Baedeker — T. S. Eliot Hypertext Project

Andrea Mantegna's St Sebastian
in "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar" and "The Love Song of St. Sebastian"

Baedeker Andrea Mantegna's "St Sebastian" (Ca d'Oro, Venice).

introduction

The section Eliot quotes in "Burbank," nil nisi divinum stabile est; caetera fumus, is an inscription on a banner that is attached to a small candle in the right-hand corner of the painting. The burning candle symbolises the soul and via Bleistein's cigar and the line "the smoky candle end of time this symbol in particular is attached to the poem and to Bleistein.

linguistical analysis

The latin phrase translates "nothing if not the divine is certain; all else smoke." On the painting, the first word is actually nihil, of which nil is a common contraction and presumably Eliot contracted it in his mind. Caetera fumus is a common Latin form to express a simile, so that we can in fact read "all else is like smoke."

textual/poetical analysis

The grave latin inscription is visually strenghtened by the candle, which slowly burns up and turns to smoke, a metaphor for life and history. This image returns in Eliot's poem later on, when "The smokey candle end of time" declines. Together with the martyred St. Sebastian on the painting, it makes for a very stark contrast with the quotation from Gautier.

As noted elsewhere, there is a strong parallellism running through this poem, in the title, in the epigraph, and in the structure of the poem itself. There is the textual suggestion of the number seven in both number of words in the Latin phrase and the seven constituents of the phrase "tra-la-la-la-la-la-laire", which is not exactly a copy of Gautier's line (see previous note).

The candle in this picture invites to draw another parallel by tying in to the declining "smoky candle end of time" in stanza five; the suggestion is that there are similarities between the martyred figure in the painting, St Sebastian, and Bleistein.

contextual analysis

The origin for the phrase is unknown, although the concept itself presumably originates with Plato's concept of the divine, which was rooted in the idea-world. Presumably this concept has survived somehow into the 1500s through the Neo-Platinists, or St Augustine, or a rediscovery of any of these sources during the Italian renaissance.

Mantegna has made three paintings of the St Sebastian, one of which hangs in Vienna, one in Paris, and one (this one) in Venice. The theme for all of these paintings was the then prevalent preoccupation with the fall of Rome. Especially artists found the inventions of their predecessors of over 15 centuries ago very impressive, and the resultant mood was one of contemplation over, exactly, the concepts of decline and death. The artistic (and public) subconsciousness was further oppressed by the then rampant plague, which caused millions of casualties throughout Europe.

This theme is expressed in the paintings in several ways. In the Vienna Sebastian this is most clearly seen in the symbolic union of two different styles of arches to which Sebastian is bound, and in the landscapes behind the arch, one of which is a reconstruction of the hay-days Roman times, the other the same landscape but as it is now. In the Venice painting, the most clear symbol is certainly the burning candle, signifying the passage of time and clarified by the banderole with the inscription. Of course, St. Sebastian himself is such a symbol too, as the Empire which executed him has in Mantegna's days made place for the religion that Sebastian was martyred for.

In those days, Sebastian also came to be seen as a protector against the plague. One of the reasons was that arrow-wounds looked a lot like plague-marks. Thus the arrows came to symbolise the onslaught of the disease, which further explains the popularity of him as a subject for painters in those days. (Greenstein)

As we can see in stanzas four through six, there are a number of similarities between what happens to Bleistein and St. Sebastian. First of all, the description of Bleistein in the first paragraph resembles that of the martyred St. Sebastian, who also has his palms turned out, his elbows bent, as well as one knee. There is also one staring eye, and although because of the shadow this cannot be seen clearly, the differing position of the left eyebrow seems to suggest that the other eye is closed (#! further detailed study of this painting or at least a larger reproduction will be necessary to confirm this).

Eliot invites us to draw a parallel between St. Sebastian and Bleistein; there are certainly paralels with Bleistein's memory of the insults against Shylock. These insults, if we read their imagery literally, also provide a link; the Jew that Bleistein remembers was perhaps killed and dumped on the street - if we examine instances of combinations of lustreless with staring eyes this often means dead - with garbage and rats on him, which seems not wholly dissimilar from St. Sebastian's fate of ending up in a sewer - there will, at the very least, also be rats there.

One historical implication is that the Jew Bleistein assumes the role of martyr similar to the position of the Christians in the Roman empire. Certainly, if we do compare the situation of the Jews in a historical context, a striking parallel exists between the constant and persistent persecutions of the Jews since Christianity rose to power in Europe, and the persecutions of the Christians by the Romans when they were still an oppressed group together with the Hebrew people. Furthermore, arrows are traditionally also symbols of verbal assaults, something which Jews have been historically prone to, not the least during the strong rise of anti-Semitism from the turn of the century up to WWII.

There are other possibilities, however, as in Faust:

Hovering around this head in circles airy,
Look that ye show the noble law of fairy:
Appease the furious conflict in his heart!
Draw out the burning arrows of remorse,
From suffered horrors cleanse his inmost part!

We could easily combine this image with Bleistein's remembrance of Shylock's remorse, where it is good to remember that the remorse in Shakespeare's play is in turn caused by Antonio's constant spurning of Shylock.

However, the association between the Jews as Martyrs against the Christians as martyrs seems to be the central image, the rest are details. The comparison his painful, and the irony indeed, as Eliot himself said several times in his letters, "intensely serious." Whether it is also far-fetched remains to be seen. Eliot himself wrote, in 1918, that "A large part of any poet's "inspiration" must come from his reading and from his knowledge of history." (T.S. Eliot, To-Day, September 1918). It does not seem far fetched that he was specifically thinking of Burbank when writing this line, as we shall see elsewhere. Apart from that, there is the influence of the controversial new Joyce novel, Ulysses, which was appearing in the Little Review during 1917-18, and was greatly admired by both Eliot and Pound:

Bloom also is the basis of democracy; he is the man in the street, the next man, the public, not our public, but Mr Wells' public; for Mr Wells he is Hocking's public, he is l'homme moyen sensuel; he is also Shakespeare, Ulysses, The Wandering Jew, the Daily Mail reader, the man who believes what he sees in the papers, everyman, and 'the goat'.(403)
Bloom suffers kata thumon; 'every fellow mousing round for his liver and his lights' (404)

...wrote Pound in 1923, but already in 1918 he had already compared Bloom with the Venus of Milo. Because of Pound's later anti-Semitism he himself has become the victim of prejudice and is often no longer ascribed the judgment which he conveyed in The Egoist, in 1913, that:

If you have forgotten my statement that the arts bear witness and define for us the inner nature and conditions of man, consider the Victory of Samothrace and the Taj of Agra. The man who carved the one and the man who designed the other may either or both of them have looked like an ape, or like two apes respectively. They may have looked like other apelike or swinelike men. We have the Victory and the Taj to witness that there was something within them differing from the contents of apes and of other swinelike men. Thus we learn that humanity is a species or genus of animals capable of a variation that will produce the desire for a Taj or a Victory, and moreover capable of effecting that Taj or Victory in stone.

Just as Sweeney is associated with Pound's metaphor of medicine, and is there in Eliot's poetry to cure the disease of modern theorists, especially those on sex, so Bleistein is here to cure Burbank's naivete and prediliction for the exterior. This was a disease which Pound also ascribed to James.

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