own fateful era—Montale has told us that every human illusion has found its matching disillusionment: “Ogni illusione è in perfetta corrispondenza con la sua delusione.”3
It is the fourth of Auden’s lost categories that most touches my theme this evening: the disappearance of the public realm as the sphere of revelatory personal deeds. In consequence, Auden says, literature has lost its traditional principal human subject, the man of action, the doer of public deeds. To the ancient world, the private sphere was ruled by mere necessity of sustaining life; whereas the public realm was the field in which a man might disclose and fulfill himself. Today, the public has become the necessary impersonal sphere; while the private leaves us our only hope of manifesting—not even perhaps virtue but merely an individual presence, a singular experience, some affinity with our fellow beings.
The setting for public action is similarly degraded. In Auden’s poem, “The Shield of Achilles,” Thetis, the mother of Achilles, looks over the shoulder of the armorer Hephaestos to discover—in an invocation of the Iliad—what contemporary embellishments he has set on the shield her son will bear to the modern struggle. You’ll remember the poem opens:
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive-trees,
Marble, well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.
A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat, and nowhere to sit down,
Yet congregated on its blankness stood
An unintelligible multitude.
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.
And the poem moves on to its doom-laden conclusion:
The thin-lipped armorer
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.4
(I might add that Auden also wrote a poem called “Secondary Epic,” which begins “No, Virgil, No.” and later, “No, Plato, No.”5)
Scepticism about arms and armory is common in the work of poets, including Virgil. To poets, swords have always been double-edged. Rochester says, in his Satyr against Mankind: “Whilst wretched man is still in arms for fear. / For fear he arms, and is of arms afraid, / By fear to fear successively betrayed.”6 In the Second World War, Henry Reed literally and figuratively took a gun apart in his delightful “The Naming of Parts.”7
The overall title of these lectures, “The Lonely Word” is taken from Tennyson’s memorial poem on Virgil, where the English laureate finds in the Roman—to quote—“All the charm of the Muses / Often flowering in a lonely word.”8 Tennyson’s poem was written just a century ago, at the request of the city of Mantua, for the nineteen hundredth anniversary of Virgil’s death; in an era when, as later, in the 1940s, in my own Australian schooldays, every British schoolchild was obliged to study Virgil. In the poem, Tennyson claims to have loved Virgil from his earliest youth—this was also the claim of Berlioz, on rather stronger evidence. I was a child when I first read Tennyson’s poem for the first time. Such is the inevitability with which poetry sets its seal on occasions that it did not occur to me then—and scarcely later—that there would be another such anniversary, and that I might be present for it. Still less could I imagine celebrating it, as I did, among the still highly recognizable settings of Book 6 of the Aeneid. For me, Tennyson had commemorated Virgil once and for all—Tennyson, whose commemorative powers were demonstrated as early as his fifteenth year when, in 1824, he carved on a rock BYRON IS DEAD.
As I shall revert to this poem of Tennyson’s in a later lecture, I shall say a word about it now. The poem touches briefly on the equivocal nature of poetic material—whether mighty or intimate, or the two converging; whether speaking of its time, or for all time, or the two simultaneously; whether it should develop a legend or express a man. Tennyson’s famous conclusion is a tribute to this encompassing power of language itself:
Now the Rome of slaves hath perish’d
and the Rome of freemen holds her place,
I, from out the Northern Island
Sunder’d once from all the human race,
I salute thee, Mantovano,
I that loved thee since my day began.
Wielder of the stateliest measure
Ever moulded by the lips of man.9
The attitudes of which I speak this evening, and their intensifying alteration in recent generations, are being addressed in relation to that power of great language. Many poets—Virgil not least of them—have struggled with the dichotomy of the helpless yet historically conscious human soul ground under by cosmic indifference. In the Georgics Virgil praises the good fortune of the farmer
living far from battles, attached to realities of earth. Seneca speculates on the possibility of civilizing mankind by teaching the young, as he says, not the crimes of a Philip or Alexander, but the beneficent qualities of existence. The theme is taken up by writers throughout centuries—many of them expressing, as Virgil in the Eclogues, ambiguities of feeling in the shadow of history or within the perspective of nature. Virgil tells us that when he set himself to write of kings and battles, Apollo plucked him by the ear—that is, by the source of memory—warning him rather to “woo with slender reed the philosophic muse.”10
But these divisions of human literary impulse took place, with however many fluctuations and unrealities, within a recognizable context of attitudes to external forces, a mentalité acknowledging external forces, a collective necessity greater than the self. Whether achieved or not, some equilibrium was immemorially held necessary to balance human existence in relation to natural and supernatural power: the Greek Dike, which saw individualism literally as “idiotic.” (In English, by the way, the word “idiot” retained something of that ancient meaning into the seventeenth century.)
In two brief poems called “History,” Montale describes the remorseless impersonality of public events, speaking of history’s detestation for details, for the “idiotic.” He depicts history as a great net with an occasional small tear through which some fish may once in a while slip out: the escaped fish does not even realize he is outside; while those looking on from the net tell themselves they are freer than he.11
An accepted starting point for this diminution of high heroic passion is the advent of the Christian era. Literature, however, shows us that human equivocation about single-mindedness was already a common topic. And for expressing these heresies, literature paid an inevitable price and the poet lost ground in his sacred function. In his Paideia, Werner Jaeger says that
the idea that poetry is not useful to life first appears among the ancient theorists of poetics; it was the Christians who finally taught men to appraise poetry by a purely aesthetic standard—a standard which enabled them to reject most of the moral and religious teaching of the classical poets as false and ungodly, while accepting the formal elements of their work as instructive and aesthetically delightful.12
Even so, St. Jerome expiated his love of pagan texts in the desert, and the Christian convert Paulinus wrote to Ausonius that “Hearts vowed to Christ have no welcome for the goddesses of song; they are barred to Apollo.”13
The Christian ideal retained the concept of mission. The Golden Bough had been supplanted by the Holy Grail, but with the profound difference that whereas the epic hero became godlike—larger than life—God had assumed Man’s daily likeness. Christ is an anti-hero. Man’s higher calling was now—at least, ideally—to godliness, meekness, obscurity, simplicity; to pacific and childlike ways; however much ferocity might still take place in the name of salvation. The literary hero remains to some extent familiar—he is necessarily beset on his life’s journey by doubt, despair, danger, terror, grief, responsibility, and above all by a temptation to self-indulgence supremely personified as Woman. In letting his choice fall on Aphrodite, Paris had chosen the gratification of private pleasure and disturbed the balance of a larger good. In consequence, his birthplace was destroyed and its survivors turned loose to wander the earth. For succumbing to the inducements of Eve, Adam was banished from Paradise. As Yeats remarked, “What theme had Homer but original sin?”14 The worst cross the Christian hero has to bear is frequently Woman—Eve, Guinevere, Isolde, Tasso’s Armida, Lady Macbeth. Literary Woman is henceforth a debilitating, or, as with Beatrice and Laura, is a redeeming influence on men and so she long remained.
Conversely, by abandoning Dido, and nobly pursuing his higher calling, Aeneas is enabled to found the Italian nation. For this he was commended by St. Augustine, in the City of God, as a pattern for Christian virtue—St. Augustine remarking with approval that Virgil allowed Dido’s tears to fall in vain.15
The pattern persisting through the morality plays and the medieval romance, and restated in The Pilgrim’s Progress, is strongly present in the nineteenth-century novel, and still discernible in modern fiction. It represents perhaps on the part of society an innate yearning toward exemplarity and also toward a caste system that survives in the figure of the knight (who belongs to what is significantly called the nobility). The knight gradually merges in literature with the man of honor, and subsequently with the merely estimable man, while humility contented itself with successive versions of Everyman.
As we see from St. Augustine’s comment, the phenomenon of Duty had supplanted the sacrifices required by pagan gods. Yet it was a “Duty” persistently supernatural enough for Wordsworth to address it, fifteen centuries later, as “Stern daughter of the voice of God.”16
Running parallel or counter to this literary stream, and often mingling with it, was the irrepressible questioning of men by man, a sifting of human conduct refreshed by the Renaissance that showed early traces of the anti-hero. The survival of the pagan gods, to borrow the phrase of Jean Seznec, was not a theological survival; paganism was recalled by man to serve the cause of humanism, or as Edgar Wind has written, to reconcile pleasure with virtue.17 From the Renaissance onward, the struggle of the central literary figure is often predominantly a sense of offending against his rational better sense. Under the aegis of Virgil, Dante is the central character of his own work, as Proust was later to be his own Narrator. And the range of mortal experience is the material for both. In a great poem of Petrarch, the poet and Love argue their case before the court of Reason. To Machiavelli a leader is a fallible and not notably virtuous mortal dealing in expedients—a view he derived, as he confirms, from his immersion in classical literature. (Alexander Pope was to write indignantly that “the politic Florentine Nicholas Machiavel affirms that a man needs but to believe himself a hero to be one of the best.”18) Hamlet, a virtuous prince, a leader born, is an unsurpassed anti-hero, who fatalistically tells us, in the very moment of professing his swordsmanship: “But you would not think how ill all’s here about my heart.”19
All these mutations, nevertheless, existed within a still recognizable frame. And “this huge stage presenteth nought but shows whereon the stars in secret influence comment.”20 Auden’s four categories of loss were not yet in receivership, however their meaning might be questioned or resisted by individual writers, or however their persistence might depend, under Puritanism, on hypocrisy. A reference to external events, a deference to the natural and supernatural, a presumption, however altered or ironical, of a larger order, endured in literature if only as belief in the future ages, the future of the earth itself until the nineteenth century, and faltered on into the twentieth. The very names of cultural epochs speak for their links to classical concepts: Renaissance, Augustan, neoclassical. Memory was gaining on history as literary capital; but public action and intimate sentiment were still literarily compatible. Only 150 years ago Walter Scott was able to pay tribute to Jane Austen’s mastery of “the exquisite touch on commonplace things,” while reserving for himself what he called the Big Wow-Wow.21
When Scott offered that tribute, the Big Wow-Wow was increasingly mal vu, in literary quarters. Other ideas, or illusions, as Montale might call them, were in literary circulation as to what was fit for history and what for memory. Pope had proposed Ridicule as the only corrective for entrenched pomposity; Burns had declared of the Establishment that the man of independent mind, he looks and laughs at all that.22 Byron had declared, of attacks on the profanity of his work, “So much the better. I may stand alone, But would not change my free thoughts for a throne.”23
No poet is more eloquent than Byron on the change in the poet’s views on history and memory, changes that intensified as the nineteenth century drew to its close. Of his own work Byron remarked, “If you must have an epic, there’s Don Juan for you. I call that an epic: it is an epic as much in the spirit of our day as the Iliad was in Homer’s. Love, reli
gion, and politics form the argument, and are as much the cause of quarrels now as they were then.”24 The transformations of emphasis in these components are a recurring topic in Byron’s work. Out of innumerable examples, a single reference—in this case to Marc Antony—will suffice here.
I have already referred to the contrast between Aeneas’s abandonment of Dido and Paris’s seduction of Helen; Aeneas chose history, the public over the private. His alliance with Lavinia is a mere political expedient—although indeed Turnus feelingly remarks of it that one would think Trojans, with their experience, might have steered clear of women forever.
During Virgil’s lifetime, Marc Antony suffered, in 31 B.C., with the Battle of Actium, the fate reserved for the man inadequate to his heroic destiny: dying like a figure of antique—or Japanese—tragedy. Of this downfall, Woman was the explicit cause. Plutarch in fact describes Cleopatra as being decked out as an image of Venus at her celebrated meeting with Antony. Virgil, in a single phrase, refers to Antony’s disgrace, condemning him as a man, victorious in every great challenge, who destroyed himself with illicit lust. By Shakespeare’s time, Antony’s story was recast as a humanly appealing struggle, in which a strong man forfeits for love his right to the hero’s immortality.
By 1823, Byron had this to say about Marc Antony’s place in history and in memory:
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