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A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies (Wiley
Blackwell Companions to Cultural Studies) 1st Edition
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-9045-6
ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9045-8
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Part I. Working with the Archive
Chapter One .................................................................................................
History That Refuses to Be Whitewashed: Barbara Chase-Riboud’s
Sally Hemings: A Novel Željka Švrljuga
Chapter Two ..............................................................................................
Emancipatory Ideas as a Narrative Constant in George Meredith’s
Rhoda Fleming
Sintija uljat
Chapter Three ............................................................................................
“If Pynchon be the Food of Action, Read On; Give Me Excess of It”: Pynchon’s Novels of Excess and Their Place in Post-postmodernity
Sanja Šoštari Chapter Four ..............................................................................................
Deleuze on the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature: A Victorianist Perspective
Tatjana Juki
The Oxymoronic Nature of the Romantic Sublime
Martina Domines Veliki
Part II. Mapping onto the Archive
Chapter Six ................................................................................................
Joyce’s Ulysses, Begovi ’s Giga Bari eva, and Freud's Contributions to the Psychology of Love
Morana ale Chapter Eight ...........................................................................................
Transforming and Interpreting History: On Donizetti’s Tudor Trilogy
Katja Radoš-Perkovi
The Croatian Diaspora as an Unfinished Transdisciplinary Project
Jelena Šesni
The Australian Girl as an Innocuous Companion of the New Woman
Tihana Klepa
Part III. The Future of the Archive
The Unsolicited Labor of the Humanities
PREFACE
Whenever we think about what it is we do in academic literary studies, we do so taking account of time. The times that are subsumed under that time of thinking are manifold. On one hand is the time of the institution in which this disciplinary practice takes place. Another time to consider is the history of the discipline itself: the historical evidence that has been produced by readings of literary texts. In addition, if the object of the discipline is ongoing literary production, then we have to be ever cognizant of new publications. Finally, since literary studies engage (in more or less direct ways) contemporary issues and how they impact the reader, we must acknowledge processes and events outside the field. We have to say that this temporality is not specific to literary studies, but is shared by the humanities as a whole.
Unlike in the sciences, there is no clearing house in the humanities, which sifts the archive and antiquates knowledge that is judged deficient or simply wrong. Rather, the humanities owe a debt to the past that can never be settled; texts from the past and the readings they spawned continually beckon to us. Second, since interpretative paradigms in studying literature are not measured by their truth claims concerning the world, they persist even when the circumstances in which they emerged have changed. These paradigms are questioned and challenged, but are rarely discarded outright; they coexist on our horizon of reading, and are activated either by personal inclination or research exigencies. One opts for a particular paradigm believing that it foregrounds issues judged to have been hidden by older paradigms. Those very occlusions become the agenda of new readings. This explains why we have intermittently witnessed the proliferation of disciplinary “turns” in the humanities.
If these “truths” are endemic to the disciplines, they also hold for the exterior conditions in which disciplinary practices are conducted. If scientific knowledge can dispense with past instruments of the pursuit of knowledge—laboratories and the like—and if these can be “museumified”, the humanities cannot utterly discard the enabling conditions of their pursuit within institutions. Their very raison d’ tre must be seen as partaking in the tasks of the university. The academic study of literature as practiced at the English Department in Zagreb during the last 80 years (whose anniversary occasioned the writings assembled in this collection)
has attempted to live up to this task, and continues to do so even in circumstances when the very idea of the university has come under attack.
Different possibilities of grouping the following papers were weighed. We decided upon the one that organizes the book in a way that shows how the disciplinary archive can be modified and expanded—while keeping in mind the need to acknowledge past literary production and research—and to engage its present condition and what that condition forebodes. If the uneven number of articles under the three headings evinces a bias in how Croatian literary scholars practice their discipline, it is evident that the issues we indicated find an echo in their research.
The first section, “Working with the Archive” opens with Željka Švrljuga’s article not only because its title uses the word archive, but because it develops an argument that illustrates how the past is always engaged in literary studies. Using Derrida’s purchase on the word “archive” as her point of departure, Švrljuga shows how a contemporary text stages a dialogue with the past. In her reading of Barbara ChaseRiboud’s Sally Hemmings: A Novel Švrljuga demonstrates how the dominant national narrative “whitewashes” history, and how a literary text helps resurrect those—in this case women of color—who were submerged and disempowered in such narratives. Methodologically speaking, the article, addressing as it does historical knowledge, enacts an interdisciplinary network that enriches the reading experience. Sintija uljat addresses George Meredith, and her article exemplifies what is at stake when we return to the literary archive. Not only does she point to a text that has not been at the center of recent critical readings, but she demonstrates that reengagement with this Victorian writer brings issues of contemporary relevance to the fore. Using Meredith’s “eclectic philosophy” as the framework of her reading, uljat focuses upon his ethics, and how this concern in his narrative converges with his poetics. According to her, Meredith’s “disengaging, liberating poetics stands out of the philosophical religious and ethical systems of his day”. As a consequence of this disjuncture, uljat argues that Meredith can be reclaimed as a “protomodernist proponent of a higher knowledge”, which in turn enables her to incorporate Lacan and Levinas into her explanation of this asynchronicity. Sanja Šoštari targets a more recent part of the literary archive; her primary focus is Thomas Pynchon. She examines different stages of Pynchon’s opus, points to some of the most important readings that have accrued around his texts, and inserts them into the general discussion of postmodernism. Dating her engagement with Pynchon, Šoštari reveals early 21st century pronouncements on the end of postmodernism. From this point, she looks back on the archive of critical
English Studies from Archives to Prospects ix
readings of Pynchon, and bemoans what she perceives as the lack of political and economic agendas in readings that have been disproportionally interested in Pynchon’s enigmatic style. Tatjana Juki analyzes that which occurs when literary theory leaves the confines of the text and incorporates the latest theory into its thinking. Juki focuses on Gilles Deleuze’s assignment of particular importance to Anglo-American literature as that assemblage “where philosophy and its memory are to suffer an ongoing reconstitution, also where the collective and the political are configured for philosophy”. In her argument, Juki draws attention to a number of Victorian figures and stages a dialogue between them and contemporary high theory. The yields of such a dialogue are explored, and thought through in the author’s own philosophically informed terms. In her article, Martina Domines Veliki revisits the Romantic Sublime. In a detailed presentation of the conceptualizations and representations of the sublime, this article exemplifies how work on the archive brings forth issues and themes that are not only of historical relevance but are problems that continue to engage human thought.
The cartographic metaphor in the title chosen for the second batch of papers, “mapping”, indicates that English and American studies have nowadays become global. This international reach stages points of contact at which scholars from abroad interpret phenomena and figures from their home cultures in dialogue with readings provided by Anglophone scholarship. Lada ale Feldman does this by drawing attention to readings of Milan Begovi ’s novel Giga Bari eva that have recognized its connection to James Joyce’s Ulysses. In her own reading, she expounds in greater detail Begovi ’s “debt” to the Irish author and then shows how the elaboration of that debt intimates a thematic whose recognition and explanation lead us to Freud, specifically to his Contributions to the Psychology of Love. The title of Morana ale’s article, “ ‘What Is a Ghost’: Joyce Haunting Krleža” paints the Irish author as a mirror against which to read Croatia’s most significant modern writer. She takes note of the fact that major Croatian scholars of literature in English engaged Krleža’s novel The Return of Philip Latinowitz and drew attention to the strange absence of Joyce in modern Croatian writing. Morana ale reviews and addresses the explanations provided for this absence, and offers a critique in which she contends that Joyce “haunts” Krleža’s writing. In a detailed analysis of three librettos by the Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti, Katja Radoš Perkovi recounts how the composer interpreted and incorporated into his work different subjects from the Tudor period in England. She describes how English history and literature figured prominently in Italian 19th century opera, how English intertexts
shed light on Italian preoccupations, and how these originals were transformed in cross-cultural appropriations. Jelena Šesni begins her article on Croatian diasporic writing by reviewing extant engagements with the topic, but contends that there is a lack of “sustained, trans- and interdisciplinary effort” in Croatia that “would initiate a full-scale dialogue addressing the social potential, cultural and economic capital, symbolic grounding, anchors of continuity, and other facets of the Croatian diaspora as it laterally and vertically connects and re-connects itself worldwide.” Šesni ’s article can be seen as an intervention that not only maps Croatian diasporic writing into, primarily, American studies, but opens a field of inquiry for any kind of future Croatian studies. The final contribution to the second section of the book is Tihana Klepa ’s reading of the female figure in the discourse of Australian nationalism. This reading undertakes a twofold mapping: it maps onto the archive of English and American studies a continent whose literature and culture cannot but be incorporated into the globalizing thrust of the discipline, but does so by showing that the nation-based approach is already fractured by gender differences. Broadly speaking, the papers assembled in this section exemplify an intercultural approach, which not only juxtaposes different cultures but which does so from a particular place, inscribing the interests and experiences of that place onto cross-cultural encounters.
The third and final group of articles supplements these forays into the past of the disciplinary archive, and the various ways in which this archive has been broadened, by looking into the future of the discipline. Borislav Kneževi views English studies and its evolution within the much broader concept of liberal education, and traces this imbrication by calling upon crucial figures within the historical trajectory of the discipline. Concerning the present of English studies as an academic discipline, Kneževi contends that it has “expanded its traditional boundaries and generated traffic across increasingly unstable disciplinary borders,” concluding that in this manner the discipline “has thus come to develop a liberality of its own when it comes to the scope of its broadening interests”. Just as Kneževi argues that it is necessary “to historicize the very times of English as a discipline”, Stipe Grgas argues that the discipline needs to be seen as partaking in the general condition of the humanities at the present moment. His title indicates that during the present conjecture, which is witnessing an ascendency if not a totalitarianism of economic interests, the knowledge and experience that the study of literature yields are simply not deemed to be of use. So as not to end on this downbeat tone, we round off the collection with Sven Cvek’s article in which he shows how a book by a Croatian writer published in the United States (Snežana Žabi ’s Broken
English Studies from Archives to Prospects xi
Records) impacts upon the agenda of both English studies and larger postsocialist controversies. According to Cvek, an approach to literary production that privileges the interpretative matrix based on identity and that takes ethnicity as its central analytical category “results in considerable epistemic losses”. On the other hand, when the focus shifts (to class, for example), other perspectives are opened that allow us insights into “a world shaped by flows of capital” and “sub-, trans-, as well as plain old national social formations”.
These brief comments on what the reader will find collected in this book do not purport to give an exhaustive account of either their content or their methodologies; they should serve as indicators of the topics dealt with in individual chapters. As such they are invitations, addressed to the potential reader. If there is a common denominator underlining the different contributions, then it is the unuttered acknowledgement of debt to an institutional setting in which the disciplinary practice of studying and teaching literatures in English has been, and is, taking place. We feel this must be reiterated, because we opine that the once-privileged position of literary studies in the curriculum should not have been taken for granted. Messengers proclaiming the need to change the structure of the university are not bringing good news to those working in the humanities. They are at the gates of our institutions, and the gates behind which we create and examine literature. We have stated that it is in the very nature of humanistic knowledge to admit its debt to the past, and we do so here. But as editors we also acknowledge our debt to the contributors to this collection. Without their work, it would not have been produced. In the present circumstances, both here in Croatia and elsewhere, that work is increasingly less recognized, not to mention compensated. We hope that the acknowledgement of our debt partially mitigates the frustration that one inevitably feels when engaged in this labor.
The Editors
PART I.
WORKING WITH THE ARCHIVE
CHAPTER ONE
HISTORY
THAT REFUSES TO BE WHITEWASHED: BARBARA CHASE-RIBOUD’S SALLY HEMINGS: A NOVEL
ŽELJKA ŠVRLJUGA
There is no history, only fictions of varying degrees of plausibility.
—François Voltaire
“Let us not begin at the beginning, nor even at the archive. But rather at the word ‘archive.’ ”1 Thus opens Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, with this philosopher’s characteristic plunge into the etymology of the word: in this case, the Greek source arkh and its dual implications of origin and order. While the former denotes the principle of beginnings (physical, historical, or ontological: history qua sequentiality), the latter implies authority (law and social order: a nomothetic code). In the Greek word’s derivative arkheion—the residence of the archon, or leading magistrate—whose function is both private (as home) and public (by way of housing official documents which the archon guards), Derrida sees an established shift from private to public spheres. He offers Sigmund Freud’s London home, which is now a museum, as his example of an institution that guards more than written documents.2
On the other side of the Atlantic, the home museum known as Monticello on the plantation of the same name, which was designed and built by another archon and national icon—Thomas Jefferson—likewise safeguards an “archive” of private transactions and canonical writings, its potential inconsistencies and holes notwithstanding. It is these “holes”— which have stirred the curiosity and swallowed the attempts of those who
1 Jacques Derrida. 1998. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1.
2 Derrida, 2; 3.
History That Refuses to Be
Whitewashed: Sally Hemings: A Novel 3
have tried to fill them—that are of interest here, reflecting Voltaire’s skeptical view of history, which this essay’s epigraph portends.3 Accordingly, the contents of an archive are as much history as they are “fictions of varying degrees of plausibility.” In light of this statement, nonwritten sources, such as orally rendered testimonies, rival the official, written ones, competing for the status of accuracy, veracity, and authenticity. With the Western world privileging the written word because of its permanence of inscription and its “authority” due to an alleged stability of meaning, the spoken word, even when eventually recorded, seems to have fared poorly in comparison. Yet while the process of authentication implies the use (and abuse) of power to argue for whatever fiction of truth one takes to be viable, it also implies a competition between different traditions, discourses and histories. What this logically and epistemologically implies is that we deal with two sets of truths, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but whose validity cannot simply be canceled if and when a veil of silence envelops either or both of them. This is the premise that lies in my title, one that signals that the whitewashing of history may conceal another hue lying buried underneath—a coloring that relates to different traditions, sources and skin colors.
The second half of my title brings in a woman of color—Sally Hemings—who has been bleached or darkened according to either the observer, or the function she has been given in historical and oral accounts and fictional renderings.4 While her name is not necessarily immediately recognized outside the U.S., its association with and disputed relationship to Thomas Jefferson are still a bone of contention in American historical, literary, and genetic debates. Whether this association relates to the novel this paper examines (which has outraged declared Jeffersonians because of
3 Since the publication of her first novel Sally Hemings, Chase-Riboud has imported Voltaire’s adage into her novels of slavery as a kind of signature, and a reservation against potential accusations of her liberal use of history. See ChaseRiboud. 1994. Sally Hemings. New York: Balantine Books, 166, 1994. -- The President’s Daughter. New York: Crown Publishers, 442; and -- 2003. Hottentot Venus. New York: Anchor Books, 302.
4 Chase-Riboud lists around twenty monikers by which Sally Hemings was known. These have not been reproduced here, in order to avoid stigmatization by way of repetition. Moreover, Thomas Jefferson’s letter of 4 March 1815 to Mr. Francis C. Gray, while in no explicit manner referring to Hemings, could have been used to argue for her “whiteness” (by virtue of her color as a quadroon), but also her “blackness”, because her slave status followed that of her mother. Founders Online. “Thomas Jefferson to Francis C. Gray, 4 March 1815.” Accessed March 26, 2015. http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-08-02-0245
the poetic license with which Barbara Chase-Riboud approaches history); or to the film and television series the novel inspired;5 or to the 1998 publication of DNA analyses that have prompted further deliberations,6 it is a historical antinomy that seems difficult if not impossible to resolve. Thus Chase-Riboud’s 1979 novel can only be said to explore what Fawn M. Brodie’s 1974 biography, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, intimates: that Sally Hemings was not only Jefferson’s slave, whose presence in history is recorded in the Monticello inventory with a price tag, but that she was also his natural wife and the mother of his slave children, whose patrimony not even the genetic “archive” can corroborate. Having left no trace of her own except her progeny, and with her role in history downplayed or mocked, Sally Hemings remains a historical cipher that invites scrutiny and interpretation. Madison Hemings’ and Israel Jefferson’s respective memoirs, while not part of an acknowledged historical archive, are nevertheless “ascertained” records that history has downplayed. Why? It seems difficult to accept that one of the founding fathers of the American nation and the third president of the United States was a founding father of a slave family, which, if true, makes him guilty of miscegenation. By no means the only one to be involved in an outlawed relationship of this type, this Father ideal, who proclaimed that “all men are created equal” and are thus rightfully entitled to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” had a skewed understanding of the implication of his claim. “All” did not include the population of African origin, which remains a national shame that the U.S. must come to terms with.7 The historians’ motivation for dismissing Madison Hemings’ and Israel Jefferson’s testimonies could not have been grounded in the fact that the two black men were Jefferson’s former slaves, but may lie in the legal
5 Jefferson in Paris (1995) and Sally Hemings: An American Scandal (2000).
6 Eugene A. Foster et al. 1998. “Jefferson Fathered Slave’s Last Child.” Nature 396: 27–28.
7 Only after DNA results were published (which ascertain a high probability that Jefferson fathered Hemings’ last child) could even a skeptical reader accept the ironic gesture of Kyle Baker’s “Happy Independence Day!” cartoon, which was posted on the artist’s website on July 2 2007. It depicts Jefferson penning an oftquoted line from the Declaration of Independence—“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal …”—comfortably seated in his study, while a small black figure, outside the study window, peeps inside, imploring, “Daddy, I’m cold.” The calligraphy/plain lettering nexus stages the comfort of the home compared to the reality of the outside world. The child is literally out in the cold, between the overseer whipping field hands, and the father figure engrossed in his idealist pursuit, eerily reflecting the post-DNA paternity debate and its inability to admit even one slave child into the family home.
History That Refuses to Be Whitewashed: Sally Hemings: A Novel 5
practice of excluding black statements, which obviously did not expire along with the institution of slavery. Madison Hemings’ 1873 affidavit, which was published four years before his death, asserts not only that Jefferson was his father, but that his mother was Jefferson’s concubine, and that Jefferson fathered all of his siblings.8 Israel Jefferson’s confirmation of the truthfulness of his friend Madison Hemings’ claims did not win much sympathy with Jefferson scholars,9 although some revised their views in the post-1998 publication of DNA tests. Others, including Andrew Burstein, suggest that Jefferson’s elder brother Randolph is most likely the children’s father; interestingly, in doing so Burstein follows the oral testimony of Jefferson’s white descendants.10 Unable to resolve the patrimony of Sally Hemings’ children, Burstein skews his argument and directs his attention to Madison Hemings’ rhetoric. His primary concern is Madison’s reference to his mother as Jefferson’s “concubine” (which, with the help of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, Burstein reads to mean “whore”).11 This leads him to conclude that Sally (always referred to by her first name alone) was a poor mother, because her son did not indicate otherwise.12 Burstein’s argument and the title of his article—“The Seductions of Thomas Jefferson”—inadvertently reveal that he, too, was seduced, by Jefferson’s rhetoric and silence, and refuses even to consider a less favorable interpretation of his historical hero. Since it is difficult, even impossible, to claim anything concerning
8 Madison Hemings. 1873. "Life Among the Lowly, No. 1." Pike County (Ohio) Republican. March 13. Accessed April 19, 2015.
http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/_Life_Among_the_Lowly_No_1_by_Madiso n_Hemings_March_13_1873; reprinted as “Reminiscences of Madison Hemings” in Fawn Brodie. 1974. Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. New York: Norton, 471–76.
9 Israel Jefferson. 1873. “Life Among the Lowly, No. 3.” Pike County (Ohio) Republican. December 25. Accessed April 19, 2015.
10 Andrew Burstein 1999. “The Seductions of Thomas Jefferson.” Journal of Early Republic 19.3: 508
11 It is interesting to note that Burstein seeks support from Johnson’s Dictionary, but fails to look up the word in the OED, which gives a much more neutral or nuanced definition: “A woman who cohabits with a man without being his wife; a kept mistress” (“Concubine”). While the critic’s choice may be based on the historical moment, for which Johnson’s dictionary is closer in time and may be more accurate, one may wonder why he does not cite Noah Webster’s Dictionary, or any other American source.
12 Burstein, 509.
this case with certainty, one should at least acknowledge the possibility of doubt.
There is another closely related issue that needs to be addressed before this discussion focuses on the novel: one that involves the practice of historiography. Within a context where Michel de Certau designates the “antinomy” between what he labels “ethics” and “dogmatism,” historiography participates in both. Or, according to de Certau:
Ethics is articulated through effective operations, and it defines a distance between what is and what ought to be. This distance designates a space where we have something to do. On the other hand, dogmatism is authorized by a reality that it claims to represent and in the name of this reality, it imposes laws. Historiography functions midway between these two poles: but whenever it attempts to break away from ethics, it returns towards dogmatism.13
In its dual commitment to theory (dogmatism, laws, and authority) and practice (ethics), historiography describes the former as a legislating force, prescribing on one hand and censoring on the other. Conversely, ethicscum-practice imposes no limits but demonstrates what can be done—or done differently—if and when, for instance, historiography becomes more than “scientific” and “univocal” discourse. This “more” in “more than scientific” can be found in “the myths and legends of the collective memory, and the meanderings of the oral tradition”, whose status as source may be downplayed by historiography. This is because of the gap between the ordinariness (baseness of discourse, style and information) of these meanderings, and historiography’s scientific discourse, with its concomitant clarity and unambiguousness.14 While this view may seem provocative to professional historians, its unconditional refutation may place them on the side of law-enforcement, whose rigidity threatens the interstice that invites, or even demands action and intervention. However, the insecure status of knowledge when dealing with fiction, which itself cannot and does not claim Truth, relies on “the stratification of meaning: it narrates one thing in order to tell something else; it delineates itself in language from which it continuously draws effects of meaning that cannot be circumscribed or checked.”15 When fiction, oral tradition and myths
13 Michel de Certau. 1986. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 199.
14 De Certau, 200.
15 De Certau, 202.
History
That
Refuses to Be
Whitewashed: Sally Hemings: A Novel 7
join forces, if they do not challenge historiography outright they at least render it ambiguous.
Therefore, if there is no historical basis for the commotion that ChaseRiboud’s novel has triggered, we can question why the Jefferson scholars react to it as they do. Since I am not a historian by profession, I read the text for what it declares itself to be—“A Novel”—yet I see history as being on par with textuality, as knowledge of the past, which, when translated into the written word, becomes a “story”—an idea supported by the aphetic form of the word “history”. The continuing debate concerning Sally Hemings has remained a protectionist enterprise that guards Jefferson from fallibility, thus from lack of ethical norms and the gentility to which he so candidly aspired. His almost godlike presence commanded an authority that few were capable of resisting in his lifetime, and that still has a grip on his followers today.
In line with her project of revising and rewriting historical data, ChaseRiboud gives voice to a repressed woman of color, whose youth, alleged beauty and “whiteness” seem to have seduced the national godhead into promiscuity and miscegenation.16 With scant though significant historical support, the novelist, like Brodie before her, configures her historical character from plausible but unrecoverable data by reading between the lines of available sources and appraising silences. What the critic alludes to, the novelist translates into Sally Hemings’ personal narrative, which responds to the discourse of history. This discourse comes from the pen of Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia and his personal correspondence, but also from the writings of others, including Abigail and John Adams, Edmund Burke, W.E.B. DuBois, Frederick Douglass, Friedrich Engels, Harriet Martineau, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Constructed as an as-if dialogue, where the verifiable excerpts are epigraphs to a significant portion of the novel’s chapters—providing a narrative impetus and historical lens—the novel creates Sally Hemings as the subject of her own narrative, commanding both her life story and the voice that renders it. To highlight her revisionist project, the author adopts the slave-narrative format, giving voice to a former slave and admitting her story to historical discourse. In line with the themes of slavery, which resurface in contemporary fiction, the genre has re-emerged as a neo-slave narrative— an aesthetic and interpretative culturally coded stratagem, with which the writer ponders the history of slavery and the condition of the slave subject.
16 The fictional Abigail Adams, an adamant detractor of slavery, sees Hemings as “a white slave”, the replica of Jefferson’s wife Martha, the title character’s halfsister. The novel brings this piece of information home on various occasions (Chase-Riboud, 73).
Like many writers before and after her, Chase-Riboud adopts it in her attempt to rescue Sally Hemings from historical amnesia, or, better, to undo the injustice done to her and her progeny. What white history represses, the revised slave narrative expresses, thus challenging the received interpretation of her character and place in history. Accordingly, the novel constructs Sally Hemings as an agent of history, whose agency, albeit limited by her condition, does not free her from responsibility when it comes to her own destiny and the destiny of her children.17
Although Chase-Riboud’s project is neither “revolutionary [n]or revelationary” to quote Larry L. Martin,18 it signals a critical change from white presentation to black representation of subjectivity and history, neither of which is devoid of problems. While the former risks inaccuracy and distortion because of potential racial or cultural biases, the latter is by no means innocent in its appropriation of the slave’s subjectivity and voice. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak cautions, the word representation has a double meaning, implying “ ‘speaking for,’ as in politics and […] ‘re-presentation’ [‘speaking about’], as in art or philosophy.”19 This indicates that, despite a benevolent effort to accord the eponymous character the proper deference, the gesture of granting her voice and representing her creatively is nonetheless a form of appropriation and exploitation, which Chase-Riboud’s novelistic project aims to counter and undermine.
Aware that the neo-slave narrative may be seen as a discourse that replicates the monological format that it tries to contest—the discourse of history—the author creates a polyphony of voices that support, silence, and question the story of Jefferson’s “dark” shadow, who, the novel proposes, followed him from his Paris years until his death in 1826. Jefferson and the Adamses, who figure both outside and inside the plot scheme (in the mentioned excerpts-cum-epigraphs, and as characters in the novel), keep company with John Quincy Adams, Aaron Burr, and John Trumbull. The three white men—America’s sixth president, Jefferson’s vice-president, and the official painter of the revolution—each have a reason for betraying Jefferson’s alleged indiscretions but observe a
17 When Hemings accompanied Jefferson’s daughter Maria (better known by her nickname Polly) as her personal maid to Paris in 1787, she could have claimed her freedom, since slavery was outlawed in France.
18 Larry L. Martin. 1980. “Sally Hemings by Barbara Chase-Riboud.” The Journal of Negro History. 65.3: 275.
19 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In: Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds). 1988. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 275.
That Refuses to Be Whitewashed: Sally Hemings: A Novel 9
gentleman’s code, thus protecting the honor of a once-cherished friend. Chase-Riboud refuses to speculate over their protectionist policy and deftly plays out their potential agendas, demonstrating in the process each man’s fear for his own reputation should he smear the image of the national idol. A comment made by the fictional John Trumbull—“The history of private passions has no place in public history”20—while not denying the Jefferson-Hemings liaison, voices a public concern with historical appearances and official (authorized) history, sidestepping the notion of individual responsibility that almost led to another president’s impeachment in more recent times. Like the 42nd President of the United States, whose middle name, incidentally, is Jefferson, the nation’s 3rd President would probably have disputed his inappropriate relationship with a slave woman 30 years his junior had he been impeached, and his declaration would have consequently been read as proof of his innocence.21
By bringing significant and verifiable agents of history into her narrative, Chase-Riboud stages their participation in the whitewashing of history. Their silence on the Jefferson-Hemings issue provides different cues to its interpreters on either side of the racial divide, while verbally embodying the proverbial principle to “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”. Their potential hypocrisy surfaces as inconsistency between thought and speech in their separate interviews with census taker Nathan Langdon, who seeks them out in his quest for information on Sally Hemings. Although it is Langdon’s job as state official that brings him to the title character’s cabin door in the novel’s opening, his fascination with this enigmatic woman grows with each subsequent visit. Inspired by the myth that surrounds her as well as his interest in Jefferson, Langdon aims to resolve the mystery of this extraordinary relationship. Local rumors, gossip, traditional ballads, James T. Callender’s caustic accusations and challenge to Jefferson to acknowledge his paramour—which were published in The Recorder in September 1802 and would soon spread throughout the country—and John Quincy Adams’s humiliating poem from 1803 all find their way into the novel, and testify to Sally Hemings’ presence in American history. Despite her public invisibility, the fictional Aaron Burr proclaims her “the most famous lady of color in the United States” at the turn of the 19th century.22 Having recognized in Langdon a “cipher [who] had been playing God” by declaring her white, Burr refrains
20 Chase-Riboud, 174.
21 See Anne du Cille. 2000. “Where in the World Is William Wells Brown? Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings and the DNA of African-American Literary History.” American Literary History 12.3: 450.
22 Chase-Riboud, 161.
from providing the desired information for fear that his own personal history would surface with his revelation:
Many great men, including himself, had illegitimate children, yet the special loss of a son or daughter to an entire race had something mythical about it. How fatal and touching this story was, and how ironic that it should be Jefferson, the image-maker, the definer of America, the nation’s most articulate voice!23
Langdon’s desire to prove Jefferson’s frailty eventually makes him a dupe in the endeavor.
The Langdon-Hemings meeting—which provides the narrative frame of the novel, and leads to a kind of friendship motivated by the young man’s curiosity and the middle-aged woman’s need for company and attention—triggers the narrative, and is textually pronounced as “volatile performances” that allow “a new Sally Hemings to emerge.”24 By translating her silence into words, Sally Hemings claims her subjectivity with a first-person narrative, which she offers to Langdon but not to the reader. This tactical narrative gesture reveals the author’s awareness of the pitfalls of representation, and ensures re-presentation without representation. Finding the young man an engaged listener, Hemings delivers the intimacies of her life with Jefferson, making him wonder what prompted America’s third president to enter a relationship with a “mulatta” when he could have selected any white woman of his choice. Unwilling to offer an alternative “truth” to the plausible one, or to embroider the romance, which could damage the credibility of her character, Chase-Riboud uses what little information is available and transforms it into her narrative raison d'être. Hemings finds herself betrayed for the sake of her dead lover when, after a year of sporadic but welcome interviews with Langdon, she discovers that he has registered her and her two youngest sons into the official Virginia census as “white”. The limited third-person point of view reveals the textual and historical antinomy in Langdon’s overdetermination and duplicity. He changed Hemings’ color to protect Jefferson from potential accusations of miscegenation, while overtly claiming that he wanted to protect Hemings from the Virginia law that banished freed slaves a year after their manumission. By drawing this marginal character of history into her narrative, Chase-Riboud stages a tug of war between ethics and dogmatism regarding the interpretation of Sally
23 Chase-Riboud, 166.
24 Chase-Riboud, 39.
History That Refuses to Be Whitewashed: Sally Hemings: A Novel 11
Hemings’ role and treatment in history. She reveals a historical paradox and its underlying contradictory racial agendas. Accordingly, Langdon is her trope of whiteness, as a legal representative of the whitewashing project of history that has been ingrained in historical biases, and to which his status as a white male makes him blind.
His poorly masked protectionist policy and even worse rhetoric, which reveal a proprietary and phallogocentric attitude in his words, “I … decided [to change your color]”, provoke Hemings’ rage and this caustic rejoinder:
‘You decided.’ He couldn’t tell whether she was going to laugh or scream.
‘You decided! For fifty-four years I’ve been Thomas Jefferson’s creature, and now… now you decide it’s time for me to be yours. Yours!’ She began to laugh. ‘It’s Judgement Day! Instead of being black and slave, I’m now free and white.’25
The thrice repeated cry of “you decide(d)”, which returns the message to its sender (the “I decided” with which the subject matter is introduced), exudes mockery with its emphasis on “you”, and culminates with detachment and derision in the final “yours”. The I/you nexus, which guarantees subjectivity, and binds us all in dialogue and nominal symmetry, highlights the translatability of power relations with the power of language. Nathan Langdon’s attempt to protect Hemings from trespassing turns him into a trespasser himself, and an undesired presence. The breach of confidence and friendship that results from this interview makes Sally Hemings aware that she has surrendered herself and her life story to yet another white man, whose intrusion and subsequent betrayal feel like mental rape. Having been seduced to reveal “her mind, her thoughts, her feelings, her history,”26 Hemings has been robbed of all a slave could call her own, and is finally ready for transformation. Her schooling in “the triple bondage of slave, woman, and concubine”, which her mother offers and whose destiny she shares,27 brings Hemings to the realization that her fault in loving the enemy and bearing his children makes her an accomplice in her own enslavement and the perpetuation of the abominable institution, through being a mother. The white men’s betrayals, empty words and promises and her own self-betrayal and blindness prepare her for action and mental self-emancipation. Although urged by her brother James to claim her freedom during their stay in
25 Chase-Riboud, 50 (italics in the original).
26 Chase-Riboud, 53.
27 Chase-Riboud, 33.
France, the teenage Sally, blinded by love, postpones her petition, forgets her condition, and becomes re-enslaved upon her return to Virginia. Having cheated herself—or having been cheated out of her freedom by her willful return, and deceived by her “husband”-lover who does not free her or her children in his lifetime for what the novel terms selfish reasons (their emancipation would imply their banishment from Viriginia)—Sally Hemings is kept in bondage even after his death. Eventually freed by Jefferson’s daughter Martha, Sally Hemings is granted permission to live on the outskirts of Monticello—as a trespasser—even after Jefferson’s estate is sold.
Though unable to change her slave past, the eponymous character symbolically erases it by burning its documents and mementos—her Paris portrait, Jefferson’s letters, and, finally, her diaries. This is another clever narrative maneuver, which consists of simultaneously presenting and withdrawing the missing evidence of Sally Hemings’ legacy, aptly eschewing a representational fallacy. The portrait that signifies her careless and naïve girl self of her Paris years is an identity no longer her own. By burning Jefferson’s letters, she erases his material presence from her life and destroys his commanding word (of love?), which seduced her in the first place. By destroying her diaries, Hemings, in turn, destroys the palpable link with the past that her body contains, thus dismissing the white body of knowledge—the written word—that does not recognize her. Her timely action is a result of a chain of events: her refusal to flee slavery with her brother James on French soil; James’s mysterious death, which haunts her; and Jefferson’s refusal to recognize his sons because of the one-drop rule. The father’s disavowal of his flesh and blood inspires her murderous thoughts, but seeing no solution for her children in such a violent act, Hemings decides instead to kill Jefferson with love. Although of dubious lethal effect, love becomes a shield with which she protects her children, and actively engages in their emancipation. If the fictional Sally Hemings participates in bringing Thomas Jefferson down, it is with her defiance to burn the letters that she wrote to him over the years. Her refusal to obey matches her unwillingness to erase herself from history. As a finishing touch, Hemings refuses the dying man her declaration of love, hoping that he would see it in her presence and sacrifice over the years. Letting him die in this way, she sends him to his silence with her own. Although a political weapon of limited scope, the protagonist’s silence is by no means a withdrawal from the word. While withdrawal would imply death, Sally Hemings, in her final refusal of whiteness, finally speaks up, voicing her protest against her circumscription, which violates her subjectivity and status. Similarly, the neo-slave narrative speaks, not
That Refuses to Be Whitewashed: Sally Hemings: A Novel 13
only for its eponymous character, but for the nameless slave subjects lost in and to history. Predicated on the traditional form that it continuously revises, the genre resists the white straightjacket that its 19th century forerunner was forced to wear, thus manumitting its form. This manumission primarily concerns the Ur genre’s traditional white frame and formulaic wording. With no need for white sanction, Chase-Riboud nevertheless knows that the genre she adopts is indelibly linked to the white discourse. The call of white history that, as already stated, figures in the novel’s numerous epigraphs, finds a narrative response in the text. Not surprisingly, a large portion of epigraphs comes from Jefferson’s Notes, most prominently from Query XVIII, which explores the manners and morals of slavocracy and their impact on all segments of the population, regardless of color. As if mimicking her character Sally Hemings’ destruction of Jefferson’s letters, Chase-Riboud symbolically “shreds” Query XVIII to pieces, scattering its fragments according to her narrative needs, albeit unable to spoil Jefferson’s word. While this gesture suggests destruction, it also serves as the textual glue of the novel’s sequel, The President’s Daughter, which uses the shreds of the Query that its prequel omitted. By reducing the role of white historical discourse to disembodied fragments, the writer refuses the whitewashing of black history and proposes a dialogue. This dialogue between different cultures, traditions and voices opens a space that demands our ethical intervention.
This intervention between rumors and the so-called official history of private affairs has turned into “history by default”, whereby the story of Sally Hemings is entrenched in “the confines of parochial Monticello, instead of a larger warp and weave of American history.”28 After years of denial, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello bowed to the repressed truth of the Jefferson-Hemings union and its resulting offspring. Two years after Foster’s DNA findings were released, the Report of the Research Committee on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings declared that the Archon of Monticello “most likely” fathered all of Sally Hemings’ children.29 This added to the evidence of the missing staircase that led from Jefferson’s bedroom to a tiny chamber above it. Having originally discovered the staircase in an archival picture, Chase-Riboud climbed it
28 Chase-Riboud, 2009. Afterword. In Sally Hemings: A Novel. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 353.
29 Thomas Jefferson Foundation. “Conclusions. Report of the Research Committee on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.” Accessed June 30, 2015. http://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/i-committee-charge-andoverview; Points 2. and 4. of Conclusions are an epigraph to Barbara ChaseRiboud, Afterword, 349.
during one of her visits, to see where it went. Its disappearance following the novel’s publication resulted in a literal hole in the wall: a reaction the writer ascribes to the part of her plot wherein the stairwell enables the couple’s secret rendezvous.30 Hence, Hemings’ hole in the wall (in which she used to hide) becomes a hole that swallows her, echoing the general policy of her erasure. The novel contends that Monticello’s sale releases Hemings of the weight and history of her own enslavement at the same time as it dispossesses Jefferson’s only surviving daughter of her father’s legacy—the architectural pride of Albemarle County.31 As one of Jefferson’s many creations, Monticello has not only made history: it has also faked it.
Brodie, Fawn M. 1974. Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. New York: Norton.
Burstein, Andrew. 1999. “The Seductions of Thomas Jefferson.” Journal of the Early Republic 19.3: 499–509.
Chase-Riboud, Barbara. 2009. Afterword to Sally Hemings: A Novel. Chicago: Chicago Review Press. 349–63.
—. 2003. Hottentot Venus. New York: Anchor Books.
—. 1994. The President’s Daughter. New York: Crown Publishers.
—. 1979. Sally Hemings: A Novel. New York: Ballantine Books.
Certau, Michel de. 1986. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Theory and History of Literature Series, Vol 17. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Dawkins, Laura. 2009. “ ‘A Seeping Invisibility’: Maternal Dispossession and Resistance in Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings and The President’s Daughter.” Callaloo 32.3: 792–808.
Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. du Cille, Ann. 2000. “Where in the World Is William Wells Brown? Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings and the DNA of African-American Literary History.” American Literary History 12.3: 443–62.
30 Chase-Riboud, 358-59.
31 Chase-Riboud, 288, 301.
History That Refuses to Be Whitewashed: Sally Hemings: A Novel 15
Foster, Eugene A. et al. 1998. “Jefferson Fathered Slave’s Last Child.” Nature 396: 27–28.
Hemings, Madison. 1873. “Life Among the Lowly, No. 1.” Pike County (Ohio) Republican. Accessed April 16, 2015.
Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. 1984. 123–325. New York: Library of America.
—. “Thomas Jefferson to Francis C. Gray, 4 March 1815.” Jefferson Papers. Library of Congress. Accessed April 25, 2015. http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-08-02-0245
Kaplan, Sara Clarke. 2009. “Our Founding (M)other Erotic Love and Social Death in Sally Hemings and The President’s Daughter.” Callaloo 32.3: 773–91.
Martin, Larry L. 1980. “Sally Hemings by Barbara Chase-Riboud.” The Journal of Negro History. 65.3: 275–76.
Oxford Dictionaries, s.v. “concubine,” Accessed April 15, 2015. <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/38426?rskey=Fuv8iU&result=1&is Advanced=false#eid>
Thomas Jefferson Foundation. Report of the Research Committee on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings., 2000. Accessed June 30, 2015. http://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/i-committeecharge-and-overview.
Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. 1994. “ ‘I Write in Tongues’: The Supplement of Voice in Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings.” Contemporary Literature 35.1: 100–35.
Spencer, Suzette. 2006. “Historical Memory, Romantic Narrative, and Sally Hemings.” African American Review 40.3: 507-31.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
CHAPTER TWO
EMANCIPATORY IDEAS AS A NARRATIVE CONSTANT IN GEORGE MEREDITH’S RHODA FLEMING
SINTIJA ULJAT
When we reflect on authorial attempts at transgressing the confines of the Victorian novelistic paradigm, we cannot but observe the expressive and ideational breadth of George Meredith (1828-1909). The question is posed as to whether the implementation of this author’s ethical judgments affects the narrative structure of his fiction. Adherence to the perpetuation of moral precepts of good, or “using fiction as an ethical weapon” (Trevelyan 1906, 173) generates both narrative flexibility and allusiveness in his novels, which are framed as “readings of life” and “studies of man”. The concept of spiritual growth as immanent in both genders, and the display of suffering that leads to spiritual recovery, impregnate his prose works. Meredith is prone to the employment of metaphor to fuel his novelistic imaginary. The narrative compactness that he has achieved signals an innovative mode that was considered stylistically obscure by critics. His commonsensical ethics, which propound the elevation of life through comic spirit, and use of wit, thus overlap with the artistic attitude and narrative ethos of an “unvictorian mind” (Horowitz Murray 2010, 52).
Meredith's experimental endeavor uncovers an eclectic narrative with progressive ideas of living, contained in a parity of religious feeling, revolutionary urges and the conviction of liberty and law. His libertarianism infuses his multi-genre work, allowing for continuous appraisal of the given poetic or novelistic form. Non-doctrinal concepts that sustain Meredith’s literary meaning include individual autonomy and self-preservation, in contrast to the positivist, utilitarian sense of selfreliance and self-interest. He inveighs the systems of Victorian androcentrism and patriarchy through the formation of characters undergoing spiritual evolution. The innermost change is made manifest in
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As early as the reign of Edward III. (1327-1377), there is record of a number of stationarii as carrying on business in Oxford. In an Oxford manuscript dating from this reign, there is an inscription of a certain Mr. William Reed, of Merton College, who tells us that he purchased this book from a stationarius. [410]
In London, there is record of an active trade in manuscripts being in existence as early as the middle of the fourteenth century. The trade in writing materials, such as parchment, paper, and ink, appears not to have been organised as in Paris, but to have been carried on in large part by the grocers and mercers. In the housekeeping accounts of King John of France, covering the period of his imprisonment in England, in the years 1359 and 1360, occur entries such as the following:
“To Peter, a grocer of Lincoln, for four quaires of paper, two shillings and four pence.”
“To John Huistasse, grocer, for a main of paper and a skin of parchment, 10 pence.”
“To Bartholomew Mine, grocer, for three quaires of paper, 27 pennies.”[411]
The manuscript-trade in London concentrated itself in Paternoster Row, the street which became afterwards the centre of the trade in printed books.
The earliest English manuscript-dealer whose name is on record is Richard Lynn, who, in the year 1358, was stationarius in Oxford.[412] The name of John Browne occurs in several Oxford manuscripts on about the date of 1400. Nicholas de Frisia, an Oxford librarius of about 1425, was originally an undergraduate. He did energetic work as a book scribe and, later, appears to have carried on an important business in manuscripts. His inscription is found first on a manuscript entitled Petri Thomæ Quæstiones, etc., which manuscript has been preserved in the library of Merton.
There is record, as early as 1359, of a manuscript-dealer in the town of Lincoln who called himself Johannes Librarius, and who
sold, in 1360, several books to the French King John. It is a little difficult to understand how in a quiet country town like Lincoln with no university connections, there should have been enough business in the fourteenth century to support a librarius.
The earliest name on record in London is that of Thomas Vycey, who was a stationarius in 1433. A few years later we find on a parchment manuscript containing the wise sayings of a certain Lombardus, the inscription of Thomas Masoun, “librarius of gilde hall.”
Between the years 1461 and 1475, a certain Piers Bauduyn, dealer in manuscripts, and also a bookbinder, purchased a number of books for Edward IV. In the household accounts of Edward appears the following entry: “Paid to Piers Bauduyn, bookseller, for binding, gilding and dressing a copy of Titus Livius, 20 shillings; for binding, gilding and dressing a copy of the Holy Trinity, 16 shillings; for binding, gilding and dressing a work entitled ‘The Bible’ 16 shillings.”
William Praat, who was a mercer of London, between the years 1470 and 1480 busied himself also with the trade in manuscripts, and purchased, for William Caxton, various manuscripts from France and from Belgium.
Kirchhoff finds record of manuscript-dealers in Spain as early as the first decade of the fifteenth century. He prints the name, however, of but one, a certain Antonius Raymundi, a librarius of Barcelona, whose inscription, dated 1413, appears in a manuscript of Cassiodorus.
PART II. THE EARLIER PRINTED BOOKS.
PART II. THE EARLIER PRINTED BOOKS.
CHAPTER I.
THE RENAISSANCE AS THE FORERUNNER OF THE PRINTING-PRESS.
THE fragments of classic literature which had survived the destruction of the Western Empire, had, as we have seen, owed their preservation chiefly to the Benedictine monasteries. Upon the monasteries also rested, for some centuries after the overthrow of the Gothic Kingdom of Italy, the chief responsibility for maintaining such slender thread of continuity of intellectual activity, and of interest in literature as remained. By the beginning of the twelfth century, this responsibility was shared with, if not entirely transferred to, the older of the great universities of Europe, such as Bologna and Paris, which from that time took upon themselves, as has been indicated, the task of directing and of furthering, in connection with their educational work, the increasing literary activities of the scholarly world.
With the increase throughout Europe of schools and universities, there had come a corresponding development in literary interests and in literary productiveness or reproductiveness. The universities became publishing centres, and through the multiplication and exchange of manuscripts, the scholars of Europe began to come into closer relations with each other, and to constitute a kind of international scholarly community. The development of such worldwide relations between scholars was, of course, very much furthered by the fact that Latin was universally accepted as the language not only of scholarship but practically of all literature.
In Italy, by the beginning of the fourteenth century, intellectual interests and literary activities had expanded beyond the scholastic circles of the universities, and were beginning to influence larger divisions of society. The year 1300 witnessed the production in Florence of the Divine Comedy of Dante, and marked an epoch in
the history of Italy and in the literature of the world. During the two centuries which followed, Florence remained the centre of a keener, richer, and more varied intellectual life than was known in any other city in Europe.
With the great intellectual movement known as the Renaissance, I am concerned, for the purposes of this study, only to indicate the influence it exerted in preparing Italy and Europe for the utilisation of the printing-press. The work of the Renaissance included, partly as a cause, and partly as an effect, the rediscovery for the Europe of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of the literature of classic Greece, as well as the reinterpretation of the literature of classic Rome.
The influence of the literary awakening and of the newly discovered masterpieces would of necessity have been restricted to a comparatively limited scholarly circle, if it had not been for the invention of Gutenberg and for the scholarly enterprise and devotion of such followers of Gutenberg as Aldus, Estienne, and Froben. It is, of course, equally true that if the intellectual world had not been quickened and inspired by the teachers of the Renaissance, the presses of Aldus would have worked to little purpose, and their productions would have found few buyers. Aldus may, in fact, himself be considered as one of the most characteristic and valuable of the products of the movement.
The Renaissance has been described by various historians, and analysed by many commentators. The work which has, however, been accepted as the most comprehensive account of the movement and the best critical analysis of its nature and influence, and which presents also a vivid and artistic series of pictures of Italy and the Italians during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, is Symonds’ Renaissance in Italy. These volumes are so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the period, and the author’s characterisations are so full and so sympathetic, that it is difficult not to think of Symonds as having been himself a Florentine, rather than a native of the “barbarian realm of Britain.”
I take the liberty of quoting the description given by Symonds of the peculiar conditions under which Italy of the fifteenth century, in
abandoning the hope of securing a place among the nations of the world, absorbed itself in philosophic, literary, and artistic ideals. Freshly imbued with Greek thought and Greek inspiration, Italy took upon itself the rôle played centuries earlier by classic Greece, and, without political power or national influence, it assumed the leadership of the intellect and of the imagination of Europe.
“In proportion as Italy lost year by year the hope of becoming a united nation, in proportion as the military instincts died in her, and the political instincts were extinguished by despotism, in precisely the same ratio did she evermore acquire a deeper sense of her intellectual vocation. What was world-embracing in the spirit of the mediæval Church passed by transmutation into the humanism of the fifteenth century. As though aware of the hopelessness of being Italians in the same sense as the natives of Spain were Spaniards, or the natives of France were Frenchmen, the giants of the Renaissance did their utmost to efface their nationality, in order that they might the more effectually restore the cosmopolitan ideal of the human family. To this end both artists and scholars, the depositories of the real Italian greatness at this epoch, laboured; the artists by creating an ideal of beauty with a message and a meaning for all Europe; the scholars by recovering for Europe the burghership of Greek and Roman civilisation. In spite of the invasions and convulsions that ruined Italy between the years 1494 and 1527, the painters and the humanists proceeded with their task as though the fate of Italy concerned them not, as though the destinies of the modern world depended on their activity After Venice had been desolated by the armies of the League of Cambray, Aldus Manutius presented the peace-gift of Plato to the foes of his adopted city, and when the Lutherans broke into Parmegiano’s workshop at Rome, even they were awed by the tranquil majesty of the Virgin on his easel. Stories like these remind us that Renaissance Italy met her doom of servitude and degradation in the spirit of ancient Hellas, repeating as they do the tales told of Archimedes in his study, and of Paulus Emilius face to face with the Zeus of Phidias.[413]
It is impossible to exaggerate the benefit conferred upon Europe by the Italians at this epoch. The culture of the classics had to be
reappropriated before the movement of the modern mind could begin, before the nations could start upon a new career of progress; the chasm between the old and the new world had to be bridged over. This task of reappropriation the Italians undertook alone, and achieved at the sacrifice of their literary independence and their political freedom. The history of the Renaissance literature in Italy is the history of self-development into the channels of scholarship and antiquarian research. The language created by Dante as a thing of power, polished by Petrarch as a thing of beauty, trained by Boccaccio as the instrument of melodious prose, was abandoned even by the Tuscans in the fifteenth century for revived Latin and newly discovered Greek. Patient acquisition took the place of proud inventiveness; laborious imitation of classical authors suppressed originality of style. The force of mind which in the fourteenth century had produced a Divine Comedy and a Decameron, in the fifteenth century was expended upon the interpretation of codices, the settlement of texts, the translation of Greek books into Latin, the study of antiquities, the composition of commentaries, encyclopædias, dictionaries, ephemerides. While we regret this change from creative to acquisitive literature, we must bear in mind that these scholars, who ought to have been poets, accomplished nothing less than the civilisation, or, to use their own phrase, the humanisation, of the modern world. At the critical moment when the Eastern Empire was being shattered by the Turks, and when the other European nations were as yet unfit for culture, Italy saved the Arts and Sciences of Greece and Rome, and interpreted the spirit of the classics. Devoting herself to what appears the slavish work of compilation and collection, she transmitted an inestimable treasure to the human race; and though for a time the beautiful Italian tongue was superseded by a jargon of dead languages, yet the literature of the Renaissance yielded in the end the poetry of Ariosto, the political philosophy of Machiavelli, the histories of Guicciardini and Varchi. Meanwhile the whole of Europe had received the staple of its intellectual education.”[414]
Symonds finds in the age of the Renaissance, or in what he calls the Humanistic movement, four principal periods: first, the age of
inspiration and discovery, which is initiated by Petrarch; second, the period of arrangement and translation. During this period, the first great libraries came into existence, the study of Greek began in the principal universities, and the courts of Cosimo de’ Medici in Florence, Alfonso in Naples, and Nicholas in Rome, became centres of literary activity; third, the age of academies. This period succeeded the introduction of printing into Italy. Scholars and men of letters are now crystallising or organising themselves into cliques or schools, under the influence of which a more critical and exact standard of scholarship is arrived at, while there is a marked development in literary form and taste. Of the academies which came into existence, the most important were the Platonic in Florence, that of Pontanus in Naples, that of Pomponius Lætus in Rome, and that of Aldus Manutius in Venice. This period covered, it is to be noted, the introduction of printing into Italy (1464) and its rapid development. In the fourth period it may be said that scholasticism to some extent took the place of scholarship. It was the age of the purists, of whom Bembo was both the type and the dictator. There is a tendency to replace learning with an exaggerated attention to æsthetics and style. It was about the Court of Leo X. (1513-1522) that these æsthetic literati were chiefly gathered. “Erudition, properly so-called,” says Symonds, “was now upon the point of being transplanted beyond the Alps.”
The names of the scholars and writers who, following Dante, gave fame to Florence and to Italy, are part of the history of the world’s literature. It is necessary to refer here only to those whose influence was most important in widening the range of scholarly interests and in preparing Italy and Europe for the diffusion of literature, a preparation which, while emphasising the requirement for some means of multiplying books cheaply, secured for the printing-press, as soon as its work began, an assured and sufficient support. The fact that a period of exceptional intellectual activity and literary productiveness immediately preceded the invention, or at least the introduction of printing, must have had an enormous influence in furthering the speedy development and diffusion of the new art. The press of Aldus Manutius seems, as before said, like a natural and necessary outgrowth of the Renaissance.
The typical feature of the revival of learning in Italy was, of course, the rediscovery of the literature of Greece. In the poetic simile of Symonds, “Florence borrowed her light from Athens, as the moon shines with rays reflected from the sun. The revival was the silver age of that old golden age of Greece.”[415] The comparison of Florence with Athens has repeatedly been made. The golden ages of the two cities were separated by nearly two thousand years; but history and human nature repeat themselves, and historians have found in the Tuscan capital of the fifteenth century a population which, with its keen intellectual nature, subtle and delicate wit, and restless political spirit, recalls closely the Athens of Pericles. The leadership which belonged to Italy in literature, art, scholarship, and philosophy, was, within Italy, conceded to Florence.
The first name in the list of Florentine scholars whose influence was important in this revival is that of Petrarch. He never himself mastered the Greek language, but he arrived at a realisation of the importance of Greek thought for the world, and he preached to others the value of the studies which were beyond his own grasp. It was at Petrarch’s instance that Boccaccio undertook the translation into Latin of the Iliad. Among Latin authors, Petrarch’s devotion was given particularly to Cicero and Virgil. The fact that during the first century of printing more editions of Cicero were produced than of any other classic author must have been largely due to the emphasis given by the followers of Petrarch to the beauty of Cicero’s latinity and the permanent value of his writings.
Petrarch was a devoted collector of manuscripts, and spared neither labour nor expense to secure for his library codices of texts recommended as authoritative. Notwithstanding his lack of knowledge of Greek, he purchased for his collection all the Greek manuscripts which came within his reach and within his means. Fortunately for these expensive literary tastes, he appears to have possessed what we should call a satisfactory independence. Some of his manuscripts went to Boccaccio, while the rest were, at his death, given to the city of Florence and found place later in the Medicean Library.
Petrarch laid great stress on the importance, for the higher education of the people, of efficient public libraries, and his influence with wealthy nobles served largely to increase the resources of several of the existing libraries. In his scholarly appreciation of the value of such collections, he was helping to educate the community to support the booksellers, while in the collecting of manuscripts he was unwittingly doing valuable service for the coming printer. He died in 1374, ninety years before the first printing-press began its work in Italy. A century later his beautiful script served as a model for the italic or cursive type which was first made by Aldus.
Symonds thinks it very doubtful whether the Italians would have undertaken the labour of recovering the Greek classics if no Petrarch had preached the attractiveness of liberal studies, and if no school of disciples had been formed by him in Florence. Of these disciples, by far the most distinguished was Boccaccio. His actual work in furthering the study of Greek was more important than that of the friend to whom (although there was a difference of but nine years in their ages) he gave the title of “master.” Boccaccio, taking up the study of Greek (at Petrarch’s instance) in middle life, secured a sufficient mastery of the language to be able to render into Latin the Iliad and the Odyssey. This work, completed in 1362, was the first translation of Homer for modern readers. He had for his instructor and assistant an Italian named Leontius Pilatus, who had sojourned some years at Byzantium, but whose knowledge of classic Greek was said to have been very limited. Boccaccio secured for Pilatus an appointment as Greek professor in the University of Florence, the first professorship of Greek instituted in Europe.
The work by which Boccaccio is best known, the Decameron or the Ten Nights’ Entertainment, was published in 1353, a few years before the completion by Chaucer of the Canterbury Tales. It is described as one of the purest specimens of Italian prose and as an inexhaustible repository of wit, beauty, and eloquence; and notwithstanding the fact that the stories are representative of the low standard of moral tone which characterised Italian society of the fourteenth century, the book is one which the world will not willingly let die. It is probably to-day in more continued demand than any
book of its century, with the possible exception of the Divine Comedy. The earliest printed edition was that of Valdarfer, issued in Florence in 1471. This was three years before the beginning of Caxton’s work as a printer in Bruges. The Decameron has since been published in innumerable editions and in every language of Europe.
A far larger contribution to Hellenic studies was given some years later by Manuel Chrysoloras, a Greek scholar of Byzantium, who, after visiting Italy as an ambassador from the Court of the Emperor Palæologus, was, in 1396, induced to accept the Chair of Greek in the University of Florence. “This engagement,” says Symonds, “secured the future of Greek erudition in Europe.” Symonds continues: “The scholars who assembled in the lecture-rooms of Chrysoloras felt that the Greek texts, whereof he alone supplied the key, contained those elements of spiritual freedom and intellectual culture without which the civilisation of the modern world would be impossible. Nor were they mistaken in what was then a guess rather than a certainty. The study of Greek implied the birth of criticism, comparison, research. Systems based on ignorance and superstition were destined to give way before it. The study of Greek opened philosophical horizons far beyond the dream world of the churchmen and monks; it stimulated the germs of science, suggested new astronomical hypotheses, and indirectly led to the discovery of America. The study of Greek resuscitated a sense of the beautiful in art and literature. It subjected the creeds of Christianity, the language of the Gospels, the doctrines of St. Paul, to analysis, and commenced a new era of Biblical inquiry. If it be true, as a writer no less sober in his philosophy than eloquent in his language has lately asserted, that except the blind forces of nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin, we are justified in regarding the point of contact between the Greek teacher Chrysoloras and his Florentine pupils as one of the most momentous crises in the history of civilisation. Indirectly the Italian intellect had hitherto felt Hellenic influence through Latin literature. It was now about to receive that influence immediately from actual study of the masterpieces of the Attic writers. The world was no longer to be kept in ignorance of those ‘eternal consolations’ of the human race. No longer could the
scribe omit Greek quotations from his Latin text with the dogged snarl of obtuse self-satisfaction, Græca sunt, ergo non legenda. The motto had rather to be changed into a cry of warning for ecclesiastical authority upon the verge of dissolution, Græca sunt, ergo periculosa; since the reawakening faith in human reason, the reawakening belief in the dignity of man, the desire for beauty, the liberty, audacity, and passion of the Renaissance, received from Greek studies their strongest and most vital impulse.”
Symonds might have added that the literary revival, which was so largely due to these Greek studies, made possible, a century later, the utilisation of the printing-press, the invention of which would otherwise have fallen upon comparatively barren ground; while the printing-press alone made possible the diffusion of the new knowledge, outside of the small circles of aristocratic scholars, to whole communities of impecunious students.
Florence had, as we have seen, done more than any other city of Italy, more than any city of Europe, to prepare Italy and Europe for the appreciation and utilisation of the art of printing, but the direct part taken by Florence in the earlier printing undertakings was, curiously enough, much less important than that of Venice, Rome, or Milan. By the year 1500, that is, thirty-six years after the beginning of printing in Italy, there had been printed in Florence 300 works, in Bologna 298, in Milan 629, in Rome 925, and in Venice 2835.
The list of the scholars and men of letters who, during the century following the work of Petrarch and Boccaccio, associated themselves with the brilliant society of Florence, and retained for the city its distinctive pre-eminence in the intellectual life of Europe, is a long one, and includes such names as those of Tommaso da Sarzana, Palla degli Strozzi, Giovanni da Ravenna, Niccolo de’ Niccoli, Filelfo, Marsuppini, Rossi, Bruni, Guicciardini, Poggio, Galileo, Cellini, Plethon, and Machiavelli. It was to Strozzi that was due the beginning of Greek teaching in Florence under Manuel Chrysoloras, while he also devoted large sums of money to the purchase in Greece and in Constantinople of valuable manuscripts. He kept in his house skilled copyists, and was employing these in the work of preparing transcripts for a great public library, when,
unfortunately for Florence, he incurred the enmity of Cosimo de’ Medici, who procured his banishment. Strozzi went to Padua, where he continued his Greek studies.
Cosimo, having vanquished his rival in politics, himself continued the work of collecting manuscripts and of furthering the instruction given by the Greek scholars. The chief service rendered by Cosimo to learning and literature was in the organisation of great public libraries. During his exile (1433-1434), he built in Venice the Library of S. Giorgio Maggiore, and after his return to Florence, he completed the hall for the Library of S. Marco. He also formed several large collections of manuscripts. To the Library of S. Marco and to the Medicean Library were bequeathed later by Niccolo de’ Niccoli 800 manuscripts, valued at 600 gold florins. Cosimo also provided a valuable collection of manuscripts for the convent of Fiesole. The oldest portion of the present Laurentian Library is composed of the collections from these two convents, together with a portion of the manuscripts preserved from the Medicean Library.
In 1438, Cosimo instituted the famous Platonic Academy of Florence, the special purpose of which was the interpretation of Greek philosophy. The gathering in Florence, in 1438, of the Greeks who came to the great Council, had a large influence in stimulating the interest of Florentines in Greek culture. Symonds (possibly somewhat biassed in favour of his beloved Florentines of the Renaissance) contends that the Byzantine ecclesiastics who came to the Council, and the long series of Greek travellers or refugees who found their way from Constantinople to Italy during the years that followed, included comparatively few real scholars whose classical learning could be trusted. These men supplied, says Symonds, “the beggarly elements of grammar, caligraphy, and bibliographical knowledge,” but it was Ficino and Aldus, Strozzi and Cosimo de’ Medici who opened the literature of Athens to the comprehension of the modern world.
The elevation to the papacy, in 1447, of Tommaso Parentucelli, who took the name of Nicholas V., had the effect of carrying to Rome some of the Florentine interest in literature and learning. Tommaso, who was a native of Pisa, had won repute in Bologna for his wide
and thorough scholarship. He became, later, a protégé of Cosimo de’ Medici, who employed him as a librarian of the Marcian Library. To Nicholas V. was due the foundation of the Vatican Library, for which he secured a collection of some five thousand works. Symonds says that during his pontificate, “Rome became a vast workshop of erudition, a factory of translations from Greek and Latin.” The compensation paid to these translators from the funds provided by the Pope, was in many cases very liberal. In fact, as compared with the returns secured at this period for original work, the rewards paid to these translators of the Vatican seem decidedly disproportionate, especially when we remember that a large portion of their work was of poor quality, deficient both in exact scholarship and in literary form. To Lorenzo Valla was paid for his translation of Thucydides, 500 scudi, to Guarino for a version of Strabo, 1500 scudi, to Perotti for Polybius, 500 ducats. Manetti had a pension of 600 scudi a month to enable him to pursue his sacred studies. Poggio’s version of the Cyropædia of Xenophon and Filelfo’s rendering of the poems of Homer, were, from a literary point of view, more important productions. Some of the work in his series of translations was confided by the Pope to the resident Greek scholars. Trapezuntios undertook the Metaphysics of Aristotle and the Republic of Plato, and Tifernas the Ethics of Aristotle. Translations were also prepared of Theophrastus and of Ptolemy.
In addition to these paid translators, the Pope attracted to his Court from all parts of Italy, and particularly from his old home, Florence, a number of scholars, of whom Poggio Bracciolini (or Fiorentino) and Cardinal Bessarion were the most important. Bessarion took an active part in encouraging Greek scholars to make their homes and to do their work in Italy. The great development of literary productiveness and literary interests in Rome during the pontificate of Nicholas, is one of the noteworthy examples of large results accruing to literature and to literary workers through intelligently administered patronage. It seems safe to say that before the introduction of printing, it was only through the liberality of patrons that any satisfactory compensation could be secured for literary productions.
During the reign of Alfonso of Aragon, who in 1435 added Sicily to his dominions, and under the direct incentive of the royal patronage, a good deal of literary activity was developed in Naples. Alfonso was described by Vespasiano as being, next to Nicholas V., the most munificent patron of learning in Italy, and he attracted to his Court scholars like Manetti, Beccadelli, Valla, and others. The King paid to Bartolommeo Fazio a stipend of 500 ducats a year while he was engaged in writing his Chronicles, and when the work was completed, he added a further payment of 1500 florins. In 1459, the year of his death, Alfonso distributed 20,000 ducats among the men of letters gathered in Naples. It is certain that in no other city of Europe during that year were the earnings or rewards of literature so great. It does not appear, however, that this lavish expenditure had the effect of securing the production by Neapolitans of any works of continued importance, or even of bringing into existence in the city any lasting literary interests. The temperament of the people and the general environment were doubtless unfavourable as compared with the influences affecting Florence or Rome. It is probable also that the selection of the recipients of the royal bounty was made without any trustworthy principle and very much at haphazard.
A production of Beccadelli’s, perhaps the most brilliant of Alfonso’s literary protégés, is to be noted as having been proscribed by the Pope, being one of the earliest Italian publications to be so distinguished. Eugenius IV. forbade, under penalty of excommunication, the reading of Beccadelli’s Hermaphroditus, which was declared to be contra bonos mores The book was denounced from many pulpits, and copies were burned, together with portraits of the poet, on the public squares of Bologna, Milan, and Ferrara.[416] This opposition of the Church was the more noteworthy, as the book contained nothing heretical or subversive of ecclesiastical authority, but was simply ribald and obscene.
Lorenzo Valla, another of the writers who received special favours and emoluments at the hands of Alfonso, likewise came under the ecclesiastical ban. But his writings contained more serious offences than obscenity or ribaldry. He boldly questioned the authenticity of Constantine’s Donation (a document which was later shown to be a
forgery), and of other documents and literature held by the Church to be sacred, and the accuracy of his scholarship and the brilliancy of his polemical style, gave weight and force to his attacks. Denunciations came upon Valla’s head from many pulpits, and the matter was taken up by the Inquisition. But Alfonso told the monks that they must leave his secretary alone, and the proceedings were abandoned.
When Nicholas V. came to the papacy, undeterred by the charge of heresies, he appointed Valla to the post of Apostolic writer, and gave him very liberal emoluments for work on the series of Greek translations before referred to. Valla never retracted any of his utterances against the Church, but he appears, after accepting the Pope’s appointment, to have turned his polemical ardour in other directions. He engaged in some bitter controversies with Poggio, Fazio, and other contemporaries, controversies which seem to have aroused and excited the literary circles of the time, but which turned upon matters of no lasting importance. It is a cause of surprise to later literary historians that men like Valla, possessed of real learning and of unquestioned literary skill, should have been willing to devote their time and their capacity to the futilities which formed the pretexts for the greater part of the personal controversies of the time. Professor Adams says of Valla: “He had all the pride and insolence and hardly disguised pagan feeling and morals of the typical humanist; but in spirit and methods of work he was a genuine scholar, and his editions lie at the foundation of all later editorial work in the case of more than one classic author, and of the critical study of the New Testament as well.”[417]
During the two centuries preceding the invention of printing, it was the case that more books (in the form of manuscripts) were available for the use of students and readers in Italy than in any other country, but even in Italy manuscripts were scarce and costly. Even the collections in the so-called “libraries” of the cathedrals and colleges were very meagre. These manuscripts were nearly entirely the production of the cloisters, and as parchment continued to be very dear, many of the works sent out by the monks were in the form of palimpsests, that is, were transcribed upon scrolls which contained
earlier writing. The fact that the original writing was in many cases but imperfectly erased, has caused to be preserved fragments of a number of classics which might otherwise have disappeared entirely. The service rendered by the monks in this way may be considered as at least a partial offset to the injury done by them to the cause of literature in the destruction of so many ancient writings. This matter has been referred to more fully in the chapter on Monasteries and Manuscripts.
One of the Italian scholars of the fifteenth century who interested himself particularly in the collection of manuscripts of the classics was Poggio Bracciolini. In 1414, while he was, in his official capacity as Apostolic Secretary, in attendance at the Council of Constance, he ransacked the libraries of St. Gall and of other monasteries of Switzerland and Suabia, and secured a complete Quintilian, copies of Lucretius, Frontinus, Probus, Vitruvius, nine of Cicero’s Orations, and manuscripts of a number of other valuable texts. Many of the libraries had been sadly neglected, and the greater part of the manuscripts were in dirty and tattered condition, but literature owes much to the monks through whom these literary treasures had been kept in existence at all.
Poggio is to be noted as a free-thinker who managed to keep in good relations with the Church. So long as free-thinkers confined their audacity to such matters as form the topic of Poggio’s Facetiæ, Beccadelli’s Hermaphroditus, or La Casa’s Capitolo del Forno, the Roman Curia looked on and smiled approvingly. The most obscene books to be found in any literature escaped the Papal censure, and a man like Aretino, notorious for his ribaldry, could aspire with fair prospects of success to the scarlet of a Cardinal.[418]
While there could be no popular distribution, in the modern sense of the term, for necessarily costly books in manuscript, in a community of which only a small proportion had any knowledge of reading and writing, it is evident from the chronicles of the time that there was an active and prompt exchange of literary novelties between the court circles and the literary groups of the different cities, and also between the Faculties of the universities. A controversy between two scholars or men of letters (and there were,
as said, many such controversies, some of them exceedingly bitter) appears to have excited a larger measure of interest and attention in cultivated circles throughout the country than could probably be secured to-day for any purely literary or scholastic issues. There must, therefore, have been in existence and in circulation a very considerable mass of literature in manuscript form, and we know from various sources that Florence particularly was the centre of an important trade in manuscripts. I have not thus far, however, been able to find any instances of the writers of this period receiving any compensation from the publishers, booksellers, or copyists, or any share in such profits as might be derived from the sale of the manuscript copies of their writings. It seems probable that the authors gave to the copyists the privilege (which it was in any case really impracticable to withhold) of manifolding and distributing such copies of the books as might be called for by the general public, while the cost of the complimentary copies (often a considerable number) given to the large circle of friends, seems as a rule to have been borne by the author.
As the author had to take his compensation in the shape of fame (except in the cases of receipts from patrons), the wider the circulation secured for copies of his productions (provided only they were not plagiarised), the larger his fund of—satisfaction. For substantial compensation he could look only to the patron. Fortunately for the impecunious writers of the day, it became fashionable for not a few of the princes and nobles of Italy to play the rôle of Mæcenas, and by many of these the support and encouragement given to literature was magnificent, if not always judicious.
During the reigns of the last Visconti and of the first Sforza, or from about 1440 to 1474, literature became fashionable at the Court of Milan. Filippo Maria Visconti is described as a superstitious and repulsive tyrant, and he could hardly by his own personality have attracted to Lombardy men of intellectual tastes. Visconti appears, however, to have considered that his Court would be incomplete without scholars, and to have been willing to pay liberally for their attendance. Piero Candido Decembrio was one of the most
industrious of the writers who were supported by Visconti. According to his epitaph, he was responsible for no less than 127 books. Symonds speaks of his memoir of Visconti as a vivid and vigorous study of a tyrant. Gasparino da Barzizza was the Court letter-writer and rhetorician, and, as the official orator, filled an important place in what was considered the intellectual life of the city.
By far the most noteworthy, however, of the scholars who were attracted to Milan by the Ducal bounty was Francesco Filelfo. He could hardly be said to belong to Lombardy, as he was born in Ancona and educated at Padua, and had passed a number of years in Venice, Constantinople, Florence, Siena, and Bologna. The longest sojourn of his life, however, was made in Milan, where he arrived in 1440, and where he enjoyed for some years liberal emoluments from the Court.
Filelfo was evidently a man with great powers of acquisition and with exceptional versatility. He brought back with him from Constantinople (where he had remained for some years) a Greek bride from a noble family, an extensive collection of Greek manuscripts, and a working knowledge of the Greek language; and at a time when Greek ideas and Greek literature were attracting the enthusiastic attention not merely of the scholars but of the courtiers and men of fashion, these possessions of Filelfo were exceptionally serviceable, and enabled him to push his fortunes effectively. He seems to have possessed a self-confidence at least equal to his learning. He speaks of himself as having surpassed Virgil because he was an orator, and Cicero because he was a poet. Symonds says, however, that, notwithstanding his arrogance, he is entitled to the rank of the most universal scholar of his age, and his selfassertion doubtless aided not a little in securing prompt recognition for his learning. Venice paid him, in 1427, a stipend of 500 sequins for a series of lectures on Eloquence. A year later he accepted the post of lecturer in Bologna on Moral Philosophy and Eloquence, with a stipend of 450 sequins. Shortly afterwards, flattering offers tempted him to Florence, where he lectured on the Greek and Latin classics and on Dante, with a stipend first of 250 sequins, and later of 450
