In an earlier post, Greatness and Aristocracy, I wrote about the idea of greatness as relating, not to absolute achievement, but to achievement within a particular context, specifically, among the aristocratic. The life of Denys Finch-Hatton (left), as depicted in Sara Wheeler's Too Close to the Sun, bears out my observation.
Everyone instantly recognized Deny's greatness, insists Wheeler, even though he achieved nothing. "Denys was a great figure," according to his obituary in Eton's magazine, "not only to Masters and boys, but to the Eton population at large, human and animal." (p. 34 (emphasis added).)
Eton's magazine is not alone in promoting the absurd notion that the animal kingdom hailed Denys' greatness. In Out of Africa, Karen Blixen reported that "'[a] lion and lioness have come [to Finch-Hatton's grave], and stood, or lain, on the grave for a long time.' . . . It was fit and decorous that the lions should come to Denys's grave and make him an African monument." (p. 308.)
But, by the end of his life (short, but still 44 years), Denys had accomplished nothing. "In terms of a career -- positions held, books published, the shibboleths of success one lists in Who's Who -- there was nothing," admits Wheeler. He left behind no written record, no diary, no significant letters. Perhaps his most enduring legacy is of the abortions and miscarriages that Beryl Markham and Karen Blixen had respectively, carrying children for whom he showed no inclination to take responsibility. "It's not clear what he ever did to merit a biography of his own," adds Nicholas Best, reviewing Too Close to the Sun for The Observer.
Plainly, when people characterized Denys as "great," they were responding not to his accomplishments, but to his place in the (waning) aristocracy. "He was the Last Edwardian Male," wrote Florence Williams, in a New York Times book review.
This use of "greatness" to invoke the aristocratic is both imprecise and not, in my view, without harm. Great people are worth our time; alive or dead, kind or mean, great people have something to teach us. Whatever their personal natures, great people have contributed something to society and human existence. Greatness, despite the costs, ought to be encouraged.
Aristocrats, on the other hand, are people who have convinced themselves and the rest of the population that they have an entitlement to wealth, based on their cultural superiority and proximity to a divine monarch. Though this class of individuals, like any strata of social organization, has something to teach us about human nature, individual aristocrats (potentially Denys among them) are often privileged wastrels, fungible in their educational value. They have not invariably contributed something to society and, as a group, they are not necessarily normatively valuable. (While, anecdotally, culture typically flourishes in aristocratic societies, the cost-benefit equation doesn't compare favorably to non-totalitarian societies in which the government substitutes as patron.)
But regardless of the larger issues at stake in conflating a romanticized notion of aristocracy with genuinely great achievement, Denys Finch-Hatton is an easy case: he was unquestionably artistocratic; he was also, unquestionably, not great. Sara Wheeler does him no favors by wrapping him in a mantle that's too broad for his shoulders: doing so only makes the man look small.
David Orr discusses in this week's NY Times Book Review the crisis of "greatness" in the current American poetry scene. "Poetry needs greatness," he explains, because poetry remains "the highest of High Art." And while Orr recognizes that the concept of "greatness" can be "strategy for concealing predictable prejudices," he also argues that without it, "we stop making demands on the few artists capable of practicing the art at its highest levels."
His argument reminded me of a passage in "The Deluge at Norderney," the first tale in Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales. In it, a Cardinal and an eccentric older woman, Miss Malin Nat-og-Dag, are stranded during a flood and, to pass the time, they discuss theology. Miss Malin asks the Cardinal if he believes in the fall of man, and he replies:
I am convinced . . . that there has been a fall, but I do not hold that it is man who has fallen. I believe that there has been a fall of the divinity. We are now serving an inferior dynasty of heaven. . . . [N]o human being with a feeling for greatness can possibly believe that the God who created the stars, the sea, and the desert, the poet Homer and the giraffe, is the same God who is now making, and upholding, the King of Belgium, the Poetical School of Schwaben, and the moral ideas of our day.
at pp. 55-56 (emphasis added). Just as the Cardinal intuits an inferior dynasty of heaven, today's poets perceive an inferior muse: how can Billy Collins and Kay Ryan answer the same Apollonian call as Lord Byron?
But from my perspective, the Cardinal (and perhaps, by extension, Isak Dinesen) got it wrong: it's not the God who has changed, but the worshipful. "Greatness," in the sense that Orr uses the term, relates not so much to achievement in an absolute sense, but to achievement within a certain context, specifically a society in which an aristocracy (in the sense of a superior class) exists.
Just as Aristole limited tragedy to a fall by an aristocrat from the pinnacle to the depths, "greatness" is similarly confined to a feat of glory by nobility. In Aristotle's day (and for centuries thereafter), society widely accepted those categorizations. But we no longer do so. In Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller claimed tragedy for those who don't have far to fall. And in Elizabeth Bishop (to take an example that Orr discusses), poetry finds glory without aristocratic pedigree.
The Isak Dinesen who scripted the Cardinal's "inferior dynasty of heaven" was, beneath her nom de plume, a woman mourning the waning of the artistocracy. She'd married into nobility and clung to her title (Baroness) long after her husband, the Baron, divorced her. She associated aristocracy with a set of values, like honor, that she seems to have felt wouldn't exist after the aristocrats expire.
But aristocracy was the bastion of unearned privilege, exploitation and cruelty, as much as it was the crucible of beauty, and art at its "highest levels" is as possible without an aristocracy as tragedy is.
Perhaps what's lacking in American poetry is not greatness, but confidence. We are not inferior humans to our ancestors, simply because the god we serve is more humane, meritocratic and accessible than in years past. We are not less because we reject the fall of man altogether. Our belief in progress, a gradual rise as opposed to a precipitous fall, is an attribute. When American poetry has the moxy to stop apologizing for society and get on with the harshly difficult job of writing poems, then we will witness a democratic greatness.
In an earlier post, Greatness and Aristocracy, I wrote about the idea of greatness as relating, not to absolute achievement, but to achievement within a particular context, specifically, among the aristocratic. The life of Denys Finch-Hatton (left), as depicted in Sara Wheeler's Too Close to the Sun, bears out my observation.
