Arcadia

“But Sidley Park is already a picture, and a most amiable picture too. The slopes are green and gentle. The trees are companionably grouped at intervals that show them to advantage. The rill is a serpentine ribbon unwound from the lake peaceably contained by meadows on which the right amount of sheep are tastefully arranged—in short, it is nature as God intended, and I can say with the painter, ‘ Et in Arcadia ego!’ ‘Here I am in Arcadia,’ Thomasina.”

Lady Croom’s description of the gardens reflects the English tastes of her time, which are undergoing a change from Enlightenment sensibilities to Romantic ones. It also illustrates how the garden functions as a symbol of Arcadia throughout the play. “Et in Arcadia Ego” is the title of a 17th-century painting by Nicolas Poussin that features a pastoral scene with shepherds and a woman gathered around a tomb. The ambiguity of the word “I” in the Latin tag has led to academic debate over whether it refers to Death or to the tomb’s occupant in the painting. Lady Croom flattens this ambiguity to use it to praise her gardens. Regardless of this ambiguity, even in the idyllic Arcadia, death is present. This alludes to the fates of both Septimus and Thomasina.

“He’s my peg for the nervous breakdown of the Romantic Imagination. I’m doing landscape and literature 1750 to 1834.”

At the beginning of the play, Hannah is critical of the emotion associated with Romanticism. Her search for knowledge and truth rejects imagination and emotion. Her research subject draws attention to the hermitage and garden as symbols within the play itself, while also signaling The Tensions Between Romanticism and the Enlightenment that will be important throughout the play.

“English landscape was invented by gardeners imitating foreign painters who were evoking classical authors. The whole thing was brought home in the luggage from the grand tour. Here, look—Capability Brown doing Claude, who was doing Virgil. Arcadia! And here, superimposed by Richard Noakes, untamed nature in the style of Salvator Rosa. It’s the Gothic novel expressed in landscape. Everything but vampires.”

The redesign of the gardens reflects the tension between ideas in the play. Like the gardens, these ideas are influenced by their context and their relationships with each other. Both Capability Brown and Richard Noakes are inspired by others. The change in the garden, to Hannah, represents the shift from the Enlightenment style to Romanticism.

“The point is, the Crooms, of course, had the hermit under their noses for twenty years so hardly thought him worth remarking.”

The invisibility of the hermit (“hardly worth remarking” by his contemporaries) reflects the gaps in historical documentation. The ordinary and normal is not remarked upon, leaving a hole in history. This comment points to the fragility and incompleteness of history, and the complexities in trying to reconstruct the past.

“The whole Romantic sham, Bernard! It’s what happened to the Enlightenment, isn’t it? A century of intellectual rigour turned in on itself. A mind in chaos suspected of genius. In a setting of cheap thrills and false emotions. The history of the garden says it all, beautifully.”

Hannah establishes her argument about the relationship between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. She connects this tension to not only the hermit but also the gardens. Despite her claims of rationality, her argument is quite impassioned, suggesting that she has a side to her character that is more Romantic than she may suspect.

“God’s truth, Septimus, if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose? Do we believe nature is written in numbers?”

Thomasina here expresses her desire to connect math and nature. Building upon the geometrical exercises she has been graphing for homework, she seeks to use math to describe nature. Her questions poetically describe her mathematical ambition and genius, bringing abstract math to the real world.

“You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.”

Septimus imagines progress as iterative, without realizing that he is extending Thomasina’s theory of the universe. His point of view is also optimistic, describing how lost ideas are recreated and then extended. Each individual plays a part in this larger process. In this argument, Septimus treats literature as if it were a scientific discovery, and the play asks us to consider if this idea applies to both subjects.

“When your Thomasina was doing maths it had been the same maths for a couple of thousand years. Classical. And for a century after Thomasina. Then maths left the real world behind, just like modern art, really. Nature was classical, maths was suddenly Picassos. But now nature is having the last laugh. The freaky stuff is turning out to be the mathematics of the natural world.”

Valentine connects art and math, suggesting that the usual strict binary between them is not accurate. Nature is both aesthetically beautiful and mathematically unusual. Thomasina’s ability to anticipate math that comes a century later confounds and frustrates Valentine, who sees the advancement of knowledge as linear.

“A theory of everything. But they only explained the very big and the very small. The universe, the elementary particles. The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks. We’re better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it’ll rain on auntie’s garden party three Sundays from now.”

Valentine here explains to Hannah why Thomasina’s work would be valuable, if it were possible. Thomasina’s ambition comes from her attempts to combine the small with the grand and the mundane with the abstract. Science and math often keep these interests separate, and they struggle to predict the ordinary. His inability to see the possibilities in chaos theory highlights Thomasina’s foresight and genius.

“I’ll tell you your problem. No guts [...] By which I mean a visceral belief in yourself. Gut instinct. The part of you which doesn’t reason. The certainty for which there is no back-reference. Because time is reversed. Tock, tick goes the universe and then recovers itself, but it was enough, you were in there and you bloody know.”

Bernard expresses an understanding of knowledge that more closely aligns with Romantic beliefs than the empiricism of the Enlightenment, tying into the theme The Tensions Between Romanticism and the Enlightenment. His understanding of time is in conflict with the scientific idea of time only moving forward. His emphasis on the individual experience presents a new point of view on time.

“But as we know now, the drama of life and death at Sidley Park was not about pigeons but about sex and literature.”

Bernard’s description of his theory could serve as a succinct summary of the play itself. In the past, the sexual entanglements of the adults drive much of the plot. In the present, efforts to recover the potential actions of Lord Byron through historical documents—including books—drive this plot line. Bernard’s emphasis on the sexual and less rational side of life speaks both to his own personal priorities as well as advocating for the more impetuous side of life.

“But don’t confuse progress with perfectibility. A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need.”

Bernard insists upon the value of artistic, emotional, and intuitive knowledge. His distinction between progress and perfectibility unknowingly argues for the value of iterations throughout time: As the world moves toward chaos, the order of perfection is not attainable. This passage also speaks to The Importance of Knowledge and Truth, in which the quest to reconstruct and better understand the past (or any other subject) is always short of perfect.

“If knowledge isn’t self-knowledge it isn’t doing much, mate.”

In his rejection of absolute truth, Bernard argues for self-knowledge. His statement reflects his association with Romanticism, which favors subjectivity and the individual over rational and generalized systems of thought and experience.

“It is a defect of God’s humour that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.”

Lady Croom refers to the passion and interests of Mr. Chater, but it can also apply to his feelings for his wife. Despite his desire to be a poet or botanist and despite his love and loyalty to his wife, fate seems to have other plans. This determinism raises questions about free will and self-determination.

“The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it’s trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren’t supposed to be in that part of the plan.”

Chloe comes to a similar conclusion as Thomasina, but for a different reason. Chloe sees the impact of sex on people’s actions. Emotions, she argues, are unpredictable. This stands in marked contrast to Thomasina’s own more rationalistic approach and mistrust of emotion.

“It can’t prove to be true, it can only not prove to be false yet.”

Hannah expresses one of the play’s key ideas. Stoppard is interested in truth and the search for truth, but he argues that absolute knowledge is impossible. Due to the limitations of the search for knowledge, whether it be the fragility of historical documentation or the lack of tools for the genius, nothing can be proven as a fact. Even something accepted as fact, like Newton’s law, can be challenged and proven false.

“It’s all trivial—your grouse, my hermit, Bernard’s Byron. Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in.”

Hannah argues that attribution is less important than the ideas themselves, and she argues that there is no real distinction between the different types of knowledge the characters seek. Rather, what is important is “wanting to know,” which Hannah regards as a fundamental part of what it means to be human.

“You can see where the dormer doesn’t match. That was her bedroom under the roof. There’s a memorial in the park.”

Like the mismatched dormer, Thomasina did not belong to her time. With the play having one location but multiple time periods, the specifics of the place underscore the interconnectivity of time. The fire of the past, whether it be a literal fire or Thomasina’s intellectual fire, has changed the present place. Notably, a memorial for Thomasina is in the garden, near Septimus’s unofficial memorial to her work: the ongoing work in the hermitage.

“Valentine: Because there’s an order things can’t happen in. You can’t open a door till there’s a house.

Hannah: I thought that’s what genius was.

Valentine: Only for lunatics and poets.”

Valentine presents learning and creation as linear, which contrasts with Thomasina’s genius. His belief that genius like Thomasina’s is akin to that of poets reflects the play’s argument that true genius melds the logic of the Enlightenment and the emotion and creativity of Romanticism.

“It means the Ezra Chater of the Sidley Park connection is the same Chater who described a dwarf dahlia in Martinique in 1810 and died there, of a monkey bite.”

The present-day question surrounding the identity of Chater reflects the play’s wider concerns with identity. Here, other characters literally identify a character. By joining two seemingly disparate identities, it is suggested that people are made of multitudes and cannot be easily categorized. Due to the fragility of the historical record, the truth has been obscured.

“I’ve proved Byron was here and as far as I’m concerned he wrote those lines as sure as he shot that hare.”

While Bernard is technically right about Byron being at the estate, he is ironically wrong about who shot the hare. The impossibility of certainty about the truth and knowledge is a key concern of Stoppard’s and is illustrated by the interweaving of the past and present storylines. Bernard’s arrogance and insistence on sticking to his theory here is also in keeping with his characterization as a vainglorious and occasionally unscrupulous scholar.

“Do not act the innocent! Tomorrow I will be seventeen!”

The humor of Thomasina’s line depends on the multiple types of knowledge possessed by the characters. Thomasina lacks sexual knowledge but sounds like she is suggesting that Septimus should sleep with her. Her innocent search for knowledge contrasts with the knowledge of disillusionment possessed by Chloe. The bitter dramatic irony of the line is that her worry about tomorrow is unnecessary, as the audience knows she is going to die that night.

“If mama comes I will tell her we only met to kiss, not to waltz.”

Exemplifying a key difference from one of the modern counterparts, Chloe, Thomasina is more innocent. She is more interested in knowledge than sex. Thomasina, after watching the many sexual couplings around the estate, views physicality as less important than knowledge. Her innocent plan to lie and say that they kissed instead reflects how she still has not crossed the threshold into adulthood.