- pa thos\n.
- 1. The quality or power in life or art of evoking a feeling of pity or compassion.
- 2. Pity.
- 3. Obs. Suffering.
- (1570–80; < Gk pathos suffering, sensation, akin to paschein to suffer)2
- pathos\n.
- The book had so much pathos I wept all through it: pathetic quality, power to affect, ability to touch, ability to arouse sympathy, poignancy, plaintiveness, sadness, feeling, sentiment, sentimentalism, sentimentality, pitiableness, anguish, heartache, agony, misery, distress, woe, desolation.
- —Antonyms
- comicality, amusement, humor, fun.3
Gustave Flaubert is born in 1821, the second son of the head surgeon at the Hotel-Dieu in Rouen. While studying law in Paris, Flaubert meets Victor Hugo in 1843. The following year Flaubert’s shattering first epileptic attack puts an end to his legal studies and confines him to the new family house in Croisset and his mother’s care. His confinement brings both the solitude and stability necessary for a life of writing.
In 1849, Flaubert reads his first full-length adult work, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, to his two closest friends. The reading takes four days, at the rate of eight hours per day. After embarrassed consultation, the listeners tell him to throw it on the fire.
Flaubert contracts syphilis in Egypt in 1850. Much of his hair falls out; he grows stout. Madame Flaubert, meeting him in Rome the following year, scarcely recognizes her son, and finds that he has become very coarse. Middle age begins here. “Scarcely are you born before you begin rotting.”4 Over the years all but one of his teeth will fall out; his saliva will be permanently blackened by mercury treatment.
Flaubert writes Madame Bovary between 1851 and 1857, which, in its graphic naturalism, becomes a succès de scandale. He declares “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” In later years Flaubert comes to resent the insistent fame of his masterpiece, which makes others see him as a one-book author. The publication of A Sentimental Education, in 1869, is a critical and commercial flop. Of the 150 complimentary copies sent to friends and acquaintances, barely thirty are even acknowledged.
In 1874, The Temptation of Saint Anthony is published. Flaubert notes, “What comes as surprise is the hatred underlying much of this criticism—hatred for me, for my person—deliberate denigration. … This avalanche of abuse does depress me.”5
Gustave Flaubert said that he wrote “A Simple Heart,” in 1876, to please his friend, the writer George Sand. She did not live to read it. Of the story, he wrote,
It is just the account of an obscure life, that of a poor country girl, pious but fervent, discreetly loyal, and tender as new-baked bread. She loves one after the other a man, her mistress’ children, a nephew of hers, an old man whom she nurses, and her parrot. When the parrot dies she has it stuffed, and when she herself comes to die she confuses the parrot with the Holy Ghost. This is not at all ironical as you may suppose, but on the contrary very serious and very sad. I want to move tender hearts to pity and tears, for I am tender-hearted myself. Now surely, no one will accuse me of being inhuman any more. …6
By the time Flaubert wrote “A Simple Heart,” he had suffered a long series of financial and personal losses, including ill health, unhappy love affairs, and the deaths of many close friends and beloved family members. He said that his heart had become a necropolis. In an ironic reversal, this story of accumulated loss and mediated redemption becomes a critical and popular success, when it is published in 1877, in a collection titled Trois Contes. However, Flaubert, nicknamed “the consumer” by his niece, dies impoverished, bitter, and lonely in 1880. Émile Zola, in his obituary notice, comments that Flaubert was unknown to four-fifths of Rouen, and detested by the other fifth.
—Here they are. I’ll begin. What of shoes? What, shoes? Whose are the shoes? What are they made of? Is a pair a repetition? And even, who are they? Here they are, the questions, that’s all.
Sherrie Levine, Small Sabots, 2001. Cast Bronze, 4 × 11 × 4 inches each. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist.
Paul Gauguin, who shared van Gogh’s quarters in Arles in 1881, sensed a personal history behind his friend’s painting of a pair of shoes. He has told in his reminiscences of van Gogh a deeply affecting story linked with van Gogh’s shoes:
In the studio was a pair of big hob-nailed shoes, all worn and spotted with mud; van Gogh made of them a remarkable still life painting. I sensed that there was a story behind this old relic, and ventured one day to ask him if he had some reason for preserving, with respect, what one ordinarily throws out for the rag-picker’s basket.
His father, he said, was a pastor, and at his urging he pursued theological studies in order to prepare for his future vocation. As a young pastor, he left for Belgium one fine morning, without telling his family, to preach the gospel in the factories, not as he had been taught but as he understood it himself. He said that these shoes had bravely endured the fatigue of that trip.
Preaching to the miners in the Borinage, van Gogh undertook to nurse a victim of the fire in the mine. The man was so badly burned and mutilated that the doctor had no hope for his recovery. Only a miracle, he thought, could save him. Van Gogh tended him forty days with loving care and saved the miner’s life. He told me that before leaving Belgium he had, in the presence of this man who bore on his brow a series of scars, a vision of the crown of thorns, a vision of the resurrected Christ.
After the story, van Gogh took up his palette again, working silently. Beside him was a white canvas. And when I began a portrait of him, I too had the vision of a Jesus preaching kindness and humility.7
Reflecting on the inevitable decay of the living body, Flaubert wrote to his mistress, in 1846:
In the mere sight of an old pair of shoes there is something profoundly melancholy. When you think of all the steps you have taken in them to only God knows where, of all the grass you have trodden, all the mud you have collected … the cracked leather that yawns as if to tell you: “well, you dope, buy another pair of patent leather, shiny, crackling they will get to be like me, like you some day, after you have soiled many an upper and sweated in many a vamp.”8
Since this letter, dated December 13, 1846, was published in 1887, it could have been read by Flaubert’s great admirer van Gogh.
The idea of a picture of his shoes was perhaps suggested by a drawing reproduced in Alfred Sensier’s book on Jean-François Millet, Painter and Peasant, published in 1864. Van Gogh was deeply impressed by this book and referred to it often in his letters. The name of the peasant-painter Millet appears over two hundred times in van Gogh’s correspondence. Comparison of Millet’s drawing of his wooden sabot with van Gogh’s painting of shoes confirms what has been said about the pathos and crucial personal reference in the latter. Millet’s sabots are presented in profile on the ground with indications of grass and hay.
It was Millet’s practice to give to friends and admirers a drawing of a pair of sabots in profile, as a sign of his own lifelong commitment to peasant life.
A fellow student wrote of a visit to van Gogh’s Paris studio. There he was shown an unfinished painting of a pair of shoes. Van Gogh told him that he had bought a pair of old shoes at the flea market, heavy and thick, the shoes of a carter but clean and freshly polished. They were fancy shoes. He put them on, one rainy afternoon, and went out for a walk among the fortifications. Spotted with mud, they became interesting. … Vincent copied his pair of shoes faithfully.
In 1950 Martin Heidegger wrote an essay titled “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In this essay he describes a well-known painting by van Gogh of a pair of peasant shoes:
From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stands forth. In the stiffly solid heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever uniform furrows of the field, swept by a raw wind. On the leather there lies the dampness and saturation of the soil. Under the soles there slides the loneliness of the field path as the evening declines. In the shoes there vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening corn and its enigmatic self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety about the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before the advent of birth and shivering at the surrounding menace of death.9
In 1968 Meyer Schapiro responded to Heidegger in his essay, “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh”:
Professor Heidegger is aware that van Gogh painted such shoes several times, but he does not identify the picture he has in mind, as if the different versions are interchangeable, all disclosing the same truth. A reader who wished to compare his account with the original picture or its photograph will have some difficulty in deciding which one to select. Eight paintings of shoes by van Gogh were recorded at the time Heidegger wrote his essay. Of these, only three show the “dark openings of worn insides” which speak so distinctly to the philosopher. They are more likely pictures of the artist’s own shoes, not the shoes of a peasant. They might be shoes he had worn in Holland but the pictures were painted during van Gogh’s stay in Paris in 1886–87; one of them bears the date: “87.” From the time before 1886 when he painted Dutch peasants are two pictures of shoes—a pair of clean wooden clogs set on a table beside other objects. Later in Arles he painted, as he wrote in a letter of August 1888 to his brother, “une paire de vieux souliers” which are evidently his own. A second still life of “vieux souliers de paysan” is mentioned in a letter of September 1888 to the painter Emile Bernard, but it lacks the characteristic worn surface and dark insides of Heidegger’s description.10
In reply to Schapiro, Heidegger wrote that the picture to which he referred is one that he saw in a show in Amsterdam in March 1930.
Schapiro responded that there had also been exhibited at the same time a painting with three pairs of shoes, and that it was possible the exposed sole of a shoe in this picture inspired the reference to the sole in the philosopher’s account, but from neither of these pictures, nor from any of the others, could one properly say that a painting of shoes by van Gogh expresses the being or essence of a peasant woman’s shoes and her relation to nature and work. They are the shoes of the artist, by that time a man of the town and city.
Meyer Schapiro dedicated his essay “The Still Life as Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh” to the memory of Kurt Goldstein, who had, during his lifetime, earned Schapiro’s gratitude by at least one gesture: having given him “The Origin of the Work of Art,” by Martin Heidegger, to read. Goldstein said nothing to Schapiro about van Gogh’s shoes. He simply pointed out Heidegger’s text.
Goldstein fled Nazi Germany in 1933, after being imprisoned there and then being freed on the condition that he leave the country. He spent a painful period in Amsterdam, before arriving in New York in 1936 to teach at Columbia University. Having emigrated when he was very young, Schapiro was already teaching at Columbia, which had become a haven for many émigré professors.
Sherrie Levine, Human Skull, 2001. Cast bronze, 5 × 4¾ × 7¼ inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist.
During this same period, Heidegger was giving his lectures on “The Origin of the Work of Art” and his Introduction to Metaphysics course, the two texts in which he refers to van Gogh.
Schapiro delivered Goldstein’s funeral oration in New York in 1965.
—Los Angeles, Spring 2001