Introduction: Thornton Wilder's Baroque Vision
On 26 August 1937, Thornton Wilder wrote to Gertrude Stein from Salzburg, “Pleasure comes in all shapes and sizes and it's now what I live for. For instance: there are two polychrome baroque archangels on the altar of the Peterskirche in poses of flight and ecstasy that no human body could ever assume, and as far as I'm concerned they're my definition of ART” (Letter 163). How could this seemingly most American of authors—whom the critic Dwight Macdonald once infamously derided as a literary Norman Rockwell (43)—care so much for baroque sculpture as to claim it for his model for “ART”? Although Wilder may seem familiar to many, he nevertheless remains something of an enigma. A recently rediscovered document in his handwriting, “The Barock; or, How to Recognize a Miracle in the Daily Life,” offers us a new opportunity to rethink his writings alongside these remarks to Stein.
Best known to audiences worldwide as the author of Our Town (1938), Wilder first won international fame with the publication of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, his 1927 novel set in Counter-Reformation Peru, which won him the first of three Pulitzer Prizes. The conventions of realism always left him cold, and even before World War I he was already exploring new forms of theatricality that could serve as alternative futures for American writing. Envisioning what might be called a “truer realism” (Fuller 216), one that could enshrine theater as a medium with its own integrity, he claimed, “The stage is fundamental pretense and it thrives on the acceptance of that fact and in the multiplication of additional pretenses” (“Some Thoughts” 270). Until recently, however, it was not recognized that Wilder understood his writing, at least partly, as the continuation and transformation of a broadly conceived baroque tradition in Europe. And yet the following manuscript, originally sketched in Wilder's handwriting and long lost in the archive, comprehensively spells out his vision of the baroque as a period, style, and source of inspiration. I recently uncovered this overlooked document in Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It sets Wilder's modernism in a new light and deserves a wide readership today.Footnote 1
Wilder's handwritten text bears no composition date. It appears in the same notebook that contains his earliest draft of Our Town, a scene titled “M marries N,” which dates to July 1935. I estimate that it was written somewhere between 1935 and 1937, a period that overlaps with the time of Our Town's composition (July 1935 through December 1937).Footnote 2 Wilder was an acclaimed public speaker and university lecturer during these years, and the manuscript's conversational tone implies that it may have been intended as a public talk. In February 1935, for example, he staged Handel's opera Xerxes (Serse in Italian, the original language of the libretto) at the University of Chicago to honor the composer's 250th birthday, and the manuscript could have been a speech delivered around the time of that opera's opening. Turning his attention from Xerxes to Our Town some months later, Wilder carried the opera's opening aria, “Ombra Mai Fu,” with him. A remnant of the baroque past, that tune became the organ prelude for Our Town's climactic wedding scene (72), sitting like a gemstone at the cosmic center of Grover's Corners. For Wilder, baroque style manifests the capacity “to recognize a miracle in the daily life.” Our Town's heroine, Emily Gibbs, arrives at just this form of recognition only in the play's final moments, when she returns to the realm of the dead after spending a few brief minutes reliving her twelfth birthday (103). Seen through the lens of this uncovered manuscript, this most iconic scene in modern American drama now seems like a twentieth-century depiction of a paradigmatically baroque vision.
In the light of this document, Wilder's lifelong passion for early modern authors (e.g., Sir Thomas Browne and Lope de Vega) looks strangely transfigured. The manuscript can be read productively alongside his “Preface to Our Town” (1938) and “Some Thoughts on Playwriting” (1941). While commenting on baroque culture, Wilder displays a virtuosic erudition, ranging over works by William Shakespeare, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and more recent authors like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist, Henrik Ibsen, and George Bernard Shaw. Certain passages further suggest that Wilder and Stein cultivated their interest in baroque style together during the months after their first meeting, in March 1935.Footnote 3 Their joint attraction to the baroque—whose inheritance Wilder traces through the Romantics to his day—reflects a broader movement among modernists connected to the theater, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Walter Benjamin, some of the most advanced thinkers on world literature and aesthetics of Wilder's time. And because the baroque has only continued in recent decades to fascinate writers, including Gilles Deleuze, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, and Édouard Glissant, the manuscript marks Wilder as an especially contemporary thinker.
Over the summer of 2018, I prepared the following reading edition with the approval of Wilder's literary executor, Tappan Wilder. The handwritten document is clearly a working draft. Readying it for print has required me to balance an editor's wish to straighten out its rougher places with a historian's need to show the author's thinking process. To this end, I have silently regularized and adjusted basic elements of capitalization, spelling, and punctuation; I have also silently incorporated into the text Wilder's smaller insertions and deletions, which his draft signals with carets and lines striking out the text. His larger, marginal revisions appear in the endnotes. The document contains ellipses marking passages that seem to require more fleshing out, including several quotations clearly sketched from memory. Wilder is irregular with his punctuation in these places, using anywhere from five to twenty ellipsis points, perhaps indicating space for another speaker's questions or responses. For consistency and simplicity, I have replaced these ellipses with the standard three-period format. The manuscript's title contains the German spelling of baroque—Barock—although Wilder uses Baroque throughout the body of the manuscript. Even with its various lacunae, this document is a remarkable essay on literary and cultural subjects still relevant to scholars today. It invites us to reconsider how we as literary scholars construct narratives of modernity and tradition, and it encourages us to reimagine Wilder's place in the landscape of modernist thought.
Until twenty years ago, the historians of art told us that the Italian Renaissance was The Thing and that the Baroque was its decadence, a superficial, vitiated, drawing-room art, and an orgy of bad taste, that fell into a decadence even of itself called the Rococo. Now we are being told that the Renaissance was a brilliant, soulless antechamber to a great art that is called the Baroque. Now, it is a pity that we have to use that phrase “we were told,” but unfortunately few people if any are able to place themselves outside the received opinions of their time and see these things for themselves. “We were told” merely means the waves of contemporary opinion, and in that we all, willy-nilly, swim.
The Baroque is understood in the light of two principles: (1) it is profoundly Catholic—as Catholic in its way as the Middle Ages was in its—and therefore being Catholic it was theocentric. It didn't merely say with its lips that God was the creator and center of all things, it believed it. Now, when one believes that God is the center of all things, man becomes a very tiny thing indeed. Man, and his most characteristic traits—reason, design, government, and daily life—becomes in one sense uninteresting and in one sense profoundly interesting. What is uninteresting is all that stew we live in: of emotion, of sex, of ambition, of display for the benefit of one another's eyes. And what is profoundly interesting is man in his relation to God, man as aspiration, as sinner, as saint, and as shepherd.
And under the greatness of the God-man relation life, daily life and public life is seen as illusion, as a dream, and in its happiest moments as a play, even as a game. And (2) the Baroque is the art of seeing the Supernatural appearing continuously in the daily life, or to borrow a phrase, it is the art of the Angel in the House—not in the sense of Coventry Patmore's praise of conjugal love, Catholic though that poem pretended to be.
Let me remind you of the life of the Catholic in a great Catholic age. The day opens with a miracle. I am not discussing now what you or I think about that miracle, nor the varying degrees of intensity with which each artist of the Baroque age experienced that miracle, nor the frequency with which such an artist was present at that miracle. For the present, it is enough to remind you that in the churches surrounding that artist, in the society completely surrounding that artist, the day opened with the miracle of Transubstantiation in the Mass. Now, when the universal society in which one lives believes that God in person becomes literally present in every one of the myriad churches of one's world, then one has introduced the supernatural into daily life and immediately a thousand consequences follow it.Footnote 1
The Baroque is an art of man's life as illusion, save insofar as it expresses itself as praise and prayer.
The metaphor on which I like to hang a consideration of the Baroque lies in the question: How do you paint an angel? Blake and Jeanne D'Arc apart, there are not many people since the eleventh century who claim to have seen angels with their physical eyes, and yet ten thousand painters have nevertheless been commissioned or have been moved to paint angels. How do you paint an angel?
Well, your ability to paint an angel that is an angel depends on the intensity with which you feel daily existence to be intermingled with the supernatural. An angel is a minister of God, and if you are aware of God your imagination will be taken [excited] by the problem of expressing that partial reflection of him—halfway between God and man—that is an angel.
Raphael could get no further than painting some beautiful not very lively Tuscan women and adding feathered-constructions to their backs. And so did the whole roll-call of the Renaissance with one exception. They are not supernatural; they are the choicest samples of the human, but the human being however selected and even enhanced in the duration of its most gracious humanity is still not angelic. Angels differ from humans not only in degree, but in kind. A choice human being is not yet an angel. An adequate angel will always come to us in art as Incorrect Drawing. . . .
No, no. I never subscribe to that doctrine that correct drawing is merely relative to the optical adjustment of the time. Correct drawing has always been recognized. Cromagnon man drew his buffaloes more “correctly” than Paul Klee draws his cows. Phidias drew more correctly than Giotto. Correct drawing, as the physical eye sees it, has been a constant in every age—merely some ages were interested in it and some were not.
The greatest draftsmen of angels in Western Art have been Fra Angelico and El Greco, and both felt deeply in their bones that correct drawing was insufficient to record the supernatural. They did not say to themselves “I shall strain the relations of mass and volume or of color,” they merely followed a deep inner necessity and it came: So, and not otherwise, an angel would appear.
Now, the Baroque age likewise felt that a church, an altar, a statue of a saint should be like nothing else on this earth. The Renaissance buildings before their eyes were therefore their norm; and they were their human norm and therefore they were inadequate to express the associations of the religious life. And what was the nearest they could see to God's estate? Why, a king's estate. A king ruled by divine right. God was a king over kings, and a court or a palace was a miniature model of his heaven. The Kingdom of Heaven was always at war—how well they knew that—with evil, so one of God's aspects, and his archangel's, was the soldier. All but the most gentle saints became men of war in the Baroque; and not gentle relaxing soldiers as in the paintings of Raphael, Perugino, Giorgione, and the others—but turbulent, active soldiers; the billowing draperies do not deny the armor beneath them. Charles the Fifth fought for his immense empire and the Pope lived in a Vatican that was an embattled fortress.
So the Baroque church is a royal palace, filled with statues of warriors that must not conceivably be mistaken for human beings.
But life is an illusion. Worldly ambitions are felt instinctively by all to be empty; the highest human grandeurs are child's play under the terrifying drama of the skies, and because they are unimportant, they can be played with. And so life is a pageant, a procession, a game of children—brief human being of ephemeral smoke—dressing up as kings and soldiers. Even the Middle Ages did not understand more completely the anonymity of man before the service of the Mass. A game is only a game when you know its conventions are all it lives by. Do you understand that? . . .
Suppose a resident from Mars should descend to earth and witness a football game. He would be told that the point of the game was to pass the leather ball between those two goal-posts. Wouldn't he say: Why does the player run with it now while the rest are all standing still? Or while the others are all strolling over to the sidelines? You would tell him that isn't possible: the whistle hasn't blown, or has blown, or the other players aren't ready. To play a game at all one must submit to a series of self-imposed imaginary impediments called conventions. Nothing is more interesting to watch than the degradation of sports through the abuse of conventions. Love of money or vindictive passions are forever trying to break through the rules and play seriously; then the game is over and war is on. A game can only live by reason of its conventions. Do you see? Well, the Renaissance believed in power and brains and reason and rank and it could not play. But the Baroque believed its conventions: that under God and the rule of death those things didn't really mean anything and so it could and did play. It played pomp and glory and the hero, and that is the art we have. But it did not play God, and that's what the Renaissance did. . . .
Baroque was least interesting in its painting, and that is because painting is the most literal of the arts. It was greatest in its music. Baroque music—Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven—is one of the greatest products of the human mind. And naturally, since life is illusion it was great in its theatre. Shakespeare, Calderón, Lope de Vega, the Elizabethan galaxy, the Spanish galaxy—all these are in various degrees Baroque. . . .Footnote 2
It is interesting to me to trace the Baroque theatre in Bavaria and Austria and to use it as an illustration of how that view-of-existence we call religion employs art in its service. From Munich southeast, there was an unbroken line of great rich monasteries. Many of them are particular triumphs of Baroque architectureFootnote 3 and contain entrance-halls, festival halls, libraries, chapels, vast fish-basin for Friday's meals, iron-wrought doors of great beauty. When the noble personages of the country visited these monasteries, it was the custom to offer them religious theatrical spectacles. These spectacles were staged at immense expense and with a wealth of mechanical ingenuity: there were saints riding by on clouds; there were showers and floods; there were ascensions and there was hell-fire. It was a great theatre epoch, now lost to us, because the greatness did not rely on the text, but on the effect of the parts relating to the whole and the psychological appropriateness of the symbols seen as spectacle. All the religious orders engaged in these performances, but the main is called the Jesuit Theatre. Its nearest counterpart is that flowering in Spanish theatre called the autos sacramentales—spectacles staged contemporaneously in Spain on Corpus Christi day, poetic dramas on subjects drawn from mythology, Biblical literature, and history from each of which a new figurative illusion to the Eucharist is drawn. The greatest autos are those of Calderón.
The Jesuit theatre lived on for a century and a half in the Danube country, feeding the temperamental requirement for the marvelous; and alluding to the Bavarian-Austrian necessity for seeing on a great scale that function that I call the miracle in the daily life. But great things do not stand still; they decay; and the human necessity to add novelty to excellence led to the shows becoming too sumptuous; the spiritual vitality became hidden under the increasing ornament and mechanical ingenuity, and the ecclesiastical authorities finally felt they had to prohibit the representation of sacred subjects on the stage. But wherever on the earth there has been an excellence, an energy from it survives floating on in the minds of men under various guises. The Austrian soul could not forgo the representation of the superhuman and when the veto was placed on the religious aspect, the need reappeared under another form: the extravaganza. Vienna knew a long theatre of wizards, fairies, talking animals, wishes and curses fulfilled. Religion wore the masque of magic. The best known example of this is Mozart's The Magic Flute. (It is now felt that the librettist of that opera was only ostensibly Schikaneder; that vivacious but ordinary-minded theatrical carpenter. The real librettist was Mozart. Goethe said that a test of one's cultural maturity was the power to see the beauty and distinction of the book, as well as of the music, of The Magic Flute.) The Jesuit theatre lives on in the plays of Raimund, a very great dramatist. (There are many great authors in the literature of the world that have not reached the critical arena of the English-speaking world. German literature penetrated England in the Victorian age, and all that was stuffiest in Carlyle and Coleridge took over all that was most sympathetic to their limitations. When the English-speaking world finally tires of looking at French literature, it will find great nourishing masterpieces waiting for it in Kleist and Raimund and Nestroy and Hölderlin; and entirely new facets of Goethe and Lessing.) It was no accident that Bayreuth was founded in the Bavarian hills: Parsifal is the last Jesuit play—there are both magicians and miraculous swans and there is the apotheosis of the Mass. And it is no accident that the Baroque genius of Max Reinhardt should come to its completion in the Baroque jewel that is Salzburg.
The sense of the marvelous finally left daily life and left its theatre. Now we have Hedda Gabler burning Lövborg's book in the stove; we have three sisters longing to go to Moscow; we have Fröken Julie seducing her footman. In the first scenes of St. Joan, Bernard Shaw reveals so inept a sense of the supernatural that he exhibits Jeanne d'Arc as making hens lay eggs and changing the direction of the wind. Green Pastures must borrow the vitality of negro religion in order to render acceptable the story of the Flood and the notion of Deity. . . .
Well, what about the supernatural in Shakespeare? What do you think? Was Hamlet's father's ghost and were the witches in Macbeth merely externalized presentations of promptings in those troubled men's minds? So we are told, and stage-directions are now presenting them as invisible and giving their lines to Hamlet and Macbeth to recite! Are the marvelous beings in Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest merely “idle” mystification?—for the sake of a grace and fantasy. It is true that Prospero says that they and everything in the world are illusion: “These cloud-capped palaces . . . etc. . . . leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff . . . rounded with a sleep.”Footnote 4 Yes, that is the last sigh of the Baroque. The drama in the sky, the wrestling with the angel for a Name has passed. Life on earth was an illusion because it paled into insignificance before the cosmological drama; now the cosmological has disappeared and the illusion is twice illusory. Daily life as play has become daily life as play without absorption. Where then shall I look for the supernatural in Shakespeare? Are they human beings, all human, only human, realistically presented?
No, great surviving art can never be merely human nature faithfully represented. What then do great writers do to human nature beyond being faithful to it?
Well, listen to this: Aristotle in his consideration of tragedy laid down the law that the protagonist of a tragedy should be a person in high place, so that his downfall involves the fortunes of a great many persons other than himself. I was long troubled by that phrase: it did not seem to me that the quintessential character of these life-stories was really touched by the secondary character of the political-social situation around them. After Agamemnon's death Clytemnestra maintained the state very well it seemed, as she had been doing it during his eleven-year absence. Oedipus's exile was followed the next morning by Creon's installation and the error he fell into involving Antigone, but the life of the people in the marketplace may be assumed to have gone on much as usual in spite of the horrendous proceedings in the royal palace. Especially in the modern world, the death of a ruler is felt to be his own affair—with the exception of a dictator.
I enquired then what Aristotle might have meant as well, and it seemed to me to be that a character at whom a great poet is gazing must have stature. And why? Because that character is inevitably to talk greatly. All speeches in imagined works by great authors are marked by the great mind of the poet: they therefore cannot be realistic-ordinary. Consider the Francesca monologue in The Inferno. Is there anything in that speech that is false to the character of a simple, fairly obscure young woman of moderate education? Yes, all of it. Dante keeps a semblance of the probable realistic incoherence of an ordinary woman, but he cannot keep out of it that universal intellectual structure which is great poetry. Apparently, this young woman from the minor Tuscan nobility has distinguished brains, has a power of compressed concentration, and has an ear for her language so refined that the vowels and consonants and long and short syllables fall with miraculous felicity. A great poet may try to character simplicity; he cannot prevent the characterized personage from gaining stature from the ventriloqual accident of the great poet speaking through the imagined mouth. Goethe's Gretchen is for a time a modest, delicate-minded village girl, but how she grows. One cannot erase from one's mind the impression that she was infinitely superior to all the village girls in a thousand villages: she breathes a great nature. It is in fact a little shocking to discover that she who has been talking great verse (“Meine Ruh ist hin” and “Du Schmerzenreiche”) is so concerned with the village gossip. You say to yourself: people who think so eloquently and in such ordered manner must be far above small-town assumptions. Great poets can only create great natures. . . .
Falstaff! Falstaff! Shakespeare may have tried to make an ordinary, eccentric, half-buffoon drunkard, but there again Falstaff talks such a dazzling web of fantasy, his prose-cadences haven't the ear, his intellectual destruction of the idea of honor is ordered with such brilliant, intellectual orderliness, that what happens to Falstaff swears at what we have come to know of Falstaff. A great soul then, cannot create a common soul. A great poet cannot write an Everyman. And so a realistic novel or play is impossible to a great hand. Great authors are not interested in the small motives, the wish-wash of the ordinary. They touch nothing they do not enhance. The subject-matter of great literature is the highest possible reaches of human nature.
The subjects they choose therefore are ordinary. In retelling them, especially in reporting the direct words of these created personages, they brush them even with a semblance of mimetic illogic, incoherence, human limitation—but the ruse is never successful. The great poet cannot restrain the greatness of his mind from somehow getting mixed up with the humble-stuff of his creature and the result is that all the characters are touched with greatness.
All the characters in Shakespeare's plays are beyond nature, because they open their mouths to such dazzling effect. One of the characters describes Imogen by saying: “She has a mind that even envy must call fair.”Footnote 5 I should say so. We have heard samples of it. Twenty minutes before we have heard her say: “. . .”
What brains! What breadth! What soul-texture!
Shakespeare “held up a mirror to nature,” did he? Not by a long shot! Mirrors have nothing like that to report. Even in that quite ordinary little play As You Like It, Rosalind abounds with such immediate, uncommon common-sense as put her far out of the range of the finest girls you could meet in a year's search of New York, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna: she is Rosalind-Shakespeare. Orlando is seldom doubled with his creator and the play is greatly harmed by the fact, but even he lets fall an occasional cadence that puts him out of the reach of the whole graduating class of Yale, Harvard, and Princeton thrown into one.
What then is the subject-matter of masterpieces? It can't be a presentation of experience and a re-statement of life and its multitude of human beings as we meet them day by day.
Well, there is a mystery here. The subject matter of masterpieces is not human nature; it is not the plot-situation (least of all that: Shakespeare picked up any tawdry plot); it is not “psychology”—jealousy, ambition, falling in love—yes, all that is there, but any clear-eyed person can do that: if human psychology were the primary consideration, it would all be vitiated by this Mind-of-Shakespeare theory whereby the persons going through the psychological demonstrations are lifted far out of the ranks of the human average to positions of stature. No, the subject-matter of masterpieces is the Action of the Poet's Mind, working on these slight pretexts. The hero of every work of art is the mind of its poet: it is that mind we watch. . . .
