What Art is All About, by George

One of the principal interests in my scholarly career has been the interpretation of literary and pictorial allegory, a concept broadly defined by one famous ancient scholar as alieniloquium, “saying one thing to mean another.” Few general readers today read much literary allegory (though every educated person should have read and thought about at least a part of Dante’s Divine Comedy) but anybody who has ever set foot in the Metropolitan Museum, the National Gallery, or the Louvre has experienced pictorial allegory. How could Dan Brown have made millions out of such a poorly written and utterly hokey book as the Da Vinci Code if people weren’t already convinced that Renaissance paintings must be full of “hidden” meanings? Let no reader attribute my remarks to mere jealousy, incidentally. Spite also plays its part.

But the “hidden” meanings of Christian art are hidden only to those who do not speak its language. I suppose a good beginning for a novice might be—a navis. A person who knows no Latin might say that the “hidden meaning” of navis is “ship”. That is not a usual way to speak about language, however, and Christian iconography is a language. Hence demystification may be available even without reference to the Knights Templar or Opus Dei, but it does involve language study. This is not to deny that pictorial language differs from verbal language. The vocabulary of the one is things, that of the other words. In ordinary language words mean things; in iconographic language things also mean things, and things other than the things denoted by the words to which they are attached. I am sure you are following this, but since a picture is worth a thousand words, consider this navis or rather navire in a piece of nineteenth-century folk art:

Q: When is a ship not only a ship?

A: When it is also the Virgin Mary, the doctrine of Atonement, and seventeen other things

I cannot teach the whole language of Christian pictorial iconography in a single post, but I can at least do better than Dan Brown—except on the vulgar business of making millions, that is. I can introduce you in a few hundred words to the basic principle of iconographic analysis in Christian art. I have been surprised to discover from information provided by blogger.com that Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche has many visitors daily from outside the United States. This should mean, if the pedagogical premise of this post is valid, that several people are looking with utter puzzlement at the picture below this paragraph. It is a photograph of one of the nine appliquéd fabric squares from a hand-made quilt, produced by an unknown American seamstress and dated 1933, recently sold by a leading Oklahoma dealer in folk-art antique fabrics.

For my fellow Americans my expectations are different. Every American who sees this image should know immediately what it means. The subject matter of the image is a cluster of cherries and a hatchet; but its meaning is “George Washington”! If you don’t see that, you have entirely missed the essence of the work of art. If you do grasp the meaning, you have grasped the essential iconological principle of medieval and Renaissance art.

For in the year 1800 an obscure Episcopal priest, the Rev. Mason Locke Weems, published his Life of George Washington. In this semi-legendary but vastly popular work we find for the first time an anecdote of the early years of the father of our country. Some foolish person gave young George, aged about six, a hatchet. The lad went about experimenting with this dangerous tool. He tried it out with fatal results on a cherry sapling recently planted out by his father. No one had seen the crime in its commission, and young George might have evaded his father’s wrath through prevarication or strategic silence; but such is not the way of a hero. “Father,” he said in response to inquiries, “I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my little hatchet.”

It is possible, though doubtful, that the story is true. It is possible that Weems simply made it up. It is also possible, as Weems claimed, that it derived from an old oral tradition within the Washington family. It doesn’t matter. Forever after in the moral theology of American civil religion cherry trees and hatchets would have a definite ethical meaning. Many Americans could hope to believe, and long did in fact believe, that the icon of the cherry cluster and hatchet meant that the kind of person who would become President of the United States was the kind of person who could not tell a lie. Well, it all depends what the meaning of meaning means, I suppose.

The great source book of European painting for about a thousand years was the Bible. It was not the only source book, but it was so pre-eminent that the eighteenth-century artist William Blake could still call the Bible “the great code of art.” It’s where Giotto and Jan Van Eyck and Tiepolo got most of their cherry trees and hatchets. I commend it to all museum visitors.

As for the image at the top of this post, it is a painting by the great Venetian painter Giovanni Bellini (+1516), now in the Courtauld Gallery. Its subject matter is the murder of a Dominican saint, Peter of Verona, usually called Peter Martyr, on April 6, 1252. That is its subject. Its meaning, which is known only to me and to two Rosicrucians in Thuringia, is a different matter. You cannot expect to get that free for nothing in a blog post. You will have to await my projected novel Giovanni Bellini and the Temple of Doom. It’s about this handsome, brilliant retired iconographer who one day picks up a men’s magazine in his urologist’s waiting room and stumbles upon…well, as I said, you’ll have to wait.

Palma de Mallorca: the Cathedral / a medley of Marianisms
How many can you identify?

Serendipity

Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford

Once in a classroom discussion we came upon the name of Walpole, and I found that only one of the students present could identify it—as that of a Massachusetts town “about midway on the road to Providence”. I let the matter drop, fearing that one who did not know who Walpole was might not even (shudder!) know what Providence was, despite the very large role each played in eighteenth-century Britain. (Robert Walpole, usually regarded as the first Prime Minister, was a Whig politician of enormous influence. Providence, which plays a major role in the tale I am about to tell, was the name used for God Almighty by people who didn’t want to sound too religious).

For people with graduate degrees in English, a tribe more numerous than you might at first suspect, whose members are too often seen these days hanging around employment agencies or welfare offices, Walpole will more likely bring to mind Sir Robert’s literary son, Horace Walpole (1717-1797). Horace has a credible claim to the title “the Goth Father”. He anticipated the Victorian medieval revival in two very important ways. First he built along “medieval” lines his own fantastic manor house, Strawberry Hill, with crypts, secret passages, and phony ruins galore. He is also the author of The Castle of Otranto, the first and one of the very best of the creepy genre that has come to be known as “the Gothic novel”.

Strawberry Hill: "a pile most fantastickal"

He invented something else: a word that has become naturalized in our English language. The word is serendipity. You know what serendipity is. In fact most educated people know and use this word--but try to translate it into some other tongue! Serendipity is, Walpole writes to his distant friend Sir Horace Mann, “a very expressive word, which, as I have nothing better to tell you, I shall endeavour to explain to you: you will understand it better by the derivation than by the definition. I once read a silly fairy tale, called ‘The Three Princes of Serendip:’ as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right …”*

I first encountered Horace Walpole in 1962 in a graduate seminar on Victorian literature taught by Dudley Johnson (Edward Dudley Hume Johnson, 1911-1995). He assigned The Castle of Otranto as “background” reading. Dudley Johnson was a great man, the chairman of the English Department in my earliest years at Princeton. He was definitely Old Princeton. His elocution, gait, and wardrobe were emblems of a vanished elegance from the era he taught so brilliantly, still alive in the Oxford of the 1930s where he had studied as a Rhodes Scholar. If you see the film The King’s Speech—which I strongly recommend—you’ll get in certain scenes something of the vibe. He was an expert in Victorian literature, both poetry and prose; in retirement he wrote an important book about British painting. In speaking of the undergraduate dramatic performances mounted by Theatre Intime, he pronounced the first word in an elaborately Frenchified manner—teh-AT-ruh. He loved nature and the writings of the great naturalists. During the War he had been a naval officer. He was strikingly handsome in the manner often qualified as “Byronic” and had on occasion modeled clothes for a glossy magazine. Most days he took his lunch at Lahière’s, the local classy French restaurant, seldom without the prelude of a martini. He retired as the Holmes Professor of Belles-Lettres in 1978. Always a private man, he virtually disappeared from the sight of his former colleagues during the last years of his life, which were clouded by domestic sorrow and serious illness.

My old colleague Dudley Johnson had virtually disappeared from my consciousness by the summer of 1990. I was then directing the Oxford summer session of the Bread Loaf School of English, resident in Lincoln College. Lincoln is in the Turl, catty-corner across from Jesus, my own old undergraduate college. (I was no stranger there. Lincoln College had been founded in 1427 by Richard Fleming, Bishop of Lincoln. The grandest undergraduate dining club in Oxford, anciently housed in the college, was called the Fleming Society. The only “outsiders” ever invited to their feasts were people providentially—serendipitously?-- named Fleming). I was teaching two seminars, both in medieval literature; but I awoke one morning with a very strong urge to reread Fielding’s Tom Jones. You have your urges, and I have mine; but this is not one to be acted upon if you have anything else to do with your life for the next two weeks.

Ever since I first knew it the short block of commercial shops on the Turl has always included two antiquarian booksellers. Right after breakfast I stepped across the road. Prominent in the window of the bookshop almost directly in front of me were twelve small, blue volumes of Fielding’s novels, the first six of which were Tom Jones. I would not know whether this was divine encouragement or diabolical temptation until the shop opened two hours later. The answer was instant when I opened the cover of the first volume to find on its fly leaf, written in Dudley’s inimitable and elegant hand, the same hand that had once signed a letter informing me of my promotion to a tenured appointment, “E.D.H. Johnson Oxford 1936”. That was the year of my birth.

The books still had the discreet labels of Blackwell’s, where Dudley must have bought them. But they had had their adventures since. Tucked into the first volume was an old invoice documenting their sale on the 25^th of May, 1954, by a Cambridge bookseller, to a probably clerical gentleman of Jesus College of that University. Mr. W. H. G. Stevenson had at the same time bought something listed as “Ramsey Glory of God”. That would be The Glory of God and the Transfiguration of Christ, the most impressive book written by Michael Ramsey, once Regius Professor of Theology and future Archbishop of Canterbury, a book I had consulted with profit while writing a study of Giovanni Bellini’s “St. Francis” in the Frick Collection.

Shortly before his death I had Dudley Johnson in my house for the first and only time. Over a glass of wine I surprised him with his old books, which he at least pretended to remember, and tried--without success, of course--to return to him. In one of his miscellaneous essays Gibbon had written of “our immortal Fielding…whose romance of Tom Jones will outlive the palace of the Escurial and the Imperial Eagle of Austria.” Dudley Johnson was not the scoffer that old Gibbon was, but he was a long-lapsed Anglican who seemed to enjoy the fact that you could get a great archbishop for a mere twelve and sixpence but would have to pay a full thirty bob if you wanted a great novelist.

*Letters of Horace Walpole, ed. P. Cunningham (London, 1891), ii, pp. 365-366.

The Mystery of Iniquity: Mysterious Still

My intention for “Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche” is amusement decorated, in an occasional lucky week, with a thin gloss of edification. I do not favor large and much commented upon current events, especially when—as is true of the mass murders in Tucson—so little of the commentary seems to me to be well considered or helpful. Yet some events so oppress the spirit that not to talk about them would be mere cowardice or evasion. They may need to be talked about rather carefully, however.

Every American of Medicare Age is likely to remember precisely where he or she was at the moment of hearing about the Kennedy assassination. It was in the first months of my teaching career; I was walking on Observatory Drive on the campus of the University of Wisconsin in Madison. It was one of the midday class breaks, and the walkways were busy with pedestrians. I overheard rather than heard the terrible news, learning from snatches of the conversation of passersby who the shooters were before I knew who had been shot. The shooters, according to one loud and confident graduate student just ahead of me, were “obviously John Birchers. Texas is crawling with ‘em.” Even that wasn’t enough of a clue for me at first. I was unaware the President was in Texas, where within the hour he had been shot and killed by perhaps the lone militant Communist in the Lone Star State.

Our minds recoil before the spectacle of gratuitous, motiveless evil. We desperately try to contain it by “explaining” it. But having abandoned the useful concept of radical human imperfection once called sinfulness, we have lost also the Pauline sense of the mystery of iniquity. We are left to clutch after the straws of pop psychology and weak montage political “scenarios.” Too many of our journalistic pundits have been rash in doing so. The murders in Tucson were unspeakable, and since it couldn’t have been the Devil that made him do it, it must be the next best thing, Sarah Palin or talk radio. I never cease to be amazed at the alacrity with which our “opinion makers” can rush to the periphery of an important issue.

It is very easy to do, as was demonstrated to me by another overhead conversation. As young parents my wife and I thought we would improve the world along with the moral character of our offspring by forbidding them to play aggressive games or to possess martial toys. Then one day I heard my elder son, aged about six, sadly explaining to a playmate of roughly the same age why he was forbidden the use of a water pistol. “It’s because,” he said, “my Daddy can’t tell the difference between a toy gun and a real gun.”

Actually, I can, and could even then. I grew up in a rural hinterland, in a world in many ways more like the America of 1789 than that of 1989. For that kind of world the legislators had decreed for its citizens a constitutional right to bear arms. We all had guns and used them. To this day I own my grandfather’s forty-five caliber Colt revolver—perhaps the most famous handgun of history, as the Glock 19 now bids fair to become the most infamous.

My neighbors regularly got wounded or maimed by pickup trucks, automobiles, tractors, hay bailers, brush-hog attachments, wire-stretchers, rattlesnakes, rabid raccoons, buzz saws, live wires, and timber axes. I cannot recall a single gun injury. But the late twentieth century eventually caught up with that old world, which now exists only in memory and carefully cultivated myth. Now it’s time for us to do some catching up too. For centuries the moral leaders of the West have stood aghast, if impotent, at every technological increment in the machinery of death. Pope Innocent II in the twelfth century regarded the “improved” longbow of the English archers, which could easily propel a metal-tipped arrow through chain mail, and even a finely smithed steel cuirass, as a diabolical invention. Its use would be unthinkable among Christians. The widespread introduction of gunpowder, and especially its use for large-bore artillery, scandalized the philosophers of a continent, but it couldn’t be stopped. In the wonderful letter Rabelais imagines that Gangantua wrote to his son Pantagruel, away at college, he speaks of the recent and “divinely inspired” invention of the printing press, but has to add, sadly “just as on the contrary artillery has been invented through diabolical suggestion”. (The Devil was still available in those days).

It is inconceivable to me that “the Founders” envisaged a society in which private citizens, even sane and sober ones, would be toting semi-automatic Glock pistols with extended magazines as they walked about the streets of large cities, through suburban shopping malls, among baby-buggies, schoolchildren, and doddering pensioners. But even if it could somehow be proved that they were so wicked or myopic as to have done so, we need only invoke another of their ideas, one concerning which there is no textual doubt whatsoever, the idea that the Constitution could be and should be changed and improved when evolving circumstances proved it needed to be (Article V). Surely if you are prepared to consider tweaking the fourteenth amendment to address the danger posed by “anchor babies”, you are willing to consider tweaking the second amendment to address the danger posed to all babies, not to mention nine-year-old girls?

We have some really serious problems in this country. That’s the bad news. In a spirit of national unity most of them could be solved with good will, intelligence, and common sense. That’s the good news. We may lack sufficient reservoirs of good will, intelligence, and common sense, however, and that’s the scary news.

A SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT more cheerful of burden

My friend, colleague, and fellow Princeton retiree Elaine Showalter, has recently launched a blog devoted to American Women Writers—a subject on which she is one of the world’s leading authorities. A public intellectual whose work will undoubtedly already be known to some in the GLGT audience, she is in every sense a capital woman, dividing her time between Washington and London. If you value American literature, and if you like good writing about good writers, you will certainly want to visit American Women Writers.

Which of the following statements unites these two women? (You are allowed only three votes).

(a) both were great writers

(b) both had a name beginning with “W”

(c) both were lay leaders in the Episcopal Church

Stare, indecisus

Saint Pancras

LONDON
Stationers' Hall

The confirmation hearings for the last Princeton alumnus (Samuel Alito) to be appointed to the Supreme Court were memorable to me for philological reasons. (The more recent hearings for two alumnæ, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, wanted even that excitement). I say this not because the nominees lacked interest or ability--far from it. But the senatorial grandstanding became oppressive. Given the gravity of the work at hand, it is a sad necessity to report that rarely do fatuity and pomposity combine with such powerful soporific effect as in the televised deliberations of Senate Judiciary Committee—an axiom of general application among Democratic no less than Republican majorities.

Among the topics on which the blowhards were blowing hardest was stare decisis, pronounced in such fashion as to encourage a belief that it referred to a Hollywood starlet or dancer named “Starry de Sizus”. Of course everyone knows that stare decisis (“to let stand those things already decided”) is not a lady but a legal principle, the invocation of which actually means “How can I use your opinion on abortion, whatever it may happen to be, against you?” Call me eccentric, but what it got me musing about was not abortion but the past participle status, Grand Central station, stationary, stationery, and the difference between an airport and an aerogare. But only now, five years latter, has the penny dropped.

I have just finished a lengthy essay for a festschrift, a naturalized German word meaning a collection of learned essays published in honor of some worthy person upon the occasion of a significant birthday or retirement. As the proud recipient of two such volumes I know how rewarding they are for the adepts of a profession whose rewards must seem by the world’s standards pretty puny. The preparations are always supposed to be secret. The intended recipient almost certainly does not read this blog, but as it is barely conceivable that he might, I say no more, except that, pursuing materials far distant from the Middle Ages, I came upon the joint commonplace book* compiled by Robert Southey and S. T. Coleridge, published in 1812.

Robert Southey (1774-1843)

You may know little more of their association (if indeed that much) than Byron’s delicious dedication to Don Juan, which while grotesquely unfair, is too good not to quote:

Bob Southey! You're a poet—Poet-laureate

And representative of all the race,

Although 't is true that you turn'd out a Tory at

Last,—yours has lately been a common case...

And Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing,

But like a hawk encumber'd with his hood,—
Explaining metaphysics to the nation—
I wish he would explain his Explanation.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834)

Southey was actually a good deal more than a Poet Tory-at (what a great rhyme!). He was for instance a serious hispanist, a student of early Iberian literature, translator of the poem of the Cid, among other works. Several of his fascinating snippets in Omniana deal with Spanish themes.

One of them brings us back to stare (to stand upright, to stand unmoving) and its interesting family. Your status is the place you’re standing, literally or metaphorically. That once was called your station in life. Our English words ending in –ion come generally from Old French versions of Latin words. If you had a lot of status in the old days, it probably went with having a lot of real estate. Since state appears to be an aphetic form of estate, Louis XIV might actually have mumbled “L’tat, c’est moi.” (The disappearance of intervocalic s in French, incidentally, with only the circumflex for spoor, is what gives us such useful doublets as hostel and hotel/ hôtel.) The President will soon deliver the State of the Union Address; but we already known in certain states of the union, not coincidentally those with large and underfunded entitlements, the economic conditions are worse than in some others.

When I was a boy in school one of Mrs. White’s favorite spelling-bee traps involved the homophones stationary (in a fixed position, unmoving) and stationery (paraphernalia for writing and especially writing paper). I was fifty years old before I realized they were the same word. The great code of medieval Spanish law is called the Siete Partidas, or “Seven Part” Law Code. It was promulgated by the admirable Castilian monarch, Alfonso the Wise (1252-1284). One of old Bob Southey’s niftier entries concerns it. Before the invention of the printing press, which allowed works to be corrected in proof by their authors, the problem of quality control in book production was acute. Thus decreed Alfonso: “Every university, to be complete, should have stationers [estacionarios] in it who have in their shops [estaciones] good books, and legible, and correct both in text and in gloss, which they let out to the scholars, either to make new books from them, or to correct those which they have already written.”

King Alfonso ruled wisely

Now a station had meant any place where one paused for a while (the stations of the Exodus, the Stations of the Cross), and especially a place where one set up shop. Here the connection with stare (stand) remains in English words like bandstands and the local kids’ lemonade stand. But on account of Alfonso’s law this one particular station (estacion) took on a particular importance and particular significance. Likewise the English Stationers' Hall of Shakespeare’s time was something like our Copyright Office.

That ought to be enough to show that stare is far from stationary, let alone decisus, wandering as it does far and wide over the lexical map. But what about train stations? What’s supposed to happen there? In French a train station is a gare, and (since French is a logical language) an airport is an aerogare. Since we have train stations why don’t we have airplane stations, too, instead of airports? Well, garer means to shunt (railroad cars), to set aside in safety, to park. Hence the word garage. It’s all about providing status for the vehicles in the form of a safe parking place, unless the vehicle involved should be a car, and outdoors.

For that they have a different word.

*Omniana or Horæ Otiosiores by Robert Southey and S. T. Coleridge, ed. Robert Gittings (1969). You need this book on your bedside table, and since a large part of the American edition was remaindered (as the peacock seldom wins the prize in the poultry contest), you can get one for a song at Abebooks.com.