Variety: The Life of a Roman Concept by William Fitzgerald (review)

In 1725, the Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson argued that beauty comes from "uniformity amidst variety." Sixty-five years later Kant put all such often-made claims to rest in the third of his revolutionary Critiques. Kant rightly saw that what he calls "the judgement of taste" ("this ode of Horace is beautiful") was a "free" judgement, not the subsumption of a particular under a rule (if so, the matter could be decided a priori without any encounter with the object); the judgement is "subjective" (I have to experience the poem's beauty for myself), but also "universal," in that it "imputes," without necessarily gaining, the agreement of others. But of course views such as Hutcheson's did not simply disappear overnight, since the discourse of variety, with its roots in Classical Antiquity, had held sway for so long. In the Preface to The Renaissance Walter Pater, while in Kantian fashion rejecting the idea of finding a "universal formula" for beauty, comments: "The value of these attempts has most often been made in the suggestive and penetrating things said by the way."

Fitzgerald tells us that when he informed colleagues and friends that he was writing on variety they expressed surprise. That they were wrong to do so, this thought-provoking and delightful book makes amply clear. We may agree with Malcolm Heath that the concern of modern classicists to justify the digressive or centrifugal features of the texts they study puts them at odds with the great majority of readers and theorists in antiquity, who ascribed rather to an aesthetics of delight-giving poikilia or varietas (even if there were heavy-hitters arguing the other way, notably Plato and Aristotle). It was the Romantic critics and their successors who became obsessed with the idea of artistic unity. At all events Fitzgerald is clearly right that this is a whole area of cultural history and the history of aesthetics that merits exploration.

Chapter 1 examines the word varius and its cognates, and the way that the discourse of variety is constructed, with "a semantic field and a complex of metaphors and topoi" that "make up the toolkit of the concept" (6). Fitzgerald correctly argues that the word "various" has lost much of its valence in modern English usage. Variety has seen its realm usurped by "choice" and above all "diversity" (he points out that the motto of the EU, in varietate concordia appears in its English version as "United in Diversity"). When today's reader encounters Milton's Eden as "a happy rural seat of various view" (PL 4. 247), she may barely notice the adjective, but in former times it was a word of power. Fitzgerald offers a rich account of Milton's description of the versification of his poem, with "the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another," as much more than simply a reference to enjambment (15). Some modern poets have tried to restore the lustre: Fitzgerald quotes MacNeice's "Snow" ("I peel and portion / A tangerine and spit the pips and feel / The drunkenness of things being various") and Graves' "Pygmalion to Galatea" ("As you are constant, so be various: / Love comes to sloth without variety"). It may be significant that both poets, like Milton, were classicists. Chapter 2 explores varied contexts where the discourse of variety is at work: nature and its plenitude, which regularly involves large issues of theology and theodicy; rhetoric with its ideal of verbal abundance, copia; politics, where variety encompasses imperial and other forms of diversity; and, what perhaps lies behind all these, aesthetics, with its concern with beauty and the inducement of pleasure. The diverse contexts are not separate of course, but constantly interlocking in multiform ways. Chapter 3 looks at a variety of ancient authors, in particular the younger Pliny, Lucretius, and Horace (the unexpected turns of whose odes convey "a strong impression of pleasurably baffling multiplicities," 24), and the diverse ways their works exhibit and explore variousness. Chapter 4 is...