Auden, Bruegel, and "Musée des Beaux Arts"
Author(s): Arthur F. Kinney
Source: College English, Vol. 24, No. 7 (Apr., 1963), pp. 529-531
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/372881
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AUDEN, BRUEGEL, AND "MUS1eE DES BEAUX ARTS"
ARTHUR F. KINNEY
Auden's use of a Bruegel' painting for
his final group of images in "Musee des
Beaux Arts" suggests that other images in
the poem may have a similar source, yet,
to my knowledge, no one has explored the
possibility. Although we can only conjecture as to the genesis of Auden's poem
about the suffering of mankind as depicted
by the Old Masters, an examination of facts
indicates that other Bruegel paintings are
probably referred to; because of this, the
poem leads us to a valuable comparison of
the same statement made by two art forms.
The final octet in the Auden poem is
concerned with the huge canvas "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" by Pieter
Bruegel the Elder, an early canvas and
the only one in the extant Bruegel work
which deals with a mythological theme.
In the picture, only the legs of Icarus are
seen: they splash wildly in the bottom
right corner of the picture, while a plowman, on whom the canvas is centered, continues to till his fields, a ship continues to
sail into the harbor, and a nearby fisherman
throws out his line, all interested in their
own affairs and all quite unaware of the
double tragedy beside them-the loss of a
life and the defeat of man's free spirit attempting to escape the restrictions of
humanity.
There are two paintings of Bruegel's
view of Icarus. One, attributed to Bruegel,
though not signed, is now in the D. M.
van Buuren collection in New York.2 But
this painting also features Daedalus, his
wings outspread in the grandeur of flight
while his head twists toward the sight of
horror in the drowning Icarus. Since
1The name of the artist has been Anglicized
variously; Auden uses "Brueghel" and Huxley
uses "Breughel," but the spelling used here is
that by which the artist signed his work.
Primarily a student of the Renaissance, Mr.
Kinney is a teaching fellow at the University of
Michigan. His avocation is the modern period,
and criticism of that period has led to the
Major Hopwood Award in Essay in 1961 and
the Bread Loaf Scholarship in Criticism in
1962.
529
Auden does not mention Daedalus, he
probably did not have this painting in
mind. Rather, he probably saw a copy of
the original by Bruegel's son, Pieter the
Younger, which is nearly an exact replica
except for Daedalus which it omits, and
which hangs in the Musees Royaux des
Beaux-Arts in Brussels. That this is the
painting referred to by Auden is corroborated by the title of Auden's poem.
This fact is important, for the Bruegel
copy hangs in a special Bruegel alcove in
Brussels with other paintings, originals or
copies, but all major - "The Adoration of
the Kings," "The Massacre of the Innocents," and "The Numbering at Bethlehem."3 When we learn that Auden spent
the winter of 1939 in Brussels ("Musee des
Beaux Arts was published in 1940), it
seems logical to assume that he also saw the
other paintings, and it was this sight of
paintings by the Old Master, I suggest,
which was the genesis of the poem.
With this much information, we can
rather safely conjecture the source of much
of the remaining imagery. "The Numbering at Bethlehem" exemplifies the genre
painting which Bruegel was the first to
do - that is, the inclusion of a major event
nearly hidden in a scene chock-full of
daily occurrences. In "The Numbering,"
Joseph and Mary have come to Bethlehem
(in the left foreground of the canvas) to be
counted for taxation (see Luke ii: 1-5), but,
2For further information on Bruegel's work,'
the best source is F. Grossmann, Bruegel: The
Paintings, Complete Edition (London: Phaidon
Press, 1955). This volume has prints of his
entire work, the definitive biography of Bruegel by Carel van Mander (1604) with corroborative evidence and some corrections, a
good critical essay, and a locating list of all of
Bruegel's works. See also Valentin Denis, ed.,
All the Paintings of Pieter Bruegel, trans. Paul
Colacicchi in "The Complete Library of World
Art" (New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc.,
1961).
'I am indebted to Miss Isabelle de Ramaix, of
the Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels,
for her gracious counsel and her verification of
the facts upon which part of this study is based.
530
COLLEGE
dressed as Flemish peasants with a crowd
of others, they are nearly lost from our
view. The canvas is also filled with a
woman sweeping snow, a peasant dragging
a load across the ice, children skating, a
woman feeding her pets, and chickens
scrambling about beneath a cart wheel.
Auden has transcribed the scene thus:
. . . when the aged are reverently, passion-
ately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always
must be
Children who did not specially want it to
happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood.
The other group of images centered on
a particular situation-that of a torturer
and his horse-may also be based on an
equally famous Bruegel painting, "The
Massacre of the Innocents." Although this
canvas hangs with the largest remaining
collections of Bruegel in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, a copy hangs
in the alcove at Brussels; it is one of his
best-known works. It probably suggested
to Auden these lines:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must
run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy
life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
Like the numbering at Bethlehem, Bruegel
again has used a Biblical theme in a Flemish
setting-this
time, the Spanish are invading the Lowlands and arresting, apparently at random, several of the peasants
there. The focus of the painting is the
center of the canvas again, where a band
of soldiers sits on horseback in a tight
clump. Circling them is a series of little
the genre type
of
miniatures-again
painting-which illustrate frightened townsfolk, interested observers, children at
play. There are five dogs in the picture:
two are playing, one observes his mistress,
one is held by a townsman on a leash, and
the fifth is racing alongside a horse. The
town, as Bruegel shows and Auden implies,
appears undisturbed: it is covered lightly
with snow, and two birds fly unconcernedly overhead. Only one torturer's
horse stands near a tree, however, and he
ENGLISH
is unable to rub against it because another
soldier, with a battering ram, is standing
between the horse and the tree preparing
to thrust his weapon at the wall of a house.
Yet this must be the horse Auden has in
mind, since it is the only torturer's horse in
Bruegel's work, and the only painting with
horses near trees.
An examination of Auden's lines with
the paintings that probably suggested them
shows that the imagery is usually accurate
for the paintings Auden undoubtedly saw
during the winter in Brussels. In referring
to the green water and the white legs of
Icarus in the painting of Icarus's fall, for
example, Auden refers to two of the chief
colorings of the canvas which smooths over
a highly tragic incident with a haze of
pastels.4 The warm white-yellow glow of
the sun, the pinkish tinge of Icarus' legs
and the light browns of the countryside are
highlighted only by the crimson of the
undershirt which the plowman wears.
From such an identification of sources,
we can draw three conclusions of some
value. First, we can examine the genetic
process of a poem which, if it rests finally
on conjecture, surely has much to support
it. We can see how the sudden sight of
two great canvases, coupled with a copy
of a third, has led to one of the more
popular of Auden's shorter poems.
Secondly, this identification supports
those critics of Auden who have called him
eclectic, who have referred to him as
"something of an intellectual jackdaw,
picking up bright pebbles of ideas so as
to fit them into exciting conceptual patterns."5 Auden's use of Bruegel for all the
imagery of "Musee des Beaux Arts" also
shows how Auden tones down the robust
sense of life that bursts from the canvases
for his own more detached, more conceptual abstraction that
4The best volume of color reproductions of
all Bruegel's work is Das Bruegel Buch
(Vienna: Anton Schroll & Co., 1936).
5RichardHoggart, W. H. Auden in "Writers
and Their Work: No. 93" (London, 1957), p.
8. See also Joseph Warren Beach, The Making
of the Auden Canon (Minneapolis, 1957) esp.
pp. 219-254.
ROUND
TABLE
531
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a
window or just walking dully along.
admires, that it took place on "an afternoon
of nurses and rumours," and who can work
with the oxymoron as a basic technique,
such oxymorons as "Problems like relatives
As Richard Hoggart has noted, Auden is
their memories like slops."
To read Auden's poem alongside color
reproductions of three of Bruegel's best
works, then, provides a sharper awareness
of both artists as well as a deeper understanding of that theme which is common
to them both.
not "terribly involved in it all."6
Yet if this is a distinct dissimilarity
between the artistic technique of Bruegel
-teeming with the vitality of life and
Bruegel's own love of the land and the
Auden-desirous
of intelpeople-and
there
lectualizing abstract concepts-still
is similarity. The theme of Bruegel and
Auden is the same: suffering does go on
about us, and, if it does not affect us directly, it often passes by us unawares.7
Perhaps there is a fire two houses up the
street; if our child is crying, the fire, for
the moment, matters little. Such a theme
was natural for Bruegel, who deliberately
left Antwerp for Brussels and peasants, to
witness the life that was not his. Such a
theme ought to appeal to the prewar
Auden, too, who took great delight in
juxtaposing the unique and the commonplace (the death of Icarus and the plowing
of a field), the Auden who could say of
the death of Yeats, a poet whom he greatly
standing . . ." or "The sky is darkening
like a stain . . ." or "They emptied out
'Richard Hoggart, Auden: An Introductory
Essay (London, 1951), p. 30.
7Another summary statement of Bruegel's
position is made by Aldous Huxley in his
essay on "Breughel": "[His paintings] show
him to have been a man profoundly convinced
of the reality of evil and of the horrors which
this mortal life, not to mention eternity, hold
in store for suffering humanity. The world is
a horrible place; but in spite of this, or precisely because of this, men and women eat,
drink and dance, Carnivaltilts against Lent and
triumphs, if only for a moment; children play
in the streets, people get married in the midst
of gross rejoicings." From Collected Essays
(New
York, 1959), p. 142.
THE OMNIPREFACE
ROBERTSTANTON
Although a preface for an anthology
to enmay have many functions-e.g.,
able the editor to explain his pedagogical
theories, to express his secret hostilities, or
to impress his family and colleagues-its
main function is to persuade as many
instructors as possible to adopt the book
for classroom use. This function, more
than any other, determines the style and
content of a good preface. A preface that
too clearly describes its book risks alienating those readers who disagree with the
anthologist's principles; on the other hand,
no one will adopt a book which seems
Mr. Stanton, assistant professor at the University of Washington, has recently returned
from Fulbright lectureships in Japan and Formosa.
merely conventional. The ideal preface,
therefore, should create an image of something fresh, unusual, exciting, and yet safe,
conservative, foolproof-an anthology that
is both mistress and wife-without
providing the reader any clear ideas at all.
This ideal preface would fit almost any
anthology. Many recent prefaces approach
the ideal, but none has yet gone all the
way. It is time for the first truly universal
as I propose it be called,
preface-or,
"omnipreface." The model I offer here is
imperfect, of course. As motivational research reveals new magic words and
phrases to supplement those already discovered (e. g., "challenging," "classroomtested," "thought-provoking"), new and
better omniprefaces will be produced.