12
PARTISAN REVIEW
Crashaw
is
an instance of an entirely baroque rhetoric, antipodal
to the "romantic" rhetoric of Shelley. The feeling of both poets is
intense; yet in Crashaw the substance can be more readily detached
from) the eccentric and distorted rhetoric. Crashaw's rhetoric is more
"external," possibly because the imagery is
not
a matter of feeling,
as it is in Shelley. Crashaw's is the rhetoric of the Gesu Church, of
Correggio in painting away the dome of the cathedral at Parma, or
of Bernini in designing the baldachin of St. Peter's; it suggests the
extravagant handling of drapery in counter-reformation statuary. Both
Crashaw and Bernini exemplify the baroque "maniera," "manner,"
or "style"-that which the seventeenth century conceived as
added to
what is wrought. The
Theophila
by Edward Benlowes is another
instance of this "deliberate, conscious perversity of language."
Nor has rhetoric a decorative value alone. The rhetoric of the
Renaissance and of the baroque has a high associative value. It is a
"formal" embellishment that depends for its effect upon tradition.
It
is
conventional, almost ritualistic; it is allusive, with inherent "cul–
tural" associations, echoes that reverberate from the past and from
one's cultivation in the "classics." An extreme instance would be poems
composed by reference to seventeenth-century poetical dictionaries.
The facade of St. Peter's, the pastoral elegy, allegoric painting or
sculpture depend upon such associations. One might remark that
T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound employ a rhetoric having such cultural
associations. There is, however, no question of rhetoric in Eliot or
Pound: both are highly allusive, but neither fulfils the essential con–
dition of rhetoric that it "embellish." Indeed, Pound approves of the
statement by Remy de Gourmont that
aLe style, c'est de sentir, de
voir, de penser, et rien plus."
However "foreign" the allusion in Eliot
or Pound may strike us as being, there
is
no Miltonic "elevation";
that is what Eliot dreads- the interruption between the surface and
the core. His own practice
is
even averse to the calculated extravagance
that marks the wit of Crashaw or Donne.
In the sense that rhetoric is traditional, it can serve as a norm.
One measures a facade by Sansovino against the Colosseum, Tasso
against the
Aeneid,
the
Aeneid
against the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey.
(" The baroque was essentially a revulsion against the norm; it directed
its rhetoric toward certain abnormal or atectonic effects, as did Bernini
or Rubens or Milton.
Lycidas
is filled with a strange, almost shock-
