An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams Part 2

Moreover, falsehood occurs not only in propositions but also in the delineation of feeling, as, for instance, when feelings are ascribed to a character other than those which nature and the subject-matter demand. You will find this fault in an epigram by Vulteius, which was for this reason rejected:

I viewed one day the marble stone That hides a man in sin well-known.

I sighed and said, "What is the point Of such expense? This tomb might serve To house kings and the blood of kings That now conceals a villainous corpse."

I burst in tears that copiously Flowed from my eyes down both my cheeks.

A stander-by took me to task In some such words, I think, as these: "Aren't you ashamed, be who you may, To mourn the burial of this plague?"

But I replied, "My tears are shed For the lost tomb, not his lost head."[9]

It was surely foreign to nature to represent a man weeping copiously because a villain and scoundrel had been buried in a n.o.ble tomb, for the funeral honors paid to scoundrels excite anger and indignation rather than pity and tears. The poet, consequently, adopted an erroneous feeling when he wept where he should have been angry and wrathful.

_On mythological epigrams._

Untruth, then, is a considerable fault, one that is quite widespread and one that embraces many sub-divisions. Under this category falls especially the use of mythological propositions, the common vehicle of poets when they have nothing to say. We have rejected many epigrams that are faulty in this kind, as, for example, Grotius on the Emperor Rudolph, which is too crowded with myths:

Not Mars alone has favored you, Invincible, At whom as enemy barbarian standards shake, But the Divine Community with gifts adore you, And with this in especial from the wife of Zephyr: She to the Dutch Apelles did perpetual spring Ordain, and meadows living by the painter's hand.

Alcinous' charm is annual, and Adonis' gardens, Nor do the Pharian roses bloom long in that air; Antique Pomona of Semiramis has boasted, And yet deep winter climbs the summit of her roof.

How shall your honors fail? The garlands that you wear Beseem Imperial triumph, which time may not touch.[10]

I know there are other things to be censured in this epigram, but I note here only that one fault which it was quoted to ill.u.s.trate.

_On puns._

To the same general category may be referred most puns, the point of which usually rises from some untruth. For example, in Sannazaro's well-known epigram:

Happy has built twin bridges on the Seine: Happy the Seine may call her Pontifex.[11]

If you take _Pontifex_ in the sense of "builder of bridges" the thought is true, but pointless; consequently, for there to be a point the word _Pontifex_ must be taken in the sense of "Bishop", and in this sense it will be false that the Pontifex is happy. Similarly, in another epigram of some reputation:

They say you're treating Cosma for his deafness, And that you promised, French, a definite cure; But you can't bring it off for all your deftness: He'll hear ill of himself while tongues endure.[12]

Take _audire_ as referring to the sense of hearing and the thought is false, since that physical defect is curable; take it as referring to a good reputation, and the thought will again be false and inept, for it is false and inept that a doctor will labor in vain to cure a defect of the ears because he cannot medicine to a diseased reputation.

All puns are embarra.s.sed by such faults, while on the other hand their charm is quite thin, or rather nonexistent. Formerly, it is true, in an earlier age there was some praise for that kind of thing, and so Cicero and Quintilian are said to have derived polished witticisms from the device of double-meaning; now, however, it is rightly held in great contempt, so much so that men of taste not only do not hunt for puns but even avoid them. They are, one must admit, more bearable, or at least less objectionable when they come spontaneously; but anyone who brings out ones he has thought up or indicates that he himself is pleased with them is quite properly judged to be inexperienced in society. Hence it is that epigrams whose elegance is derived from puns are held of no account. For since verses are only composed by labor and diligence he is justly considered to be a weak and narrow spirit who wastes time in fitting such trivial wit into verse. One should add, too, that there is another disadvantage in puns, that they are so imbedded in their own language that they cannot be translated into another. For these reasons we have admitted few punning epigrams into this anthology, and those only as examples of a faulty kind.

_On hyperbolical ideas._

In the category of false ideas must be reckoned the hyperbolical.

These are not false in a given word, for we dealt with this above, but false in the whole train of thought. Of this kind is that epigram of Ausonius, the absurdity of which is unbearable:

Riding in state, as on an elephant, Faustus fell backwards off a silly ant; Abandoned, tortured to the point of death By the sharp hooves, his soul stayed on his breath And his voice broke: "Envy," he cried, "begone!

Laugh not at my fall! So fell Phaethon."[13]

Ausonius was imitating in this epigram the Greeks, who were quite open to this sort of bad imitation, as may be seen in their Anthology which is stuffed full of such hyperboles. A good many fall into the same fault either because their talent is weak or because they write for the unskilled--a consideration which should move those who have no compunction about reading, let alone praising, the silly tales of Rabelais which are filled with stupid hyperboles.

_On debatable and controvertible ideas._

Furthermore, debatable and double-edged ideas, about which the reader is in doubt whether they be false or true, fall under the same category of falseness. For this doubtfulness, since it takes away all pleasure, removes also the beauty. For this reason I have never approved the conclusion of Martial's epigram:

Equal the crime of Antony and Photinus: This sword and that severed a sacred head-- The one head laurelled for your triumphs, Rome!

The other eloquent when you would speak.

Yet Antony's case was worse than was Photinus': One for his master moved, one for himself.[14]

The reader is bothered by a sort of quiet annoyance that the poet should so confidently take a dubious idea for a certain one. He might easily argue against the poet that on the contrary it seemed to him that a man who commits a crime for his master is more at fault than one who commits it for himself, and he could support his position with rational arguments. For one who sins for his own advantage is driven to his deed by such emotions as rage, l.u.s.t, and fear, and these as they diminish the power of willing in like measure diminish the magnitude of the offence. But one who effects a crime at another's behest comes coldly to the deed, a fact that convicts him of a far greater depravity. One could allege these and similar lines of argument against Martial's position, and could reverse the sense of his distich so that it read no less irrationally:

Yet Antony's case was better than Photinus': One for his master moved, one for himself.

Hence this whole category of controvertible ideas lacks literary merit and should be studiously avoided by those who aim at beauty, which in the last a.n.a.lysis is to be found in truth alone, and in truth of such a sort that as soon as it is proposed the reader recognises as true and accepts it.

_The second virtue of ideas, that they should agree with the inner nature of the subject; and thence on ideas foreign and accidental to the subject._

The second virtue of ideas with respect to the subject-matter is that they should agree with its inner nature: that is, that they should be elicited out of the very inners of the subject and not far-fetched or drawn from external accidents which are only the accompaniments of things. By this rule we have been delivered from numerous frigid epigrams, of which I subjoin a few examples:

Foreign and far-fetched is Owen's on a lyre:

That there is concord in so diverse chords Discordant mankind some excuse affords.[15]

As if nothing were more pertinent for making men ashamed of their discords than the concord of strings on a lyre.

From concomitant accidents, and not from the very heart of the subject itself, is drawn this epigram of Germanicus Caesar, though the verses are otherwise sufficiently polished:

The Thracian boy at play on the stiff ice Of Hebrus broke the waters with his weight And the swift current carried him away, Except that a smooth sherd cut off his head.

The childless mother as she burned it said: "This for the flames I bore, that for the waves."[16]

Certainly the mother had a deeper and more native cause of grief than that her son was destroyed partly by water and partly by fire; she would have grieved no less had he perished wholly in water or wholly in fire. The whole reason for grief, then, ought not be sought in such a slight circ.u.mstance, which was an accompaniment of and not the grounds for grief.

Negative descriptions labor under the same fault, namely those in which are enumerated not what the endowments of the subject are but what they are not. This is justly censured in one of Barlaeus'

epigrams, which is in other respects quite polished:

Of royal Bourbon blood, by whose aid once Belgium believed that G.o.d inclined to her; For sceptered fathers famed, more famed for war, And by Astraea's doom of rare renown; Whom War as general, Peace lauds unarmed, To whom so many lands and seas are slaves; Neither the fleece drinking barbarian dye I send you, nor Sidonian artifice, Nor Indian ivory, Dalmatian stone, Nor the choice incense that delights grave Jove, Nor warring eagles, no, nor cities stormed, Nor plundered canvas from the conquered sea; Louis, I give you Christ as King and Lord, t.i.tles not foreign to the ones you bear: For I would send you, greatest of all kings, Than which I cannot more, I send you G.o.d.[17]

Surely it is a long way around to enumerate what you will not give the King in order to make clear how slight your gift is. Besides, the conclusion is harsh in that a book about Christ is called G.o.d and Christ, as if Christ and a book about him were the same thing. But this is a commonplace absurdity of what one may call the dedicatory _genre_, in which writers almost always speak of their book as if there were no difference between the book itself and its subject: thus, if they write about Caesar or Cato, "Caesar and Cato," they say, "prostrate themselves before you;" If about Cicero, "Look," they say, "Cicero addresses you and takes you as patron:" all of which are correctly to be reckoned in the category of false statements.

_In what way ideas are to be made agreeable to men's character. On avoiding offense; and, first, on obscenity._

The harmony of idea and subject is a matter fairly easy to understand, but the attuning of idea and men's character is more difficult to grasp and requires more painstaking treatment. For in this inquiry the whole scope of human nature must be thoroughly examined, and our silent inclinations and aversions must be laid open so that we will know how to avoid the one and comply with the other. For it cannot be that anything should please that offends nature, or anything displease that complies with natural inclinations. We will touch briefly on some of these points, but only on those that suffice to our purposes.

In the first place, there is in the nature of man an aversion to the shameful and the obscene, and this the more powerful in the best and well-educated natures. All obscene ideas offend this sense of shame to such an extent that they are regarded as alien to nature, ugly, and uncivilised. Nor does it matter that some corrupt souls laugh at them.

For civilization, as we have said, does not consist in agreement with a corrupt, but with a virtuous and moral, nature. Consequently, absolutely nothing of this kind is to be found in the conversation of respectable men, and is only resorted to by those who lack any feeling for Christianity as well as for genuine society and civilization.

Therefore we have excluded all shameful and licentious epigrams not only in deference to morals and religion but also to good taste and civilization. Of this Catullus and Martial in Antiquity witness that they had no perception at all, for they filled up their works with a good deal of ill-bred filth, and on that account must be regarded not only as dissolute but also as vulgar, uncultivated, and, to use Catullus' own phrase, "goat-milkers and ditch-diggers."[18]

_On the cheap subject-matter of some epigrams._