FIVE

Passions, Rhetoric, and
Characterization

The ordinarily accepted theories of the soul and its faculties, and attendant attitudes toward different parts of the soul, profoundly affect and explain human activities as well as approaches to thought and behavior. The faculty psychology and its vocabulary explain the way all character is conceived by Baroque artists and analyzed by their audiences or spectators; for example, whether they prefer decorous French art or the more untrammeled, traditional English works of art. Artistic conventions often are used to convey psychological states or character types. Thus, rhetorical effect frequently is a result of characterization, just as rhetorical devices help us understand character.

I

The passions are important to dramatic and poetic character analysis. The terminology is the same from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century. Shakespeare, for example, is full of references to the passions that he couches in the vocabulary of the faculty psychology. In some randomly selected passages from “The Rape of Lucrece,” the villain Targuinius speaks to Lucrece:

Sextus Tarquinius, by having his reason (a faculty peculiar to man) overcome by the irrational force of his passions (a part of the concupiscible or sensible soul, which man shares with animals), has become a lawless animal (laws are a product of reason). The vocabulary of the soul as Shakespeare uses it here is still a part of our language.² Yet from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century, the vocabulary of the soul does not consist of disembodied metaphors as it does today. It refers to diagrammable parts of the soul, making the references much more vivid. And even when theorists disagree as to parts and functions, they alter the diagram rather than construct one anew.

Shakespeare’s Falstaff is a literary example from the late seventeenth century whose sensible, or second, soul rules his entire behavior, and his character can be analyzed in this light. Falstaff is an exciting person, more witty and interesting and less predictable than someone like Prince Hal, who is soberly trying to develop his understanding. Falstaff’s imagination, common sense, and appetite control both his thoughts and his actions. He is no coward. He acts expediently: he heeds his common sense, his instinct for self-preservation, and his appetites. His fluency in elocution, or words and images, comes from his imagination. Falstaff’s puns indicate a magnificent range of fancy (I Henry IV: I, ii, 6-48). And his imagery is strikingly vivid and concrete, rather than abstract (for example, II Henry IV: III, ii, 307-309). Falstaff fancifully argues against judgment, illogically supporting fantasy and drink (I Henry IV: IV, iii, 91-119). His fancy leads him into outbursts of song (II Henry IV: II, iv, 31-33). And in painting he prefers low, uninstructive hunting scenes (II Henry IV: II, i, 137-45). Sometimes King Henry V thinks Prince Hal is like Falstaff, that he lacks the judgment whereby to control his passions (II Henry IV: IV, iv, 54-68). Falstaff has no conscience, no developed abstract sense of right and wrong, because the understanding of right and wrong is lodged in the reasonable soul. He has no conception of honor because he is incapable of realizing what honor could possibly be (I Henry IV: V, i, 127-39). Shakespeare’s characterization of Falstaff is consistent throughout. Falstaff says he has “judgment and understanding,” but at the same time he insists (and probably believes) that he is a young man (II Henry IV: I, ii, 157-83); he unphilosophically and irrationally cannot bear talk of his own death and old age (II Henry IV: II, iv, 217-18). He does not generalize about mankind, concentrating his mind on one person, one situation, or one object at a time.

Charming though he is, Falstaff is really a glorified animal, his essence that of the second soul, and King Henry V must allegorically reject that part of his soul if he is to become an efficient king. Shakespeare (although he may also employ the character for various other dramatic purposes) embodies, through Falstaff’s dialogue and action, an abstraction of the second soul, in makebelieve flesh, blood, and clothes, creating for our pleasure and edification what seems to be a very real person. And we should judge Falstaff as an idealized version of an inferior sort of human being. Falstaff’s appearance, his bulk and red nose, makes him appetite personified. To the later seventeenth century, he is a kind of Silenus, a charming drunkard who is an instructor of youth as well (in this case Prince Hal). Socrates the teacher is also represented by painters as part Silenian, and Poussin’s Triumph of Silenus 1635-36) and van Dyck’s Le Silène ivre (1617) give approximations of Falstaff’s image: the old, drunken, roistering fat man with a face and function we associate with Socrates (Plate 12). Note also in Poussin’s painting the activities and figures associated with the second soul. Dryden himself, after describing Falstaff’s qualities, immediately discusses Socrates, associating the two characters. Such a conception sets Falstaff’s character and appearance clearly in our minds.³

The faculty psychology in the Baroque age does more than help explain or depict characters; it permeates the whole development of drama as a medium that both instructs and amuses by means of passions. The rise and fall of passions often are equivalent to plot, and characterization replaces plot as the most important element in a play. Thomas Otway’s excellent and popular Venice Preserved (1682), a play relying almost entirely on historical theories of the soul for its conception, meaning, and effect, is not an imitation of an action in the Aristotelian sense but is rather an imitation of a series of motions.⁴ Motion in the seventeenth century is equivalent not only to the motion of action but also to emotion. If we explain the organization of Venice Preserved as understood and used by playwrights of the period, and the organization of the play as it relates to the passions, we see that Venice Preserved is a display of passions (or characterization), rather than a plot of action, dependent on the passions aroused in the soul of Jaffeir, the protagonist. Each reversal or turn of passion, which in this play is synonymous with a turn of plot, is caused by people’s playing on Jaffeir’s emotions, and those varying passions fit the parts of the play as these parts are defined by Sir William Davenant (and repeated by Thomas Rymer).⁵

According to Davenant, “The first act is the general preparative [that renders] the chiefest characters of persons, and end[s] with something that looks like an obscure promise of design” (in Spingarn, II, p. 17). In Act I, Jaffeir is torn by desires of revenge and ambition, which are overcome by his love for Belvidera (Otway, pp. 120-21), and love is usually called the highest passion since it leads to a harmony of the soul with God (F. N. Coeffeteau, Table of Humane Passions With Their Causes and Effects, trans. Edward Grimeston [London, 1621], pp. 78-174). At the end of Act I, Jaffeir thinks he is resolved, at peace with himself. The promise of the design is the struggle we shall witness taking place in Jaffeir’s soul.

Davenant says, “The second [act] begins with an introducement of new persons, so finishes all the characters, and ends with some little performance of that design which was promised at the parting of the first Act” (in Spingarn, II, pp. 17-18). And indeed, in Act II of Venice Preserved we meet all the minor characters, each of whom is out of temper, each afflicted by at least one overriding passion: lust for gold or revenge or ambition. We learn that the corruption that pervades Otway’s Venetian community comes from the lack of control by the reasonable parts of the characters souls. At the end of the act, the conflict in Jaffeir continues; Belvidera is forcibly torn from his side. He will not be ruled by love but will be subject to revenge and hatred and will carry out the plans to which those evil passions will lead him (Otway, p. 126).

In Act III, Otway again follows Davenant’s description: “The third [act] makes a visible correspondance in the under-walks, or lesser intrigues, of persons, and ends with an ample turn of the main design and expectation of a new” (in Spingarn, II, p. 18). The decadent senator Lord Antonio (Otway’s caricature of the first earl of Shaftesbury) indicates his animalistic soul by his impersonation of animals, and Jaffeir discovers the conspirator Renault’s intemperate, animallike lust for Belvidera. Otway’s character Renault reveals the curse of concupiscence, saying, “What a slave is man! / To let his itching flesh thus get the better of him” (Otway, p. 131). At the end of the act, we are left waiting for the meeting between Jaffeir and Belvidera. We see an “ample turn of the main design” because of Jaffeir’s passion. With Jaffeir alienated from them, the conspirators may be betrayed or they may succeed; the result depends on which way Jaffeir’s passions move him. This state of affairs leads to the expectation of a new turn.

In Act IV, scene i, conquered by Belvidera and love, Jaffeir decides to betray the conspirators; love temporarily overcomes hatred, revenge, and friendship. But in the reversal in scene ii, Jaffeir’s passion of friendship for Pierre overwhelms the love Belvidera inspires, and in hatred he tries to stab her. Jaffeir speaks of his “divided soul that wars within” (Otway, p. 139). At the end of the act, Belvidera reconquers him, as Jaffeir says, “by all the power that’s given thee o’er my soul” (Otway, p. 140). We see again that Jaffeir’s turns of passion fit Davenant’s description: “The fourth [act] . . . gives a notorious turn to all the underwalks and a counterturn to the main design which changed in the third [act]” (in Spingarn, II, p. 18).

The final act, Act V, Davenant says, unties the knots of the play. In the last act, we see that Jaffeir’s passion for duty and friendship, as they are allied with hatred and revenge, cannot be reconciled to harmonious love. Thus, Belvidera’s understanding fails to control her passions when Jaffeir leaves her to go to Pierre. Her soul can no longer cope with its internal dissension, and she gives up all control over her fancy. In short, she goes completely mad. In a passage reminiscent of the scene of Lear’s madness (III, ii), Belvidera expresses the passions raging in her soul:

After she goes mad, Belvidera’s fancy (now unchecked by the judgment) imagines scenes that have no connection with the existent world; they are only for what she has always longed:

Murmuring streams, soft shades, and springing flowers, Lutes, laurels, seas of milk, and ships of amber. [V, 355-62]

Jaffeir then goes to Pierre, who dies on the scaffold. Jaffeir commits suicide, the passion that manifested itself in friendship winning out over his love for Belvidera. In the last scene, the mad Belvidera dies, the ghosts of Pierre and Jaffeir hovering overhead. The spectacle is hardly verisimilar, appealing almost entirely to the audience’s emotions. And Otway expects the spectators’ understandings to be overcome by the power of the passionate spectacle.

The faculty psychology provides the rationale and the method for plot and characterization, as well as for homeopathically manipulating audiences and spectators. Furthermore, it induces visual expectations into the minds of audiences or readers, for gestures in acting are conventional. Generally speaking, the reasonable part of the soul is most important. Where poetic justice is used, characters ruled by passion—for example, Racine’s Phèdre—come to bad ends, while characters whose understanding and judgment dominate their souls are wise, good, and fortunate. Even where poetic justice is dispensed with, the audience is manipulated by the playwright according to his conception of their collective souls. This is what happens in Venice Preserved. There is no poetic justice, and the outcome of the play is logical. We see Jaffeir and Belvidera as horrible examples of souls distraught, of the trouble that comes when the parts of the soul war against each other, with no resolution occurring in this life. It is no wonder the play was popular with audiences who no doubt generally agreed with the philosophy of the soul on which the play rests.

II

The various parts of the soul and how they are affected by music are intimately connected to characterization, whether by reaction, performance, or composition. Purcell’s song “Musick’s the cordial of a troubled mind” is excellent testimony to the belief in music’s power to calm the passions. It is “the softest remedy that grief can find.” It “calms the rufling passions of the mind” (Henry Purcell, Orpheus Britannicus [London, 1721], I, pp. 117-22). Almeria, in William Congreve’s The Mourning Bride (1697), is another late seventeenth-century character who is out of temper, whose reasonable soul is unable to control her passions. The most expeditious way Congreve can show this defect is through Almeria’s reactions to music, for “Music has charms to sooth a savage breast” when it is of the right kind.⁶ When Congreve’s play opens, the harmony of music (as an imitation of the harmony of the universe) is supposed to bring Almeria’s soul into harmony with itself and with the universe, but it does not. She is too distracted, too out of balance or temper. She says:

Music is supposed to be able to calm disharmonious passions or to arouse them. Either it keeps the soul in temper through its calming effects, its own harmony, or it assaults the seat of harmony and understanding in the soul, raising disharmonious passions, which are supposed to be controlled by the judgment. These disharmonious passions are the “motions” of the soul; they are set in action by external motions taking such forms as sound, smell, and literal movement. One way to describe this process is to say that external motions (sounds, smells, movements) touch the senses, actuating motions within us. Thus, when we say that a work of art moves us, we are saying that we are literally moved, our passions are aroused. When we describe the consequence of motion in this way, we are talking about local motion, the stimulation of a specific sense or senses. The imagination can, of course, stimulate the senses, and thus the conscious use of synaesthesia permeates art of the period—paintings to stimulate smell and touch and music to stimulate sight, for example. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the tendency is to do this allegorically; later, it is done more directly.⁷

A character’s judgment, not his imagination, is essential to decorum of behavior and speech, a concept very important to sophisticated men and women of the Baroque age, and we get clues about a person’s judgment or lack of it through his attitudes toward music and its performance. Music, as well as the other media, is rhetorical, the direct affection of the senses being the purpose of “practical” music. Music arouses passions, producing an imbalance in the soul, but since through harmony music supposedly also heals the sick or emotionally disturbed, the effect of harmony is not always local. The spirit of a piece of music, the harmony, enters the soul, calming the passions and inducing harmony totally. In conjunction with the imagination and the passions (in the second soul), music may raise forces in the soul contrary to the rule of harmony, judgment, and understanding. Or it can help calm those same passions. A person with a strong understanding need not fear music. In fact, a well-balanced person always likes music, and something is terribly wrong with a person who does not like music at all. This idea is present before and during the Baroque age on the Continent as well as in England. Henry Peacham, for instance, quotes what he calls an old Italian proverb: “Whom God loves not, that man loves not music.”⁸ Thomas Mace says that music is “that thing which [the] worst of men most. . . refuse.”⁹ We need only cite Malvolio in Twelfth Night (1600; II, iii, 80-85), Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (1597; I, v, 1-3; II, vi; V, i, 83-88), Gripe in Shadwell’s The Woman Captain (1680; see Act II), and Lump in Shadwell’s The True Widow (1679; see Act III). All of these music haters are desiccated, humorless (in both the modern and the old meaning) misers or social climbers. Quite simply, they lack the humanity, the elevation of the reasonable soul, that responds to a harmony that is the earthly reflection of divine harmony; this quality differentiates the more admirable forms of human life from the lower.

Although music can move us strongly, and although we may succumb to its charms temporarily, the reasonable soul in a balanced person should assert itself immediately after the music stops. A rational person from polite society never is carried away by music. As La Bruyère says, “A man of sense [bon sens] has in him the seeds of all truth and opinions; nothing is new to him. He admires little, it being his provence chiefly to approve.”¹⁰ If the reason does not reassert itself when the music ceases, the understanding must be deficient. Something is the matter with a character who responds too strongly or emotionally to music after it has stopped. If someone says, “Play again that song I love so well,” either he has to be cured of a weakness or he will come to a bad end. Thus, we know something is wrong with Duke Orsino’s soul in Twelfth Night (1600) when he says, “If music be the food of love, play on, / Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken, and so die. / That strain again” (I, i, 1-4; see also II, iv, 1-4). The same is true of Alceste in Molière’s Le Misanthrope (1666) when he repeats his nice but silly song (the scene with Oronte in Act I). It is also true of Sir Humphrey Scattergood in Shadwell’s The Woman Captain (1680) when he calls for “the song I love so well” and then goes down into his garden to hear it again.¹¹ And the fumes of alcohol, combined with Timotheus’s music, have overcome Alexander’s understanding and judgment in Dryden’s “Alexander’s Feast” (1697), leading him to lust, violence, and other emotions and the actions that they inspire.

A well-bred, dignified person of the Baroque period rarely performs music, unless something is the matter with him. For an example of something wrong with the reason of an individual who sings, see Dryden’s Marriage à la Mode (1673; I, i); Doralice opens the play singing “Why should a foolish marriage vow.” Shadwell, too, thus uses singing in The Lancashire Witches (1681), in Bury Fair (1689), in Don John, or The Libertine (1675), and in the Amorous Bigotte (1690). There is an idea that the convention against singing in public may be primarily English. Edward Dent points out that the Elizabethans think someone who breaks into song mad, clownish, or supernatural. He explains further that the English believe that singers are only the medium for music. The Italian idea, he says, is that music expresses the personality of the singer.¹² There is something to the idea of differing national ideas and customs toward behavior. In Book II Lomazzo discusses national differences in showing emotion (p. 52) and in various kinds of dances (p. 53). But there are other traditional opinions about public performances that without question transcend national boundaries. The playing of wind instruments is especially frowned on (they are considered the most passionate instruments and therefore they appeal to the lowest parts of the soul). Lomazzo records the story of Minerva’s (she represents the highest parts of the soul) throwing away her instrument when she saw herself in the mirror (ibid.). Alcibiades did the same. Castiglione refers to the same stories (p. 104), enjoining people to avoid playing wind instruments. This disapproval extends beyond the Baroque age. The eighteenth-century English gentleman Lord Chesterfield goes even further, telling his son that all music is for listening only:¹³

If you love music, hear it; go to operas, concerts, and pay fiddlers to play for you; but I insist upon your neither piping nor fiddling yourself. It puts a gentleman in a very bad light; brings him into a great deal of bad company; and takes up a great deal of time, which might be much better employed. Few things would mortify me more, than to see you bearing a part in a concert, with a fiddle under your chin, or a pipe in your mouth.

The change in attitudes toward performing lies in attitudes toward music. If music composes the soul, inducing into it the same heavenly harmony it expresses, it is good and important. If music serves mainly to affect the passions, it is not a decorous activity for anyone with at least pretensions to good breeding.

In the early seventeenth century, practical music is thought to heighten and intensify words, thus fusing poetry and music, intellect and passion.¹⁴ Poetry ordinarily is related to intellect; practical music, to passion. In the music of Lanier and Lawes, the words come first. There are no repeats, and Lanier’s music, for example, would be meaningless out of context.¹⁵ By the time of Henry Purcell and John Blow, the music is more important than it is in earlier works. There are repeats, and the music can be heard by itself.¹⁶ The reason for the secondary role of music in the first part of the century is the Neoplatonic idea expressed by Ficino that the word is from and for the mind; whereas music, although often a reflection of the harmony in the universe, finds its analogue in that harmony rather than in the mind of God, which is the origin of that harmony. Since the higher music is a reflection of God’s harmony and is able to project that harmony, serenity, and health into a soul filled with disharmony (disharmony even to the point of insanity), it is in one sense a medical device, while the lower kind of music is merely an arouser of passion.¹⁷ Music (or dancing) as a curative can be dangerous or not, depending on the origin of the disease. It may restore harmony to the soul by calming the passions. However, if a disease comes from music, music will make it worse: a tune, for example, may keep repeating itself in a person’s mind, increasing the aberrant passion.¹⁸

There are problems about how music expresses, or is able to express, specific things like a passion or an idea. We have mentioned before how practical music or musica humana imitates the thoughts expressed. In a phrase such as “his throne on high,” “high” will be sung on a note higher than the preceding.¹⁹ The matter of rhythms’ and keys’ expressing or representing specific passions is more complex. Isherwood says that French composers of the early seventeenth century do not “correlate or imitate particular passions with particular musical rhythms,” but use them only “to provide a sense of motion and sound vaguely appropriate to the emotional content of the text” (p. 71). This practice seems to be generally followed. Keys are more interesting. Isherwood says that in Lully’s Amadis tragédie, C is optimistic; f is a “dark key”; and F expresses faint optimism. There are several other key changes before the finale in C, when the lovers are reconciled (p. 234). Despite his use of keys to express passion, Lully knew the French thought that music (or indeed any art) that overly exercises the lower emotions (as opposed to ambition or glory, for instance) is not good. He was a rational composer who wrote music for a group of people who thought themselves rational. Because of Lully’s rationality, Edward Dent says that in his operas, he does not use music enough for characterization (p. 157), but Dent does not seem fully aware of the meanings of keys. He does say, however, that the C trumpet is martial and that Lully uses major keys (actually, Lully merely prefers them) because the French did not like “the savage emotionalism of the Italians” (p. 204), an emotionalism expressed in minor keys.²⁰ In French drama and painting, the same attitude toward rationalism holds true. Poetic justice is a dramatic rule for that reason. In painting, Simon Vouet’s Allegorie des beaux arts (1626-27) is an example. He shows that rationality should rule art even though the passions are present. Minerva presides over the arts, while the passions in the form of an undesirably presented satyr lurk in the bushes.

The meaning of keys is often rather elusive in the Baroque age because there was no exact, standard pitch and because a key does not always mean the same thing. Still, keys do mean something, and a composer had to have a reason for choosing one key in preference to another. Certain keys were used for particular instruments, especially for a valveless brass instrument. The emotions connected to this instrument, therefore, help determine what the keys it played in are supposed to express. The trumpet is a good example, and almost all of the trumpet parts in Purcell’s Orpheus Britannicus are in C. Purcell (1658-94) uses C mainly for panegyrical odes (twenty of them) and war songs and triumphs (twelve). In Purcell’s “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1692” (Orpheus Britannicus, II, pp. 157-66), each instrument displays its sounds in a different key. Flutes were considered passionate or erotic, violins or like instruments were considered rational. Emanuel Winternitz examines the musical meanings of the lira da braccio in his Musical Instruments and Their Symbolism in Western Art (1967), analyzing Raphael’s Parnassus in terms of musical instruments. He comments also on the erotic nature of flutes. Purcell uses flutes in love songs played in the appropriate minor keys emphasizing the lower passions (in the Orpheus Britannicus). He does so in “Hark the songsters of the grove” (I, p. 76), in “In vain the amorous flute and soft guitar” (I, p. 203), and in “Is my cavalier return’d” (p. 68), to name only three examples.²¹

The meanings of keys and the attendant problems can be seen without much elaboration in the songs of Henry Purcell and John Blow. Blow is a good composer but less up-to-date than Purcell, who of course was a first-rate musician and composer.²² Blow’s use of key indicates less preciseness of meaning than Purcell’s, corroborating Isherwood’s idea that key meanings become more definite as the century goes on (p. 71); yet Blow’s music corresponds generally with the classification of loose meanings set up by Jean-Philippe Rameau in his Traité de l’harmonie (1722).²³ Rameau’s idea is that keys and chords are identical with the modes, which in themselves are supposed to express particular passions.²⁴

Purcell uses specific keys, more or less, with certain emotions. His songs about passionate love and its torments are in the keys of c, d, and g. He saves e for the most extreme cases of death, cold, doubt, and so on; a is not so extreme but is used generally for the same subjects. In a single song he changes keys to indicate which emotion is being expressed. For example, in “Bess of Bedlam” (Orpheus Britannicus, I, pp. 101-103) a madwoman wanders from passion to passion as her delusions—and the keys—change. This device is used by Purcell, too, in “ ’Tis nature’s voice” (I, pp. 158-165), a song about the passions themselves. There are a few exceptions to this scheme of Purcell’s but there are reasons for them. Purcell wrote a panegyric to English wool in d and an ode to the merchant fleet in g. Apparently, the London merchants were more old-fashioned and still liked their panegyrical odes in minor keys.

The nuance of a particular passion presented itself to a composer of the time as fitting a certain key. Thus, there are no strict classifications. The pangs of love are less serious and less moving at one time than another, fitting one key rather than another. We can judge what a key means only from more general effects since a feeling for some keys is and was to a certain extent a personal matter. Thus, Blow’s and Purcell’s ideas as to what each key represents agree in general but sometimes differ in particulars. (Purcell, however, is more consistent in his assignations of significance to keys.)

III

Expression of the passions in painting is done through more or less codified or understood signals, rhetorical devices that take the form mainly of facial appearance but also of gestures, colors, draperies, hair, and scenes. Here, the English were almost totally dependent on French and Italian practice and theory. Roger Des Piles in his Principles (1709), in defining the difference between expression and passion, explains what passions are and how they are expressed.²⁵ To Des Piles, expression is a general term,

signifying the representation of an object, according to its character and nature, and according to the turn which the painter has a mind to give it. [Passion] is an emotion of the body [the second soul], attended with certain strokes or lines in the face, denoting an agitation of the soul. . . . All passion is expression, but all expression is not passion. [P. 101]

Since Des Piles’s statement that the passions are expressed through certain strokes or lines was generally accepted, it is easy to see how emotions became codified. Charles Le Brun’s Traité des passions (Paris, 1698), of course, codifies the passions (for examples, see Plates 16, 17, and 18), and his ideas were highly influential.²⁶ Le Brun also experimented with human heads, representing the animal traits of the second soul as birds, cats, pigs, and so forth (Plates 19, 20, and 21).²⁷ Félibien records that traits of the body and face show character. In Félibiens “Second Conference” (Saturday, 4 June 1667) van Opstal comments that Laocoön’s courage and goodness are seen in his large chest and high shoulders, that his face and body show douleur (pain), horror, fear, and despair all together, especially douleur. Félibien says that colors express perfectly the passions of the soul (Entretiens, III, p. 209).²⁸ Des Piles is more specific in describing the passions. There are two kinds (an idea he gets from Quintilian): pathetic and moral. The pathetic commands, the moral persuades. The pathetic passions are violent—hatred, wrath, and envy; the moral are those of tenderness and humanity. Then he indicates how features show these passions. To show scorn, raise the tip of the nose and swell the nostrils, “drawing the upper lip up to the corners of the mouth.” “The nose,” says Des Piles, “is the seat of anger in beasts,” not men. Therefore, it expresses only the emotions of beings representing the animal soul. Pan, for example, wrinkled up his nose in anger when the nymphs tied him up and insulted him.²⁹ Lomazzo is even more specific than Des Piles. In A Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge, Carvinge, and Building (trans. Richard Haydocke [London, 1598]), he describes a military complexion :

Swart complexion, mixed with adust redde, having a low forehead, great eyes, in color yeallowe like the flame of fire, with large eyelids, wide and open nostrils, breathing forth vapors in great abundance, a wide mouth, thicke lips, and redde, white teeth, small eares, a round chinne, forhead and jaws, a darkish haire, but tending to a fiery redde; stiffe, wreathed, and curled locks, an exile, shril and violent voice, etc. delighting altogether in laborious matters, as to beare arms, exercise his bodie in wrestling. . . . Likes report of terrible and fearful accidents better than smooth and pleasant carpet-discourses: he is exceedingly sensual, impatient, unquiet, stirring, etc. [Book II, p. 14]

The soldier is obviously a type, and his personality has been formed by a particular humour, namely, choler. His choler upsets the harmony of his soul, causing him to be afflicted by violent passions like anger and hatred, besides giving him other qualities: boldness, arrogance, fierceness, boisterousness, and violence.³⁰ Lomazzo also describes abstract passions. Mercy (or a merciful person) has a sour, pale, woeful countenance and a weeping, bowing head; his neck is turning, his hand reaching out, his arms spreading abroad (p. 66). See, for instance, Simon Vouet’s Saint Eustache enlève au ciel (1635)³¹ and Charles Le Brun’s Les reines de Perse aux pieds d’Alexandre, ou la tente de Darius (1660-61; Plate 14).³² Rusticity in a person is shown by posture. A character leans with an arm or a leg on what is next to him. His actions are clownish, slow, irreverent (p. 71). Poussin’s shepherds in The Arcadian Shepherds (ca. 1662) are good examples of rustic folk (Plate 11).³³ Color, to Lomazzo, not only expresses emotions but adds “a . . . true spirit and life to all such things as are first artificially drawn” (Book III, p. 97). Mirth is red. Thus, the Virgin casts her eyes to earth (humility), but her complexion is mixed with red (Book II, p. 44). All of these gestures, colors, and expressions serve to raise passions in viewers. They do so homeopathically, according to “what kinde of bodies” are most receptive to what is expressed (Book II, p. 12). In other words, a passion expressed most easily arouses someone with a like passion, thus altering the body by the influence of art (Book II, pp. 10-12). Raphael, to Lomazzo, is the best painter of motion because he expresses the most balance, the least turbulence, and induces that balance into the soul of the viewer. Raphael is the favorite painter of the seventeenth-century French for the reasons Lomazzo gives.

Characterization in painting appeals to the understanding, the imagination, and the passions as it instructs and gives delight; it also was thought to express the soul of the creator. The greatest painters unite instruction of the understanding with the highest pleasures. That is, a painter shows the power of his understanding (or lack of it) by expressing through his characters the harmony or lack of harmony in his own soul, instructing his viewers through his own example and inducing the pleasure of harmony into their souls through the total harmony of his work.³⁴ Raphael and Virgil, with their graceful balance and regularity, were much admired in late seventeenth-century France, Restoration England, and in general in the eighteenth century because their understanding or judgment is so obviously in control of their art. The admiration felt for Raphael’s painting is an elevated kind of pleasure. Thus, characterization in Raphael’s painting is linked to the kind of pleasure based on the harmony appreciated by the understanding rather than to the titillation experienced by the external senses, which arouses low passions. We can see how instructive pleasure works in artistic characterization by looking at Shaftesbury’s analysis of The Judgment of Hercules .³⁵ In his essay “Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of the Judgment of Hercules” (1713), he says that in a history painting (the highest genre of painting), “Men, . . . manners, and human passions are represented” (in Holt, II, p. 244). Thus, Hercules becomes an instructive example whose elevated soul leads him to choose the path of virtue (a higher pleasure) over the pleasures of the senses. Shaftesbury thinks that the greatest pleasures are those that lead to, and result from, harmony in the soul, and in a painting the depiction of the more noble passions gives the greatest pleasure. Roland Fréart de Chambray, in An Idea of the Perfection of Painting (trans. John Evelyn [London, 1668]), says much the same thing. In characterization, the higher passions give pleasure and instruct by example. He says,

But as the first three parts are highly necessary for all painters in general [invention, proportion, coloring]; this fourth, which concerns expression and motion of the spirit, excells them all, and is indeed admirable; for it gives not only life to figures, by representing their gestures and passions; but seems likewise to make them vocal and to reason with you. It is from hence, a man is enabl’d to judge of the worth and abilities of a painter. [P.14]

Fréart’s “expression and motion of the spirit,” as it is translated by Evelyn, is a complex phrase. Expression of the spirit refers to the artist’s soul as well as to the soul of the character; motion of the spirit means the emotions in the character’s souls. He assumes here that the motion of the spirit is on a high level; otherwise, the artist would not be a good man, and thus a bad artist. Fréart then goes on to say that good characterization means honor, modesty, and good manners. In other words, in good characterization, we are instructed by the ethos of the artist himself, as well as by the example of his characters. Raphael is an excellent artist to consider since in the late seventeenth century he was noted for his expression.³⁶ We can use Fréart’s ideas (ideas common in the late seventeenth century) to analyze Raphael’s The Madonna of the Goldfinch (Plate 3). In the symmetry of the painting, we can see the piety and good nature of the major figure (illustrated through her grace and through her noble, relaxed, and humane gentility) as well as the peaceful good nature of the children (Christ and John the Baptist), all reflecting the tranquil soul and the piety of the artist. The Virgin becomes a model for good behavior. Lorenzo di Credi (1459-1537) may not be as good a craftsman as Raphael, and in his Madonna and Child with Young St. John (Plate 4) it is immediately apparent that he is also less well tempered. The symmetry is there; the Virgin is a model for good, pious behavior; and the drawing of the major figure is excellent. What is missing is a grace of vision, the harmonious blending of elements and actions. The major figure is more awkward, superficial. And it is artificially posed: the tilt of the head, for example, is an affectation showing a fanciful aberration. The motion of the spirit is less impressive; the expression, inferior; the painter is inferior in his own character; the painting is not as good as Raphael’s.

Not all painters and critics necessarily agree with the ideas of the rather straitlaced Fréart, who thinks nudes vulgar, for example. Still, their way of looking at paintings is fundamentally the same.³⁷ Nicholas Poussin, in speaking of his own work, agrees generally with Fréart (1647) :

If the picture of Moses found in the waters of the Nile, which belongs to Monsieur Pointel, has filled you with a feeling of love, it therefore bears witness to the fact that I did it with more love than your pictures. Don’t you see that it is the nature of the subject that is the cause of this effect and of your feelings and that the subjects that I treated for you must be represented in a different manner? This is what the whole artifice of painting consists of. Pardon the liberty I am taking if I say that you have shown yourself to be hasty in the judgment you made of my works. To judge them well is very difficult unless one has closely combined a great amount of theory and practice in this art. Our emotions should not be the sole judge but reason, too.

[Si le tableau de Moïse trouve dans les eaux du Nil, qui possède Monsieur Pointel, vous a donne dans l’amour, est-ce un temoignage pour cela que je l’aie fait avec plus d’amour que les vôtres. Voyez vous pas bien que c’est la nature du sujet qui est cause de cet effet, et votre disposition, et qui les sujets qui je vous traité doivent être representes par une autre manière. C’est en cela que consiste tout l’artifice de la peinture. Pardonnez à ma liberté si je dis que vous vous êtes montré précipiteaux dans le jugement que vous avez fait de mes ouvrages. Le bien juger est très difficile, ci l’on n’a en cet art grande théorie et practique jointes ensemble. Nos appetits n’en doivent pas juger seulement, mais la raison.]³⁸

The close relationship of characterization to instruction and pleasure is summed up concisely in a passage by Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose thinking reflects the same tradition although he lived a century later. After stating that “you cannot express the passions [the lower passions], all of which produce distortion and deformity, more or less, in the most beautiful faces” (p. 58), he later says,

To him who has no rule of action but the gratification of the senses, plenty is always dangerous; it is therefore necessary to the happiness of individuals, and still more necessary to the security of society, that the mind should be elevated to the idea of general beauty, and the contemplation of general truth; by this pursuit the mind is always carried forward in search of something more excellent than it finds, and obtains its proper superiority over the common senses of life, by learning to feel itself capable of higher aims and nobler enjoyments. In this gradual exaltation of human nature, every art contributes its contingent towards the general supply of mental pleasure. Whatever abstracts the thoughts from sensual gratifications, whatever teaches us to look for happiness within ourselves, must advance in some measure the dignity of our nature. . . . The art which we profess has beauty for its object; this it is our business to discover and to express; but the beauty of which we are in quest is general and intellectual; it is an idea that subsists only in the mind; the sight never beheld it, nor has the hand expressed it: it is an idea residing in the breast of the artist, which he is always labouring to impart, and which he dies at last without imparting; but which he is yet so far able to communicate, as to raise the thoughts, and extend the views of the spectator; and which, by a succession of art, may be so far diffused, that its effects may extend themselves imperceptibly into publick benefits, and be among the means of bestowing on whole nations refinement of taste: which, if it does not lead directly to purity of manners, obviates at least their greatest depravation, by disentangling the mind from appetite, and conducting the thoughts through successive stages of excellence, till that contemplation of universal rectitude and harmony which began by taste, may, as it is exalted and refined, conclude in virtue.³⁹

By “disentangling the mind from appetite,” as Reynolds puts it, the artist will have started a spectator’s mind on the path toward virtue. He does so through the presentation of characters that in themselves aspire to the highest levels of human excellence and that reflect the virtues of the artist himself. The artist projects himself and what he wants to express through his characterizations. His own state of being, therefore, should be such that the understanding rules the thoughtless passions and appetites and the shifting, unprincipled opinions of the second soul. All art should appeal to the understanding. The flawed characters conceived by artists in terms of the faculty psychology, characters torn between one passion and another or between passions and virtues, became important object lessons for people who analyzed their own souls and behavior in the same way.