The Temple Of Fame: A Vision

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M Newman, Archive Report (National Trust 1996) [An extensive and detailed study of the estate and its owners] On an iron pillar, holding up the fame of Troy: Homer, Dares, Dictys, "Lollius", Guido delle Colonne, and Geoffrey of Monmouth. Architectural Conservation student Anushka Desouza says: “It’s brilliant to get a hands-on experience of things that we are learning in class.” John M. Aden, Pope's Once and Future Kings: Satire and Politics in the Early Career (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978). Chaucer observes Fame as she metes out fame and infamy to groups of people who arrive, whether or not they deserve or want it. After each of Fame's judgments, the god of the north winds, Aeolus, blows one of two trumpets: "Clear Laud" to give the petitioners fame or "Slander" to give the petitioners infamy. At one point, a man who is most likely Herostratus asks for infamy, which Fame grants to him.

The three temples of the Elysian Fields make a moral statement, but Kent and Cobham added further layers of subtlety to give the ensemble political and religious dimensions as well. John Dixon Hunt declares the Temple of British Worthies to be an "ideological building." He states that "the message of these figures is anti-Stuart, anti-Catholic, pro-British." Lord Cobham had been dismissed from Queen Anne's army and was among those Whigs who came to oppose Sir Robert Walpole's ministry. The choice of figures for the temple--in particular, the omission of Queen Anne--underscores this point. In addition, a quotation from Virgil is presented with a crucial line omitted. Hunt explains: "This particular religious hostility is reinforced by a quotation from the sixth book of the Aeneid . . . in which a line praising priesthood is omitted. . . . Such is the learned subtlety of [this building] that we must not only identify our Virgil but recognize how and why it is incomplete." The views of the Danube Valley from the monument are for free. Visitors with children should note that the classical lines of the building are not spoilt by safety railings. An Essay On Criticism (London: Printed for W. Lewis & sold by W. Taylor, T. Osborn & J. Graves, 1711).The Elysian Fields present a much more ambitious scheme of associations; they require a visitor to compare ancient virtue with its modern counterpart . . . to register the political significance of the British Worthies, which in turn required noticing that a line was missing from a Virgilian quotation, and to appreciate that the Temple of Ancient Virtue called to mind the Roman Temple of Vesta . . . at Tivoli, and the Temple of British Worthies some other modern Italian examples. For introductions to the drama, see Schirmer, John Lydgate, pp. 100–08, and Pearsall, John Lydgate (1970), pp. 183–88. While writers discussing the poetic powers of eighteenth-century gardens tend to fixate on the small sector of Stowe containing these three temples with their political and religious connotations, other iconographical programs could be found in other parts of the garden. Ronald Paulson writes that the rotondo was the focal point of the garden, since it could be seen from all parts of the estate. This structure originally held a gilded statue of Venus; later this was replaced by a statue of Bacchus. Since the grounds also boasted a Temple of Venus (which, the current Stowe guidebook reports, contained "indelicate murals") and a Temple of Bacchus, Paulson argues that the overall theme of the garden was love in all its varieties. He states, "The temples thus tell of wives running away from their jealous husbands to consort with satyrs, Dido seducing Aeneas, and even a saint who finds it hard to resist sexual temptation in his grotto." For example, Schirmer, John Lydgate, p. 38, criticizes the poet for being “imitative” and “remote from life in his archaic book-knowledge and predilection for rhetoric.” Norton-Smith, “Lydgate’s Changes,” p. 177, says the “borrowings of time and place illustrate Lydgate’s characteristic stripping away of Chaucerian complexity, especially of allegory.” For Spearing, Medieval Dream-Poetry, p. 173, the poem indicates Lydgate’s “failure to grasp what is really happening in fourteenth-century dream-poems.” And Russell, English Dream Vision, pp. 199–201, agrees that Lydgate pays homage to his elder without coming close to rivaling his achievements. New approaches to Lydgate do not find much use for these tired truisms, and Edwards, “Lydgate Scholarship,” confirms that actually they have long been suspect. Simpson, Oxford English Literary History, p. 50, offers a salutary corrective: “almost none of Lydgate’s works is directly imitative of Chaucer: those poems that do relate to Chaucer’s do so with more powerful strategies in mind than slavish imitation.”

At the opening of Walhalla in 1842, 160 persons were honored in the Hall of Fame through 96 busts and 64 nameplates or tablets. (Nameplates are used for historical figures of unknown appearance including some mythical figures and societies.) Since 1847, the number has been increased to 130 busts and 65 nameplates. The extraordinary erasure of Emmeline Pankhurst is superbly documented in Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography (Routledge 2002) by June Purvis, the first full-fledged treatment in nearly 70 years of “that weapon of will-power by which British women freed themselves from being classed with children and idiots in the matter of exercising the franchise,” wrote the London Evening Standard, and the “most remarkable political and social agitator of the early part of the twentieth century,” The New York Herald Tribune declared. Purvis not only takes her cue from West, her biography goes well beyond West’s essay by repudiating much of the left-controlled historiography on the votes for women movement. Both in her narrative and in her notes, Purvis shows just how elaborately Mrs. Pankhurst’s trajectory from Labor Party supporter to Conservative candidate for Parliament has been misunderstood anddiminished. Purvis quotes historian Joan Beaumont as pointing out that “recent feminist writers have projected their own alignment with anti-imperialism and anti-militarism onto the past, seeing imperialism and militarism as incompatible with feminism when this was not so for many women in the First World War.” Sylvia and many of her socialist allies took a pacifist line and were horrified when Mrs. Pankhurst, like Rebecca West, believed that her country and British culture came first, especially in war. While it is true that the WSPU ceased all agitation for the vote during the war, its leader hardly reneged on fighting for a greater role for women in society. She wanted them working in the munitions factories, for example, saying in late January 1915: “I’m not nursing soldiers. There are so many others to do that. . .it’s no more to be expected that our organisers should now necessarily take to knitting and nursing than that Mr. Asquith should set his Ministers to making Army boots and uniforms.” Yet she found it was the trade unionists who objected to women in the factories, fearing their lower pay for females would deprive the male breadwinner of hisjob.

Comments from the archive

Fame has no necessary conjunction with praise: it may exist without the breath of a word: it is a recognition of excellence which must be felt but need not be spoken. Even the envious must feel it: feel it, and hate it in silence. See Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, p. 9: “Is not the most erotic portion of the body where the garment gapes?” (emphasis original). Spearing, Medieval Dream-Poetry, p. 173, argues that Lydgate takes up such details because he is “interested in such things simply for their own sake, as a magpie is attracted by anything shiny.” Yet comparable images of mutability, fragility, and flux have an important place in The Temple of Glas, as befits a poem about shifting loyalties and erotic passions (especially if they are unsanctioned).