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William Kerrigan Of Scorn "There is a history of emotions as well as a history of ideas," J.V. Cunningham maintained.1 Scorn, I would think, ranks with the most complex of anger's many varieties, yet if scorn has found an historian, I have yet to find him. It seems at first glance the sort of topic that might have interested Montaigne or Bacon, but it did not, quite possibly because "scorn" is not a classical word. Though older etymologists suspected that the term might derive from Latin excornu, "deprived of horns," hence "to humiliate or ridicule," it seems to come instead from OldHigh German skem, meaning "derision." Lacking the cachet of classical usage, the word does not figure prominently in neoclassical attempts to define the literary kinds, even in the case of satire, where it might well have figured. Dryden, whose vocabulary is everywhere rich with historical import, managed to write the "Essay on Satire" without its services. I have been able to locate the word only sporadicallyin the eighteenth-century philosophers ofsentiment. But scorn, as we will see, did indeed have its time and place in the history of English and American culture, and the story of this emotion sheds some light on the academic study of English literature as we find it in America on the brink of the twenty-first century. We might begin with Wycliffe's translation of Matthew 27:29: "Thae kneleden bifor hym, and scorneden hym and seiden, Hail kyng of the iewes." The word "mocked" replaced "scorned" in Tyndale, Cranmer, Geneva, Douai-Rheims, and King James, but the old term survived in the Christian imagination of George Herbert, whose Christ in "The Sacrifice" must suffer the hyperbole of scorn: They bow their knees to me, and cry, Hail king: What ever scoffes & scornfulnesse can bring, I am the floor, the sink, where they it fling.2 144William Kerrigan The Christ of Milton's Paradise Regained, also remembering the old language, knows that he must endure "tribulations, injuries, insults, / Contempts, and scorns, and snares, and violence" (3.190-91). Scorn itself is a kind of sink. Joshua Poole's English Parnassus (1657), a schoolmaster's book meant to refine English letters with rhymes, synonyms, and poetic phrases, offers this foul bunch in its entry on "scorn": "Disdainful, proud, insolent, squint-eyed, sullen, wry-mouth'd, deriding, contemptuous, arrogant, sowre-eyed, peevish, haughty, swelling, surly, currish, churlish, spightful, angry, despising, undervaluing, disesteeming, unbecoming."3 We can discern a specific kind of foul gesture in this noxious semantic field by continuing with biblical associations. The King James Bible uses the word in the first verse of Psalms: "Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful." Scorn, the taunting enjoyed by persecutors, is reserved in its highest form for God himself: "He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have his foes in derision" (Psalms 2:4, KJV), where "to laugh" is rendered, in the 1588 Book of Common Prayer, "to laugh to scorn." Before long we will discuss how Milton weaves this passage into the overall design of Paradise Lost. It is immediately clear that scorn demonstrates or expresses superiority, a holding in contempt. It can refer to either the disdain of the superior or the indignity suffered by the inferior. Tamburlaine, as if created to scorn, scorns constantly. He is almost a parody of this posture, and indeed became a popular object of satirical scorn.4 The bellicose but immature Coriolanus scorns to a fault, and is scorned in return. We are already able to observe that scorn is hard to kill because the antidote is almost always another variety of scorn. So scorn is the pleasure of the conqueror in his conquest, the true religion expressing its superiority to false rivals: the joy of being better, and letting others know it. How was the ransomed Talbot treated by his French captors? "With scoffs and scorns and contumelious taunts" {Henry VI, Part 1 1.4.38). Having received the insult of the tennis balls, Henry V promises that even the...

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