Chrysopoeia 2: Volpone (He's the Fox - the Fox with the Golden Brush)

Aubrey Beardsley:  

Volpone Adoring His Treasures (1898)

 

Good morning to the day; and next, my gold: 

Open the shrine, that I may see my Saint.

 

 

I. 

 

Ben Jonson's brilliant comic play Volpone (1606) opens with a very famous scene of gold veneration that is worth reproducing in full:

 

 

A ROOM IN VOLPONE'S HOUSE. ENTER VOLPONE AND MOSCA. 

 

VOLPONE: 

 

Good morning to the day; and next, my gold: 

Open the shrine, that I may see my Saint. 

 

MOSCA WITHDRAWS THE CURTAIN REVEALING PILES OF GOLD, PLATE, JEWELS, ETC.

 

Hail the world's soul, and mine! More glad than is 

The teeming earth to see the long'd-for sun 

Peep through the horns of the celestial Ram, 

Am I, to view thy splendour darkening his; 

That lying here, amongst my other hoards, 

Shew'st like a flame by night; or like the day 

Struck out of chaos, when all darkness fled 

Unto the centre. O thou son of Sol, 

But brighter than thy father, let me kiss, 

With adoration, thee, and every relick 

Of sacred treasure, in this blessed room. 

Well did wise poets, by thy glorious name, 

Title that age which they would have the best; 

Thou being the best of things: and far transcending 

All style of joy, in children, parents, friends, 

Or any other waking dream on earth: 

Thy looks when they to Venus did ascribe, 

They should have given her twenty thousand Cupids; 

Such are thy beauties and our loves! 

Dear saint, Riches, the dumb god, that giv'st all men tongues; 

That canst do nought, and yet mak'st men do all things; 

The price of souls; even hell, with thee to boot, 

Is made worth heaven. Thou art virtue, fame, 

Honour, and all things else. Who can get thee, 

He shall be noble, valiant, honest, wise - [1]

 

 

II. 

 

There are many things I love about this speech: for one thing, Volpone's is a profoundly cynical and materialist philosophy, which imagines even the anima mundi in chemical-elemental (non-spritual) terms. This is to immediately challenge all those idealistic thinkers from Plato to Hegel who identified the world-soul as a force of vital intelligence which is accesible to (because self-identical with) human reason.

 

The Gnostics may, like Volpone, have also posited gold as the essence of all that exists, but for them this was alchemical allegory; for them, gold was not a metal gifted to mankind from beyond the stars in an age before life itself, it was rather the Light Soul to be contrasted with the dead matter within which it is imprisoned. 

 

Gold may have been recognised as the noblest of all noble metals - and their origin - but it is still regarded with contempt by those whose real concern is with the inner gold (i.e. the spark of divinity) within each of us. Volpone may use religious language - open the shrine that I may see my saint - but he does so mockingly, that is, in a knowingly idolatrous manner. 

 

And when Volpone expresses a desire to kiss his gold, we are reminded that there is also an erotic aspect to his gold fetish. However, unlike Auric Goldfinger - whose case we discussed here - Volpone doesn't desire gold in a perverse manner and, ultimately, I don't think he is guilty of either greed or lust; what he does, in fact, is exploit the vices of others. 

 

For as he confesses to his man-servant, confidant, and fellow-schemer, Mosca: "I glory more in the cunning purchase of my wealth / Than in the glad possession ..."

This line is crucial, I think, in understanding Volpone's character - and my attraction to him; for he reminds me of the Embezzler, played by Malcolm McLaren in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980); a man who enjoys manipulating events, exploiting the gullible, and defrauding the rich. Yes, he wishes to generate cash from chaos, but it's the swindle itself that most excites his imagination. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm quoting from Ben Jonson's Volpone as found freely online as a Project Gutenberg eBook: click here. 

 

 

D. H. Lawrence's Daimonic Dendrophilia

Wallace Smith: Illustration for 

Fantazius Mallare (1922)

I have discussed D. H. Lawrence's dendrophilia elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark [click here] and readers will surely recall the scene in Women in Love in which Birkin enters into a state of erotic delirium whilst surrounded by various plants, bushes, and young trees: 

 

"The soft sharp boughs beat upon him, as he moved in keen pangs against them, threw little cold showers of drops on his belly, and beat his loins with their clusters of soft-sharp needles [...] and then to sting one's thigh against the living dark bristles of the fir-boughs; and then to feel the light whip of the hazel on one's shoulders, stinging, and then to clasp the silvery birch-trunk against one's breast, its smoothness, its hardness, its vital knots and ridges - this was good, this was all very good, very satisfying. [...] He knew now where he belonged. He knew where to plant himself, his seed: – along with the trees, in the folds of the delicious fresh growing leaves. This was his place, his marriage place." [1]

 

So one might imagined that Lawrence would have loved the above image by the American artist Wallace Smith for Ben Hecht's controversial novel Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath (1922) [2], showing a man having sex with a tree. 

 

Only you would be mistaken: Lawrence hated the novel and hated the illustrations by Smith. In a letter-cum-review of the work written shortly after publication - having had a copy of the book sent to him by a friend - Lawrence says this:

 

"Many thanks for sending me the Ben Hecht book. I read it through. But I'm sorry, it didn't thrill me a bit, neither the pictures nor the text. It all seems to me so would-be. Think of the malice, the sheer malice of a Beardsley drawing, the wit, and the venom of the mockery. These drawings are so completely without irony, so crass, so strained, and so would-be. It isn't that they've got anything to reveal at all. That man's coition with a tree, for example. There's nothing in it but the author's attempt to be startling. Whereas if he wanted to be really wicked he'd see that even a tree has its own daimon, and a man might lie with the daimon of a tree. Beardsley saw these things. But it takes imagination." [3]   

 

That, I think, is very interesting - particularly the part about the daimonic aspect of a tree and the possibility of a human being forming an erotic relationship with such, thereby adding an occult element to Lawrence's dendrophilia. 

 

I think Lawrence is right to suggest that a sexual encounter between any two objects involves a "contact between two alien natures" [4] and is always therefore as much a violent struggle as it is a sensual delight. And, personally, I dislike Smith's drawing because it anthropomorphises the tree; by having it take on a distinctly all-too-human female form he produces a heteronormative rather than truly transgressive artwork. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 107-08. 

[2] Those interested in reading Hecht's novel and taking a look at Smith's illustrations can do so thanks to Project Gutenberg: click here.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Review of Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath, by Ben Hecht', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 215 

 

[4] Ibid.,  p. 216.