“The Muses' Concord”
Ideas and purposes are communicated in art by rhetorical means, and all the arts touch different senses to achieve comparable effects. In other words, we can feel the same after reading a poem, listening to a piece of music, watching and listening to a play, and looking at a painting. The means of rhetorical art, which induces an emotional state, whether in oratory, poetry, music, or painting, are used to persuade or to capture audiences or viewers by appealing to, or delighting, the senses and thence the passions. The passions, or feelings, excited by rhetorical devices are supposed to overcome the understanding to varying degrees; this result depends on whether the artistic work in question has either an instructive or a pleasurable purpose. The moral or intellectual instruction often may be the important end of a work of art, but it comes after appeals to the senses and passions. Although logic has to be part of rhetoric for expression to make sense, people are less easily instructed or persuaded by the rigor of logic than by emotional means. In other words, audiences must be made ready, softened up as it were, so instruction can take place. The passions to which the means of art first appeal are therefore of great importance, as are the devices that do the appealing and manipulating, and from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century treatises on the soul and on the arts, because of their rhetorical orientation, all evince great interest in the passions: what they are, which ones to strive for, and how to raise them.1
A work of art as an artificially contrived object comes to us via our senses, moving through common sense and the memory and the imagination, all a part of the second, sensible, concupiscible soul, the seat of the passions. At this point, either the effects of the work of art may go on to the reasonable (highest) soul, there to be judged and evaluated according to abstract, elevated principles by the understanding and to show its instruction, or the work may excite the passions to such an extent that the reasonable soul is overcome and bypassed, and we act or are impressed according to appetite and passion (not reason). We may do so willingly, succumbing to the blandishments of pleasure and luxury, just as Hercules at the crossroads supposedly did not. Yet in our appreciation of art, we are drawn to the moral or instruction only by the way the artist first captivates our senses through color, sound, words, design, and invention. Thus, the different kinds of art are interchangeable vehicles, interchangeable in the sense that any one of them can project a creator’s intention through the same kind of passion, and although the art of expressing images varies with each medium, its place and function in the artistic process remain the same. Anthony Blunt is not being fantastical when he says that if The Death of Germanicus is Poussin’s first epic, The Triumph of Flora is his first lyric.2 The identification with rhetoric is fundamental to each art and to comparisons. The growing reliance on affective theories strengthens the relation of art to rhetoric because of the way in which rhetorical devices attempt to elicit specific effects.3
The rhetorical devices and conventions used in the Baroque era are so much a part of art that they became homeopathic. That is, a passion represented in a work of art, through certain stylized means, is supposed to produce the same passion in an observer. The French physicist Claude Perrault, for example, points out that all the arts play on our passions by different means (which we would call different media).4 All try to achieve the same effects, that is, to raise the same passions, and theorists in all the arts use similar terminology or at least try to show how their devices are either the same or similar to the standard, traditional, rhetorical devices found in all the books on rhetoric, for even figures of speech are important in terms of their effects. The passions are high (elevating to the soul, or elevated) or low (appealing to the lowest passions) depending on the purpose of the artist. Since all people have more or less the same passions, a work of art can persuade or sway all who recognize the conventions.5 Our recognition of the rhetorical approach and of the conventions used by it enhances our understanding and appreciation of seventeenth-century art. The pervasiveness and importance to the Baroque age of the rhetorical way of approaching art led Zachary Pearce to observe in 1714 that rhetoric’s future was greater than the past it had enjoyed among the ancients.6
I
There was general acknowledgment that art should appeal to the passions of the second soul, as well as to the judgment of the highest, that it should not concentrate solely on abstractions such as harmony, which appeal to the understanding through a rarefied form of delight. George Puttenham in 1598 says that poetry “invegleth the judgment of man, and carieth his opinion this way and that, withersoever the heart by impression of the ear shalbe most affectionatly [by means of the passions] bent and directed.”7 He says the same thing is true for music, that Orpheus mollified “hard and stony hearts by his sweete and eloquent perswasion.”8 Later writers agree. John Blow in the Preface to Amphion Anglicus (London, 1700) thinks music softens people and prepares their minds for wisdom and virtue. He says that music is supposed to
teach and cultivate humanity; to teach civilized nations; to adorn courts; to inspirit armies; to inspire temples and churches; to sweeten and reform the fierce and barbarous passions; to excite the brave and magnanimous; and above all to inflame the pious and the devout. [Dedication]
Blow’s first two purposes of art are instructive, “to teach.” The other purposes are “to adorn,” “to inspirit,” “to inspire,” “to sweeten,” “to excite,” and “to inflame.” The arousal of passion receives more weight than instruction alone. Most of his purposes are to persuade by arousing the proper, higher passions, and all of his purposes fall under the headings of docere, conciliare, and movere—the three purposes of rhetorical oratory given by Cicero and repeated by St. Augustine.9 Le Bossu also says that poetry is persuasion,10 and even Rapin, with due caution, says that delight, although not the main end of poetry, comes first:
[Poesy] labours [tries rhetorically] to move the passions, all those motions are delightful, because nothing is more sweet to the soul than agitation, it pleases itself in changing the objects, to satisfy the immensity of its desires. ’Tis true delight is the end poetry aims at, but not the principal end.11
Others who write about poetry and prose, poetry and music, music and painting, painting and poetry (and architecture and sculpture as well) use rhetorical terminology and refer constantly to rhetorical similarities among the arts. Henry Peacham, in talking about music, says (1622):
Yea, in my opinion, no rhetorick more persuadeth [than music], or hath greater power over the mind [soul]: nay hath not musicke her figures, the same which [sic] rhetorique? What is a revert but her apostrophe? her reports, but sweet anaphoras? her counterchange of points, antimetaboles? her passionate airs but prosopopeias? with infinite others of the same nature.12
The art of rhetoric is, of course, the art of persuading, and the figures Peacham mentions come from books of rhetoric.13 Peacham is so specific that his close comparisons of figures of speech with musical devices would be fallacious except that the figures and devices of rhetoric, whether in music or in speech, through their powers over the mind are designed to produce certain effects or raise particular passions in an audience. Thomas Mace in Musick’s Monument (1676) is even more explicit:
And as in languages, various humours, conceits, and passions (of all sorts) may be exprest; so likewise in music, may any humours, conceit, or passion (never so various) be exprest; and so significantly, as any rhetorical words or expressions are able to do; only (if I may not be thought too extravagant in my expressions) if any difference be; it is, in that musick speaks transcendentally, and communicates its notions so intelligibly to the internal, intellectual, and incomprehensible faculties of the soul; so far beyond all language of words.... I have been more sensibly, fervently, and zealously captivated, and drawn into divine raptures and contemplations, by those unexpressible rhetorical, uncontroulable perswasions, and instructions of musick’s divine language, than ever yet I have been, by the best verbal rhetorick.14
Notice that raptures (coming from the sensible soul) precede contemplations (which come from the understanding, in the reasonable soul), just as a work of art appeals to passions before it gets to the understanding. Notice also that music persuades (and persuasion is the essence of rhetoric). Mace goes on to say that music has “allusions and references,” that “Pavins, Allmaines, and . . . ayres [are] ... so many pathetical stories, rhetorical and sublime discourses; subtil, and intricate argumentations; so suitable, and agreeing to the inward, secret, and intellectual faculties of the soul and mind.”15
Lomazzo (in 1584-85) expresses the same kind of thought (as does Coeffeteau in his Table of Humane Passions [1615]), saying that “painting speaks all languages” and describing the operation of the creative mind of a viewer, listener, or reader. His discussion in Book III of the meanings of different colors (like Puttenham’s consideration of tropes) is the same as Marin Mersenne’s discussion in L’Harmonie universelle (1636) of the musical meanings of instruments, keys, and modes. Lomazzo says, “Neither doth it [color] only express the outward formes of things; but also discovereth certain inward passions; painting, as it were laying before our eyes, the affections of the mind, with their effects.”16 Mersenne in talking about music goes even further:
Music is an imitation or a representation just as poetry, tragedy, or painting is, as I have said elsewhere, for it does with sounds or the articulated voice what the poet does with verse, the actor with gestures, and painting with light, shadow, and colors.
[La musique est un imitation ou representation aussi bien que la poésie, la tragédie, ou la peinture, comme i ’ay dit ailleurs, car elle fait avec les sons, ou la voix articulée ce que le poète fait avec les vers, le comédien avec les gestes, et le peinture avec la lumière, l’ombre et les coleurs.]17
Poetry (oratory) can produce emotions different from those of its imagery and its tropes and figures, just as Lomazzo says that the color red signifies fierceness (p. 112) and Camus de Mézières (1780) says that the Tuscan order of architecture produces a feeling of force and solidity.18 The figure of hyperbaton, Longinus says, produces vehement passions,19 just as Rameau says that “harmony may excite different passions in us depending on the chords that are used”20 and Mersenne says that the different intervals produce different passions: “From joy to sadness, anger, hatred, and other emotions that serve to cause the listener to follow the intent of the orator.” [Joye, à la tristess, à la cholère, à la haine, et aux autres affections qui servent pour porter l’auditeur à suivre l’intention de l’orateur] (I, p. 7). We are clearly in the realm of rhetoric when Mersenne compares the art of the composer with the art of the orator.21
The rhetorical way of raising passions can be further illustrated by conventional devices. Lomazzo points out that “valiant and stoute men” have “locks that are rough, wreathed”; groups of colors such as “black, earthie, light, lead-like, and obscure colors . . . breed in the eye of the beholder tardity, musing, melancholy”; “green, sapphire, reddish, and gold and silver mixed as yellow” elicit pleasurable sweetness; and rose, light green, and bright yellow elicit joy, mirth, and delight. There are other groups of colors but these should serve as examples.22 Thomas Mace in Musick’s Monument (1676) compares music to rhetoric (p. 118), noting that “fugues are humours and conceits” (p. 120). He uses rhetorical terminology throughout his work, giving the nature of the “kinds” of music in passionate terms, according to their measures. Thus, galliards are grave and sober; “corantoes,” brisk and cheerful (p. 129). When Mace becomes more philosophical, he explains the passions in musical terms, saying that love and hatred and pleasure and pain, for example, all are expressed in agreements of intervals. The second and seventh, he says, are horridly hateful and displeasing. In going on to higher matters, he says that the Holy Trinity is expressed in unisons, thirds, and fifths and that the octave unites like unity itself, the harmony of the cosmos, the oneness and wholeness of God’s conception (p. 265). Then he goes on to analyze each chord. To Mace, music is a natural language (p. 37).23
Musical modes are thought to unite the arts and become in themselves rhetorically conceived genres, analyzed as to the different effects each expresses and elicits.24 Plato, in Book III of The Republic, rejects the mixolydian and hyperlydian modes because they are used for dirges and laments. The Ionian and Lydian modes are rejected as languid. Only the Dorian and Phrygian modes are kept because they express bravery, courage, and steadfastness.25 Aristotle says that “rhythm and melody supply imitations of anger and gentleness, and also of courage and temperence” through the modes: “The myxolydian is sad and grave, the Dorian is of a moderate and settled temper, while the Phrygian inspires enthusiasm.”26 Plutarch follows Plato.27 Marin Mersenne, in L’Harmonie universelle (1636), says that music speaks through the modes so that an audience can understand the discourse (p. 39). He devises a musical alphabet (p. 40) and later compares modes to genres of literature and painting because they all imitate human nature, meaning the passions (p. 93). Mersenne even diagrams the modes for us (p. 97).
In music, the expression of the passions may be complex because the modes are complex. Mersenne says that in dealing with the passions a musician must consider “the time, the place, the characters, and the subject on which the stress should be placed so that he points out the syllable on which the voice must dwell and which it must build up and reinforce” [le temps, le lieu, les personnes, et le sujet pour lesquels l’accent, se doit faire afin qu’il marque sur la syllable, sur laquelle la voix doit appuyer, et qu’elle doit haisser et renforcer] (p. 371); he later gives examples. The same ideas carry into the eighteenth century. Jean-Philippe Rameau in his Traité de l’harmonie (1722) says essentially the same thing about chords and keys. He claims that the ancients made a mistake by ascribing modes to melodies when the melodies were based on chords. Melodies have to do with taste; chords are an imitation of truth, of nature (p. 157), because of the proportions that obtain in them. The meanings attached to specific chords became associated with specific passions although the chords themselves through proportion were thought to embody abstract truths. Thus, Rameau actually uses convention to explain the meanings of keys and modes, but a convention so well established that it was the same as truth for his well-conditioned listeners. In the major, the classification runs this way: octaves of do, re, la, songs of mirth and rejoicing; fa or sib, tempests, furies, and so on; sol or mi, tender and gay songs; re, la, or mi, “grandeur and magnificence.” In the minor, re, sol, si, and mi are for sweetness and tenderness; do or fa, tenderness and “plaints”; fa or sib, mournful songs. Rameau says that the other keys are not in general use (p. 164).
These conventions were developed in the seventeenth century. A major key became gay or optimistic, a minor sad (p. 163), and by Rameau’s time the associations were well established. To Rameau, all the twenty-four keys, or tons, are supposed to reflect generally a passion. Minor keys are not necessarily sad in the Renaissance, and in the Restoration the less intellectually advanced sections of the populace do not think or feel so. Purcell, for example, uses minor keys in several songs of rejoicing that he wrote for London merchants. Bertrand Bronson explains how intellect and emotion combine in the meaning of keys:28
The prevailing tonality of the work [Handel’s setting (1736) of Dryden’s (1687) “Song for St. Cecilia’s Day”] is D major [see “Re majeur” in Rameau’s analysis], and the spirit of it, over all is one of confidence, power and trust. The choice of key is of course by no means haphazard. This particular tonality is selected, not because Handel has thought of some music themes that promise to lie comfortably in the key of D major, but because the dominant mood of Dryden’s ode “means” D major. The tonality could have preceded the formula of a single phrase of the music in Handel’s imagination. Why D major has this significance is not easy to tell, but it is not by Handelian fiat that it does so. Handel is following a tradition. ... It is less a matter of feeling than received doctrine. It has nothing to do with private impressions or sensibilities. . . . This is objective, in that it is determined by the intellect rather than the sense. It belongs to the idea of the key rather than to the sense impression—inevitably so in an era when pitches were inconstant, and when mean temperament had yet to be established. But by Handel’s day the intellectual significance of the keys was sufficiently fixed to enable an emotional meaning to associate itself with the idea. [Pp. 99-100]
The musical modes by tradition, by convention, thus become like the different genres, which are in themselves modes. Camus de Mézières (as late as 1780) can therefore compare the orders of architecture to the modes, and even to the keys, of music (since each key also has a specific emotional effect) because of the different effects each order is supposed to produce. He says that the Ionic order by implication is sweet and tender (as Roland Fréart de Chambray also says in Parallèle de l’architecture antique avec la moderne [Paris, 1650], p. 36).29 Mézières speaks for the Ionic order in the following passage:
In fact, the first torus, the scotia, and the second torus seem to produce for the eye what the notes sol, si, and re do for the ear. The headings are like voice passages and glides.
[En effet le première tore, la scotie, et la second tore semblant produire à l’oeil ce que les tons de sol, si, se, font à l’oreille. Le filets sont comme les passages et ports de voix.] [P. 32]
Fréart’s Parallèle as translated by John Evelyn (1680) avoids the musical analogy at one point, comparing the Doric order, the first order, to Hercules with his “rough-hewn and massie club” (pp. 8, 12). Fréart later says that the Ionians,
considering therefore that the figures of a man’s body, on which the Doric order had been formed, was of a shape too robust and massy to fit holy places and become the representation of celestial things [heavenly harmony], they would needs compose an order after their own mode, and chose a model of a more elegant proportion, wherein they had more regard to the beauty than to the solidity of the work.30
The Ionic order is thus second. The third order, the Corinthian, represents palm branches and is still more ornate.31 The three orders of architecture are therefore associated with the ideas connected to the three parts of the soul. The emotions applying to the regard with which each is held apply also to each kind of column. The sweetness and beauty of the understanding are represented in the Ionic order, the passion and force of the sensible soul in the Doric, and the inscrutable power of vegetable nature in the Corinthian. Each order thus is similar to various forms in the other arts that appeal to the same part of the soul.
There is another kind of allusion to the musical modes as used rhetorically to influence the state of receptors’ souls. George Puttenham, in Book II of The Arte of English Poesie (1589), treats proportion in stanza forms and meter, comparing these different forms and their measures to the various modes, to rhythmus or measure, and to the concord of rhyme. The effect of poetry’s form is brought about by its proportion, its similarity to music. Puttenham says that “poetical proportion . . . holdeth to the musical,” that “poesie is a skill to speake and write harmonically” (p. 79). When Puttenham writes about the modes and how they influence the audience, arousing passions in the soul, he notes also how the same kind of proportion is conveyed through the eye, saying, “your ocular proportion doeth declare the nature of the audible” (p. 98). And thus he uses diagrams of stanza forms to communicate his ideas. What we have here, of course, is an explanation of the similarities among the arts that derive from their rhetorical nature and a realization of how similar effects are raised through different media. Puttenham is saying that poetry communicates ideas and passions not only verbally but also nonverbally, as music does, and ocularly (on the page), as does painting.
The kind of explanation Puttenham gives for the effects of poetry and the terms he uses, such as sound, rhythmus, significance, and musical nomenclature, are behind Baroque English prosodical ideas and terminology.32 Clearly, the heroic couplet became so popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries because of its inducement of harmony in the soul, because of its balance and all the possibilities of different kinds of balance and harmony. The triplet in heroic verse thus literally becomes a dissonance, which then leads back to the more stable ending found in the couplet proper. The same is true of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century uses of synalaepha and ideas of “smoothness” and “sweetness.” The imitations of Cowleyan pindarics and the Italian canzone were done with the musical modes in mind, the rise and fall of the verse rhetorically expressing and inducing passion in the souls of receptors according to authorial intention. The ideas had been current over a long period of time. As Puttenham says,
For the ear is properly but a conveyance for the minde, to apprehend the sence by the sound. And our speech is made melodious or harmonicall, not only by strayned tunes, as those of Musicke, but also by choice of smooth words: and thus, or thus, marchalling them in their comeliest construction and order. . . . The ministry and use of words doe breed no little alteration in man. For to say truely, what els is man but his minde? . . . He therefore that hath vanquished the minde of man, hath made the greatest and most glorious conquest. But the mind is not assailable unlesse it be by sensible approches [through the senses], whereof the audible is of the greatest force for instruction or discipline: the visible, for apprehension of exterior knowledge. [P. 207]
Nicholas Poussin often says the same thing about painting that Fréart says about architecture and Puttenham about poetry; that is, he compares painting to the other arts because of the effects produced in the viewer, discussing parallels among painting, poetry, and music in terms of effects produced by the modes and by other rhetorical techniques. He talks in painters’ terms about the Phrygian mode, which at least from Plato on is associated with a specific effect that music produces.33
Its sharper aspect . . . vehement, furious, very severe, and which astounds people.
I hope to paint a subject in this Phrygian mode before another year passes.
[Son aspect plus aigu . . . véhement, furieux, très sevère, et qui rend les personnes étonnées.
J’espère devant qu’il soit un an, dépeindre un sujet avec ce mode phrygien.]34
He talks also of imitating poetry (1647):
The good poets used great care and marvellous artifice to fit the words to the verses [of music] and to dispose the feet in accordance with the usage of speech, as Virgil did throughout his poem, where he fits the sound of the verse itself to all his three manners of speaking [high, middle, low: the three rhetorical levels of style] with such skill that he really seems to place the things of which he speaks before your eyes by means of the sound of the words ... so that when one hears or pronounces them, they produce a feeling. . . . Therefore, if I had made you a picture in which such a style was adhered to [a grim subject with grim sounds], you would imagine I did not like you.35
At other times, Poussin talks about two instruments that affect the souls of listeners (and viewers): action and diction. Sometimes, the two are treated separately, and sometimes together as parts of elocution. We have seen how Poussin uses what Demosthenes, Cicero, and Quintilian say about action or gesture (actio) in terms of rhetorical delivery and how he believes that without the use of action in the posture of his characters, lines and colors (words or diction) are useless.36 He speaks also, as do others, of parallel genres in the arts, each genre being defined by a view of reality that treats nature as better than, the same as, or worse than it actually is. This rhetorical idea is used to define genres such as the ones already mentioned, plus others like panegyric and satire. Each is supposed to produce a specific or a general effect on an audience or to determine an audience’s attitude toward reality in a certain way (say, sneering, mocking, or admiring) and does so by playing on certain emotions. Views of reality or ways of perceiving nature produce certain emotions in themselves, thus becoming natural genres or kinds of literature, arousing passions in the same way that musical modes arouse passions. A generical view of art is rhetorical in that an artist picks a genre or kind to manipulate his audience or to arouse in them certain attitudes or feelings about reality. And he is helped by the emotional predisposition his audience has toward specific genres.
The extent to which Poussin thought of painting as rhetorical is easy to underestimate. Anthony Blunt in his lectures on Poussin points out that Poussin wanted spectators to “read” his paintings through the attitudes of objects and by their facial expressions. In his letter to Chantelou concerning his painting of the Israelites gathering manna (Plate 10), Poussin says:
Moreover, if you remember the first letter I wrote you mentioning the movements of the figures that I promised to include, and if you consider the picture as a whole, I think you will easily recognize which are the ones that are languishing, which admire those showing pity, performing acts of charity, of great necessity, of desire, sustaining themselves with consolation, and so on, for the first seven figures on the left will tell you everything that is written here and all the rest is cut from the same cloth; read the story and the picture so that you may know if each thing is appropriate to the subject.
[Au rest, si vous vous souviendrés de la première lettre que je vous ecris, touchons les mouvements des figures que je vous prometois di faire, et que tout ensemble vous considériés le tableau, je crois que facillement vous recognoistrés quelles sont celles qui languisent, qui admire celles qui on pitié, qui font action de charité, de grande nécessité, de désire, de se repestre de cõsolation, et autres, car les sept première figure à main gauche vous diront tout ce’ qui est ecy escrit et tout le reste est de la mesme estoffe: lisés l’istoire et le tableau, afin de cognoistre si chasque chose est appropriée au sujet.]37
As Blunt says,
This idea of reading the picture is fundamental in Poussin’s conception of painting. In Poussin’s ‘The Israelites Gathering Manna’ (1637/38-39), we are to read the characters’ gestures. All add to the effects the painting is supposed to elicit in its viewers. The same thing is seen in all his other paintings, such as the highly rhetorical ‘Time Saving Truth from Envy and Discord’ (1641), or the oratorical gestures in ‘The Seven Sacraments: Baptism’ (1642).38
The same ideas hold true, more or less, for other artists of the period. All gestures correspond to modes; they carry out the makers’ intentions in creating states of mind in spectators, consonant with what an artist is trying to say and do. This idea seems obvious, except that the gestures can be defined metaphorically as a kind of language, each used elsewhere in art and oratory.
II
An artist’s purpose in making a work of art can be high or low, and he appeals to the kinds of passions suited to his aim. He may or may not be successful. If a low appeal to the senses succeeds, the artwork is exciting or titillating; if it does not succeed, the work is low and disgusting. Dryden, in his reply to Jeremy Collier’s attack, admits to having produced art that appeals to the baser appetites of the second soul: “I have pleaded guilty to all thoughts and expressions of mind which can be truly argued of obscenity, profaneness, or immorality, and retract them” (in Watson, II, p. 293).39 A high purpose produces some extremely interesting and effective works of art. Some of these works reflect the reforming zeal of the Counter-Reformation, when much seventeenth-century religious art becomes less contemplative and more propagandistic than earlier art and thus more consciously rhetorical, more strongly appealing to the emotions, and more committed to overcoming the understanding. Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Virgine is of this nature, as are Bernini’s Mistica dottora in the Cornaro chapel,40 Carravaggio’s Conversion of St. Paul (1601-1602), St. Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, and all the painful images of martyrs, their wounds and their sufferings. The heightening demanded by emotional art depends on violent action and tropes and figures in poetry; violent action, color, and trompe l’oeil in painting; and splendid noises and effects (for instance, echoes, instrumentation, and size of ensembles) in music.
The highest art often is thought of as the kind that appeals to the emotions so strongly that it captivates one’s whole being, bathing the soul in pleasure and ecstasy. Montaigne says in his Essays (as translated by Charles Cotton [London, 1685]):
There is indeed a certain low and moderate sort of poetry that man may well enough judge by certain rules of art; but the true, supreme, and divine poesie is equally above all rules and reason. . . . This is a sort of poesie that does not exercise, but ravishes and overwhelms our judgment. [I, p. 325]
It sounds as if Montaigne is thinking of the sublime (a concept synonymous with elevation), which he probably is not since concepts of the sublime did not take hold until the last part of the seventeenth century.41 But once we enter the realm of raising the passions in the soul, we are talking about rhetoric proper, whether we are talking about Montaigne’s passage or the sublime. According to Boileau’s Traité du sublime (1674), and Longinus’s Peri Hupsous (or On the Sublime), too, the raising of passions by sublime, or any other kind of, passages or imitations of actions is essentially rhetorical in nature. In translation Boileau says, “I have made a few reasonable observations thereupon, which perhaps may prove advantageous to many of our rhetoricians” (p. 3). The concept of aesthetic sublimity is only touched upon in the seventeenth century, and although Boileau also says that “[the sublime] does not so much perswade, as transport us to a certain admiration and astonishment, which is a clear different thing from bare pleasing or perswading” (pp. 4-5), the raising of elevated passions belongs under the aegis of classical rhetoric, as Boileau elsewhere implies, and as writers of the period say.42 The importance of rhetorical devices to the raising of the passions becomes even more marked if we consider the influence of Ramistic rhetoric, which places style and elocution alone under the heading of rhetoric, an idea that was influential in the English Renaissance after 1580 and lingered on, despite opposition, into the seventeenth century.43
Michelangelo, “Detail of Trumpeters” from Last Judgment (1541). Vatican, Sistine chapel; photo Alinari Scala.
Lorenzo di Credi, Madonna and Child with Young St. John (1612-13). Rome, Borghese; photo Alinari Scala
Andrea Pozzo, Apotheosis of Ignatius Loyola (1685). Rome, Sant’ Ignazio; photo Anderson-Alinari from Art Reference Bureau.
Peter Paul Rubens, Le Coup de lance or Christ between the Two Thieves (ca. 1620); courtesy Koninklijk Museum, Antwerp.
Peter Paul Rubens, Apotheosis of the Duke of Buckingham (1625-28); reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees, The National Gallery, London.
Copy after Nicholas Poussin, The Triumph of Silenus (original 1635-36); reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees, The National Gallery, London.
Copy after Nicholas Poussin, The Triumph of Bacchus (original 1635-36); courtesy Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri (Nelson Fund).
Charles Le Brun, The Queens of Persia at the Feet of Alexander (ca. 1660). Versailles; photo Musées Nationaux.
Charles Le Brun, The Triumph of Alexander in Babylon (ca. 1664). Paris, Louvre; photo Musées Nationaux.
Charles Le Brun, “Woman Expressing Admiration with Astonishment” (1698). Paris, Louvre, cabinet des dessins; photo Musées Nationaux.
Charles Le Brun, “Head Showing Expression: Terror” (1698). Paris, Louvre, cabinet des dessins; photo Musées Nationaux.
Charles Le Brun, “Heads of Crow-men with heads of crows and owls” (1668). Paris, Louvre, cabinet des dessins; photo Musées Nationaux.
Charles Le Brun, “Two Heads of Wild Boar-men. Two heads of Pig-men” (1668). Paris, Louvre, cabinet des dessins; photo Musées Nationaux.
Charles Le Brun, “Heads of Cat-men and Monkey-men” (1668). Paris, Louvre, cabinet des dessins; photo Musées Nationaux.
A rhetorical device that produces astonishment stuns or makes one speechless. All works that raise violent emotions do more or less than exhibit the regular, harmonious proportions that are beautiful. As the senses move to something other than beauty, Dryden says, “The sight looks with pain on craggy rocks and barren mountains, and continues not intent on any object which is wanting in shades and greens to entertain it.”44 Lomazzo says that greens (and shades) produce pleasurable sweetness and the attendant passion of delight,45 a rather mild passion associated with the smaller, more regular, and gentle effects of harmony, symmetry, and beauty. To Dryden, “intentness” is contemplation, an attribute of the understanding, and the judgment cannot work under the effect of asymmetrical, harsher, extraordinary images or objects, more violent than those that are beautiful. What is beautiful is perfect or nearly perfect, and although perfection of the soul implies absence of passion, the contemplation of perfection, near perfection, or the idea of perfection is supposed to produce in the soul an elevating, mild, delightful feeling or passion. This idea of perfection is called beauty. Dryden conceives of beauty as the result of a rhetorical process culminating in an artistic object that is harmonious and balanced, raising in our minds “perfect and ideal images and thoughts,” satisfying our understandings or judgments by “harmony and order,” and pleasing “our senses with appropriate sounds, colours, etc.”46 It is easy to see why the correct works of Raphael, Lully, Virgil, Boileau, and Racine are so highly regarded in the Baroque era, especially when we consider that the harmony and balance they express and represent are regarded as including harmony and balance in the highest part of the souls of their audiences and spectators. Their work is both socially useful and beautiful, producing mostly emotions of satisfaction, calmness, and sweetness rather than astonishment or some other strong feeling.
The higher, stronger passions often are connected with the elevating effect of a work of art as a whole. The passions expressed by a work of art produce in the souls of audiences and spectators those same passions. They are conducive to the highest pleasures, which are described by words such as admiration, astonishment, and sublimity. A work of art overcomes the judgment through its imaginative power expressed rhetorically, elevating the soul to great heights. Thus, the power of art is great enough to elevate the soul to a pleasurable state almost in tune with universal harmony. Coeffeteau says in his Table of Humane Passions that “pleasures quench the judgment” (p. 264). He says also that admiration is a pleasure and “it is a great content to behold things which give us a subject for admiration: for the wonder which they stir up in our soules, inflames us, and makes us desire to know them, and the cause of our admiration. . . . With extreme pleasure . . . [we] mount up to the highest degree of our nature, and to elevate it to her perfection : wherefore this admiration causeth joy” (p. 282). In the same way, the admiration aroused in us by the total effect of Dryden’s “Alexander’s Feast,” for example, although a passion, is of an elevated nature, not like the baser passions of lust and envy, which the poem raises in passing.
Admiration and astonishment, as they are raised by means of rhetorical devices that appeal strongly to the senses, are very powerfully felt. As Charles Le Brun says, among the passions astonishment and admiration are of great strength, and Dryden says that admiration is “a pleasure [a passion in itself] not to be expressed by words.”47 The definition of admiration changes during the seventeenth century, becoming weaker as some of its earlier connotations are taken over by sublimity and astonishment. Dryden says admiration is strong, but Le Brun says it “is the first and mildest of the passions and the one which causes the least disturbance to the heart.” The “excess of admiration causes astonishment, and astonishment can come upon us before we even know whether this object suits us or not.”48 Astonishment is connected to lightning and thunder, and when it occurs, the understanding or reason is struck into nonfunctioning quiescence. It is a term connected to the sublime, and Boileau notes this in innumerable places in his Traité du sublime (1674). Although in the seventeenth century admiration and astonishment often are used together, astonishment begins to take over connotations earlier attributed to admiration. By 1766, Gotthold Lessing can say that “admiration is only a cold sentiment whose barren wonderment excludes not only every warmer passion but every other clear conception as well.”49
The most powerful and energetic works of art induce the stronger passions of astonishment and admiration. Dryden, in his justifications of heroic drama, calls figures that try to achieve the stronger passions “bold figures” and equates them with the heightening of strong colors in painting.50 If the heightening works, the audience is transported, the reasonable soul is overcome; if the heightening does not work, the result is tumidity and laughter, as Dr. Johnson points out in his Life of Dryden, saying of four passages from three of Dryden’s heroic plays, “the two first may be allowed to be great, the two later only tumid.”51 Many late seventeenth-century writers think it possible to place too much emphasis on the passions. The passion involved in King Lear, for example, led to Nahum Tate’s adaptation, with its happy ending. Thomas Rymer, the English rules critic, the voice of reason, hated Othello; Roland Fréart de Chambray and other French writers thought Michelangelo vulgar; the French moderns thought Homer unsuited to the more refined tastes of seventeenth-century France; and Englishmen of genteel taste preferred the fine sentiments and sedate sounds of Italian love songs to the more rollicking, often bawdy ditties of their native land. Since action usually produces reaction, it is not surprising to find that English audiences of the Baroque era also liked the rhetorical excitement of sometimes outrageous dramatic statements and actions that have little to do with reason; the most obvious example of this sort of art is English Restoration heroic drama. When they are most effective, these stronger images or objects excite the passions enough to bypass the understanding.
The idea that both imagination and judgment (delight and instruction) are important to art gave place more and more to the idea that judgment is a manipulative, factual, and rational faculty in a limited sense, that it is needed primarily to tame, to control, and to manipulate the unruly passions. The kind of work that raises the highest passions in the noblest ways sometimes reaches a union of the understanding and the imagination far surpassing the mortal powers of the judgment. Art that achieves this end is primarily allegorical, appealing to the highest parts of the soul through proportion, harmony, and other elevated levels of appreciation, echoing the harmony of God’s creation and inducing that harmony in the souls of spectators and audiences. Art of this kind was predominant in the Neoplatonic orientation of the Renaissance. Later in the seventeenth century, and especially in the Restoration, as the understanding of medieval or Renaissance senses of allegory disappeared and as belief in the new science and factual knowledge (knowledge that is perceived through the senses) grew, there was a corresponding growth in art that appeals to the senses. Thus, the purpose of art changed, and the rhetorical manipulation of the passions through elocutio became more important than the rhetorical communication of a vision of supernatural truth and beauty, a vision often communicated through arrangement or proportion appealing to the understanding. French rules criticism, an avant-garde seventeenth-century movement, rhetorical in the way that it favors manipulation of the emotions through verisimilitude and through a system of values external to works of art, grew in importance, although not so quickly in England, where older views lasted longer. The process of what Morse Peckham calls cultural drift52 is in the Baroque age a change from art that primarily presents beauty to art that primarily raises emotions. But art is seldom, if ever, one kind or the other. Renaissance artists themselves were very much aware of rhetorically manipulating the emotions of their spectators or audiences, and late seventeenth-century artists were aware of abstract, Neoplatonic concepts of beauty. The mixture of these extreme attitudes toward art produced some impressive hybrids, works that express the energy and spirit of a vision of perfection combined with strong, effective appeals to the emotions. It is this kind of art that we think of when we describe great examples of Baroque art.
III
All of the conventional figures that produce the passions, as well as those that produce harmony, homeopathically achieve both high and low effects, depending on the makers purpose. Lomazzo says in Book I, painting expresses “divers affections and passions of the mind” (p. 13), while a comely proportion and expression of these affections and passions produce the emotions connected to beauty (p. 25), which again is “communicated to the eye and so conveyed to the understanding” (ibid.). For example, the “effects of piety, reverence, and religion are stirred up in men’s mindes by means of their suitable comliness of apt proportions” (ibid.). In other words, the expression of an emotion arouses that emotion in viewers. In the homeopathic theory of art, love or hatred depicted on the stage or in a painting (or poem or piece of music) is supposed to induce love or hatred in the spectators. The idea spans the Baroque age. John Hughes says,
Nature herself has assigned, to every motion of the soul, its peculiar cast of countenance, tone of voice, and manner of gesture; and the whole person, all the features of the face and tones of the voice answer, like strings upon musical instruments, to the impressions made on them by the mind. . . . [Therefore] all tones supply the actor, as colours do the painter, with an expressive variety.53
The homeopathic potentialities of both high and low passions are illustrated by Charles Le Brun’s Methode pour apprendre à dessiner les passions (1695), in which he describes, in words near to those of Descartes and in pictures, the passions a painter uses to raise those same passions in the viewers of his art (see Plates 16-18). He employs such depictions of passions himself, excellent examples of which are his series of paintings of Alexander the Great.54 Note the similarity between the woman in Plate 16, who expresses admiration, and the woman on the far right side of The Queens of Persia at the Feet of Alexander (Plate 14), who is admiring Alexander. We, too, are supposed to feel admiration. The homeopathic qualities of enthusiasm are mentioned also by Roger Des Piles, who says they go beyond the more slow-working effects of the sublime.55 According to Des Piles:
Enthusiasm itself is a rapture that carries the soul above the sublime, of which it is the source, and has its chief effect in the thoughts and the whole together of a work. . . . The sublime is perceived equally, both in the general, and in the particulars, of all the parts. [P. 71]
The painter works himself up into an enthusiastic state several times in the course of his making. The spectator who perceives and feels this enthusiasm, and who does not have to consider particulars, is transported at once. The enthusiasm embodied in the work “ravishes the mind with such violence, as leaves it no time to bethink itself” (ibid.).
Music, as Gretchen Finney says, has to be emotional to raise emotions (p. 131). She shows how affective theories of art were coming into being in the seventeenth century and says that Monteverdi (1567-1643) thought (in 1638) he was the first to depict anger in music, in his Il combattimento di Tancredi e di Clorinda (ca. 1610). Handel’s splendid musical setting (1736) of John Dryden’s “Alexander’s Feast” (1697) shows how well a composer can induce passions homeopathically. Alexander the Great is enticed into one passion after another by Timotheus, and Handel’s music and Dryden’s verse express those same passions through musical conventions and poetic devices. The scenes are dramatic and pictorial, sequential yet separated, and they are described in such a way that a painter could use them as the bases for a series of paintings on the passions. The details are left out, which is the prerogative of the medium of poetry and which allows us to see our own conception of, for example, Alexander’s face.56 Handel’s keys, phrases, tempos, and dynamics, for example, manipulate our emotions, making us feel in our souls Alexander’s emotions. For instance, in the section starting “Break his bands of sleep asunder / With a rattling peal of thunder,” we are in the key of D, with its “grandeur and magnificence” (Rameau, p. 164), employing trumpets and drums in an astonishing display of virtuosity, literally waking us up (as well as Alexander) and exciting us, too. The section is entirely artificial since Timotheus’s lyre could not except by connotation perform such marvels, but the passions the music arouses in us do not allow us to think of the inconsistencies. They overcome our rational faculties, leaving us astonished (stunned) by Handel’s and Dryden’s rhetorical artifices and in a state of admiration. The poem is a masterpiece by itself and Handel’s setting is equally grand. When the work is properly performed, its effectiveness comes from the rhetorical skill of its makers.57
Tropes and figures also are described as homeopathic devices. Puttenham, in The Arte of English Poesie (1598), indicates as much by labeling figures of speech with appropriate English names, names that indicate not only the intention with which an author would use these figures but also the effect they are supposed to have on readers or audiences. “The drie mock” (ironia), “the bitter taunt” (sarcasmus), “the fleering frumpe” (micterismus), “the privvy nippe” (charientismus), and “the overreacher, otherwise called the loud lyer” (hyperbole) are just a few.58 The translations of Boileau’s Traité du sublime indicate the same idea: Pulteney (1680) says that anaphora and diatiposis combined produce “disorder and confusion,” which “is the best argument of passion, which is itself nothing but a disorder and confusion of the soul” (p. 85), “so there is disorder in his method, and a method in his disorder” (p. 86); the same thing is repeated in the 1687 translation, as well as in the one published in 1712.59
The passions have to be used judiciously, however, if art is to be rational; particular caution must be exercised when they are employed homeopathically. There are good and bad passions and affections. Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) tells us what they are (p. 141).60 The good affection is joy, which dilates the heart and preserves the body. The bad affections are simple and mixed. The simple are emotions like sorrow and fear. Sorrow, for example, contracts the heart, macerates the soul, causes melancholy and even death. The mixed affections are such passions as anger, revenge, hatred (inveterate anger), zeal (against one who hurts what you have loved), joy at another’s bad luck, pride, self-love, and envy. They are mixed because a little of each is necessary for health and stability. They are bad when they overcome the reason and are used for bad purposes, as defined rationally. The violent emotions of Elizabethan drama were thought barbaric by the French because they raise and exercise passions thought debilitating to the soul.
When the artist’s purpose is rational, effective homeopathic use of the passions produces on occasion excellent art and persuasive propaganda. The cultural drift in the Baroque era is toward such rational art, in which the rhetorial means of arousing emotion are subservient to rational, calculated ends. As Thomas Tickell says in The Spectator: “The finest works of invention and imagination are of very little weight, when put in the balance with what refines and exalts the rational mind” (No. 634, 17 December 1714). It is easy to see how rhetorical art became used for purposes of propaganda (as it still is). Art was, of course, used in that way politically, especially by Louis XIV for his personal glorification and for the glory of France. He was able to do so by centralizing supervision of the arts in his personally controlled academies.61 The same thing has been said about the Catholic church of the Counter-Reformation. It certainly is true that after the Council of Trent, the arts in Roman Catholic countries became more rhetorically oriented, more propagandistic, more aimed toward raising specific passions to manipulate those who came in contact with art in churches, pageants, and elsewhere.62 The effects on art exerted by the two movements of rationality and of manipulation of emotions are incalculable. Rational art leads also to a refined kind of taste. André Félibien, for example, disapproves of astonishment, saying that it is produced by Gothic art, art that lacks the simplicity, order, and substantialness of that of the ancients. All these commendable qualities are present in the best works, works by Raphael, Poussin, Racine, and Lully.63 With such sentiments in mind, we can understand how Continental as well as many English writers tended to approve of French Alexandrine couplets, English heroic couplets, the measured music of Lully, and the designs of figures literally balanced against each other in paintings such as Raphael’s Crucifixion, Parnassus, and The School of Athens.
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