Mimesis (19 page)

A scene, then, which no antique historian would have considered worth representing, Gregory relates in the most graphic manner; and it would seem to have been its very graphicness which made him want to represent it. If, for example, we read the story of the flight of the hostage Attalus (3, 15; it furnished the subject of Grillparzer’s
Weh dem der lügt
), we come upon the scene where the fugitives hide from their mounted pursuers behind a bramble. The horsemen halt just in front of it:
dixitque unus, dum equi urinam proiecerint …
(and one of them said, while the horses staled …). What classical author would have given such a detail! We see how Gregory, to make his report come alive, invents such things spontaneously, out of the compulsion of his own imagination—after all, he was not present! What he related he tried to make visual, palpable, perceptible through all the senses. In this he is also served by the most distinctive characteristic of his style: the numerous brief pieces of direct discourse, which he uses wherever he has an opportunity. Any story that he can, he thus makes into a scene. We have already referred to the role which direct discourse plays in classical historiography (pp. 39 and 46). It is used there almost exclusively for set speeches in a rhetorical vein. The emotion and drama in them is purely rhetorical. They organize and regulate the facts but do not make them concrete. Gregory on the other hand gives us dialogues and similar brief utterances by his personages—words which break out in a moment and change the moment into a scene. I cannot here enumerate the long series of scenes in which he has one or two people speak in his clumsy Latin, which
often gets in the way, which seems too eager to sound literary, but through which time and again the concrete vigor of the vernacular penetrates. But let me mention at least a few examples (of which the murder scene just mentioned already furnishes one). In the story of Attalus the conversation between the cook and his master (
rogo ut facias mihi prandium quod admirentur et dicant quia in domu regia melius non aspeximus
, 3, 15—I want you to fix up a dinner for me that will really surprise them and make them say they never saw a better, not even at the King’s house;
ibid
., the conversation at night between the cook and his son-in-law); in the struggle over the bishopric of Clermont, the threats with which the presbyter Cato assails the archdeacon Cautinus (
Ego te removebo, ego te humiliabo, ego tibi multas neces impendi praecipiam
, 4, 7—I’ll kick you out, I’ll make you eat dirt, I’ll have you put to death by inches); the argument between King Chilperic and Gregory over the Trinity (anger and scorn in the King’s answers, for instance,
manifestum est mihi in hac causa Hilarium Eusebiumque validos inimicos habere
—I obviously have some very powerful opponents in this matter, like Hilary and Eusebius—or
sapientioribus a te hoc pandam qui mihi consentiant
, 5, 44—I’ll put this matter to wiser men than you and they will agree with me); Fredegundis at Bishop Praetextatus’ sickbed, with the entire preceding and following scene (8, 31); Bishop Bertramnus of Bordeaux’s answer concerning his sister (
requirat nunc eam revocetque quo voluerit, me obvium non habebit
, 9, 33—Let him look for her and take her wherever he wants to; I won’t object); the violent argument between Princess Rigundis and her mother (9, 34); Guntchram Boso and the Bishop of Trier (9, 10); and as a particularly arresting example, the downfall of Mundericus, when, toward the end, where Mundericus is led through the gates of his castle by the traitor Aregyselus, the moment of suspense before the murder is set in sharp dramatic relief by a few words in direct discourse:
Quid adspicitis tam intenti, populi? An numquid non vidistis prius Mundericum?
—Why are you staring at us like that, you people? Haven’t you ever seen Mundericus before? (3, 14).

In all these conversations and exclamations, brief, spontaneous passages between human beings are dramatized in a most concrete fashion: eye to eye, statement answering statement, the actors face one another breathing and alive—a procedure which can hardly be found in antique historiography; even the dialogue of the classical stage is shaped more rationally and more rhetorically. The spontaneous
and brief dialogue does, however, occur in the Bible—compare what we said on the subject above, p. 45. Undoubtedly the rhythm and the atmosphere of the Bible, especially of the New Testament, are always present in Gregory’s mind and help to determine his style. And they release forces which are already present in Gregory and his epoch. For everywhere in his History the spoken language of the people unmistakably makes its presence felt; though the time when it can be written is still far away, it keeps echoing through Gregory’s consciousness. Gregory’s literary Latin not only is decadent grammatically and syntactically, it is used in his work to an end for which, originally or at least in its heyday, it seemed little suited—that is, to imitate concrete reality. For the literary Latin, and especially the literary prose, of the golden age is an almost excessively organizing language, in which the material and sensory side of the facts is rather viewed and ordered from above than vividly presented in its materiality and sensoriness. Together with the rhetorical tradition, the legal and administrative genius of the Romans contributes to this. In the Roman prose of the golden age there is a predominant tendency simply to report matters of fact, if possible only to suggest them in very general terms, to allude to them, to keep aloof from them—and, on the other hand, to put all the precision and vigor of expression into syntactical connections, with the result that the style acquires as it were a strategic character, with extremely clear articulations, whereas the subject matter, the stuff of reality, which lies between them, though it is mastered, is not exploited in its sensory potentialities. (This is so even in Cicero’s letters, and at times most emphatically; as an example one might read the famous apologia in the letter to P. Lentulus Spinther, ad fam. 1, 9, especially §21.) The tools of syntactical connection thus reach the height of subtlety, exactness, and diversity—an observation which applies not only to conjunctions and other devices of subordination, but also to the use of tenses, word order, antithesis, and numerous other rhetorical devices, which are likewise made to serve the same end of exact, subtle, yet pliable and richly shaded disposition. This wealth of articulations and dispositional devices makes possible a great variety of subjective exposition, amazingly facilitates reasoning on the facts, and leaves the writer a freedom—not again attained in such a measure until long afterward—to suppress certain facts and to suggest doubtful details without assuming explicit responsibility.

Gregory’s language, on the other hand, is but imperfectly equipped to organize facts; as soon as a complex of events ceases to be very
simple, he is no longer able to present it as a coherent whole. His language organizes badly or not at all. But it lives in the concrete side of events, it speaks with and in the people who figure in them. And it can give forceful and varied expression to their pleasure, their pain, their scorn and anger, or whatever other passions may chance to be raging in them (whereas the judgments Gregory occasionally passes on his characters are on the whole summary and devoid of finesse; for example 9, 19, toward the end, concerning Sicharius). How much more direct his sensory participation in events is than that of any classical author, we can learn from a comparison with the most realistic of them all, Petronius. Petronius copies the language of his parvenu freedmen, he makes them speak their corrupt and repugnant jargon as a much more conscious and exact imitator than Gregory; but it is obvious that he applies this style as a rhetorical device and that he would write a report or a history quite differently. He is a gentleman of rank and culture, presenting a farce to his equals, with every
raffinement
. He is consciously dealing in a comic art form, and if he so chooses he can write in many other veins as well. But Gregory has nothing to hand except his grammatically confused, syntactically impoverished, and almost sophomoric Latin; he has no stops to pull, as he has no public he might impress with an unfamiliar excitant, a new variant of style. But he does have the concrete events which take place around him; he witnesses them or he hears them “hot from the oven,” and in a vernacular which, though we may be unable to form a completely clear idea of it, is obviously always present to his ear as the raw material of his story while he labors to translate it back into his semi-literary Latin. What he relates is his own and his only world. He has no other, and he lives in it.

Furthermore, the pattern of the events he has to report meets his style halfway. Compared with what earlier Roman historians had to report, they are all local events and they take place among people whose instincts and passions were violent and whose rational deliberations were crude and primitive. True enough, Gregory’s work gives us a very imperfect idea of the connections of political events; but, reading it, we almost smell the atmosphere of the first century of Frankish rule in Gaul. There is a progressive and terrible brutalization. The point is not simply that unqualified force comes to the fore in every local district, so that the central governments are no longer alone in its possession, but also that intrigue and policy have lost all formality, have become wholly primitive and coarse. Such concealment and
circumlocution in human intercourse as are characteristic of every higher culture—politeness, rhetorical euphemism, indirect approach, social appearances, legal formalities even in the pursuit of a political or commercial robbery, and so on—fall into abeyance, or, where some vestiges of them remain, survive at best as crude caricatures. Lusts and passions lose every concealing form; they show themselves in the raw and with palpable immediacy. This brutal life becomes a sensible object; to him who would describe it, it presents itself as devoid of order and difficult to order, but tangible, earthy, alive. Gregory was a bishop—it was his duty to develop Christian ethical attitudes; his office was a practical and demanding one, in which the cure of souls might at any moment be combined with political and economic questions. In the preceding epoch the center of gravity of the Church’s activity had still been the consolidation of Christian dogma, a task in which subtlety and intellectuality had often been displayed to excess. In the sixth century that activity, at least in the West, was concentrated upon practical and organizational matters. This shift is vividly exemplified by Gregory. He lays no claim to rhetorical training; he has no interest in dogmatic controversies; for him the decisions of the Church Councils are fixed and beyond dispute. But there is room in his heart for everything that can impress the people—legends of the saints, relics, and miracles to feed the imagination, protection against violence and oppression, simple moral lessons made palatable by promises of future rewards. The people among whom he lived understood nothing about dogma and had but a very crude idea of the mysteries of the faith. They had lusts and material interests, mitigated by fear of one another and of supernatural forces.

Gregory seems to have been just the right man for these conditions. He was little more than thirty years old when he became Bishop of Tours. If we may judge the man by the writer, he must have been spirited and courageous, and certainly he was not easily disconcerted by anything he saw. He is one of the first examples of that actively practical sense of reality which we so often have occasion to admire in the Catholic church and which, developing early, made Christian dogma into something that would function in the realm of life on earth. Nothing human is foreign to Gregory. His lights search every depth. He calls things by their right names, yet manages to preserve his dignity and a certain unctuousness of tone. Nor does he in any sense refuse to employ secular in conjunction with spiritual means. He understands that the Church must be rich and powerful if she is to
achieve lasting moral ends in this world, and that he who would make a lasting conquest of men’s hearts must bind them to himself by practical interests too. Furthermore, the Church was forced into the domain of practical activity in many ways—by the giving and receiving of alms, by her role in mediating disputes, by the administration of her rapidly increasing land-holdings, and by all sorts of political involvements. In a higher and less immediately practical sense, Christianity had been realistic from the beginning. We have already discussed how Christ’s life among the lower classes and the simultaneous sublimity and shamefulness of his Passion shattered the classical conception of the tragic and the sublime. But the Church’s realism, as it appears, perhaps for the first time, in literary form in Gregory, goes still further, into practical activity in the practical world, is nourished by everyday experience, and has its feet on the ground. Gregory is professionally in contact with all the people and conditions he writes about; he is professionally interested in individual ethical phenomena; they are the ever-present field of his activity. From his activity in the pursuit of his duties he acquires his ability to observe and the desire to write down what he observes; and his very personal gift for the concrete evolved naturally from his office. In his case any aesthetic separation of the realms of the sublime and tragic on the one hand and of the everyday and real on the other is of course out of the question. A churchman, practically concerned with the life of men, cannot separate these realms. He encounters human tragedy every day in the mixed, random material of life.

To be sure, his talent and his temperament take this Bishop Gregory far beyond the realm of what is strictly concerned with his cure of souls and the practical problems of the Church. Half unconsciously he becomes a writer, a molder of things, laying hold of what is alive. Not every priest could have done that; yet at that period no one could have done it who was not a priest. Here lies the difference between the Christian and the original Roman conquest: the agents of Christianity do not simply organize an administration from above, leaving everything else to its natural development; they are duty bound to take an interest in the specific detail of everyday incidents; Christianization is directly concerned with and concerns the individual person and the individual event. It seems, furthermore, that Gregory was conscious of the significance and even of the specific character of his writings. For although he often apologizes for having the temerity to write
despite his inadequate literary training (which is, by the way, a traditional rhetorical formula), he yet in one instance (9, 31) adds a solemn request to posterity not to alter his text in any way:
ut numquam libros hos aboleri faciatis aut rescribi, quasi quaedam eligentes et quaedam praetermittentes, sed ita omnia vobiscum integra inlibataque permaneant sicut a nobis relicta sunt
. And he makes the same point still more clearly in the following lines, which are an allusion to the rhetoric of the schools, whose further development in medieval Latin they seem to anticipate: “If you, priest of God, whoever you may be [so he addresses posterity] are so learned [here he enumerates every discipline and every branch of literary knowledge] that you find my style boorish [
ut tibi stilus noster sit rusticus
], I yet implore you, do not destroy what I have written.” Today when Gregory, even as a stylist, seems to many of us more valuable than the majority of the most polished humanists, one cannot read such an apostrophe without emotion. In another passage he makes his mother appear to him in a dream and urge him to write, and then, when he objects that he is lacking in literary culture, answer him:
Et nescis, quia nobiscum propter intelligentiam populorum magis, sicut tu loqui potens es, habetur praeclarum?
(Do you not know that we hold the way you are able to write in higher esteem, because the people can understand it?) And so he falls to work courageously, to quench the thirst of the people:
sed quid timeo rusticitatem meam, cum dominus Redemptor et deus noster ad distruendam mundanae sapientiae vanitatem non oratores sed piscatores, nec philosophos sed rusticos praelegit?
(But why should I be ashamed of my lack of culture, if our Lord and Redeemer, to destroy the vanity of worldly wisdom, chose not orators but fishermen, not philosophers but peasants?) This entire passage, with the vision of his mother in a dream, does not occur in the
History of the Franks
but in the preface to the
Life of Saint Martin
and is directly related to the saint’s miracles. But it can be applied without hesitation to everything Gregory ever wrote: in all his work he writes for general, immediate, sensory-concrete comprehension, in keeping with his talent, his-temperament, and his office:
sicut tu loqui potens es
.