The "Metaphysicals": English Baroque Literature in Context
I
In the still predominantly British study of English literature, the term "Baroque" is hardly ever used to describe the era between the Renaissance and the age of Neoclassicism, and it seems that only scholars of comparative literature who have dared look across the Channel, such as René Wellek, as well as cultural scholars use it in their approach. In British studies of English literature, the term "Metaphysical" is still given preference. Originally, "Metaphysical" was used as a derogatory term by the Neoclassicists in order to differentiate their aesthetics, which was based on reason and clearly defined rules, from the Baroque aesthetics of the "last age". From their point of view the Baroque poets had offended against the eternally valid norms of reason and nature and so, in this diphemistic sense, "Metaphysical" was meant to describe something "unnatural" or "adverse to nature" rather than the "supernatural". After John Dryden's and Samuel Johnson's derogatory use of the term "Metaphysical", it became a neutral technical term -- a frequent semantic change when the immediate historical context sinks into oblivion. In his influential Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693) Dryden described how, during his aberration from reason as a youth, he was dazzled by Abraham Cowley's "points of wit, and quirks of epigram" and other "puerilities", and looked upon him as a pupil of the Baroque poet John Donne:
He [Donne] affects the metaphysics, where nature only should reign. [...] In this Mr Cowley has copied him to a fault.
In 1779, Samuel Johnson wrote a short biography of Abraham Cowley. This was the first of a series of biographical and critical prefaces to his anthology of Works of the English Poets (1779-1781), a book firmly based on Neoclassical principles. His judgement and terminology followed Dryden's:
About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed the Metaphysical poets [...].
In a rather haphazard enumeration Samuel Johnson accused these 'unnatural' poets of a great many offences against reason and nature: exhibiting artificiality instead of concealing art, the desire for originality at the expense of the mimesis of nature, unpolished stylistic carelessness, abstruse conceits arbitrarily yoked together in a kind of discordia concors, enormous hyperboles, gross absurdities, and horrible obscenities often conveyed in puns and quibbles. The Rationalistic and Neoclassical purification of the language, as propagated by the Académie Française after 1634 and by the Royal Society after 1668, tolerated no multiple meanings of words that would confuse the understanding, and thus radically inverted the dynamic expansion of the Renaissance and (even more so) of the Baroque vocabulary prominent in Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Donne. Shakespearean and Metaphysical puns and quibbles offended against the most basic Neoclassical rules of reason, the rule of clarity and the rule of decorum.
Apart from being distorted by Neoclassical prejudices, Samuel Johnson's catalogue of the characteristics of English Baroque literature is also rather incomplete. Ever since Grierson's edition (1912) and Eliot's essay (1921), research into Baroque poetry has not only led to a revision of Neoclassical prejudices but has also looked at the Baroque period unhampered by the distortions of a different aesthetic approach. It has, moreover, led to a substantial expansion and modification of Johnson's catalogue. On the basis of recent research studies, the characteristics of English Baroque literature can be summarized in nine points:
• CONCEIT AND EMBLEM. In the literary comparison or image the distance between vehicle and tenor was widened in an artificial and affected way to such an extreme or even contrariness that any logical or natural relationship between the two was no longer immediately recognizable. Comparing the body, in which the soul lives confined until its liberation by death, to a prison or to a coffin had been a natural conventional illustration of Plato's soma-sema-doctrine; but comparing the body to a rusty gun barrel which the bullet of the soul breaks in order to fly upward to heaven, as John Donne did in his Second Anniversary (1612), was an instance of Baroque wit, originality, and eccentricity:
But thinke that Death hath now enfranchis'd thee,
Thinke that a rusty Peece, discharg'd, is flowne
In peeces, and the bullet is his owne,
And freely flies: This to thy Soule allow,
Thinke thy shell broke [...]
The 'eccentric' world picture spreading through Europe after Nicolaus Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) produced equally 'eccentric' art forms, which were later labelled with epoch-terms denoting just this eccentricity: 'baroque', 'il seicento eccentrico'. A remarkable manifestation of this loss of the centre or Verlust der Mitte can be seen in Baroque church architecture. Here, the circle as the typical feature of Renaissance groundplan design was replaced by the Baroque oval. Thus the church-goer's traditional experience of the centre below the cupola was clearly distorted. Typical examples are Bernini's Jesuit Sant' Andrea al Quirinale in Rome or the Jesuit Loreto Church near the Hradčany (Castle) in Prague. In Baroque rhetoric, the conceit replaced the Renaissance image just as the oval replaced the Renaissance circle in Baroque architecture, giving the reader an equal sense of distortion. A typical example is the famous divine poem on the repentant sinner Mary Magdalene, 'The Weeper', and its strong-line coda, 'The Tear' (MSS ca 1640), by the Roman Catholic and Counter-Reformatory poet Richard Crashaw. The poem disrupts the well-proportioned and by now time-worn Petrarchan comparison of eyes with fountains or orbs and tears with springs or stars in the most extravagant and illogically mixed ways. In rapid and broken succession, the eyes are no longer fountains but become extended to "portable and compendious oceans" faithfully and paradoxically following their beloved Christ, and the tears are drops weeping for their own loss, or, more paradoxically, moist sparks, watery diamonds, maiden gems worn by a wanton woman blushing at Christ, her very masculine and beautiful lover, pearls of dew carried on pillows stuffed with the down of angels from the sinner's lowly dust to heaven, to be metamorphosed into stars and singers in the heavenly choir of angels. Besides concrete physical objects such as eyes and tears, abstracts such as moderation, repentance, grace, wisdom, and love could also be illustrated by such far-fetched and original vehicles. Thus, the obvious and harmonious comparison of love with fire in Petrarch was replaced by the artificial and eccentric comparison of love with a flea in Donne. This concettismo was closely related to the originally anti-Calvinist and Counter-Reformatory mixed genre of the emblem. Complementing a Baroque history painting, the emblem was chiefly meant to convey abstract doctrines of faith and philosophy to the human senses, in a tripartite combination of word and picture. This task would almost necessarily put a strain on the emblem writer's inventiveness in finding eccentric vehicles and tertia comparationis, as when he illustrated the universal indispensability of divine and human love by depicting the world as a cask and Amor-Christ as a cooper binding together that cask's loose planks. It is typical of this Baroque ut pictura poesis that, for instance, the conceptistic comparison of divine grace with a magnet, which alone can draw the iron human heart up to God, was used both in a holy sonnet of John Donne's and in an emblem in Georgette de Montenay's Monumenta Emblematorum Christianorum (1540).
• THEATRICALITY. Much has been written about the theatricality and dramatic quality of Metaphysical poetry, especially in its earlier phase. In their radical opposition to Calvinistic theology, Metaphysical poems are intensely picturesque, displaying all the pictorial splendour usually associated with the flashy illusory stage-designs of the Stuart court-masque. Calvin's rabbinistic, anti-Catholic, (and allegedly early Christian) interpretation of the first commandment of the decalogue (Exodus 20. 4), forbidding not only idols but all pictures, had entailed his ban on plays and playhouses in general. No theatres were allowed in Calvin's Genevan theocracy, and the early English Calvinists' ("Puritans'") antagonism to the theatre and its consequences has been well investigated. Small wonder that the Counter-Reformation reacted by stressing both the practice of the theatre (Jesuitendrama) and the literary and artistic commonplaces of the theatre. "Totus mundus agit histrionen", "el gran theatro del mundo", "das große Welttheater", became a favourite theme and motif of Baroque literature. Moreover, against the background of the sister arts ut pictura poesis, attention should be paid to the theatricality both of Baroque church architecture and of Baroque painting. Baroque churches were splendidly designed as theatrum sacrum, and theatrical illusion (as in trompe l'oeil ceilings) was consciously made use of in order to involve the senses ad majorem Dei gloriam. The heavens opening and revealing God surrounded by his hierarchies of angels in all their glory was portrayed as a theatrical pageant comparable to (and exceeding) that of the most splendid court-masques, giving observers a sensual foretaste of the delights to come in the world beyond. Baroque paintings, too, are full of theatre motifs and heavy drapery, with curtains allowing glimpses of what seemingly was not meant to be seen. This, of course, had the contrary effect: disclosing rather than concealing, arousing curiosity and guiding the eye directly to what was only half-heartedly hidden. Christ in the manger or Christ on the cross no longer carries a napkin or loincloth hiding his shame, but rather a theatre curtain revealing it and conveying Christ's erotic potency and soteriological fertility to the astounded spectator.
• ANTITHESIS AND PARADOX. Not only in literary comparisons but also in the context of the two conflicting world pictures and two conflicting religions -- even the most remote elements were connected in contentio or composition (now called antithesis) or synoeciosis or opposition (now called paradox). We find heaven and hell, life and death, fire and water almost automatically linked, just as Baroque literature reflected the increasing awareness of a world out of joint on all levels. In their massive accumulation and complex clusters, antithesis and paradox became distinctive characteristics of Baroque rhetoric. Thus, in his two earliest verse letters referring to his participation in the Islands Expedition (1597), John Donne opposed the descriptions of two contrary experiences in extremis, a sea storm and a sea calm. Both not only threatened the sailors' lives, the second even more than the first, but confronted them with two versions of pristine, pre-Creationist, Godless chaos. In the storm
Darkness, lights elder brother, his birth-right
Claims o'er this world, and to heaven hath chas'd light.
All things are one, and that none can be,
Since all formes, uniforme deformity
Doth cover, so that wee, except God say
Another Fiat, shall have no more day.
And in the calm
He that at sea prayes for more winde, as well
Under the poles may begge cold, heat in hell.
All aim is lost in disorientation, all coherence (of the fleet) is gone. All order, distinctions, and laws of causality are annihilated in a hell of shrieking noises or baking heat. The speaker can no longer distinguish directions and seasons, day and light, sleep and death, health and disease. And every thing and act planned for the sake of survival either fails or turns to its very contrary. The accumulated paradoxes underline the obliteration of all created relationship between cause and effect, as of all rational order. Another of Donne's eschatological poems either composing or opposing extremes is The First Anniversary (1611). Here the old world, shaken by a severe fever with hot and cold flushes, doubts whether the end of this crisis signifies the world's survival or its death, only to learn that its inevitable decay due to sin is the (certainly very Utopian) precondition of its rebirth into a virtuous and prelapsarian state. In Cyril Tourneur's play The Revenger's Tragedy (1607), the hero Vindice wavers between extreme love and extreme disgust, libido and contemptus mundi, at the sight of the skull of his murdered mistress, which is wrapped in beautiful clothes. Arthur Hübscher talks of "Baroque as a means of forming an antithetical awareness of life".
Situative as well as rhetorical paradoxes can be found in all epochs of literature, and have been aptly classified in three types: the serious and unresolvable paradox, the comical and satirical paradox, and the playful or semi-jocular paradox. The distinctively Baroque paradox belonged to the first type. Like the conventional serious paradox, it opposed extreme opposites in seeming logicality; but it aimed at eccentric surprise. It exceeded the conventionality of Tertullian's maxim of "credo quia absurdum" in its witty originality and offence against conventional decorum. In John Donne's Holy Sonnets, each speaker tries to overcome the broken state of the world and the church in a privatissime illogical communion between two lovers, himself and his desired God. The speaker will never be free unless God chains him, and will never be chaste unless God rapes him. God has to overthrow him in order that he may firmly stand. In Richard Crashaw's 'Hymn to Saint Teresa', penetration is the precondition of virginity as well as ignorance the precondition of knowledge, bankruptcy the precondition of trade, weakness the precondition of strength, martyrdom and death the precondition of life, and fall and sin the precondition of resurrection and salvation. In their theological and philosophical unresolvability, such serious paradoxes, homiletically conventional or sensationally shocking, were radically different from the traditional comical and satirical type of paradox on the one hand, and from the traditional playful or semi-jocular type of paradox on the other hand. And they also differed from the paradoxy that modern literary theory postulates for all poetry (Cleanth Brooks and the New Criticism) or even prose (Paul de Man and Deconstructivism). The distinctive feature of Baroque paradoxes is their shocking choice of joined opposites as well as the sheer quantity of obsessive paradox cumulation, which sets them apart from the serious paradoxes that survived in the Augustan age, with its self-imposed obligation to a return to harmony and to the restrictive rule of decorum. The typically Baroque use of paradoxes must be understood as the literary expression of an age that did not only have to face new contradictory theologies, philosophies, and views of history. The age had, above all, been taken by surprise in having to face a totally new, non-geocentric world picture. Where the centre is lost, excess and eccentricity are the new norm itself. Thus, an aesthetics of excess, eccentricity, disproportion, non-balance, monstrosity, and stupendousness became the hallmark of the Baroque: "la estetica di stupare". And so the Baroque sought to bridge by an excessive and eccentric, original and innovative wit and art what faith found increasingly difficult to believe. It was here that the replacement of religion by art began, and it is here that we find Matthew Arnold's and Friedrich Nietzsche's predecessors in doubt. Baroque man lived torn between two logically irreconcilable world pictures: on the one hand, the old Ptolemaic, geocentric one which had for centuries given man a sense of order and dignity, which was now increasingly called in doubt; and, on the other hand, the new Copernican, heliocentric one which, though it proved empirically convincing, resulted in a deep sense of physical and moral displacement and ontological disorientation. Tycho Brahe's typically Renaissance attempt at reconciling the two world pictures shows the whole extent of the dilemma. From an early seventeenth-century rational and erudite man's point of view, Anthony Munday spoke of "opposed truth" , and Baltasar Gracián of "monstruos de la verdad". This antithetical awareness explains Crashaw's desperate call to return to Saint Teresa's childish, pre-logical, and mystical acceptance of contraries beyond man's rational comprehension. But the lost firmness of faith was irretrievable, and Baroque mysticism differed from medieval mysticism in its strong element of doubt. In this, Baroque love of paradox and Baroque mysticism were closely connected.
• QUIDDITY. As shown above, Baroque literature's characteristic feature of replacing logical lines of argumentation by paradoxes, syllogisms, barocones and other kinds of witty and spurious argumentation reflects the feeling of an original community and continuity increasingly torn apart. George Herbert's broken altar (fragmented in violation of biblical law) symbolizes the broken church, and is wittily associated with the psalmist's broken heart as well as the speaker's broken poem. The speaker's poetic sacrifice, like all sacrifice, aims at an 'at-one-ment' with God, though (paradoxically) to the exclusion of both the church and the community. Donne's First Anniversary, his above-mentioned poetic anatomy of the dead old world, provides another type of such unexpected disruptions of the train of thoughts. It teems with sudden changes of argument and truncated thoughts, marked by aposiopeses or interruptions of the type of "But no!" and underlined by numerous antitheses and unresolvable paradoxes. Another splendid instance is Donne's poem 'A Noctural upon St Lucy's Day', with its wittily paradoxical and surprising treatment of alchemy. The speaker, tout seul by the death of his beloved lady and in his isolation from "all others", feels more than ordinarily depressed on St Lucy's day, being the shortest, darkest, and most sapless day of the year. All others stand in expectation of the next spring, which will renew their erotic vitality. The speaker, however, feels his own death multiplied into utter nothingness. Alchemy, the ultimate goal of which was the transformation of lower into higher matter, is replaced by a "new alchemy", transforming nothingness into a higher form of nothingness. Then this utter bodilessness will exalt him far above the mere fleshly and goatlike regeneration of "all others" and effect his regeneration into an infinitely higher love. Thus, nothingness distilled to its "quintessence" and "elixir" becomes a higher life, the nadir turns zenith. A dense erotic imagery (alchemy and alembics, the tropic of capricorn, sap and balm, lust, goat, bed) is inseparably interwoven with an equally dense religious number symbolism (3, 5, 7, 9, 12) and imagery (sun, vigil, eve). Such a definitely unprudish sensuality as appears in these paradoxes refers to still another source of the logically broken dispositio of the classical literary rhetorical discourse: the trompe l'oeil argumentation of the Jesuits, i.e. the deliberate satisfaction of the senses, condemned by Calvin, by deceiving the senses (as well as in the above-mentioned trompe l'oeil perspective of Baroque church ceiling paintings) ad majorem Dei gloriam following Ignatius of Loyola and the Council of Trent (1545-63).
• PRIVATE MODE AND LYRIC EGO: AMOR DIVINUS - AMOR EROTICUS. With the growing post-Copernican sense of macrocosmic chaos and the post-Machiavellian (and pre-Hobbesian) threat of political chaos, especially civil war, man tended to withdraw and in some cases even to create his own ordered microcosm: alone with his paramour in his love chamber, alone with his God in his prayer-room, or, in the most extreme case, entirely alone (as the speaker of Andrew Marvell's 'The Garden'). This self-imposed separation of microcosmic privacy from macrocosm and state, in the hope of finding a last refuge of cosmic harmony in this privacy, dissolved the time-honoured doctrine of the three integrally corresponding planes of the Creation. Calvinistic Protestantism had destroyed the old holistic Roman Catholic ceremony of the Eucharist (and with it the kath'holon unity of sensuality and spirituality, man and God, as well as high and low members of one church community). This had significantly contributed towards an irreversible development still in progress today, the individualization and isolation (Vereinzelung) of man, which modern sociologists have called "the tyranny of privacy". Cast back upon himself in his private prayers for forgiveness and peace, the Protestant had begun to leave the traditional communio and to become tout seul. Efforts during the Counter-Reformation to re-establish the old kath'holon feeling of a communio ecclesiastica et eucharistica were doomed to fail. In court culture, too, this by now irreversible development became apparent in the increasing isolation of the monarch and nobility. Whereas King Henry VIII and his daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, had still visited the country and personally responded to entertainments and pageants presented to them by the citizens, the succeeding Stuarts more and more withdrew into the privacy of their courts. King James I (1603-25) ostensibly reduced contact with the people, and King Charles I (1625-40) tried to abolish such public relations altogether, with disastrous political consequences which cost him both his throne (1642) and his life (30 January 1649). The cult of the Stuart court-masque may be regarded as another symptom of that isolation, as the royals and their courtiers staged plays in which they themselves were both actors and spectators, to the exclusion of the public. The admission of representatives of 'the world' to royal audiences became an intimidating ritual set in equally intimidating surroundings of architectural designs, which almost signalled unwelcome intrusion.
Driven into a similar isolation, quite contrary to his nostalgic Catholicism, the Baroque poet of the early Stuart period (1603-40) shunned the community of a world which he felt to be in the agonies of death and decay--vaguely comparable to the later Romantic poets' cult of loneliness, and then again to the self-withdrawal of the Decadent poets of the Fin de Siècle. It has been convincingly shown that the individual speaker and lyric ego of the Baroque period assumed a solipsistic poetic dignity and dramatic complexity which was not regained until the lyrical revival in the Romantic movement of the later eighteenth century. The speaker or ego of a Baroque lyric equally scolded the celestial bodies, the king, the nobility, the clergy as well as secular wealth and public morality as intruders, and banished them from the place of his poetic privacy. Thus John Donne about himself and his mistress:
She is all States, and all Princes, I,
Nothing else is,
and about himself and his God:
Churches are best for Prayer, that have least light:
To see God only, I goe out of sight,
and the speaker of Andrew Marvell about himself and his garden:
Society is all but rude,
To this delicious Solitude.
In a study of Baroque religious poetry in France, Helmut Hatzfeld referred to a particular expression of this private mode, which he called the "tout-seul formula". In the context of this vehemently defended private mode of the Baroque poets it is noteworthy that amor eroticus and amor divinus, i.e. love-chamber and prayer-room, could be freely exchanged in a most sensuous and unprudish manner (just as, in Baroque art, Christ appears as a potent and tender lover with all erotic connotations). Thus, consciously following the Old Testament Song of Solomon and the contemporary emblem books, John Donne could not only be the great solitary lover and the great solitary divine, but was also able to convey divine love to the senses of his readers through erotic images of the private practice of physical love. One of his most notorious poems in this respect is his 'Hymn to Christ at the Author's Last Going into Germany' (MS 1619). The speaker addresses Christ as an intimate lover, paradoxically demanding freedom and protection in an unfree and tyrannous relationship dominated by jealousy and zeal, "divorcing" the speaker from all his former friends and desires, and demanding an amorous tryst with Christ in the darkness of a church where they can hide and make love out of sight of the community. With the saving ship or ark of the church "torne" in times of the religious conflicts of the Reformation, the Baroque poet, now tout seul, moves closer to his God to be saved from Noah's flood:
IN what torne ship soever I embarke,
That ship shall be my embleme of thy Arke;
What sea soever swallow mee, that flood
Shall be to mee an embleme of thy blood;
Though thou with clouds of anger do disguise
Thy face; yet through that maske I know those eyes,
Which, though they turne away sometimes,
They never will despise.
The reader of the Baroque poet's lyrics, like the hearer of the Baroque divine's sermons, is almost excluded, progressively so from Donne via Herbert and Crashaw to Vaughan and Traherne. In Donne's 'A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning', the lovers' bodies have become so thin (like precious beaten gold) and so translucent and transcendent as almost to leave the material world behind (as in death) and to be sacred in their remoteness:
T'were prophanation of our joyes
To tell the layetie our love.
Individual love, be it amor divinus or amor eroticus, is indispensable for salvation where the community is breaking up, the ring or circle of perfection only being attainable by the refined lovers' "stiffe twin compasses". In Donne's 'The Ecstasy', the reader is assigned the role of a hypothetical third person, selected on strictest conditions and only temporarily admitted to observe the alchemically refined lovers (and the primacy of their newly mixed mind directing the new union of their bodies) from a "convenient distance":
If any, so by love refin'd,
That he soules language understood,
And by good love were growen all minde,
Within convenient distance stood,
[...]
And if some lover, such as wee,
Have heard this dialogue of one,
[...]
• RELIGIOUS MEDITATION. The justification of and appeal to the senses ad majorem Dei gloriam, in conscious opposition to Calvin's reductionist spiritual theology, led the Baroque poets to adopt the Aristotelian enargeia or evidentia -- the ideal of "ante oculos ponere" as it is used in Ignatius of Loyola's Exercitia Spiritualia. Calvin's destruction of the Eucharist had bedevilled the sensuous enjoyment of God, and Protestantism's recourse to the printed text had interrupted the lively and sensuous exchange between the speaker and hearer, the face-to-face interaction as between the giver and taker in the Eucharist. The Counter-Reformation sought to re-establish that old sensuous interchange, and the need to bridge extreme poles which were drifting more and more apart accounts for the strained artificiality of the Baroque artist's creative effort. The truth conveyed by a work of art was not only to be understood, but to be received with ecstatic sensuality. It was meant to be heard with the ears, seen with the eyes, smelt with the nose, tasted with the tongue and felt by the sense of touch. This led to the tripartite structure of the Ignatian meditation as a weapon of the Counter-Reformation. In the first but indispensable step of meditation, compositio loci, the meditant had to conceive a vivid image of a particular scene of salvation, Christ's Crucifixion or Heaven or even Hell, if necessary with the aid of a Baroque painting. He had to feel Christ's pains, to see his blood flow, hear his words on the cross, taste and smell the sweetness of heaven and the sulphurous stench of hell, before he was allowed to proceed to a theological comprehension in the second step of meditation. In the third stage he had to transfer his feelings and understanding into affective involvement and practical action. In 1954 Louis Martz, and in 1955 Arno Esch, showed this tripartite structure to be characteristic of a great part of English Baroque poetry. In the title of his work Louis Martz even suggested calling all English Baroque poetry "The Poetry of Meditation".
• STRONG LINES. In his Ars Poetica, Horace had recommended the golden mean between elliptical brevity and long-winded detail; and the early Neoclassicists of the School of Ben Jonson followed this conventional rule of "Breve esse laboro Obscurus fio". The Baroque poets of the School of Donne, however, revolted by making the very contrary, "masculine" elliptical brevity for the purpose of stylistic obscurity, their poetic ideal. In classical literary rhetorical discourse, obscurity had ever been a stylistic device of the ornatus. Thus, even in its own time, the term "strong lines" was used for English Baroque poetry, vehemently opposed by the early Neoclassical School of Ben Jonson. In the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque age models changed: they shifted from Demosthenes' dense precision of thought to Isocrates' dazzling external form, from Cicero's balanced stylistic clarity to the epigrammatic and elliptical taciturnity of Tacitus and Seneca. This also explains the popularity that Tacitus's contemporary Martial and his Epigrammata enjoyed with the Metaphysicals, who delighted in writing terse epigrams both in English and Latin: Donne's Epigrams, Herbert's Passio Discerpta, Crashaw's Epigrammata Sacra, Marvell's Inscribenda. Thus, the stylistic ideal of the Golden Latinity of Horace and Cicero was replaced by the later stylistic ideal of the Silver Latinity of Tacitus and Martial. Art historians, and, in their wake, literary historians consequently attempted to explain the Baroque as a returning phenomenon of decadence following classical peaks. This was done, for example, by the art historian Jacob Burckhardt in 1855 and in 1860, until in Renaissance und Barock (1880) his pupil Heinrich Wölfflin suggested accepting Baroque decadence as an art form of its own. Decades later, this was still the case with Ernst Robert Curtius: in Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (1948) he opposed classicism and mannerism as virtus and vitium.
• PLAIN STYLE. The plain, partly colloquial, and often consciously deformed poetic style is a particularly striking feature of the English Protestant Baroque. John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, and Thomas Traherne demonstratively rejected the poetic diction and high stylization of Renaissance poetry from Petrarch to Shakespeare, as well as the ornatus malus of stylistic Mannerism (Euphuism, Gongorism, Marinism). Thus, the plain style of English Baroque poems stood in antithetical tension to their highly complicated and conceptistic intellectual content. George Herbert expressed this most controversially - and even paradoxically - in his two 'Jordan' poems, with an artificial pun on the 'plains of Jordan':
Who sayes that fictions onely and false hair
Become a verse? Is there in truth no beautie?
Is all good structure in a winding stair?
[...]
I envie no mans nightingale or spring
Nor let them punish me with losse of rime,
Who plainly say, My God, My King.
It should, however, be noted that Herbert's 'Jordan' poems are self-deconstructive in their apparent contradiction between their argument in favour of pristine, original, 'natural' plainness (analogous to the Protestant recourse to 'primitive' Christianity) on the one hand, and their 'artificial' though non-mannerist rhetoric on the other hand (analogous to the Roman Catholic insistence on post-primitive tradition and ornament). This expresses the Anglican Church's and the Metaphysical poet's tension between their Protestant and their Roman Catholic heritages, also reflected in the palace architecture of the period, where plain Neoclassical faades concealed ornate Baroque interiors, - the more private the rooms the more ornate their decorations. Typical examples were Inigo Jones's Banqueting House in his unexecuted designs for a new Whitehall Palace, his Wilton House, and the Caroline Aston Hall near Birmingham. This contrast between interior and exterior ornamentation can also be traced in the development of the Church of England. Though Protestant in its public self-presentation, the Church of England was secretly re-Catholicizing itself from within, most notably in the religion and politics of King Charles I and Archbishop William Laud.
In Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth Century Lyric, a study based on rich source material, Barbara Kiefer Lewalski shows how the plain style of the Bible, so dear to Protestants, influenced English Baroque poetry no less strongly than did Ignatian meditation. It is a well known fact that European Protestantism could only encounter the, in a literal sense, 'sensational' flood of anti-Calvinist, Counter-Reformatory pictorial and emblematic art by its increasing acceptance or 'containment' of the picture itself and simply by using its contents for Protestant purposes. The by now plain churches, robbed of their ornamentation by iconoclasm, were filled again; what was originally a Counter-Reformatory emblem was now dedicated to the Protestant cause, and the tripartite structure of the Ignatian meditation was adopted for numerous Protestant Baroque poems. English Protestant Baroque, however, differed considerably from Continental Jesuit Baroque in its frequent use of the biblical plain style as an important means of Protestant appropriation.
• ARS EST PRAESENTARE ARTEM. The classical maxim "ars est celare artem", often wrongly attributed to Horace, was the rhetorical poetic ideal in the Renaissance as well as in the later age of Neoclassicism. The Neoclassical critic Joseph Addison, for example, found fault with the Baroque poet's 'false wit', as apparent in "Anagrams, Chronograms, Lipograms, and Acrosticks" as well as "Poems cast into the Figures of Eggs, Axes, or Altars". And the Neoclassical critic Samuel Johnson later generally pointed out that the Baroque poet perverted the doctrine of 'ars est celare artem' into its very opposite:
The Metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavour.
In his Neoclassical saeva indignatio, and due to his lack of distance to the Baroque period, Samuel Johnson was unable to understand that the art and learning displayed in the Baroque work of art (poem or sermon alike) were indispensable. They were meant to surprise the readers, hearers, and spectators and thus helped to convey the impression of total novelty and originality, which mirrored a totally new world picture. So, "new" was a favourite adjective in the titles of Robert Southwell's poems. Moreover, they kept the reader or audience in admiration and at a distance, thus guaranteeing the artist's private mode. Both reader and audience were meant to enjoy the absolute originality and scarcely comprehensible complexity of his brilliant wit from a distance, just as they would admire a firework display. The Italian Baroque poet Giambattista Marino, well known among English Baroque poets, expressed this principle in a memorable couplet:
E del poeta il fin la meraviglia [...]
Chi non sa far stupar, vada alla striglia!
Moreover, the "dissociation of sensibility", first identified and denominated by T. S. Eliot in 1921, had not yet taken place in the Baroque age. The learning of the Baroque poet expressed in verse and prose was not only intellectual but also emotional. According to Eliot the Baroque poets were "men who incorporated their erudition into their sensibility" and felt their thoughts "as immediately as the odour of a rose". Eliot criticized Neoclassicism for having dissociated the original integral unity of life and art, for splitting it into emotion and reflection, decorum and indecorum, as well as into "true wit" and "false wit".
II
The enumeration and contextual description of these nine characteristic features of English Baroque literature in verse and prose indicates a complex variety of seemingly heterogeneous causes. But their overall coherence and interaction, the nature of and reason for their historical development, as well as their connections with the other Baroque arts both in England and on the Continent demand an even more extensive and differentiated contextual documentation. These characteristic features were often attributed to a returning esprit de révolution against the compulsion by rules and norms characteristic of the Baroque, Romanticism, and then again the Neoromantic Fin de Siècle. Sigmund Freud showed that in human life superego-oriented, Apollonian phases controlled by rules and norms are always followed by id-oriented, revolutionary and Dionysiac phases despising rules and norms. Literary historians such as F. L. Lucas have applied this observation to literary history, as, for example, in their explanation of Romanticism as a revolution against rule- and norm-oriented Neoclassicism. The same is true, at the turn of the 17th century, for the increasing rebellion against the fixed Petrarchan conventions which had dominated Renaissance poetry. Under this aspect, Baroque Metaphysical and Neoclassical Cavalier poetry may be regarded as two very different, even contrary reactions to the same outworn Renaissance tradition. The Metaphysicals reacted by extension and excess according to the principle of originality. They tried to exceed Renaissance art by even more various forms and expressions; they sought its wit and splendour amongst other things by a superabundance of even bolder paradoxy; they extended traditional images to the most tortuous, unexpected, surprising, and original conceits by way of an excess of discordia concors and an innovative urge towards forward orientation, Entgrenzung. The Cavaliers, on the contrary, reacted by restriction according to the principle of imitation. They aimed at less variety, less wit and flashiness, preferring clarity and purification of the language, modification of extremes, reduction of images to natural associations, imitative backward orientation to the model of the Age of Emperor Augustus (1st century BC), obedience to the rules laid down by reason and Horace, Begrenzung and Überschaubarkeit. The fundamental difference appears from an invective that a Cavalier poet, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, wrote against the "male" and "strong line" Metaphysicals:
The reason why men run into such obscure conceits, is because they think their wit will be esteemed, and seem more when it lies in an odde and unusual way, which makes their verse not like a smooth running stream; but as if they were shelves of sand, or rocks in the way, and though the water in those places goeth with more force, and makes a greater sound: yet it goeth hard and uneasy. As if to expresse a thing hard, were to make it better.
John Donne, the figure-head of the Metaphysical school, and Ben Jonson, the head of the Cavalier school ("the tribe of Ben"), were irreconcilable enemies. The Baroque reaction, however, became the dominant tradition and very much the fashion of the day. Its roughness, novelty, and juxtaposition of extremes mirrored the disorientation of the age much better than the countercurrent Neoclassical reaction with its smoothness, elegance, naturalness, and backward orientation. This also explains the fact that more Cavalier poets occasionally wrote Metaphysical poems than vice versa. Yet in the course of time, Cavalier Neoclassicism was destined to prevail and supersede the Metaphysical Baroque everywhere in Europe: first in France (with Malherbe), then in England (with Dryden), and last but not least in Germany (with Gottsched).
The distinctive Metaphysical originality can be well demonstrated from the Metaphysicals' radical break with the traditional Renaissance sonnet. There was the compulsory form of 14 lines, with its high stylization of nature and the cosmos and the beloved donna angelicata as well as a fixed characterization of the beloved lady and an equally fixed allocation of roles with stereotyped comparisons. And there was the tragic "star-crossed lover", who could not reach his heavenly and pure beloved lady in this life, and from whom she withdrew even further in death. There were his sweet sighs and his eyes, from which the tears shed as from a fountain at the sight of his unattainable donna angelicata, with her sun-like eyes, her lips as red as corals, her snow-white skin, her breath sweet as the smell of roses, her golden hair and her walk angelic and light under the fateful power of the stars and among the sweet songs of murmuring meadow flowers. After two hundred years such a litany of Petrarchan conventions would necessarily have to lead to a revolution which took place first in the form, later in the content (inventio) and finally, in the Baroque period, even in the diction (elocutio) of Baroque poetry.
A similar development had already taken place in the history of painting. Since about 1520, the pre-Baroque Mannerists had begun to break the canonical forms of Renaissance painting (Raphael, Leonardo) by defocussation, decentralization, and winding lines (serpentinata) anticipating Bernini. Then, immediately in their wake, the high Baroque painters broke the content of Renaissance painting by sensualizing, eroticizing, and aggrandizing biblical history, as well as by dismissing the Renaissance ideals of proportion and beauty. Eccentricity, even deformity, became a hallmark of Baroque art, as in many of the court portraits of the Spanish painter Velazquez.
The history of music sticks out insofar as this stylistic modification of the principle of harmony by distortion, dissonance, eccentricity, and enormity occurred somewhat later, around 1600, with the breaking up of traditional polyphonic composition, and lasted somewhat longer, until around 1750. Pure polyphony began to be hybridized by monophony, further enriched with an increasing wealth of extremes and dissonances. The early period of Baroque music has been aptly characterized as aiming at typically Baroque originality, exploring "new resources such as chromaticism, dissonance, tonality, monody, recitative, and new vocal and instrumental combinations." The introduction of the thoroughbase or basso continuo initiated a stile moderno (as distinct from the traditional polyphonic stile antico) which remained the fashion until the middle of the eighteenth century: the epoch of Baroque music. This chiaroscuro-like thorough bass was often performed by ever new gigantic bass instruments which produced ever lower and darker sounds, throwing into relief tortuous lines of chromatically arranged tones high above: the contrabassoon, the great bass recorder, the bass flute, the bass dulcian, and the large bass viol. By contrast, and analogous to the literary conceit, the instruments playing the upper lines grew more and more elevated in pitch: the Baroque flute or recorder, the (valveless) Baroque trumpet, the favourite oboe or hautboy expressing love (oboe d'amore), the frequently introduced "sharp violins" expressing "jealous pangs and desperation, fury, frantic indignation, depths of pains and heights of passion". Thus, compositional artificiality (including quaintly handled counterpoints and compositiones figuratae such as notes arranged to form a cross or other subject of the piece) coexisted with intense passions as analysed and described in philosophical, literary and musical Affektenlehren. The widening of extremes was reflected in the concerto grosso as a favourite genre of Baroque music, with a small concertino (mostly of violins) playing against an overwhelming orchestral grosso. And it also manifested itself in the popularity of the castrato with his artificial voice ("falsetto"), whose growth-hampered larynx and unbroken voice produced a vocal range that no natural voice was capable of (up to three and a half octaves). His artificial voice, again, was matched by the castrato's monstrous size and androgynic appearance, which later exposed him to the ridicule of the 'nature'-oriented Neoclassical critics. Moreover, artificiality was the hallmark of many musical genres of the Baroque, such as the opera and the fugue, which later incurred similar satirical blame, as in Alexander Pope's second Dunciad (1742). There, the Harlot Opera with her false tinsel thus addresses the Empress Dulness "in quaint Recitativo":
"O Cara! Cara! silence all that train:
Joy to great Chaos! let Division reign:
Chromatic tortures soon shall drive them hence,
Break all their nerves, and fritter all their sense:
One Trill shall harmonize joy, grief, and rage,
Wake the dull Church, and lull the ranting Stage;
[...] "
In the history of poetry, however, these compository eruptions are to be observed as early as in the history of painting. In 1530, Sir Thomas Wyatt still imitated Petrarchan sonnets rather closely in his English adaptations. His successor, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, was already varying the Petrarchan rhyme patterns by choosing alternating rhymes and a final couplet, a form which was later even adopted by Shakespeare. And in 1582, Thomas Watson published Hecathompathia, a fairly conventional cycle of one hundred sonnets, though revolutionary in its 18-line form. About this time, however, in Astrophil and Stella, Sir Philip Sidney was already beginning to play with the conventional inventio of Petrarchism. He did so by making the failure to imitate Petrarch and Ronsard the precondition of a slowly developing and very erotic passion.
Ten years later his successor Edmund Spenser broke the conventional inventio in his Amoretti, allowing the courtship to be crowned by success and marriage. Finally, in the 1590s, Shakespeare left all conventions behind, replacing the beautiful donna angelicata by a promiscuous bisexual youth and an ugly dark prostitute and complicating this confusion of emotions by introducing a fourth character, the Mannerist Rival Poet, who alternately sleeps with both the youth and the Dark Lady. But Shakespeare -- as well as Surrey and Watson and Sidney and Spenser -- largely remained loyal to the Renaissance conventions of poetic diction, even if he criticized empty elocutionary pathos in his Rival Poet.
It was left to the revolutionary and Baroque poet John Donne and his School to completely break apart the monolithic Petrarchan canon of form, content, and diction. Donne's originally invented conceits, which may be explained as modelled on the tortuous pictorial illustrations of the contemporary emblem books, exploded traditional Petrarchan diction as effectively as his well-nigh ugly plain style and his originally invented metrical forms, which he freely chose to underline his very un-Petrarchan contents. Thus, the close relationship between the emblem and the conceit needs some further investigation in order to understand the Metaphysical revolt against Renaissance Petrarchism's ideals of proportion and beauty.
As a contemporary of Shakespeare, Donne also wrote his Songs and Sonnets for circulation in manuscript. Donne, born and brought up a Catholic, converted to Protestantism about 1596 and became an Anglican High Church divine. He was well acquainted with the Baroque conceits of the Jesuits modelled on Ignatian examples, as they were used in the underground activities of the Counter-Reformation in England in the 1590s, which took place despite the threat of most severe punishments. The prose meditations and poems of the English Jesuit and early Baroque author Robert Southwell circulated in manuscript and will probably have been known to John Donne, as was Southwell's spectacular and most cruel fate: Southwell was executed in London in 1595, after three years of imprisonment and torture in the Tower. In any case, John Donne was familiar with the "emblems" or "hieroglyphics" of the Alciati tradition, which had its roots in a misunderstanding of the Egyptian hieroglyphs as pictorial moral ideograms. It was a fertile misunderstanding in the history of art, which explains the synonymity of "emblem" and "hieroglyph" in the Baroque period , and which is still apparent in the original misnomer 'hieroglyph'. The Tridentine justification of the theological usefulness and acceptability of the 'sensational' picture, in contrast to Calvin's view, eventually led to the emblem gaining a similar Counter-Reformatory significance. The emblem acted as a mediator between the abstract contents of faith and the human senses, just as the Baroque painting or sculpture did for the concrete contents of faith. Modelled on the Exercitia of Ignatius, it was made to stimulate all the senses. Even the conscious deception of the senses, for example in the Baroque illusionist paintings on walls and ceilings ad majorem Dei gloriam, was accepted in line with the Jesuit principle of 'dulce et utile'.
Thus the 'sensational' visual art of the Baroque did not refrain from presenting abstract items of faith, such as divine grace, divine love and forgiveness, theological and secular sins and virtues through bold pictorial analogues, even if vehicle and tenor lay very far apart without any natural connection, thus acting against all laws of philosophical logic. As obvious clichés were only rarely available, the most important characteristic of an emblem book author in the Alciati tradition was the Baroque sense of 'wit', i.e. the capacity to produce original, artificial and remote pictorial analogies making use of the proverbial Jesuit sophistry and inventiveness. In the eikon of the emblem, he visualized divine grace via the image of a magnet for an iron heart or via the image of a besieger in front of a besieged fortress shaped like a heart. And in the poema of the emblem, he elaborated his lemma to explain the illustrations, thus creating literary conceits.
Baroque poems can often be read as the poemata of emblem books, as for example, John Donne's Holy Sonnet 'Thou hast made me':
Thy Grace may wing me to prevent his art,
And thou like Adamant draw mine iron heart.
Thus, the emblem art of the Counter-Reformation turned out to be a highly appropriate instrument to break up clichés by means of witty conceits, including the clichés of a declining literary Petrarchism. The Council of Trent legitimized the practice used in Baroque poetry which, following the biblical Song of Solomon, presented divine love through physical erotic love, and thus made it the object of desire. Presented thus in numberless emblem books dedicated to amor, it easily allowed the rendering of spiritual into secular rhetoric. Instead of applying the stereotyped, obvious and logical comparison of love with fire, John Donne used the tortuously conceited, original, witty, artificial and by no means logical comparison of love with a flea, which is far from obvious and stands in need of a 'Jesuitical' explicatio rabulata.
The emblem book as a source of English Baroque rhetoric was to be found all over the British Isles and was generally accessible. It is true that emblem books were originally meant as a weapon of the Counter-Reformation and that the art of printing in England was notoriously backward, so that until the Restoration a relatively small number of English emblem books (compared with the immense flood of Continental emblem books) had been printed. But, firstly, the pressure exerted by the Counter-Reformatory 'sensational' paintings and sculpture was so great that the Protestants had to move away from stern Calvinistic doctrine and avail themselves of the fine arts by adjusting them to their Protestant cause: their churches grew more and more ornamented, they filled their emblem books with pointedly Protestant contents. Secondly, Catholic as well as Protestant emblem books from the Continent circulated freely in England, and English emblem book authors often received their printing plates directly from the Catholic capital of printing, Antwerp, or the Protestant capital of printing, Leyden, and then supplied them with new English lemmata and poemata. English Protestantism even assimilated the Ignatian meditation, also filling it with Protestant contents. The poems of the Protestant Nonconformist or 'Puritan' Metaphysicals, Andrew Marvell and the early John Milton of the hymn 'On the Morning of Christ's Nativity' (MS 1629), convey the Calvinist view of nature's corruption with all the pictorial splendour of Baroque emblem books and Baroque paintings. The first step of meditation, the visual imagination of the details of salvation and faith, remained invariably the same: compositio loci, composición del lugar, seeing the spot. This explains the preference for the tripartite structure of meditation also present in Protestant English Baroque poetry.
The emblem-generated conceit with its distinctively 'sensational' quality contributed to the distortion of elegant, well-proportioned, though time-worn Renaissance comparisons. It is frequently linked to the closely related paradox, as both rhetorical figures reflect the time's need to live with two logically opposed and irreconcilable world pictures. John Donne called that church the most faithful bride which opened her lap to everyone; and Richard Crashaw identified that woman as the most celestial whose sins and repentance had bowed her down to earth most lowly. Crashaw's 'Saint Mary Magdalene, or, The Weeper' shows how Petrarchan clichés were cited in order to immediately and extensively disrupt them with adynata, antitheses, paradoxes, and to endow them with a sensational and tangible eroticism which replaced the barrenness of the frustrated Petrarchan lover's vain complaints. The sexuality of Christ is marked as clearly as in Baroque emblems, where Christ is often syncretistically presented as a naked Amor-Christ, the son of Venus-Maria, or in Baroque paintings, where Christ is often shown as an ecstatic lover (even on the cross). Streams of bloody sweat pour from the ecstatic face, and streams of blood pour from the vaginal wounds, and believers or saints approach these wounds to suck in the blood or probe them with their fingers. Crashaw's poem, as stated above, starts on the conventional comparison of the repentant sinner's eyes with fountains or orbs and tears with springs or stars, only to eroticize them and to vary them into ever-changing and ever contradictory new images. These are accumulated with an enormously dynamic vitality, creating ever new sensations of surprise. The reader of the poem feels his thoughts whirled around, much as the spectator of the wall paintings of a Baroque church cupola feels his eyes restlessly wandering into heaped-up vistas of splendid and erotic images. The poem's sensational and theatrical composición del lugar quality in its insistence on balmy sweetness and rich perfumes is obvious. Mary Magdalene's tears are no longer mere symptoms of self-humiliation or complaint for the loss of virginity. Paradoxically, they combine virginity and procreation, repentance and enjoyment, lowliness and richness, self-humiliation and self-exaltation, in a markedly erotic diction combined with alchemistic vocabulary suggesting ever new potencies.
Such heaped combinations of antitheses (contentiones) and paradoxes (synoecioses), as defined above, dominate even the shortest Metaphysical poems, everywhere shoring up a neo-mystical and holistic creed against threatening ruin and doubt, shouting "credo quia absurdum" so much the louder in their attempt at bridging the enormity of the gap. This neo-mysticism explains the frequency with which smallness and infinity as well as time and eternity are either juxtaposed or paradoxically joined under one aspect, cutting across the neat Thomistic categories of tempus, aevum, aeternitas. The first stanza of the final chorus of Crashaw's Nativity Hymn, a typically Baroque poem written in the theatrical style of a Caroline court-masque, may serve to illustrate this:
Wellcome, all WONDERS in one sight!
Aeternity shutt in a span.
Sommer in Winter. Day in Night.
Heauen in earth, & GOD in MAN.
Great little one! whose all-embracing birth
Lifts earth to heauen, stoopes heau'n to earth.
The disproportion and enormity of such cumulated antitheses and paradoxes, disrupting all Renaissance ideals of beauty, not only mirror the tension of men confronted with irreconcilable world pictures, theologies, philosophies, and historiographies. They also attest to a sense of living in a world totally out of joint and fragmented, descended into chaos , standing in need of salvation and in need of a re-orientation on all three corresponding levels of the once ordered cosmos: macrocosm, microcosm, state, as described above. On the state level, especially at court, men observed an increase in political Machiavellianism. In England, Machiavellianism was (mis)understood as a disruptive ethical philosophy, disconnecting ethics from fixed natural norms and linking it to political utility, thus providing a justification for intrigue and murder. The Machiavellian stage-villain, multiplied in Jacobean and Caroline drama, was a reckless devil incarnate and solipsistic individualist divorced from all religious and social ties, "Ego mihimet sum semper proximus".
The most famous literary manifestation of this widespread feeling that political, social, and moral coherence was crumbling together with the chaos in macrocosm and microcosm is John Donne's First Anniversary (1611) - a very theatrical poem full of conceits and breaches of logic, using as its central conceit the anatomy of the corpse of the old world after its slow and weary decease:
And new Philosophy calls all in doubt,
The Element of fire is quite put out;
The Sun is lost, and th'earth, and no mans wit
Can well direct him where to looke for it.
And freely men confesse that this world's spent,
When in the Planets, and the Firmament
They seeke so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out againe to his Atomies.
'Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone;
All just supply, and all Relation:
Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinkes he hath got
To be a Phoenix, and that then can bee
None of that kinde, of which he is, but hee.
Ten years earlier, Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (1601-2) had shown the exemplum horrendum of a culture in decline, its ruin caused by the relativization of "degree, priority, and place" as well as "moral philosophy" and the "law of nature". Shakespeare had his Ulysses deliver his famous "degree speech" drawing a similarly dark portrait of the horrible and universal chaos caused by the loss of the old geocentric order:
O, when degree is shaked,
Which is the ladder to all high designs,
The enterprise is sick! How could communities,
Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenitive and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
But by degree, stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows!
The ominous signs of a world descending into chaos are depicted in many contemporary sources describing similar details. With its enumeration of the symptoms of decadence, John Donne's swan song anticipated the apocalyptic mood of the Fin de Siècle poets, who, in their turn, rediscovered English Baroque poetry as congenial: the assumption of eccentric as well as centric spheres (already made by the Ptolemaic astronomers), of man growing smaller and smaller as well as more prone to disaster, of seasons increasingly out of tune while at the same time losing all attributes of beauty, proportion and colour, of new epidemics (such as syphilis and influenza), of masses of vermin, of numerous fateful meteors, of the loss of the noble art of divination due to the broken "correspondence" between heaven and earth:
For heaven gives little, and the earth takes lesse,
And man least knowes their trade and purposes.
Between those two corresponding levels - macrocosm and microcosm - there existed a third level of correspondence: the state as 'bodie politick'. But even the state, where order manifested itself in peace within and without, seemed, at that time, to be falling prey to the chaos of war. In England no end to the wars with Spain and France was in sight, and the ever increasing religious and political polarization clearly pointed to the inevitability of the imminent Civil War; on the Continent the Thirty Years' War broke out and devastated Germany with the same vehemence as the Civil War did in England.
Thus, the individual Baroque artist felt increasingly disconnected from all three (formerly corresponding) levels which had once been believed to be firmly connected and based on a divinely pre-established world order. This sense of disconnectedness produced various reactions, attempts at bridging the gap on the one hand, and resignation on the other hand. On the one hand, as shown above, devices of contrariety joined in art what could no longer be joined in theology: the poet's conceit and paradox as well as the painter's chiaroscuro and the musical composer's counterpoint. In this context we should understand the idea of the work of art as an atoning sacrifice to reconcile estranged mankind to God, - an idea later revived in Romantic poetology (and another respect in which Baroque poetry anticipated Romantic poetry). The idea is most prominently expressed in George Herbert's The Temple, even in the collection's introductory poem,
A verse may finde him, who a sermon flies,
And turn delight into a sacrifice.
and then, memorably in his pattern poem 'The Altar', where the "broken ALTAR" of the poet's heart and pen is offered as a sacrificial act of at-one-ment and soteriological reintegration:
O let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine,
And sanctifie this ALTAR to be thine.
The self-confessing speaker's private mode shows how, on the other hand, the Baroque artist resignedly withdrew into his own privacy: together with his mistress into the intimacy of his love chamber, with his God into the isolation of his praying-room, with his own thoughts into the isolation of a garden or a library. So, in the one extreme, Baroque horticulture brought forth secluded retiros. In their high-walled and small enclosures man found a visual (and psychological) safeguard against the immensity and the chaos without, a centre regained . In the opposite extreme, the overwhelming and centralized palace gardens of the Baroque princes mirrored the 'new theology', which implicitly taught that immensity, immeasurability, unrepresentability, and apparent chaos were the image of the immensity of God, who had created that seemingly disorderly universe. In this theology, loss of measure became the new measure itself. This provocative creed is also contained in Crashaw's 'The Weeper'. Mary Magdalene, the "pretious Prodigall" ever sweating balmy tears at the approach of Christ her bridegroom whom she ever follows, is exuberant, excessive, luxuriant, and wanton in her overproductive physical secretion , just as the poet is excessive in his cumulation of shockingly sensational images. Excess implicitly appears no longer to be an ingredient of sin, but of the virtue of imitatio Dei. The Baroque princes' excessive gardens as well as excessive erotic lives must be seen in this context of the history of ideas, the more so as love and the garden (as love's classic location) had been closely associated from both classical antiquity and the Old Testament Song of Solomon to the Baroque emblem books.
Baroque poetry was characterized by an attitude of a totally unascetic, un-Pauline, Epicurean contemptus mundi, which called into question both the traditional concept of the world and of man as well as the traditional ethical and artistic restrictions of the Renaissance. This was especially true in the context of Ficino's neo-Platonic love ethic. John Donne, the love poet, drove the world and its social norms out of his love chamber by using coarse, unpoetic, and sneering language, thus breaking all ethical and stylistic decorum. In 'The Canonization' he went so far as to paradoxically praise himself and his mistress as saints, not because of any kind of chaste subordination of their bodies to a sovereign mind, but because of the consuming quality of their unrestrained and erotically potent sensuality. The second stanza of the poem is particularly revealing as to the connection between revolutionary and anti-Petrarchan love and rhetoric on the one hand, and the Baroque contemptus mundi on the other:
Alas, alas, who's injur'd by my love?
What merchants ships have my sighs drown'd?
Who saies my teares have overflow'd his ground?
When did my colds a forward spring remove?
When did the heats which my veines fill
Adde one more to the plagui Bill?
Soldiers finde warres, and Lawyers finde out still
Litigious men, which quarrels move,
Though she and I do love.
The Petrarchan clichés (such as sighs like sea storms, tears like spring-tides, spells of cold like winter storms in spring, spells of heat like epidemics) are not only chosen to mock traditions no longer held to be acceptable. They also depict a chaotic world, war and destruction of countless people, to which the witty Baroque poet contrasted the better alternative of voluntary self-consummation in excessive love. Thus, the poet, freed from traditional social and ethical restrictions, simultaneously demonstrated his release from traditional restrictions of style.
The same is true for John Donne's religious poetry. In the III. Satire, for example, he broke all conventions of the Anglican Church, dispensed man from both the teachings of the great churchmen and the orders of his King, binding him solely to his own conscience as moulded by the Law of God alone. Wherever Donne emphasized that secular laws and teachings could only be of limited validity, he emphasized the breach of tradition by an extensive use of paradoxes:
That thou mayest rightly obey power, her bounds know;
Those past, her nature, and name is chang'd; to be
Then humble to her is idolatrie.
Just as the Baroque poet called on the king, the nobility, the clergy and the traditional guardians of morality not to interfere by scolding breaches of decorum, he also kept his readers, audience and critics at respectful distance. He displayed all his learning in esoteric thought and language, refusing any direct understanding of his poetry. The most extreme example of this is, no doubt, Baroque pulpit oratory with its extensive and complex trains of thought; additionally laden with patristic and rabbinic knowledge, and often also with quotations in Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syrian and Arabic. Baroque poetry, too, shows such strategies of distance and isolation in its private mode: among these were the strong lines with their obscurity as well as their overriding principle not to conceal art: "ars est praesentare artem."
In historical perspective, the contemptus mundi increased in the same measure as the new Copernican concept of the world gained ground and wars devastated both England and Germany, and man withdrew into his privacy as described above. Both the lives and the works of the older Baroque poets such as John Donne and George Herbert were torn between the extreme poles of a splendid public career and a private withdrawal. Their poems dramatize the defence of their escapist private mode against the ever present temptations of a chaotic world.
Through his clandestine marriage with Ann More in 1601, against all rules of civil and canonical law, John Donne forfeited his chance of a public career, thus thwarting all his previous efforts: "John Donne, Anne Donne, Vn-done". Later, Donne was deeply disappointed when the King whom he had scolded and rebuked only made him Dean of St. Paul's instead of Archbishop of Canterbury. The bridge between heavenly spirituality and worldly sensuality was never broken down entirely, either in Donne's life or in Donne's poetry, where erotic and spiritual love were so dramatically juxtaposed that it is often difficult to distinguish between his love poems and his divine poems. 'The Canonization' may be regarded as the best example of that double tension.
Donne's pupil George Herbert, younger brother of the prominent Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury, born in 1593 and 17 years Donne's junior, found it less difficult to give up his highly prestigious office as public orator at the University of Cambridge. In ostentatious modesty, he became rector of the humble country parish of Bemerton, located within walking distance between Salisbury, the reputed cathedral town, and Wilton House, the gorgeous palace of his family, the Herberts, Earls of Pembroke. His Temple poems -- published in the year of his death by his literary executor Nicholas Ferrar, who also chose to live in rural isolation -- reduce the tension between erotic and spiritual love by submerging Donne's erotic imagery, and are much more easily classified as divine poetry. Yet they retain, albeit in reduced form, the dramatic tension between the desire for privacy and the temptations of the world, as for example in 'The Quip':
The merrie world did on a day
With his train-bands and mates agree
To meet together, where I lay,
And all in sport to geere at me.
Richard Crashaw, born in 1613 and trained on Giambattista Marino, was even more willing to dispense with an academic career at Cambridge within the Anglican Church hierarchy. Crashaw, a former High Churchman, turned to the Spanish mystics, converted to Catholicism and died in 1649, holding a minor church office in Loretto. His hymn 'The Weeper' ends with two stanzas spoken by Mary Magdalene's personified tears, in which the migrating tears affirm their scorn at pursuing such "inferior gemmes" as are placed on such "toyes" as crowns or coronets, vain and evanescent things even below drops of morning dew hovering upon flowers. They would much rather
[...] goe to meet
A worthy object, our lord's FEET.
The treasures of the world, however, are still present and not yet quite removed from the poem's scope. They survive in its intense sexual imagery, visualizing Mary Magdalene as a typically Baroque woman embracing the extremes of sensuality and spirituality, much as does the Mary Magdalene of the Baroque paintings by Georges de la Tour and El Greco. The strong Ignatian component in Crashaw's Italianate Baroque, amor eroticus as a significant of amor divinus, would not allow a pure saint's total withdrawal and spiritualization. Thus, Crashaw's divine poems lack Donne's dramatic defence of the private mode while retaining (or even intensifying) his dramatic tension between amor divinus and amor eroticus.
Andrew Marvell (born in 1621) and Thomas Traherne (born as late as 1637) were contrary characters in their public aspirations. Marvell was Latin Secretary to the Council of State (as successor to John Milton) before and anti-Cavalier controversialist after the Restoration; whereas Traherne, by contrast, was content to lead a single and devout life as rector of Credenhill in his native Herefordshire. What both had in common though was that, when they died (Marvell in 1678 and Traherne in 1674), they left their private mode Metaphysical lyrics unpublished. Marvell's lyrics were found by his housekeeper and published in 1681 (Miscellaneous Poems), and Traherne's were not found until 1896 and published in 1903 (Poetical Works). The private mode of their Metaphysical lyrics is quite unthreatened by worldly aspirations. In one of Marvell's much-anthologized meditational poems, a drop of dew, symbolizing the soul, has dropped into a bed of roses; yet it weeps with its own tear at the loss of heaven, despising the beauty and fragrance of the earthly roses,
So the World excluding round,
Yet receiving in the Day.
The speaker of Marvell's 'The Garden' drives the private mode to its very extreme, so as to make a tragi-comical fool of himself. Thus, the poem provides a satire on the exuberances of the Roman Catholic (as opposed to Marvell's and the early Milton's more restricted Protestant) Baroque. As such, the speaker of 'The Garden' voices the opposite extreme to the ascetic speaker of 'A Mower against Gardens', neither of which extremes Marvell would have adopted. Marvell's speaker is a sensualist, hedonist, sybarite, whose love of solitude appears as a mere temporary recovery from amorous excesses, to which his fancy recurs again and again. Quite apart from the fact that he grossly misunderstands the mythical tales of Apollo attempting to rape Daphne and Pan attempting to rape Syrinx, his desire "To live in Paradise alone" as a prelapsarian Adam before the creation of Eve stands in blatant contradiction to his erotic fancy, giving the lie to this extreme of the private mode. His equation of his garden with Paradise evokes associations of Original Sin and the Fall of Man, which he seems to blot out. And his spiritual ecstasy, with a free soul "Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade", is proved a short-lived illusion by his observations in the poem's final (seventh) stanza: the seasonal flowers, the sundial, the short-lived bees computing "thyme" or "time", suggest the narrow limits of his corporeal existence: memento mori. And even then, the obvious pun on "hours" and "whores" proves him an unregenerate extreme sensualist. Thus read, the poem is a Protestant Baroque plea for a private mode which provides no Donnean excuse for worldly amorousness.
In Traherne's highly visionary Poems of Felicity, such as 'Eden' and 'Innocence', worldly seductions are no longer perceived, any more than worldly pains. Traherne was a Cambridge Platonist, a fact which helps explain his anti-Calvinism and flat denial of a fallen and corrupt earth:
A learned and a Happy Ignorance
Divided me,
From all the Vanitie,
From all the Sloth Care Pain and Sorrow that advance,
The madness and the Miserie
Of Men. No Error, no Distraction I
Saw soil the earth, or overcloud the Skie.
Traherne's 'proto-Romantic' yearning for infancy and a child's anamnetic view of the world as a reflection and part of heaven uneclipsed by clouds of Calvinistic denigration goes well beyond Crashaw's mysticism. In his lyrics, this spiritual view of the world transcends and rules out Vaughan's contemptus mundi as to the merry world and its enticements. Traherne's parallel 'proto-Romantic' denial of anything profane in the world, anticipating Blake, finds a brilliant expression in his poem 'On Leaping over the Moon'. The poet's vision melts with that of his little brother skipping over a pool of water, and the reflection of this everyday scene in the water interfuses it with the skies, so that the brother seems easily and without any danger to overleap the moon. In the instructive light of this nightly vision, the scene is no longer banal. The same "Place of Bliss" appears "under our Feet" and "o'er our Heads":
On hev'nly Ground within the Skies we walk,
And in this middle Center talk:
Did we but wisely mov,
On Earth in Hev'n abov,
We then should be
Exalted high
Abov the Sky: from whence whoever falls,
Through a long dismal Precipice,
Sinks to the deep Abyss where Satan crawls
Where horrid Death and Despair lies.
In this mystical vision, man is again placed into a centre, between an easily reached heaven above and an impotent hell below. Traherne's poem shows men on the lookout for a new anthropocentric orientation, replacing the lost geocentric world picture. However, in the 200 years of reordering which elapsed between Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) and Pope's Essay on Man (1733-34), Traherne's solution of the problem is a very private and unteachable one. Small wonder that Traherne, who never addresses any reader except his brother as his alter ego, saw no point in a literary reputation, remained content with his small parish in his native Herefordshire, where he died, and left his manuscripts unpublished. This demonstrative disdain for literary reputation was only surpassed by the American Metaphysical poet Edward Taylor (1644-1729) in his small frontier village of Westfield in Massachusetts, who in his will even forbade the publication of his manuscripts. Like Traherne's, Taylor's manuscripts were not discovered and published until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries respectively.
Finally, Henry Vaughan, born in the same year as Andrew Marvell, showed no hesitation at all about giving up worldly careers with his conversion after 1648, and about remaining in the seclusion of his home county of Breconshire (Wales). His secular love poems belong to the period before his conversion: Poems (1646) and Olor Iscanus (MSS ca 1647). Quite unlike Donne, Vaughan felt ashamed of their erotic worldliness, and even more ashamed when his friends injudiciously published Olor Iscanus in 1651.His religious poems such as 'The World', 'The Retreat', or 'Corruption' -- all published in 1650 as part of the collection with the paradoxical title Silex Scintillans -- show him to be a nostalgic primitivist in the sense of Neo-Platonism, totally removed from this dark, chaotic world with its aspirations in love and war, and an esoteric admirer of the Hermetic philosophy: Man, no longer the crown of creation on a still earth in the centre of the universe but hurled somewhere around the sun, seeks rest in a world-contemning ecstasy of the mind, carrying him above all physical things even more than the speaker of Marvell's 'The Garden' with his imagined escape to a "green thought in a green shade":
I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great Ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright,
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years
Driv'n by the spheres
Like a vast shadow mov'd. In which the world
And all her train were hurl'd.
And thus, mystically uplifted into the light of the Empyrean, Vaughan's enraptured speaker looks pitifully down on this dark, chaotic world and its hurled-about votaries, who live in lightless caves: the lover and the statesman, the miser and the Epicurean. They are so far removed from the ecstatic speaker's scope that they cannot tempt him any more. Parallel to the decline of the Elizabethan drama and the Ptolemaic universe, Metaphysical poetry was increasingly deprived of its original dramatic tension. The struggle between the temptations of privacy and those of the world upon the 'stage of life', the tension between erotic and divine love, and the conflicting rhetorical figures of disparity, which had been part of its Baroque theatricality, are irretrievably lost:
O fools (said I,) thus to prefer dark night
Before true light,
To live in grots, and caves, and hate the day
Because it shews the way,
The way which from this dead and dark abode
Leads up to God,
A way where you might tread the Sun, and be
More bright than he.
The difference between the earlier and the late Metaphysical poets is mirrored in Metaphysical pulpit oratory, if we compare the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne on the one hand with those of Jeremy Taylor on the other hand. Taylor, chaplain to King Charles I (as Andrewes had been chaplain to King James I), and Charles's spiritual aide on the scaffold, preached sermons that accumulated and intertwined Metaphysical conceits in disdain of all worldly aspirations:
LEARN to despise the world; [...] for it is a cousenage all the way; the head of it is a rainbow, and the face of it is flattery; [...] its body is as a shadow, and its hands do knit spider's webs; it is an image and a noise, with a Hyaena's lip and a Serpents tail [...]
In the history of Metaphysical poetry, this loss of dramatic tension and theatricality becomes manifest in a comparison of the late Mary Magdalene hymns or Christmas hymns of Henry Vaughan with the early ones written by Robert Southwell and Richard Crashaw. The "Dear, beauteous Saint" of Vaughan's Silex Scintillans has cast away all of Mary Magdalene's traditional pictorial attributes: her mirror, her carefully combed hair, and her vessel of nard which simultaneously denoted the anointing of Christ's feet and the pernicious box of Pandora. Here, the saint's weeping eyes are no longer "sins loose and tempting spies", but fixed stars despising all earthly contact, except for their remote exhortation of "dark straglers" (moral and political sinners lost in the darkness of error). Similarly, Vaughan's hymn on 'Christ's Nativity' presents an unworldly child in a clean manger, and one of the poem's few remaining conceits (the comparison of the manger with a human heart) opens up an estranging gap in time and space between man and God, a gap which God alone can bridge from far beyond human reach:
I would I had in my best part
Fit Roomes for thee! or that my heart
Were so clean as
Thy manger was!
But I am all filth, and obscene,
Yet, if thou wilt, thou canst make clean.
Robert Southwell's and the young Milton's Christmas hymns, by contrast, describe very personal encounters with a "silly, tender Babe [...] In homely manger trembling" , a tangible God "All meanly wrapt in a rude manger". Pre-Baroque and Baroque paintings of the Nativity, as by Correggio, Barocci, and Caravaggio, mark the extreme poverty and everyday homeliness of the world's most exceptional moment of divine epiphany. The mightiest prince of the whole world appears in the homeliest hut, the greatest weakness is the greatest strength, and the child's sweet birth is envisaged so as to foreshadow the man's bitter passion. The swaddling-cloth is both at once: royal cloak and dead body's shroud. If such paradoxical and highly dramatic bridging of extremes may be regarded as a characteristic of Baroque art, then Vaughan's comfortable adoption of the spiritual and undramatic renunciation of the sensual extreme, both in his life and his poetry, indicates the end of the Baroque epoch.
Conversely, the late Metaphysical disintegration of Baroque complexity and dramaticality could also manifest itself in the very opposite way, fusing with Cavalier poetry (and thus breaking up the Baroque private mode). Abraham Cowley discards all spirituality and mysticism from the love poetry of his collection The Mistress (1646), isolating an extremely carnal amor eroticus from its theological combination with amor divinus. The late or post-Baroque "dissociation of sensibility" (as identified by T. S. Eliot) resulted from God becoming more and more removed from man, an intellectually constructed rather than emotionally experienced deus absconditus. Thus, the dissociation of sensibility increasingly split a more and more beast-like sexuality from a more and more barren and sterile holiness. This is the disintegrative line of the development of erotic literature from Abraham Cowley via the Earl of Rochester and John Cleland to Victorian pornography and the demonic or merely de-spiritualized animal eroticism in the anti-religious poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Gottfried Benn. Cowley's poetry links love to gold, dowries, and treasures, even where his Machiavellian speakers ironically disavow all prostitution, as in 'The Given Love':
To give All will befit thee well;
But not at Under-Rates to sell.
This speaker's claim to uniqueness and privacy proves mere irony. A comparison of the poem with Donne's 'The Canonization' shows the almost parodistical destruction of the Baroque private mode. Whereas Donne's speaker excludes the genteel world and its accepted values in order to realize his unifying love with his one mistress, Cowley's speaker does so only in order to unmask both that world and himself as true dissimulating Machiavels, changing both amorous allegiances and political allegiances according to opportunity. The only thing that distinguishes him from the world is his honesty:
I'll some such crooked ways invent,
As you, or your Fore-fathers went:
I'll flatter or oppose the King,
Turn Puritan, or Any Thing.
This should not, of course, mislead us to regard late Metaphysical poetry simply as a decadent form of Donne's poetry. It stands in its own right, but it moved closer to Cavalier poetry and thus indicated its epoch's need for a less scholastic, less dramatically torn, but more rationalistic way of writing. It has been aptly shown that this development is also reflected in the development of the aesthetic philosophy of and in the style of Thomas Hobbes. The apparent chaos in macrocosm, state, and microcosm had first led the intellectuals into a more or less extreme withdrawal, with the consequence of an upgrading of private and social mode poetry and a simultaneous devaluation of all public mode genres, notably the epic. The heyday of Metaphysical and Cavalier poetry saw an increasing decline both in the production of epic poetry and prose and in the quality of drama. But, as the sense of chaos visibly increased with the Civil War in Britain (and the Thirty Years' War in Germany), there arose a new demand for a new public responsibility in literature.
After 1640 the public mode of poetry flourishing in the Renaissance again gained ground, and with it the classical public mode genres, i. e. the verse epic and the drama (the latter being strictly prohibited though secretly cultivated throughout the Commonwealth). John Milton's early lyric poetry written between 1629 and 1638 (such as the Nativity Ode, the sonnet 'On Shakespeare', and Lycidas) had already shown symptoms of overstepping the private mode and reassuming a public praeceptor populi stance, so that Milton could later claim them as poetical exercises for his epic magnum opus (first his projected King Arthur, then Paradise Lost). By having recourse to the epic models of Spenser and the Spenserians, notably Giles Fletcher, Milton demonstratively reached back across the hiatus which the late Jacobean and the Caroline period had left with regard to the writing of epics. Moreover, as the public mode or epic revival advanced from 1640 to 1660, the lyric poetry of the Metaphysicals and Cavaliers with their private and social modes respectively lost ground, so that the order of genre precedence was reversed again: the verse epic grew first and lyric poetry last in respect. Thomas Hobbes's 'Answer to Davenant', published separately in Paris in 1650 and then prefixed to the London edition of William Davenant's public mode verse epic Gondibert (1651), rates the "Heroique Poem Dramatique" highest, and "Sonets, Epigrams, Eclogues, and the like peeces" lowest, as being "but Essayes and parts of an entire Poem". At the end stood the triumph of Neoclassicism, with Abraham Cowley's recantation of his earlier Metaphysical mode of writing, the 'Ode of Wit' (1656):
In a true piece of Wit all things must be,
Yet all things there agree.
As in the Ark, joyn'd without force or strife,
All Creatures dwelt; all Creatures that had Life.
Or as the Primitive Forms of all
(If we compare great things with small)
Which without Discord or Confusion lie,
In that strange Mirror of the Deitie.
But, eventually, the decline of Metaphysical poetry was also inseparably linked to the decline of Cavalier poetry. Lyric poetry and the lyric ego's private or social mode, repudiated in High Neoclassicism from Dryden to Johnson, did not reappear until the lyrical revival of the Preromantic and Romantic Movement of the later eighteenth century.
III
In default of formal artes poeticae and artes rhetoricae, we have to reconstruct Metaphysical ideals and their rationale from various sources. Among the richest sources are no doubt the numerous English and Latin elegies on the death of the famous poet and preacher John Donne in 1631. Some of these were incorporated in the posthumous editions of Donne's poems in 1633 and 1635. They unanimously emphasized the uniqueness of the preacher and the poet. Donne's biographer, Izaak Walton, equated "miraculous Donne" with a prophet, sent by God to his dull people. Sir Lucius Cary and Richard Corbet called Donne a king, at whose death comets ought to have fallen from the sky. Arthur Wilson praised Donne as a spirit of high-flying fantasy "in the aire of Wit", whose flights, though admired by many, only few could follow. Henry Valentine compared Donne to the unique solitary phoenix, 'unica semper avis'. Donne himself had used the same image in his First Anniversary when describing his contemporaries after their loss of 'all relation'. The best known is the elegy by Thomas Carew, who described Donne as the last of his age, gleaning a harvested tradition. After him, poetical quality would be replaced by mere light-weight quantity. Although such demonstrative rhetoric of praise or blame (genus demonstrativum) makes use of literary commonplaces rather than historical facts, Carew's pitching of Donne's Baroque originality against Neoclassical imitation and obedience to rules shows one of the prime characteristics in the self-understanding of the Metaphysicals, in the context of the time-honoured querelle des anciens et des modernes. Carew's epitaph has become a literary quotation:
Here lies a King, that rul'd as hee thought fit
The universall Monarchy of wit.
In terms of the history of ideas, the ideal of the Baroque poet was the counterpart of the ideal of the absolute prince. Thus, "the divine right of kings" formed the counterpart to "the divine right of poets". In this respect, too, the Baroque poetry of the Metaphysicals reflected the intellectual climate of the age (of Stuart absolutism) much better than the Neoclassical poetry of the Cavaliers with its strict submission to Horatian rules. The Baroque refused to submit to poetic traditions and rules as laid down and reflected in Cicero or Horace, Scaliger or Puttenham. The Baroque prince refused to submit to ancient political traditions and rules as they could still be found in Erasmus or Elyot, for instance. While the medieval authoritative theorists of politics such as John of Salisbury, Bracton and others had placed the prince both above and under the law, rex supra et infra legem, rex legibus absolutus et legibus alligatus, the Baroque prince tended to neglect the latter parts of that dualistic approach. This new understanding of his absolute position had its roots not so much in Bodin or Hobbes, but in Machiavelli's 'absolving' the prince from hitherto firmly established and divinely ordained ethical norms.
In politics, one of these traditional rules had demanded social interaction with the subjects, visits and audiences such as Elizabeth I had still cultivated. But, 'absolving' himself from that time-honoured rule, the Baroque prince, like the Baroque poet, tended to withdraw into his privacy. There may seem to exist a basic contradiction between the Baroque poet and his enclosed garden on the one hand, and the Baroque prince and his gigantic palace and garden on the other hand. But, quite apart from the fact that contradiction was the life and soul of Baroque culture, the contradiction is resolved in the poet's and prince's common pursuit of saving privacy, 'absoluteness', though by opposite means. The poet as the prince's subject kept the world at a distance on a smaller scale, parallel to his forbidding rhetoric; the prince did the same on a larger scale, with his forbidding architectural and horticultural pomp.
As to Baroque palace architecture, the contradiction between the plain 'Protestant' faades and the Baroque 'Roman Catholic' interiors has already been noted above. It symbolized the progressive estrangement between the early Stuart court and the people, the 'absolutism' which cost King Charles I his life. Later, in Restoration England, during the reign of his son Charles II (1660-85), the same phenomenon manifested itself again in another form, e. g. in Sir Christopher Wren's 'Protestant Baroque' church architecture, which combined Bernini's Baroque with Jones's Neoclassicism. Wren's original designs were too close to Bernini and the Roman Catholic Baroque, and the king's judicious policy demanded a compromise. Wren had to cut Bernini's vertically towering upward lines and arches into segments, interrupting them by strong horizontal lines expressing the curbs set on Stuart absolutism. A similar reduction in force and ornament can be observed in Wren's, Vanbrugh's, and Hawksmoor's palace architecture.
As for Baroque garden architecture, the contradiction appears in the heterogeneous combination of the garden's gigantic dimensions with the private bowers, nooks, and secretive mazes enclosed within its walls. A short characterization of the medieval garden will help us to understand the Baroque garden, not only by contrast, but because the typology of the medieval garden still shaped the numerous Metaphysical garden poems by Southwell, Donne, Herbert, Marvell, and Vaughan, as well as the numerous garden pictures of emblem books. The typical medieval garden is a "garden enclosed", entailing all the erotic and divine symbolism derived from the Old Testament Song of Solomon. As such, the medieval garden had been understood as an image of paradise in the religious as well as erotic sense. The Greek word for the Hebrew Garden of Eden was "παράδεισος" ('enclosed'), and associated Paradise with the Hebrew "לואנ ןג" ('garden enclosed') of the Song of Solomon. As a consequence of this association, iconography presented both Paradise and its image in nuce, the medieval garden, as walled round-in, hedged enclosures. The interior - fertile and cultivated - would represent an "idealized, controlled representation of nature" and thus, of course, divine order. Outside the walls was the domain of barren chaos, out of which God had created this orderly world. The gardener of the medieval hortus conclusus was consequently an image of God, alter Deus, - and also of the medieval king, alter rex - , insofar as he cultivated and fertilized the garden (which would otherwise be as barren as the chaos without). He had to graft in order to bring about fertility (note the sexual imagery) and to cut and prune in order to prevent excrescences (note the judicial imagery). This 'garden of love' with its sexual and divine connotations designated both fruitfulness and harmony. The medieval garden was a peaceful fruit and vegetable garden for the cultivation of food and medical herbs, indicating that both God and his terrestrial representative, the king, were in charge of providing peace, nourishment, and healing for their people. Deus medicus and rex medicus were commonplace terms and icons. This iconology and symbolism survived in the emblems and poems of the Baroque period, although the gardens themselves had by then radically changed. The reader of Donne's 'Twickenham Garden', for instance, must have been acquainted with that tradition in order to understand the poem's speaker, a soul-sick man (like Shakespeare's Hamlet) possessed by the deadly sin of acedia. He visits God's garden of love and medicine only to persevere in his grief, because he refuses to see suffering as a precondition to regeneration or Good Friday as a precondition to Easter:
And that this place may thoroughly be thought
True Paradise, I have the serpent brought.
After the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, that paradisiacal 'garden of love' metamorphosed from intimacy to grandeur, and from a fruit and vegetable garden to an ornamental garden. Thus, it lost part of its religious symbolism in the wake of the general process of secularization. It adjoined a palace, mansion, or monastery, though not yet as part of a grand design comprising buildings and gardens. The development then progressed to the Baroque garden, facing a royal, ducal, or episcopal palace and proportioned to the whole length of that palace's faade. Moreover, it enriched the traditional Renaissance parterre by introducing costly, large-scale, artificial terraces. In its gigantic size and design, this ensemble embodied the Absolutist's prince's centralistic concentration of power. Spectacular and theatrical, with large and fragrant (mostly artificially grown) flowers and fruit, and with the magnificent mise-en-scène of its garden feasts to the sound of specially commissioned garden or river fireworks and musical entertainments, the Baroque garden was - like Baroque poetry - designed to appeal to all the senses. Thus, it provides another proof of the close link between Baroque and absolutism. This is also apparent in the Baroque garden's ingenious new water architecture, including machine-operated artificial fountains on meadows and in artificial musical grottos. Nevertheless, as has been stated above, the interior of that gigantic Baroque garden was fantastically subdivided so as to provide the prince with "retiros" from the courtiers, just as the whole garden provided the court with a "retiro" from the 'vulgar' populace. The self-isolatory private mode was guaranteed both ways.
Among these retiros counted the mazes or labyrinths characteristic of the Baroque garden. They mirrored the epoch's sense of disorientation, though they were mostly constructed around a firm and fixed centre - as if insisting on the notion of a still centralized universe and the presence of a God and a Heavenly Jerusalem still acting as the final destination for man (though he may be temporarily lost) on the pilgrimage of his life. But, in their dazzling combination with bowers, crooked lanes, and arboreta (artificial forests), they brought an element of artificial chaos into that otherwise cultivated garden, which had formerly been understood to exclude all chaos in favour of a small undisputed cosmos. Thus, the Baroque garden expressed the epoch's disorientation post Copernicum as well as Baroque poetry, its sense of contrariety or "antithetisches Lebensgefühl". In England, the Baroque garden's association with Stuart absolutism led to the fatal destruction of all Baroque gardens under Cromwell. The walls were pulled down, the bowers and mazes mangled, and the statues demonstratively beheaded, as was the king himself on 30 January 1649. Andrew Marvell's 'The Mower against Gardens' paradoxically condenses all the Puritan arguments against the artificiality of such Baroque gardens into a Metaphysical poem. The poem's plain unreliable speaker, a rustic mower, and evidently more Calvinistic than Marvell himself, argues on the basis of the typically Protestant and anti-Catholic ideal of (Christian) original primitiveness, innocence, and simplicity. To him, the artificial grottos, waterworks, statues, exotic plants and "adulterate" fruits of Baroque gardens constitute a denaturation, a falsification of God's original primitive design:
'Tis all enforc'd, the Fountain and the Grot;
While the sweet Fields do lye forgot.
Denaturation does not only imply devitalization and vilification, but sin. The poem's initial attack upon the "Vice" of "Luxurious Man" names one of the seven deadly sins, 'luxuria', the irregular lust of lovers, and the loss of both men's and plants' procreative vitality through unnatural excess in those oversecretive and overamorous gardens:
Luxurious Man, to bring his Vice in use,
Did after him the World seduce:
And from the fields the Flow'rs and Plants allure,
Where nature was most plain and pure.
What follows is a densely and subtly interwoven catalogue of other sins involved in Baroque horticulture: pride (in man's 'dealing between the bark and the [forbidden) tree' by assuming to improve God's natural paradise), robbery (in the Roman Catholic Spaniards' expeditions to exploit the exotic treasures of South America), adultery (in the unnatural breeding of new but unprocreative plants and trees), the Baroque princes' irregular craze for unnatural unprocreative eunuchs as gardeners, singers, or even lovers, and the Baroque princes' neglect of their public duty in the private mode of their walled-in self-seclusion. Here, "A dead and standing pool of Air" is perversely given preference to a more natural and accessible garden
Where willing Nature does to all dispence
A wild and fragrant Innocence.
This wild and fragrant innocence is implicitly pitched against the stale incense in Roman Catholic nunneries and churches. Far from Calvin's iconoclasm, Marvell was a Protestant who had appropriated the Baroque, though on a smaller scale and without the Roman Catholics' love of pompous artificial excess, just as the Baroque interior of Protestant churches adapted Baroque paintings and ornament on small panels and in reduced proportions. In that respect, Marvell's preference for natural and proportionate gardens resembled that of the High Churchman George Herbert in Bemerton, Salisbury. Similarly, in Andrew Marvell's topographical poem 'Upon Appleton House. To my Lord Fairfax', the speaker argues not against gardens and garden pleasures themselves, but against unnatural artificiality, unnatural enclosures, and unnatural pompous grandeur and disproportion as typical of the Roman Catholic and Counter-Reformatory Baroque. His tale of the past, when the heiress Isabel Thwaites, wooed by William Fairfax, was confined in the former nunnery, establishes a significant parallel between Roman Catholic monasticism and Baroque horticulture. Both appear as dominated by sinful pride and unnatural luxury, both erect walled-in dungeons, and both lack the natural vigour of procreation. Yet now the original nunnery's confining walls have been pulled down, and Cromwell's General Thomas Fairfax has built himself a solid, unpretentious, and functional brick mansion for temporal residence instead of a vast, artificial, and ornamental Baroque palace for permanent self-seclusion, and a 'military garden' instead of its complement, the 'amorous garden'. Fairfax's garden "laid [...] out [...] In the just Figure of a Fort" was decorated with naturally grown flowers that often bore military names; it had no artificially bred trees and flowers, no artificial waterworks, no artificial grottos, no artificial terraces, and no statues of fauns and fairies. Instead of providing an escapist private-mode retiro, this military garden was as functional and related to the unquiet times as the fortified house. Here General Fairfax would perform military exercises even in times of temporal peace: si vis pacem para bellum. This, as well as the speaker's appeal to General Fairfax not to withdraw but to commit himself to public duties, or his allegorical argumentation both against too high (Cavaliers) and too low (Levellers), make it evident that Marvell's garden stanzas replace the Baroque private mode by a pre-Augustan public mode in keeping with the unquiet times. Accordingly, they are no longer poetry in praise of artificial Baroque retiros, the less so as the speaker repeatedly expresses the author's Protestant conviction that the earth's paradisiacal prelapsarian state cannot possibly be retrieved (natura totaliter corrupta). The poem's expository grotesque satire on the sham perfection and strained inventiveness of Salomon de Caus and his falsification of God's creation and creation's natural proportions establishes the contrast to the excesses and unrealistic escapism of Roman Catholic and Absolutist architecture and horticulture:
Within this sober Frame expect
Work of no Forrain Architect;
That unto Caves and Quarries drew,
And Forrests did to Pastures hew;
Who of his great Design in pain
Did for a Model vault his Brain,
Whose Columnes should so high be raise'd
To arch the Brows that on them gaz'd.
One of King Charles I's favourite Baroque gardens was Wilton House Garden, in front of the above-mentioned home of the Herberts, Earls of Pembroke, near Salisbury, begun around 1632 after designs by Salomon de Caus and with the help of Inigo Jones. It was chiefly modelled on the design of the magnificent Baroque garden in front of the palatial Villa D'Este in Tivoli near Rome, built by the powerful and ambitious Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este between 1560 and 1575, and on Caus's Hortus Palatinus in Heidelberg, built from 1615-1620 for Elizabeth Stuart and her husband Elector Frederick V of the Palatinate. Wilton House was restored by Inigo Jones and John Webb from 1649-52, decades after John Donne had visited Lady Pembroke, the mother of his pupil George Herbert. Although the garden was not begun until the time of Donne's death, the king's and the poet's visits expressing their common predilection for the same palace and family once again show the cultural and ideological kinship of absolutism and the Baroque.
The private mode of the Baroque poet, however, was easier to realize than the private mode of the Baroque prince. In the closed 'internal' circle of his court, the literal 'absolutism' of the Baroque prince's 'external' rule ended. Here, he was obliged to submit to a strict set of formal rules of courtly etiquette. The medieval king's divinely imposed 'heavy burden' had thus shrunk to 'idle ceremony' , the merely formal remains of his ancestors' exacting code of princely virtues.
In contrast to their Neoclassical successors with their strict obedience to formal rules and restrictions, each of the English Baroque poets was a distinctive individual who emphasized his originality by breaking all conventional forms and conventions "as hee thought fit". Eventually, English Baroque literature died together with Stuart absolutism and was superseded by Neoclassical poetry (analogous to Restoration concepts of kingship), following ancient models and obeying rules and norms. In spite of its adulatory rhetoric, Thomas Carew's elegy on John Donne had proved prophetic.
University of Bonn
Rolf P. Lessenich
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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
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