The Defence of Poesy by Sir Philip Sidney

Sir Philip Sidney has always been remembered as one of the greatest figures of the Elizabethan age, despite the relative humility of his accomplishments and the brevity of his life. As a courtier, statesman, soldier, and poet, he was hard-working and moderately successful, but his continuing reputation seems to lie more in who he was than in what he accomplished.

People loved him. If there was one perfect knight of the Elizabethan court, one Sir Galahad, it was Sir Philip Sidney: sincere in religion, brilliant in intellect, generous and impulsive in battle. During a three-year tour of the Continent in the early 1570s, he was discipled by the Huguenot Hubert Languet and witnessed the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre in Paris. Later, he returned to England to take up the Puritan political cause, rebuking the Queen for considering a marriage to the Duke of Alencon (a brother of the Romanist French King) and working hard for a grand European Protestant alliance against the Roman Catholics.

Meanwhile he became a patron of the arts. His essay The Defence of Poesy, which I'm going to review today, is now considered the greatest work of Elizabethan literary criticism in an age stuffed with literary giants. It is a defence of the art of fiction against its detractors; and I was interested to read it.

Let me begin with a definition of "poesy", or poetry, since the definition is not quite what it is today. Sidney explains that he does not mean rhyme and verse, but fiction. Indeed, the scholar of ancient literature will soon realise that song and fiction were almost indistinguishable up until the Enlightenment.

[I]t is not riming and versing that maketh a poet—no more than a long gown maketh an advocate, who, though he pleaded in armor, should be an advocate and no soldier—but it is that feigning notable images of virtues, vices, or what else, with that delightful teaching, which must be the right describing note to know a poet by.

In response to some current literary objections to the art of fiction, Sidney set out to provide a legal-style defence of the art. Amazingly, most of the Elizabethan objections to fiction are the same as those made today; and much of Sidney's response still rings true, although I could wish it appealed more often to Scripture and less often to Homer and Virgil.

Sidney begins with his arguments in favour of poetry. First, he argues, stories and songs exist across the world, in all societies. This fiction and song are the only learning which primitive cultures know, and will provide the key for future learning among these people. Then, turning to the Romans, he explains that the Roman word for storyteller was vates, which he translates to mean "prophet, diviner." This, he believes, is a just reflection of Scripture: the psalms of David are poetry, and the psalmist is a prophet:

For what else is the awaking his musical instruments, the often and free changing of persons, his notable prosopopoeias, when he maketh you, as it were, see God coming in His majesty, his telling of the beasts’ joyfulness and hills’ leaping, but a heavenly poesy, wherein almost he showeth himself a passionate lover of that unspeakable and everlasting beauty to be seen by the eyes of the mind, only cleared by faith?

This alone, Sidney says, demonstrates that poetry "deserveth not to be scourged out of the church of God."

Sidney then goes on to the Greeks, and demonstrates that the Greek word for a poet can be translated as "maker." Like Tolkien after him, Sidney argues for a subcreative right: as God created the world, so man may imitate his Creator, and subcreate new worlds. I'm a little suspicious of Sidney's reasoning here: he says that creation, or nature, is "brazen", while the creations of the poets are "golden." A similar problem crops up later, when he argues that fiction is better than history.

Then Sidney makes his argument for poetry as mimesis:

Poesy, therefore, is an art of imitation, [...] that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth; to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture, with this end,—to teach and delight.

Fiction, in this definition, is imitation of life with the double purpose of teaching and delighting the reader. Sidney classifies it into three categories:

1. Poetry written to praise God, such as the Psalms, the Song of Songs, and so on.

And this poesy must be used by whosoever will follow St. James’ counsel in singing psalms when they are merry; and I know is used with the fruit of comfort by some, when, in sorrowful pangs of their death-bringing sins, they find the consolation of the never-leaving goodness.

2. Poetry dealing with philosophical, moral, or historical matters.

3. Fiction. Instead of depicting reality as it is, Sidney explains, the task of fiction writers is to depict reality as it might or should be. This is the kind of poetry the essay is written to defend, since, as Sidney argues, no other kind of teaching has such power to move us to virtue:

For these, indeed, do merely make to imitate, and imitate both to delight and teach, and delight to move men to take that goodness in hand, which without delight they would fly as from a stranger; and teach to make them know that goodness whereunto they are moved:—which being the noblest scope to which ever any learning was directed, yet want there not idle tongues to bark at them.

For Sidney, the primary use of fiction is to teach, and the aim of all teaching is "virtuous action". Therefore the question arises, is fiction useful for teaching virtuous action? Isn't moral philosophy a much better means of teaching? Or if we must have stories, what about the stories we find in history?

But neither, according to Sidney, can teach as well as fiction can teach:

The philosopher therefore and the historian are they which would win the goal, the one by precept, the other by example; but both not having both, do both halt. For the philosopher, setting down with thorny arguments the bare rule, is so hard of utterance and so misty to be conceived, that one that hath no other guide but him shall wade in him till he be old, before he shall find sufficient cause to be honest. For his knowledge standeth so upon the abstract and general that happy is that man who may understand him, and more happy that can apply what he doth understand. On the other side, the historian, wanting the precept, is so tied, not to what should be but to what is, to the particular truth of things, and not to the general reason of things, that his example draweth no necessary consequence, and therefore a less fruitful doctrine. 

Philosophy falls short because a man can describe a bird in flight, or Westminster Abbey, to you in hundreds and thousands of words without you getting an inkling of what he means; while if he were only to give you a picture of the thing he means, you could grasp it in an instant. "The poet is indeed the right popular philosopher," Sidney explains. His words "strike, pierce, possess the soul." Fiction has a power which nothing else can attain to.

Certainly, even our Saviour Christ could as well have given the moral commonplaces of uncharitableness and humbleness as the divine narration of Dives and Lazarus; or of disobedience and mercy, as that heavenly discourse of the lost child and the gracious father; but that his thorough-searching wisdom knew the estate of Dives burning in hell, and of Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom, would more constantly, as it were, inhabit both the memory and judgment.

History, too, Sidney says, falls short. And it falls short because history is not as "doctrinable" as fiction: in works of history, we must depict men as they are or were, but in fiction we are free to depict them as they should be. On the face of it, I agree with him--I think there's a great need for reading fodder designed to give people an ideal to live up to. Howard Pyle did just this sort of thing in his awfully good yarn, Men of Iron, and GA Henty did it in everything he wrote. Other authors write more flawed characters for the purpose of showing how that flaw can be addressed. Fiction, as opposed to history, does make the work of teaching through story easier, since if it is difficult to find a person who thoroughly embodies all the lessons we wish to teach, we can much more easily make him up--just as the prophet Nathan, in rebuking King David, was obliged to invent a rich man and a ewe lamb.

However Sidney's argument becomes shakier as he alleges that historians can't show any reason behind the flow of events in their stories, but that too often in history we see good people punished and evil people promoted. This ignores the sovereign rule of Providence over history and makes the study of history futile. It's also a self-defeating argument. If we give history up and turn to fiction as the only place to see vice punished and virtue rewarded, then we may learn virtue, but we will have little reason to want to apply it to our lives if we are not trained to see Providence punishing vice and rewarding virtue throughout history. The argument scrambles onto firmer ground when Sidney states it in terms of our inability to say for sure what the meaning of a particular historical event is. However, Scripture gives us an interpretive lens for history and a reason to believe in Providence.

Fortunately we readers of fiction don't need the argument from history to prove that fiction has a place in the Christian life. As Sidney points out, the Lord used fiction all the time to teach doctrine, and he mentions the story of the prophet Nathan a couple of times:

The application most divinely true, but the discourse itself feigned; which made David (I speak of the second and instrumental cause) as in a glass to see his own filthiness, as that heavenly Psalm of Mercy well testifieth.

By this Sidney concludes that fiction is the best way to teach virtue:

I think it may be manifest that the poet, with that same hand of delight, doth draw the mind more effectually than any other art doth. And so a conclusion not unfitly ensueth: that as virtue is the most excellent resting-place for all wordly learning to make his end of, so poetry, being the most familiar to teach it, and most princely to move towards it, in the most excellent work is the most excellent workman. 

From here, Sidney proceeds to dismiss five common objections to fiction:

1. That there are better ways to spend one's time. Sidney's answer is that there's nothing better one can do with one's time than to be moved to virtue by fiction, which is more powerful to do so than any other tool.

2. That poets are liars. Sidney replies that poets never pretend to be telling the truth, but plainly admit that they are spinning fictions.

And therefore though he recount things not true, yet because he telleth them not for true he lieth not; without we will say that Nathan lied in his speech, before alleged, to David.

3. That fiction trains readers to escapism, or as Sidney puts it, "abuseth men's wit, training it to wanton sinfulness and lustful love." He admits that yes, fiction can do this, but this is an abuse of fiction: used properly, fiction is just as powerful in training men to virtue:

Nay, truly, though I yield that poesy may not only be abused, but that being abused, by the reason of his sweet charming force, it can do more hurt than any other army of words, yet shall it be so far from concluding that the abuse should give reproach to the abused, that contrariwise it is a good reason, that whatsoever, being abused, doth most harm, being rightly used—and upon the right use each thing receiveth his title—doth most good.

4. That fiction diverts readers from real-world, gainful employment. Sidney, quite rightly, points out that all peoples in all times have had fiction, including many vigorous and enterprising societies, and adds that if this is an objection to fiction, then it must also be an objection to every kind of book-learning.

5. The fifth objection is that Plato intended to outlaw fiction in his Republic! This is very interesting--it shows the extent to which even the early Reformers (of the kind objecting to fiction) still leaned on pagan philosophers with repugnant ideas like Plato's. Sidney handily disposes of this objection by pointing out that Plato's objection to fiction was based on its use in his days to 'defame' the gods--a nice historical point, but not relevant enough to talk about here. Still, I think it's very interesting that the Great Authority called on in opposition to fiction is Plato, while the Great Authority upon whom Sidney calls in support of fiction is Our Lord.

In conclusion, I found Sidney's The Defence of Poesy a really interesting discussion of some, but not all, of the questions surrounding the right uses of fiction. One rather amusing tid-bit was the historical detail that the ancient Romans used to play what's known today as "Bible roulette"--you know, the thing where you let the book flop open, and whatever verse you come up with is The Lord's Word To You For Today! Only, the ancient Romans played this game with Virgil's Aeneid, not with Scripture. Sidney calls it "a very vain and godless superstition"!

Personally, I disagree with Sidney that fiction is the best way of teaching virtue. I entirely agree with him that it is a powerful and important tool for teaching virtue, but one simply cannot do away with moral philosophy either. The Lord Christ used both in His ministry on earth, from the moral philosophy contained in the Sermon on the Mount to the fictitious parables previously mentioned. Both are equally important, complementary, and indispensible.

Bartleby.com etext

Lady Sybil's Choice by Emily Sarah Holt

Recently I got the chance to read another one of ES Holt's fascinating and painstakingly-researched historical novels. Lady Sybil's Choice, set in twelfth century France and Jerusalem, follows the early fortunes of Guy of Lusignan through the eyes of a young fictional sister, Elaine of Lusignan.

Elaine of Lusignan is precocious, fiercely intelligent, and passionately attached to her elder brother Guy. When he travels to the Holy Land to fight the Saracens and make a name for himself, Elaine comforts herself with the promise that she will one day go to join him, at the same time that she tries to quiet the appetite in her soul for something more than this life can give. When she finally arrives in Jerusalem with her foppish brother Amaury, Elaine finds that she has already been supplanted in Guy's affections by the lovely Sybil, sister of the leper king of Jerusalem. She learns to love Sybil, but how will her frail peace of mind, which depends on earthly things, cope with the looming storms on the horizon?

I was interested in reading this book because the history of the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, also known as Outremer, is one of the most romantic and hopeless last stands in history. While a lot of attention is given to the Third Crusade, dominated as it was by those larger-than-life, legendary personalities of Richard Coeur-de-lion and Saladin, hardly any attention is paid to the hundred-year reign of the kings of Jerusalem over a feudal colony of men who, at vast expense and for the purpose of freeing the once-Christian lands of the Near and Middle East from the oppression of Islam, travelled far from their homes and native climates to settle and raise families on the frontlines of East and West. The conquest of the Christian East by Islam in the 600s was tragic, but so was the fall of Outremer in 1187.

Sybilla

Lady Sybil's Choice is set in the years leading up to Queen Sybilla's accession to the throne of Jerusalem in 1186, and the political intrigue surrounding that event which threatened her marriage to Guy of Lusignan, who she devotedly loved. It's a fascinating snapshot of many of the attitudes of the times, and the narrator--clever, iconoclastic, and questioning Elaine--is engaging to read about. However the book is not primarily about the history of the period, which I found a little disappointing. It's primarily about the spiritual journey of Elaine--hampered by the idiosyncracies of the church of the day--to repentance and saving faith. To this all the other personages and events of the story take second place. For example, why was ES Holt (a formidable and discerning historian in her own right) such a fan of Guy of Lusignan (whom most historians credit with weakness, indecision, and a hand in the bad tactical decisions which lead to the defeat at Hattin), and so antagonistic to Raymond of Tripoli? I most eagerly read the Historical Appendix at the end of the book to glean the few clues she left.

In the end, I felt that the story of Elaine's spiritual journey in pre-Reformation Christendom had been told against a too brilliant and tantalising backdrop. Although the book wraps up well with a fascinating and (surprisingly) historically factual climax, which ties the story and backdrop together neatly, I was left with more questions than answers about this historical period.

This said, the treatment of pre-Reformation Christendom by a well and truly Protestant novelist is very interesting in this book. While I'd be surprised if true belief was as difficult to find in those days as ES Holt suggests in the novel, I generally found the novel even-handed and historically well-founded. One of the things I most appreciated about this was that although the medieval Church is depicted with all its faults (and perhaps with too few of its virtues to outweigh them) the characters who are really Christians remain part of the Church of the day; they are not time travellers from the 1500s.

ES Holt also does a good job of evoking the piquant and distinctive way the medievals viewed history:

There was the legend of Monseigneur Saint Gideon, who drove the heathen Saracens out of his country with a mere handful of foot-soldiers; and that of Monseigneur Saint David, who, when he was but a youth, fought with the Saracen giant, Count Goliath, who was forty feet high.... The story that Amaury liked best of all was about Madame Esther, the Queen of Persia; and how she intreated her royal lord for the lives of certain knights that had been taken prisoners....

This is, of course, not the way that we have been brought up to read Scripture, and while ES Holt intended to point out that the stories had passed into oral tradition by this time, becoming distorted, I still can't help wondering if ready access to Scripture would have made the medievals more prosaic about their Bible heroes. I doubt it! "Certain knights that had been taken prisoners" does seem roughly analogous to "the enslaved Jewish nation"!

In the end, there was a lot to like about Lady Sybil's Choice. But I'm still looking around for a good history or novel on Outremer.
 

Ebook: The Epic of Reformation, by me

It's my very great pleasure to launch an ebook, The Epic of Reformation: A Guide to The Faerie Queene, which is a slightly updated and revised edition of the Faerie Queene Feature Week I ran here in January.

"The Faerie Queene is English Lit’s best-kept secret. Not only is it a series of epic quest stories sprinkled liberally with battles, gore, monsters, and romance; it’s also a series of profound meditations on the Christian life and virtues, and on top of that, the whole thing symbolises Reformation theology and politics.

"The epic comes in six and a half books each depicting a private Christian virtue as embodied in a knight who has been sent on some terrible quest by the Faerie Queene of the title, Gloriana. The Faerie Queene mixes great storytelling with great doctrines, physicality with spirituality, song with theology, allegory with politics. The result is fiercely meek, graciously sensuous, lyrically grotesque, and boisterously orthodox—just like the Puritans themselves. Within its pages there are doctrines and insights the world has forgotten or only half-remembers—just like the Reformation itself. And it is not just a guide to the political and theological landscape of Reformation England; it’s a map to future reformation.

"Dim the lights. Pass the popcorn, the opera-glasses, and the power-ballad cigarette lighter—we’ll need them all. Let the fierce wars and faithful loves begin."

Now you can get my guide to The Faerie Queene in handy ebook form!  

Get it on Kindle for just $2.99.

Or, even if you've only read the original blog series, feel free to leave a review on Amazon.

The Twenty-Fourth of June by Grace S Richmond

Well, I'm back from a busy fortnight helping out a friend, but thanks to her, I have a whole new author to review.

Grace S Richmond's 1914 novel The Twenty-Fourth of June is a cozy vintage romance. A wealthy and unattached young idler, Richard Kendrick, runs an errand for the even wealthier uncle whose heir he is--and finds himself in the warm, lively, and industrious Gray home, seeing family life for the very first time, and equally fascinated by this experience as by the charming Roberta Gray. Before long, Richard finds a way to install himself in the Gray home as a secretary to Miss Gray's uncle. But although the family at large takes Richard to their heart, he finds Roberta prickly and often even forbidding. Soon, it becomes clear that she looks down on him as a good-for-nothing socialite. Will Richard rise to the challenge and find a useful occupation? Can he really be as useless as Roberta thinks? Will Richard finally be able to set up the home he's come to dream of? Well--the answers shouldn't be too difficult to guess.

This was a most enjoyable novel, of course. It had all the best strengths of a vintage novel, and few of the weaknesses. Oh yes, it was a little bit sentimental about the home, and you could easily play Vintage Romance Novel Bingo with its plot (Outwardly unlikeable hero with hidden depths, tick--heroine partly changes her mind about him after seeing his house, tick). But on the other hand, it skirted a few of the pitfalls: the home was not seen as a place of idleness, but of industry; women are not the only righteous characters in the book; and so on.

There is not a whole lot I can say about this book in a review, except that I enjoyed it and you might too. This is partly because of the genre of the book itself--while Mrs Richmond gets up to some interesting writerly tricks, such as the almost impressionistic portrait of the Gray's home in the first chapter, the themes of the book are quite simple, and all lying around on the surface where it's easy to see them.

This is not necessarily, of course, a bad thing. I have myself enjoyed homes very much like the one described in the novel, and the more books in which idle young men find a purpose the better! It's a good, wholesome, inoffensive book that also happens to be well-written and satisfying, if not on the same level as Mansfield Park. Recommended, and I'll certainly be interested in reading some more Grace S Richmond in future.
 

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

When it comes to giant French novels, a distinction should be drawn between those immense enough to crush you into paste if they fell on you out of a tree, and those big enough merely to seriously injure you. Clocking in at just under 900 pages in my Wordsworth Classics edition, Alexandre Dumas’s classic revenge thriller The Count of Monte Cristo is a good 200 pages shorter than our Penguin Les Miserables. While both books share a fascination with romanticism and revolution in 1800s Paris, and while I read both of them during my mid teens, there was one important difference between the books which recently prompted me to re-read the Count but outsource Les Mis to a friend. This important difference is simply the fact that, while Hugo takes you on scenic tours of Paris nunneries and underground sewers to distract from the fact that his plot could have been dealt with in half the time, Dumas flings you into a driving, multi-strand plot that never derails or slows down. I remember staying up very late to finish it the first time I read it, and found it just as briskly enjoyable this time round.

The plot is very simple. At nineteen, the likeable and good-natured Marseilles sailor Edmond Dantes is about to marry his fiancée Mercedes and become captain of the ship Pharaon. Then his enemies—Danglars, a shipmate who covets the captaincy, Fernand, a fisherman who covets the fiancée, and Caderousse, a tailor, their weak and avaricious crony—denounce him to the local prosecutor, M de Villefort, as a Bonapartist. The real Bonapartist is M Nortier, the prosecutor’s revolutionary father; so to save his reputation and career, M de Villefort has Edmond buried in the deepest dungeon of the Chateau D’If.

In the Chateau D’If, Dantes meets and becomes the student of the learned Abbe Faria, whose tales of a fabulous treasure buried on the desolate island of Monte Cristo convince everyone that he must be mad. Fourteen years later, Dantes escapes to find that his aged father starved to death and his fiancée married Fernand in his absence. Meanwhile Villefort, Danglars, and Fernand have shot to fame, power, and fortune. Dantes lays his plans meticulously: then, at last, armed with boundless wealth, devoted servants, and the knowledge of his enemies’ darkest secrets, the Count of Monte Cristo comes to Paris to wreak vengeance.

(Cue the ominous opera music, but don’t pay any attention to it, because none of the characters do.)

Eldorado by Baroness Orczy

When her stage-play-turned-novel The Scarlet Pimpernel became a runaway bestseller, Baroness Orczy did what any bestselling author worth her salt does: she wrote a sequel, and then went on merrily writing them until she was quite exhausted.

The result, as usual, was a little uneven and fans of The Scarlet Pimpernel--the kind of short, light, tight novel that comes out of a good melodramatic short story--are divided on which ones are worth reading and which are not. Eldorado, however, is often ranked first among these sequels.

My only criticism of The Scarlet Pimpernel is that it is too short. Eldorado is a good deal more substantial both in length and in themes, although it lacks the tightly-woven plot of the original.

Just a few months after the events of The Scarlet Pimpernel, the League gathers in Paris to plot their most daring enterprise yet: the rescue of the Dauphin, the young son of the guillotined Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. This time, impulsive young Armand St Just--the brother-in-law of the Pimpernel himself--has asked for and received his first assignment in Paris, headquarters of the Revolution itself, where he is still in danger for his association with the Scarlet Pimpernel. As plots and counter-plots swirl around the young Dauphin, Armand is sucked into danger when he loses his heart to a young actress and meets the Scarlet Pimpernel's implacable enemy--Chauvelin, who gleefully presents him with a sadistic choice: betray his beloved leader to a lingering death by torture, or watch his fiancee perish on the guillotine. How will the Scarlet Pimpernel escape this time?

This book comes in three parts, and honestly, I was yawning during the first part, during which we watch Armand St Just sulk about his Jeanne and make a succession of very silly decisions. Orczy's overwrought style doesn't help much, for she never met the five-syllable word she didn't love:

Already a year and a half ago the excesses of the party had horrified him, and that was long before they had degenerated into the sickening orgies which were culminating to-day in wholesale massacres and bloody hecatombs of innocent victims.

The plot kicks up a gear, however, in Parts II and III, where the narrative focus shifts to our old friend Marguerite, the melodrama ticks up a notch or two, and we realise just where Armand's foolishness has led him.

There were a couple of interesting things to note about this book. The way Orczy speaks about the guillotined Louis and Marie-Antoinette is oddly messianical--"their last ignominious Calvary" she says of their deaths, and they, the Dauphin, and the Scarlet Pimpernel are all variously described in her purple prose as "martyrs". These quasi-religious references are unusual, even for the period in which she was writing. Are the Scarlet Pimpernel books a hagiography for the ancien regime? To be certain, I think Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were probably sincere Christians, and the influences of Christendom on the ancien regime were part of what the Revolution sought to destroy, but can they be said to have died for their faith? Whether they can or not, is it because of their faith that Orczy calls them martyrs, or because they represent a shabby substitute faith in blue blood and titles?

I tend towards the latter explanation. But then, God and Providence are regularly invoked in this book, and at one moment, the division between the ancien regime and the revolutionaries is explicitly stated in terms of Christian faith:

"In the name of God, Sir Percy," he said roughly, as he brought his clenched fist crashing down upon the table, "this situation is intolerable. Bring it to an end to-night!"
"Why, sir?" retorted Blakeney, "methought you and your kind did not believe in God."
"No. But you English do."
"We do. But we do not care to hear His name on your lips."

Another interesting thing about Eldorado is the relationship of Sir Percy and Marguerite Blakeney. I mention this because in most melodramatically emotional vintage novels, romantic love is the most important thing in the world--and even the quote above ends in Sir Percy getting more annoyed about Chauvelin bringing Marguerite into the conversation than the name of God. And yet, if there's one theme that ties this book together, it's that some things are more important than romantic love. Armand's predicament stems from his inability to learn this. Percy dreams of being at home with Marguerite, and she wishes her husband didn't spend most of his time risking his life in France instead of safely at home. But both of them realise that their own happiness is not this important.

In the end I enjoyed Eldorado a lot more than I expected to, despite Orczy's hilariously overwrought prose. If you are fond of The Scarlet Pimpernel, I recommend reading this one.



Eldorado has not to my knowledge been filmed itself, but elements of the plot are generally used in adaptations of the original book. I've seen the 1982 Scarlet Pimpernel with Anthony Andrews, Jane Seymour, and Ian McKellan, a fun adaptation of both novels.

A Word About Sponsors

I remember when I was a very little girl I intended to be an artist when I grew up. One day my Dad went to a friend's art exhibition and when he came back I asked him all about it. He mentioned that the paintings had been made with no view to their commercial viability. This surprised me, because profit was the last thing I associated with Art. "Should they care about that?" I asked.

And Dad said, very seriously, "Suzannah, many artists insist on making art for art's sake, but when you grow up, you need to realise that it's very important to produce a beautiful work of art, and then sell it for as much as you can get for it."

At the time I didn't understand all the philosophical ramifications to this question and its answer. All this time later, I can only say that Dad gave me the right advice. Commercial viability is an indispensable aspect of Christian art.

In saying this I don't mean that art must be limited to the utilitarian. Rather I mean that it must be produced in response to demand. I mean this in two ways.

Chartres

First, truly great art must exist at the intersection of aesthetic genius with popular appeal: it must be comprehensible and enjoyable by the common man; it must be common knowledge, alethia, rather than hidden knowledge, gnosis (Philippians 4:8). Christian culture has tended to delight in the beauty of the commonplace, as in the art of Rembrandt and Vermeer, or in the beauty of the things everyone can understand and admire, like the music of Bach or the heroic tales of Tolkien. This does not, of course, exclude profundity or a shared cultural lexicon which outsiders might find difficult to understand. It does not exclude staircases into glorious upper stories of thought. But the door into the structure must be very low and humble. One does not need a university education in order to realise that Chartres Cathedral is staggeringly beautiful--indeed, one had better not get a university education if he wishes to go on thinking that Chartres is beautiful. But a lifetime's study could hardly exhaust it.

Second, art must be commercially valuable because if it is worth spending lots of time on, then the artist has both the right (1 Timothy 5:18) and the duty (v 8) to realise its commercial value to support himself and his family. The Christian artist is a craftsman, a workman, not the brooding, lonely ubermensch of the Romantic imagination. The Christian artist is a businessman, and usually an anonymous one. Bach only became a celebrity centuries after a life spent cranking out cantatas to support his large family. His disciplined approach to his art mirrored that of the craftsman of medieval times, whose gigantic genius peeps out from the pages of illuminated manuscripts, glows from stained-glass windows, and writhes in carven wood, always giving the glory to God rather than self. By contrast the modern artist is too often a celebrity who works when inspiration strikes, often heavily subsidised by government, to produce incomprehensible works.

Something's going on at Kia!

I believe that when the dust of history settles, the greatest art of the current age will turn out to have been the commercial art. John Williams, for example, has a solid claim to being the greatest composer of our time. Artists like Drew Struzan may be remembered when others are not. TV commercials like this, which must sell you a Kia Cerato in a matter of seconds and still be worth watching the twentieth time, are a surprisingly underappreciated artform. Perhaps the epitome of contemporary commercial art, so far, is BMW's "The Hire" series.

Which is a long way of bringing us to the point of this post, which is that Vintage Novels will now be providing affiliate links to the Book Depository, my favourite place to buy new books, to Audible, a major audiobook provider, and to one or two others if my applications go through. Reviewing books may not be much of an Art, but in keeping with family tradition and religious principle, I will be trying to get some money out of it. Purchases made within the relevant time of clicking on one of the affiliate links at Vintage Novels will earn me a small commission. These links will be available up on the sidebar, and also at the bottom of each post, together with shiny new buttons for Project Gutenberg and Librivox, referring you to which has never earned me money and never will. My only regret is the annoying white border around the buttons, which I hope my tech man can fix.

S.D.G.