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Baroque
 Peter J. Burgard

Baroque
Figures of Excess in Seventeenth-Century
European Art and German Literature

Wilhelm Fink
Printed with the generous support of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung and Harvard University

Cover illustration:
Baciccio, Triumph of the Sacred Name of Jesus, 1679, Il Gesù, Rome.
Photograph by LivioAndronico, CC BY-SA 4.0

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed
bibliographic data available online: http://dnb.d-nb.de

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without prior written permission from the publisher.

© 2019 Wilhelm Fink Verlag, ein Imprint der Brill-Gruppe

(Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, Niederlande; Brill USA Inc., Boston MA, USA; Brill Asia Pte Ltd, Singapore;
Brill Deutschland GmbH, Paderborn, Deutschland)

Internet: www.fink.de

Cover design: Evelyn Ziegler, München

Production: Brill Deutschland GmbH, Paderborn

ISBN 978-3-7705-6400-2 (hardback)

ISBN 978-3-8467-6400-8 (e-book)
 for Zoë
for being there
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

A NOTE ON TEXTS ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi

INTRODUCTION—The Contested Baroque 1

Part One MODELS—Art and Architecture: Bernini, Borromini, Velázquez,

Rubens, Fracanzano, De Hooch, et al. 23

Part Two PRELUDE—Opitz and the Play of Poetics 99

Part Three PERFORMANCE—Gryphius: Drama of Indecision and Tragedy

of the Transitory 137

Part Four CHORUS—A Surfeit of Baroque 227

Introduction 229

Chapter One—Seizing the Day and Losing Oneself: Opitz

and Fleming 233

Chapter Two—Fleming’s Oscular Logic 247

Chapter Three—Dead Metaphor Society? Opitz,

Finckelthaus, Zesen, Hoffmannswaldau 257

Chapter Four—The Vanity of vanitas and the Formality of

Form: Gryphius at Midnight 281

Chapter Five—Simplex Complex: Grimmelshausen’s

Emblematic Erasure 297

Part Five POSTLUDE—The Echo of Opitz 337

FIGURES—List of Illustrations and Color Plates 347

viii TABLE OF CONTENTS

TEXTS—Bibliography 361

INDEX 379

COLOR PLATES 387

 A NOTE ON TEXTS

Because I hope this book will be of use to students as well as professors, and
perhaps of interest to other readers as well, I quote throughout not from
standard scholarly editions of German Baroque literature, which are readily
available only to very few, but rather, where possible, from the Reclam Verlag
editions that are readily available to all, easily affordable, and edited by experi-
enced scholars. The hope, after all, is that readers of my text will want to read,
or re-read, Baroque literature.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been so long in the making that too many students, colleagues,
and friends have responded to my ideas for me reasonably to thank them
all by name or indeed to remember every one of them, but thank them all
I do. I can, however, and must thank three institutions specifically, whose
support has been essential to my studies of Baroque art and literature: the
IFK Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna,
which awarded me a generous fellowship at a pivotal point in my research;
the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, which supported my research for two
crucial years and now supports the publication of this book; and above all
Harvard University, which affords me the privilege and luxury of awe-inspiring
students, extraordinary colleagues, an unmatched library, and a wonderful art
museum just steps away on any day.
Still, more important than these institutions are individuals without whom
this book would not exist. My late parents Helen and Harald, my Aunt Jo, my
brother Marc, my sisters Renée, Michèle, Denise, and Anna, and my parents-
in-law Erika and the late Bernhard have all—with love, good grace, and gener-
ous interest—supported me through many phases of the project. Of students,
colleagues, and friends who contributed in one way or another to my work on
the Baroque and this book, I owe particular debts of gratitude to Ben Bennett,
Chris Braider, Elio Brancaforte, Tom Conley, Neil Donahue, Charitini Douvaldzi,
Grace Farrell, Marjorie Hall, Volker Kaiser, Herb Kessler, Marika Knowles,
Alex Lambrow, Elaina Lin, Elizabeth Lloyd-Owen, Doris McGonagill, the late
Gerhard Neumann, the late Peter Pütz, Rasheed Sabar, Richard Silverstein,
Emery Snyder, Hans-Peter Söder, Ben Sudarsky, Richard Thomas, Bill Todd, the
late Mary Vidal, Juliane Vogel, Nicoline Weller, and Wulf Weller, and especially
to Joe Connors, Karl Guthke, Jochen Hörisch, and Richard Schade, but most of
all to Giancarlo Maiorino and Paul Panadero.
I am grateful, before all others, to Sylvia Schmitz-Burgard—my wife and
intellectual companion of nearly four decades—and to the most important
person in our lives, our daughter Zoë Burgard, who since early childhood has
accompanied me to museums, to libraries, to countless Baroque churches, and
later to Harvard—from a time when she had to wonder what it was all about
until now, when she has herself become a scholar, knows my interpretations,
and has her own. When she once wrote “Thank you for giving me the world and
then exploring it with me,” she didn’t realize she was stealing my line.

Cambridge, Massachusetts
December 2018
INTRODUCTION
 THE CONTESTED BAROQUE

“The Baroque still remains one of the least tamable beasts in the wilderness
of criticism.” Giancarlo Maiorino began his 1990 book, The Cornucopian Mind,
with those words.1 In the nearly three decades since then, there has been an ex-
plosion of interest in the Baroque, an interest borne as much by popular culture
as by academia. Everywhere one turns, it seems, there have been exhibitions,
coffee-table books on Baroque art and Baroque interiors, and various bombas-
tic or overwrought cultural productions described as excessive and as Baroque.
There are even clichéd puns—a sure sign of popular acknowledgment—such
as the cringeworthy “going for Baroque.”2 In academia and particularly in art
history, the boom, to which I must admit I have contributed with a symposium,
an anthology, several essays of my own, and now this book, has grown in the
last decade or two and in some areas, notably Caravaggio studies, nearly ex-
ceeds any overview.3 Still, the agitation conveyed by Maiorino’s tautologically
emphatic “still remains” remains understandable.
The problem with the popular interest is less that much of what it calls
Baroque has little to do with the actual historical phenomenon of the Baroque
or with an understanding of it informed by our own historical and cultural-
theoretical position—one not infrequently finds instinctive recognition of im-
portant characteristics of the Baroque—than that the application of the term
generally occurs, whether employed appropriately or not, only in the most su-
perficial manner, as does the use of the concept of excess for descriptive pur-
poses. The problem, in other words, is that the popular interest in the Baroque,
welcome as it often is (one has gotten to see many more exhibitions of Baroque
art than ever before, to read engrossing popular books such as Jonathan Harr’s
The Lost Painting, and to derive some perverse pleasure from Dan Brown’s
botching of Bernini in Angels and Demons),4 rarely helps anyone come closer
to understanding what the Baroque is really all about.
Despite a number of excellent studies, the academic interest in the Baroque
leads to its share of problems as well. One is that academic studies so often
put the cart before the horse. Articles and books on the Baroque court, the
Baroque church, the Baroque state, Baroque dance, Baroque politics, Baroque
theology, Baroque science, Baroque history, Baroque x, are legion, but gener-
ally seem to have little sense of what they mean, specifically, by the adjective
“Baroque,” except to the extent that they might assume that anything “of” the
seventeenth century is automatically Baroque. This is of course not the case.
The Baroque is a phenomenon of the seventeenth century, but the seven-
teenth century does not somehow “equal” the Baroque. One need only think of

© Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2019 | doi:10.30965/9783846764008_002

4 Introduction

Francis Bacon, René Descartes, or Isaac Newton—all of the seventeenth cen-

tury, none of them Baroque. Still, most scholars seem to think of “Baroque” and
“seventeenth century” as essentially interchangeable.5
At the other extreme are those who treat the Baroque primarily as a su-
prahistorical phenomenon. This is a tendency encouraged by Heinrich
Wölfflin, first in his Renaissance und Barock of 1888 and then more so in his
Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe of 1915, and even earlier on, although rela-
tively little note has been taken of it, by Nietzsche in his aphorism “Vom
Barockstile” of 1879.6 It is a tendency, however, that improperly unties the
Baroque from its historical mooring. Not that there is anything improper about
understanding the Baroque suprahistorically, as long as one remembers where
and when it comes from and has a good sense of what it originally was.
Helen Hills diagnosed the situation of the Baroque in similar terms in 2011,
writing at the start of her anthology, Rethinking the Baroque: “In recent years
the idea of ‘baroque’ or ‘the baroque’ has been seized upon by scholars from
a range of disciplines and the term ‘baroque’ has consequently been much
in evidence in writings on contemporary culture, especially architecture and
entertainment. Most of the scholars concerned have little knowledge of the
art, literature, and history of the period usually associated with the baroque.
A gulf has arisen. On the one hand, there are scholars who are deeply im-
mersed in historical period, who shy away from abstraction, and who have
remained often oblivious to the convulsions surrounding the term ‘baroque’;
on the other, there are theorists and scholars of contemporary theory who
have largely ignored baroque art and architecture.”7 Hills’s anthology was an
important intervention, but some years later still has not opened seventeenth-
century scholars to abstraction or induced theorists to immerse themselves in
seventeenth-century art, architecture, and literature to the extent one might
have hoped when it first appeared. More interventions are necessary—studies
focusing on seventeenth-century literature that, in the context of the art and
architecture that would come to be known as Baroque, proves to be Baroque as
well. Mine is one such study.
The Baroque is an aesthetic phenomenon of what we might call the “long
seventeenth century”—c. 1580–1730, up to 1750 when including later Baroque
music as well as the last phases of German and Czech Baroque architecture—
primarily in Southern, Western, and Central Europe.8 Some manifestations
can be found in Northern Europe as well as in Latin America of the same or a
slightly later period, and some temporal expansions are appropriate, in both
directions: backward to the so-called Hellenistic Baroque (one thinks of the
Barberini Faun in Munich’s Glyptothek or the Great Altar of Zeus in Berlin’s
The Contested Baroque 5

Pergamon Museum) and forward to, among others, German Expressionist

drama and the postmodern Neo-Baroque. Not that the Baroque ever called
itself Baroque. The appellation came later, usually in less-than-flattering ref-
erences to the excesses of its art and literature, but “the Baroque” took hold,
established itself firmly by the mid-to-late nineteenth century, and was quite
thoroughly articulated, theorized, and historicized at the turn and in the first
decades of the twentieth century.9
Between the historical and suprahistorical, we encounter the problem that
the vast majority of studies that actually address the Baroque as what it is,
that historically circumscribed aesthetic phenomenon, tend, when they are
not pursuing yet another analysis of Walter Benjamin and his theory of alle-
gory, to focus on styles and themes.10 It is essential to remember that without
the seventeenth-century aesthetic phenomenon we would never have had the
term “Baroque” itself, and so it could never have been employed to describe
either earlier or later arts and letters, on the one hand, or other phenomena
of its age, such as politics, religion, science, history, etc., on the other. The his-
torically bound and the suprahistorical: these have been the pillars of Baroque
scholarship, and the tradition remains strong, even though there have been
numerous innovative, interdisciplinary, sometimes inspiring and compelling
investigations of the Baroque over the last few decades—by Bal, Benthien,
Braider, Buci-Glucksmann, Calabrese, Deleuze, Hallyn, Hills, Johnson, Lahiji,
Maiorino, Maravall, and Panadero, to name a few.11
For all that excellent work, we have come much closer to knowing, but still
do not know well enough, what the Baroque is. Certainly, most of us know
it when we see it, thinking most likely of a Caravaggio or Rubens painting,
a Bernini sculpture, a Borromini church, or the rhetorical excesses of some
seventeenth-century poem or drama. But when confronted, say, with a Pieter
de Hooch painting like his Courtyard of a House in Delft (1658, Fig. 1, Plate 1),
we either do not see the Baroque or, given the declaration that it is a work of
the Baroque, we are no longer sure that we really do know it when we see it.12
This might be one way of describing the point of this book: progressing from
the knowing-it-when-we-see-it of the styles we have come to associate more
or less automatically with the Baroque to the not-knowing-it-when-we-see-
it—at least not so quickly and not without a little help—of the compositional
principles underlying those styles and thus their conceptual ground. Once
we have understood this, we will be in a position to recognize—at the end of
Part One—just what a transgressive, Baroque work of art a painting like this de
Hooch really is. And, as we will then see, just what makes a work of literature
Baroque.
6 Introduction

Fig. 1
Pieter de Hooch,
Courtyard of a House
in Delft, 1658. See
also Plate 1.

All thematic, historical, and philosophical approaches are useless for the
understanding of the literary text, the painting, the sculpture, or the architec-
tural work if they do not grow out of close reading, out of careful and persistent
attention to what is actually going on in the text as text, the painting as paint-
ing, the sculpture as sculpture, the architecture as architecture. Close readings
of works of art and architecture are not infrequently dismissed as “formalist,”
as if it were a dirty word, and it is my sense that fewer and fewer works of lit-
erary scholarship undertake such close reading. Too many skip lightly across
the surface of the works, cherry-picking the evidence of a particular theme,
historical context, discipline, or idea. Too many put their argument too far in
the foreground while allowing the object of the argument to languish in the
background. Among even some of the most exciting studies of the arts, too
many skip forward, on the basis of snippets of textual analysis, to tours de force
of intellection and imagination inspired by the works, but thereby risk losing
and frequently enough do lose touch with them. Perhaps I will be faulted for
not going far enough beyond the works of art and literature I discuss, for ex-
ample into more historical than aesthetic considerations or into the manifold
The Contested Baroque 7

theoretical paradigms that could be brought to bear on my argument and

readings—and perhaps I will be faulted for being quite frank, even polemically
so, about the sacrifice of text to context—but I hope not to be faulted for losing
touch with the works themselves.

The Book

The purpose of this book is to show that German literature of the seven-
teenth century both is Baroque and confirms what the Baroque is—the lat-
ter by articulating the Baroque aesthetic in a medium, literature, and in lands,
German-speaking, removed from its origin. In order to do so, I will: first, read
the Baroque aesthetic in its roots in European, particularly Italian, art and
architecture; second, read the articulation of that aesthetic in the Buch von
der deutschen Poeterey of 1624, Martin Opitz’s (1597–1639) founding work
of German Baroque literature; third, pursue an extended close reading of
the manifold performance of the aesthetic in arguably the most important
German drama of the seventeenth century, Andreas Gryphius’s (1616–1664)
Leo Armenius of 1646; fourth, illustrate it through a series of shorter readings of
canonical works of the period, including a) the most famous carpe diem poem
of the period, by Opitz, and a poem by Paul Fleming (1609–1640) that further
explores the devolution of personal identity we find in Opitz’s formulation of
love, b) Fleming’s famous kiss poem, c) poems by Opitz, Gottfried Finckelthaus
(1614–1648), Philipp von Zesen (1619–1689), and Christian Hoffmann von
Hoffmannswaldau (1616–1679) that deploy Petrarchistic conceits, d) a for-
mally exceptional sonnet by Gryphius, e) the first great German novel and
the only one from the seventeenth century still widely read today, H.J.C. von
Grimmelshausen’s (1622–1676) Simplicissimus of 1668;13 and fifth, conclude by
attempting to echolocate, as it were, a poem by Opitz.
This book, then, is a collection of readings. Over the course of not a few
years, I have come to my understanding of what the Baroque is through in-
tensive readings of works of both art and literature, before immersing myself
in theories of and scholarship on the Baroque, and then through repeated re-
readings of those works. The readings of art, essential to the understanding of
the literature, are close but mostly brief and are confined almost entirely to
Part One, since this book is concerned primarily with literature. Two future
books, I hope, will concern themselves exclusively with Baroque art and ar-
chitecture.14 It is also easier, at least at the outset, to be brief and yet com-
prehensible in explicating the composition of works of art than that of works
of literature, for in terms of the analysis of a work itself, it is easier to see the
8 Introduction

details of composition, to see form, to see what a viewer describes, and per-
haps even to explore the aesthetic implications of what we see. Still, those
implications are often more readily accessible in the reciprocal reading of art
and literature, by which I mean that my readings of literature should further
support the readings of art that lay the groundwork for them, and works of art
will play a role in some concluding consolidations of the readings of literature.
The effect of my readings will be to incorporate German literature into the
European aesthetic phenomenon called Baroque.15 Only after the conceptual
grounds of styles and themes and with them the recognizable principles and
characteristics of the Baroque have been sufficiently determined would one
then be in a position, were that one’s aim, to speak of politics, dance, religion,
science, history, late Hellenistic sculpture, late twentieth-century culture, etc.,
as being specifically Baroque. Before I can get to the readings of literature,
however, what constitutes the Baroque must be addressed through the discus-
sions of art and architecture and of Opitz’s seminal poetics of 1624, the ground-
ing work not only of German Baroque literature, but of modern vernacular
German literature itself. In the first two parts of this book, then, we will already
see how the principles of that art and architecture and the conceptual founda-
tion they disclose were transported across national and media boundaries into
German literature.

Scholarship and the Baroque Period

In general terms, the history of Baroque scholarship for much of the last cen-
tury or so has been a history of receiving and rejecting Wölfflin’s antithetical
definition of the Baroque vis-à-vis the Renaissance.16 In the field of literary
scholarship, it has been a history of first transferring and applying Wölfflin’s
categories to the literature of the seventeenth century and then, gradually and
laboriously, discovering that there is not complete agreement between the arts
and that there are continuities between Renaissance classicism and human-
ism, on the one hand, and the Baroque on the other.17
Gerhart Hoffmeister traces these histories in the introduction to his Deutsche
und europäische Barockliteratur, arguing that “das ahistorisch vorgehende
Systembilden war vielfach zu sehr antithetischen Denkmodellen verhaftet, als
daß es der Vielfalt der Phänomene im Kontext der Zeit gerecht werden konnte.
Gerade die Kunsthistorik ist seit Wölfflin zu der Einsicht gelangt, daß die auf­
einanderfolgenden Epochenstile nicht in einem antithetischen Verhältnis
zueinander stehen, sondern gradualistisch ineinander übergehen.”18 It is, of
course, unfair to accuse Wölfflin of being ahistorical, since his antithetical
The Contested Baroque 9

stylistic model was precisely the result of historical investigation and com-
parison and only subsequently led to a more suprahistorical hypostatization
of some fundamental oppositions between recurring Classical and Baroque
phases.19 Historical analysis and abstraction into conceptual categories are not
mutually exclusive, but rather, in the best of cases, inform one another.
What concerns me more is that the recognition of a “Vielfalt der Phänomene”
has, over the decades, led scholars to an extreme diversification of the
Baroque—e.g., its subdivision into ever smaller historical units such as “pre-
baroque,” “early baroque,” “high baroque,” “late baroque,” “rococo-baroque” (an
impossibility, in my view), and so on. In its ever greater historical, geographical,
thematic, and even confessional specificity (the debatable, and as the present
book will implicitly demonstrate, ultimately unsupportable distinction be-
tween “Catholic Baroque” and “Protestant Baroque”),20 this has succeeded in
obscuring the very notion of the Baroque. At the same time, I would argue, this
proliferation of Baroques, like the proliferation of supposedly Baroque areas of
knowledge and inquiry (politics, religion, science, history, etc.), could itself be
seen as Baroque, even if unintentionally so.21
The continuous subdivision into variously qualified Baroque periods in
turn led to the virtual abandonment of the Baroque as such by a great many
scholars, perhaps especially scholars of German literature. Hoffmeister told us
in his 1987 book that “‘Barock’ ist ein in der Forschung äußerst umstrittener
Begriff, den man aufgrund seiner fragwürdigen Verwendbarkeit neuerdings
zu vermeiden sucht,” and from Hans Gerd Rötzer we learn that “die Versuche,
das Barock als eine Einheit zu fassen, selbst als eine Einheit der Widersprüche
in Begriffe zu fassen, sind gescheitert”; in 2003, Hoffmeister would then re-
iterate the call to avoid using the term Baroque.22 This, of course, does not
prevent scholars from continuing to use the supposedly misleading or use-
less term or from implicitly presupposing precisely the kind of antithetical
model they deem insufficient. Indeed, Hoffmeister himself, after saying they
are to be avoided, proceeds to employ freely both the term Baroque and the
Baroque-Classicism antithesis. This we can take as one sign of the fact that,
much as some might want to, we cannot entirely relinquish thinking in terms
of discrete periods and of the antitheses that help constitute them, even while
acknowledging that the discreteness and antitheses may not be absolute.
Literary history and art history always return to periodization, for it is an
inherent category of historical thinking. Pointing to the often stark differ­
ences among the poets and artists accommodated under the term Baroque
and weary of the attempts to define the term and the debates surrounding
such attempts, many scholars decided over the last decades that “seventeenth-
century literature and art” or “Early Modern literature and art” constitute
10 Introduction

sufficient designations. Such conclusions, based on the recognition of differ-

ences within and continuities between periods, reflect what I view as a middle
stage of scholarship—a stage of exhaustion—between a previous, more or less
antithetically grounded determination of the period and a following return to
periodization. The challenge for this next stage, the stage in which this book
could be said to find its place, is to discover the grounds on which what was
previously held to diverge can be seen to converge, to discover the fundamental
tendencies of the period that can accommodate the multiplicity of phenom-
ena, that reveal commonalities within the age and discontinuities between the
ages that supersede, respectively, the previously adduced differences and con-
tinuities. The new periodization may eventually be proved wrong in various
ways, but this prognosis does not make the project any less necessary for our
understanding of the cultural productions of different ages.
Discontinuities within an age do not preclude a fundamental relation,
and continuities between ages, be they formal or thematic, do not disprove
a more significant antithetical relation. Rather, the antithesis always, of
course, presupposes and thus to some extent contains the thesis, and a sub-
versive discourse or practice cannot help but inhabit the discourse or prac-
tice the grounds of which it questions. An antithetical relation is just that—a
relation.
Thus the rejection of Wölfflin—on the grounds that continuities can be
adduced between the Renaissance and the Baroque and that there are seem-
ingly unbridgeable differences between works he considers Baroque—does
not hold.23 Moreover, the problem literary scholars over the last century have
increasingly experienced in the application of Wölfflinian categories to literary
phenomena does not lie in some hopelessly doomed enterprise of analogiz-
ing textual and visual art. Indeed, since the term Baroque was first applied to
seventeenth-century cultural productions with regard to the visual arts, any
discussion of the Baroque in literature must operate, at some stage, on the
basis of such an analogy. The real problem in the use and abuse of Wölfflin, I
believe, is, first of all, that his delineation of the Baroque is one that emerges
almost exclusively from considerations of style and yields stylistic categories
that are not always easily transferred to textual analysis (e.g., linear vs. paint-
erly or plane vs. recession), and, second, that a vocabulary had not yet evolved
that could sufficiently ground his stylistic differentiations in conceptual terms.
Of course, one can, as many do, consider all the problems that have arisen
from the period designation Baroque and its seemingly inherent uncertainty
and then simply decide to discard the notion altogether. I would argue, how­
ever, along with Jeremy Robbins in his treatment of seventeenth-century
Spanish literature, that such uncertainty is itself Baroque.24 The Baroque has a
The Contested Baroque 11

curious way of resurrecting and reasserting itself. Not only do those who pro-
claim the intention of discarding the term often find it impossible to do with-
out it in practice, but also, as I have already indicated, in the quarter-century
or so since Maiorino’s book, there has been a veritable renascence, as it were,
of Baroque studies that explicitly frame themselves as studies of the Baroque.
Still, Christopher Braider concludes in 2004, there is “no clear consensus
about what the term baroque means.”25 A quarter-century before Braider and
a decade before Maiorino, Murray Roston, who would clearly disagree with
Hoffmeister on the legitimacy of the term Baroque, wrote that “if the baroque
has now won recognition as an art form in its own right, the source of its aes-
thetic impulse remains in dispute.”26 It is to the resolution of this dispute—or,
if not, at least to the dispute itself—that I hope to contribute.

System and Excess

The stylistic divergence of the Baroque from the Renaissance that Wölfflin
articulates—here we arrive at the argument at the heart of this book—resides,
even though Wölfflin was not thinking in such terms, in the radical divergence
of their respective attitudes toward the idea and practice of system. It is the
critique of system that grounds the Baroque aesthetic and that can be seen to
determine essentially all of the works of European art and most of the works
of German literature belonging to the canon of the Baroque. In many cases this
may seem counter-intuitive, for example in Opitz’s poetics, the focus of Part
Two. Baroque poetics are often seen as straightforward rule-books for the pro-
duction of poetry and as composed on the model of systematic Renaissance
poetics such as Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Poetices libri septem. Even in recent
scholarship, Opitz’s poetics is still seen in this way.27 I will argue, however, that
Opitz’s project is ironically unsystematic, indeed anti-systematic—in other
words, that already at the start of German Baroque literature, that movement’s
foundational work questions its own foundation and ushers in a literary age
that will, as a whole, subvert—most often playfully—the systematic age that
preceded it, by which I mean Renaissance classicism and humanism.28
The primary means of this subversion and what I consider the overriding
characteristic of the Baroque that justifies the use of the term is excess, but in a
more fundamental and thorough sense than it has in common parlance. Both
as a thematic element and as a formal characteristic, in the eighteenth century
and later it was excess, as Schwulst, that was used reductively to denigrate the
art and literature of the Baroque.29 Here I rehabilitate excess—in all its mani-
festations, formal, thematic, figurative, etc.—as an aesthetic function, as an
12 Introduction

idea central to the cultural productions of the age, and as both the subject and
the object par excellence of Baroque practice and celebration.
In scholarship since the 1970s, it has been customary to acknowledge the
excess of Baroque texts and other cultural productions, but then to determine
that the excess is superficial, cloaking a fundamental systematicity under the
surface, and thus, as John Cull writes, just a “sugar-coating of playfulness […]
as a method in their system.”30 In contrast, I will argue that excess is constitu-
tive of the Baroque, even if paradoxically constitutive, since excess is inimical
to the very notion of coherent construction, debilitating even as it constitutes.
Excess is a term that encompasses many other signifiers that circulate in the
literature on the Baroque—terms such as immeasurable abundance, surplus,
spontaneous and astonishing profusion, continuous proliferation, teeming fe-
cundity, wanton growth, copious and luxuriant increase, etc.—but while all of
these terms can be accommodated in one way or another by the idea of sys-
tem, excess is the only one that indicates an actual breach, a radical violation,
not only of the boundaries of aesthetic and social propriety, but most generally
and significantly of the closure of system. My articulation of the Baroque as
a critique of the systematic foundation of the Renaissance is itself, of course
and ironically, a systematic undertaking that attempts to define and thus to
establish a certain unity, but here it is a unity in scare quotes, a ‘unity’ that
rests on artistic and textual phenomena characterized precisely by irreducible
non-unity.

“Baroque”

A brief remark on the word “Baroque” is in order. There has long been disagree-
ment over the origin of the word as it was first employed in art history. There
are those—such as Erwin Panofsky in his essay “What is Baroque?”—who in-
sist that it derives from “baroco,” a mnemonic device for a syllogistic figure
denoting false or deceptive conclusions: “[I]t came about that the word Baroco
(French and English Baroque) came to signify everything wildly abstruse, ob-
scure, fanciful, and useless.” Panofsky rejected out of hand the other common
derivation—a word denoting an irregular, misshapen pearl—claiming that
it “is most improbable both for logical and purely linguistic reasons.”31 But
there are many others, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for ex-
ample Gilles Ménage and Johann Joachim Winckelmann, until our own time,
for example Timothy Hampton in his introduction to Baroque Topographies,
who emphasize its derivation from the Portuguese “barrôco” for a distorted
pearl.32 If one approaches the Baroque from the standpoint of its relation to
The Contested Baroque 13

system, however, there is no need for disagreement, for both derivations pro-
vide a meaning of the word that quite clearly reflects its system-subverting
character.33 Baroco—obscure, abstruse, fanciful, and deceptive—implies
reasoning that diverges from and crosses the boundaries of strict systematic
articulation and formulation and that fails to achieve the system’s goal of cer-
tainty. And barrôco—a lopsided, non-spherical pearl—can easily be seen to
imply, for example, the breaking and overflowing of boundaries, the ex-centric,
the asymmetrical, the rupture of perfect form, the idiosyncratic, the irregular,
the overabundant, and, in general, excess. Everything, in other words, that is
incommensurable with system.


 

 NOTES

1 Quotations from the primary texts analyzed (Opitz’s poetics, Gryphius’s Leo Armenius,
Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus, and multiple poems), following a first citation in an
endnote, are documented in the text. All other quotations and references are documented
in the endnotes to each part. Giancarlo Maiorino, The Cornucopian Mind and the Baroque
Unity of the Arts (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1990), 1. The second half of the title of
Maiorino’s excellent book seems to echo the title of Irving Lavin’s influential book, Bernini
and the Unity of the Visual Arts, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), although
I take Maiorino’s meaning to be that a particular aesthetic is at work in the various arts, thus
bringing them together, as opposed to Lavin, who argues that unity is a central characteristic
of Baroque works of art. In this book, I draw into question Lavin’s (and many others’) notion
of unity in Baroque art.
2 This pun had great currency in the 1990s, even to the point of having been used as a catchy
title for an exhibition at The Contemporary in Baltimore in 1995–1996. See Lisa G. Corrin and
Joaneath Spicer, eds., Going for Baroque: Eighteen Contemporary Artists Fascinated with the
Baroque and Rococo (Baltimore: The Contemporary and The Walters, 1995).
3 An early version of portions of my introduction and Part One and a majority of Part Two first
appeared in “The Poetics of Irony: Opitz and the (Un)Grounding of German Literature,” in
History and Literature: Essays in Honor of Karl S. Guthke, ed. William Collins Donahue and
Scott Denham (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2000), 47–71 and 501–504.
4 Jonathan Harr, The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece (New York: Random
House, 2005); Dan Brown, Angels and Demons (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
5 Just in my direct experience, for example, this was the case at a 2005 meeting of the German
Studies Association, where eight sessions on “Baroque and Modernity” constituted a
conference-within-the-conference, but from my perspective this symposium was unable to
achieve any significant insight into the relation between the Baroque and modernity because
most everyone speaking and commenting, including scholars of German literature, seemed
actually to mean “seventeenth century” whenever they said “Baroque.” And this despite the
fact that there was already at least one fascinating and well-known model for approaching
the relation between Baroque and modernity: Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason:
The Aesthetics of Modernity, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Sage, 1994). It was the case
again at a symposium on Paul Fleming at the University of Erlangen in 2009—see Was ein
Poëte kan! Studien zum Werk von Paul Fleming (1609–1640), ed. Stefanie Arend et al. (Berlin:
De Gruyter, 2012)—where, despite a number of excellent lectures, there was substantial re-
sistance to understanding the Baroque as before all else an aesthetic phenomenon that re-
quires devoting primary and intense attention to its artworks and texts. At a recent business
meeting of the Society for German Renaissance and Baroque Literature (SGRABL Summit,
University of Minnesota, February 2016), not only was there some fierce resistance to the
use of “Baroque” as anything other than an historical marker, but a significant number of
those present even militated against the designation “Early Modern,” favoring “Premodern,”
an impossibly broad, essentially useless category, especially when one considers the affinities
between the Baroque and the modern that Buci-Glucksmann and a number of others have
explored. There was talk of changing the name of the Society—more out of concern over
the diminishing attention the field receives in the U.S., it seemed, than for any substantial
intellectual reason—and one even more meaningless name, something along the lines of
“Earlier Literature” (earlier than what, I wonder?), was actually floated as a possibility. It is
The Contested Baroque 15

experiences such as the first and last of these three that may offer some explanation for di-
minishing attention to German Baroque literature in the United States.
6 Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock: Eine Untersuchung über Wesen und Entstehung
des Barockstils in Italien (Munich: T. Ackermann, 1888) and Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe:
Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1915); Friedrich
Nietzsche, “Vom Barockstile,” in Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, ed.
Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: dtv, 1980), 2:437–438. Nietzsche—who at the
University of Basel was a colleague of Jacob Burckhardt, Wölfflin’s later teacher—discusses
alternating classical and Baroque phases, thus anticipating Wölfflin by nearly a decade.
Nietzsche’s text did receive significant attention from Wilfried Barner in a chapter entitled
“Nietzsche über ‘Barockstil’ und ‘Rhetorik’” of his Barockrhetorik: Untersuchungen zu ihren
geschichtlichen Grundlagen (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1970), 3–21. A more contemporary example
of seeing the Baroque primarily as a suprahistorical phenomenon would be Tom Conley’s
statement, in his excellent foreword to Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold, that “‘Baroque’ designates
a trope that comes from the renewed origins of art and has stylistic evidence that prevails
in culture in general”: Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), x.
7 Rethinking the Baroque, ed. Helen Hills (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), i.
8 While I have given some thought to and occasionally discussed with colleagues aspects of
the canon of Baroque music that reflect the aesthetic phenomenon as I will argue we must
understand it, I am not able to argue with authority regarding the music of the period and so
will leave that to any musicologist who may find it rewarding to pursue.
9 Jane Newman devotes her book, Benjamin’s Library, to the history, from the perspective of
Walter Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, of these articulations, theorizations,
and historicizations in what may be called a tour de force of tertiary literature. Tertiary is
of course what Wissenschaftsgeschichte of literary scholarship—in its relation to its object,
literature—always is. See Jane O. Newman, Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and the
Baroque (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). Newman’s is, as she writes, an attempt to
rescue those debates about the Baroque, including Benjamin’s contribution, from obscurity
“by focusing on the important role the Baroque played in theorizations of European moder-
nity that exploded onto the world stage” in those decades (2). In other words, understanding
the Baroque is not Newman’s primary or even secondary concern. Her concern in analyzing
fin-de-siècle scholarship on the Baroque is understanding a different period and different,
not primarily aesthetic, phenomena through the Baroque. This cannot help but amount to
an instrumentalization of the Baroque itself. And yet how can one do even that without
first having a notion of what the Baroque is, rather than just how things called “Baroque”
may have served these other purposes? Benjamin’s Library, in the end, is not on the whole a
book about German Baroque literature, or even, for that matter, really about scholarship on
Baroque literature as it pertains to understanding that literature, but rather about political,
philosophical, and cultural concerns contemporary to, informing, and evinced by that schol-
arship. Even in the one, long section of a chapter that presents a sustained reading of a work
of Baroque literature, Gryphius’s Catharina von Georgien, what is at stake is less the play itself
than “understanding Benjamin’s reading of Andreas Gryphius’s shockingly literal allegori-
cal play […] in the context of the confessional stew created by Benjamin’s contestation of
Warburg scholarship” (21). The fine insights in Newman’s reading of the play are extensively
encumbered and ultimately overwhelmed by historical and theoretical contexts, the context
of Benjamin’s articulation of allegory, and, as Newman herself asserts, “the emblematic co-
coon that surrounds the Catharine play” (184).
16 Introduction

10 Mine is not another Benjamin book, although I will of course use his insights into Baroque
drama where I find them useful: Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels,
vol. 1, bk. 1, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 203–430. Christopher Braider has commented on the lack of
connection between studies of this Benjamin book on the Baroque Trauerspiel and the
object of Benjamin’s own study: “Critical Theory chiefly focuses on Benjamin’s Ursprung
independent of German Baroque drama as such. However, in a talk at the University of
Colorado, Boulder, in Fall 1999, Samuel Weber evinced an incipient interest in the drama
at least to the extent of checking Benjamin’s claims against some of the texts”: Baroque
Self-Invention and Historical Truth: Hercules at the Crossroads (Burlington, VT: Ashgate,
2004), 32. This focus on Benjamin continues unabated, as we can see, for example, in
Nadir Lahiji’s 2016 book, Adventures with the Theory of the Baroque and French Philosophy
(London: Bloomsbury, 2016). Newman’s Benjamin’s Library makes, even if in the tenu-
ous manner I have asserted, the connection Braider had decried as absent in Benjamin
scholarship.
11 Mieke Bal’s Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999) is a book that developed out of Bal’s work on the ple-
nary lecture she presented at my symposium on “Baroque Re-Visions” at Melk Abbey and
the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna in October 1996 (see pages 2 and 16–18). She
isolates a few phrases from the invitation to the symposium and turns them into straw
men against which she can cast her project, which in the end is actually very much in
the spirit of what the symposium had hoped to achieve: see my introduction, “Vorwort:
Äquivoke Anmerkungen zum vorläufigen Projekt einer Definition des Barock,” in Barock:
Neue Sichtweisen einer Epoche, ed. Peter J. Burgard (Vienna: Böhlau, 2001), 11–14, and the
essay version of Bal’s lecture in the same volume: “Auf die Haut / Unter die Haut: Barockes
steigt an die Oberfläche,” 17–51. The other studies I refer to here are: Claudia Benthien,
Barockes Schweigen: Rhetorik und Performativität des Sprachlosen im 17. Jahrhundert
(Munich: Fink, 2006); Christopher Braider, Baroque Self-Invention and Historical Truth;
Christine Buci-Glucksmann, La folie du voir: De l’esthétique baroque (Paris: Galilée, 1986)
and Baroque Reason; Omar Calabrese, Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times, trans. Charles
Lambert (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Gilles Deleuze, The Fold;
Fernand Hallyn, The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler, trans. Donald M.
Leslie (New York: Zone Books, 1990), especially the chapter entitled “Thinking the Ellipse,”
203–230; Helen Hills’s anthology, Rethinking the Baroque, and her own contributions to
it; Christopher D. Johnson, Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and
Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Lahiji’s Adventures; Giancarlo
Maiorino, The Cornucopian Mind and the Baroque Unity of the Arts; José Antonio Maravall,
Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Paul Francis Panadero, “Die Karnevalisierung des
Barock: Prodigiöse Zeichen, groteske Ausdehnungen und die ‘realistischen Augurien der
Erfahrung’ im Theater Calderóns und Shakespeares,” in Barock: Neue Sichtweisen einer
Epoche, 289–320. The only book included in this list that addresses specifically German
Baroque literature is Benthien’s, because, even though there are a number of points on
which I disagree with it (one of which I will address in my reading of Hoffmannswaldau),
it is an innovative and sophisticated exploration of a wide range of that literature, a read-
ing that pursues a fascinating theme and figure—silence/speechlessness—that is at the
same time, especially in the context of poetry and perhaps even more so drama, always
more than just theme and figure, namely always necessarily also a matter of textuality. As
The Contested Baroque 17

different in focus and aim as her book and this one may be, they are in at least one sense
complementary. If my book is about what is said, and how and why, in German Baroque
literature, Benthien’s is its counterpart avant la lettre in addressing what is not said, and
how and why, in that literature. And whether concerned with what is said or with what is
not said, both are concerned, above all else, with what German Baroque literature does.
12 Throughout, I provide dates of works of art according to the best information I could find
on the year of completion. Some are thus approximate. Occasionally, where apposite to
my argument, I provide the span of years in which a work was created.
13 In the last 20 years alone, there have been two new translations of the novel into English:
The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus, trans. J. A. Underwood (London: Penguin
Books, 2018) and Simplicissimus, trans. Mike Mitchell (Sawtry, UK: Dedalus, 1999). See
Ritchie Robertson’s review of the Underwood translation and comparison of it with
Mitchell’s: “Story of the Scrote’s Own Sprog,” The Times Literary Supplement, May 4, 2018,
4–5.
14 The two books are at different stages of completion: Caravaggio’s Calling: Dissimulation
and Doubt and Skew: Bernini’s Roman Chapels and the Asams’ Munich Church.
15 I will restrict myself to Western and Southern Europe. One could extend the investigation
and the examples to Bohemia (perhaps especially the work of Christoph Dientzenhofer
and his son Kilian Ignaz, but also that of the Asam brothers, Egid Quirin and Cosmas
Damian, who were occasionally active in Bohemia as well as in Bavaria) and elsewhere
in Europe, but there is only so much room here. I will address the Asam brothers in
my study of Bernini’s Roman chapels. Extending the investigation to England is more
problematic: one’s first question, as perhaps with Netherlandish art, might naturally be
how one could find the Baroque, which one tends to link so closely with the Catholic
Counter-Reformation, in a Protestant land, but I think this question can be answered,
especially with reference to Christopher Wren, John Vanbrugh, and Nicholas Hawksmoor,
and I hope to do so in a future study of what I call the “Veiled English Baroque.” Confession
does not strike me as decisive in determining a commitment to the Baroque aesthetic;
indeed, all of the German Baroque literature I investigate in this book was written by
Protestants, with the possible exception of Grimmelshausen, who is thought to have con-
verted to Catholicism.
16 See Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock (1888) and Kunstgeschichtliche
Grundbegriffe (1915). It is in the latter work that Wölfflin establishes his five famous juxta-
positions of the attributes of Renaissance and Baroque art and architecture, viz: linear vs.
painterly, plane vs. recession, closed vs. open form, multiplicity vs. unity, and absolute
vs. relative clarity.
17 For a discussion of the transferral of the term “Baroque” from the fine arts to literature
in the first half of the twentieth century, see René Wellek: “The Concept of Baroque in
Literary Scholarship,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 5, no. 2 (1946): 77–109.
Wilfried Barner, in a 1971 essay, also sets the history of literary scholarship on the Baroque
in the context of the reception of Wölfflin: “Die literarische Barockforschung [floriert]
nun schon seit über einem halben Jahrhundert und [stellt] zudem in ihren Ursprüngen
ein spezifisches Produkt deutscher Wissenschaft dar. 1915 bereits erschienen Heinrich
Wölfflins ‘Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe’, die bekanntlich den entscheidenden
Impuls zur sogenannten Übertragung des Barockbegriffs von der bildenden Kunst auf die
Literatur gegeben haben.” Barner goes on to wonder whether this transfer wasn’t perhaps
a mistake: “Könnte es nicht sein, daß man mit dem Barockbegriff der bildenden Kunst
schon im Ansatz inadäquate Kategorien an die deutsche Literatur des 17. Jahrhunderts
18 Introduction

herantrug?” Wilfried Barner, “Stilbegriffe und ihre Grenzen: Am Beispiel ‘Barock,’” Deutsche
Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 45, no. 2 (1971): 304.
18 Gerhart Hoffmeister, Deutsche und europäische Barockliteratur (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1987),
3–4. Hoffmeister had already been arguing this point for some time; see his “Barocker
Petrarkismus: Wandlungen und Möglichkeiten der Liebessprache in der Lyrik des 17.
Jahrhunderts,” in Europäische Tradition und deutscher Literaturbarock: Internationale
Beiträge zum Problem von Überlieferung und Umgestaltung, ed. Gerhart Hoffmeister
(Bern: Francke, 1973), 37.
19 Wölfflin has been accused of other things as well, most insistently perhaps of being lit-
tle more than a formalist, which is a favorite accusation by art historians of analyses of
works of art that focus on what one actually sees in them more than on historical contexts
and on iconography, which might yield better understanding of a work, but frequently
enough do not. Misreadings of artworks due to insufficient attention to the works them-
selves, misreadings where aspects of works are described that are clearly not in evidence
or where the formal composition is misrepresented, are legion. Even an art historian
whose work I greatly admire not too long ago referred to Wölfflin as an “arch-formalist.”
Two decades earlier, however, Marshall Brown had already argued convincingly against
such a view, concluding that “Wölfflin’s own five paired categories of the understanding
[in his Principles of Art History] are tools for interpreting the meaning of the artistic act
and never a merely formal or analytical apparatus”: “The Classic Is the Baroque: On the
Principle of Wölfflin’s Art History,” Critical Inquiry 9, no. 2 (December 1982): 404. While I
cannot agree, for reasons that will become apparent, and as enticing as the notion may
be, with Brown’s reinscription of the Classical as the Baroque (on the basis of “an os-
cillating balance of sympathy between them,” 385), I think he is correct in pointing out
that Wölfflin’s Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe is a favorite whipping post, but one that
those holding the whips, as is usually the case, cannot do without: “Those who criticize
Wölfflin’s apparent oversimplifications almost invariably do so in the service of convic-
tions about the complexity and difficulty of style formation that they have unwittingly
learned from him” (380). Even if one wishes to insist that he was a reductive formalist, one
still has to acknowledge, I think, that the resultant insights into Classical and Baroque art
are generally accurate.
20 The northeastern German Protestant Baroque is often categorized as Wortbarock, ‘word
Baroque,’ as opposed to the southern German and Austrian Catholic Baroque, which is
seen as Bildbarock, ‘image Baroque.’ For a discussion of this differentiation, in the context
of a larger discussion of allegory, see Rüdiger Campe, “Continuing Forms: Allegory and
translatio imperii in Caspar von Lohenstein und Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,” Germanic
Review 77, no. 2 (2002): 128–145, especially 129 and 141n8.
21 One finds all sorts of other “Baroques” as well—post-Baroque, contemporary Baroque,
etc.—but perhaps the most amusing is the “Ultra-Baroque,” which in its very tautology—
tautology, in its repetition, being construed as a virtual identity of two statements or
ideas, where the apparent identity is of course never truly identical—reflects the non-
self-identity, the non-unity, that I will argue is a significant aspect of the Baroque. See
Ichiro Ono, Divine Excess: Mexican Ultra-Baroque (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996)
and Mabel Moraña, “Baroque / Neobaroque / Ultrabaroque: Disruptive Readings of
Modernity,” in Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context, ed. Nicholas Spadaccini
and Luis Martín-Estudillo (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005), 241–281. The no-
tion of the Ultra-Baroque strikes me as either superfluous or a mistake, insofar as it is de-
fined as “the baroque of the baroque” (Ono, 83) and “utilized to designate extreme forms
The Contested Baroque 19

of baroque style, ‘rococo’ or ‘churrigueresque’” (Moraña, 269). Through its excess one
could say that the Baroque is already a superlative, so that “the baroque of the baroque”
would be the logically impossible superlative of the superlative, and the Churrigueresque
seems very much a part of Baroque excess, while the Rococo is sooner a move away from
than an intensification of the Baroque, if the latter were even possible.
22 Hoffmeister, Deutsche und europäische Barockliteratur, 1; Hans Gerd Rötzer, “Schwerpunkte
der neueren Barockforschung,” IASL 3 (1978): 170; see also Herbert Jaumann, “Barock,”
in Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft: Neubearbeitung des Reallexikons der
deutschen Literaturgeschichte, ed. Klaus Weimar et al., 3rd ed. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1997),
1:200–201. In a 2003 online article, Gerhart Hoffmeister asserts that “because there existed
no convincing congruence with the multiplicity of styles in the various arts (architecture,
music, painting) and literary genres (novels, plays, lyrics), it is counterproductive to as-
sert a specific ‘Baroque style’ as a common denominator for all forms” and that “recently
the tendency has been to avoid the fluid term ‘German Baroque’ altogether” (Hoffmeister
argues instead in favor of “Literature of the Early Modern Period”): “German Baroque
Literature,” The Literary Encyclopedia, first published September 26, 2003, https://www.
litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1332.
23 For a sophisticated defense of Wölfflin, see Brown, “The Classic is the Baroque.”
24 Jeremy Robbins, in describing seventeenth-century Spanish literature, a literature whose
scholars seem to have much less trouble calling it Baroque than is the case with German
literature, writes of “a culture of uncertainty taking hold of the artistic imagination”:
The Challenges of Uncertainty: An Introduction to Seventeenth-Century Spanish Literature
(London: Duckworth, 1998), 10.
25 Baroque Self-Invention and Historical Truth, 5. One could continue here with a further his-
tory of attempts to come to terms with the Baroque, but since Braider has done this so
well and succinctly, I refer readers to pp. 5–9 of his book, which may be the best book
yet written on the Baroque, a critical tour de force, but one that has a significantly differ-
ent focus than mine. Like me, Braider is concerned with the conceptual ground of the
Baroque, but he seeks it in temporality. He recognizes many of the characteristics of the
Baroque that I will be addressing (see especially page 8), but then takes them as a given
and theorizes that what brings them together is their relation to history, “the experience
of unsettling secondness Pascal articulates with Montaigne in view” (12; emphasis in origi-
nal). I, on the other hand, take a step back to ask what the common conceptual ground of
the Baroque in its original manifestation, as aesthetic phenomenon, might be. Braider’s
book earns criticism, however, for its uncritical adoption of a conventional bias about
German Baroque literature among twentieth-century theorists of the Baroque, but one
that I hope my book will demonstrate is mistaken. Echoing the Benjamin scholars he
criticizes for not engaging with the object of Benjamin’s study (see note 10 above), Braider
remarks, in a vast generalization: “Composed in a German that is hard to read, and adopt-
ing forms that show little of the finesse its French, Spanish or Italian counterparts display,
German baroque literature was largely obsolete even in its own day, constituting a corpus
only Benjamin-like antiquarians could love” (22). This statement is misleading: German
Baroque literature is no harder to read for an educated German-speaker than Shakespeare
is for an educated English-speaker. The finesse of the poetry of Opitz, Fleming, Zesen,
Gryphius, and Hoffmannswaldau, of the novels of Grimmelshausen, and of the drama
of Gryphius and Lohenstein requires, as one might expect and as should become appar-
ent in these pages, actual engagement with the texts, even though it may not rise to the
level Braider expects (it was at that point, after all, a very new literary language). And
20 Introduction

the literature was certainly not obsolete in its own day, when one considers that “its own
day” spanned more than 60 years and reverberated even beyond that—at least until the
stultifying ‘classical’ literature and literary theory of Gottsched and the denigration of
the Baroque by Winckelmann in the context of his rapture over the classical, both in the
mid-eighteenth century—or when one considers the intensity and breadth of scholar-
ship on the Baroque in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and then again in
the 1960s and 1970s—when it was not at all unusual to write either one’s doctoral or one’s
postdoctoral thesis on the Baroque—and, indeed, ever since. Braider may have made this
remark, however, less out of conviction than out of a desire to set up his following claim,
that “[t]his antiquarian obsolescence emerges, moreover, as a deliberate feature of one
of German drama’s most prestigious exemplars, the tragedy of Sophonisbe […] by the
‘German Seneca’ Lohenstein” (22).
26 Murray Roston, Milton and the Baroque (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980), 3.
27 Hoffmeister, for example, writes of “die von der Renaissancepoetik und -praxis abhängige
Dichtung der Opitzschule” and points out that it is seen to constitute a “pre-baroque clas-
sicism” (Deutsche und europäische Barockliteratur, 1). Recent scholarship continues in this
vein, e.g., Dirk Niefanger, Barock (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000), 83–92, or Jörg Wesche, who
writes of the “präskriptiven Anspruch der Anleitungspoetiken” with specific reference to
Opitz: “Barock,” in Metzler Lexikon Literatur: Begriffe und Definitionen, ed. Dieter Burdorf,
Christoph Fasbender, and Burkhard Moennighoff, 3rd ed. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007), 70.
For more such views, see the text and notes of Part Two, on Baroque poetics, which will
demonstrate that Opitz himself, while he uses Renaissance poetics, does not depend on
them in the way Hoffmeister and most others believe.
28 See Maiorino, especially 1–3.
29 The most famous and influential jeremiad against the Baroque was that of Johann
Joachim Winckelmann, who has widely been considered the father of modern art history.
See his “Abhandlung von der Fähigkeit der Empfindung des Schönen in der Kunst und
dem Unterrichte in derselben” of 1763, in Winckelmanns Werke in einem Band, ed. Helmut
Holtzhauer (Berlin: Aufbau, 1969), 138–166. There he claims that the works of artists such
as Caravaggio and Bernini lack beauty, arguing, for example, that Caravaggio’s paintings
“cannot” be beautiful, “denn sie sind der Natur des Lichts zuwider” (161). This only proves
that Winckelmann was severely limited in his seeing, that his view of the world and of art
had not progressed beyond the relatively simple clarity of the Renaissance.
30 John T. Cull, “The Baroque at Play: Homiletic and Pedagogical Emblems in Francisco
Garau and Other Spanish Golden Age Preachers,” in Writing for the Eyes in the Spanish
Golden Age, ed. Frederick A. de Armas (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004),
237. The specific system Cull means here is the Jesuit “system of prayer.” Cull’s study con-
cerns the use of emblems by the Jesuits as playful excesses designed to make their doctrine
more palatable (on emblem, excess, and system, see my reading of Grimmelshausen’s
Simplicissimus in Chapter Five of Part Four). See also Calabrese, who discusses excess at
length and relates it both to the (Neo-)Baroque and to what he would call the destruc-
tion of system (see especially the third chapter, “Limit and Excess,” 47–67). However,
Calabrese, who is concerned with defining a cultural system he calls the Neo-Baroque,
repeatedly posits the rehabilitation of excess as or in system, even though his definition
of excess correctly demonstrates its incommensurability with system.
31 Erwin Panofsky, “What is Baroque?,” in Three Essays on Style, ed. Irving Lavin (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1995), 19. Panofsky wrote his essay in 1934 and only added his first long
paragraph on “baroco” in a much later version, according to the editor sometime after
The Contested Baroque 21

1960 (203), where he also added a footnote to a Spanish-language essay of 1934 address-
ing this etymology (editor’s note 1 on page 207). Even after all that time he still seems to
have been unaware of or to have failed to acknowledge at least two treatments of the
relation between “Baroque” and “baroco” that appeared in the two decades preceding his
first version, one by a well-known scholar and one by an already renowned thinker (the
editor also fails to mention them): Karl Borinski’s Die Antike in Poetik und Kunsttheorie:
Von Ausgang des klassischen Altertums bis auf Goethe und Wilhelm von Humboldt, 2 vols.
(Leipzig: Dieterich, 1914), 1:188, 199, 303, and 308 (Borinski, 1:199 and 308, traces the re-
lation between Baroque and baroco back to Baltasar Gracián in his Arte de ingenio of
1642 and revised Agudeza y arte de ingenio of 1648, where Gracián refers to such a syl-
logism) and Benedetto Croce’s 1925 essay, “Il Concetto del Barocco,” La Critica: Revista
di Letteratura, Storia e Filosofia diretta da B. Croce 23 (1925): 129–143, especially 129–130.
Panofsky’s rejection on linguistic grounds of the derivation from a word for irregular pearl
could be a function of portraying the derivation as being definitively “from Latin veruca
and Spanish barueca” (19). The French baroque derives from Spanish barrueco, but more
closely from Portuguese barrôco; however, it is unclear whether this derived from Latin or
another source. One can find assorted conjectures about the origin in various etymologi-
cal dictionaries, including a derivation from Spanish berruca or “wart” (this clearly related
to Latin verruca for wart). Panofsky’s objection on “logical” grounds does not hold, as my
argument should show.
32 Gilles Ménage, Dictionaire etymologique, ov Origines de la langue françoise, rev. ed. (Paris:
J. Anisson, 1694), 82: “Barroques. On appelle ainsi les perles & les dents qui sont d’inégale
grandeur […] Covarruvias, au mot barrueco [Borinski misquotes this as “barrucco”: Die
Antike, 1:303—P.B.], dit que ce mot Espagnol qui signifie une perle barroque.” Johann
Joachim Winckelmann, “Sendschreiben über die Gedanken von der Nachahmung der
griechischen Werke in der Malerey und Bildhauerkunst,” Gedanken über die Nachahmung
der Griechischen Werke in der Malerey und Bildhauerkunst: Zweyte vermehrte Auflage
(Dresden and Leipzig: Walther, 1756), 87: “Sie lernten erkennen, daß in der Natur nichts
dem andern gleich ist. […] Man gab dieser Art zu arbeiten [freely embracing multiplic-
ity and difference—P.B.] die Benennung des Baroquegeschmacks, vermutlich von einem
Worte, welches gebraucht wird bey Perlen und Zähnen, die von ungleicher Grösse sind.”
Timothy Hampton, “Introduction: Baroques,” in “Baroque Topographies: Literature /
History / Philosophy,” special issue, Yale French Studies 80 (1991): 3. Irving Lavin, in his
notes to Panofsky’s “What is Baroque?,” provides references to two other 1960s studies
of the word “Baroque” and the various theories surrounding its derivation (20). See also
Jaumann, “Barock,” 1:199–204.
33 Robert Harbison, Reflections on Baroque (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), re-
marks that “Both sources [the pearl and the mnemonic device—P.B.] identify a distortion
of straightforward form as the crux” (211).
 PART ONE
MODELS
Art and Architecture:
Bernini, Borromini, Velázquez,
Rubens, Fracanzano, De Hooch, et al.
Ein Bild stellt sich dar als das Unübersichtliche, Unlogische, Unsinnige. Es demons-
triert die Zahllosigkeit der Aspekte, es nimmt uns unsere Sicherheit, weil es uns die
Meinung und den Namen von einem Ding nimmt. Es zeigt uns das Ding in seiner
Vielbedeutigkeit und Unendlichkeit, die eine Meinung und Ansicht nicht aufkommen
lassen.

Gerhard Richter
In order to see the subversion of systematics I am talking about, and because
one cannot separate the literary from the artistic Baroque if the term itself is
to remain meaningful and useful, it is necessary first to compare the archi-
tecture, sculpture, and painting of the Renaissance to that of the seventeenth
century. Moreover, approaching Opitz’s poetics by way of art seems to be in-
vited by the doctrine of ut pictura poesis that reigned from the Renaissance
to the Enlightenment and that Opitz himself, as it happens, explicitly invokes
when he writes in a poem that “der Pinsel macht der Feder / Die Feder wide-
rumb dem Pinsel alles nach.[…] edles mahlen [sey] / Poeterey die schweig’ /
und die Poeterey / Ein redendes Gemäld’ und Bild das Lebe.”1 I trust it will
become apparent why Gerhard Richter is right in what he declares about pic-
tures, but only up to the second clause of the final sentence and no further.2
In making this comparison, I bracket out Mannerism.3 Mannerism is a spe-
cific movement of approximately the middle half of the sixteenth century, fall-
ing between the Renaissance and Baroque, while some art historians see the
Baroque as a return in some ways to the classicism of the Renaissance. On
my view, the justification for seeing the Baroque as a return to Renaissance
classicism—with all the harmony, stability, and clarity the latter implies—lies
in its realistic representation of nature and in its turn away from that very obvi-
ous Mannerist departure from the naturalism of the Renaissance.4 One need
only compare the naturalism of Caravaggio’s, Bernini’s or Rubens’s figures
(1610, Fig. 2) with a Bronzino or with the distorted perspectives, the impos-
sible proportions, and the stretched-out figures of a Parmigianino or, on top
of all that, the supernaturalism, almost surrealism of El Greco. Parmigianino’s
Madonna of the Long Neck (1540, Fig. 3) looks, after all, as if she’s just had a
session on the rack, and the radical recession of the eight columns in the right
background of the painting serves to mock accurate perspective. In this regard,
Baroque painting and sculpture are far subtler. In what appears to be a return
to Renaissance naturalism, the Baroque actually eclipsed the Renaissance by
achieving the greatest verisimilitude in painted and sculpted representation
that has ever been attained.5 However, this naturalism is only one aspect of
Baroque art, and it creates the context for a much more forceful subversion of
the systematic principles underlying Renaissance art.

© Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2019 | doi:10.30965/9783846764008_003

26 MODELS

Fig. 2
Peter Paul Rubens, The
Elevation of the Cross, 1610.

One might say that Mannerism paved the way for Baroque subversions, but
that the Baroque recognized a more effective means of subversion in the use
or deployment of the naturalism of the Renaissance. An effectively subversive
discourse or practice always necessarily inhabits the discourse or practice it
subverts.
Especially in the early stages of this first part of the book, which grounds my
readings of German Baroque literature, I focus on Italian art and architecture,
not German, because of its exemplarity—Italy and more specifically Rome
being the cradle of the Baroque—and because I am concerned with the nature
of the Baroque in general and with pursuing the source of its aesthetic impulse
regardless of artistic medium and national boundaries. As the argument pro-
gresses, I turn my attention increasingly to Flemish, Spanish, and finally Dutch
Baroque painting, to which the points I make about the Italian Baroque can
easily be seen to apply.
The introductory comparisons of Baroque to Renaissance art and architec-
ture are mostly quite brief, serving primarily to point up essential contrasts
Art and Architecture 27

Fig. 3
Parmigianino, Madonna dal Collo
Lungo, 1540.

and to point out essential components of the Baroque aesthetic. As these be-
come established, I will dive more deeply into analysis of individual works,
especially Bernini’s David and then, in the last third of Part One, paintings by
Velázquez, Rubens, Fracanzano, and de Hooch.

BAROQUE VERSUS RENAISSANCE, REVISITED

In one of the quintessential and certainly most familiar works of the

Renaissance, Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man (c. 1490, Fig. 4), we can see not only
that age’s concentration on regular, undistorted forms, but also, schematically,
the desire to make nature, in the form of man, as well as art, in the form of an
artist’s rendering of the human body, fit into a system of boundaries, center-
ing, and coherence. In Cesare Cesariano’s illustrations for his 1521 translation of
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio’s De architectura, we find another Vitruvian Man, albeit
28 MODELS

Fig. 4
Leonardo da Vinci,
Vitruvian Man, 1490.

one whose conformity to a perfectly central structure is only accomplished

with some force (Fig. 5).6 Leonardo frames the human form within an inter-
section of the two grounding forms of Renaissance systematics, the circle and
the square. In Cesariano we find the same, except that he goes to exceptional
lengths, namely dramatic inaccuracy in the representation of the human body,
to make the square fit perfectly in the circle, which in turn fits perfectly into
another square. Cesariano dots his systematic i by drawing crossing diagonal
lines that start at the corners of the outer square, run directly through the inter-
section of the circle and the corners of the inner square through the tip of the
man’s middle fingers and touching the tips of his big toes, and that intersect at
his navel. A greater focus on the center, both formally and thematically, is dif-
ficult to imagine. The will to system is unmistakable. 30 years earlier, Leonardo
did not go to such lengths. That he actually, due to his accurate representation
of the human form, calls attention to the failure of that systematization does
not, however, diminish the significance of the attempt. We might then take
these images as a basis on or against which to consider the art and architecture
of the Renaissance and Baroque.
Art and Architecture 29

Fig. 5
Cesare Cesariano,
Vitruvian Man, 1521.

ARCHITECTURE

Turning first to architecture, the plans of any number of sacral buildings—

let us take Bramante’s plans for St. Peter’s and his Tempietto as examples
(c. 1505 and c. 1502, Fig. 6 and 7)—and the treatises of Leon Battista Alberti
and Sebastiano Serlio demonstrate the Renaissance concern for perfect pro-
portion, the repeated use of circles and squares, symmetry, and, above all, the
idea of the center. Serlio’s many variations of church plans in his Seven Books
of Architecture would reflect, in a kind of summation, the fixation on centered
structure at the heart of the architecture of Renaissance classicism (Fig. 8 and
9, from Book Three and Book Five, respectively).7
Keeping Leonardo, Cesariano, Bramante, and Serlio in mind, we can see
how the buildings of the age reflect these conceptual foundations. For ex-
ample, Alberti’s San Sebastiano in Mantua (1460, Fig. 10, 11). Reflecting central
tenets of Alberti’s 1452 De re aedificatoria, it is a free-standing, central-plan
church, indeed one of the two archetypical centralized plans, namely the
30 MODELS

Fig. 6
Donato Bramante, St. Peter’s, Rome, Plan,
1505.

Fig. 7
Donato Bramante, Tempietto, Rome, Plan
1502.

Fig. 8
Sebastiano Serlio, Plan of Bramante’s
Dome, 1540.
Art and Architecture 31

Fig. 9
Sebastiano Serlio, Plan for a Temple, 1551.

Fig. 10
Leon Battista Alberti, San Sebastiano,
Mantua, Façade, 1460.

Fig. 11
Leon Battista
Alberti, San
Sebastiano, Mantua,
Plan, 1460.
32 MODELS

Greek cross (the other being the circle), with its square in the center. San
Sebastiano stresses coherence through this centering, but also in the symme-
try of both façade and plan and—of great significance to Renaissance archi-
tects—in the equal width and height of its façade, which imply the perfect
proportions of a square. Regarding Alberti’s Sant’Andrea in Mantua (1471, Fig.
12), aside from the equal width and height of its façade, of note is, as Janson
points out, yet another manifestation of Renaissance architectural coherence
in the “complete continuity [of the façade] with the interior of the church,
where the same colossal order, the same proportions, and the same triumphal
arch motif reappear in the nave walls; the façade offers an exact ‘preview’ of
the interior.”8 Commissioned to complete the façade of Santa Maria Novella in
Florence (1470, Fig. 13), Alberti refashioned a Gothic façade in his Renaissance
idiom. He added the striped corner piers, the four Corinthian columns, and the
classical central portal on the lower level, the latter of which, in conjunction
with the two original side doors, emphasizes the façade’s anticipation of the
tall central nave flanked by two smaller side naves that the visitor finds upon
crossing the threshold into the church. Alberti’s more significant contributions
to the façade—the attic across the entire width and the second story—bring
us back to what we witnessed in Leonardo and Cesariano: he not only includes
circles in the scrolls and pediment of the second story and the long row of

Fig. 12
Leon Battista Alberti, Sant’Andrea,
Mantua, Façade, 1471.
Art and Architecture 33

Fig. 13
Leon Battista
Alberti, Santa Maria
Novella, Florence,
Façade 1470.

circles within squares across the attic, as well as the circle (the window) and
square intersecting on the upper level, but he also renders the façade a system
of three equal squares. By adding the attic to the first story, Alberti transformed
it into a rectangle twice as wide as it is high or, given the vertical division at the
center of the main portal, two equal squares. He then added the third square
that, together with the massive curved scrolls on either side of it, constitutes
the second story and that is centered on top of those two squares. (In order
to recognize the lower squares, one need only imagine or draw a vertical line
down from the peak of the pediment and a horizontal line across the top of
the cornice above the attic.)9 Alberti thus achieved equal height and width in
this façade as well.
By contrast, when we consider the façade of Francesco Borromini’s San
Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (commonly known as San Carlino; interior comple-
tion 1641, first story of façade completed 1667 by Borromini, remainder of fa-
çade and bell tower completed 1677 by Bernardo Castelli Borromini; Fig. 14),
we find a radical departure from and critique of the Renaissance architectural
idiom. Here is a church that accommodates itself to its site, rather than assert-
ing independence from it, insofar as Borromini, first, made it fit a small and
irregularly shaped plot and, second, had to incorporate into the façade and
plan of the church the late sixteenth-century fountain, representing the River
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 The Project Gutenberg eBook of Samuel
Reynolds House of Siam, pioneer medical
missionary, 1847-1876
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
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Title: Samuel Reynolds House of Siam, pioneer medical

missionary, 1847-1876

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Release date: July 30, 2022 [eBook #68647]

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SAMUEL

REYNOLDS HOUSE OF SIAM, PIONEER MEDICAL MISSIONARY,
1847-1876 ***
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
 SAMUEL REYNOLDS HOUSE
“THE MAN WITH THE GENTLE HEART”
Rev. SAMUEL REYNOLDS HOUSE, M.D.
 “The Man With the Gentle Heart”

Samuel Reynolds House

of Siam

Pioneer Medical Missionary

1847-1876

By
GEORGE HAWS FELTUS, A. M., B.D.

ILLUSTRATED
 New York Chicago
Fleming H. Revell Company
London and Edinburgh
 Copyright, mcmxxiv, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

Printed in the United States of America

New York: 158 Fifth Avenue

Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave.
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Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street
 Preface
Quaint, old-time title pages sought to present an epitome of the
contents of the volume. While the name of Dr. House occupies the
sole post of honour on this present title page, none would be more
urgent than he to have that place shared by his wife, Harriet Pettit
House, and her assistant, Arabella Anderson-Noyes, and by their
godson, Boon Itt, whose achievements occupy a good share of the
pages that follow.
The essential material in this book has been drawn from the letters
and journal of Dr. House, now for the first time available for the
purpose. This material has been supplemented by correspondence
with various individuals connected with the principal persons
mentioned. The facts thus ascertained have been interpreted and
amplified by the careful reading of nearly every book in English on
Siamese subjects. For this reason, the narrative may claim to be
fairly complete and authentic.
Two reasons have prompted publication. One reason is to make
accessible valuable historical materials. In the archives of the
Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions no records covering this
period have been found other than the meagre references in the
annual reports of the Board. The diary of Dr. House’s co-worker, Rev.
Stephen Mattoon, was destroyed by fire; and, so far as is known, no
other private records for those early years are in existence. The only
primary source of information is the chapter, “History of Missions in
Siam,” from the pen of Dr. House, in the volume Siam and Laos, in
which his modesty has obscured the importance of his own labours.
So this book is offered as a contribution to the history of the Church
in Siam.
The other reason is that the Church is entitled to the stimulus of
the heroic examples of these godly people. Biographies, at best, do
not appeal to a large circle of readers. Missionary biographies
appeal to fewer still. However, a book that stimulates a few hundred
workers in the vineyard of the Lord may effect more good in the long
run than a book of great but passing popularity. I venture to believe
that few will read the record of the life-work of Dr. and Mrs. House
and the brief story of Boon Itt without being quickened by the
example of their persistent faith, buoyant hopefulness, sublime trust
and apostolic devotion.
Not the least worth while do I count it to be able to place this
narrative in the hands of the young Church of Siam that she may
transmit to the rising generation the story of “The Man With the
Gentle Heart.”
I acknowledge with appreciation the hearty encouragement of
friends to publish what my own inclination would have allowed to
remain in private manuscript. Also, I gladly state that publication
would not have been possible without the financial assistance of
friends who feel that the Church of today should have the privilege of
knowing these noble characters, but who themselves prefer to
remain unnamed.
George Haws Feltus.
The Manse, Waterford, N. Y.
 Contents
I. A Sudden Plunge Into Work 9
II. “The Man with the Gentle Heart” 23
III. The Little Chisel Attacks the Big Mountain 34
IV. Relations with Royalty and Officials 47
V. Lengthening Cords and Strengthening
Stakes 63
VI. Cholera Comes But the Doctor Carries On 76
VII. Providence Changes Peril Into Privilege 101
VIII. Siam Opens Her Doors—More Workers Enter 131
IX. First the Dawn, Then the Daylight 156
X. New King, New Customs, New Favours 179
XI. Harriet Pettit House 195
XII. Home Again, and “Home At Last” 221
XIII. Boon Tuan Boon Itt 230
 Illustrations
FACING
PAGE
Rev. Samuel Reynolds House, M.D. Title
Sketch Map of Siam 34
Harriet Pettit House 196
Rev. Boon Tuan Boon Itt 230
 I
A SUDDEN PLUNGE INTO WORK
Dr. Samuel R. House did not have time nor need to “hang out a
shingle” upon reaching Bangkok. He had been there only a few days
—not long enough to unpack his goods—when “a message came
from some great man by three trusty servants that a servant whom
he loved very much had got angry and had half cut his hand off with
a sword.”
This wound was not accidental but self-inflicted. It was a perverted
result of a Siamese custom. In those days slavery prevailed in the
country. Besides the war-captives who were cast into slavery,
custom made it possible for any of the common people to be sold
into servitude. If a man failed to pay a debt there were two
alternatives before him, to be confined in one of the horrible jails until
he discharged his obligation, or to sell himself or his wife or children
into slavery to remain in that state until the accumulated value of the
services should cancel the debt.
Only too often these debts were the result of gambling, a vice that
was universally prevalent under license of the government. If the
debtor was fortunate enough, he might sell the chosen victim to
some lord who was willing to accept the services in pledge for a loan
with which to pay the actual creditor. Such an arrangement was not
altogether without its advantages, for many an improvident
spendthrift had a comfortable living for himself and family assured by
the better management of his lord. But once in servitude the victim
was likely to be held in peonage indefinitely, because usury on the
loan was liable to mount up faster than the value of services
rendered.
It will readily be imagined that a man so improvident as to permit
himself to fall into slavery would not be the most willing worker, and
many would be the tricks of the lazy man to labour as little as
possible. A rather common scheme to avoid an unpleasant duty or
merely to spite the over-lord was to go to the extreme of inflicting
upon self a wound that would incapacitate from work. Such was the
nature of this first surgical case to which Dr. House was called.
The readiness with which this great man summoned a strange
foreign doctor will be easily understood when it is known that for
twelve years previous there had been an American physician in
Bangkok. Since 1835 Rev. Daniel B. Bradley, M.D., representing the
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (A B C F
M), had been practising medicine and he had established a high
reputation among all classes for western medicine and surgery. On
account of the recent death of his wife, Dr. Bradley, with his young
children, had sailed for home only a few weeks before the arrival of
the new missionary.
When Dr. House set out for Siam he knew that Dr. Bradley was
there and, having had no practical experience in his profession
before leaving home, he looked forward to beginning his labours in
association with one who not only was a skilled practitioner but who
also knew the pathological conditions of the Siamese. When, upon
arrival, Dr. House discovered that Dr. Bradley had withdrawn he felt
some alarm at the absence of professional counsel, for he had a
constitutional lack of self-confidence that caused him to feel a painful
burden of responsibility in prescribing for patients. At the end of the
first six months he wrote:
“Whatever seemed once likely to be my fate it is pretty
certain now that there is more danger of my wearing out
than of rusting out in this land. Have been on the run or
occupied with visitors all the day and evening ... and my
poor brain has, like its fellow labourer the heart, been
compelled to go through with a great deal. What sights of
 human misery I am compelled to see. And to feel that I
have not the power of skill to alleviate,—the iron enters my
soul.”
Whatever may have been the first effect of being compelled to
enter upon his profession alone, it is doubtful whether Dr. House
ever perceived that this constraint was probably one means by which
he gained the confidence of the Siamese within a very short period.
For instead of being regarded either as a competitor or as an
assistant to Dr. Bradley, he was accepted at the outset upon the
reputation which his predecessor had so firmly established. It was
this repute of western medicine which caused the great man to send
so promptly for an unknown physician to treat the self-mutilated
servant.
Quickly it became known among the people of Bangkok that
another physician had arrived. The calls for treatment came in such
numbers and with such importunity that in self-defense it was
deemed wise to open the dispensary which had remained closed
since the departure of Dr. Bradley, although there was only a limited
supply of drugs on hand and the nearest base of supplies was
London. The dispensary, or hospital as it was sometimes called, of
which Dr. House thus suddenly found himself the proprietor and
whole staff, was just one of the innumerable floating houses which
lined the river banks of the Siamese capital. It is said that when this
new capital was being established the common people were not
allowed to build houses on land but permitted to live only in boats. At
any rate, until modern times the larger portion of the population lived
in floating houses.
These houses are simply constructed. A raft of bamboo forms the
foundation, which is moored to the bank or to poles driven into the
mud. Upon that foundation a one-story house of boards, thatched
with palm leaves, is built. The house is, customarily, divided into
three rooms. At either end, extending clear across the floor is a
kitchen and a common bedroom. The space between is occupied by
the common living-room and a porch. The living-room is fully open
along the porch, from which it is separated by the rise of a step.
Closely packed together in irregular rows, sometimes two or three
deep, these houses are ranged along the banks of the river and of
the many canals that form the Venetian highways of the city. The
channel beneath the houses, kept from being stagnant by movement
of the tide, served at once as the sewer and the family bath. Many of
these houses are occupied as stores, with their merchandise
exposed to the full view of the customer who does his shopping in a
boat.
It was such a house as this that served the missionary as a
hospital. But “hospital” is scarcely the proper word to use judged
from the equipment, which consisted of a chair or two, a table for
operations and a few mats for the patients. But the place had one
great advantage—the open side exposed the work of the foreign
doctor to the gaze of the curious natives who stopped while passing
in their boats, and then related to their friends the wonders they had
seen.
Here in this rude native shelter, until he gave up his profession, Dr.
House applied himself with deep devotion and self-abandon to
relieving the physical sufferings of the people. He placed himself
wholly at their service, and made no discrimination between rank of
those he served. Frequently he would not reach the dinner table till
the middle of the afternoon, detained by the importuning patients;
and he even laments that the people would not summon him in the
night time in case of serious need.

SOME TYPICAL CASES

His record of patients, to one who is not familiar with a physician’s
records, gives astonishment at the kind of cases which seemed to
predominate. One class was the ulcers and running sores—many of
them most aggravated. These usually were the result of long-
neglected wounds. He writes of extracting bamboo splinters great
and small that had become imbedded in the flesh and remained
there to produce serious inflammation and infection. In such cases
an ignorance too dense for intelligence to comprehend was the
contributory cause of untold suffering. A second class of cases
frequently appearing was that of fresh wounds resulting from
drunken brawls, street fights, treachery and revenge, or self-
mutilation. Scarcely a week passed but a patient was brought in with
head cut open, face gashed, back lashed, or some other gaping cut.
But most loathsome of all were the diseases which the doctor
characterised as the result of vices—diseases which found victims
among all sorts and conditions of men who “working that which is
unseemly” received “in themselves that recompense of their errors
which was meet.”
A cursory review of one day’s succession of patients will be
suggestive. Here returns a man with a tumor on his ear, having the
previous day been advised to come for an operation:
“With good courage and I believe without a trembling
hand, I sat down to this, my first operation not only in the
Kingdom of Siam, but the first operation I think I ever
undertook. It was a simple one, and oh, I cannot but catch
such a glimpse of my Father’s loving-kindness in thus
gently leading his poor ignorant by such simpler cases into
the confidence in myself necessary to do the more serious
cases which will doubtless fall to my lot.... Believing that
without His blessing the simplest operation would fail and
with it the most doubtful one might prosper, I lifted up my
heart a moment to Him in whose name I had ventured to
come among this people to try to do them good.”
While attending him, a boat came up with two women, one a
loathsome object full of sores and scabs—face, hands and limbs—
the scars of former ulcers. A Chinaman with a scrofulous neck—a
lad with gastric derangement—a boy whose leg was transfixed with
a sharp piece of bamboo—so moves the procession. As he returns
late for dinner he observes:
“This morning was fully occupied till dinner at 2 p. m.,
trying to do the works of mercy—how could I send any
away empty! And oh, how happy I should have been in
such Christ-like works had I but knowledge of the
diseases, and judgment and skill. As it is now, the
deciding what is to be done with each case is an act of the
 mind positively painful, because I am constantly fearing
that I may not follow the best possible plan.”
On another day thus reads the entry:
“On going down to the floating house at 9 a. m., found
several new patients. A Chinaman of fifty, with caries of
the lower jaw, skin of cheek adhering, pus has discharged
from a large cavity within the mouth. Another Chinaman
with syphilitic destruction of the bones of the nose—a hole
left in the flattened face where pus was discharging.... He
seemed to be in great torment—eaten of worms literally.
Now a mother brings a naked child of five, having large
ulcers and a lump on the thigh, the sequel of the smallpox
had two or three months ago. A Chinaman brings the child
of a friend; poor lad, the smallpox had destroyed one eye
and blinded the other—so no hope, no remedy.”

BUSY DAYS AND A BURDENED HEART

The hours at the hospital were daily from early morning, frequently
from six or seven o’clock, till noon. During the latter part of the
afternoon he answered calls in various parts of the city. By these
calls he came into the homes of the people and became better
acquainted with them than he could have done under ordinary
circumstances. He gives what he calls a fair specimen of the
missionary physician’s life in Siam when his hands are full:
“When I awaked in the morning found two sets of
servants waiting for me—one from Prince Chao Fah Noi,
who had sent his boat for me to go up to his palace just as
soon as I could finish my breakfast; another from Chao
Arim, the King’s brother, wishing me to come over and see
some one in his palace very sick. My first duty of course
was to attend to little George, whom I found still living,
though much the same. This occupied the time before
breakfast. After a hasty meal, stepped into the sampan
sent for me (the servants still waiting to take me across