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Debates, Rhetoric and Political Action: Practices of Textual Interpretation and Analysis 1st Edition Claudia Wiesner
Appraisal, Sentiment and Emotion Analysis in Political Discourse
This book adopts a multi-method multimodal approach to the study of online political communication, applying it to case studies from the United Kingdom, France, and Italy towards offering a portrait of the rapid ideological shifts in contemporary Western democracies.
The volume introduces an integrated framework combining Sentiment and Emotion Analysis, rooted in lexical semantics, and the qualitative dimensions of Appraisal Theory, applying it to large corpora of online political communication from the United Kingdom, France, and Italy. Combei and Reggi highlight their combined potential in analysing the multimodal resources in such discourses and in turn revealing fresh insights into layers of subtext and the ways in which parties and movements frame their political programmes and values. The authors also take into account culture- and language-specific variables across the three countries in shaping such discourses. The volume makes the case for an integrated methodological framework that can be uniquely applied to better understand the multimodal communicative landscape of divisiveness in today’s rapidly shifting political climate and other forms of online communication more broadly.
This book will be of interest to students and scholars in digital communication, political communication, multimodality, and qualitative and quantitative discourse analysis, especially those interested in corpus-assisted approaches.
Claudia Roberta Combei is a Researcher (RTD-a) in Linguistics and Head of the Experimental Phonetics Laboratory at the University of Pavia. She earned her PhD from the University of Pisa, specialising in phonetics and corpus linguistics. Her research employs a mixed-method approach, exploring topics such as political and social media discourse, non-native speech, and sociophonetics. She has co-coordinated the RadioCast-it speech corpus and serves as a member of the editorial board of Bibliography of Metaphor and Metonymy – MetBib. She has reviewed for national and international scientific conferences and journals.
Valeria Reggi is a discourse analyst and certified English-Italian translator. She is currently an Adjunct Professor and Tutor at the University of Bologna and the University of Brescia, and she collaborates with University College London. Valeria Reggi is also a member of the Editorial Board of the Media Ecology journal New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication. Her research interests include Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, political discourse, disinformation, stereotyping, nationalism, and critical thinking.
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Appraisal, Sentiment and Emotion Analysis in Political Discourse
A Multimodal, Multi-method Approach
Authored by Claudia Roberta Combei and Valeria Reggi
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Studies-in-Multimodality/book-series/RSMM
Appraisal, Sentiment and Emotion Analysis in Political Discourse
A Multimodal, Multi-method Approach
Claudia Roberta Combei and Valeria Reggi
First published 2024 by Routledge
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and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
The right of Claudia Roberta Combei and Valeria Reggi to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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ISBN: 978-1-032-21420-7 (hbk)
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DOI: 10.4324/9781003268345
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C. R. Combei’s dedication:
To my family, past and present. Your love and influence remain close to my heart even as time and distance keep us apart.
V. Reggi’s dedication:
To Alfonso – my loving dad, my best friend and an everlasting source of inspiration.
Authorship note ix
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Book outline 7
2 Language and politics 10
2.1 Populism and polarisation in the 21st century 12
2.2 Politics and discourse: two sides of the same coin 19
2.3 What can linguistics tell us about political discourse? 22
2.4 Talking politics online 29
3 A multi-method approach for the analysis of political discourse 35
3.1 Online political discourse: a multimodal challenge 37
3.2 From messages to data 40
3.3 Automated corpus analyses 43
3.4 Appraisal analysis of polarised communication 47
4 Right-wing parties: then and now 56
4.1 The League, an Italian story 57
4.2 United Kingdom: from the Brexit Party to Reform UK 62
4.3 Brothers of Italy, a cumbersome past 64
4.4 France: from the National Front to the National Rally 67
4.5 Concluding remarks 70
5 Engaging with the audience 74
5.1 From followers to voters 78
5.2 Fear, anger, trust 86
5.3 Similarities and differences across media 92
5.4 Concluding remarks 95
6 Defining identity 97
6.1 Tweeting from right to right 101
6.2 The website as a receptacle of programmes and values 114
6.3 Concluding remarks 124
7 Us against them: a multimodal perspective
7.1 Visual campaigns 128
7.2 Them, an overview 130
7.3 Us against them 131
7.4 Concluding remarks 140
8 Online communication and
Authorship note
Appraisal, Sentiment and Emotion Analysis in Political Discourse: A Multimodal, Multi-method Approach (C. R. Combei and V. Reggi)
This book is the collaborative effort of two authors, Claudia Roberta Combei and Valeria Reggi, who both contributed their expertise and insights to its creation. Throughout the book, the authorship of each chapter and section is as follows:
Chapter 1 (‘Introduction’) was authored by both authors. Chapter 2 (‘Language and politics’) was authored by Claudia Roberta Combei.
In Chapter 3 (‘A multi-method approach for the analysis of political discourse’), the ‘Introduction’ was written by both authors, Valeria Reggi authored Sections 3.1 and 3.4, while Claudia Roberta Combei authored Sections 3.2 and 3.3.
Chapter 4 (‘Right-wing parties: then and now’) was authored by Valeria Reggi.
In Chapter 5 (‘Engaging with the audience’), the ‘Introduction’ and Sections 5.1, 5.2, and 5.4 were authored by Claudia Roberta Combei, while Section 5.3 was authored by Valeria Reggi.
In Chapter 6 (‘Defining identity’), the ‘Introduction’ and Section 6.3 were authored by Valeria Reggi, Section 6.1 was authored by Claudia Roberta Combei, while Section 6.2 was authored by both authors.
Chapter 7 (‘Us against them: a multimodal perspective’) was authored by Valeria Reggi.
Chapter 8 (‘Online communication and societal cha(lle)nges’) was authored by both authors.
1 Introduction
The year 2022 can possibly be considered a milestone in the recent history of European politics. For the first time after World War II, the far right consolidated its position by making a significant upward trajectory in two of the most populated countries – and founding members – of the European Union (EU), France and Italy. In the French presidential elections, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (Rassemblement National, RN) made an unprecedented leap forward, reaching 41.6% of the ballot. In Italy, Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia, FdI) won the general elections with 26% of the votes, within a right-wing coalition that obtained a total of 43.8%. This result also coincided with the appointment of the first female Prime Minister in the history of the Republic – Giorgia Meloni, the leader of FdI. The remarkable success of these parties was preceded by the rapid growth of many right-wing movements across Europe in the previous decade. One of the key factors (or, possibly, the decisive factor) of this upward trajectory was the attention that these parties devoted to implementing effective communication strategies, especially on online channels. For this reason, we have decided to focus our analysis on the online discourses of four European right-wing parties with different characteristics and electorates, which, in our opinion, provide a significant test bed for our multimodal, multi-method discourse analysis.
The debate on the rise of the (far) right in Europe has been animating the academic stage for over three decades, that is, long before its current electoral success. This is because not only radical parties are now more popular than ever, but their successes have also had an impact on the so-called mainstream right (Wagner and Meyer, 2017; Bale and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2022), as the borders between centrist positions and extreme ideologies are becoming fuzzier by the day. Some European radical parties are approaching topics such as authoritarianism, immigration, and sovereigntism with a more moderate outlook than in the past to appeal to a wider electorate. In other cases, the mainstream right has generally embraced more extreme positions, but in so doing has often risked losing votes from moderate
voters; hence, it has been unable to replace the far right, which, having intensified its extremism, has often managed to meet the electorate’s increasing demand for law and order. Besides country-specific conditions, the general reason for the steady upward trajectory of the right as a whole lies in addressing the topics that most involve the electorate: the societal changes (and challenges) brought forth by a series of severe economic crises, the intensification of migration flows, and globalisation (Mudde, 2007; Wodak, 2015; Kriesi and Schulte-Cloos, 2020).
The present-day success of right-wing parties in France and Italy is significant not only in quantitative terms but also because it marks a clear shift of these actors from the original fringe position as heirs of the postFascist party, the Italian Social Movement (Movimento Sociale Italiano), to a catch-all, mainstream political identity. This shift towards the right in France and Italy has taken place, quite remarkably, in just a decade. It has involved a considerable ‘restyling’ of the parties’ images and manifestos, which have led them to disavow their extremist (often racist and sexist) past and offer a positive, humane identity embodied by modern female leaders.
While the case of the National Rally and Brothers of Italy is perhaps the most blatant, two other movements have been building fresh identities in recent years: the Italian party League (Lega) and the British party Reform UK. As we shall see in Chapter 4, the former started to abandon its traditional regionalism to open up to a national electorate in 2014 with the leadership of Matteo Salvini. This evolution was met with favour by the electorate in 2019, but was not confirmed by the recent elections, which showed a dramatic decrease in the percentage of votes; nonetheless, at present, the League is firmly in power as a member of the rightwing coalition that won the Italian elections. Reform UK, on the other hand, is progressively building a new political identity that may retain some of the principles that it inherited from the defunct Brexit Party, while, at the same time, fitting in others to deal with the troubled context of the United Kingdom after its exit from the EU and trying to meet the demands of the electorate ahead of the next parliamentary elections.1
Time will tell whether these trajectories may affect political action or are merely a rhetorical device for electoral success. What is relevant for our research is that, despite significant differences in their scope and motives, they provide an interesting and varied example of the paramount role of communication in shaping and re-shaping political identities, and, as such, they offer interesting material for our analysis.
The evolution from fringe movements to mainstream parties has motivated us to opt for the broad definition of ‘right-wing’, dropping all references to their, more or less marked, extremism and radicalism – current or past. This does not imply that we intend to disregard the existence of
highly polarised tones and themes recalling a genealogy influenced by radical ideologies in some of the parties’ communications, as our analysis will show. We would rather focus on the political identity these parties communicate, both explicitly and implicitly, and how they choose to communicate it, without delving into labels that are still the subject of debate and too specific for the purposes of this book.
While the debate on the definition of resurgent rightist parties with the use of terms such as ‘far’, ‘radical’, or ‘extreme’ is not particularly enlightening when studying their discursive strategies, their definition as ‘populist’ is significant and deserves some attention (Betz, 1993; Mudde, 2007), as it deeply affects the content and style of political communication. Populism is one of the most relevant phenomena not only in contemporary politics but also in contemporary society; so much so that it was nominated word of the year by Cambridge Dictionary in 2017. Whether we understand it as a ‘thin-centered ideology’ (Mudde, 2004: 544), a rhetorical style (Aslanidis, 2016), a political strategy (Weyland, 2001), or a political style (Moffitt, 2016), there is no doubt populism has permeated the way contemporary political actors address their electorates. Although the phenomenon is ‘transversal’ to the party’s ideological affiliation, most European populist parties are, in fact, rightist (Taggart and Pirro, 2021). In the case of our study, the reverse is also true, as all the right-wing parties under analysis are typically acknowledged as ‘populist’ (ibidem). For this reason, Chapter 2 will provide a brief discussion of the many definitions of populism, which will help us to find a viable, consistent grid for our analysis of the prevailing themes of the parties’ communication.
The success of populism is due to its chameleon-like nature, making it pervasive and difficult to pinpoint, and also due to Web 2.0, which provides a favourable environment for its success on different levels. Social media offers an apparently unmediated communication channel for party leaders to connect to potential voters. Although the audience is usually aware that the leader is very unlikely to read any of the comments to her/ his posts (an activity that is normally carried out by communication specialists), the structure of social media is dialogic and is treated as such. It is worth noting that, while acknowledging the extraordinary importance of spin doctors and communication specialists, we have decided not to directly feature them in this analysis. As the discussion on populism will show, a leader is not only responsible for a party’s communication but she/ he embodies the party and promotes its ideology to the public. Specialists, therefore, are considered part of the communication process but are not held accountable for the final message. Furthermore, platform algorithms suggest customised content based on users’ individual preferences and, in so doing, foster the spread of a polarised view of society on which populism thrives. The role of discursive strategies in creating and sharing
populist content and in turning social media platforms into arenas for permanent electoral campaigning will be explored in Chapter 2.
The paramount importance of online communication for the parties under analysis has motivated us to focus, on the one hand, on the material made available on their official websites, such as billboards, graphics, information web pages, news and programmes, and, on the other hand, on Twitter posts as a privileged channel for political communication on social media. It is worth noting that there were (and still are) significant differences in the quantity and type of material on the parties’ websites. Although these differences speak volumes about the parties’ respective communicative strategies, we did not focus on them because, due to the uneven nature of the available material, it was necessary for us to choose the data and the parties to analyse on the grounds of their similarities. Therefore, in order to study comparable material, we selected the parties depending on the aspects we wanted to focus on. For example, the absence of a news section on the League’s website made us opt for FdI and Reform UK, whereas we chose to make a comparison between RN and FdI due to their similarities in graphic content.
The rationale for this selection will be explained when discussing the analysis and its results, in Chapters 5 through 7. At this stage, it is important to point out that, despite significant differences in the communication strategies put in place by the parties, these samples offer a broad overview of the role of different modes, such as verbal texts, images, and videos, in political communication. While online material provides insight into the state of a party’s communication, its impermanence is also an undeniable limitation, as websites are constantly updated, and any analysis may become obsolete in a flash. We believe, however, that the observations that our study offers retain their validity. Most material is still available despite website updates, and all four websites have, so far, developed consistently, following their own style and principles, which means that the conclusions we came to are still applicable to current content. Even the time gap that separates our analysis from the confirmation of the success of the right in 2022 should not be considered a hindrance. It is true that our study refers mostly to material collected in 2021 but the results are relevant nonetheless: on the one hand, polls were already showing that most right-wing movements were skyrocketing; on the other hand, all the actors under analysis were campaigning for local or general elections of the following year. In other words, the context of electoral competition and the favourable forecasts made the communication strategies of those parties all the more interesting to analyse.
These preliminary observations help us explain the origins of this project and answer the question, ‘Why yet another book on the discourse of the right?’ Even better, ‘Why yet another book on the analysis of the discourse
of the right?’ First, as we have already observed, the right has been gaining momentum across Europe, especially in the last decade (Taggart and Pirro, 2021). Moreover, we are living in an age in which the outcome of elections and referendums worldwide seem to be often affected by a duplicitous use of these media platforms, while the concepts of fake news, misinformation, and disinformation have entered our everyday language. Much effort has been devoted to holding social media corporations accountable and introducing digital literacy into school programmes (Council of Europe, 2016; Veltri, 2017; European Commission, 2018). On the level of content and fact-checking, important initiatives proliferate online and offline on how to debunk fake news and misinformation,2 including those promoted by social media themselves (e.g., Twitter has recently introduced a crisis misinformation policy).3
However, we should never forget that digital communication is still, first and foremost, an exchange of messages. It involves signs (words, sounds, images) that we are already expected to know how to encode and decode in our everyday communication outside of cyberspace (Hall, 2001). It is true that the digital evolution has added a hypermodal dimension to it, consisting of complex connections of meaning fostered by hyperlinks (Lemke, 2002); it is also true that traditional communication is not subject to algorithms and to cognitive ‘bubbles’ created to entrap us. All communication, however, is by definition subject to ‘noise’, the rules and the affordances that are typical (or exclusive) of every channel. The digital realm, however, has not altered the essence of the communicative process, as it basically consists of a message being encoded by a sender, sent through a channel that can be affected by noise, and later decoded by a receiver, within a specific context (Jackson, 2014: 76). The digital world is no exception, and its algorithms may cause noise. Except for the peculiarities of the web in leading our attention in one direction or another, manipulation and misinformation act on digital messages in the very same way as on traditional ones. That is why knowing the rules of digital communication is very important, but mastering the way communication works is essential, regardless of the use of digital or analogue channels.
One of the most important principles that is frequently overlooked by analysts is that communication depends on a variety of semiotic resources such as language, paralanguage, kinesics, images, sounds, and so on (Baldry and Thibault, 2006; Kress, 2011), which act simultaneously to make meaning. Each of these resources is called a mode. As we shall see in Chapters 2 and 3, the characteristics and use of modes depend on and express both power relations and cultural habits. In a word, modes are socially shaped and culturally given (Kress, 2010: 79). The presence of a variety of semiotic resources in any form of communication and their cultural and social value bear two important consequences on the design of this research.
Firstly, the analysis needed to be multimodal, that is, to account for different modes and the meanings they carry. Secondly, it needed some reflections on the ideological implications on the choice of modes and their meaning potential: as all texts ‘realize the interests of their makers’ (Kress, 2011: 36), power is always involved in the process of meaning-making (ibidem). This was all the more true as the texts analysed were published online (thus involving a wide array of semiotic resources) and concerned political communication, which by nature promotes a specific worldview. To better encompass the dual nature, both ideological and multimodal, of online political communication, we have chosen the approach of social semiotics, which focuses on the context of sign-making as well as on the interests of the sign-maker (Jewitt, 2011: 36). While other approaches focus on the interactional aspect or the organisational structures of communication, social semiotics ‘deals with meaning in all its appearances, in all social occasions and in all cultural sites’ (Kress, 2010: 2).
The significant contribution that Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) can provide to develop critical thinking consists in offering effective linguistic tools to foreground and understand implied propaganda and manipulation, especially (but not limited to) when it comes to political communication, upon which crucial electoral choices are made. The British referendum on EU membership and the misinformation that preceded the vote are a very recent example of the magnitude of this impact. Since political communication has become increasingly varied and multi-channelled, we believe that discourse analysis needs to apply to different semiotic resources. Its tools need to become more comprehensive by integrating qualitative and quantitative methods and applying them to different modes: encouraging critical thinking by suggesting a viable way to apply discourse analysis within a multimodal frame is precisely the goal to which this volume intends to contribute.
The horizontality and availability of digital platforms, especially social media, have prompted a change in how political debate is handled by parties and their leaders. This process has also influenced the way linguists analyse political discourse. As mentioned, multimodality is well represented in online political discourse, because official websites and social media posts are often accompanied by emojis, images, photographs, videos, and hyperlinks to other websites or resources. However, this characteristic of political discourse has received scholarly attention only in recent years (e.g., Poggi et al., 2013; Wodak, 2015; Mackay, 2022; Poggi and D’Errico, 2023), when the increasing presence of politicians on television and online has made it possible to analyse the effect of their multimodal conduct on the voters’ perceptions. For instance, some studies have shown that the electorate builds political opinions and preferences not so much on the basis of the arguments conveyed by the actual speeches, but instead
on the basis of extra-verbal elements, such as the physical appearance of the candidates, their posture and gestures, or the emotional valence of the messages they deliver (see Maricchiolo et al., 2014; Boussalis et al., 2021; Gennaro and Ash, 2022, for a discussion). Our work brings into play the multimodal dimension of political communication as well as its emotional content; to do so, we adopt a multi-method approach to analyse the online discourse produced by the four right-wing populist parties mentioned earlier.
In this respect, Chapter 3 proposes a feasible combination of corpus analyses, including the exploration of specific elements and constructions (direct interrogatives, hashtags, and emojis), an automatised lexicon-based system for sentiment and emotion analysis, Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Grammar of Visual Design (1996) and Martin and White’s Appraisal Theory (2005), the latter being applied also by means of manual coding with Multimodal Analysis Images and Multimodal Analysis Video (O’Halloran et al., 2012; Tan et al., 2012). In order to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of right-wing communication, automated and qualitative methods are applied in tandem, following a convergent research design (Creswell and Plano Clark, 2011), as we shall discuss in Chapter 3. To account for the versatile characteristics of online political discourse, we consider over 30,000 tweets published on the Twitter accounts of the parties and of the party leaders as well as a representative sample of pages taken from the parties’ websites. Tweets, which can only be 280 characters long, are given more prominence thanks to multimodality and emotional valence, which also help politicians to personalise their communication and to reach the electorate more directly and efficiently. Moreover, the official websites contain all sorts of multimodal data (e.g., videos, interactive content, manifestos, billboards, leaflets, news, and events), and oftentimes they reference tweets and other social media posts in their home pages contributing to the creation of a variegated and multimodal media ecosystem. In order to account for how online political discourse is constructed linguistically and how the political content is framed, our research takes into consideration both verbal and nonverbal components that are analysed according to the attitude they foreground (Martin and White, 2005), the sentiment they convey, and the emotions they evoke (Plutchik, 2001). The material that is primarily visual (e.g., billboards) is investigated following Kress and van Leeuwen (1996), in an attempt to disentangle and comprehend implied meanings.
1.1
Book outline
Chapter 2 presents an overview of the relationship between language and politics, with a focus on the role of discourse in the political strategies of
populist movements. The chapter examines the definitions of populism and its preference for polarised discourse. It then goes on to explore the academic debate on political discourse analysis, with particular reference to corpus-based studies on the topic. The last section focuses on digitally mediated political communication and its paramount role in the communication of populist parties as a space for permanent electoral campaigning.
Chapter 3 offers an overview of the multi-method, multimodal approach to the analysis of political discourse that the book aims to propose. The first part of the chapter discusses the challenges of collecting, processing, and analysing the data of online political communication. The following sections provide details of the three strands of analysis (1. multimodality, 2. corpus exploration and sentiment and emotion analysis, and 3. appraisal analysis), with a focus on tools and experimental design. At the same time, the chapter offers a reflection on how these levels intertwine and why they are used together in order to foreground implied subtexts.
Chapter 4 contextualises the case studies by providing an overview of the parties’ backgrounds. Particular attention is devoted to their similarities, their differences, and their, often intertwined, trajectories, which provide solid ground for selecting them as test beds. These characteristics include their participation in electoral campaigning, their varied range of vote shares, and the different amount of attention they received from academic scholars.
Chapter 5 discusses the emotional valence of online communication directed at potential voters by analysing the discursive strategies of FdI and Reform UK. The chapter focuses on the use of specific linguistic elements and constructions (emojis, hashtags, and questions), as well as on the fear/ anger-trust emotive discursive structure, deployed primarily for audience engagement, the creation of an ingroup, and campaigning purposes. The automated corpus analyses are complemented by a multimodal investigation of a sample of tweets, news, and videos.
Chapter 6 examines the role of identity construction in the political strategies of western democracies, in which so-called identity politics have become common practice, especially for populist parties. The construction of group membership is based on the creation of an external ‘Other’ by means of representations, which are negotiated and re-negotiated in political discourse by means of increasingly emotional language. The chapter presents an analysis of the linguistic strategies employed by FdI, League, and Reform UK to define their identity and values through online communication. The study concerns tweets and website material and adopts an automated quantitative exploration and a manual qualitative analysis able to reveal the multimodal nature of the data.
Chapter 7 examines how FdI and RN build oppositional identities in the online graphic material they offer to activists and supporters. It focuses on
the multimodal analysis of this material due to its dual nature, as it comprises professional propaganda design and visual messages that are processed rapidly by the human brain. Their connection with the text, their composition techniques, and characteristics of colour, shape, and lighting are crucial in foregrounding implicit messages.
In Chapter 8, we will draw the conclusions of our study and reflect upon the role of multimodal, multi-method discourse analysis in understanding contemporary political discourse and its intricate network of implied meanings.
Notes
1 https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2022/12/16/votingintention-con-23-lab-48-14-15-dec-2022?s=03 (accessed August 2023).
2 It is worth mentioning, among many others, the projects called Bellingcat and First Draft, whose results of ceaseless investigations are published online on a regular basis and provide useful guidelines and tools for information checking. In Italy, the collective of writers called Wu Ming offers, under the nickname of Nicoletta Bourbaki, interesting insights on disinformation about historical events and trustworthy sources to debunk it.
3 A detailed report of the actions taken by Twitter to fight misinformation is available at this web page: https://help.twitter.com/en/resources/addressingmisleading-info (accessed August 2023).
2 Language and politics
In her 2017 TED talk,1 Lera Boroditsky talks about how language shapes the way human beings perceive reality around them, influencing their thoughts, values, and emotions. For many years, linguists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers have tried to decipher the impact of language on our thoughts and beliefs, concentrating especially on abstract concepts that are generally subject to interpretation. A large body of research agrees that language may mould the way we categorise information and how we understand concepts such as time, space, and causation (Majid et al., 2013; Gelman and Roberts, 2017). For example, the findings of a research by Boroditsky and Gaby (2010) indicate that speakers of some languages perceive time differently from speakers of other languages. In particular, they found that the speakers of indigenous Australian languages with absolute spatial reference systems (using fixed locations to describe objects and events) tend to represent time along an east-west axis, rather than a relative spatial axis based on the human body. This result was surprising, as previous studies on other languages found that people used relative spatial axes (such as left-right or front-back) to represent time (Núñez and Sweetser, 2006). Studies like this demonstrate the influence of language on the perception of abstract concepts and highlight the importance of analysing this relation.
Therefore, it can be anticipated that language would hold immense power in the political arena, especially because it builds a direct conduit between political actors, abstract political concepts, and the audience. In fact, politics is brought into life through language when politicians utter their political beliefs and values. Nothing is left to chance in the use of language in politics. Politicians are often supported by communication professionals (known as ‘spin doctors’ since the 1980s) who can frame topics, policies, and events in such a way that consensus may be gained from the audience (potential voters). Let us consider a scenario in a political election campaign where ‘party A’ is known for its immigration policies that discriminate against a certain group, such as the LGBTQ+ community. To mitigate the electorate’s scrutiny and divert attention from the discriminatory stance of their
DOI: 10.4324/9781003268345-2
politicies, ‘party A’ adopts a framing strategy: they shift the focus by vehemently denouncing the entire manifesto of their opponent, ‘party B’. By doing so, ‘party A’ can redirect the voters’ attention away from their own discriminatory practices, downplaying the issue and evading accountability. This strategy allows ‘party A’ to exploit language in such a way that they effectively manipulate the narrative to their advantage.
Because language is a useful tool in politics, political discourse has drawn interest not only from scholars such as philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, or linguists but also from artists (e.g., actors, singers), as well as from the general public. As scholars have shown, memes, music, films, and other forms of art or digital culture are not just limited to entertainment; they can be political and have been recently analysed in relation to populist movements and parties (Way, 2021a). Although it has a long tradition, protest songs have also been used in very recent times to express political dissent and to raise awareness about political and social issues. For example, the songs of Italian singers Margherita Vicario, Dutch Nazari, and Willie Peyote reflect the issues and experiences of marginalised groups such as immigrants and try to bring awareness to the injustices and inequalities these people face. Similarly, the Italian rap singer Gemitaiz has no problem attacking politicians through his songs, while his colleague Salmo called on Salvini’s voters to burn his CDs.2 Similar stances can also be found in the world of theatre. For example, in 2018, Elio Germano and Chiara Lagani wrote and staged a stimulating play entitled La mia battaglia – later launched as a virtual reality experience under a different name (Segnale d’allarme – La mia battaglia)3 – that walks the audience through the use of propaganda and manipulative language in politics.
Caruso’s (2020) study focuses on a slightly different aspect related to the use of music in politics. The author explores the interplay between the political development of the left-wing populist party Podemos in Spain and its use of music as a means for changing the political and cultural discourse. The results suggest that the party struggled to represent social diversity through music that could resonate with a wide audience and convey the party’s alignment with popular attitudes. Similarly, Way’s (2021b) paper employs a multimodal critical discourse analysis to examine the use of spoken and written language, sound, and images to explore populism and Brexit in viral music mash-ups. The analyses reveal that rather than focusing on logically structured political arguments, mash-ups rely on entertaining, affective, and populist discourses. An example of how music may have influenced politics is Giorgia Meloni Remix by MEM & J, two young DJs who produced an ironic, but catchy, tune based on Meloni’s self-description ‘I’m Giorgia, I’m a woman, I’m a mother, I’m Italian, I’m Christian’4 (see also Section 4.3). Although not intended, this song may have contributed to evoking a patriotic feeling among the electorate and creating a memorable image of the FdI leader.
What is intentional, however, is the design of political messages by political actors and their staff. Speeches, tweets, and other content are meticulously designed to resonate with the electorate and, for this purpose, a range of discursive strategies are generally exploited (e.g., the use of emotive language, specific language constructions or wording). We believe that this holds true even more when it comes to populist communication. Indeed, as we briefly discussed in Chapter 1, contemporary political discourse is invariably entangled with the notion of populism, especially as right-wing parties are often associated with it in the mediatic debate. This occurs so much so that leaders of European rightist parties such as Le Pen and Salvini have accepted the populist label and even flaunted it with pride.5 Populism (an operational definition of this concept is provided later on in this chapter) has, in fact, only recently been explored in relation to its discursive aspect (Aslanidis, 2016). This chapter follows the same line of research and explores the fundamental role of language in politics by examining the discursive strategies used by politicians (in particular, populist politicians) to convey their messages and beliefs, as well as to establish a connection with their voters.
The first section of this chapter provides operational definitions of populism and explores how populist politics has intensified the oppositional discourse in the public arena in the 21st century. These preliminary theoretical considerations are necessary because the term ‘populism’ has been surrounded by a great deal of confusion and misinterpretation, despite its ubiquity in the public debate. In the second and third sections of this chapter, the attention is shifted to the scholarly debate on politics and discourse. To date, linguists, philosophers, sociologists, and political scientists have proposed several theoretical frameworks of research to address the topic. In this book, the language of politics and politicians is filtered through the lens of corpus analysis and also relies on tools and techniques from Natural Language Processing (NLP), multimodal, and appraisal analysis. After a presentation of the preliminary theoretical tenets of the analyses employed in linguistic research on this topic, we provide a brief survey of some corpus-based studies on political discourse. The last section of the chapter focuses on digitally mediated political communication, indicating how populist politicians have managed to turn social media and micro-blogging platforms into a space that enables them to conduct permanent electoral campaigning.
2.1 Populism and polarisation in the 21st century
The headline of a 2018 newspaper article by the Guardian stated that ‘one in four Europeans vote[d] populist’,6 indicating that the so-called populists tripled their share of votes in the Old Continent in the last 20 years.
As a matter of fact, a significant number of populist parties and movements have obtained electoral success in recent years, most of them managing to gain seats in parliament or in government. When this work was drafted, populists were in power, either alone or as part of a coalition, in Italy, Hungary, Poland, Spain, and the Czech Republic.
Scholars have offered several theories to account for the recent success of the parties that are generally labelled as populist. Some of these explanations revolve around global economic distress and insecurity, specifying four main potential drivers of populism: the 2007–2008 Financial Crisis, the unfavourable trade shocks, the rise of economic inequalities, and the decline of social mobility (Ramiro and Gomez, 2017; Passari, 2020). Other researchers have advanced the cultural backlash hypothesis, suggesting that certain categories of voters (less educated and more conservative) resort to populism as a reaction to the society they regard as increasingly globalised and cosmopolitan and to the degradation of their value systems (Norris and Inglehart, 2019). The aforementioned economic and sociocultural factors already combined with immigration flows towards Europe have also been linked to the rise of populist parties (Muis and Immerzeel, 2017).
Besides investigating the triggers of populism, scholarly debate has also hinged on defining the concepts of ‘populism’ and ‘populist’. This discussion is still open and too broad to report here. For these reasons, in the lines that follow, some general considerations will be briefly outlined as regards the notion of ‘populism’ and the difficulty to define it. As previously discussed, the last decade has experienced an upsurge of populism in Europe, so the terms ‘populism’ and ‘populist’ have been on everyone’s lips, in both scholarly and broad public debate. Despite this vast diffusion, the principles of the populist phenomenon have not always been fully understood by everyone. Indeed, finding a generally accepted definition of ‘populism’ is challenging. Substantially, this is also related to the fact that the notion of ‘populism’ has spread very quickly among the public – mostly due to the abuse of the term by the media – and the fact that its interpretation has largely depended on the intuitions people have had about the populist phenomenon in their capacity as voters and citizens. At the same time, Müller (2017) also suggests that the term ‘populism’ has been frequently used by the public to refer to a kind of anti-establishment movement. Since an exhaustive discussion on the phylogeny of populism is impractical, let us simply provide the essential theoretical basis useful to understand this concept by focusing on the characteristics of the populist phenomenon and its relationship with the political discourse.
Before the rise of populism in Europe, the term ‘populism’ was generally employed to refer to the 20th-century parties and governments in Latin America that enforced fiscally irresponsible policies (Acemoglu et al.,
2013; Combei et al., 2020). Notably, the term ‘populism’ is credited to Russian populism, which is generally regarded as the first form of populism to have ever existed (Wortman, 1967). The Russian word narodnik, which stems from narod (‘people’ in Russian), is, in fact, translated as ‘populist’. Even if some scholars have called into question the analytical utility of the term ‘populism’, since people tend to use it to refer to ‘everything and nothing’ (Anselmi 2017: 5), recent research on the concept of populism in Europe has inspired a flourishing debate. Among the first scholars that reanimated the term ‘populism’ in the 21st century, we find Cas Mudde and Kurt Weyland. Their definitions of populism are quite diverse though. Mudde claims that populism is a ‘thin-centered’ ideology that can be complemented with other ‘host’ ideologies (2004: 544), while Weyland (2001) defines it as a political strategy. Many other scholars have also defined and described populism. For instance, Moffitt (2016) considers it a political style; Taggart (2000: 2) states that populism is a ‘slippery concept’, recognising the profound difficulty of defining it ‘as an idea or as a political movement’, but also provides a list of the main characteristics of populist movements: hostility towards representative politics, a focus on the ‘heartland’ as an idealised community, lack of core values, and a programme that aims to respond to contingent crisis with no long-term outlook (Taggart, 2004; see also Section 4.5). Müller (2014) says that populism is a different way of approaching power, while for Aslanidis (2016), it is a rhetorical style.
On a different note, Cachanosky and Padilla (2019: 10) claim that defining populism by relying on ‘exaggerated features’, such as propagandistic models of communication, a leader’s charisma, the promotion of unsustainable economic policies, and political mobilisation would be insufficient since other non-populist parties share these characteristics as well. Anselmi (2017: 5) sustains that defining populism and discussing the vagueness of the term ‘populism’ has actually become rhetorical topoi. Finally, he claims that populism should be seen as ‘a specific configuration of political power with specific socio-political determination’ (ibidem: 7).
In the present work, populism is treated as an approach to political power, the fundamental value of which revolves around popular sovereignty and the people’s general will. It will be argued that anti-elitism, anti-EU stances and nationalism, political personalisation, and the polarisation of specific topics are obtained through subtle discursive devices and strategies and potentiated by the leader’s charisma.
In spite of the differences in the aforementioned definitions and interpretations of populism, most scholars agree on the claims that characterise the populist-oriented belief. The main tenet regards the government’s duties, which should reflect the ‘general will’ of ‘the people’ – considered ‘pure’ ( Mudde, 2004 : 543). The pureness of the people is often
portrayed in opposition to the ‘corrupt elite’ (ibidem) – namely, the traditional political class that is no longer able to represent ‘the people’. Particularly pertinent for right-wing populism is the consideration of ‘the people’ as victims to be saved, so the populist leader is often portrayed as a saviour. It goes without saying that populism expresses an anti-establishment attitude and it proposes an alternative to the decadent elitist politics. From a populist perspective, power does not come from the rule of law, but instead, it hails from ‘the people’. Cachanosky and Padilla (2019: 214) claim that ‘this source of legitimacy is the foundation of the authoritarian characteristic of populism’, suggesting that populist leaders – irrespective of their place on the left-right political spectrum – position themselves above the law.
The conceptual understanding of populism in terms of anti-elitism and ‘people centrism’ spells out another fundamental aspect to consider: the political construct of ‘the people’ enforces polarisation, as it enables the populists to separate the electorate into two groups: ‘us’ and ‘them’. It stands to reason that ‘the people’ are to be found in the ‘us’ group, while the ‘them’ group is a sort of an all-purpose label used to refer to what is external to the ‘us’ group. More specifically the ‘them’ group represents the elite or mainstream politics, but also immigrants, corporations, or supranational unions and organisations. Putting these two concepts in discourse is crucial and populists seem to know how to do it. Anselmi (2017: 8) says that populist political discourse is characterised by a ‘Manichean style’ and that it seeks to create political polarisation. Indeed, populism appears to be based on an oppositional idea of society, so building a homogenous ingroup identity becomes essential (Pelinka, 2013). In this respect, (Reggi 2023; see also Pasquino, 2008) draws attention to the role of demos and ethnos: on the one hand, ‘the people’ (demos) are the absolute sovereign; on the other hand, for right-wing populist parties, ‘the people’ may correspond to ethnos, when they represent the ideal, homogeneous ethnic community inhabiting the homeland. The populist leaders build a harmonised in-group identity when they frame the discourse in oppositional terms (‘us’ against ‘them’). Besides defining and exemplifying the group’s values and beliefs – oftentimes in a myth-making fashion – thanks to the new media, the leader also engages in an ongoing, direct dialogue with the electorate, giving the potential voters the opportunity to share their opinions and participate in decision-making (see also Section 2.3).
At this point, it is clear that language plays a crucial role in populism since it serves as a bridge between the populist leader and their electorate, and, as mentioned, discourse is the preferred tool for creating shared ingroup identity and membership (Pickering, 2001). Populist leaders may use an emotional tone and a colloquial register to engage with the electorate to the point where some populist political actors resort to slang and
even obscene language (Zaslove, 2011). Scholars acknowledge the importance of language in political discourse and, as a matter of fact, one of the methods of measuring populism is through content analysis. This approach focuses mostly on the rhetorical aspect of populism. More specifically, starting generally from Mudde’s understanding of populism, the fundamental features of this phenomenon are operationalised (e.g., the people vs. the elite, anti-establishment) in the form of the words of a lexicon. Such a lexicon is employed for the content analysis of party manifestos and other texts to measure the degree of populism of political parties (Hawkins et al., 2019; Rooduijn and Pauwels, 2011; Combei and Giannetti, 2020).
A different method of measuring populism is offered by Inglehart and Norris (2016): a party is defined ‘populist’ if it achieves over 80 points on a standardised 100-point scale that is constructed using 13 indicators from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey – CHES (Polk et al., 2017; Polk and Rovny, 2017). For the CHES research, experts rank the positions of European parties on a variety of issues and themes, including support for liberal lifestyles, traditional values, diversity, and market deregulation, as well as preferences for tax reductions or welfare programmes. Some of these indicators are also used to measure the parties’ position on the left-right ideological spectrum. Therefore, the results of such tests may indicate whether a party is left-wing populist, centrist populist, or right-wing populist.
Interestingly, however, Laclau (2007) claims that populism lacks a clear ideological underpinning, in the sense that it may be both left-wing and right-wing. From this perspective, Anselmi (2017) says that for Laclau both Fascism and Maoism may be viewed as populist ideologies. More conciliatory theories, however, distinguish populist parties not just by their populist component but also by their ideology (Mudde, 2004). In particular, several researchers (Otjes and Louwerse, 2015; Huber and Schimpf, 2017) hold that populist parties have differing views on a variety of topics, such as the promotion of exclusive (right-wing populist parties) or inclusive (left-wing populist parties) communities; this is evident, for instance, in parliamentary voting, where the mere populist facet has little to no influence.
Irrespective of the underlying ideology, populist parties share the contestation of the political establishment, but it is the ideology that conditions who ‘the people’ should fight against. According to Huber and Schimpf (2017), left-wing populists understand the concept of ‘the people’ on a class basis, concentrating primarily on the underprivileged, while rightwing populists define ‘the people’ from a nativist perspective (e.g., ethnicity, cultural background). More specifically, while rightist populist parties promote nationalism and aim to protect ‘the people’ from culturally liberal elites and external threats (e.g., immigrants, gender minorities), leftist populist parties focus on the economy and claim to protect ‘the people’ from
the privileged elites (e.g., capitalists, corporations). Previous research has shown that right-wing populist parties have a strong sense of issue ownership over immigration and that their anti-immigration position has contributed to their electoral success (Combei and Giannetti, 2020).
The literature also indicates that left-wing populists are inclusive at a societal level and in terms of political participation, but they are exclusive when it comes to the control of power; conversely, right-wing populists are exclusionary in relation to all these issues since they believe that they are the only legitimate representatives of ‘the people’ (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2013; Huber and Schimpf, 2017). Interestingly, both left-wing and right-wing populist parties display Euroscepticism since they perceive the EU as an elite-driven supranational organisation, and they disapprove of the complexity and the lack of transparency involved in its decision-making processes. Nevertheless, left-wing populist parties blame the EU for defending neoliberalism at the expense of ‘the people’, while right-wing populists blame it for weakening national sovereignty and culture. (Rooduijn and van Kessel, 2019).
It is important to clarify that this book does not concentrate on the populist phenomenon as a whole. First of all, left-wing populist parties are not considered here, while right-wing populist parties are analysed only with respect to their discursive strategies. Moreover, even though the rightwing parties taken into account in this work are generally characterised by the presence of populist discursive features, they do not always display all the characteristics attributed to populist parties (see also Chapter 4). Finally, no distinction is made here between right-wing and far-right parties, on the grounds that most of the parties considered in this study do not recognise themselves as right-wing extremists. As Lorimer (2020: 1389) mentions, far-right parties usually attempt to portray themselves as ‘legitimate political actors’, and thus they may refute the claims of their radicalism. Phrases such as ‘far-right’ and ‘extreme right’ have been notably disputed by some leaders, such as Salvini, who called his party ‘extremists of common sense’ during a public manifestation in May 2019.7 Besides, attempting a definition and a classification of the parties under analysis would require a discussion on the wide literature available (Mudde, 2007) and, as such, would be beyond the need of this book for a purely operational categorisation.
After having defined and described the concept of ‘populism’, let us briefly outline its current expression in the countries considered in this volume: France, Italy, and the United Kingdom (see also Chapter 4, for a detailed discussion). In France, populist movements may be traced back to the 1950s, when Poujade – the right-wing populist movement – mobilised merchants and farmers against the fast process of industrialisation. Nowadays, the two most prominent populist parties in France are the National
Rally (called National Front – Front National – until 2018) and France Unbowed (La France Insoumise). National Rally is defined as a right-wing populist party that revolves around anti-elitism and ‘people centrism’, seeking to give voice to the will of the people – portrayed as a silent majority – in opposition to the ‘caste’ (Ivaldi, 2018). France Unbowed is a leftwing populist party that displays mainly anti-establishment features, aiming to provide the people on the margins of society with an alternative to the elite – viewed as a uniform group of politicians and oligarchs (ibidem).
Italy has been defined as an epicentre of contemporary European populism, in light of the fact that the country had one of the first anti-politics movements of the post-war period (the short-lived Everyman’s Front –Fronte dell’Uomo Qualunque – from 1946 to 1949) and the first populist government in the Eurozone from 2018 to 2019 (Combei and Giannetti, 2020). According to Anselmi (2017: 66), Italy might be ‘the only country in the world where several populist forces compete with each other’ and where the political discourse is permeated by ‘populist tones and styles’. The beginnings of the Italian neo-populist trend are thought to be due to the rise of Silvio Berlusconi – a charismatic self-made businessman and politician whose approach to politics was, in fact, called ‘telepopulism’ (Taguieff, 2006) – in the early 1990s. Currently, three parties dominate the populist scene in Italy: the Five Star Movement (Movimento Cinque Stelle), the League, and the Brothers of Italy. The Five Star Movement has been characterised by a non-ideological positioning able to conquer both leftwing and right-wing voters. The party follows several core principles and values, such as direct democracy and direct expression of popular sovereignty, the fight against corruption and the ‘caste’, and attention to environmental issues. The League is generally labelled as a right-wing populist party for its anti-elitist stance and participative structure, seeking to take a stand against ‘vested interests’ (Albertazzi et al., 2011). However, in promoting small business and leaner bureaucracy, the party is also libertarian populist (Ignazi, 2008). Finally, Brothers of Italy has been described by some scholars (e.g., Campus, 2020; Zulianello, 2020) as a right-wing populist party, but many others (e.g., Borri and Verzichelli, 2021) have labelled it differently (e.g., nationalist, far-right, conservative). The most relevant features of right-wing populism displayed by Brothers of Italy are nativism (ethnically defined Italian identity), the defence of Italian values and traditions (at the heart of which the party points to the traditional family), and the promotion of anti-immigration policies.
Until some decades ago, in the United Kingdom, the populist label was generally applied to individual politicians, such as Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher, while nowadays populism is seen more as ‘a general feature of British party politics’ (van Kessel, 2015: 147). A common characteristic
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Title: Laocoon
An essay upon the limits of painting and poetry. With remarks illustrative of various points in the history of ancient art.
Author: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Translator: Ellen Frothingham
Release date: February 29, 2024 [eBook #73078]
Language: English
Original publication: Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1873
Credits: Richard Tonsing, Tim Lindell, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
Transcriber’s Note:
New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.
L .
An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry.
WITH REMARKS ILLUSTRATIVE OF VARIOUS POINTS IN THE HISTORY OF ANCIENT ART.
BY GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM LESSING.
TRANSLATED
BY
ELLEN FROTHINGHAM.
BOSTON: ROBERTS BROTHERS. 1890.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by
ROBERTS BROTHERS,
In the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
U P : J W & S , C .
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE.
A translation of the Laocoon was given to the English public by E. C. B , one of the tutors of Leamington College, in 1853. Very few copies found their way to America, and the book is now difficult to obtain.
The desire of the present translator has been to make a version which could be easily read by persons ignorant of any language save English. To this end an attempt was made to banish all foreign languages from the text, and substitute for the original quotations their equivalents, as near as possible, in English. This method was found, however, on trial, to be incompatible with the closeness of Lessing’s criticism, depending, as that in many cases does, on the shade of meaning of the original word. For the sake of consistency, therefore, Lessing’s method has been adhered to in every instance; the words of the author cited being retained in the text, and a translation given in a foot-note wherever the meaning was not sufficiently indicated by the context. The same course has been pursued with the modern as with the ancient languages.
Dryden’s translation of Virgil has been used throughout, and Bryant’s of Homer in every case but one, where a quotation from the Æneid and the Odyssey stood in close connection. In this single instance Pope’s version was preferred; his style being more in harmony with that of Dryden, and his want of literalness being here not objectionable.
Such notes as were not necessary to the understanding of the text have been transferred to the end of the book.
The translator would here acknowledge the valuable assistance received from Mr. W. T. B in the rendering of quotations from the classics.
E F .
B , June, 1873.
PREFACE.
The first who compared painting with poetry was a man of fine feeling, who was conscious of a similar effect produced on himself by both arts. Both, he perceived, represent absent things as present, give us the appearance as the reality. Both produce illusion, and the illusion of both is pleasing.
A second sought to analyze the nature of this pleasure, and found its source to be in both cases the same. Beauty, our first idea of which is derived from corporeal objects, has universal laws which admit of wide application. They may be extended to actions and thoughts as well as to forms.
A third, pondering upon the value and distribution of these laws, found that some obtained more in painting, others in poetry: that in regard to the latter, therefore, poetry can come to the aid of painting; in regard to the former, painting to the aid of poetry, by illustration and example.
The first was the amateur; the second, the philosopher; the third, the critic.
The first two could not well make a false use of their feeling or their conclusions, whereas with the critic all depends on the right application of his principles in particular cases. And, since there are fifty ingenious critics to one of penetration, it would be a wonder if the application were, in every case, made with the caution indispensable to an exact adjustment of the scales between the two arts.
If Apelles and Protogenes, in their lost works on painting, fixed and illustrated its rules from the already established laws of poetry, we may be sure they did so with the same moderation and exactness with which Aristotle, Cicero, Horace, and Quintilian, in their still existing writings, apply the principles and experiences of painting to
eloquence and poetry. It is the prerogative of the ancients in nothing either to exceed or fall short.
But we moderns have in many cases thought to surpass the ancients by transforming their pleasure-paths into highways, though at the risk of reducing the shorter and safer highways to such paths as lead through deserts.
The dazzling antithesis of the Greek Voltaire, that painting is dumb poetry, and poetry speaking painting, stood in no text-book. It was one of those conceits, occurring frequently in Simonides, the inexactness and falsity of which we feel constrained to overlook for the sake of the evident truth they contain.
The ancients, however, did not overlook them. They confined the saying of Simonides to the effect produced by the two arts, not failing to lay stress upon the fact that, notwithstanding the perfect similarity of their effects, the arts themselves differ both in the objects and in the methods of their imitation,
But, as if no such difference existed, many modern critics have drawn the crudest conclusions possible from this agreement between painting and poetry. At one time they confine poetry within the narrower limits of painting, and at another allow painting to fill the whole wide sphere of poetry. Whatever is right in one must be permitted to the other; whatever pleases or displeases in one is necessarily pleasing or displeasing in the other. Full of this idea they, with great assurance, give utterance to the shallowest judgments, whenever they find that poet and painter have treated the same subject in a different way. Such variations they take to be faults, and charge them on painter or poet, according as their taste more inclines to the one art or the other.
This fault-finding criticism has partially misled the virtuosos themselves. In poetry, a fondness for description, and in painting, a fancy for allegory, has arisen from the desire to make the one a speaking picture without really knowing what it can and ought to paint, and the other a dumb poem, without having considered in how far painting can express universal ideas without abandoning its proper sphere and degenerating into an arbitrary method of writing.
To combat that false taste and those ill-grounded criticisms is the chief object of the following chapters. Their origin was accidental,
and in their growth they have rather followed the course of my reading than been systematically developed from general principles. They are, therefore, not so much a book as irregular collectanea for one.
Yet I flatter myself that, even in this form, they will not be wholly without value. We Germans suffer from no lack of systematic books. No nation in the world surpasses us in the faculty of deducing from a couple of definitions whatever conclusions we please, in most fair and logical order.
Baumgarten acknowledged that he was indebted to Gesner’s dictionary for a large proportion of the examples in his “Æsthetics.” If my reasoning be less close than that of Baumgarten, my examples will, at least, savor more of the fountain.
Since I made the Laocoon my point of departure, and return to it more than once in the course of my essay, I wished him to have a share in the title-page. Other slight digressions on various points in the history of ancient art, contribute less to the general design of my work, and have been retained only because I never can hope to find a better place for them.
Further, I would state that, under the name of painting, I include the plastic arts generally; as, under that of poetry, I may have allowed myself sometimes to embrace those other arts, whose imitation is progressive.
LAOCOON.
I.
The chief and universal characteristic of the Greek masterpieces in painting and sculpture consists, according to Winkelmann, in a noble simplicity and quiet grandeur, both of attitude and expression. “As the depths of the sea,” he says,[1] “remain always at rest, however the surface may be agitated, so the expression in the figures of the Greeks reveals in the midst of passion a great and steadfast soul.”
“Such a soul is depicted in the countenance of the Laocoon, under sufferings the most intense. Nor is it depicted in the countenance only: the agony betrayed in every nerve and muscle,—we almost fancy we could detect it in the painful contraction of the abdomen alone, without looking at the face and other parts of the body,—this agony, I say, is yet expressed with no violence in the face and attitude. He raises no terrible cry, as Virgil sings of his Laocoon. This would not be possible, from the opening of the mouth, which denotes rather an anxious and oppressed sigh, as described by Sadolet. Bodily anguish and moral greatness are diffused in equal measure through the whole structure of the figure; being, as it were, balanced against each other. Laocoon suffers, but he suffers like the Philoctetes of Sophocles. His sufferings pierce us to the soul, but we are tempted to envy the great man his power of endurance.”
“To express so noble a soul far outruns the constructive art of natural beauty. The artist must have felt within himself the mental greatness which he has impressed upon his marble. Greece united in one person artist and philosopher, and had more than one Metrodorus. Wisdom joined hands with art and inspired its figures with more than ordinary souls.”
The remark which lies at the root of this criticism—that suffering is not expressed in the countenance of Laocoon with the intensity which its violence would lead us to expect—is perfectly just. That this very point, where a shallow observer would judge the artist to have fallen short of nature and not to have attained the true pathos of suffering, furnishes the clearest proof of his wisdom, is also unquestionable. But in the reason which Winkelmann assigns for this wisdom, and the universality of the rule which he deduces from it, I venture to differ from him.
His depreciatory allusion to Virgil was, I confess, the first thing that aroused my doubts, and the second was his comparison of Laocoon with Philoctetes. Using these as my starting-points, I shall proceed to write down my thoughts in the order in which they have occurred to me.
“Laocoon suffers like the Philoctetes of Sophocles.” How does Philoctetes suffer? Strange that his sufferings have left such different impressions upon our minds. The complaints, the screams, the wild imprecations with which his pain filled the camp, interrupting the sacrifices and all offices of religion, resounded not less terribly through the desert island to which they had been the cause of his banishment. Nor did the poet hesitate to make the theatre ring with the imitation of these tones of rage, pain, and despair.
The third act of this play has been regarded as much shorter than the others. A proof, say the critics,[2] that the ancients attached little importance to the equal length of the acts. I agree with their conclusion, but should choose some other example in support of it. The cries of pain, the moans, the broken exclamations,
filling whole lines, of which this act is made up, would naturally require to be prolonged in the delivery and interrupted by more frequent pauses than a connected discourse. In the representation, therefore, this third act must have
occupied about as much time as the others. It seems shorter on paper to the reader than it did to the spectator in the theatre.
A cry is the natural expression of bodily pain. Homer’s wounded heroes not infrequently fall with a cry to the ground. Venus screams aloud[3] at a scratch, not as being the tender goddess of love, but because suffering nature will have its rights. Even the iron Mars, on feeling the lance of Diomedes, bellows as frightfully as if ten thousand raging warriors were roaring at once, and fills both armies with terror.[4]
High as Homer exalts his heroes in other respects above human nature, they yet remain true to it in their sensitiveness to pain and injuries and in the expression of their feelings by cries or tears or revilings. Judged by their deeds they are creatures of a higher order; in their feelings they are genuine human beings.
We finer Europeans of a wiser posterity have, I know, more control over our lips and eyes. Courtesy and decency forbid cries and tears. We have exchanged the active bravery of the first rude ages for a passive courage. Yet even our ancestors were greater in the latter than the former. But our ancestors were barbarians. To stifle all signs of pain, to meet the stroke of death with unaverted eye, to die laughing under the adder’s sting, to weep neither over our own sins nor at the loss of the dearest of friends, are traits of the old northern heroism.[5] The law given by Palnatoko to the Jomsburghers was to fear nothing, nor even to name the word fear.
Not so the Greek. He felt and feared. He expressed his pain and his grief. He was ashamed of no human weakness, yet allowed none to hold him back from the pursuit of honor or the performance of a duty. Principle wrought in him what savageness and hardness developed in the barbarian. Greek heroism was like the spark hidden in the pebble, which sleeps till roused by some outward force, and takes from the stone neither clearness nor coldness. The heroism of the barbarian was a bright, devouring flame, ever raging, and blackening, if not consuming, every other good quality.
When Homer makes the Trojans advance to battle with wild cries, while the Greeks march in resolute silence, the commentators very justly observe that the poet means by this distinction to characterize the one as an army of barbarians, the other of civilized men. I am
surprised they have not perceived a similar characteristic difference in another passage.[6]
The opposing armies have agreed upon an armistice, and are occupied, not without hot tears on both sides (δάκρυα θερμὰ χέοντες), with the burning of their dead. But Priam forbids his Trojans to weep (οὐδ’ εἴα κλαίειν Πρίαμος μέγας), “and for this reason,” says Madame Dacier; “he feared they might become too tender-hearted, and return with less spirit to the morrow’s fight.” Good; but I would ask why Priam alone should apprehend this. Why does not Agamemnon issue the same command to his Greeks? The poet has a deeper meaning. He would show us that only the civilized Greek can weep and yet be brave, while the uncivilized Trojan, to be brave, must stifle all humanity. I am in no wise ashamed to weep (Νεμεσσῶ
he elsewhere[7] makes the prudent son of wise Nestor say.
It is worthy of notice that, among the few tragedies which have come down to us from antiquity, there should be two in which bodily pain constitutes not the least part of the hero’s misfortunes. Besides Philoctetes we have the dying Hercules, whom also Sophocles represents as wailing, moaning, weeping, and screaming. Thanks to our well-mannered neighbors, those masters of propriety, a whimpering Philoctetes or a screaming Hercules would now be ridiculous and not tolerated upon the stage. One of their latest poets, [8] indeed, has ventured upon a Philoctetes, but he seems not to have dared to show him in his true character.
Among the lost works of Sophocles was a Laocoon. If fate had but spared it to us! From the slight references to the piece in some of the old grammarians, we cannot determine how the poet treated his subject. Of one thing I am convinced,—that he would not have made his Laocoon more of a Stoic than Philoctetes and Hercules. Every thing stoical is untheatrical. Our sympathy is always proportionate with the suffering expressed by the object of our interest. If we behold him bearing his misery with magnanimity, our admiration is excited; but admiration is a cold sentiment, wherein barren wonder excludes not only every warmer emotion, but all vivid personal conception of the suffering.
I come now to my conclusion. If it be true that a cry, as an expression of bodily pain, is not inconsistent with nobility of soul,
especially according to the views of the ancient Greeks, then the desire to represent such a soul cannot be the reason why the artist has refused to imitate this cry in his marble. He must have had some other reason for deviating in this respect from his rival, the poet, who expresses it with deliberate intention.
II.
Be it truth or fable that Love made the first attempt in the imitative arts, thus much is certain: that she never tired of guiding the hand of the great masters of antiquity. For although painting, as the art which reproduces objects upon flat surfaces, is now practised in the broadest sense of that definition, yet the wise Greek set much narrower bounds to it. He confined it strictly to the imitation of beauty. The Greek artist represented nothing that was not beautiful. Even the vulgarly beautiful, the beauty of inferior types, he copied only incidentally for practice or recreation. The perfection of the subject must charm in his work. He was too great to require the beholders to be satisfied with the mere barren pleasure arising from a successful likeness or from consideration of the artist’s skill. Nothing in his art was dearer to him or seemed to him more noble than the ends of art.
“Who would want to paint you when no one wants to look at you?” says an old epigrammatist[9] to a misshapen man. Many a modern artist would say, “No matter how misshapen you are, I will paint you. Though people may not like to look at you, they will be glad to look at my picture; not as a portrait of you, but as a proof of my skill in making so close a copy of such a monster.”
The fondness for making a display with mere manual dexterity, ennobled by no worth in the subject, is too natural not to have produced among the Greeks a Pauson and a Pyreicus. They had such painters, but meted out to them strict justice. Pauson, who confined himself to the beauties of ordinary nature, and whose depraved taste liked best to represent the imperfections and deformities of humanity,[10] lived in the most abandoned poverty;[11] and Pyreicus, who painted barbers’ rooms, dirty workshops, donkeys, and kitchen herbs, with all the diligence of a Dutch painter, as if such things were
rare or attractive in nature, acquired the surname of Rhyparographer,[12] the dirt-painter. The rich voluptuaries, indeed, paid for his works their weight in gold, as if by this fictitious valuation to atone for their insignificance.
Even the magistrates considered this subject a matter worthy their attention, and confined the artist by force within his proper sphere. The law of the Thebans commanding him to make his copies more beautiful than the originals, and never under pain of punishment less so, is well known. This was no law against bunglers, as has been supposed by critics generally, and even by Junius himself,[13] but was aimed against the Greek Ghezzi, and condemned the unworthy artifice of obtaining a likeness by exaggerating the deformities of the model. It was, in fact, a law against caricature.
From this same conception of the beautiful came the law of the Olympic judges. Every conqueror in the Olympic games received a statue, but a portrait-statue was erected only to him who had been thrice victor.[14] Too many indifferent portraits were not allowed among works of art. For although a portrait admits of being idealized, yet the likeness should predominate. It is the ideal of a particular person, not the ideal of humanity.
We laugh when we read that the very arts among the ancients were subject to the control of civil law; but we have no right to laugh. Laws should unquestionably usurp no sway over science, for the object of science is truth. Truth is a necessity of the soul, and to put any restraint upon the gratification of this essential want is tyranny. The object of art, on the contrary, is pleasure, and pleasure is not indispensable. What kind and what degree of pleasure shall be permitted may justly depend on the law-giver.
The plastic arts especially, besides the inevitable influence which they exercise on the character of a nation, have power to work one effect which demands the careful attention of the law. Beautiful statues fashioned from beautiful men reacted upon their creators, and the state was indebted for its beautiful men to beautiful statues. With us the susceptible imagination of the mother seems to express itself only in monsters.
From this point of view I think I detect a truth in certain old stories which have been rejected as fables. The mothers of Aristomenes, of Aristodamas, of Alexander the Great, Scipio,
