The foundation of my faith as a Latter-day Saint is a lifetime of experiences of a kind that falls under the general heading of religious, or mystical. I prefer the term revelatory. The primary task that I have set for myself as a writer is to explore, articulate, and represent those revelatory experiences in words. In this series of blogs I want to discuss some of the approaches that I and other Restorationist (as William Morris is using the word) writers have taken as their task. The order of business in this enteprise is as follows:
- Outline certain developments in English, French, German, and American literature from approximately 1648 to approximately 1939.
- Place the literary achievement of Joseph Smith against the background so drawn.
- Against the background of 1 and 2 combined, argue in defense of certain kinds of poems (including the kinds I happen to have written) within the Restorationist tradition that is coming into being.
This is how one Restorationist writer, still finding a direction, sees things now.
The Neo-Classical Base-line
The Peace of Westphalia in 1648; the final defeat of the Fronde in France in 1653; and the restoration of the English monarchy in 1666 temporarily ended a long period of religious and civil tumult in Europe. The victorious aristocratic elites valued order—an order, with itself firmly in charge. After the emotional and ideological excesses that had characterized the disorder from which they had just emerged, they valued “reason,” which was not critical of the existing order but rather is better understood as “reasonableness,” “common sense,” that validated the existing order. That order was upheld by Christian orthodoxy in its Roman Catholic and Protestant variants. An essential element of the orthodoxy was the idea of “The Great Chain of Being,” which held that the Nicene Christian God had decreed a strict hierarchical order of all matter and life. God was at the top of the chain, and below him in descending order were angels, demons, stars, moon, kings, princes, nobles, commoners, domesticated animals, wild animals, trees, other plants, precious stones, precious metals, and other minerals. “Reason” required that each individual human being accept his assigned place in the hierarchy, which was complete and therefore unchanging—the Creation was a finished product. Hope for better than one’s assigned lot on earth was to be left for the Resurrection.
The literary spokesmen for the ruling elite were the poets we know as the Neo-Classicists. Their literary doctrine was articulated most famously by Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, commonly known simply as Boileau, in his L’Art Poétique (1674). Boileau’s influence is evident in the Essay on Criticism of the English Alexander Pope, and in the Versuch einer kritischen Dichtkunst für die Deutschen of the German Johann Christoph Gottsched. Some passages from Pope’s Essay will have to suffice here to give the flavor of the philosophy and of the poetry that it justified:
Nature to all things fix’d the Limits fit,
And wisely curb’d proud Man’s pretending Wit:
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First follow NATURE, and your Judgment frame
By her just Standard, which is still the same;
Unerring Nature, still divinely bright,
One clear, unchang’d and Universal Light,
Life Force, and Beauty, must to all impart,
At once the Source, and End, and Test of Art.
……………………………………………………………………
Those rules of old discover’d, not devis’d,
Are Nature still, but Nature Methodiz’d;
Nature, like Liberty, is but restrain’d;
By the same Laws which first herself ordain’d.
Hear how learn’d Greece her useful Rules indites,
When to repress, and when indulge our Flights.
Neoclassic doctrine was based on the mimetic understanding of literary art, going back to Plato and Aristotle, as the imitation of life. “Imitation” did not mean mere copying or the mechanical reproduction of a particular object. Rather, according to this theory, the artist created an idealized image that was more beautiful than nature (things as they inherently are, not “nature” as the world of the outdoors) itself could offer. The artist was to seek la belle nature (the phrase used by Charles Batteux, in Les Beaux-art réduit à un même principe, 1747). He was a “mirror,” as it were, in which life (and only selected aspects of life) was reflected. The artist was seen as a craftsman (not a visionary, as he would come to be seen by the Romanticists), and the Neoclassicist placed great emphasis on form and looked to ancient Greece and Rome for instruction in the rules by which beautiful form could be created. I rely here on Morris Bishop, in his introduction to Boileau’s L’Art poétique in A Survey of French Literature, vol. 1 (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), p. 241:
Descartes had convinced the seventeenth century that reason unaided may attain to essential truth, and that the human will may dominate passions and emotions. Boileau agrees, and he concludes that the purpose of art is to search for truth with the instruments of reason. Hence truth, nature, and beauty are bound together; whoever pursues one of them with sound reason and rigorous will finds them all.
The sincere artist must make constant choices between the truth and the innumerable falsities. The truth may be known by the universal consent accorded it by intelligent men, particularly by the great Greeks and Romans. Beware then of the temptations to depart from universal truth; beware of the wild imagination, the fantastique, the precious, the burlesque. Beware of the allurements of originality; anyone can be original—and absurd.
It is not enough that the work of art be true. It must also be trueseeming,[not “truthiness,” but] vraissemblable. Here is the chief task of the artist: to make his truth trueseeming. To succeed, he must incessantly study technique, he must know the trade of words, dramatic construction, poetic devices. Much of the Art poétique consists of counsels on technique.
Personal revelatory experience was not a theme explored by the Neoclassicists. Such a sweeping negative proposition is dangerous, of course, but I doubt that it can be challenged to any appreciable effect. Personal religious experience, direct knowledge of the Infinite and Eternal, which was the Nicene Christian God, was unnecessary to one’s mortal happiness or salvation and was not encouraged; it might, after all, be subversive of the established order. (Just look at what Joseph Smith did.) Knowledge of the realm beyond that known through the senses was the province of established religious authority. In the words of Martin Turnell (Baudelaire: A Study of His Poetry, New Directions, 1972, p. 18): “The great imaginative writers of the seventeenth century made a searching examination of human nature, but their world was necessarily circumscribed. Their vision was confined to the natural sphere, to man in society. Religious experience, in the sense in which we understand the term, metaphysical speculation, and Nature were virtually excluded from their work.”
Much of the foregoing (which I will surely need to “tweak” as I go) may be commonplace to my readers, but it seems necessary to establish a baseline from which to explore certain aspects of what was to follow in the centuries after Boileau, Pope, and Gottsched.
SOURCES AND REFERENCES
Balakian, Anna. The Literary Origins of Surrealism: A New Mysticism in French Poetry. New York University Press, 1947.
Bishop, Morris. A Survey of French Literature, Volume One: The Middle Ages to 1800. Rev. ed. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965.
Blanning, Tim. The Romantic Revolution: A History. Modern Library, 2010.
Bredvold, Louis I., et al., eds. Eighteenth Century Poetry & Prose. 2d ed. The Ronald Press Company, 1956.
Hibbard, Addison, and Horst Frenz, eds. Writers of the Western World. 2d ed. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1954.
Turnell, Martin. Baudelaire: A Study of His Poetry. New Directions, 1972.
Boileau’s L’Art Poétique in French can be found online at https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/L%E2%80%99Art_po%C3%A9tique
I have not found an English translation online, but a translation in print is Soames, Sir William, and John Ozell, trans., Art of Poetry and Lutrin, Oneworld Classics, 2008.
Pope’s An Essay on Criticism is online at http://poetry.eserver.org/essay-on-criticism.html
Gottshed’s Versuch einer kritischen Dichtkunst für die Deutschen is online in German at http://www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/Gottsched,+Johann+Christoph/Theoretische+Schriften/Versuch+einer+critischen+Dichtkunst. I have not found an English translation (and no, I cannot read it in German).
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(Thought a link to the Morris essays might be helpful.)
Thank you. Dennis told me last night to do that, but it was late, and I forgot. Br. Morris and I have traveled independently some of the same road in our thinking, and I definitely intend to acknowledge what he has done in that series.
Thanks for the link.
I wanted to make the post by deadline, which was midnight (although I see by the timestamp that this blog is keyed to Central Standard Time, which must be Jonathan’s time, so a great many of my posts have been late, as I think back over the past), so I didn’t take the time to search it out.
I’m very excited to see where all this goes.
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I’m looking forward to see where this goes. And I appreciate the bite-sized chunk.
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So am I.
Me too!
An interesting start. I look forward to seeing where you go with this.
At the risk of jumping ahead, it seems to me that despite the frequently cited (and very real) affinities of Joseph Smith and Mormonism for American-style transcendental Romanticism, Mormonism as actually experienced by many Mormons often has a rather neoclassic bent. We support the idea of a great chain of being — just not the same corrupt one (in our view) that was upheld by traditional European culture and religion. We believe that the truths of eternity are both inherently reasonable and discoverable by reason, to a greater degree than most religions. Joseph Smith may be a transgressive figure, but not one who values transgression in itself, but rather transgression against a corrupt order and in favor of a different (divine) order. Personal revelation does not trump central authority, but rather supports properly constituted authorities. True, Mormonism exalts free will — but typically frames it (as my mother used to put it) as the choice between doing what’s right and what’s wrong, with “right” being clearly understood as obedience to something external to self.
In short, I can’t help but feel uneasy at descriptions of Mormonism as an essentially Romantic movement, when in my mind it seems more like a competing neoclassicism (or some other term better suited to Mormonism’s central thrust).
(Apologies for not posting this comment earlier. We had some problems with the website.)
Jonathan,
I think you’re right: modern-day Mormonism (and, for that matter, maybe any progressive movement) is caught in this tension between the two approaches. The transgressive (open to boat-rocking, world-shifting revelations and the inherent disorder of anyone being able pray to God and get answers) vs. the obedient (to a status quo/established line of authority). The wild-haired prophet in the wilderness vs. the respectable commander-in-chief. I know it sounds like I’m suggesting a moral hierarchy between these two categories, but I try to see the value at both ends of the spectrum. I think the tension is a productive one, though not without its winners and losers, and as the pendulum swings back and forth and we humans choose our sides and battles, God keeps loving us.
I say I try to enjoy the straining between these two forces, but I think I find myself, like you Jonathan, slightly “uneasy” with an easy description of Mormonism as Romance (and no one is accusing Colin of this, mind you, we’re just anticipating the ways this conversation could be framed) and more resigned to the ways in which it looks like a “reasonableness” (to cite Colin speaking of the European elites) that “validate[s] [an] existing order.”
But, Colin, I (like you, I think) am drawn to the space that Mormonism does (or did) allow for a kind of mystical (more personal, “off-the-grid”) exploration of the divine! That part of our heritage will never be erased. I really like where you’re going with these posts and look forward to reading more.
No, where I am going is not to make Joseph out to be a Romanticist, though the parallels cannot be ignored. The question is what they mean, what is their relationship to the Restoration. And yes, there are elements of Neoclassicism in the scriptures of the Restoration, something like a Great Chain of Being, a regard for form–but it is “liberating form,” in Marden Clark’s phrase. This truly is getting ahead, however. I already have the next four installments written, and in them I begin to address the concerns you have expressed; unfortunately it will take four months to get them up here, and by my estimate this process could go on for more than a year, unless I get booed off the podium. Of course, a kernel of what I have to say in this blog is already in two of my books, _Glyphs_ (my own poems, with an “Author’s Note” that adumbrates some theory), and _Six Poems by Joseph Smith: A Dimension of Meaning in the Doctrine and Covenants._ I had hoped that what is in those books would instigate the conversation that has begun here. The conversation also could go on in person at the Enliten Bakery on Provo Main Street, where I arrive on most Thursdays at about 6 p.m., to have a rice or pasta bowl before open-mic poetry reading begins at about 7:30. I would be delighted to find company there. I will be the harmless looking old man sitting against a wall with my laptop on my table.
I look forward to the further installments. Please understand that I’m not intending to derail the conversation, just get thoughts on the table as they occur to me. As for in-person conversation: I’d love to show up, but unfortunately, the commute from Wisconsin is rather long…
Comments along the way are welcome. They will help to shape what lies ahead–this can be a real conversation. And BTW, why not “Restorationist” as the term to distinguish JS from Romanticists and all others?