10
PARTISAN REVIEW
the luster of satins, the glitter of jewels, the smirk of his puppet-like
figures who play at sentimentality.
The Rape of the Lock
shows how
Pope also kept his eye no less fixedly upon "unpoetic" little facts.
v
As
for the operatic and pastoral "manners," they belong in that
great seventeenth-century tradition represented by the painting of
Rubens and the Poussins, the
Pharonnida
of William Chamberlayne,
the heroic play, the Miltonic organ voice, and the sweeping ca–
dences of Dryden. Even if Dryden has of late met approval and
the baroque in the fine
arts
is no longer dismissed out of hand, our
admiration of seventeenth-century poetty is held within the confines
of our distrust of "rhetoric." We dislike the extravagant and pastoral
baroque, both of which are rhetoric.
The most inclusive definition of the baroque is an eccentric or
hypertrophied rhetoric. The Renaissance evolved a rhetoric of a monu–
mental kind in Raphael's School of Athens, Titian's Pesaro Madonna,
the early designs for St. Peter's, the sculpture of the Medici Chapel,
and ·the King James Version. By an elaboration and emancipation
of this rhetoric the operatic baroque achieved its most characteristic
effects.
Our position toward the seventeenth century is anomalous. How–
ever much we admire the strained effects of Donne, we are averse to
"magniloquence" as such; witness Eliot's objection to the "deteriora–
tion" of language in Milton. Consequently we are out of the strongest
currents of the seventeenth century, wherein the "metaphysical" ex–
pression must be viewed against the wider baroque impulses that
moved about and through it. We make concessions to the opera or
even to the "superb caprices" of Rubens that we hesitate to make to
Miltonjc language. We feel the tensions and ambiguities of the seven–
teenth century, but not the accompanying baroque assertiveness and
release. This aspect of the baroque is purely kinetic-an abandon, a
katharsis, whether it be the exclamatory violence of Donne or the
Miltonic grandiloquence and surrender to movement. Repose was to
be found only in the broad majesty of Poussin's arcadian landscapes
or the measured progress of
Comus
and
Il Penseroso.
But these, too,
were rhetoric.
Large issues are involved in an appreciation of this ornate ba–
roque-nothing less, in fact, than one's attitude toward rhetoric.
