A more detailed commentary on Helm's quotes from Curtius.
In a message dated 3/17/2016 4:30:35 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
"As to Curtius "getting his ideas," from someone, he might object to that
construction."
Indeed. I don't think Germans like to think of themselves as getting ideas
from others. Although this trend may have started with Hegel. Putnam used
to say that he started to enjoy reading Hegel, "after I forgot that Popper
had forbidden us to read him!".
And in any case, Curtius was perhaps a Frenchman -- having been born in
France.
Helm: "On page 7 he is writing of Troeltsch and Toynbee with approval."
Good.
Helm quotes direct from Curtius:
"The convergence of our knowledge of nature and our knowledge of history
into a new, 'open' picture of the universe is the scientific aspect of our
time. At the close of his Historismus, Troeltsch outlines the task of a
concentration, simplification, and deepening of the intellectual and cultural
content which the history of the West has given us and which must emerge
from the crucible of historicism in a new completeness and coherence."
This construction is so German in syntax that one wonders who translated
his essay! (I value translators whose mother tongue is English than German,
and one is curious here).
Helm goes on quoting from Curtius:
"Most effectual would be a great artistic symbol, such as the Divina
Comedia once was, and later Faust."
Can we compare Divina Comedia with Fausto? I guess we can. According to
Geary's axiom, "Everything is comparable to anything else". I think Divina
Comedia is actually THREE artistic symbols, for the Anglophones love the
"Inferno" (vide Cole Porter, "You're the tops, you're Inferno's Dante"), the
Romanians love the "Purgatory" and only the Vaticanians love the Paradise!
Helm goes on to quote Curtius
"It is remarkable that in Toynbee too -- even though in an entirely
different sense -- poetic form appears as the extreme concept of historicism.
His train of thought is as follows: The present state of our knowledge, which
takes in barely six millenniums of historical development, is adequately
served by a comparative method of investigation which attains to the
establishment of laws by the road of induction."
Popper would HATE that. He hated everyone (even a historian) who believed
in induction! ("hate" is a paraphrase and a hyperbole, Popper would have use
"if you allow me to respectfully disagree").
Helm goes on to quote from Curtius:
"But if one imagines the stretch of history too be ten times or a hundred
times, the employment of a scientific technique becomes impossible. It
must yield to a poetic form of presentation: 'It will eventually become
patently impossible to employ any technique except that of 'fiction.'"
--- which is the title of Borges's collection of short stories. As opposed
to non-fiction. The Greeks saw History as having her own muse, so the fact
(_sic_!) that a historian writes fictions is not as paradoxical as it
sounds!
Helm:
"Curtius dismisses Spengler, disbelieving his "laws." He hasn't mentioned
Marx and won't if his index is to be believed, but I'm sure he would
dismiss Marx's "laws" as well. Toynbee claimed no laws, using only induction
on
the 21 Societies he examined and these are the ones Curtius is primarily
referring to in the above. If differences multiply as time goes on,
relationships viewed inductively must become more and more tenuous and vague
(assuming laws of history do not exist)."
It's actually GOOD that Curtius does not believe in laws. After all, he was
a professor of late Latin (i.e. non-classical) Latin literature -- and
what LAW can you find there?! Even in the evolution of Italian from Latin (if
evolution it was) I don't think there were any laws! The use of some
auxiliaries that we find BOTH in Italian and French may make you think that
there
are 'linguistic' laws in the passage from Latin to the Romance languages
such as Italian and French. But why did the Italians prefer to stick with
the old Latin nominative plural in -i, say? Some linguists, I've read,
interpret this -i DIFFERENTLY, and not a direct continuation of the Latin
form.
But why did the French prefer other ways of forming the plural? No laws!
Helm:
"As to resorting to poems to sum up societal epochs, one perhaps has no
difficulty in accepting in a certain sense Homer as representing early Greek
society, Dante the 14th century in Italy, Cervantes and Shakespeare 16th
and 17th century Spain and England, and Goethe 18th century Germany, but in
thinking about them I don't believe they can be said to "sum up" their
various societies. On the other hand, if we add significantly to them (all
the
other "poetry" being written), perhaps that might work."
I see your point.
I think Borges has a 'fiction': Shakespeare's Memory. I would add VIRGIL
representing Roman society! He was commissioned to do so! Alighieri I find
too religious to represent anything! And I prefer his earlier poetic phase!
Problem with Dante and summing up is that TOSCANA was a bit of its own
kingdom, so we cannot pretend that Alighieri represented the whole of ITALY as
it then never existed! In fact, it was pretty much totalitarian rule that
made Tuscan the "Italian lingo" par excellence just to please the worshippers
of Alighieri! The Italians refer to this as the 'question of the
language'. It may be different with Shakespeare, but if you think of Chaucer
(who
got his ideas from Boccaccio) they often say that had he chosen to write in
Anglo-Norman, there would be no such thing as English literature -- since
Beowulf was buried and forgotten by then!
Helm:
"Earlier Curtius praises Toynbee by describing some of his ideas and then
writes, "These selected and isolated details cannot give even a remote idea
of the richness and illuminating power of Toynbee's work -- still less of
the intellectual strictness of its structure and of the precise controls to
which the material presented is subjected. I feel this objection. I can
only offer in reply that it is better to give even an inadequate indication
of the greatest intellectual accomplishment in the field of history in our
day than to pass it over in silence.""
Witters would disagree: he loved to pass over in silence!
Cfr. the rhetorical commonplace, damn by faint praise, but never praise by
faint damn!
Helm:
"I took this to mean that Curtius would not be relying upon Toynbee to any
great extent in what follows. In his index Curtius has only one line of
references for Troeltsch, two lines for Toynbee as opposed to 5 for Spenser,
10 for Shakespeare and 28 for Publius Papinius Statius."
which is as it should.
Throughout the Middle Ages, Stazio's "Thebaid" remained a popular text,
inspiring a 12th-century French romance and works by Boccaccio and Chaucer.
Statius' development of allegory -- a rhetorical commonplace as Curtius
would have it -- helped establish the importance of that technique in Medieval
poetry.
In the Renaissance, the Silvae, thanks to Poliziano, helped inspire an
entire genre of collections of miscellaneous, occasional poetry called Sylvae
which remained popular throughout the period, inspiring works by Hugo
Grotius and John Dryden.
Dante mentions Statius in De vulgari eloquentia along with Ovid, Virgil,
and Lucan as one of the four regulati poetae (ii, vi, 7).
In Divina Commedia, Dante and Virgil are caught up with Statius as they
leave the Fifth Terrace (reserved for the avaricious and the prodigal) and
enter the Sixth (reserved for the gluttonous).
Statius' redemption is heard in Canto XX (the mountain trembles and the
penitent souls cry out "Gloria in excelsis Deo") and he joins Dante and Virgil
in Canto XXI.
He then ascends Mount Purgatory with them and stays with Dante in the
Earthly Paradise at the mountain's summit, after Virgil has returned to Limbo.
He is last mentioned in Canto XXXIII, making him one of the longest
recurring characters in the comedy, fourth to Dante, Virgil and Beatrice.
He is NOT mentioned in Paradise, though, as Geary notes, "he presumably
ascends like Dante".
Dante appears to claim that Statius was a secret convert to Christianity as
a result of his reading of Virgil, although his conversion is not attested
in any historical source.
This would offend Popper but does not offend me.
A 2012 study dedicated to Dante's writing of Statius's relation to
Christianity has shown the significance of the fact that Dante does not state
that
Statius ever converted to Christianity, but that his Neapolitan predecessor
let himself be "baptized" by Christians -- which is better than nothing I
assume.
In Restoration England, John Dryden wrote a poem entitled "To Sir Robert
Howard" that refers to Statius' Achilleid.
Dryden criticizes Statius' unfinished epic, calling it "too bold", which as
Geary notes, "is always better than calling an unfinished epic 'a bore'".
Geary adds: "It has not turned into a film yet, alas."
Cheers,
Speranza
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