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Pure Historicism in Literature
Thomas Chatterton - An Excelente Balade of Charitie
Thomas Chatterton (1752–70) was one of the most tragic figures in British literary history. Born into straitened circumstances owing to the premature death of his father, Chatterton nevertheless exhibited formidable poetic talent at an early age. By sixteen he had published a text in archaic language he said he had discovered in a chest at St. Mary Redcliffe in his native Bristol. Soon thereafter other documents and poems began to surface, including Bristowe Tragedie, which painted a particularly colorful portrait of late medieval Bristol in the words of a fifteenth-century monk named Thomas Rowley, friend of a known historical figure, Bristol merchant and mayor William Canynge.
Encouraged by the publication of his poems, Chatterton moved to London, where he intended to establish himself as a writer. Within months, however, the "marvellous boy" committed suicide, evidently driven to despair by poverty, neglect, and poor health (appendix 1, no. 27).
Having come into the world at a time when antiquarian passions flourished, Chatterton had hoped to advance his career by sending a copy of his Rowley treatise on painting to Horace Walpole (see chaps. 8 and 10), who in 1762 and 1765 had published his own Anecdotes of Painting in England: with some Account of the principal Artists and incidental Notes on the other Arts collected by the late Mr. George Vertue. Walpole, however, discovered Chatterton's imposture after showing The Ryse of Peyncteynge, yn Englande, wroten bie T. Rowleie. 1469 for Mastre Canynge to Thomas Gray and Rev. William Mason, both of whom pronunced it a modern fake.1
"An Excelente Balade of Charitie: as wroten bie the gode Prieste Thomas Rowley, 1464," published posthumously in 1777, was one of Chatterton's last works in late-medieval verse, and one of a large number of archaic poems which, for their outstanding ingenuity and quality, made Chatterton in death a figure of tragic heroic stature for such romantic literati as Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron, and de Vigny.
Chatterton evidently synthesized his fifteenth-century literary style by poring over several sources, including Speght's edition of Chaucer, Bailey's Universal Etymological Dictionary, and Kersey's Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum. Virtually all of the words he employed are found in the last two reference works, while in some instances Chatterton altered spellings or invented his own locutions.2
The following lines from "An Excelente Balade of Charitie," which depict the arrival of a storm in a characteristically Rowleian manner, are, in the words of one critic, "not to be excelled either in ancient or modern poetry":
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29 The gatherd storme is rype; the bigge drops falle;
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30 The forswat meadowes smethe, and drenche the raine;
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31 The comyng ghastness do the cattle pall,
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32 And the full flockes are drivynge ore the plaine;
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33 Dashde from the cloudes the waters flott againe;
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34 The welkin opes; the yellow levynne flies;
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35 And the hot fierie smothe in the wide lowings dies.
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36 Liste! now the thunder's rattling clymmynge sound
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37 Cheves slowlie on, and then embollen clangs,
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38 Shakes the hie spyre, and losst, dispended, drown'd,
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39 Still on the gallard eare of terroure hanges;
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40 The windes are up; the lofty elmen swanges;
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41 Again the levynne and the thunder poures,
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| 42 And the full cloudes are braste attenes in stonen showers.3 |
Gustave Flaubert - Salammbô
Gustave Flaubert's Salammbô (1862) is nothing less than a meticulously detailed literary recreation of ancient Carthage. Putting theory into practice, Flaubert traveled to Tunisia to study the actual sites he would describe with such extraordinary authenticity and attention to detail. As an historical novel Salammbô has held its place in the Western literary canon, and has even been the basis of several operas (Mussorgsky, Hauer, and Fénelon). But it remains as controversial today as ever, thus fulfilling Sainte-Beuve's prediction that "Salammbô, indépendamment de la dame, est dès à présent, le nom d'une bataille, de plusieurs batailles."4
In a lengthy letter to Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert countered numerous criticisms about the historical accuracy of Salammbô with great aplomb, and eloquently defended his artistic integrity. Some of his comments appear below (the translations are my own):
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I wanted to put in place a mirage, applying to Antiquity the processes of a modern novel, and I tried to be simple. . . . Yes, I say simple and not sober. There is nothing more complex than a Barbarian.
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| You are right . . . I got things going, I forced history, and as you have very well said, I wanted to cause a siege. But with a military subject, what is the harm in that? What is more, I did not entirely invent it, I merely gave it a little weight. |
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You may be right about what you say concerning the historical novel and Antiquity, and I might very well have failed. Nevertheless, verisimilitude and my own impressions make me think I have created something that resembles Carthage. But that is not the question. Do I make a mockery of archeology? If the color is not uniform, if the details clash, if the customs are not derived from religion and the acts of passion, if the characters are not followed through, if the costumes are not appropriate to actual practices and the architecture to the climate, if there is not, in a word, harmony, then I am at fault. If not, then I am not. Everything holds.
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| It seems to me that the curiosity, the love that drew me to vanished religions and peoples, has something pleasant and inherently moral about it. |
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Rest assured that I have not created a fantasy-Carthage. Documents about Carthage exist and they are not all in Movers. One has to look a little further afield for them. For which reason Ammien Marcellin provided me with the exact shape of a door, the poem of Corippus (the Johannide), many details about small African tribes, etc., etc.
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Flaubert himself, on the other hand, felt that one of the faults of Salammbô was that "the pedestal is too big for the statue," and that he might otherwise have devoted another hundred pages to the purely fictional title character herself. The novelist first introduced her to the modern world in the following passage, in which architecture, landscape, and costume conspire to project an aura of ancient mystery:
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All at once the highest terrace of the palace lit up, the middle door opened, and a woman covered in dark clothing, Hamilcar's daughter herself, appeared on the threshold. She descended the first staircase that ran at an angle along the second floor, then the second, and the third, stopping on the last terrace at the top of the galley stairway. Motionless, with her head lowered, she looked at the soldiers. . . .
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| At last she descended the galley staircase. The priests followed her. She moved forward into the cypress-lined avenue and walked slowly between the captains' tables, who drew back as they watched her pass by. |
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Her hair, powdered with a violet-colored sand and made up in the shape of a tower after the fashion of the Canaanite virgins, made her appear taller than she actually was. Braided pearls attached at her temples fell down to the corners of her mouth, which was pink like a half-opened pomegranate. On her chest was an assortment of jewels that imitated in their multicolored splendor the scales of a moray eel. Her bare arms, covered with diamonds, emerged from a sleeveless tunic whose red flowers shone like stars against a deep black background. She wore a large deep-purple cloak of unknown material that trailed behind her, following her every step like a great wave, and around her ankles was a small golden chain to regulate her gait.
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Arthur Miller - The Crucible
Arthur Miller's The Crucible (1953), a chillingly dramatic recreation of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, carries an important political subtext about the communist witch-hunts that took place under the baleful influence of McCarthyism in the early 1950s. However, its relevance to mid-twentieth-century America or, indeed, to any historical period mired in the politics of prejudice and injustice, in no way diminishes the effectiveness of The Crucible as a theatrical work that recaptures the essence of an extraordinary time and place in American history.
Like Flaubert, Miller has been criticized for historical inaccuracies and distortions. Indeed, this is almost invariably the case for any work of art about the past that attempts to portray its subject in a more or less authentic manner. In an article appearing in The New Yorker on 21 and 28 October 1996 during the production of the recent big-screen film version of the play, Miller himself explained the genesis and style of his work. It is worth quoting at length:
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I had read about the witchcraft trials in college, but it was not until I read a book published in 1867—a two-volume, thousand-page study by Charles W. Upham, who was then the mayor of Salem—that I knew I had to write about the period. Upham had not only written a broad and thorough investigation of what was even then an almost lost chapter of Salem's past but opened up to me the details of personal relationships among many participants in the tragedy.
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I visited Salem for the first time on a dismal spring day in 1952........In the gloomy courthouse there I read the transcripts of the witchcraft trials of 1692. . . .
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I had not approached the witchcraft out of nowhere or from purely social and political considerations. . . . That John Proctor the sinner might overturn his paralyzing personal guilt and become the most forthright voice against the madness around him was a reassurance to me, and, I suppose, an inspiration. . . .
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But as the dramatic form became visible, one problem remained unyielding: so many practices of the Salem trials were similar to those employed by the congressional committees that I could easily be accused of skewing history for a mere partisan purpose. Inevitably, it was no sooner known that my new play was about Salem than I had to confront the charge that such an analogy was specious—that there never were any witches but there certainly are Communists. In the seventeenth century, however, the existence of witches was never questioned by the loftiest minds in Europe and America. . . .
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This anxiety-laden leap backward over nearly three centuries may have been helped along by a particular Upham footnote. At a certain point, the high court of the province made the fatal decision to admit, for the first time, the use of "spectral evidence" as proof of guilt. . . .
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It was as though the court had grown tired of thinking and had invited in the instincts: spectral evidence—that poisoned cloud of paranoid fantasy—made a kind of lunatic sense to them, as it did in plot-ridden 1952, when so often the question was not the acts of an accused but the thoughts and intentions in his alienated mind. . . .
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I was also drawn into writing "The Crucible" by the chance it gave me to use a new language—that of seventeenth-century New England. That plain, craggy English was liberating in a strangely sensuous way, with its swings from an almost legalistic precision to a wonderful metaphoric richness. . . .
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But it was not yet my language, and among other strategies to make it mine I enlisted the help of a former University of Michigan classmate, the Greek-American scholar and poet Kimon Friar. . . . The problem was not to imitate the archaic speech but to try to create a new echo of it which would flow freely off American actors' tongues. As in the film, nearly fifty years later, the actors in the first production grabbed the language and ran with it as happily as if it were their customary speech.
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Miller's effort to create "a new echo" of seventeenth-century American English to make his play more readily intelligible to living actors and audiences can be taken as evidence of a certain adaptive historicism. The resulting language of the play, however, still retains a cogent "period" style that differentiates it from Modern spoken English, as the following representative excerpt from act 4 illustrates:
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Elizabeth: Giles is Dead.
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He looks at her incredulously.
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Proctor: When were he hanged?
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Elizabeth, quietly, factually: He were not hanged. He would not answer aye or nay to his indictment; for if he denied the charge they'd hang him surely, and auction out his property. So he stand mute, and died Christian under the law. And so his sons will have his farm. It is the law, for he could not be condemned a wizard without he answer the indictment, aye or nay.
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Proctor: Then how does he die?
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Elizabeth, gently: They press him, John.
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Proctor: Press?
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Elizabeth: Great stones they lay upon his chest until he plead aye or nay. With a tender smile for the old man: They say he give them but two words. "More weight," he says. And died."
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As for the reception and meaning of The Crucible, Miller offers the following perspectives:
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On opening night, January 22, 1953, I knew that the atmosphere would be pretty hostile. The coldness of the crowd was not a surprise; Broadway audiences were not famous for loving history lessons, which is what they made of the play. . . . The critics were not swept away. "Arthur Miller is a problem playwright in both senses of the word," wrote Walter Kerr of the Herald Tribune, who called the play "a step backward into mechanical parable. . . ."
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About a year later, a new production, one with younger, less accomplished actors, working in the Martinique Hotel ballroom, played with the fervor that the script and the times required, and "The Crucible" became a hit. The play stumbled into history, and today, I am told, it is one of the most heavily demanded trade-fiction paperbacks in this country. . .
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I am not sure what "The Crucible" is telling people now, but I know that its paranoid center is still pumping out the same darkly attractive warning that it did in the fifties.
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