Joan is a member of a club in town called the “Old Guard,” a name perhaps suggesting the age but not necessarily the distinction of its membership. It is in fact a group of men and women of retirement age, many of whom have had distinguished careers in what I shall call the world and have carried into their retirements not merely a great deal of varied life experience but intellectual vigor, imagination, and sociability. I am not a member, though I now and again scrounge an invitation from my spouse to the weekly lectures that seem to be the group’s chief raison d’être.
The lecturers come from far and wide, but this is a college town, and Princeton faculty members are not infrequently recruited. A slightly odd feature of faculty life is that though you are surrounded by eminences in many fields, you do not ordinarily get to hear them lecture.
The lecturer at the most recent meeting, Anthony Grafton, an internationally famous historian, who is in his last year before retirement, happens also to be my long-time friend and close neighbor. He is a brilliant scholar and extraordinary teacher. In this dazzling and highly entertaining lecture, he drew on materials from a recent book co-authored with Maren Elisabeth Schwab and entitled The Art of Discovery in Renaissance Europe: How Scholars and Artists Learned to Dig into their Past (Princeton, 2022). It was about the birth and early history of antiquarianism and the antiquaries who practiced it. Tony was dealing mainly with Italian and other continental scholars of the fifteenth and sixteenth century, but he brought to my mind an eminent Englishman of the seventeenth. I refer to the Norwich physician-philosopher-theologian Sir Thomas Browne, the famous author of the Religio Medici. Slightly less known, though inescapably brought to my mind by Tony’s wonderful lecture, is Browne’s Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or a Brief Discourse on the Sepulchral Urns late found in Norfolk (1658), generally regarded among the greatest monuments of English baroque prose. One early European mortuary practice was the burial of the remains of cremations in small caskets, boxes and ceramic vase-like jars. This practice has survived in many cultures, and could be said to be flourishing as cremation has become more commonplace in western countries. Browne’s title tells it all while telling nothing. His essay starts out being “about” some ancient burial urns found at Walsingham, Norfolk, in 1658. but soon turns to life, death, and the Meaning of It All. Browne is widely admired as the greatest writer of baroque English in our literature. In a passage redolent of the ambiguous anthropology touched upon in last week’s essay, Browne thus summarizes the human condition: “But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing Nativities and Deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting Ceremonies of bravery, in the infamy of his nature. Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us.”
Even for a very great writer, the exhibition of mannered language runs the risk of peer censoriousness. Ben Jonson was highly critical of the language of the Faerie Queene. “Spenser,” he wrote, "in affecting the ancients, writ no language: yet I would have him read for his matter.” Another censorious Johnson (Samuel) made similar remarks about Browne’s prose. Hydriotaphia cannot be said to be written in no language, but it’s English that no other major writer ever achieved or even very nearly imitated. The learned neologism of the title itself (a combination of Greek “water jug” and “burial”) is a typical Brownism.
Browne was an antiquary but a most philosophic one. He was genuinely interested in the funeral urns to be sure, but more as a moralist than an archeologist. There are other notable examples in English literature. Shelley, to a certain degree, was interested in the actual Egyptian monuments behind the idea of an imaginary statue of the Pharaoh “Ozymandias”. But the subject of the poem is the vanity of human wishes.
According to Max Weber (and many others) the chief project of the Enlightenment, or at least its collateral inevitability, was “the disenchantment of the world.” Plausible, but bad news to a medievalist, for there was of course considerable loss among the gain. “There was a time,” wrote Wordsworth of his childhood, “when meadow, grove and stream, the earth, and every common sight to me did seem appareled in celestial light, the glory and the freshness of a dream”. But--and what a sad but it is--“The things which I have seen I now can see no more.” In another place: “Physician art thou? one all eyes, Philosopher! a fingering slave, One that would peep and botanize Upon his mother's grave?”
Prof. Grafton made the point that especially in Renaissance Italy, where ancient ruins were nearly everywhere, there was a strong tendency to associate new discoveries of old tombs and burial sites with specific famous ancient people. The antiquaries were not big on unknown soldiers. In my own researches I ran across several medieval tales concerning the grave of the poet Ovid—in reality a site entirely unknown and unknowable—a poetical tomb that was conveniently mobile throughout upper Italy. (If one had to guess about Ovid’s actual burial site, as one indeed does have to, a better bet would be coastal Romania.) The medieval legend of his tomb has several versions, but the core narrative is this: two priests, students, or other literate type are wandering along some Italian via or another and come upon a tomb clearly marked PUBLIUS OVIDIUS NASO and try, with surprisingly easy success, to conjure up the long dead poet’s animated spirit. They want to ask him a question. “Please tell us, Sir,” they ask, “Which was the best line you ever wrote and which the worst?” Old Ovid replies with two pithy lines lines, both of which are genuine and (this being Ovid after all) are about sex. I’ll give the lines in abbreviated but accurate paraphrase. The worst line: the great God decrees that whatever feels good is good. The best line: It is virtuous to abstain even from lawful joys. The moral calculus, of course is that of medieval asceticism. But it is surely a rare example—I at least know of no other—of literary criticism offered not upon but from the grave.
It is not surprising, perhaps, that great historians have taken as their subject matter the written works of such of their predecessors who have written about the past. The history of written history and of those who wrote it is endlessly fascinating. Thomas Browne was a medicus, of the tribe “physician” that by Wordsworth’s time could invoke the scathing lines I cited two paragraphs above. But his world was still sufficiently enchanted to invite his investigations into the mystery of “fiveness” and to speculate about the spiritual meaning of the scriptural water jars in the story of Jesus’s first miracle (John 2), the Greek word being Latinized in the Vulgate as hydrias. One hardly knows whether to call this mode of thought semi-medieval or semi-modern; but the prose in which is it explicated is delightful.
No comments:
Post a Comment