Going Dutch

 

                                                        Blawenburg church in winter
 

            Last week one of our musical friends sent us an email letting us know that on the following Sunday he would be playing his violin as part of a trio during the morning service at the Reformed Church in Blawenburg.  We took the hint and showed up for nine o’clock.  It was the first time I had been to a religious service of that denomination.  The music, all Vivaldi, was well done, and nicely complemented a simple, dignified worship service and an excellent sermon.  Blawenburg is an unincorporated wide place in the road (two roads, actually) in Montgomery Township, Somerset County, NJ, on the outskirts of Princeton.  The Reformed Church, which used generally to be called the Dutch Reformed, descends from the mainstream of Low Countries Protestantism of the Reformation period.  It shares a good deal in common with English and Scottish Presbyterianism and their American descendants.  We recall that some of the English “Pilgrims” who came to New England in the early seventeenth century had first sought refuge in the Netherlands.  Today there is not all that much that is ethnically Dutch in the Reformed Church.  But just as you will still find traces of seventeenth-century French Catholicism in Québec, you might find traces of seventeenth-century Dutch Protestantism in Holland, Michigan.

 

            The Dutch colonial presence, which had been powerful in old New York, long remained visible in Brooklyn, Long Island,  and in parts of central New Jersey.  It survives today chiefly in place and family names, and in aging ecclesiastical buildings.  I am an aficionado of libraries.  There is a magnificent gem of a nineteenth-century theological collection preserved at the Dutch Reformed seminary in New Brunswick.  I suspect that the library acquisitions budget has been far from opulent for at least two generations, so that the collection itself has a kind of museum aura.  New Brunswick is an old town in which there is also a very large old Reformed parish church.  Indeed in the Princeton area there are many handsome old Dutch church buildings of similar design, most of them disproportionately large in reference not merely to today’s church-going population but to what might be called absolute population.  The last “official” population figure I have for Blawenburg is 190; the church I visited, built in 1832, could easily seat 300.  Sunday’s congregation, not counting the musicians, was about a dozen.  Fit audience if few, and certainly friendly.  I was reminded of a huge and absolutely empty seventeenth-century Dutch church built in stone that I saw in Colombo, in Sri Lanka.

 

                                                                      Reformed St. Bavo's, Haarlem
 

            Nowhere does architectural form more necessarily follow function than in ecclesiastical buildings.  Most of the church interiors one sees in old Dutch paintings are actually rather jarring to the informed eye: medieval buildings that were theologically “cleaned up” in the waves of rabid iconoclastic vandalism that were a distinctive   expression of the Protestant Revolt in the Low Countries.  A Gothic church emptied of its mysterious flickering lights, colored windows, dark side chapels and abundance of icons of various sorts can seem lifeless and antiseptic.  The public worship of the old Catholicism was built around a sacred performative mystery, and often enough mystification—what Browning memorably called “the blessed mutter of the Mass.”  The Protestant reformers demanded a radical return to the Bible, to its reading and to its explication by their preachers.  When they began to raise new church buildings, the difference in emphasis became obvious in the architecture: simple undecorated boxes, though often with lateral balconies, with the focus on central lecterns from which the Bible was read and pulpits from which it was preached.  There had been to some slight extent a medieval anticipation of this in the churches built by medieval Dominicans—members of the Order of Preachers—whose buildings have with exaggeration been called “preaching barns”.

 

            I am hardly an expert on the religious history of the Low Countries, but I did read a couple of books years ago that have stuck with me.  The first was The Rise of the Dutch Republic (1856), by John Lathrop Motley.  Motley was an accomplished statesman and amateur historian whose works, though now pretty much discarded, found a large popular audience in the nineteenth century.  The major theme of the work is the triumph of Protestant liberty over Catholic religious oppression in the Spanish Netherlands of the sixteenth century.  Despite certain biases, it is full of fascinating episodes vividly recounted.  The other book is an extraordinary and now sadly neglected novel first conceived in that same year of 1856, though published only a decade later: The Legend of Ulenspiegel by Charles de Coster.*  This brilliant work may be the Moby Dick of Belgian literature, though perhaps a little shorter.  The original text celebrates, in a pseudo-Renaissance French, the exploits of the famous folk hero and trickster Till Eulenspiegel.   The name is translated “Owlglass” in early English versions.  The iconographic attributes of an owl and a glass (i.e., mirror) characterize visual representations of this Wiley Coyote of popular Low German literature.  De Coster honors the bilingualism of his region while transforming a legendary picaresque figure into a hero of religious liberty in an actual historical situation: quite a remarkable feat, really.

 

                                                             

                                                                Eulenspiegel and friends, by Lukas van Leiden

and in a Renaissance comic book

 

            All this came flooding into my mind along with the Vivaldi “Sarabande.”  Perhaps it was the noble simplicity of that piece that brought to my mind two other unavoidable (for me) cultural connections with the simplicity of Netherlandish Christianity.  These were the Beghards and the Beguines, on the one hand, and Erasmus of Rotterdam on the other.  It is possible that you have never heard of the former.  The Beghards (men) and the Beguines (women) were lay followers of the religious life in late medieval Europe—monks and nuns, so to speak, but living in the lay world.  They were to be found in many parts of Europe, but particularly in the Low Countries.  Their lives, like those of so many of the simple folk in The Legend of Ulenspiegel, were often considered scandalous by the official ecclesiastical authorities, but the official ecclesiastical authorities were experts in finding scandal.  As for Erasmus of Rotterdam, he is a household name.  He was one of the most learned men in Europe as the age of the Revival of Learning began, and his erudite works continue to challenge scholars to this very day.  He was the editor of the first modern scholarly edition of the Greek New Testament, a book that has probably been the most seriously studied text in the world for half a millennium.  But of all his own original works his favorite, and mine, is as simple in its aspect as an old whitewashed church building on a country road.  It is called the Enchiridion, or Handbook; and it lays out the vision of a simple Christian life very different from the stultifying logic-chopping of the dogmatic theologians of his day.  I think of it as especially Dutch.

 

 

*Charles de Coster, The Legend of Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzac, and Their Adventures Heroical, Joyous and Glorious in the Land of Flanders and Elsewhere, trans. by F. M. Atkinson (London: Heinemann: 1922).  The scholarly edition is La légende et les aventures héroiques, joyeuses et glorieuses d’Ulenspiegel et de Lamme Goedzk au pays de Flandres et ailleurs, ed. Joseph Hanse (Bruxelles: Renaissance du Livre, 1959).

 

           

Historical Shifts

            With the exception of Benjamin Franklin, perhaps, the only Founding Fathers to claim a place in the popular American memory are those who rose to presidential office.  For that reason the name of John Witherspoon (1723-1794), along with the large majority of the other names  appended to the Declaration of Independence, would probably go unrecognized by most Americans.  Does Button Gwinnett ring a bell?  Joseph Hewes?  But as Witherspoon was an early, long-serving , and consequential president of the educational institution now known as Princeton University, located in Princeton, N. J., where I live, his memory is indeed preserved here.  Not long before I retired the University installed a large and imposing statue of Witherspoon on a prominent campus site.  To the extent the town has a “downtown,” its center is the point at which Witherspoon Street begins its northward course at right angles with the main drag, Nassau Street, at the gates of the University campus.  One of the town’s public schools is named after Witherspoon—and here, of course, today’s essay begins.

 

            Witherspoon owned slaves.  The question of the degree to which this undoubted fact was consistent with his role as a prominent Presbyterian divine or an alumnus of the Scottish Enlightenment has not been wholly ignored; but it became decisive for the town’s school board, which voted to remove his name from “his” school.  The erasure is definitive, but I believe that dickering continues concerning the most appropriate replacement name.  Since there is no requirement that a school has to be named after anybody, something like  P.S. no. 3 might be the best bet to avoid future controversy.  Saint Augustine reminds us that all human funerary customs, while ostensibly honors for the defunct, are actually and necessarily palliatives for the living.  The same is largely true, I believe, of all memorials and memorializations; and it comes perilously close to being true of all written history.  As perceptions, needs, and tastes vary and change among historical populations, so also do their attitudes toward history.  Thus all written history must be in a sense provisional, and historical revisionism constant.  This does not mean that all historical facts are uncertain.  It should warn us, however, that many interpretations of those facts are debatable, and not a few grossly influenced by anachronism and the intellectual predispositions of the historian.

 

            The year 1992, which was among other things the five-hundredth anniversary of the first transatlantic voyage of Christopher Columbus, witnessed a large number of books, colloquia, lectures, and exhibitions relating to that event.  I was offered the exciting opportunity to serve as one of the curators of a major exhibition mounted at the Library of Congress.  It was entitled “1492-1992: the Ongoing Voyage”.  My credentials for this assignment were at best modest, but it was not a chance to be missed.  I had a strong interest in the “spiritual milieu” of the late medieval Mediterranean world, in which religion, politics, and a very active international and indeed intercontinental maritime economy stimulated both cultural cooperation and cultural conflict.  I had published some essays on Columbus’s religious ideas, which were quite strange and clearly related to a major strain of apocalyptic thinking widespread in the Franciscan Order of his day.  The project required a great deal more of me, of course, including wide reading in maritime history and the copious literature of travel and exploration of the European Renaissance.

 

            I was part of a large team, which included many academic types and civil servants.  It was in this milieu that I encountered for the first time the attitudes and vocabulary of political correctness at industrial scale.  Our view of the person of Columbus remains mysterious, remote, and fragmentary to this day.  I conclude that he was both a late medieval mystical autodidact, and one hell of a sailor.  But his practical expertise warred with fantastic preconceptions he had inherited from ancient geographers and “nature” writers who had taught him to expect to find, in the world’s distant islands, all sorts of monstruous human life: men with dogs’ heads, cyclopses, assorted weirdos.  The prevailing attitudes of 1992  rather reversed things.  The monsters were to be found in the Niña, the Pinta, and above all the Santa Maria, Columbus’s flagship.  The phrase “the discovery of America,” which had been in general use more or less forever, was not merely “Eurocentric” but oppressive to “native Americans”—the word native having for certain scholars overnight changed its etymological and customary meaning in the direction of aboriginal and therefore no longer applicable to the vast majority of Americans born in America.

 

 

            Trying to understand the meaning of Columbus at the time of the quincentenary of 1992 led me bone up a bit on previous centennial observations.  There actually was a tercentenary in1792, though one only modestly noted in a new republic with a great deal else on its mind. For all I know President Witherspoon may have adorned it with a few well-chosen words on the Princeton campus.  If so, I have not found them.  But the hagiographic celebration par excellence was the Columbian Exposition of 1892-93, which was a whing-ding the likes of which the world had never witnessed.  Though officially opening on “Columbus Day” of 1892, the main period of its visitation was 1893.  The venue was Chicago, in-your-face Chicago, “a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities” in Sandburg’s famous poem.  Within this actual city the town fathers built an ideal one, classical in its architecture and lavish in its expense, with a kind of Venetian lagoon at its center.  The ostensible occasion—the four hundredth anniversary of the European discovery of America—was quite obviously a mere front.  The real subject was the emergence of the United States as a super-power, industrial colossus, and paradise of the arts and sciences.  But of course there was plenty of Columbus, too, and what a Columbus he was.  Discovering in Columbus a superspreading genocidal maniac requires some preparatory political softening up, to be sure; but the vision is not wholly removed from subsequent developments in the long history of colonization and emigration in the Americas.  Discovering in him a plucky proto-Protestant entrepreneur and self-made industrial baron is another.  And that was the Columbian vibe of the Expo of 1893.

 

            In 1892 all the virtues that had been attributed to George Washington in Parson Weems’s famous biography of 1809 (source of the cherry-tree legend, among others) were found vibrant and expanded in the imagined character of a Genoese maritime adventurer.  American lexicographers know that in 1892 such racial slurs as wop and guinea were already widely applied by native Americans of the day to Americans of Italian birth; but for expositional Columbus, the olive oil line was breached.  The Knights of Columbus, the Catholic lay organization, had been founded ten years earlier; but he now became the Italian-American icon par excellence.  Meanwhile, for Protestant America the Columbian Exposition really solidified Columbus’s credentials as Yankee hero.   Memories of the 1892 Columbus were still vivid enough to moderate some of the recent iconoclastic intentions directed toward the 1992 Columbus, whose popular reputation has by no means improved over the last quarter century.  In various places statues of Columbus, prime candidates for erasure, were spared in deference to the possible feelings of the “Italian-American community,” still thought of as having some residual grievance leverage.  I doubt that the Scottish-American community has what it would take to rescue John Witherspoon.

 

                                                   Chicago, 1893
 

            One of Faulkner’s characters, speaking of the historical burden of the “Lost Cause” syndrome of the Old South, says: “The past is never dead.  It’s not even past.”  This pithy sentiment, usually attributed to the novelist himself, is frequently quoted, and for good reason.  It’s one of those quotations that sounds really good, quite without the necessity of explaining what it might possibly mean.  I, for one, have only the vaguest idea.  I have spent the better part of my life studying the past, but I have found it a past, while quite past indeed, demanding of both sympathy and humility in trying to understand and assess it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Grandchildren

 

                                   John Henry                 /              Hazel

 

            We have six grandchildren—real ones, I mean—in addition to an indeterminate number of imaginary ones on whom this essay may briefly touch if I have time.  The grandchildren range in age commodiously from twenty-eight to seven, one full twenty-one- year span of childhood by the old legal reckoning.  Five of them are of the female sex, including both the eldest (Sophia) and the youngest (Hazel).  The plethora of granddaughters has been for me a special blessing.  In my family of birth there had been only sons, three of them.  The faint mysterious hint of a daughter, stillborn when I was two, a shadow and another sorrow is a mother's hard life, was barely even a spectral presence.  I regard the tutelage provided by so many highly accomplished girls and their mothers a special gift of my mature years.

 

            I have somewhere a little pewter plaque with the following assertion: “Happiness is Being a Grandfather”.  Not too long ago at the bottom of the yard in one of several now long-established weed beds, I stumbled upon a similar ensign claiming that particular little plot to be “Granpa’s Garden.”  You are surely familiar with the genre, which is widely to be found in its various forms on bumper stickers, belt buckles, sweatshirts, and coffee mugs throughout the land.  Call me a snob.  I ordinarily recoil from outsourcing proclamations of my sentimental life to the indentured rhymers at Hallmark cards or the proprietors of Interstate rest-stop tchotchke-sellers.  But the relationships between grandparent and grandchild actually does provide an opportunity for felicity sufficiently potent to overcome even the saccharine annoyances of American commercialism.

 

            Just at the moment we are enjoying a Covid-delayed visit from the Montrealers—that is, Luke and Melanie and their two kids, John Henry (8) and Hazel (7)—our only grandson and our youngest granddaughter.  I suppress political commentary in this blog, and so will not comment upon the combination of personal self-righteousness and practical incompetence with which the smarmy Canadian Prime Minister has supervised the pandemic in his land, leaving much of his unvaccinated population in lockdown behind a closed border.  Personal opinion.  In any event, it has been a long time since we have been able to visit with this family, and we are reveling in the opportunity.  The first thing that strikes one is that kids do grow.  Furthermore, their mental and ethical growth is as notable as their dramatic physical expansion.  They get more and more interesting and delightful.  They move from cute to acute.  They become great companions.

 

         On Monday, Luke and I set out with the two kids on what I think of as my “regular” walk.  Later on their mother Melanie, taking a slightly shorter route, caught up with us about half way along; we then proceeded together.  This is a hike of approximately three miles, most of it through lovely sylvan glades above the lake and along a short section of the Delaware and Raritan Canal.  Though they spend a lot of time in the great outdoors of Québec, John Henry and Hazel are of course city-dwellers for whom the zoological opulence of suburban New Jersey might as well be the Serengeti.  We set out with the conscious intention of cataloguing the animal and bird life we saw on the walk, and in the first five hundred yards we were able to record chipmunk, deer, groundhog, rabbit, and squirrel.  The birds were too numerous to count.  One special treat came when, looking down from the height of a cliffside path, we could clearly see four or five turtles, some of them quite large, sunning themselves on the trunk of a dead tree fallen into the water.  I was disappointed only by the absence of the cormorant that often joins them.  For the kids, the permanent interest of the natural beauty is at the moment complemented by the diminishing remnants of the cicada phenomenon of which I wrote in a recent post.  Everywhere along the beaten forest track are hundreds of the little holes from which the critters have emerged in their prehistoric exoticism.  The little corpses of the thousands which have briefly fulfilled their last full measure of procreative devotion lie scattered promiscuously everywhere, sometimes in such numbers as to create unpleasant whiffs of decomposition.

 

            Walking along the canal paths, we pursued a somewhat eccentric mission.  Our house has a small atrium, with its own tiny pond and turtles, through which a short path leads from the glass door to my study to a wooden exterior door on the other side.  I am trying, very slowly, to cover this path with a layer of the white sea pebbles to be found throughout this part of Jersey in much of the topsoil and practically all gravel.  I try to pick up a small bag full of these pebbles on every walk.  If I had enough grandkids, we could do it on an industrial scale!

 

            Yesterday was the hottest day of the year to date, both broiling and muggy.  I wasn’t feeling all that great, and I probably should not even have undertaken such an ambitious walk under the conditions.  I was soon huffing and puffing badly, and finding it difficult to carry on.  My son Luke was sensitive enough to intervene.  When we were a couple thousand yards from home, he suggested that he run home and fetch a car, while the rest of us await his return, sitting in the shade on the abutment of a bridge over a little creek.  I agreed with relief; I am gradually having to accept such necessary humiliations.  Young John Henry, not yet nine years old, was a little distressed on my behalf and tried to pretend that he, too, needed the relief.  Partly because my only grandson and I are both named John, and partly because a fragment of a recent sermon came to mind, and partly because I seem to specialize in bizarre patterns of thought, a certain Bible text text (John 3:30) leapt to my mind.  It is one that identifies John the Baptist in some well-known medieval and Renaissance paintings, including the unforgettable Isenheim altar-piece: Illum oportet crescere, me autem minui (“As he grows greater, I must grow less”).  Volumes of puzzling medieval exegesis were devoted to this puzzling verse, but I finally understood what it means, or at least what it means to me.  It is a simple truism of biological and historical life.  And a very comforting one at that.  Our vital continuity is that of our posterity.

 

            All grandparents probably think that their grandchildren are superior beings.  I certainly do.  I refer, of course, to my real as opposed to my imaginary grandchildren.  Many of my readers will be puzzled by the very concept of imaginary grandchildren, though I suspect that several of my fellow seniors will know immediately what I refer to—a grift vaguely related to the “Spanish prisoner,” the “Nigerian entrepreneur,” and various telemarketing schemes involving aluminum siding, ornamental plaques, or John Wayne memorabilia.  Not too long ago the AARP featured it in their popular “Geriatric Scam of the Week” feature.*   I got my first call about five years ago, then two or three more each year since.  I picked up the landline and said “Hello”.  The immediate response, in a youngish adult male voice that I might place as originating somewhere along a line from Beaumont TX to Morgantown WV, was interrogative: “Grampa”?  I didn’t think so, as my only grandson at the time was about three.  “I think you have the wrong number,” I said, utterly without effect.  “No, Grampa,” he said.  “It’s me.  I ran into some trouble, and I need a little help.”  After a few more confusing remarks, I simply hung up.  But at length--by the fourth or fifth such call-- I had grasped the concept and developed my own little line of dialogue.  “I’d love to, but thing is, George, Butch double-crossed me on that last delivery, and the cartel is after me.  Watching every move I make.”  That was pretty good, I thought; but I could do better.  I finally settled on “I’d love to help you out, Sonny, but I spent my last damn dime bailing out Granny.  Possession with intention, initial hearing in about a month.  I was actually hoping to  borrow a little something from you.   And, honest, this time I’ll pay you back.”  If you are simply trying to round out your scumbag credentials, breaking into the alms boxes in impoverished country churches is all well and good; but prostituting the impulses of grandparental love really is beyond the pale.

 

 

*https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/info-2018/grandparent-scam-scenarios.html

 

 

Small Latin, Less Greek

 

 

                                                       Small Latin

            I had never come across the name of William Nicholas Selig (1864-1948), an important but mainly forgotten figure in the early history of the movie business, until a few weeks ago; but he was clearly a man of parts.  As is very frequently the case, my fleeting discovery of Selig was tangential to my ruminations on a couple of disparate bits of information that had crossed my consciousness at more or less the same time.  The first was an announcement coming out of Princeton University that in the future undergraduate concentrators (majors) in the classical languages and literatures would not in fact be required to undertake formal study in either the Latin or the Greek language.  This particular development has been the subject of a good deal of comment in the national press, where it has been connected, correctly, with many other “equity” initiatives undertaken here and elsewhere and supposed to address racial inequities in various aspects of higher education.  I have now been retired from the faculty for some years, and I was not in any event a member of the Classics Department.  My reactions to the announcement, aside from astonishment, are probably predictable, but of no special relevance to today’s topic anyway.  So I proceed immediately to the second bit of information—or in this instance perhaps, speculation.  It concerns Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan playwright.

            Marlowe was definitely a mysterious character.  That’s not too unusual for espionage agents, and Marlowe seems to have been one, among other things. Most famously of course he was the author of at least two extraordinary plays, as well as several less extraordinary, and some fine poetry.  Many scholars think that he had a part in the writing of some of the plays of his contemporary, Shakespeare.  He would appear to have been a rather naughty fellow, whose possible sexual proclivities and probable religious unorthodoxies are of the sort to fascinate contemporary scholarship.  What is definitely known—or at least I thought was definitely known—was the manner of his death.  He is supposed to have been stabbed to death in a violent quarrel in a house, possibly a public house or tavern, in Deptford on London’s South Bank on May 30, 1593.  The speculation which I encountered was that his death was actually staged.   According to this theory the coroner’s report of the supposed event—which an eminent Shakespeare scholar discovered in the archives nearly a century ago—was but one element in an elaborate ruse designed by shadowy but politically powerful personages.   They needed to secure for their asset Marlowe a most original kind of cover by disappearing him.  Activating a sleeper agent is child’s play compared with activating a dead one, which was their eventual goal.  In hiding, the supposedly defunct Marlowe continued to write plays, but of course they had to be attributed to other probable Shakespeare collaborators or ghosters such as Greene and Peele.

            This isn’t exactly Q-Anon, perhaps, but it did remind me that a few of the better conspiracy theories I have encountered flowed from the pens of my fellow literary scholars.  That’s how I happened brush up against the name invoked in the first sentence of this essay, that of William Nicholas Selig, one of the first moguls of the film industry.  Things often come together in very strange ways.  One of Selig’s pet projects, around the time of the tercentennial of Shakespeare’s death in 1913, was a plan to make a series of films of the Bard’s plays.  In this effort he felt moved to launch a lawsuit against George Fabyan (1867-1936), the heir of a textile tycoon and a pioneer of military cryptography.  Fabyan and Selig were actually old buddies, as well as fellow “cards”, as they used to be called.   An example of Fabyan’s cardism is this:  in 1905 he published a bound book of a hundred empty sheets entitled What I Know about the Future of Cotton and Domestic Goods.  Yes, blank pages!  Get it?  What a card.  As a cryptographer he had swallowed both hook and sinker of the main line of the “Bacon cypher”, the phantasmagoric “proof” that Sir Francis Bacon was the actual author of the plays that a hoodwinked world had for three centuries attributed to some theatrical nonentity called Will Shakespeare.  Selig was probably burnishing his own credentials as a card when he sued Fabyan on the grounds that Fabyan’s expert opinion threatened the reputation of Shakespeare and therefore of the prospective profits from the planned series of filmed plays.  Coverage of the lawsuit made great press for both men.

            What most Shakespeare scholars today call the “Baconian heresy” had a good run.  For at least half a century a lot of serious and consequential people maintained that since Shakespeare could not possibly have written the so-called plays of Shakespeare, somebody else must have done it, and that somebody else must have been Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626).  There would be a lot to talk about here, but my particular interest in this essay is not the who but the why.  Why was it impossible that Shakespeare could have written his own plays?  Answer: Because those plays are full of learned lore, and he was a commoner who had not gone to university!  More particularly, because he did not know Latin.  That is, the Baconians regarded Shakespeare with what in today’s lingo is sometimes called the soft bigotry of low expectations.  If you are convinced that either by nature or by nurture a fellow is incapable of doing something, you are unlikely to credit the fact that he has actually done it.

 

                                                           Large Latin

            The Baconian heresy really got going in mid-Victorian times, but it had had some seventeenth-century preparation.  In an introductory poem in the Shakespeare first folio (1623) the Bard’s great admirer Ben Jonson, himself deeply steeped in the classical tongues, famously marveled that a writer with “small Latine, and lesse Greeke” could have written such masterpieces.  By the time Milton wrote “L’Allegro” (1645) Shakespeare has progressed, or perhaps regressed, to the role of rustic vernacular prodigy, in contrast to the erudite classicist Jonson.  One of the things that L’Allegro the “cheerful man” likes to do is to take in a comedy at the local theater: “Then to the well-trod stage anon,/ If Jonson’s learned sock be on, /Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child, / Warble his native wood-notes wild.”  Here Jonson’s own classical learning—the sock being an erudite allusion to the footgear of comic actors on the ancient Greek stage—is contrasted to Shakespeare’s supposed naively gorgeous hillbilly English.   As a matter of fact Shakespeare’s small Latin was probably bigger than that of even some Princeton classics majors of yore, the ones who actually studied Latin, let alone those of our brave new future.

            There is probably still a general consensus among institutions of higher education on both sides of the Atlantic concerning their fundamental two-fold mission: the preservation of “old” knowledge on the one hand, and the search for and discovery of “new” knowledge on the other.  The recognition that there is such a thing as new knowledge necessarily implies pedagogic and curricular change as well as continuity, guaranteeing that there will in perpetuity always be some vanishing good old days for alumni to lament.  One of Princeton’s nineteenth-century alumni crises came when the faculty struck from the list of required prerequisites for application for admission to the place a demonstrated competence in ancient Greek. Many alumni were sure that civilization as previously recognized had ended.  The faculty, however, were merely acknowledging the reality of the expansion and increasing democratization of American public education.  Princeton students could do their Greek after arriving on campus.

 

 

Academic Vintage

                                                                     Cassiciacum

            In the year 386 the young Augustine rusticated for an extended period with various friends and family members at a large country house at Cassiciacum, a bit north of Milan.  There he spent a good deal of time praying, reading, writing and discussing books and their ideas, often al fresco, walking along the field paths or seated amid the shade of the vineyards.  This was one of the more consequential vacations in western cultural history.  I can’t go into all that now, but I can confirm the reality of literary seminars conducted in vineyards—a feature of the story I had been inclined to regard as poetic license, along with his sitting under a fig tree to read the Epistle to the Romans—because I just participated in one.

 

            On Saturday last, chauffeured by two good friends from New York, we made our way to the Unionville Vineyards in Ringoes, N.J., where the son and daughter of our recently departed friend and mentor, the great Dante scholar Robert Hollander, had arranged a Dante seminar in memory of their father.  There were I suppose about twenty-five of us, some family members, but mainly old students of the maestro and alumni of his own legendary summer seminars taught for many years in a Tuscan castle.  Our leader was Dr. Frank Ordiway, one of his brilliant students of the 1980s, and a great expert on medieval Italian writers and the Latin classics.

 

                                                      Unionville NJ

 

            The Divine Comedy is a long poem (about 14,000 lines) divided into three long sections, one devoted to each of the “three kingdoms” of the imagined afterlife—Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Heaven (Paradiso).  These long parts are called in Italian cantiche (singular, cantica.)  Each cantica is subdivided into smaller units called cantos, of which there are a hundred in the whole poem—thirty-three in each of the two latter cantiche, and thirty-four in the Inferno, with the very first canto acting as a kind of introduction to the whole poem.  As you can see, a canto’s average length is about 140 lines.  There is a vast body of secondary criticism devoted to Dante, especially in the form of essays that are meditations upon or explications of one of the hundred individual cantos.  Frank chose this mode; the particular canto of his choice was the thirtieth of the Purgatorio.  We began in the Hollander fashion with a viva voce reading of the whole canto, both in Italian and in the English translation.  The Italian reader, Jennifer Borghi, who holds joint American and Italian citizenship and has lived for years in Italy, is an opera singer to boot; the English reader was Katherine Charles, an English professor at Washington College.  The high level of the bilingual elocution was a harbinger of Dr. Ordiway’s presentation and the student discussion it stimulated. 

 

            In my experience people are likely to make one of two mistakes in reading Dante.  The first is to assume that you can simply sit down and read his poem as you would a newspaper op ed or a detective novel.  You can’t, at least not with pleasure and comprehension.  The second is so to quail before the “otherness” of the poem--with its elaborate and perhaps fantastic structure, its huge and promiscuous catalogue of historical, biblical, and mythological personages, its relentless literary allusions, its obscure historical references, and the strangeness of its religious ideas—as to give up in despair.  It was Mark Twain who defined a great book as “a book everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” This is another way of saying that good reading, however pleasurable, sometimes involves real work.  I am ready to guarantee that you really do want to read this poem—but you could probably use some help.

 

            Dante certainly needed lots of help himself.  I refer to Dante the literary character, the first-person narrator of the poem, a man lost in a dark wood, up the creek sans paddle, as the story begins.  Fortunately three heavenly ladies, aware of his situation, conspire to rescue him.  What he needs first of all is good guidance—moral and literary—and so a guide is enlisted.  Who could be more qualified to lead a befuddled Florentine through a Christian epic than Virgil, the greatest poet in the pagan Latin literary tradition?  Well, lots of people, you might think, but you have to get used to surprises in this poem.  By historical misfortune, Virgil himself lived “in the time of the false and lying gods”.  Tough luck.  He is eternally doomed to the Underworld, suburban Hell, so to speak, Hell’s high-rent district, a place without the more sensational torture chambers, but also entirely without hope.  Yet he can guide another toward a goal that he himself could not achieve.

 

 

            There is a difference between leading toward and leading to, a difference dramatized in the canto carefully chosen by Ordiway for our discussion.  Virgil apparently can get Dante no further than 62.5% of the way toward the Beatific Vision, by my reckoning.  In the thirtieth canto of the Purgatorio Virgil abruptly disappears, and his A-Team replacement, a heavenly lady named Beatrice, takes over.  It is hard for a reader not to find cruelty in this passage.  By this point in the poem Virgil has saved Dante’s bacon more times than a reader can remember.  He has taught, guided, comforted, encouraged and literally carried him through intellectual and physical terrors nearly impossible for us to grasp.  Virgil now simply vanishes from the poem.  Dante is given all of six lines to express his distress—a distress for which he is immediately reprimanded by his new and superior guide.  Onward and upward!  Ultreia!

 

        So there we were, seated in a vineyard in a wide circle of folding chairs, thinking and talking about all this.  In speaking of the suddenly absent Virgil, Dante the pilgrim had called him “the sweetest of fathers.”  We were gathered at event convened by a son and a daughter to memorialize their distinguished father.  In Germany, where they virtually invented the modern Ph. D. degree, scholars reverently referred to their doctoral supervisors as “Doctorväter,” doctor-fathers.*  I have heard the leader of our seminar use that term of his old teacher, as I myself have used it of mine.  Analogies are comparisons in which some elements are alike and some unalike; but I believe all of us there grasped the particular poignancy of an extraordinary passage of poetry that invoked at once the sadness of irreparable loss and the promise of continuing vitality offered by great poets and their great interpreters for generations yet unborn.  All of us gathered there in that grassy circle were aware that we had had to say goodbye to a trusted guide and mentor.  But no more than Dante himself had he left us comfortless.  There was a whole warehouse of happy memories; and we were after all reading our text from the bilingual text of the Divine Comedy "in a verse translation by Jean Hollander and Robert Hollander.”  It was a considerable dantisa of the seventeenth century, John Milton, who perhaps said it best.  “A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”

 

 

 

*In the contemporary scene the term should be recognized as parental rather than exclusively paternal.  There are of course  doctor-mothers, one of the most notable being Beatrice, Virgil’s supererogator.  On that one, Dante was approximately seven hundred years ahead of the Pope.